Acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements
The opportunity to reevaluate the complex legacies of the Meiji-period art historian Okakura Kakuzō (1863-1913) first arrived when we co-chaired the one-day academic workshop "Okakura Kakuzō and Meiji Japan" at Harvard University in April 2009. This workshop was organized by the East Asian Art History Program of the Department of Art and Architecture and generously sponsored by the Rockefeller Fund for East Asian Art at Harvard University. We thank Mark Erdmann for his help organizing the conference, as well as all of the speakers for kindly agreeing to turn their presentations into articles for this volume.
We express our deepest gratitude to Kinoshita Nagahiro, the guiding spirit behind this issue. We were most fortunate to benefit from his counsel time and again. His advice on the selection of Okakura's writings for translation was invaluable, and the task of translating difficult passages would have been much more arduous had he not generously walked us through them, line by line, word by word. We also thank Michio Yonekura for his kind help in interpreting Okakura's inaugural address to Kokka. We thank Timothy Unverzagt Goddard and Kevin Singleton for their fluent translations.
Christopher L. Hill produced an expert translation of Takeuchi Yoshimi's influential essay on Okakura. We also extend our thanks to Richard Calichman for sharing his knowledge of Takeuchi. Nozomi Naoi kindly prepared what we hope will serve as the most useful and up-to-date scholarly bibliography on Okakura.
We also thank Kyoko Selden and Alisa Freeman for their translation of an essay by Nagai Kafū, a contemporary of Okakura and also a world traveler who showed a keen interest in Japanese art and aesthetics. We would especially like to honor the contributions Kyoko made to the Review over the years and are proud to have had the privilege of working with her for this issue. [End Page xi]
The following individuals and organizations generously provided us with permissions and assistance to reproduce and reprint copyrighted materials: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Tenshin Memorial Museum of Art in Ibaraki, Honda Yūko, Inaga Shigemi, and Tagami Yūichi. We also thank Momoi Azusa for her administrative help.
Last but not least, we extend our gratitude to the Jōsai International Center for the Promotion of Art and Science at Jōsai University for this opportunity to guest-edit a volume on Okakura Kakuzō, and to Haga Kōichi and Natta Phisphumvidhi for their work in the production of this issue. Finally, we are most grateful to Miya Elise Mizuta, the journal's managing editor, for her tireless effort, meticulous attention, and good judgment. [End Page xii]
Noriko Murai is assistant professor of modern Japanese art history in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Sophia University in Tokyo. She co-authored Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2009), and her co-edited anthology Inventing Asia: American Perceptions around 1900 is forthcoming in 2013. Her publications include a contribution to Shikaku hyōshō to ongaku (Visual Representation and Music), vol. 4 of Jendā sōsho (Series on Gender) (Akashi, 2010) and "Contemporary Ikebana and the Potential of Art History at the Boundary of Art," Journal of History of Modern Art 26 (2009). She is currently working on a book project on Okakura Kakuzō.
(nmurai@sophia.ac.jp)
Yukio Lippit is professor of history of art and architecture at Harvard University, where he has taught since 2003. Recent publications include Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Ito Jakuchū (1716-1800) (The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 2012), Kenzo Tange: Architecture for the World (Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 2012), and Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2012).
(lippit@fas.harvard.edu)
