Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  The year after that first seminar, I graduated from Oxford and came to work for Oomoto’s International Department. Since then, I’ve helped out as a member of the seminar staff every summer, and the process of watching how the arts are taught to foreigners has been very educational. For example, as part of the tea-ceremony course, the students take a brief class in pottery. The idea is for them to fashion a tea bowl or sweet tray with their own hands, and every year, this ceramics class is truly amusing to see.

  A tea bowl is a very plain object. Its form is bound by function, so its height, thickness and shape are all largely predetermined. A tea bowl is simply a tea bowl – I believe that people who get caught up in the wonderful artistry and design of a particular tea bowl are largely missing the point. The simple approach dates back to the sixteenth century, when Rikyu established tea ceremony in the form we now know it. Tea had originally come from China, and for generations tea ceremony in Japan existed as a way to show off expensive utensils, including bowls made of gold or jade. But originating in the Zen temple of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, there grew up a new approach to tea, called wabi. Wabi refers to rustic simplicity. The wabi tea masters modeled their tearooms after thatched cottages, and included a hearth cut into the floor. In utensils, as well, their preference was for the simple and unadorned; this is why Rikyu chose to have his tea bowls made by a tile maker. The rough, black surface of tile was perfectly wabi.

  Another word for simple and unadorned might be ‘boring’. The genius of Rikyu and the other early tea masters was to reject bright colors and interesting shapes, because these seize the attention and distract us. They brought boring objects into the tearoom and used them to create a peaceful and meditative atmosphere. But the seminar students have great difficulty in making something boring. At all costs, they must inject some originality into their work, and they are not satisfied until they have made their bowls ‘interesting’. They mold their bowls into a square shape, drape the sides with dragons and curling snakes, attach jagged teeth to the rim or paint the entire surface with inspirational slogans like ‘Peace, Respect, Purity, Solitude’. The results are anything but meditative. David used to say, ‘The pottery class exists so the clay can draw the poison out of the students’ fingers.’ Among our students, however, there are occasionally some Japanese, and they obediently make their tea bowls as they are told to. Boring is fine by them, and their bowls turn out to be quite beautiful.

  It has often been pointed out that the Japanese educational system aims to produce a high average level of achievement for all, rather than excellence for a few. Students in school are not encouraged to stand out or ask questions, with the result that the Japanese become conditioned to a life of the average. Being average and boring here is the very essence of society, the factor which keeps the wheels of all those social systems turning so smoothly. It need hardly be said that this is one of the major drawbacks of Japanese life. However, in watching the pottery class at Oomoto, the weak points of the American educational system became evident as well. Americans are taught from childhood to show creativity. If you do not ‘become a unique person’, then you are led to believe you have something wrong with you. Such thinking becomes a stumbling block: for people brought up in that atmosphere, creating a simple tea bowl is a great hardship. This is the ‘poison’ to which David was referring. I sometimes think that the requirement to ‘be interesting’ inculcated by American education might be a very cruel thing. Since most of us lead commonplace lives, it is a foregone conclusion that we will be disappointed. But in Japan, people are conditioned to be satisfied with the average, so they can’t fail but be happy with their lots.

  If so many revelations can boil up out of one day in the pottery studio, one can imagine how much there is to be learned from the study of the traditional arts. I don’t believe that Japanese philosophy, such as the essence of jo, ha, kyu, zanshin, can be conveyed by words. When one tries to explain these things verbally, there is a sense of ‘slow, faster, fast, stop – is that all there is to it?’ Only by experiencing the arts with one’s own body does one understand their true meaning. In that sense, the traditional arts are the true gateway to the country’s culture.

  In recent years I have also come to see that Japan’s roots lie as much in Southeast Asia as in China or Korea. As a result, I spend much time traveling in Thailand and Burma – this is my fourth gate to Asian Studies. But the more I travel, the more I must reluctantly grant that the authors of ‘theories of Japaneseness’ have something of a point: every country in the world is unique, but Japan is a treasure house of uniqueness. As an island off the Asian mainland, it was able to absorb cultural influences from China and Southeast Asia while at the same time preserving near-total isolation as a society. It became a sort of cultural pressure cooker into which many ingredients went, but from which none came out.

  Japan is a hapax. You can try to approach it by comparing it to China and Southeast Asia, or you can read the voluminous literature on the subject of Japaneseness. But as Van der Loon used to warn his students, in the end you cannot understand a hapax – you will never really know what it means.

  CHAPTER 6

  Calligraphy

  The Signs of Ginza

  When I began writing the articles that make up this book, I asked a friend for advice. ‘Roof thatching in Iya and Kabuki seem interesting enough subjects to write about, but I’m not so sure about calligraphy,’ he replied. ‘Interest in the art of calligraphy is limited to a very small group, isn’t it?’

  This may be so, but I would say that calligraphy is the one traditional art which is seen everywhere in Japan. From letters, shop signs, newspaper and book advertisements, down to the labels on the little white envelopes containing chopsticks, the Japanese are surrounded by the art of Chinese kanji characters in myriad forms. From this point of view, calligraphy is one of the defining traits of life in Japan, and you can hardly get through a single day without encountering it. Which is reason enough to write about the subject, but actually I have another motive: I loved calligraphy as a little boy.

  My first meeting with kanji characters was at the age of nine at school in Washington, DC. Our teacher, Mrs Wang, explained that each character was made up of pieces called ‘radicals’, using the character kuo (country) as an example. First, she wrote a large square on the blackboard, representing the borders of the country: this square is the ‘containment radical’. Inside the large square, she put a small square – the ‘mouth radical’; that is, many mouths to feed. Under the mouth, she added a straight line to represent the expanse of land. And next to the mouth she wrote the four-stroke combination of dots and slashes that makes up the ‘spear radical’, symbolizing the defense of the country.

  She then wrote three more characters – wo, ni, ta (I, you, he) – on the blackboard. We were to copy them one hundred times each, putting emphasis on the stroke order. She insisted that unless we wrote each character in the right order, they would never look beautiful. But when we were shown the stroke order for the character wo it struck me as a very strange way of writing, especially the order for the right-hand part of the character, which happened to be the spear radical again.

  The correct way to write ‘spear’ is to first draw a horizontal line, followed by a diagonal line down through it. However, the latter is not just a straight line: it curves slightly, and has a hook at the bottom turning back up to the right, producing a pleasant springing sensation as you write it. After this, you write another diagonal near the bottom, and finally return to the top to add a dot. Left to right, swoop down and spring up, right to left, and then jump back to the top again – the movement of the hand seemed like a dance to me. Writing wo a hundred times was great fun. Even today, when I write this character, or others that include the spear radical, all my childhood pleasure at practicing the strokes comes flooding back.

  When I was twelve and my family moved to Japan, we crossed America from shore to shore by car. We stopped at Las Vegas on the way, and
I was stunned by the city’s neon splendor. But my father only said, ‘This is nothing compared to Tokyo’s Ginza district.’ He was right. Not only the Ginza but Yokohama as well were brimming with gorgeous neon signs, and everywhere I looked there were kanji characters and the hiragana and katakana alphabets, leaving an impression of chaotic and feverish brilliance. People often ask me, ‘What made the biggest impression on you in Japan?’, and I always reply, ‘The street signs of Ginza.’

  From that time on, I began to study kanji in earnest. Our housemaid was a sixty-year-old woman named Tsuru-san. As we watched the sumo bouts on TV together, Tsuru-san would explain the characters of the wrestlers’ names to me. They included everyday characters such as ‘mountain’ or ‘high’, but there were also some extremely unusual ones – such as ‘phoenix’, used in the name of the great Taiho, the sumo hero of the 1960s, whose record has never been beaten. As a result, my kanji vocabulary became rather unbalanced, but nevertheless, with time, I gradually became able to read shop signs around the city.

  I learned ‘phoenix’ partly because I worshipped Taiho and partly because it had so many strokes. Years later I was to discover that this love of many strokes appears to be something built into children. In 1993, my two young cousins from Olympia, Washington, came to stay with me for a year; Trevor was aged sixteen, Edan was nine. Although they didn’t know a single word of Japanese, they attended the local schools in Kameoka and had to tackle kanji and the two alphabets. Edan hated studying in any way, and was quite hopeless at mastering the alphabets, so I was surprised when he came home from school one day, very excited, with a kanji to show me. It was the kanji for ‘nose’, which is extremely complicated. He was proud of his achievement, and I could see that part of the appeal lay in the complicated nature of the character. The way all of its pieces fitted together had the appeal of a model made with a toy construction set. Trevor, for his part, was fond of kirin (unicorn), which consists of two detailed characters with a combined forty-two strokes. Kirin also happens to be a brand of beer.

  Back to my own childhood. I attended St Joseph International School in Yokohama. At that time, about a third of the students at St Joseph were Japanese, a third were Chinese from Chinatown and the rest were children of the city’s foreign consular staff and long-time business residents. My best friend was a Chinese boy named Pakin Fong. Though only thirteen, Pakin was amazingly skilled at both calligraphy and ink painting, and I still have a painting of bamboo that he made for me when we were students together. The bamboo leaves are painted delicately in thin, greenish ink, and look almost like feathers; the piece is rendered as expertly as the work of any professional Japanese painter. Pakin became my teacher and instructed me in the use of the brush.

  I was not improving much under Pakin’s guidance alone, so I went out and bought a beginner’s calligraphy lesson book. Tsuru-san was delighted, and presented me with a calligraphy set. Inside the set’s red lacquer box were an inkstone, a brush, an ink stick and a small ceramic water-dripper for wetting the inkstone. When I returned to America, Tsuru-san gave me another water-dripper, this one made of bronze. Tsuru-san had been the daughter of a well-to-do family before the war, but she had lost everything during the air raids. The only thing she had been able to salvage from the flames was this tiny water-dripper. Even today, it is among the most treasured of all my possessions, and only used on special occasions.

  Pakin Fong turned out to be my first and last calligraphy teacher. Since the age of fourteen, I have studied entirely by copying, using textbooks and practice pieces like Senjimon (The Thousand Character Classic), which distills Chinese wisdom into 254-character lines, never repeating a character. Later, when I built my art collection, I copied from the handscrolls and shikishi and tanzaku plaques in my collection.

  So began my interest in calligraphy, but it was not until my second year at Oxford in 1975 that I went ‘professional’. During the spring break, I visited my friend Roberto in Milan. Roberto was only twenty-two, but he had found friends and patrons in the jet set and was already doing a brisk business as an international art dealer. At his apartment he showed me a notebook in which Man Ray, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol had sketched drawings for him. I looked at them and thought, ‘I can do that!’ Above Roberto’s bed was a large Andy Warhol portrait – a few splashes of bright color over a blown-up photograph. It was all the encouragement I needed. I asked Roberto to bring me some paper and colored Magic Markers, and seated under the Andy Warhol I penned several dozen calligraphies. On returning to Oxford, I went to an art-supply store and stocked up on a variety of different colors of washi (Japanese rice paper), brushes and ink, and began pouring out calligraphies. Not all of them were calligraphies per se; some were ink paintings, which are just one step away from calligraphy.

  One day, a friend of mine from Hong Kong named Kingsley Liu bought one of these pieces for five pounds. It was an ink painting of three peaches, one of which bore a remarkable resemblance to a person’s derrière. Kingsley found it quite humorous and promptly put it up in his bathroom. I think all artists remember the day they sell their first work. I was quite excited, in spite of the fact that my first commercial work hung on a bathroom wall.

  My first teacher was Chinese, and my first buyer was Chinese. On reflection, most of my calligraphic inspiration comes from China. This is hardly surprising, however, since kanji characters originated in China. Kanji are perhaps China’s single greatest cultural contribution to the world. In antiquity there were other hieroglyphic scripts, such as Ancient Egyptian and Mayan. These scripts showed signs of the same development which kanji underwent: first there were pictographs – drawings of things like a spear or a mouth; the next generation of glyphs combined these ‘radicals’ into more complicated forms; they were then abstracted and simplified, and in the final stage a kind of shorthand developed. But the other hieroglyphic scripts failed to survive to the present day. Only kanji did.

  The fascination of kanji is such that many of China’s neighbors, including Korea, Vietnam and Japan, fell under their sway. However, in the twentieth century, Vietnam has discarded kanji completely, and Korea is slowly phasing them out. Kanji are simply too difficult to learn. Linda Beech used to say that she felt all her kanji were lined up on a long bridge inside her head: as soon as she added a new character to one end, an old one fell off the other end. Today, other than in China and Chinese communities, it is only in Japan that kanji continue to thrive, supported by the two alphabets, katakana and hiragana. This is a sign of Japan’s essential conservatism, for which the Japanese pay a high price, spending years in school memorizing the eighteen hundred kanji in common use and their thousands of variant pronunciations and combinations. I shudder to think what a large expanse of gray matter in my own brain must be devoted to kanji, at the expense of other, more worthwhile, knowledge.

  However, once you have learned kanji, unique mental pleasures become possible. What distinguishes kanji from an alphabet is that each single character contains a concept. It is my theory that the mental process which occurs in the brain when you see kanji is different from that which occurs when you read characters in an alphabet. When you read a word made up of alphabetical letters, you must first line these up in the brain before you can understand what is being said. But when you look at a kanji character, its meaning penetrates the brain directly. As a result, one cannot ignore kanji signs, even if one wants to. I almost never read signs when I’m in America, but whenever I ride the Japanese subway I find myself unconsciously reading the advertisements hanging in the carriages. Nor is this just a weakness of mine – my fellow passengers are doing the same, some of them even reading out loud.

  Each character has many layers of meaning, giving kanji especially rich connotative powers. For example, the character t’ai means ‘peace’ or ‘perfect balance’. It is the name of a hexagram of the I Ching, and the character used for China’s sacred Mt T’ai; it can also mean ‘Thailand’. In the language of every country, vocabulary take
s on added meanings over time, but I can think of no example like Chinese, in which the same words have been in continual use for three thousand years. A kanji is surrounded by a cloud of meanings, like the colors radiating from the halo of a Buddha.

  The gaudy street signs which struck me in childhood are not just confined to Japan. In Hong Kong, China or most large cities of Southeast Asia where ethnic Chinese live, a pandemonium of signs can be seen. This is partly due to these countries lagging behind Europe and America in sign restriction and city planning. There is also the practical matter that kanji can be read from top to bottom as well as right to left or left to right, allowing for those long vertical signs along the sides of tall buildings. But the main reason for all these signs is that the shapes and meanings of the characters are appealing. They are one of the pleasures of daily life.

  It was the use of the brush that allowed the Chinese to develop kanji into forms of such expressive power. There is a saying, ‘A line is a force’, and calligraphy is essentially nothing more than a flowing line; the brush allows the line to be thick or thin, wet or dry, tightly or loosely outlined. In this way, the ‘force’ is turned inwards or outwards, quietly repressed or explosively released. Force combines with meaning.

  With regard to meaning, hanging scrolls commonly display phrases of three, five or seven words. Nowadays, they are as often as not slogans such as ‘Harmony, Respect, Purity, Solitude’. Traditionally, calligraphy scrolls were more subtle: poems, suggestions of the season, or Zen koans (illogical thoughts designed to force you to enlightenment). As I sit here writing, there is a calligraphy hanging beside me by a Zen abbot of Manpuku-ji Temple in Kyoto. It reads, ‘The voice of the clouds enters the night and sings’. It is the perfect description of rainy nights here in Kameoka, when the rain patters on the roof and I can hear the rush of the stream at the foot of the garden. I have another Manpuku-ji scroll, which I like to set out when old friends come to visit, which reads, ‘I turn the flowers and wait for the butterfly to arrive’. Another scroll which comes to memory is one I first saw at the headquarters of one of the tea schools in Kyoto: ‘Sitting alone on a great noble peak’. What could better conjure up the solitariness of a quiet tearoom? An example of a Zen koan is, ‘I gaze at my loved one in a corner of the sky’. The ‘loved one’ means the moon, and this is the gateway to the koan.