ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of how Japonisme was interpreted by Japanese art critics and scholars of Western art during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The term Nihon shumi, or “the taste for Japan,” was used at the time to describe the Western interest in Japanese art. Discussed here are the texts written by members of the Shirakaba group, Nagai Kafū, and the pioneering scholars of Western art in Japan, including Kobayashi Taichirō and Yanagi Ryō, among others. By the 1930s, stimulated by Kafū’s reappraisals of ukiyo-e prints from the Edo period, Japanese scholars of Western art began to examine the influence of ukiyo-e on modern French art through the use of visual comparisons.
