PARIS— When Admiral Perry sailed into Kurihama harbor in 1853, reopening Japan to active trade with the West, he unleashed an esthetic fusillade that was heard round the Western art world, loudest of all in its capital, the city of Paris. As Japanese prints, albums and objects began to arrive in plenty from the East, a kind of mania set in among artists, critics, designers and collectors alike. And when Japan proudly sent a large cache of art and objects to the 1867 International Exposition in Paris, that enthusiasm began to reach a broader public. The rest, as writers so often like to say, is history, but it is a history in which art, fashion and commerce, deep understanding and superficial exploitation, invention and mimickry mingle in about equal parts. It is also a history that forms one of the most exciting chapters in the story of 19th-century art and to which several generations of scholars and curators have devoted much time and thought in both written and exhibition form.

''Japonisme,'' an exhibition on view at the Grand Palais in Paris through Aug. 15 and thereafter in Tokyo, is the latest addition to the study of Japanese influence on Western and particularly French art, and it captures much of the excitement of its topic. Among the largest and most thoroughly multimedia endeavors of its kind, the show creates a dramatic sense of East meeting West, or at least of West appropriating East. ''Japonisme'' bubbles around the visitor like a hyperactive whirlpool, its many currents pulling the eye and mind first in one direction and then another.

Strung out, albeit quite densely, through two floors of long narrow galleries at the Grand Palais, ''Japonisme'' is virtually without organizational signposts. Consequently, its immense scope doesn't hit you until near the finish, which may be just as well. When you wade ashore at its far end, you will find that your understanding of most of the major art movements of the second half of the 19th century - from Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau, to Jugendstil and the Viennese secession - has been significantly rearranged. And the word fad has assumed a new, somewhat cleansed, potency as well.

The show is organized on the same non-hierarchical, revisionist principles that inform the new, controversial Musee d'Orsay, almost directly across the Seine. Possibly because it is focused on a specific subject, or because Japanese art itself is non-hierarchical, with ceramics being equal to painting, for example, ''Japonisme'' brings these principles into much sharper and more credible focus. It is a show that gives revisionism a good name, which is to say that it presents items of differing quality, sensibility and historical significance without allowing them to blend together.

The curators have placed works by conservative academic artists alongside those of avant-garde painters, and have included drawings, prints, posters, photographs and architectural plans and models. They have given a great deal of space to the decorative arts, including silverwork, porcelain, pottery, furniture, glassworks, clothing and wall coverings. And in several instances - although there could be more - they have included the Japanese prints, albums and objects that were often direct sources of inspiration.

As a result, this show vividly marks different kinds and stages of reaction to Japanese influence. Paintings by academic artists and illustrators reveal that Japanese culture supplied them with new, exotic props and, above all, with another distant culture to sentimentalize and Westernize in derivative, classically based pictorial terms. James Tissot's ''Enfant prodigue - aux pays lointains'' of c. 1881, an image of young, but not particularly Japanese, geishas dancing before a Western male visitor, symbolizes this relationship to alien cultures on several levels. Like Tissot, such artists as Firmin Girard and Robert Blum, one of the first Americans to visit Japan, tended to Anglicize their (usually female) subjects. Blum's ''Ameya'' of 1891, an image of street vendors surrounded by women and children, sets a precedent for and is far more cloying than Norman Rockwell's images. A work that earned Blum membership in the National Academy of Design, it may also be a touchstone of 19th-century kitsch. Alongside these strange, stillborn hybrids, one encounters landmarks of late 19th-century painting, and usually to quite illuminating effect. For those artists disenchanted with the empty formality of academic art and soon to be known as the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, Japanese prints in particular helped catalyze a revolution that was waiting to happen by supplying a series of alternatives to one-point perspective. Prints by such Japanese masters as Hiroshige, Hokusai and Utamaro were actively collected from the early 1860's onward. The flattened or tilted spaces, strong colors and asymmetrical, often dramatically cropped compositions of Japanese prints, as well as their emphasis on the small, casual detail or single gesture, gave Western artists new tools with which to draw closer to modern life and render it more vividly. At the same time, the profound respect for nature evident in much Japanese art and thought - the belief that man was simply another inhabitant of the universe rather than its center - affirmed the Impressionists' attraction to the shifting lights and forms of the natural world.