From the 1920s to the early 1940s, Japanese department stores provided Japanese urban middle-class households with art and artifacts from China, Korea, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. The department stores not merely sold art and artifacts from Japan's Asian neighbors but also promoted the cultural confidence to appreciate and collect them. At the same time, aspiring middle-class customers satisfied their desire to emulate the historical elite's taste for Chinese and other Asian objects by shopping at the department stores. The aesthetic consumption of Asian art and artifacts formulated a privileged position for Japan in the imperial order and presented the new middle class with the cultural capital vital to the negotiation of its social status. This article examines the ways in which department stores marketed “tōyō shumi” (Oriental taste), which played a significant role in the formation of identity for both the imperial state and the new middle class in 1920s and 1930s Japan.

Just a century ago, in 1843, Ralph Waldo Emerson read for the first time a complete translation of “The Four Books” of the Chinese classics, copying many sentences from them in his “Journals.” Many of these quota-tions reappear in his later “Works”—and almost every volume contained one or two illustrative sayings taken from the Chinese classics. The greater part of these entries in his journals are in an appreciative tone, and his quotations from them in the “Essays” are mostly used to confirm his own beliefs.

The surviving private papers of Robert Hart, Inspector General of the Imperial Maritime Customs, 1863-1911, were deposited at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1971. They have been studied in part by a few scholars, including the present writer. Most of Hart's papers, private and official, were destroyed in the Boxer Revolution, when his house and office were burned, but his private diary, in 77 volumes, was saved from the general destruction by a 4th Assistant (B) of the Customs who carried it from the house in a black tin chest. Apart from the diary, the papers consist of loose materials, some 120 packages of private letters and miscellaneous printed Customs reports for the period 1900 through 1908.

More than one hundred textbooks in American and world history, geography, modern problems and civics were examined recently by social studies and Asiatic specialists to evaluate the accuracy and adequacy of the material included on the Far East. Their report, Treatment of Asia in American textbooks (104 p. 40¢), has been published by the American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations, New York. Dr. Howard E. Wilson, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, coordinator and editor of the report, writes that “There may be arguments over what pupils need most to be taught about Asia; there can no longer be argument over the necessity of their being well informed.” One significant recommendation made by all the analysts was that experts in Asiatic affairs should be consulted more frequently by textbook authors and publishers to insure “accuracy, relevancy, and comprehensiveness of information included” on Asia.