Contemporaneous with his investigations into Japanese religion, Tsuda also pursued his study of art, as an employee of the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum. Among his many art publications while employed at the museum, he co-authored two articles with senior colleagues: Imaizumi Yūsakū (1850-1931), a former colleague of Okakura Kakuzō, and Miyake Yonekichi (1860-1929), the museum's director. Letters in the Metropolitan Museum of Art archives indicate Tsuda continued working for the Tokyo museum until he took a leave of absence to come to the Met in late 1924. Dr. Bashford Dean (1867-1928), Arms and Armor curator at the Met and a renowned zoologist, facilitated this appointment. Dean had amassed a collection of Japanese arms and armor, considered the best outside Japan, that he gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.In 1917 Dean made his third trip to Japan, to negotiate the acquisition of additional Japanese arms and armor for his museum.
The first correspondence between Dean and Tsuda in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Arms and Armor archives files dated to September 26,1917, suggests Dean met Tsuda during this trip. Other letters indicate negotiations for Tsuda to work at the Met began then although he did not arrive until late in 1924. He remained in New York through September 1926. His duties entailed cataloging the Japanese arms and armor collection and research on some objects in the Asian department. Notes in museum files mention that Tsuda had a wife, three children, and a maid to support in Tokyo while he was in New York, so in order to help him supplement the museum's modest salary, curators helped arrange for Tsuda to give public lectures at New York area institutions including New York University, where he offered a series of fifteen lectures on Buddhist art. While in the United States, Tsuda endeavored to facilitate better mutual understanding between Japanese and Americans by publishing an article about his experiences, that he titled "Early Japanese Racial Problem and That of America." He apparently could not find a publisher.
Tsuda returned to Japan and to his job at the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum via stops in major cities of Europe in fall of 1926. Met records indicate he continued to work on special projects until 1929, curtailed perhaps because of financial troubles at the Met caused by the stock market crash. One of these projects is known. In October 1927, Tsuda helped the Met negotiate the purchase of the important arms and armor collection of Mr. Seki Yasunosuke. He also translated explanations by the collector for a museum publication (Hoopes 1930: 221). A letter Tsuda sent to Dean in March 1927 indicates that by the time he worked on this project, he had already resigned his position at the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum to work for the Imperial Japanese Railways on a project to compile a twelve volume series of guide books about Japan. The Japanese state considered attracting tourists an important source of stimulating the economy (Nakagawa 1998). Writers like Tsuda played a vital role in this effort because they helped disseminate information to foreigners about the many scenic and historic places in Japan. Tsuda's research for this project must have formed the basis of his Handbook of Japanese Art.
During the years he worked for the Imperial Japanese Railways, two lectures that Tsuda presented in English to foreigners in Tokyo merited review in The Japan Advertiser, a Tokyo-based English language newspaper founded in 1905 that merged in 1940 with the better known, and still existing, Japan Times. These articles make it apparent that he enjoyed public speaking and had an engaging lecture style. One review, "Buddha Explained for Asia Society" (The Japan Advertiser 1927), described how Tsuda extolled the "harmony of Buddhism, not only with races and beliefs of the Orient but also with races and beliefs of all lands." The reporter noted that "[i]n vividly describing the naturalness of Buddhism, at one time in his address he discussed the seating postures of the Buddha. This he illustrated by climbing upon the top of the table and naturally placing his legs in the attitude Buddha assumes so gracefully in statue, carving and painting." Although the interweaved pose of his legs appeared simple, the audience commented that it would be "impossible for them to imitate." In the second review, "History of Shinto Held that of Japan" (The Japan Advertiser 1928), Tsuda described the "inseparable connection between Shinto and the national life." His praise of the universality of Buddhism and of the ethno-religious nationalism centered around Shinto reveal his endorsement of official policies and popular characterizations of Eastern values. Tsuda was very much a man of his times.
Tsuda's fluency in English, knowledge of Japanese art, and familiarity with America explain the trajectory of his career in the 1930s, as an employee of government departments focused on international cultural relations. When the government created the Board of Tourist Industry in 1930 as a division of the Ministry of Railways, Tsuda may have been transferred there; the preface to his Handbook of Japanese Art credits several members of that board for assistance on his book. In 1934, he probably joined the staff of the newly created Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai or KBS), a semi-independent agency that received money from the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Its creation came soon after Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, as a way to independently continue the aims of that organization through furthering international understanding about Japanese art, history, and culture. The KBS produced numerous English language publications, by both Japanese and foreign authors, and sponsored lecture series and art exhibitions abroad (Cohen 1992, 121). It was succeeded by the Japan Foundation in 1972.
Although Tsuda's Handbook of Japanese Art was published by a commercial Japanese publisher, its production must have been sponsored by the KBS; he acknowledges the assistance of some of its prominent staff members in his preface. The year after it appeared, the KBS served as major coordinator for an important exhibition of Japanese art treasures from Japanese collections at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Tsuda, while employed by the KBS, worked on this project, as secretary for the exhibition's executive committee (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1936, vii). Numerous prominent private collectors and museums in Japan lent first rate objects to the exhibition, including some designated as national treasures. Some of the art, then privately owned, later came into collections in the United States. The long list of those involved with planning the exhibition comprised important government bureaucrats, academic scholars, diplomats, museum curators, politicians, and KBS officials. Both Anesaki Masaharu and Baron Dan Ino were members. The catalogue listed Dan in several capacities—as an executive board member, as a director of the KBS, and as a lender to the exhibition.
Dan's illustrious father, Dan Takuma (1858-1932), an illustrious art collector and Mitsui corporation executive, had advocated closer cooperation between Japan and Western countries. He died in an infamous assassination plot by ultra-nationalists. His son, educated at Harvard, evidently shared his feelings and served on the Japanese Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, along with other members of the KBS (and Nitobe). The elder Dan was among the close friends of Masuda Takashi (1848-1938), legendary Japanese art collector and head of Mitsui conglomerate (Guth 1993). Tsuda was acquainted with Masuda as well, probably through his association with Dan Inō, who also worked as a director at Masudas Mitsui corporation. In the first sentence of the introductory chapter of Tsuda's Handbook of Japanese Art (p. 39), he described his participation in a tea ceremony at Baron Masuda's Odawara estate in 1933 (Guth 1993, fig. 4-7). This prominent mention of Masuda alerts the knowledgeable reader to the fact that Tsuda was privy to Japan's most elite circles of art collectors, of which Masuda stood at the pinnacle. It suggests, correctly, that the art subsequently discussed in the volume would be of the sort appreciated by collectors such as Masuda, whose aesthetic preferences became largely synonymous with the criteria the government used to select its national treasures.
The names of the publishers of subsequent publications by Tsuda in the 1930s, in both English and Japanese, reveal his continued involvement with KBS, the Railway Ministry, and religious organizations. Befitting the tenor of the times, Tsuda seems to have become increasingly drawn to explaining nationalist
Shinto ideology and early myths about the Japanese people, ancestor, worship, and veneration of the Emperor. After the war, he continued to publish in both Japanese and English. One of his last articles, in the September 1955 bulletin of the Tokyo National Museum, was one of many short reminiscences published to honor Langdon Warner (1881-1955). In it, he described how he worked with Warner as the KBS representative on the installation of the Japanese section of a major exhibition, "Arts of the Pacific Basin," that Warner organized at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939 (Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai 1939). Tsuda's record of publications ends in 1961 with an article about the future of Japanese emperorship and the justice of peace, written for a religious studies journal. By then he had reached the age of seventy-eight.
The Perspective and Scope of Tsuda’s Handbook of Japanese Art
Tsuda published widely about Japanese art and culture, and other societies with which the Japanese people interacted or which influenced its cultural development. These interests contributed to the central theme of his Handbook of Japanese Art: explaining how the Japanese people created a new art of their own based on adaptations of foreign influences (p. 41). He also remarked that he hoped his book would instill appreciation for Japanese art in readers through teaching them to enjoy the beauty of things, which he considered central to "advancement of human culture." This stress on art appreciation typified the thrust of most Western language books on Japanese art of his day (Rosenfield 1998, 164). But Tsuda, like Okakura, tied art appreciation with spirituality, in his case, the complicated symbolism of esoteric Buddhist doctrine that he believed would serve as a moral guide, to "instruct us in human behavior" and "elevate our manner of living" (p. 42). As noted in a review of Tsuda's Handbook of Japanese Art in The New York Times on October 4, 1936, its publication was probably timed to prepare the English speaking public for the 1936 Boston exhibition. The author of the review wrote of Tsuda's "easy and informal manner" though he described the English as "a little quaint in its construction," but noted that its "intimate atmosphere" made the text seem like it was "a pleasant chat" (Jewell 1936).
At the time the book was first published, both Japanese and Western scholars had already been collecting, exhibiting, and publishing studies of Japan's premodern arts, gardens, and architecture for over sixty years. In the beginning, disagreement about the relative importance of Japan's diverse arts, the avid collecting of Japanese art by foreigners, and the derelict state of many historic structures and gardens, made assessment of these cultural artifacts both challenging and imperative. The "short bibliography" of the original edition of the Handbook attests to the intensity of these early endeavors. It included seventy-nine English language titles dating from 1875 to the 1935, with the majority of the volumes published after 1900. However, it did not include the even larger number of English language magazine articles devoted to the arts of Japan, museum exhibition catalogues, or official Japanese government publications of Japanese arts exhibited at international expositions abroad. All the major early English language monographs are present, except one, Louis Gonse's Japanese Art (Gonse 1891), perhaps because it had originally been published in French (in 1883).
Significantly, native Japanese authors wrote only twenty-three works on this list. Of these, independent foreign publishers issued thirteen. Various departments of the Japanese national government, quasi-official agencies such as KBS, or commercial Japanese publishers working in alliance with government officials published the remaining ten. Tsuda's Handbook belongs to this latter category. This distinction is important because most of the ancient arts featured in Tsuda's book, and others published in Japan, were made in the nation's political centers of Kyoto, Nara, Kamakura, and Tokyo for the elites of society by artists of prestigious lineages. Additionally, these arts came mainly from collections of the Imperial Household (the emperor) or the three great national museums in Kyoto, Nara, or Tokyo. Many of these objects, and the gardens and religious structures Tsuda and other Japanese publications highlighted, were those the government designated as national treasures (kokuhō). Westerners, in contrast, long held highest admiration for more recently made small decorative sculptures and exquisite functional crafts, then described as "industrial arts," and Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. By drawing attention to these monumental arts of great antiquity the government sought to demonstrate the cultural parity of their nation's art with that of European countries. However, Tsuda did include some arts that did not make the government's national treasure list, ukiyo-e prints and some decorative arts created as profitable export products, because no survey book on Japanese art aimed at a foreign audience could exclude them.
The Japanese government first enacted laws in 1897 to safeguard its artistic heritage, initially designating select ancient buildings and religious arts (principally paintings and sculptures) at religious institutions as national treasures. These cultural artifacts then became eligible for government subsidies and, in the case of art, could not be removed from the country by foreign collectors (Guth 1997 and 1996-1997). Since then, the government has been regularly refining these laws, for example, by allowing nomination of art in private collections in 1929, and by appointing individuals who possess knowledge of traditional craft techniques as "Living National Treasures" in 1955. Collecting and exhibiting these treasures became the mission of Japan's national museums, in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara, where they remain the featured exhibits today (Tseng 2008). But unlike European arts, which privileged the "high" arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting over the "low" arts of crafts, Japan's national treasures included examples of unique, hand made crafts in various media in recognition of their cultural significance, and of the exceptional mastery of the techniques required to create them, a defining characteristic of the Japanese artistic tradition.
Japan first formally introduced these national treasures to the West in its displays and accompanying exhibition catalogues of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 (Tseng 2008, 182-183). To coincide with this event, a private Buddhist organization with close ties to government cultural agency officials began publishing these materials between 1899 and 1908, in a deluxe series of twenty bi-lingual (Japanese and English) volumes titled Shimbi Taikan (literally: "the compendium of true beauty;" but titled in English: Selected Relics of Japanese Art). Notably, ancient and medieval era Buddhist materials (seventh through fourteenth centuries) comprised a large portion of these works. Their significance in the hierarchy of Japan's art history remains so strong to this day that few scholars in Japan or the West have examined much of the Buddhist art and architecture created after that time (Rosenfleld 1998, 171; Graham 2007).
In the English language preface to the first Selected Relics volumes, Kuki Ryūichi (1852-1931), director of the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum and chair of the committee that selected the first group of national treasures, explained the reasoning behind this emphasis, with the following comments: "The Japanese people, who possessed an inborn idea of the beautiful, obtained abundant materials for expressing it in concrete forms, when Buddhism was brought into them.... Buddhism was both the introducer and encourager of Japanese art." Tsuda Noritake's Handbook became the first inexpensive single volume English language survey of Japanese art for wide public distribution to prominently feature these national treasures. In it, they are identified in illustration captions with the letters N.T. Most of his illustrated materials reside in national museums, prominent temples and shrines, or famous Japanese private collections. Tsuda only illustrated one piece in a foreign collection, a suit of armor from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he had worked (Fig. 106, p. 179).
Notably, because he emphasized the types of art owned by the national museums, Tsuda's book did not feature arts made by anonymous makers for commoners, broadly defined as mingei (folk crafts) by Yanagi Sōetsu (1889-1961), who coined the term in 1926. Yanagi founded the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in 1936 in Tokyo to house his collection of these materials, which he considered as sup
erior to arts by and for the elites (national treasure quality art) because they represented the art of the people. Yet, Tsuda must have known of Yanagi's ideas, since the Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai also supported Yanagi by publishing his studies, which promoted nationalist values in their celebration of native folk-craft traditions (Yanagi 1936; Brandt 2007).
Another important form of Japanese art he excluded is calligraphy, to this day rarely featured in survey books for foreign readers. This absence may reflect not only foreigners' perceived inability to appreciate it because they could not read the scripts, but also lack of interest in it by the early twentieth century Japanese public, especially younger Japanese (Tseng 2008, 208). Although national museums have, from their inception, collected calligraphy, they placed less emphasis on it than on painting and sculpture, which were regarded highest in the Western hierarchy of fine arts (which did not include calligraphy at all).
A History of Japanese Art Page 2