|
|
|
Book Review
Asia
| Donald Keene. Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793–1841. (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture.) New York: Columbia University Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 289. $24.50.
|
| Donald Keene's first book on Western studies in Tokugawa Japan, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, appeared in 1952. A half century later his first volume on Japanese art history revisits what scholars in that country knew of Western learning in the early nineteenth century and explores the works of a fine painter who is little recognized outside Japan. |
1
|
|
Keene's lively narrative treats Watanabe Kazan as astonishingly inquisitive about the Western world from which Japan was largely cut off after 1600. Kazan was a son of a poor samurai retainer of Tahara, a minor fief in today's Aichi prefecture. Born and reared in Edo (old Tokyo), he took up painting as a youth to support his family and in his mid-twenties grew interested in Dutch studies, the only path to Western learning at the time. Eventually he was imprisoned for his devotion to foreign learning and his supposed support for a recent revolt in Ōsaka. Sentenced to house arrest the following year, he grew disheartened and killed himself in 1841. |
. . . |
There are about 595 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|