동서교섭사로 보는 일본의 ‘미학적 국가주의’

From the mid-19th century onwards nationalist diatribe infiltrated deeply into all forms of European culture, affecting visual arts, literature and architecture at the highest and most popular level. The world expositions launched at that time were the international site to compete revealing the driving force of nationalism. Japan’s participation in it as the first runner among the Asian countries left strong and ever-lasting impression of its national identity via not only its construction of Pavilion but also discourse and rhetoric around Japanese art and culture going along with it. Okakura Kakuzo’s contribution to the latter was so significant that the early history of Japanese world expositions could not be examined without his catalogues and books published for spreading his idea of ‘aesthetic nationalism.’ Owing to the small circle of friends centred around Tokyo Imperial University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Japanese art could gain its international reputation in Meiji period. It represented the leading edge of Japanese art scholarship in America at the turn of the century. Among them the relationship between Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzo is particularly important to see how Japanese art made its way to receive its successful recognition of the West. Under the inf luence of Fenollosa, Okakura had absorbed Hegelian perspective, which affected his interpretation of Far Eastern thought and its relation to the West. On the basis of the close connection to the America’s leading authorities on Japanese art, Okakura’s contribution to its promotion was never to be emphasized especially through his publication such as The Ideal of the East, The Awakening of the East and The Awakening of Japan, and Book of Tea not to mention of the exposition catalogues. His influence to the West was quite fundamental with his involvement with the several world expositions such as Chicago Exposition(1893), Saint Louise Exposition(1904), and Japan-British Exposition(1910). Those World expositions were most crucial in terms of the direct relation of his discourse of Japanese art. This essay probes into the way Okakura’s discourse involves with the construction of expositions and how it goes along with Japanese nationalism. His rhetoric of Japan’s art and culture was strongly ideological enough to be called ‘Aesthetic Nationalism,’ which led the West to recognize Japanese culture representing Asia in totality as was asserted by Okakura’s phrase “Asia is one.” He published those catalogues to explain and aestheticize the architectures and artworks installed inside pavilion buildings for the western public: such as The Ho-o-den (Phoenix Hall) for Chicago Exposition, Japanese Temples and Their Treasures for Japan-British Exposition. He also delivered a lecture entitled “Modern Problems in Painting” for Saint Louise Exposition. This essay therefore has been launched to explore Okakura’s discursive alignment with the construction of Japanese pavilion and its organization at the field of world expositions of the three major ones mentioned above in particular. In a word, the main purpose of the research lies in probing into the relation of construction of Japanese pavilion and subsidiary areas such as garden and fair. In order to enlighten such alignment, the project particularly focused on the way in which Japanese nationalism engaged in organizing and promoting Japan’s art and culture. In doing so, I would shed light on Japan’s colonialist attitude toward Asia, to which Okakura’s idea contributed theoretically. His suggestion of ‘one Asia’ has been used strategically for the purpose of empowering Japan in its competition with the Western countries. This research aims to reveal the way in which Okakura’s aesthetic discourse of Japanese art has been put into political strategy under Japanese nationalism, that is not necessarily the same with his own theoretical perspective.