Abstract
ven before the dissolution of Shogunate and the Meiji Reforms around 1868, which opened up Japan to the world, Japan has been of considerable cultural influence on the English-speaking world. This remote country in East Asia has for a long time been a foil to Western view of the world in the 19th century, with its isolated culture that willingly refused "superior" western culture and religion, and was perceived as developing in a unique condition of complete isolation.
With its opening, Japan became an exotic object of desire in the eyes of the artists of the time, be it Gilbert with his opera Mikado set in Japan or painters such as Gogh and Monet copying the style of Japanese print art in their works. Many western scholars and entrepreneurs working on the development of Japan also wrote books about their experience in the East forming western public opinion and some of them, such as Fenollosa and Hearn, became so enamoured with Japan that they regarded it as their new homeland.
This was just one of several waves of Japanophilia that we can see in the West; one of them is going on right now centred around anime and pop-culture. This talk will try to introduce these waves of Japanese cultural influence on the western art and propose several approaches towards the research of historical and cultural issues surrounding the relationship between the Western and Japanese culture