Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  Hidari (i.e., “left-handed”) Jingaro was the most famous of Japanese sculptors in wood. Legend told how he had lost an arm and gotten a name: when an offended conqueror demanded of Jingaro’s Daimyo the life of his daughter, Jingaro carved a severed head so realistically that the conqueror ordered the artist’s right hand to be cut off as punishment for killing the daughter of his lord.55 It was Jingaro whose chisel formed the elephants and the sleeping cat at the shrine of Iyeyasu at Nikko, and the “Gate of the Imperial Envoy” at the Nishi-Hongwan Temple in Kyoto. On the inner panels of this gate the artist told the story of the Chinese sage who washed his ear because it had been contaminated by a proposal that he should accept the throne of his country, and the austere cowherd who quarreled with the sage for thus defiling the river.56 But Jingaro was merely the most characterful of the now nameless artists who adorned a thousand structures with lovingly carved or lacquered wood. The lacquer tree found in the islands a peculiarly congenial habitat, and was nourished with skilful care. The artisans sometimes covered with successive coats of lacquer, cotton and lacquer a form chiseled in wood; but more often they went to the pains of modeling a statue in clay, making from this a hollow mould, and then pouring into the mould several layers of lacquer, each thicker than before.57 The Japanese carver lifted wood to a full equality with marble as a material for art, and filled shrines, mausolea and palaces with the fairest wood-decoration known in Asia.

  VI. ARCHITECTURE

  Temples—Palaces—The shrine of Iyeyasu—Homes

  In the year 594 the Empress Suiko, being convinced of the truth or utility of Buddhism, ordered the building of Buddhist temples throughout her realm. Prince Shotoku, who was entrusted with carrying out this edict, brought in from Korea priests, architects, wood-carvers, bronze founders, clay modelers, masons, gilders, tile-makers, weavers, and other skilled artisans.58 This vast cultural importation was almost the beginning of art in Japan, for Shinto had frowned upon ornate edifices and had countenanced no figures to misrepresent the gods. From that moment Buddhist shrines and statuary filled the land. The temples were essentially like those of China, but more richly ornamented and more delicately carved. Here, too, majestic torii, or gateways, marked the ascent or approach to the sacred retreat; bright colors adorned the wooden walls, great beams held up a tiled roof gleaming under the sun, and minor structures—a drum-tower, e.g., or a pagoda—mediated between the central sanctuary and the surrounding trees. The greatest achievements of the foreign artists was the group of temples at Horiuji, raised under the guidance of Prince Shotoku near Nara about the year 616. It stands to the credit of the most living of building materials that one of these wooden edifices has survived unnumbered earthquakes and outlasted a hundred thousand temples of stone; and it stands to the glory of the builders that nothing erected in later Japan has surpassed the simple majesty of this oldest shrine. Perhaps as beautiful, and only slightly younger, are the temples of Nara itself, above all the perfectly proportioned Golden Hall of the Todaiji Temple there; Nara, says Ralph Adams Cram, contains “the most precious architecture in all Asia.”59

  The next zenith of building in Japan came under the Ashikaga Shogunate. Yoshimitsu, resolved to make Kyoto the fairest capital on earth, built for the gods a pagoda 360 feet high; for his mother the Takakura Palace, of which a single door cost 20,000 pieces of gold ($150,000); for himself a Flower Palace, that consumed $5,000,000; and the Golden Pavilion of Kinkakuji for the glory of all.60 Hideyoshi too tried to rival Kublai Khan, and built at Momoyama a “Palace of Pleasure” which his whim tore down again a few years after its completion; we may judge its magnificence from the “day long portal” removed from it to adorn the temple of Nishi-Hongwan; all day long, said its admirers, one might gaze at that carved portal without exhausting its excellence. Kano Yeitoku played Ictinus and Pheidias to Hideyoshi, but adorned his buildings with Venetian splendor rather than with Attic restraint; never had Japan, or Asia, seen such abounding decoration before. Under Hideyoshi, too, the gloomy Castle of Osaka took form, to dominate the Pittsburgh of Japan, and become the death-place of his son.

  Iyeyasu inclined rather to philosophy and letters than to art; but after his death his grandson, Iyemitsu, content himself with a wooden shanty for his palace, lavished the resources of Japanese wealth and art to build around the ashes of Iyeyasu at Nikko the fairest memorial ever raised to any individual in the Far East. Here, ninety miles from Tokyo, on a quiet hill reached by a shaded avenue of stately cryptomerias, the architects of the Shogun laid down first a series of spacious and gradual approaches, then an ornate but lovely Yo-mei-mon Gate, then, by a brook crossed with a sacred and untouchable bridge, a series of mausolea and temples in lacquered wood, femininely beautiful and frail. The decoration is extravagant, the construction is weak, the omnipresent red paint flares like a hectic rouge amid the modest green of the trees; and yet a country incarnadined with blossoms every spring may need brighter colors to express its spirit than those that might serve and please a less impassioned race.

  We cannot quite call this architecture great, for the demon of earthquake has willed that Japan should build on a timid scale, and not pile stones into the sky to crash destructively when the planet wrinkles its skin. Hence the homes are of wood and seldom rise beyond a story or two; only the repeated experience of fire and the reiterated commands of the government prevailed upon the citizens of the cities, when they could afford it, to cover their wooden cottages and palaces with roofs of the. The aristocracy, unable to raise their mansions into the clouds, spread them spaciously over the earth, despite an imperial edict limiting the size of a dwelling to 240 yards square. A palace was rarely one building; usually it was a main structure connected by covered walks with subordinate edifices for various groups in the family. There was no distinction of dining-room, living-room or bedroom; the same chamber could serve any purpose, for at a moment’s notice a table might be laid down upon the matted floor, or the rolled up bedding might be taken from its hiding-place and spread out for the night. Sliding panels or removable partitions separated or united the rooms, and even the latticed or windowed walls were easily folded up to give full play to the sun, or the cooling evening air. Pretty blinds of split bamboo offered shade and privacy. Windows were a luxury; in the poorer homes the summer light found many openings, which in winter were blocked up with oiled paper to keep out the cold. Japanese architecture gives the appearance of having been born in the tropics, and of having been transported too recklesssly into islands that stretch up their necks to shivering Kamchatka. In the more southern towns these fragile and simple homes have a style and beauty of their own, and offer appropriate dwellings for the once gay children of the sun.

  VII. METALS AND STATUES

  Swords—Mirrors—The Trinity of Horiuji—Colossi—Religion and sculpture

  The sword of the Samurai was stronger than his dwelling, for the metalworkers of Japan spent themselves on making blades superior to those of Damascus or Toledo,61 sharp enough to sever a man from shoulder to thigh at a blow, and ornamented with guards and handles so highly decorated, or so heavily inlaid with gems, that they were not always perfectly adapted to homicide. Other workers in metal made bronze mirrors so brilliant that legends arose to commemorate their perfection. So a peasant, having bought a mirror for the first time, thought that he recognized in it the face of his dead father; he hid it as a great treasure, but so often consulted it that his suspicious wife ferreted it out, and was horrified to find in it the picture of a woman about her own age, who was apparently her husband’s mistress.62 Still other artisans cast tremendous bells, like the forty-nine-ton monster at Nara (732 A.D.), and brought from them a sweeter tone than our clanging metal clappers elicit in the West, by striking a boss on the outer surface of the bell with a swinging beam of wood.

  The sculptors used wood or metal rather than stone, since their soil was poor in granite and marble; and yet, despite all difficulties of material, they came to surpass their Chinese and Korea
n teachers in this most definitive of all the arts—for every other art secretly emulates sculpture’s patient removal of the inappropriate. Almost the earliest, and perhaps the greatest, masterpiece of sculpture in Japan is the bronze Trinity at Horiuji—a Buddha seated on a lotus bud between two Bodhisattwas, before a screen and halo of bronze only less beautiful than the stone lacery of Aurangzeb’s screen in the Taj Mahal. We do not know whose hands reared these temples and built this statuary; we may admit Korean teachers, Chinese examples, Indian motives, even Greek influences coming down from far Ionia across a thousand years; but we are sure that this Trinity is among the most signal accomplishments in the history of art.*

  Possibly because their stature was short, and their bodies could hardly contain all the ambitions and capacities of their souls, the Japanese took pleasure in building colossi, and had better success in this questionable art than even the Egyptians. In the year 747, an epidemic of smallpox having broken out in Japan, the Emperor Shomu commissioned Kimimaro to cast a gigantic Buddha in propitiation of the gods. For this purpose Kimimaro used 437 tons of bronze, 288 pounds of gold, 165 pounds of mercury, seven tons of vegetable wax, and several tons of charcoal. Two years and seven attempts were required for the work. The head was cast in a single mould, but the body was formed of several metal plates soldered together and thickly covered with gold. More impressive to the foreign eye than this saturnine countenance at Nara is the Daibutsu of Kamakura, cast of bronze in 1252 by Ono Goroyemon; here, perhaps because the colossus sits on an elevation in the open air, within a pleasant entourage of trees, the size seems to accord with the purpose, and the artist has expressed with remarkable simplicity the spirit of Buddhist contemplation and peace. Once a temple housed the figure, as still is the case at Nara; but in 1495 a great tidal wave destroyed both the temple and the town, leaving the bronze philosopher serene amid widespread destruction, suffering and death. Hideyoshi too built a colossus at Kyoto; for five years fifty thousand men labored at this Buddha, and the great Taiko himself, clad in the garb of a common laborer, sometimes helped them conspicuously at their task. But hardly had it been erected when, in 1596, an earthquake threw it down, and scattered the wreckage of its sheltering sanctuary about its head. Hideyoshi, says Japanese story, shot an arrow at the fallen idol, saying, scornfully, “I placed you here at great expense, and you cannot even defend your own temple.”65

  From such colossi to dangling netsuke Japanese sculpture ran the range of every figure and every size. Sometimes its masters, like Takamura today, gave years of labor to figures hardly a foot tall, and took delight in representing gnarled octogenarians, jolly gourmands and philosophic friars. It was good that humor sustained them, for most of the gains that came from their toil went to their subtle employers rather than to themselves, and in their larger works they were much harassed by conventions of subject and treatment laid upon them by the priests. The priests wanted gods, not courtesans, from the sculptors; they wished to inspire the people to piety, or to fashion their virtues with fear, rather than to arouse in them the sense and ecstasy of beauty. Bound hand and soul to religion, sculpture decayed when faith lost its warmth and power; and, as in Egypt, the stiffness of conventions, when piety had fled, became the rigor of death.

  VIII. POTTERY

  The Chinese stimulus—The potters of Hizen—Pottery and tea—How Goto Saijiro brought the art of porcelain from Hizen to Kaga—The nineteenth century

  In a sense it is not quite just to Japan to speak of her importing civilization from Korea and China, except in the sense in which northwestern Europe took its civilization from Greece and Rome. We might also view all the peoples of the Far East as one ethnic and cultural unity, in which each part, like the provinces of one country, produced in its time and place an art and culture akin to and dependent upon the art and culture of the rest. So Japanese pottery is a part and phase of Far Eastern ceramics, fundamentally like the Chinese, and yet stamped with the characteristic delicacy and fineness of all Japanese work. Until the coming of the Korean artisans in the seventh century, Japanese pottery was merely an industry, moulding crude materials for common use; there was, apparently, no glazed pottery in the Far East before the eighth century, much less any porcelain.66 The industry became an art largely as a result of the entrance of tea in the thirteenth century. Chinese tea-cups of Sung design came in with tea, and aroused the admiration of the Japanese. In the year 1223 Kato Shirozemon, a Japanese potter, made his way perilously to China, studied ceramics there for six years, returned to set up his own factory at Seto, and so far surpassed all preceding pottery in the islands that Seto-mono, or Seto-ware, became a generic name for all Japanese pottery, just as chinaware, in the seventeenth century, became the English term for porcelain. The Shogun Yoritomo made Shirozemon’s future by setting the fashion of rewarding minor services with presents of Shirozemon’s tea-jars, filled with the new marvel of powdered tea. Today the surviving specimens of this Toshiro-yaki* are accounted almost beyond price; they are swathed in costly brocade, and kept in boxes of the finest lacquer, while their owners are spoken of with bated breath as the aristocracy of connoisseurs.67

  Three hundred years later another Japanese, Shonzui, was lured to China to study its famous potteries. On his return he established a factory at Arita, in the province of Hizen. He was harassed, however, by the difficulty of finding in the soil of his country minerals as well adapted as those of China to make a fine pâte; and it was said of his products that one of their main ingredients was the bones of his artisans. Nevertheless Shonzui’s wares of Mohammedan blue were so excellent that the Chinese potters of the eighteenth century did their best to imitate them for export under his counterfeited name; and the extant examples of his work are now as highly valued as the rarest paintings of Japan’s greatest masters of the brush.68 About 1605 a Korean, Risampei, discovered at Izumi-yama, in the Arita district, immense deposits of porcelain stone; and from that moment Hizen became the center of the ceramic industry in Japan. In Arita, too, labored the famous Kakiemon, who, after learning the art of enameling from a Chinese ship-master, made his name almost synonymous with delicately decorated enameled porcelain. Dutch merchants shipped large quantities of Hizen products to Europe from the port of Arita at Imari; 44,943 pieces went to Holland alone in the year 1664. This brilliant Imari-yaki became the rage in Europe, and inspired Aebregt de Keiser to inaugurate the golden age of Dutch ceramics in his factories at Delft.

  Meanwhile the rise of the tea ceremony had stimulated a further development in Japan. In 1578 Nobunaga, at the suggestion of the tea-master Rikyu, gave a large order for cups and other tea utensils to a family of Korean potters at Kyoto. A few years later Hideyoshi rewarded the family with a gold seal, and made its wares, the Raku-yaki, almost de rigueur for the ritual of drinking tea. Hideyoshi’s generals returned from their unsuccessful invasion of Korea with numerous captives, among whom, by a discrimination unusual in warriors, were many artists. In 1596 Shimazu Yoshihiro brought to Satsuma a hundred skilled Koreans, including seventeen potters; and these men, with their successors, established throughout the world the high reputation of Satsuma for that richly colored glazed ware to which an Italian town has given our name of faience. But the greatest Japanese master in this branch of the art was the Kyoto potter Ninsei. Not only did he originate enameled faience, but he gave to his products a grace and proud restraint that have made them precious to collectors ever since, so that his mark has been more often counterfeited than that of any other artist in Japan.69 Because of his work, decorated faience mounted to the intensity of a craze in the capital, and in some quarters of Kyoto every second house was turned into a miniature pottery.70 Only less famous than Ninsei was Kenzan, older brother of the painter Korin.

  The romance that so often lurks behind ceramics appears in the story of how Goto Saijiro brought the art of porcelain from Hizen to Kaga. An excellent bed of potter’s stone having been discovered near the village of Kutani, the feudal lord of the province resolved to
establish a porcelain industry there; and Goto was sent to Hizen to study its methods of firing and design. But the secrets of the potters were so carefully concealed from outsiders that Goto for a while was baffled. Finally he disguised himself as a servant, and accepted a menial place in the household of a potter. After three years his master admitted him to a pottery, and there Goto worked for four years more. Then he deserted the wife whom he had married at Hizen and the children whom she had borne to him, and fled to Kaga, where he gave his lord a full report of the methods he had learned. From that time on (1664) the potters of Kutani became masters, and Kutani-yaki rivaled the best wares of Japan.71