Later in 2008, Britons will commemorate the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I. This year as every year, at London's Cenotaph, lines will be recited from a poem, For the Fallen:

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old [ ...] At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them."

The war ended on Nov. 11, 1918, and those lines are repeated on the Sunday nearest that date, known as Remembrance Sunday. But ironically, the name of the poet who wrote them is likely to be forgotten. Today he is neglected even by many students of Japan, although his links with the country were substantial and his achievements distinguished."

Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster in 1869. Educated at Oxford University, he won the Newdigate Prize — a prize for poetry by Oxford undergraduates also won by such famous writers as Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde. In his 20s and 30s, he published volumes of verse. During the war, too old for active service, he worked with the Red Cross. For his war poetry, the best of his other original verse and his translation of Dante, he is considered a distinguished minor English poet. But his true expertise was as a scholar of Oriental art — Japanese in particular. For many years he worked in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, where he cultivated an extensive knowledge of the field. A century ago this year, in 1908, he published Painting in the Far East, the first full account of its subject in any Western language."

In those days the study of Asian arts was often a long-distance pursuit. Binyon's British Museum colleague Arthur Waley, who became one of the leading British authorities on Chinese art and poetry, never traveled to East Asia. Binyon was 60 in the year of his only trip to Japan, when he gave a series of lectures at the Tokyo Imperial University. This way of studying from afar, inevitable in the days when aviation was in its infancy, might have encouraged Orientalist fantasies. But Binyon was free of them. Chuo University professor David Ewick has fairly called him one of the first English writers "to respond reverentially and without condescension to experience of Japan."

Many early European visitors to Japan were missionaries, going to the country with the deliberate intention of fostering a foreign ideology. Binyon, by contrast, went with an open mind. Perhaps his interest in art and his training as a poet had shaped his outlook as a traveler: his desire to observe precisely, reflect and compare, to which value judgments were secondary. Crucially, he saw how his experience of and attitudes to Japan might reflect back on his understanding of his homeland and of himself. His lectures in Tokyo, later collected in the book Landscape in English Art and Poetry, not only discussed the influence of Japanese art on Western painters, but also used the traditions of Japanese painting and writing to shed light on those of English art and literature.

Japan left its mark on Binyon's poetry too. As early as 1910 he had written a verse play inspired by the techniques of noh — years before similar experiments by his more famous contemporary, W. B. Yeats. His visit to Japan spawned several fine poems, particularly Koya-san, about a visit to the sacred mountain in Kansai. Here, Binyon treated Buddhism not as an exotic, incomprehensible creed, nor (as Rudyard Kipling had done in his poem about the Great Buddha of Kamakura) as a disguised form of Christianity. Instead, he saw the religion as one of many answers to a universal human need — a need that impels both the Buddhist pilgrim and the poet on his secular, cultural pilgrimage:

"I that had journeyed from so far a shore

Found at the world's end the same pilgrim soul,

And the old sorrow, no flight can outstrip."

The "old sorrow" is the traditionally Japanese, but universally human, sense of mono no aware: the transience of things. Back in England, Binyon still drew on the experience of Japan. One of his last poems, The Burning of the Leaves (1942), is about garden waste being consigned to a bonfire. Through that theme, Binyon, then in his 70s, examined his own mortality. There is a Buddhist note in the skeptical attitude toward earthly ambitions and passions: "rootless hope and fruitless desire." And a Japanese sensitivity to the way in which the seasons suggest the fragility and transience of human life is apparent in the closing line: "Nothing is certain — only the certain spring." The poem brings Japanese philosophy back to Binyon's English garden. It might be a model for those who travel and wish to claim they have learned something from the experience.

It is a war poem too: A metaphorical bonfire was then consuming English cities, and soon Allied firebombing would be razing the cities of Japan. It is sad that Binyon, whose work had done much to promote understanding and appreciation of Japanese culture in Britain, died in 1943, at the moment when relations between the two countries were at their historical nadir. And it is appropriate, perhaps, that his most famous poem, For the Fallen, commemorates the dead of a war in which Britain and Japan were allies. He too is worthy of remembrance.