Japanese · 1863–1913
Okakura learned English as a child in Yokohama from a missionary while learning classical Chinese from a monk, and spent his life arguing with the West in its own language. He studied under Ernest Fenollosa, helped found the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and led the campaign to stop Meiji Japan from throwing away its own art in its rush to modernise — a campaign that saved a great deal of what is now in Japanese museums. He resigned after a scandal, founded a rival academy, and from 1904 ran the Asian art department at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He wrote The Ideals of the East, which opens with the sentence that Asia is one, and The Awakening of Japan, and then in 1906 The Book of Tea, a hundred pages in English addressed to Americans who thought Japan was a curiosity. It has never gone out of print.