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The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan
The 1904 book that famously declared “Asia is one” was among the first studies in English to reference Zen as it explored the roots of Japanese beauty. Like the author’s The Book of Tea, this volume emphasized the spiritual ideals of Asian, and especially Japanese, art. Kakuzo Okakura (1863–1913) was an administrator and scholar whose writings helped shape the West’s early views of Japan and Asia.
152 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1903
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About the author
Kakuzō Okakura
104 books245 followersOkakura Kakuzō (岡倉覚三), also known as Okakura Tenshin (岡倉 天心), was a Japanese scholar who contributed the development of arts in Japan. Outside Japan, he is chiefly remembered today as the author of
The Book of Tea
.
Born in Yokohama to parents originally from Fukui, Okakura learned English while attending a school operated by Christian missionary, Dr. Curtis Hepburn. At 15, he entered Tokyo Imperial University, where he first met and studied under Harvard-educated professor Ernest Fenollosa. In 1889, Okakura co-founded the periodical Kokka. A year later he was one of the principal founders of the first Japanese fine-arts academy, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (東京美術学校 Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō), and a year later became its head, although he was later ousted from the school in an administrative struggle. Later, he also founded the Japan Art Institute with Hashimoto Gahō and Yokoyama Taikan. He was invited by William Sturgis Bigelow to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1904 and became the first head of the Asian art division in 1910.
Okakura was a high-profile urbanite who had an international sense of self. In the Meiji period he was the first dean of the Tokyo Fine Arts School (later merged with the Tokyo Music School to form the current Tokyo University of the Arts). He wrote all of his main works in English. Okakura researched Japan's traditional art and traveled to Europe, the United States, China and India. He emphasised the importance to the modern world of Asian culture, attempting to bring its influence to realms of art and literature that, in his day, were largely dominated by Western culture.
His book, The Ideals of the East (1904), published on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, is famous for its opening line, "Asia is one." He argued that Asia is "one" in its humiliation, of falling behind in achieving modernization, and thus being colonized by the Western powers. This was an early expression of Pan-Asianism. Later Okakura felt compelled to protest against a Japan that tried to catch up with the Western powers, but by sacrificing other Asian countries in the Russo-Japanese War.
In Japan, Okakura, along with Fenollosa, is credited with "saving" Nihonga, or painting done with traditional Japanese technique, as it was threatened with replacement by Western-style painting, or "Yōga", whose chief advocate was artist Kuroda Seiki. In fact this role, most assiduously pressed after Okakura's death by his followers, is not taken seriously by art scholars today, nor is the idea that oil painting posed any serious "threat" to traditional Japanese painting. Yet Okakura was certainly instrumental in modernizing Japanese aesthetics, having recognized the need to preserve Japan's cultural heritage, and thus was one of the major reformers during Japan's period of modernization beginning with the Meiji Restoration.
Outside of Japan, Okakura had an impact on a number of important figures, directly or indirectly, who include philosopher Martin Heidegger, poet Ezra Pound, and especially poet Rabindranath Tagore and heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner, who were close personal friends of his.
Born in Yokohama to parents originally from Fukui, Okakura learned English while attending a school operated by Christian missionary, Dr. Curtis Hepburn. At 15, he entered Tokyo Imperial University, where he first met and studied under Harvard-educated professor Ernest Fenollosa. In 1889, Okakura co-founded the periodical Kokka. A year later he was one of the principal founders of the first Japanese fine-arts academy, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (東京美術学校 Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō), and a year later became its head, although he was later ousted from the school in an administrative struggle. Later, he also founded the Japan Art Institute with Hashimoto Gahō and Yokoyama Taikan. He was invited by William Sturgis Bigelow to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1904 and became the first head of the Asian art division in 1910.
Okakura was a high-profile urbanite who had an international sense of self. In the Meiji period he was the first dean of the Tokyo Fine Arts School (later merged with the Tokyo Music School to form the current Tokyo University of the Arts). He wrote all of his main works in English. Okakura researched Japan's traditional art and traveled to Europe, the United States, China and India. He emphasised the importance to the modern world of Asian culture, attempting to bring its influence to realms of art and literature that, in his day, were largely dominated by Western culture.
His book, The Ideals of the East (1904), published on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, is famous for its opening line, "Asia is one." He argued that Asia is "one" in its humiliation, of falling behind in achieving modernization, and thus being colonized by the Western powers. This was an early expression of Pan-Asianism. Later Okakura felt compelled to protest against a Japan that tried to catch up with the Western powers, but by sacrificing other Asian countries in the Russo-Japanese War.
In Japan, Okakura, along with Fenollosa, is credited with "saving" Nihonga, or painting done with traditional Japanese technique, as it was threatened with replacement by Western-style painting, or "Yōga", whose chief advocate was artist Kuroda Seiki. In fact this role, most assiduously pressed after Okakura's death by his followers, is not taken seriously by art scholars today, nor is the idea that oil painting posed any serious "threat" to traditional Japanese painting. Yet Okakura was certainly instrumental in modernizing Japanese aesthetics, having recognized the need to preserve Japan's cultural heritage, and thus was one of the major reformers during Japan's period of modernization beginning with the Meiji Restoration.
Outside of Japan, Okakura had an impact on a number of important figures, directly or indirectly, who include philosopher Martin Heidegger, poet Ezra Pound, and especially poet Rabindranath Tagore and heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner, who were close personal friends of his.
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June 20, 2017
The Ideals of the East was one of the first books to give Western readers an Eastern perspective on Asian aesthetic ideals and it was perhaps Okakura’s intention to correct the conclusions of foreign scholars with a limited cultural understanding of Asia by writing it.
It makes for a very fascinating read, not only for its general view of Japanese and Asian art in a historical context, but also because of the unique perspective Okakura offers of Asian views before the 20th century political winds and wars would remold them, before Japan, China and Korea were separated by the golf of communism and the atrocities of World War II. It felt a bit like watching a tragedy when you are aware something terrible will happen but the hopeful character onstage is blissfully ignorant.
Okakura is inevitably defensive at times and strives to elevate Japanese art and equal it or set it above the rest of Asia and Europe in particular. In his view, the culmination of Chinese and Indian spiritual and moral ideals are only fully realized in Japan and Europe, in particular the Greek civilization, must be denied all influence in the Asian sphere. Given the time the book was written in, it is understandable why he would feel obliged to idealize Japanese art. Given the onslaught of Western ideas and manners, he must have felt the need to act as protector and worshipper of that which he believed made his country’s culture unique.
Despite a massive influx of Western ideas, Japan’s culture still maintains its individuality today, bending even modernity to its own whims. And while it no longer rises quite to his lofty standards, I suppose that Okakura would have at least been glad of that.
It makes for a very fascinating read, not only for its general view of Japanese and Asian art in a historical context, but also because of the unique perspective Okakura offers of Asian views before the 20th century political winds and wars would remold them, before Japan, China and Korea were separated by the golf of communism and the atrocities of World War II. It felt a bit like watching a tragedy when you are aware something terrible will happen but the hopeful character onstage is blissfully ignorant.
Okakura is inevitably defensive at times and strives to elevate Japanese art and equal it or set it above the rest of Asia and Europe in particular. In his view, the culmination of Chinese and Indian spiritual and moral ideals are only fully realized in Japan and Europe, in particular the Greek civilization, must be denied all influence in the Asian sphere. Given the time the book was written in, it is understandable why he would feel obliged to idealize Japanese art. Given the onslaught of Western ideas and manners, he must have felt the need to act as protector and worshipper of that which he believed made his country’s culture unique.
Despite a massive influx of Western ideas, Japan’s culture still maintains its individuality today, bending even modernity to its own whims. And while it no longer rises quite to his lofty standards, I suppose that Okakura would have at least been glad of that.
February 7, 2014
This book was written during the Meiji Period and as such does not have a modern perspective. It is also quite dense and meandering. However, it does provide an overview of art through out the history of Japan. Okakura opens the book with "Asia is one" and argues that all of Asia is interconnected. While there is a sense of Okakura's feeling about Japanese superiority, it highlights the flow of ideas throughout East Asia and the impact that Okakura believes this had on Japanese art. The book also gives a good historical overview, making it clear that the isolation of the Tokugawa period was an anomaly in Japanese history.
May 7, 2023
A difficult book to rate--as art history it is middling at best, more of a cliffs notes summary on Japanese art done in about 100 pages. Given its brevity, and the political tone it was written in, much of its content has to be taken with large heap of salt.
As for said political tone, this is what makes the book somewhat interesting and instructive, but not for the reasons its author intended. Okakura is probably better known for his other work, "The Book of Tea," an essay on Japanese culture viewed through the specific lens of the Tea Ceremony. This focus not only makes that book more memorable, but also eases the problems that are more obvious in "Ideals of the East"--namely Japanese Imperialism.
It must be remembered that Okakura lived and wrote during the Meiji Era, which began in 1868 with the "Restoration" of the Japanese emperor to his "true status" as the sole ruler of the nation. The process by which this occurred was more than just the brief revolution that led to the overthrow of the Shogunate: it was an entire cultural, social, and political transformation of Japan from an agrarian, feudal land that had no real conception of itself as a nation-state (as we have come to know it today) into a "modern" empire. Other people groups were going through similar rebirths at the time, but part of what makes the Japanese case so interesting was how swiftly and brutally this change was made.
It is a common misconception that the average Japanese person prior to the Restoration had any sense of loyalty or reverence for the emperor, or even "Japan." Most Japanese conceptualized themselves from the standpoint of their village or region, administered by a lord (daimyo), who used his retainers (samurai) to maintain order. Far from the now mythologized version seen in movies, anime, and video games, the samurai and the political-social order they represented were not considered especially noble or good, even before the rampant corruption of the Tokugawa period that preceded Meiji. Like the military class of any ancient society, their job was to use violence on behalf of some authority's interest, nothing more.
The leaders of the Meiji Restoration (both the actual revolution as well as the cultural movement that followed) were smart enough to know that a modern, patriotic public could never be built on this kind of foundation. The Japanese people had to be made into, well, the "Japanese people." This required the formation of a national consciousness that touched on every area of culture: history, music, politics, and of course, art.
Art is, and always will be, a political statement. "Great art is that which before we wish to die," as Okakura says here--the usually subtle undertones of imperialistic fervor spilling over into true fanaticism. What makes this book interesting is not its art history but its role in the larger project of making Japan an imperialistic power that could stand toe-to-toe with the other emerging great powers of the day. The urgency with which Okakura strives to demonstrate in these pages that Japan has a culturally, racially distinct and unique aesthetic is as necessary a part of this endeavor as building armies and battleships. It is the emotional and spiritual arms-building that will justify not only Japan's place as an equal beside Europe, but also as the natural ruler of all Asia.
Throughout this book Okakura repeats a common theme of Japan as the "culmination" of Asian artistic values--the perfect balance between the "individualism" of India and the "authoritarianism " of China. This evaluation is clearly reductive and over-simplified, and meant to instill a sense of pride and accomplishment in the Japanese reader, and one of admiration and respect in the Western one. Fascist movements in Europe relied on the same general idea--our "people" are unique and special, and past history, far from demonstrating the diverse and ever-changing nature of humanity actually shows our unchanging claim to superiority. Blood and soil, etc.
I am not trying to single out Okakura here, and I do not think he was consciously aiming to justify the looming militarization of Japan and all the misery it would soon cause. But there is a thematic line between works like this and later tragedies which is not entirely accidental. Like the German "volk" ideology that later became Nazism, or the American Exceptionalism that led to Indigenous massacres, no one person is truly responsible. But we have a duty to carefully examine the many separate pieces that enabled such movements in order to prevent it from happening again.
"Ideals of the East" is valuable for objective study in the same way that works on the Middle East or Africa from the same time period are still valuable. They are riddled with inaccuracies and clearly racist philosophies, but they tell us something about the Orientalist mindset that created them. Edward Said promoted the study of art that we might call "problematic" today not because he thought they were not problematic, but to understand why. This is different from praising them or uncritically digesting them in the name of "academic freedom," or "free speech."
I love Japanese culture (including the "weeby" parts that are often cringe-inducing). All of it is part of the story of who I am, but because of that I want to thoroughly understand why it is the way it is. This means my "love" for it is not just a straight-forward approval. It is a mindful consideration of the good and bad aspects of its whole nature. As a result, I cannot read books like "Ideals of the East" without thinking about the darkness that was hovering in its cultural background. You cannot read this as a simple overview of Japanese art history without doing so and be intellectually, and ethically, honest with yourself. But if you do you will achieve what Said called a truly humanist view of the world--an appreciation of what is true in a given work of art or literature.
As for said political tone, this is what makes the book somewhat interesting and instructive, but not for the reasons its author intended. Okakura is probably better known for his other work, "The Book of Tea," an essay on Japanese culture viewed through the specific lens of the Tea Ceremony. This focus not only makes that book more memorable, but also eases the problems that are more obvious in "Ideals of the East"--namely Japanese Imperialism.
It must be remembered that Okakura lived and wrote during the Meiji Era, which began in 1868 with the "Restoration" of the Japanese emperor to his "true status" as the sole ruler of the nation. The process by which this occurred was more than just the brief revolution that led to the overthrow of the Shogunate: it was an entire cultural, social, and political transformation of Japan from an agrarian, feudal land that had no real conception of itself as a nation-state (as we have come to know it today) into a "modern" empire. Other people groups were going through similar rebirths at the time, but part of what makes the Japanese case so interesting was how swiftly and brutally this change was made.
It is a common misconception that the average Japanese person prior to the Restoration had any sense of loyalty or reverence for the emperor, or even "Japan." Most Japanese conceptualized themselves from the standpoint of their village or region, administered by a lord (daimyo), who used his retainers (samurai) to maintain order. Far from the now mythologized version seen in movies, anime, and video games, the samurai and the political-social order they represented were not considered especially noble or good, even before the rampant corruption of the Tokugawa period that preceded Meiji. Like the military class of any ancient society, their job was to use violence on behalf of some authority's interest, nothing more.
The leaders of the Meiji Restoration (both the actual revolution as well as the cultural movement that followed) were smart enough to know that a modern, patriotic public could never be built on this kind of foundation. The Japanese people had to be made into, well, the "Japanese people." This required the formation of a national consciousness that touched on every area of culture: history, music, politics, and of course, art.
Art is, and always will be, a political statement. "Great art is that which before we wish to die," as Okakura says here--the usually subtle undertones of imperialistic fervor spilling over into true fanaticism. What makes this book interesting is not its art history but its role in the larger project of making Japan an imperialistic power that could stand toe-to-toe with the other emerging great powers of the day. The urgency with which Okakura strives to demonstrate in these pages that Japan has a culturally, racially distinct and unique aesthetic is as necessary a part of this endeavor as building armies and battleships. It is the emotional and spiritual arms-building that will justify not only Japan's place as an equal beside Europe, but also as the natural ruler of all Asia.
Throughout this book Okakura repeats a common theme of Japan as the "culmination" of Asian artistic values--the perfect balance between the "individualism" of India and the "authoritarianism " of China. This evaluation is clearly reductive and over-simplified, and meant to instill a sense of pride and accomplishment in the Japanese reader, and one of admiration and respect in the Western one. Fascist movements in Europe relied on the same general idea--our "people" are unique and special, and past history, far from demonstrating the diverse and ever-changing nature of humanity actually shows our unchanging claim to superiority. Blood and soil, etc.
I am not trying to single out Okakura here, and I do not think he was consciously aiming to justify the looming militarization of Japan and all the misery it would soon cause. But there is a thematic line between works like this and later tragedies which is not entirely accidental. Like the German "volk" ideology that later became Nazism, or the American Exceptionalism that led to Indigenous massacres, no one person is truly responsible. But we have a duty to carefully examine the many separate pieces that enabled such movements in order to prevent it from happening again.
"Ideals of the East" is valuable for objective study in the same way that works on the Middle East or Africa from the same time period are still valuable. They are riddled with inaccuracies and clearly racist philosophies, but they tell us something about the Orientalist mindset that created them. Edward Said promoted the study of art that we might call "problematic" today not because he thought they were not problematic, but to understand why. This is different from praising them or uncritically digesting them in the name of "academic freedom," or "free speech."
I love Japanese culture (including the "weeby" parts that are often cringe-inducing). All of it is part of the story of who I am, but because of that I want to thoroughly understand why it is the way it is. This means my "love" for it is not just a straight-forward approval. It is a mindful consideration of the good and bad aspects of its whole nature. As a result, I cannot read books like "Ideals of the East" without thinking about the darkness that was hovering in its cultural background. You cannot read this as a simple overview of Japanese art history without doing so and be intellectually, and ethically, honest with yourself. But if you do you will achieve what Said called a truly humanist view of the world--an appreciation of what is true in a given work of art or literature.
Read
July 14, 2025Dense, challenging, and much more scholarly than the Book of Tea, which is in my opinion Okakura's true masterpiece. Reading through this without the aid of notes, pictures or even the mere transliteration of names into their modern/pinyin script, I felt somewhat akin to the monkey of the proverb, trying to grasp for the moon by reaching its reflection on the surface of the lake.
December 1, 2024
Realmente no me lo he acabao entero pero como mi profe me ha dicho que me lo lea entero en inglés u he hecho un esfuerzo sobrehumano en leerme esta verga, me merezco marcarlo como leído.
August 6, 2021
Sinceramente, no me ha gustado nada, pero para se honestos es enteramente por mi culpa y no por el autor, que sin lugar a duda fue una eminencia en su ámbito (y como curiosidad, escribió el libro en inglés pese a ser un nativo japonés).
El problema es que este pequeño ensayo es más bien filosófico, e incluso religioso, que artístico. Leí y leí páginas de términos budistas e indios sin entender nada. Solo se le recomendaría a alguien que esté muy interesado y muy metido en el mundo de los estudios de Asia oriental.
El problema es que este pequeño ensayo es más bien filosófico, e incluso religioso, que artístico. Leí y leí páginas de términos budistas e indios sin entender nada. Solo se le recomendaría a alguien que esté muy interesado y muy metido en el mundo de los estudios de Asia oriental.
December 20, 2025
Kakuzō Okakura’s Ideals of the East is less a museum catalogue than an historical perspective of the Japanese personality: a compact, ardent defence of Japanese (and broadly East Asian) aesthetic sensibility written for an age when the West still presumed to be the arbiter of modern taste. The book reads simultaneously as cultural criticism, philosophical meditation, and programmatic call-to-arms. Its chief achievement is rhetorical — Okakura persuades a skeptical global readership to see art not as mere decoration or commodity but as a lived ethic, a mode of perception that shapes how a people lives, thinks, and holds memory.
Historicizing a plea
The author composed his ideas at a crucial historical juncture. The Meiji transformations had thrust Japan into the machinery of global modernity; Western techniques, institutions, and market values were being adopted rapidly. Against this torrent he articulates a defence of continuity: art as an integrative social practice that resists fragmentation into utilitarian pieces or market objects. He writes less to romanticize the past than to insist that heritage — if properly understood — supplies spiritual cohesion at moments of rapid change.
Aesthetics as moral ecology
The most compelling strand in Ideals of the East is Okakura’s insistence that aesthetics are inseparable from ethics. He treats the tea ceremony, ink painting, pottery, and the architecture of gardens as practices in moral attention: exercises in restraint, humility, and selective absence. The Japanese aesthetics he celebrates — the virtues of simplicity, understatement, restraint, and ma (the significance of negative space) — function sociologically: they limit hubris, cultivate modesty, and preserve a sense of the sacred in everyday life. For him, beauty is not an ornament but a stabilizer of feeling and social relation.
Form and voice
Okakura writes with a slipperiness that blends aphorism, learned citation, and plain polemic. The prose occasionally lapses into hortatory declamations — which is precisely its rhetorical point — but more often it strikes a nimble register that moves from close observation (of a teacup’s glaze or the spare sweep of a garden path) to broad cultural generalization. The book benefits from this oscillation: it allows a reader to register how small, tactile art objects stand as indexes for entire civilizational habits.
Intercultural positioning and limits
A careful reader must also interrogate the writer’s positional stance. He writes as both insider and interlocutor to the West — a posture that makes his analysis particularly effective for a Western audience but that also opens him to ambivalence. At times he essentializes “the East” into a coherent spirit in ways that smooth over regional diversity and historical discontinuity. His tone can read as defensive, as if marshalling an aesthetic identity against caricature. This defensive posture, while rhetorically necessary in his moment, can flatten complexities — for instance, the tensions within Japanese modernity between preservation and reform, or the influence of continental and religious crosscurrents on what he calls a unified “spirit.”
Furthermore, Okakura’s moralizing about taste sometimes shades into a hierarchical view of cultures: he admires restraint and suggests its superiority to a Western penchant for display. Modern readers should attend to how aesthetic values can be weaponized into cultural claims about civilization and worth.
Resonance and legacy
Despite these caveats, the book’s influence is clear and continuing. Okakura helped reframe Western approaches to Japanese art, contributing to the respect with which tea bowls, ink scrolls, and gardens came to be regarded. The book anticipates many later discussions in comparative aesthetics, postcolonial criticism, and design theory — especially debates about how traditions recalibrate themselves under modern pressures. For artists, curators, and educators, its central claim — that art is a grammar of life — remains provocatively useful.
Who should read it
Ideals of the East is recommended for readers who value argument that is compact but capacious: art historians, philosophers of aesthetics, designers, and anyone interested in the cultural politics of taste. Read it as both historical document and ongoing provocation: a passionate defence of a way of seeing that asks whether modern life can make room for quiet attentiveness, understatement, and the discipline of absence. If the book’s confident generalizations sometimes irk, they nevertheless force the reader to reconsider what art does for a society — not as spectacle, but as a repository of values.
Historicizing a plea
The author composed his ideas at a crucial historical juncture. The Meiji transformations had thrust Japan into the machinery of global modernity; Western techniques, institutions, and market values were being adopted rapidly. Against this torrent he articulates a defence of continuity: art as an integrative social practice that resists fragmentation into utilitarian pieces or market objects. He writes less to romanticize the past than to insist that heritage — if properly understood — supplies spiritual cohesion at moments of rapid change.
Aesthetics as moral ecology
The most compelling strand in Ideals of the East is Okakura’s insistence that aesthetics are inseparable from ethics. He treats the tea ceremony, ink painting, pottery, and the architecture of gardens as practices in moral attention: exercises in restraint, humility, and selective absence. The Japanese aesthetics he celebrates — the virtues of simplicity, understatement, restraint, and ma (the significance of negative space) — function sociologically: they limit hubris, cultivate modesty, and preserve a sense of the sacred in everyday life. For him, beauty is not an ornament but a stabilizer of feeling and social relation.
Form and voice
Okakura writes with a slipperiness that blends aphorism, learned citation, and plain polemic. The prose occasionally lapses into hortatory declamations — which is precisely its rhetorical point — but more often it strikes a nimble register that moves from close observation (of a teacup’s glaze or the spare sweep of a garden path) to broad cultural generalization. The book benefits from this oscillation: it allows a reader to register how small, tactile art objects stand as indexes for entire civilizational habits.
Intercultural positioning and limits
A careful reader must also interrogate the writer’s positional stance. He writes as both insider and interlocutor to the West — a posture that makes his analysis particularly effective for a Western audience but that also opens him to ambivalence. At times he essentializes “the East” into a coherent spirit in ways that smooth over regional diversity and historical discontinuity. His tone can read as defensive, as if marshalling an aesthetic identity against caricature. This defensive posture, while rhetorically necessary in his moment, can flatten complexities — for instance, the tensions within Japanese modernity between preservation and reform, or the influence of continental and religious crosscurrents on what he calls a unified “spirit.”
Furthermore, Okakura’s moralizing about taste sometimes shades into a hierarchical view of cultures: he admires restraint and suggests its superiority to a Western penchant for display. Modern readers should attend to how aesthetic values can be weaponized into cultural claims about civilization and worth.
Resonance and legacy
Despite these caveats, the book’s influence is clear and continuing. Okakura helped reframe Western approaches to Japanese art, contributing to the respect with which tea bowls, ink scrolls, and gardens came to be regarded. The book anticipates many later discussions in comparative aesthetics, postcolonial criticism, and design theory — especially debates about how traditions recalibrate themselves under modern pressures. For artists, curators, and educators, its central claim — that art is a grammar of life — remains provocatively useful.
Who should read it
Ideals of the East is recommended for readers who value argument that is compact but capacious: art historians, philosophers of aesthetics, designers, and anyone interested in the cultural politics of taste. Read it as both historical document and ongoing provocation: a passionate defence of a way of seeing that asks whether modern life can make room for quiet attentiveness, understatement, and the discipline of absence. If the book’s confident generalizations sometimes irk, they nevertheless force the reader to reconsider what art does for a society — not as spectacle, but as a repository of values.
December 30, 2019
Interessante spunto sull'estetica e l'arte giapponese partendo dagli albori - e quindi la forte influenza indiana e cinese - fino al 1902, anno della pubblicazione del libro.
Okakura, morto nel 1912, copre fino al periodo Meiji e dunque questo libro è da intendersi privo dell'evoluzione artistica giapponese dal 1900 ad oggi. Non è da considerarsi un compendio, quanto più un excursus che offre interessanti spunti di approfondimento sia dell'arte che della storia del giappone. Il volume, ben curato, è corredato anche da immagini in bianco e nero dei capolavori dei periodi presi man mano in esame.
Okakura, morto nel 1912, copre fino al periodo Meiji e dunque questo libro è da intendersi privo dell'evoluzione artistica giapponese dal 1900 ad oggi. Non è da considerarsi un compendio, quanto più un excursus che offre interessanti spunti di approfondimento sia dell'arte che della storia del giappone. Il volume, ben curato, è corredato anche da immagini in bianco e nero dei capolavori dei periodi presi man mano in esame.
December 19, 2025
Gran libro. Sí pide tener algunas bases sobre la historia de distintos países de oriente como la China o India —amén de Japón, obvio— y de su arte, también mucho ojo con la cantidad de nombres que menciona el autor. No obstante, al final viene una línea cronológica que es de mucha ayuda.
Hay atisbos de romanticismo en el texto por parte de su autor, no obstante, es un libro fenomenal que se disfruta de principio a fin; ojalá más gente se dé el chance de leer este libro.
Hay atisbos de romanticismo en el texto por parte de su autor, no obstante, es un libro fenomenal que se disfruta de principio a fin; ojalá más gente se dé el chance de leer este libro.
June 19, 2021
Skimmed, so I may be somewhat off, but this seemed like bombastic 19th century style nationalism to me. I found it fairly unpleasant and vaguely (and sometimes not so vaguely) racist. I think it’d be a better idea to find a more modern book covering these topics. Came off as excessively abstract and dry as well.
February 8, 2022
This didn't grab the way the last Kakuzo Okakura book I read did, but that's at least in part because I know a lot less about eastern art than I'd like. I think I'd have gotten much more out of the book if I'd found an edition with images/illustrations; that probably would have made up for my art-history ignorance.
December 27, 2024
我的天哪。
到《展望》這一章，佐伯彰一和劉仲敬翻譯到最後都動情了，氣魄逼人。
孫莉莉像是小姑娘穿媽媽的高跟鞋，在挑兩人的鞋子穿。
又讓我想起來《出賣上海灘》的作者嘲諷蔣介石的飛行員，
投擲炸彈怎麼都投不中黃浦江裡的日軍戰艦，
然後心想五點半該下班了，趕快投一個炸彈回去了，
於是投到了外灘南京路，死掉7、800人。
她選的一雙鞋子差不多就是這樣兩隻鞋，
左腳的炸彈炸在南京路，右腳的炸彈炸在大世界。
中國的飛機、炸死中國的百姓。
這種既視感。
到《展望》這一章，佐伯彰一和劉仲敬翻譯到最後都動情了，氣魄逼人。
孫莉莉像是小姑娘穿媽媽的高跟鞋，在挑兩人的鞋子穿。
又讓我想起來《出賣上海灘》的作者嘲諷蔣介石的飛行員，
投擲炸彈怎麼都投不中黃浦江裡的日軍戰艦，
然後心想五點半該下班了，趕快投一個炸彈回去了，
於是投到了外灘南京路，死掉7、800人。
她選的一雙鞋子差不多就是這樣兩隻鞋，
左腳的炸彈炸在南京路，右腳的炸彈炸在大世界。
中國的飛機、炸死中國的百姓。
這種既視感。
May 8, 2025
Un poco decepcionante. No se centra para nada en el arte, lo menciona con pinzas en escasas ocasiones. El 90% del libro habla sobre hinduismo, budismo y otros ismos. No se entiende ni la mitad del libro entre tanta terminología budista. En fin, que para saber de arte, no te sirve.
November 2, 2021
This book was very fun for me; despite needing to find the exact edition from 1970. Other than that roadblock, I learned a lot, and that’s great for a history nerd as myself.
December 21, 2014
This book is unreadable.
A sample passage, picked out more-or-less at random:
Not taken out of context, since there is no context to take it out of. 180 indigestible pages of this.
A sample passage, picked out more-or-less at random:
Buddhism, the predominating impulse of the period, was, of course, that of the second Indian (monastic) phase. Gensho (Hiouen-Tsang) was a pupil of Mitrasena, a disciple of Vasubandhu, and through his great translations and commentaries he, on his return from India, inaugurated the new school known as the Hosso sect, of which the idea seems to have been at work even before his time. Kenshu, assisted by Gissananda of Central, and Bodhi-ruchi of Southern India, further enforced the same movement in the beginning of the eighth century, and established the Kegon sect, which aims at complete fusion of mind and matter. The intellectual effort of this period being so closely akin to that of modern science, art becomes largely a reaching forth towards a visualization of the vastness of the universe, resting and centring itself upon the Buddha. It therefore assumes colossal dimensions, and the Buddha images become the immense Roshana (Vairochana) Buddhas. The Roshana Buddha is the Buddha of Law in contrast to the Buddha of Mercy, which is Amida, and the Buddha of Adaptation, which is Sakya-Muni himself.
Not taken out of context, since there is no context to take it out of. 180 indigestible pages of this.
May 14, 2015
This book is filled with useful information, but it is a very dry read. I only recently discovered my passion for reading so maybe it's inexperience, but I found it really hard to keep up with Mr. Okakura's writing style, getting lost in all his rhetoric. I think of 'Ideals of the East' more as reference type read in the sense that it's not very interesting, but chuck full of history.
January 28, 2015
This book follows the evolution of art through many stages, from the earliest recorded times to modern ones. The ideals of the East shows us just what makes the Japanese art so distinctive and unique.
June 26, 2016
Written in the early 1900s, this book describes the cultural evolution of asian art, from a Japanese perspective. Densely written, it's slow going, but contains some interesting facts and may or may not be worth it to you, depending on your level of fascination with asian art influences.
September 21, 2008
This is a historical primary source.
May 7, 2015
Outdated nowadays, but very helpful for seeing perspectives of Art History and Japanese Art in the early 20th century.
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