Kakuzo Okakura

Kakuzo Okakura (1862–1913) was born in Yokohama shortly after Japan's forced opening to Western trade, and came of age as the Meiji government pursued rapid, wholesale Westernisation; alarmed at the resulting contempt for Japan's own artistic traditions, he co-founded the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1889 and later the Japan Art Institute, championing traditional Japanese painting against the tide of imported academic realism. Dismissed from the Fine Arts School amid a personal scandal in 1898, he travelled and lectured in India and the United States, eventually becoming curator of the Chinese and Japanese art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he spent much of his later career. Writing directly in English for a Western readership he felt had reduced Japanese culture to charming curiosities, he published The Ideals of the East (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904), and The Book of Tea (1906), using the tea ceremony as a window onto a broader Japanese aesthetic and spiritual philosophy. He died in Japan at fifty.