The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  I see this spirit in Toyotomi Hideyoshi.18 The extent of his understanding and appreciation of art is a mystery to us, and we may never know the degree of his input into the art projects he commissioned. Furthermore, Hideyoshi himself was no artisan, and surely he made the most of his workers’ unique abilities. Still, without a doubt, all the art produced on his orders is consistent in character: it is the epitome of artifice; it is extravagant to the extreme. As long as the work was carried out along those lines, Hideyoshi gave his artisans free rein. When he was building a castle, he would gather the biggest damned boulders in the realm. The walls of the Sanjū sangendō are giants among walls; the folding screens of the Chishakuin were so enormous that when sitting in front of them Hideyoshi must truly have looked like a monkey among the blossoms.19 To this man, art and shit were alike, both products born of the most vulgar intentions. Be that as it may, the works do have an undeniable decisiveness about them. They have a calm and settled feel. . . .

  There is no trace of such elegance or leisure in Hideyoshi’s work. Each and every thing that he did was an expression of his fanatical desire for things unparalleled in the realm. There is no evidence of hesitation, no trace of even the slightest restraint. He wanted all the beautiful women in the realm, and, when denied, somebody would end up like Sen no Rikyū: dead.20 Hideyoshi was able to demand anything, even the impossible. And he did. There is something comforting about the incessant demands of a spoiled child, and this feeling, magnified to the level of a nation’s ruler, is what blossoms in all the works Hideyoshi left behind. . . .

  I yearn for those who lived true to their desires, the common man living a common life without apology, the petty man living a petty life with no regrets. I feel the same way about the arts: they must be honest. And temples—they don’t come before the monks; there should be monks and, only then, temples. The existence of Ryōkan had nothing to do with temples. If we do indeed need Buddhism, it means that we need monks, not that we need temples. Let the ancient temples of Kyoto and Nara burn to the ground. The traditions of Japan would not be affected in the least. Nor would Japanese architecture as a whole suffer. If a need exists, we can just as well build the temples anew; the style of prefab barracks would be just fine.

  The temples of Kyoto and Nara are virtually all the same, and none sticks out in my memory. It is the coolness of the rocks at Kumazaki Shrine that stays with me; it is Fushimi Inari’s outrageously vulgar red torii arches, making a tunnel more than two miles long, that I can’t forget. Offensive to the eye and without an ounce of beauty to recommend them, yes; but being tied to the heartfelt desires of the people, there is something about them that strikes straight to the heart. These structures do not posit nothingness as an ultimate value, and their forms are petty and vulgar. But they are necessities. I have no desire to compose myself in the stone garden of Ryōanji, but there are times when I want to lose myself in thought while watching kitschy revues at the Arashiyama Theater. Humans love what is human, and that alone. True art, too, is infused with the truly human. Rejuvenate myself beneath some sterile stand of trees, removed from the world of our most human emotions? No thanks. . . .

  Old things, tedious things—it is only natural that they should fade away or be reborn in a new form. . . .

  On Beauty

  Three years ago I lived in a town called Toride. It’s a tiny place along the Tonegawa River with only two restaurants to choose from: one serves pork cutlets and the other noodles. I ate the cutlets every day and, after six months, couldn’t stand the sight of them. I used to go into Tokyo twice a month and, as a rule, would come home drunk. . . .

  The town is only about fifty-six minutes by train from Ueno in the heart of Tokyo. On the way you cross three big rivers—the Tonegawa, the Edogawa, and the Arakawa—and on the banks of one of these sits Kosuge Prison. You can get a great view of this colossal modern structure from the train as it shoots past. The wings of this prison house stretch out proudly in the shape of an “X,” and it is all surrounded by very tall concrete walls. Thrusting skyward at the intersection of the wings is a watchtower taller than the chimney of any large factory. As you would expect, this grand building does not have a single decorative embellishment and is, however you look at it, a most prison-like prison. Built in the way it is, you couldn’t imagine it being anything but a prison, and this made the sight strangely appealing. I wasn’t drawn to this structure because it coincided with certain preconceptions of what a prison should look like (oppressive, say). Instead, I found it appealing for sentimental reasons. Or put another way, there was something beautiful about it. The scenery of the Tonegawa River and the Teganuma marshlands failed to move me as this prison did, and this fact was so odd that I sometimes wondered whether there wasn’t something wrong with me. . . .

  In the following passages Ango describes, first, a dry-ice factory on Tsukudajima and later a destroyer, both of which he also found appealing in their utterly utilitarian construction.

  The Kosuge Prison and the dry-ice factory. Other than being struck by the fact that their sturdy beauty stirs up that yearning within me, I’ve never really thought about what they have in common. Their beauty is entirely different from that of places like the Hōryūji or Byōdō in temples.21 If we take into consideration the antiquity or history of places like the Hōryūji and the Byōdō in, there is no denying that there is something beautiful about them. But it’s not an immediate beauty that stirs our very souls or strikes straight to the heart. To appreciate their beauty, we somehow have to supplement their deficiencies. The Kosuge Prison and the dry-ice factory, though, appeal to us more directly; there is nothing to supplement, and they have the power to inspire that yearning within me. I’ve never felt the need to consider why this is so. . . .

  What makes these three things—the prison, the factory, and the destroyer—so beautiful? It is the fact that no frills have been added for the sake of beautifying them. Not a single pillar or sheet of steel has been added in the interest of beauty; not a single pillar or sheet of steel has been removed because it is not aesthetically pleasing. What is needed, and only that, has been placed precisely where it is needed. With the superfluous removed, the unique shapes demanded by necessity emerge. These are shapes true to themselves, and they bear no resemblance to anything else. Where needed, the pillars are ruthlessly warped, the sheets of steel are hammered unevenly into place, and the overhead rails jut out of nowhere. It is all done out of necessity, pure and simple. No preconceived notion was powerful enough to obstruct the creation of these things; the necessities behind them were unstoppable. And thus three utterly unique objects were created. . . .

  Being pleasing to the eye does not in and of itself qualify something as truly beautiful. What really matters is substance. Beauty for beauty’s sake is not sincere; it is not, in the end, authentic. Such beauty is essentially empty and has no truth capable of moving people. When all is said and done, we can just as well do without such items. I couldn’t care less if both the Hōryūji and the Byōdō in burned to the ground. If the need should arise, we’d do well to tear down Hōryūji and put in a parking lot. The glorious culture and traditions of our race would most certainly not decline because of it. True, the quiet sunsets over the Musashino plains are no more. What we have instead is the sun setting over the rooftops of housing tracts, the prefabs all built right on top of one another. The dust in the air is so thick that it blocks the sunlight on even the clearest day, and the moonlight has been replaced by the glare of the neon. But our lives as we actually live them have their roots in this landscape, and as long as that is the case, how can it be anything but beautiful? Just look—planes fly overhead, iron warships glide through the seas, trains dart by on elevated rails. Our day-to-day lives are healthy and as long as this is so, our culture is healthy, even if we do pride ourselves on replicating Western architecture with cheap, prefab knockoffs. Our traditions, too, are healthy. If the need arises, plow under the parks and turn them into vegetable plots. If insp
ired by a genuine need, then those plots are an integral part of our everyday life, and they are sure to be beautiful. As long as we live sincerely, apish imitation is nothing to be ashamed of. If it is an integral part of our everyday lives, apish imitation is as precious as creativity.

  * * *

  1. Because of the time changes and International Date Line, December 8 is the date that Japanese readers know for Pearl Harbor Day. “December 7” would have the same meaning to American readers.

  1. Bodies of the dead are traditionally laid out with their head to the north, which is the reason that most Japanese avoid sleeping that way.

  2. The strands of hair will be given to the soldiers’ families as mementos of their lost sons, brothers, or fathers.

  1. “The Ox Man” (Gyūjin) is based on some passages from the Zuozhuan commentaries to the Spring and Autumn Annals, a chronicle of the state of Lu in northeastern China from the eighth to the fifth century B.C.E. The original source for this story of the unnatural death of a high official of Lu appears in the section on the fourth year of Duke Zhao of Lu (538 B.C.E.) of the Zuozhuan. Both Lu and Qi were among the warring states of this ancient period, occupying territories now located in modern Shandong Province, China.

  2. The li, an ancient Chinese measurement of distance, was equal to about 1,360 feet.

  1. On the border between Outer Mongolia and Manchuria, where in 1939, Soviet troops routed a division of Japan’s Guandong Army.

  2. The Taishō era lasted from 1912 to 1926. Rakugo refers to the comic monologues recited by professional storytellers.

  1. In the Japanese original, the name is written as To-e or To-ye, but the translator has changed it to a more easily pronounced name in English.

  1. The Omoro sōshi is a sixteenth-century collection of ancient Okinawan prayers and songs.

  2. Deigo flowers is the common name for Erythrina indica flowers, found commonly in Okinawa.

  1. The square brackets indicate words deleted in the original to avoid suppression by the censor. Since there is no way to tell what the poet had in mind, these are my surmises.

  1. Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was a prominent American writer who in 1889 went to Japan, where he taught and wrote a number of highly popular accounts of Japanese history, literature, and culture. Toward the end of his life, Hearn’s increasingly ambiguous attitude toward the Japan of his day is best captured in his Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, published in 1904, which is perhaps the book that Hagiwara had in mind.

  1. Ango’s assault on the conventional icons of traditional Japanese culture is aimed largely at the model left by German architect Bruno Taut (1880–1938). Taut arrived in Japan in 1933, and his books praising traditional Japanese culture and architecture (including one whose title Ango appropriated for this essay) were embraced by a Japanese public craving foreign affirmations of the nation’s worth. Taut championed the stark, minimalist (sabi) vein of Japanese aesthetics, the pinnacle of which he found in Kyoto’s Katsura Detached Palace (Katsura rikyū). Built in the seventeenth century, this compound includes the tokonoma (alcoves), landscape gardens, and tearooms of which Taut was so fond.

  All the individuals mentioned are classical artists championed by Taut. Although the roster includes metal workers and sculptors as well, most of the figures are associated with the tradition of bunjinga, or “paintings by literati.” Distinguished by their understated, elegant simplicity, these paintings often are natural scenes depicted with no more than a few quick, seemingly casual brushstrokes of black ink on a white scroll. Many include a few short lines of poetry, another of the literati talents.

  2. Here Ango is referring to tales of samurai valor like that of the “forty-seven rōnin,” Chū shingura. After the wrongful death of their lord in 1701, these loyal retainers lulled the responsible party into a false sense of security by feigning lives of decadence and debauchery. They then stormed his residence and killed him in the bath, an act of vengeance for which they were ordered to take their own lives. The story has long been immensely popular and has been told and retold in countless forms.

  3. Ango’s defense of imitation is part of his polemic against Taut, who opens his book A Personal View of Japanese Culture with the following epigram: “Imitation is the death of Beauty.” Throughout his writing, Taut offers approval of only those Japanese works of art faithful to indigenous traditions.

  4. Like the figures mentioned in the opening paragraph, all these artists and schools from various periods in Japan’s history were praised by Taut and considered representative of Japan’s unique cultural tradition.

  5. The word “vulgarity” (zokuaku), along with the related “fraudulent” (inchiki) and “kitsch” (ikamono), represents a key concept in this essay. Taut used these words to denigrate cultural practices that deviated from Japan’s indigenous aesthetic tradition—anything imitative—and Ango rehabilitates them in his attempt to reorient the lines of cultural discourse.

  6. Oki Kazuo, the son of a wealthy Kyoto family, worked with Ango on a number of literary projects in Tokyo.

  7. Saga and Mount Atago, both located in northwestern Kyoto, often are associated in classical poetry with their elegant cherry blossoms and exquisite foliage. As such, the setting contrasts sharply with the all-too-worldly, here-and-now concerns of the Kurumazaki Shrine, discussed later.

  8. Signs on the shrine grounds identify the deity as the scholar Kiyohara Yorinari (1122–1189), and the practice described here by Ango persists to this day.

  9. Both Mount Kiyotaki and Mount Ogurayama are famous for their autumn leaves. Mount Ogurayama also has long been a favorite spot for viewing cherry blossoms, and it lends its name to a famous collection of Japanese poetry, the Ogura hyakunin isshu (One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets, ca. 1235). As in the preceding section, Ango is evoking sites celebrated in the classical arts before a jarring juxtaposition of them with a more humble, “vulgar” place. Earlier, it was the Kurumazaki Shrine; here, it is the Arashiyama Theater.

  10. “Nekohachi” was originally a generic label for the Tokugawa (Edo) period (1600–1868) street performers, who would imitate cats, dogs, roosters, and other animals. By Ango’s day, the word referred to a broader range of itinerant entertainers. “Byōyūken” indicates this particular performer’s professional affiliation. The “satisfaction guaranteed” clause was actually all loophole: because there was no claim to be the original Nekohachi of Tokyo’s Edoya, the performer could not possibly be revealed as an imposter.

  11. The True Pure Land sect, Jōdō shinshū (or, more simply, Shinshū), was founded by the monk Shinran (1173–1262). In keeping with his belief that Buddha’s grace forgives all imperfections and in hopes of further spreading Buddhism among the laity, Shinran abolished the prohibition on marriage for monks. He himself married and raised a family. Later mentioned are the headquarters of two branches of the sect. The Western Honganji was built in 1591, and the Eastern Honganji in 1602.

  12. “Southern school paintings” (nanga) is another name for the “literati paintings” (bunjinga) described in footnote 1.

  13. Ryōanji is a Zen temple in the northwestern section of Kyoto and dates to 1450. Its rock garden, consisting of fifteen large and small rocks placed on an intricately racked bed of white gravel, is the subject of many different metaphysical interpretations.

  14. The Shugakuin Detached Palace, most of which dates to the late seventeenth century, is famous for its buildings done in the sukiya style, in which an apparently simple, rustic dwelling reveals, when carefully inspected, intricate craftsmanship. It also is known for gardens employing the technique of shakkei, or “borrowed landscapes.” Trees and bushes are placed and shaped to direct visitors’ eyes to mountains visible in the distance, thereby “borrowing” elements of the natural terrain beyond the garden’s walls. The Shugakuin was another of Taut’s favorite pieces of Japanese architecture.

  15. Ike Taiga (1723–1776) was an eclectic artist who traveled widely from his base in Kyoto. He was an ico
noclast, insisting, for example, on painting ugly subjects at a time when the portraits of beauties were all the rage. The poet-monk Ryōkan (1758–1831) grew up not far from Ango’s hometown in what is now Niigata Prefecture. He became a monk early in life, studying at various monasteries and traveling incessantly throughout Japan. Ryōkan was known for living in complete compliance with his whims: he slept, drank saké, meditated, or played just as the spirit moved him. Ryōkan was well into his sixties when he fell in love with a nun forty years his junior. She recorded many of the poems from his final years.

  16. “Nothingness is the absolute value” (naki ni shikazaru) is a key concept in this section of the essay, in which Ango is radically rereading the legacy of certain premodern artists whose eccentricities earned them the status of folk heroes. While their rejection of worldly goods and securities—their embrace of nothingness—is often interpreted as evidence of the erasure of their ego, Ango here recasts it as the ultimate expression of that same ego: so committed was their quest for perfection that they refused to settle for anything less.

  17. The Tōshōgū Shrine, completed in 1646, enshrines Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), the man who completed the unification of Japan and whose descendants reigned as shōguns for more than two hundred years. Incredibly ornate, even gaudy in its extensive use of gold foil and intricate carvings, the Tōshōgū represents the polar opposite of the stark, minimalist aesthetic seen in the tearoom and the Shugakuin and Katsura Detached Palaces. Taut was influential in canonizing the minimalist sabi aesthetic as the core of Japan’s indigenous arts and effacing the more ornamental veins, which he believed were merely derivations of Chinese models. Taut often represented the latter with the Tōshōgū, dismissing it as mere “kitsch.”