When I visited Japan, I was filled with questions about how the ideas about Japanese art penetrated the French market. In other words, how did Japanese art arrive on the shores of France. With that question in mind I headed south to Kyushu and on to Sasebo, where my friends lived, and with their help I was able to explore where the Dutch traded with Japan from the small, artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay.

Every art movement, from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Symbolism, Surrealism, and Mid-Century Modernism, would not have evolved as it did without the fairly sudden and thorough inundation of Japonism in the second half of the 19th Century.