ABSTRACT
AMERICANS, perhaps better than any others, ought to have a sympathy, and so perhaps an understanding, of the profound attraction that one culture can feel for another. American culture has been molded by the dialectic of our continuing relationship with the development of European civilization, and much of our developing and changing self-image has come from our own sense of a response to the Other, a model to be emulated or discarded but never altogether ignored. We are less aware, perhaps, of the profound relationship that Japanese artists and intellectuals have felt with France. The fascination that the French felt for Japan, particularly for her arts, in the latter part of the nineteenth century has been well documented, but relatively little has been written about the continuing excitement that the French intellectual, social, and artistic model has supplied for Japan since roughly the same period. A list of the important writers and intellectuals from the interwar period will show at once how powerful these affinities were to become: Yokomitsu Riichi the novelist, Nishiwaki Junzaburō the poet, Saeki Yūzō and half a dozen other important artists, Kuki Shūzō the philosopher, and many others spent much of their professional and creative lives trying to place in the context of their own evolving sense of Japanese civilization the lessons they felt that they had learned through the French experience.
