Okakura Kakuzō

(1862 - 1913)

Born in Yokohama in 1862, eight years after Commodore Matthew Perry opened Japan up to foreign trade, Okakura Kakuzō studied at Tokyo Imperial University and spent time in India, befriending poet Rabindranath Tagore. In his first work, The Ideals of the East, he wrote, “Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas.” Okakura was at one time a curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.