Okakura Kakuzō was born in Yokohama in 1863, the son of a silk merchant. He learned English as a boy at a missionary school. That decision shaped everything after it.

He studied at Tokyo Imperial University under Ernest Fenollosa, an American who had come to Japan to teach philosophy and fell for its art. Together they spent the 1880s cataloguing temple treasures at a moment when Japan was modernising fast and throwing its own past away. Okakura helped found the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1887 and ran it from 1888. He was forced out in 1898. Within months he had founded a rival, the Japan Art Institute, with the painters who left alongside him.

Then he went the other direction. He wrote three books in English for Western readers: The Ideals of the East (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904), and The Book of Tea (1906). From 1904 he lived mostly in Boston, crossing back to Japan again and again. He became the Museum of Fine Arts’ curator of Chinese and Japanese art in 1910. Isabella Stewart Gardner was his friend and patron; a copy of The Book of Tea still sits in her museum.

The Book of Tea is the one people still read. It uses the tea ceremony to explain a way of seeing — the beauty of the imperfect, the unfinished, the ordinary afternoon. He died at his mountain villa in Niigata in 1913, at 50, still curator in Boston and still planning his next trip.