His given name was Kakuzo Okakura. He was born in Yokohama in 1863, the second son of the Ishikawaya, a raw-silk export business run by a former retainer of the Fukui domain. He graduated from Tokyo University in 1880 and entered the Ministry of Education; from about 1883 he surveyed old shrines and temples across the country under the vice-minister Ryuichi Kuki. In 1886 he was sent abroad with Fenollosa as a member of the art investigation commission, to observe art education in Europe and America. After returning he helped prepare the opening of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts), and in 1890, at the age of twenty-seven, became its second principal. He aimed at a new painting worthy of a modern nation, but his drive for radical reform of Japanese painting met resistance, and he left the post in 1898. He then founded the Japan Art Institute with twenty-six colleagues who followed him, among them Gaho Hashimoto. In 1904, feeling that innovative Japanese painting would not be accepted at home, he went to America. He was taken on by the Chinese and Japanese art department of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he arranged and catalogued the Eastern collection, and became close to Mrs Isabella Gardner, the great collector known as the queen of Boston society. In 1906 he set about rebuilding the Japan Art Institute, reorganising it and moving its first section (painting) to Izura. Calling the place “the Barbizon of the East”, he aimed at a new Japanese painting and summoned Taikan Yokoyama, Kanzan Shimomura, Shunso Hishida and Buzan Kimura. In his last years he collected energetically in China, India and Japan for the Boston museum, and wrote and lectured to introduce the art of Japan and the East to Europe and America. In 1910 he became head of the museum’s Chinese and Japanese art department.