This dissertation explores diverse perceptions about Japan and its art that emerged in Boston between 1880 and 1900, and the interactions among such perceptions in Boston's specific cultural milieu. After 1870 Boston sent many specialists to newly opened Japan, while the general public enthusiastically embraced exotic Japanese goods and eagerly sought information about the country. During the period, lively discussions about what constituted "a true Japanese taste" ensued, engaging many levels of Boston's population. As an examination of Orientalism, this study challenges the homogeneous and monolithic model constructed by Edward Said and attempts to investigate in specific terms the multiplicity of perceptions about Japan that existed in a limited geographical region and time period, using material culture as one focus. The sources for this study include the personal papers, published records, contemporary newspaper accounts, and visual culture of Japan-related individuals and events. Chapters examine, first, the history of knowledge about Japan in Boston before the 1876 Centennial; second, Edward Sylvester Morse (1838--1925), a scientist whose public lectures on Japan in Boston in the early 1880s and whose pottery collection generated lively public debate; third, the Japanese display at the 1883--1884 Boston Foreign Exhibition and its reception; and fourth, Bunkio Matsuki (1867--1940), a Japanese native who transformed himself after 1890 from a vendor of Japanese trinkets into a fine arts dealer of Japanese antiques in Boston.

The findings demonstrate how the earlier, popular perception of Japan, informed mainly by Japanese export wares and limited public information, interacted with a newer, more ethnologically based version of knowledge in the 1880s; in addition, in the 1890s, a more academic understanding of Japan emerged, to be embraced by a smaller circle of specialists. Before the separation of popular- and high-culture attitudes toward Japan after 1900, these views converged in various cultural arenas, producing in late nineteenth-century Boston a cultural dialogue that included contradictory voices. The exploration of the specificity of the dialogue, as it was expressed in many media and by diverse people, offers a new model of cultural studies and reinforces Boston's central role in the construction of knowledge about Japan.