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Japonisme is a term often used to describe the shaping effects of Japanese culture and aesthetics on European art, but by the 1880s a similar trend emerged in the US, influencing popular culture as well as fine arts and poetry. This essay examines how Japonisme figured T. S. Eliot's development as a poet, focusing on Boston as a world city that was rapidly becoming global. It shows how Kakuzo Okakura, an art historian and curator of Asian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts during the time when Eliot was a Harvard undergraduate, and Masaharu Anesaki, a pioneer in the study of comparative religion who lectured on Mahayana Buddhism there when Eliot was a graduate student, inspired transpacific intercultural dialogue that would last the poet a lifetime. Eliot's formative encounter with Okakura and Anesaki raised his awareness of his family history in a region with longstanding ties to Asia; it nurtured his ambivalent engagement with such Boston-area writers as Emerson, whose prior interest in Confucianism laid a foundation for Eliot's modernism; and the encounter taught Eliot valuable lessons about moral action and impersonality, culminating in poems such as Four Quartets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-to late 1880s, a little-known Japanese painter named Aoki Toshio arrived in San Francisco, where he made a name for himself as T. Aoki, a painter, newspaper and magazine illustrator, and public storyteller. As a Japanese painter in California, Aoki was subject to prejudice from both Japanese and Americans, each of whom endeavored to situate him within a different set of social identities and artistic styles. This article assesses his positionality and works, asking what they reveal about the international circuits of Japonisme and Japanese art in the late nineteenth-century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]