Read the claim and reason. Claim: The Great Wave is the most historically significant artifact within Japanese culture because it represents global changes in Japanese society.
Reason: The Great Wave stands as a prominent metaphor for the changes in Japanese society because it tells us about Japan’s state of mind as it stood on the threshold of the modern world in the middle of the nineteenth century. Which sentence from A History of the World in 100 Objects provides the most effective evidence to support this claim and reason?
This bestselling woodblock print, made around 1830 by the great artist Hokusai, is one of his series of thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution began, the great manufacturing powers, above all Britain and the United States, were aggressively looking for new sources of raw materials and new markets for their products.
“So this great wave seemed, on the one hand, to be a symbolic barrier for the protection of Japan, but at the same time it had also suggested the potential for the Japanese to travel abroad, for ideas to move, for things to move back and forth.”
In the long years of relative seclusion Japan, governed by a military oligarchy, had enjoyed peace and stability.