Virginia Review of Asian Studies

JAPONAISERIEAND IMAGINED NIRVANA: HENRY ADAMS’ 1886 SOJOURN WITH HENRY LAFARGE

DANIEL A. MÉTRAUX

MARY BALDWIN COLLEGE

[Editor’s Note: A much shorter less involved version of this article was published in the 2010 issue of this journal]

There is the old saying that “The Grass is always Greener across the Street.” Very often when a nation or society is in deep distress, its citizens will imagine a place somewhere where life must be so much better than at home. Such was the case with many Chinese who sought out “GoldMountain” in California in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Many Americans held a very negative view of their country from the 1860s through the late 1880s after years of bitter civil war and the economic turmoil and corruption of the “Gilded Age” of President Grant and his thieving cohorts.

A goodly number of Americans developed a highly idealistic and utopian image of Japan replete with aristocratic grace, beautiful kimono-clad women, and exquisite peaceful gardens. A large number of Americans visited Japan hoping to witness this charmed paradise up close, but their reactions to the reality of Nippon varied greatly. Some writers like teacher-missionary E. Warren Clark (1849-1907), who worked in Japan from 1871-1875, fell in love with the country and wrote that the Japanese were the Anglo-Saxons of Asia. Others when confronted with the realities of a newly-emerging Japan had a far more jaundiced view of the country.

The goal of this research is to analyze the encounter that famed American writer and historian Henry Adams (1838-1918)[1] had in Japan during his visit there from early July to late September 1886. Adams, the great-grandson and grandson of American presidents, shared this idealistic view of Japan and after his wife Clover committed suicide in late 1885, Adams decided to go to Japan to find “peace of mind,” or “Nirvana.”

His idealized preconceptions and his reactions once he actually encountered Japan provide a very clear case study of how Americans and other Western travelers imagined and then reacted to this ancient but rapidly modernizing nation.

Henry Adams around the time he visited Japan

The Idealized View of Japan

During the latter years of the nineteenth century both Europe and the United States were swept by a full-fledged Japan craze known as japonaiserie. This phenomenon occurred at a time when Japan was becoming the first modern Asian power and Chinese power and prestige was on the decline. It created a considerable market for things Japanese including such arts and crafts as prints, pottery, bronzes, china and kimonos. During the 1880s there was also a shift in popular attitudes towards Japan that portrayed that country as an exotic paradise populated by genteel people with noble etiquette and serene beauty. Writer Pierre Loti in his work Madame Chrysanthème wrote: “Heavens! Why, I know her already! Long before setting foot in Japan, I had met her, on every fan, on every teacup with her silly air, her puffy little face, her tiny eyes, mere gimlet-holes above those expanses of impossible pink and white cheeks (quoted in Lee, 3).

This fixation with Japan allowed Gilbert and Sullivan to create a spectacular fantasy world in The Mikado that bore little resemblance to the real Japan (Lee, 4-5). Their production’s huge success in 1885 led to the further spread of this spurious view of Japan. Josephine Lee remarks that “The Japan craze included the import of relatively chaste items, but also objects accompanied by stories of geishas, customs such as the nude bathing of men and women, and shunga (Japanese erotic art…) that created impressions of Japan as a place of sexual license, pleasure and deviance (Lee, 15).”

Japan during the late nineteenth century had caught the imagination of many educated Americans who, while not very knowledgeable of the actual country, imagined an exotic land filled with incredible beauty and deep wisdom and philosophy. Some envisioned a kind of fairy land that more closely resembled Old Japan than the New that was evolving during the Meiji era (1868-1912). Their image of Japan was more like the fairy tale world of the Tale of Genji, a “floating world” of aristocratic grace and stately ritual, of high art and elaborate ceremony. It was a magical land devoid of the greed, corruption, and incredible violence that had afflicted the United States during and since the Civil War. The austere simplicity of the Zen temples, the quiet beauty of the Japanese garden, and the virtuous women pointed to a ready escape from the excesses and ostentation of the Victorian era in the United States and Europe. Some artists like John La Farge (1835-1910) were entranced with the simple and graceful beauty of Japanese art and were emulating it in their own art as early as the 1860s.

Many Westerners felt that they would encounter a GoldenLand in Japan that was free of many of the negatives that plagued the West. There was also the realization by others that Japan was modernizing quickly and that this would eventually lead to the demise of the old Japan. This fear led art collectors like Sturgis Bigelow and Ernest Fenollosa, painters like John La Farge, and other artists, writers like Lafcadio Hearn and Jack London and explorers to travel to Japan in search of this ideal world. While in Japan they collected material goods and intellectual ideals which they ferried back to the New World and did everything possible to persuade authorities not to destroy the nation’s artistic and cultural heritage.

The reality of Japan, however, brought different reactions once the travelers descended from their boats and began the process of discovering Japan on their own. Japan during the Meiji period experienced revolutionary change. The Japanese people, spurred on by their political and societal leaders, decisively broke with their past and embarked on a decidedly emphatic course of modernization. There was marked disdain for anything old. Some shrines and temples fell into disrepair or were abandoned, some of their buildings torn down for firewood, and there was even talk of melting down the huge Kamakura Daibutsu to put the metal to “better use.” (Richie 2001, 88)

There were some leading Japanese who were horrified at their country’s obsession with things modern and its penchant of destroying much of the old Japan. They received substantial help from many of Japan’s Western visitors who realized the incredible value and importance of the country’s cultural treasures. Fenollosa alone saved thousands of invaluable relics, shipping many of them to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts where they remain on display to this very day. Even former President U. S. Grant got into the act when he chanced upon a Noh play. The Noh theatre had been in decline in the early years of the Meiji era when Grant chanced upon a performance. His enthusiasm for Noh helped spur a revival.

Not all in the West were enraptured by this fantasy-land view of Japan. British playwright Oscar Wilde wrote in 1891:

Now do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai or Hokei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact, the whole of Japan is pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had a chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants…. (Quoted in Lee, 36)

Henry Adams and Japan

Henry Adams’ 1886 visit to Japan would fit the prescription pronounced by Wilde very well indeed. Adams traveled to Japan with artist Lafarge, leaving the United States in June and staying in Japan from 1 July through the end of September. He had developed a highly idealistic view of Japan over the years, he and his wife had built a good collection of Japanese art, and he thought that a trip to Japan might be the perfect antidote following his wife’s sudden suicide earlier that spring. When asked he said that his travels to Japan were his search for Nirvana.

Adams’ classic The Education of Henry Adams depicts the author’s search for a true understanding of the bewildering world around him. He discusses the many social, political, technological and intellectual changes that had occurred in his own adulthood and laments that his classical education had ill-prepared him to understand the great transformations taking place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the telephone, the automobile, x-ray machines, and so much more. Since traditional education had failed him, he devoted his life to extensive self-education. He became a great world traveler endeavoring to learn about other cultures while at the same disparaging the empty-shell of American life during the “Gilded Age.” Adams hoped that there might be a more worthy civilization outside of America and that Japan might be such a place. He went to Japan hoping to further his self-education, but his letters reveal that he found exactly what Wilde would have predicted.

What makes Adams’ visit to Japanfrom 1 July to late September 1886 interesting is his monumental expectations of the idealized view of Japan, his quick realization that his preconceptions were little more than a fable, and his disappointment with the reality of a modernizing Japan. Adams was a world traveler with a keen eye for the minutiae of Europe, the South Seas, Italy and other places he visited, but he viciously turned against Japan and people and things Japanese once he realized the folly of his preconceptions.

Adams is also interesting because he was one of the few writers with a decidedly negative view of Japan and the Japanese. He was never anti-Japanese, but his comments showed a very unflattering side of Japan that is in marked contrast to the often gushing comments by other Western visitors over the supposedly unique virtues and accomplishments of their host nation. But Adams’ viewpoints are in marked contrast to his travel companion La Farge who somehow found the beautiful aspects of Japan that he had been seeking through his art.

Henry Adams is celebrated as one of the great American historians of the nineteenth century.[i] Adams grew up in one of the leading American political and intellectual families of the 1800s and early 1900s. He never sought nor received political office, but his work as a historian and his wide circle of highly influential friends which included several presidents made him one of the most influential American figures of his day. Besides his interest in American history, Adams had a deep fascination with medieval European history which he taught at Harvard University in 1877 and focused on in one of his best books, Mont Saint Michel and Chartes And like many of his countrymen, Adams had a deep fascination for things and ideas Japanese and made a trip to Japan one of his top dreams and priorities in life. He hoped to realize his dream when he traveled there with his friend John La Farge in the summer and early fall of 1886.

It was La Farge perhaps who contributed more to the American consciousness about Japan than Adams. From the 1860s until his death in 1910, La Farge’s “precocious, passionate and sustained engagement with Japanese art was unmatched by any American of his time.” (Benfey 1970, 136) A century ago La Farge was easily the artist most responsible for introducing Japanese ideas and methodology into American art. Any visit to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts collection of La Farge’s work will allow the observer to see the great influence Japan had on his art, especially his watercolors and his many examples of stained glass… La Farge's 1897 book, An Artist’s Letters From Japan (La Farge, 1986) provides the reader with fascinating insights into many aspects of life in Japan during the middle part of the Meiji period from an artist’s perspective.

Adams had planned to visit Japan long before actually embarking on his trip. He and his wife Clover[ii] had spent part of their honeymoon on the Nile in Egypt in 1872 and were anxious to embark on a second trip to an exotic land in the mid-1880s. Both were avid collectors of Asian art with which they planned to decorate their new house under construction on Lafayette Square in WashingtonDC. Adams, who left his professorship in medieval history at HarvardUniversity in the late 1870s, also had a scholarly interest in Japanese religion and had befriended several Japanese diplomats including the Japanese ambassador, Kiyonari Yoshida.

Yoshida was one of the first Japanese officials to settle in the United States. Yoshida hailed from an old aristocratic family and had many of the graces and charm of traditionally educated high ranking Japanese. Yoshida spent many hours with Adams, regaling him with stories of the grace and beauty of old Japan. Yoshida gave Adams a sense of aristocratic Japan and taught him the game of Go.

Adams also developed a close friendship with Yoshida’s successor Baron Ryuichi Kuku (1852-1931), who was also a connoisseur of Japanese art. Kuki greatly encouraged Adams in learning more about Japanese arts and traditional culture and urged him to visit Japan on his own. Adams also had developed a very serious interest in Buddhism and wondered if its diagnosis of suffering as the key problem facing mankind and whether its prescription for finding peace and happiness in this world was the key. By 1884 Adams had completed the first volume of his early history of the Republic and wanted a break. He yearned to explore the fantasy world Yoshida and Kuki had implanted in his mind.

Historian Christopher Benfey notes:

Japan as Henry and Clover Adams conceived of it – an impression confirmed by the courtly Baron Kuki – was a world of aristocrats and connoisseurs, high ritual and deep wisdom, where exquisite gifts were exchanged rather than bought and sold. This idea was the perfect counterweight to the money-grubbing vulgarities of Gilded Age Washington under President Grant, a corrupt town that was unable to put the proper value on an Adams descended from the Adamses. Confucian Japan knew about filial piety and respect for benevolent rulers. There, the scholar and the ruler were one, or so Henry Adams imagined it.(Benfey 2003, 120)

Sadly, Clover was not to live long enough to embark on this journey. She had suffered from depression all her adult life and suffered a prolonged episode following the death of her father, to whom she was devoted, in April 1885. She committed suicide on 6 December 1885 by drinking a vial of potassium cyanide which she used to develop her photography. Deeply distressed by Clover’s demise, Adams sought to escape Washing-ton by stepping up his Japan travel plans.

Not wishing to travel alone, he offered to pay all of La Farge’s expenses if the artist would accompany him. La Farge and Adams had known each other when they taught at Harvard in the mid-1870s and had kept in touch. La Farge was living apart from his family in New York and felt hemmed in by conflicting art commissions and a sense of fatigue that led to his inability to create new ideas for his work. Adams had traveled to New York on 3 June 1886 when he heard from his brother Charles, head of the Union Pacific Railroad, that his company’s luxurious “Director’s Car” was in Boston and would return to Omaha the following day. He asked Adams if he would like to use it. Henry readily agreed and swooping up a willing La Farge, off they went on their spur of the moment adventure.

They boarded a luxury rail car and were in San Francisco and ready to take a steamer all the way to Tokyo by June 11th. They arrived in Yokohama by the end of June.

While traveling West La Farge and Adams encountered a young reporter at the depot in Omaha. According to Adams: “….[I]n reply to his inquiry as to our purpose in visiting Japan, La Farge beamed through his spectacles the answer that we were in search of Nirvana, the youth looked up like a meteor , and rejoined: ‘It’s out of season!’” (Ford 1930, 366).