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In 1899 and 1900, Sadayakko (1871-1946)1 and Otojiro Kawakami (1864-1911) toured the United States and Europe with their troupe of actors, performing plays that com- bined elements of Kabuki, melodrama, and realism. In Japan, audiences had recognized the company's performances as pioneering the modern genre of Shinpa (new school drama), and when they performed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, artists like Pablo Picasso, André Gide, and Auguste Rodin found inspiration in their work and regarded them as modernist peers. In most of the United States, however, as the Kawakamis traveled from San Francisco across the Midwest and then to a few East Coast cities, their performances were generally seen as exotic orientaba.2 Much of their tour consisted of brief appearances in each location, playing in half-filled theatres to spectators drawn by the novelty of a Japanese theatre troupe. One significant excep- tion to this reception was in Boston, where the Kawakamis drew repeat customers, twice extended their stay to a two-month run, and earned the type of critical acclaim that foreshadowed their reception in Paris. This warm reception derived from the robust Japonisme that flourished in both academic and commercial circuits in Boston, and from a critical emphasis on the troupe's realist style that propelled spectators to recognize the Kawakamis as practitioners of modern theatre.
This essay examines how the conjunction of Japonisme-a phenomenon documented by scholars like T. J. Jackson Lears, Julia Meech-Pekarik and Gabriel Weisberg, and Neil Harris3-and a critical discourse about modern realism on the part of Boston reviewers shaped spectatorial viewing practices that constituted what I call a modernist audience, by which I mean-recognizing that the definition of modernism itself, especially with respect to stylistic criteria, was not necessarily constant-a self-aware group of specta- tors who, although not located in one of the conventional centers of modernism, was attuned to international artistic developments. The Boston modernist audience gained knowledge of the international through a substantial investment in an education that allowed them to identify "modernist" art when they saw it, to position themselves as aware of "the modern," and to compare what they were seeing in Boston to accepted international examples. This modernist audience was thus locally situated though internationally oriented, seeking to prove, on an international scale,...