At the time of Okakura’s first residency in the United States (1904), he seems to have encountered a minor literary vogue of writing about luxury items such as tobacco or tea as keys to national cultural values. Arthur Gray’s The Little Tea Book (1903) appears to have provided a major impetus for Okakura to explain Japanese culture through the symbolism of Japanese “Teaism” in his Book of Tea (1906). This paper indicates Okakura’s likely “borrowings” as to vocabulary, certain facts, and the structure from Gray’s book. Okakura’s “too poetic” style for the purpose of the book could also be explained by an apparent influence of the poetic and sociable style of Gray’s work intended as a gift book.

　The Book of Tea was not as widely reviewed as Okakura’s two earlier, more “serious,” books, probably due to its seemingly lay approach and sociable style. Yet it has increased its popularity and importance in the States during the years while the two earlier books have almost entirely lost theirs. The most important discovery made by the early reviewers of The Book of Tea must be that the idea of art for art’s sake had existed in Japan centuries earlier than in the West.

　How did Englishmen and Americans consider Noh plays of Japan? What did they discover in Noh plays? In this paper the author has tried to answer these questions.

　Chamberlain and Aston were the first men to pay attention to “pivot-words” in Noh plays. The former thought them delightful in the extreme, while the latter considered this kind of jeu de mots a mistake in serious composition.

　Waley observed that yugen, the essence of Noh plays, as written in the Kadensho by Zeami, compares with the natural grace of a boy’s movements and with the gentle restraint of a nobleman’s speech and bearing. Keene, after explaining the ideal of yugen the meaning of which had changed during the three centuries between Shunzei and Zeami, described the training of the nine levels of actors. Fenollosa found that the beauty and power of Noh lie in its concentration and that all elements unite to create a single clarified impression. From the ideas of Fenollosa, Pound developed the theory that the better plays are all written to present a single image which appears in the climax of the play and is described by the chorus.

　Yeats discovered in Noh plays a single metaphor as deliberate as the echoing rhythm of line in Chinese and Japanese painting, and invented a form of drama, distinguished and symbolic. These observations show us that their approach to Noh plays threw a fresh light on our traditional drama and paved the way for our modern drama.