Kakuzo Okakura

Kakuzo Okakura is the author of The Book of Tea. He is a career academician, and has worked to preserve Japanese artwork and heritage and share his knowledge of the Asiatic cultures with Westerners. He founded the Japanese Art Institute to preserve Japanese art and culture, and later became a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Art.

Editor Everett F. Bleiler sees Okakura as a study in contrasts, being both exceptionally brilliant and at the same time childish. He is in some ways well-learned, but in other ways he suffers from prejudice and cultural myopia. In addition to this complexity of character, Bleiler identifies three "sides" to Okakura, each of which are exhibited in The Book of Tea. These are the Scholar, the Sentimentalist, and the Visionary. While lesser works of Okakura have, in Bleiler's opinion, suffered from one of these sides being too dominant, The...