Americans and the Modernization of Japan

FAIN: FT-13594-77

Robert A. Rosenstone
California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA 91125-0001)

To research in the papers of Townsend Harris, first foreign consul to Japan; Lafcadio Hearn, author of books on Japan, and Ernest Fenollosa, philosopher and aesthetician. PI wishes to examine their role as cultural mediators between Japan and the U.S. and the dilemma which this role created - were they primarily carriers of Western values and civilization to Japan, or explicators of the Orient for Americans? Study thus considers the problems of cross- cultural influence and the meaning of modernization in an important historical context.