Exemplary Things

I've been fascinated with the term meibutsu for a long time. In 1993, I published a book about Japan’s industrialist collectors. While writing it, I became intrigued with the fact that these nouveau riche collectors sought out works of art that had been classified as meibutsu in catalogs of the collections of Japan's previous feudal rulers. Industrialists competed with one another to acquire these emblems of wealth and socio-cultural status, not unlike their American contemporaries, J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Clay Frick competed to purchase masterpieces from European royal collections. And I thought, this is really interesting. What is it about this label that has given it such pervasive and enduring power? I knew writing a holistic study of the topic was too ambitious to take on at the time, but more than thirty years later, I felt ready to take on the challenge of writing something to reveal how this term arose and evolved over time. No Japanese or American scholar has really unpacked meibutsu in this way. People have looked at it from one angle or another, but not as a taxonomic system whose constituents are interlinked and mutually influential.