During its rapid modernization, beginning in the Meiji Era (1867–1912), Japan eagerly transplanted advanced technologies, social systems, and conceptual frameworks from the West. Japanese leaders were inspired by advanced models of technology and sociopolitical structures in countries like Great Britain, United States, France, Germany, etc. and made an effort to transplant them in the Japanese soil as quickly as possible. Although this process of adaptation and transplantation in the material area has been examined by scholars of Japanese modernity, relatively little attention has been paid to the locus where Japanese intellectuals went to look for spiritual inspiration for the creation of a modern nation-state.

In this talk, Hiroshi Nara will show that intellectuals, especially among those in the arts, subscribed to the idea of Greece (and, to some extent, Rome) during this period of profound transformation. This adoring gaze upon Greece can be said to have started by American art historian Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), who commented in the 1870s on formal stylistic similarities between Hellenistic art and early Japanese sculptural art. Although Fenollosa posed this hypothesis as nothing more than a romantic conjecture, the idea evolved and begot its own life. For example, influential intellectuals of the period, such as art historian Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913), philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1961), poet Aizu Yaichi (1881–1956), art historian Yashiro Yukio (1890–1975), economist/historian Taguchi Ukichi (1855–1905), and many others took it and developed it in their own ways.

Light refreshments will be served.