hey stood" (Wright 45). This is the indirect approach--covering his trail by nearly ignoring the Japanese contribution to architecture.
It is difficult to say why Wright was so opposed to anyone believing he had been influenced by Japanese architecture. He more than admitted to the influence of the prints, saying, "If Japanese prints were to be deducted from my education I don't know what direction the whole might have taken" (qtd. in Nute 224). But it is revealing that he cites Japan as one of the nations whose architecture fit its setting--one of the leading tenets of Wright's organic theory. It should also be noted that Wright never denigrated Japanese architecture. He referred to the Renaissance as "that setting sun Europe mistook for dawn" and to the period's buildings as mere exercises in adapting the classical orders (qtd. in Menocal 151). When he wanted to express his opposition to some idea, Wright was very capable of doing so. In one of his rare attempts at describing Japanese architecture, Wright merely, as Manson puts it, looked at it "as a sort of index of the national tidiness"(37). But Wright did admit that the architecture was "a kind of spiritual ideal of natural and hence organic simplicity" (qtd. in Manson 37).
It takes one of Wright's defenders to show how basic the connection is between Wright and Japanese architecture. Smith accepts Wright's disingenuous claim that he knew nothing of Japanese architecture, "other than what he could see in the prints", prior to his 1905 visit to Japan (92). Smith then supports his argument by pointing out that the ukiyo-e, the popular theater prints that Wright collected, constituted a break with Japanese tradition as the aesthetes, led by Whistler, had broken with tradition in admiring this non-Western art. He believes that one or the other of these rebellions has to explain Wright's attraction to the art--though why the art itself could not attract him is not cl...