by Alex Kerr
That is when I learned that artworks have secrets. In the case of a Tibetan mandala, there is a universe of esoteric symbolism: colors, directions, the names of Buddhas and their attributes. But even the most simple painting of trees or grasses might also conceal secrets. One night, David opened a pair of six-paneled gold screens in the living room. They made up a willow-bridge painting, a conventional theme in which weeping willows stand beside a curving wooden bridge. These screens, however, were particularly old, and seemed to have an expressive power lacking in later versions. We began to discuss what made them so different. As we talked, we noticed that the willow branches to the left hung straight, while those on the right swayed, as if a breeze were blowing though them. To the left was the moon; on the right, no moon. We realized that the screens were depicting the transition from night to day, the breeze being the first breath of dawn. Then someone pointed out that the branches on the trees to the left were bare; the branches on the right were sprouting young leaves. So the screen was also depicting the moment when winter passes into spring. In the river under the bridge, waterwheels were turning, and the bridge itself, which in Japan symbolizes the arrival of messengers from the other world, was a great arc curving towards the viewer. Everything in these screens was turning and transforming from old to new and from dark to light. ‘And so,’ concluded David, ‘these screens are a painting of the moment before glory.’
Unlocking the secrets of things has much to do with observation. One night, David sat me down in front of a set of Chinese snuff bottles, and said, ‘Tell me what you see.’ I saw ceramics, lapis lazuli, iron, gold, silver, ivory, glass, lacquer, copper, jade and amber. It was a lesson in looking at materials. The main thing I learned from David, however, was the interrelation of all his pieces, the way in which they were all links in a single worldview. I have since met other collectors of Chinese art whose pieces are more important from an art-history point of view. But not a single one of them understood and manifested the relationship between things as David did. This came from having lived in an old mansion in Beijing’s declining days. While Japan has lost much in the twentieth century, China lost infinitely more during the turmoil of the Maoist years. There are only a handful of people alive who have any idea of the lifestyle of the Chinese literati in the old days. In that sense, David’s knowledge is a unique resource, as fragile and mysterious as Iya Valley.
For example, Chinese furniture is not something you arrange by setting here and there to taste. Those kangs and tables demand to be arranged along symmetrical axes, which David aligned with the center of the living room and the tokonoma alcoves. Each ceramic vessel or statue needs to rest on a stand, and that ensemble in turn relates to the painting behind it. The books, jade scepters, brushes and whisks displayed on tables symbolize the pleasures and amusements of a gentleman. For example, what I had taken to be driftwood were pieces of rare aloes incense wood, and nearby could be found the silver cutting knife, the bronze chopsticks and the celadon burner that were needed for burning incense.
David taught me an important lesson that I would never have heard from art historians and curators: beauty comes first. ‘It should be old, it should be valuable,’ he said. ‘But first ask yourself, “Is it beautiful?” ’
‘How can I know if a new thing I have bought is beautiful, or if I have simply become carried away?’ I asked.
He answered, ‘There are two ways. One is to have a beautiful house. The other is to surround the new thing with beautiful things. If it’s not right, they will reject it.’
After that, whenever I bought an antique, I would put it in David’s living room to see how it looked. Most of the time my purchase would be revealed as an eyesore. But one time I bought an old Chinese table in Kyoto, brought it back to David’s and set it in a tokonoma without telling anyone. We got through the whole evening without David noticing it, and so I knew that the table was good.
Fascinated as I was by David’s collection, I was in no position to start collecting jades and Chinese ceramics. Instead, I continued with old books and calligraphy. By 1977 I had moved to Kameoka, so I had ample time to explore the antique shops of Kyoto. One day, the master of an old bookstore showed me a set of ten shikishi (square plaques) and tanzaku (rectangular plaques) – small pieces of paper with calligraphy in an archaic and refined style. They were decorated very delicately with gold, silver and mica, on papers dyed red and blue. He was offering them to me for 5000 yen each, roughly $20 at the time. I turned them over and was shocked to read ‘Prince Konoe’, ‘Regent Nijo’, ‘Minister of the Left Karasumaru’, and so on. These were genuine pieces of calligraphy by court nobles of the seventeenth century! I could not believe that they could be bought so cheaply, but at the time there was simply no interest in Japan in such things. So I began collecting shikishi and tanzaku. After I had acquired several dozen of them and the general style became clear, my curiosity was aroused. The hair-thin lines of elegant calligraphy on these plaques were different from anything I had ever seen in Japan. I began to inquire into the history of these princes and ministers, and was thus introduced to the world of the kuge, the court nobles.
The kuge were descended from the Fujiwara family, who ruled every aspect of court life during the Heian period. They controlled almost all the important court posts, reducing the Emperor to puppet status. It was the Fujiwara nobles and related families who built fantasy pavilions like Byodoin near Nara, and penned the poems and novels for which the Heian period is famous. After several hundred years of Fujiwara dominance, the extended family grew so large that it became necessary to distinguish between the various branches. So people started calling the branch lineages by their street addresses in Kyoto: for example, the Nijo family, the Karasumaru family, the Imadegawa family, etc. Over time, there grew to be about one hundred families, called the kuge. They were seen as having semi-Imperial status, and were carefully distinguished from the buke, or samurai families.
When the samurai class overthrew the system of noble rule at the end of the twelfth century, the kuge lost all their lands and revenue. They had no choice but to find work, but after four hundred years of writing poetry by moonlight, the only work they were able to do was in the field of the arts. So they became teachers of poetry, calligraphy, court dance and ritual. Over time, they developed a system of hereditary franchises, in which each family purported to be the holder of ‘secrets’ passed down to the head of the house. Outsiders could only acquire these secrets by paying for them.
The next step, naturally, was the proliferation of secrets. The kuge organized their secrets into hierarchies, with lesser secrets for beginners and more profound secrets for advanced students, on an ascending pay scale. This was to become the prototype for the ‘schools’ of tea ceremony, flower arrangement and martial arts predominant today. Typically, these schools have a hereditary grand master, a system of expensive titles and licenses granted to students, and ranks (such as the different colored belts in karate and judo).
With the coming of peace and prosperity at the beginning of the Edo era in the early 1600s, a renaissance of kuge culture occurred in Kyoto. Each family taught its specialty, the Reizei concentrating on poetry, the Jimyoin on Imperial calligraphy, the Washio family on Shinto music, and so on. The one art they all had in common was their delicate calligraphy, which they wrote on shikishi and tanzaku at tea parties and poem festivals.
The kuge lived in cramped quarters in a village surrounding the Imperial Palace. They never had money. The story goes that right up until World War II, they would pay a visit to their neighbors just before the New Year, when all debts must be settled. ‘I am very sorry,’ the kuge would say in polite accents, ‘but our family will not have enough money to pay our debts by the end of the year, so we will have to set fire to the house and flee in the night. I hope that will be no trouble to you.’ This was a disguised threat, since setting fire to one house in the crowded inner city of Kyoto might destroy an entire district. So the neighbors would take up a
collection and bring the money over to the kuge on the last day of the year.
All the impoverished kuge possessed was their memory of the Heian era’s refinement, so they developed ways of living elegantly in poverty. Examples of this can be seen in every kuge art, and it exercised an incalculable influence on the city of Kyoto. For example, the construction of teahouses such as the famous Katsura Detached Palace, the utensils of tea ceremony, even the dainty displays one sees today in store windows can be traced back to the kuge.
People who come to Kyoto hear much about Zen and tea ceremony. But Kyoto is not just Zen and tea; it was also the center of the culture that grew from the fine-grained sensibility of the kuge. When the capital was moved to Tokyo in 1868, many of the kuge moved north with the Emperor. Their village around the Imperial Palace was razed, leaving the large open spaces you see today surrounding the palace. As a result, almost nothing tangible remains of kuge history, and their culture never became a tourist attraction; there is very little written about their world, so most people are hardly aware that it ever existed. Nevertheless, their romantically delicate sensibility survives in waka poetry, incense ceremony, geisha dance and Shinto ritual. But if I had not purchased a few 5000-yen shikishi on a whim, I would never have discovered it.
As the years I spent in Kyoto went by, the scope of my collection grew. The next step from shikishi and tanzaku was hanging scrolls, and then folding screens, ceramics, furniture, Buddhist sculpture, and more. My collection expanded to include not only Japanese art but pieces from China, Tibet and Southeast Asia as well. However, no matter how underpriced the folding screens or Buddhist statues were, they never cost Mere hundreds or thousands of yen, so collecting began to involve real money. In order to pay for it, I began to sell or trade pieces to friends, and before I knew it, I had become an art dealer.
As the business grew, I eventually found my way into Kyoto’s art auctions; in Kyoto, these auctions are called kai, or ‘gatherings’. These gatherings are a closed world known only to dealers. They are completely unlike Christie’s or Sotheby’s, where the auction houses research the pieces and publish a catalogue in advance, and buyers can examine objects at their leisure before bidding. In a Kyoto kai, no information is made available, and there is no time to even get a close look at the work. With a flourish, the auctioneer unrolls a handscroll across a long table, and with no mention of the work’s author or date, the bidding commences. Buyers have only an instant in which to look over the seals and signature on the work and to examine the quality of the paper and ink before placing their bids. So participation in these auctions requires a highly trained eye, to say the least. At first I found myself utterly at a loss.
Rescue came in the form of my scroll mounter, Kusaka. At eighty, Kusaka had close to sixty years’ experience of the Kyoto auctions, and over that time had seen tens of thousands of screens and hanging scrolls. I had sent him some of my screens for repair, and through this connection, he allowed me to accompany him to the kai. As a mounter, Kusaka could judge paper and ink with the eyes of an expert, and he had an encyclopedic memory of signatures and seals. Muttering, ‘No signature, but that’s the seal of Kaiho Yusho – looks like the real thing …’ or ‘The characters have vigor, but the paper is dubious. Maybe you ought to pass this one by …’, Kusaka became my teacher at the kai. In this fashion, I was able to acquire knowledge that decades of university study could never bring.
There are two types of antiques. One consists of objects already circulating in the art world, in good condition and with artist, period and provenance well documented. The other type is made up of objects which in Kyoto are called ubu (literally, infant). Ubu objects are those surfacing in the art world for the first time; very often they have sat for years in old storehouses. These storehouses, called kura, have defined the special character of the Japanese art market.
Traditionally, most houses in Japan of any size or wealth had a kura built alongside. These storehouses were necessary because of the ‘empty room’ ethos. Furniture, paintings, screens, trays and tables appeared in a Japanese house only when needed, and varied by season and by occasion. I was once shown into a kura belonging to a prominent family in the mountains of Okayama. The mistress of the house explained that she kept three full sets of lacquer trays and bowls there – one for the household, one for guests, and one for VIPs. Well-to-do families needed a place, separated from the house itself, where they could store such things. You can spot kura by their unique architecture: tall, squarish structures with peaked roofs, a few tiny windows and walls of thick white plaster. The plaster walls protected the building against damage from the fires and earthquakes that were the scourge of Japan.
There was a strong taboo against entering the kura unless you were the head of the house. In Kyoto, a maid would boast about her status by saying, ‘I’m the number-one maid. I’m allowed to enter the kura.’ Even in the prewar years, when Japan’s culture was still more or less intact, kura were rarely entered, and obscure objects inside tended to get forgotten. And after the cultural shock of World War II, there was suddenly no need at all for the trays, plates and screens kept inside them, so their huge wooden doors were shut for good. Their present-day owners, caught up in the rush for modernization, deem the kura and their contents almost completely worthless: when it comes time to tear down an old compound, the owner calls in an antique handler, or ‘runner’, who buys the entire contents of the kura in one lot, more or less as scrap. The runner carts it all away in a truck and delivers it to the auctions, where dealers such as myself see it for the first time. These things are ubu. When an artwork which has been sleeping for years in a kura arrives at auction, it is as if it has popped out of history. Sometimes I open a screen – stiff from mildew, damp and insect damage – and realize that I am likely to be the first person to see it in a century. At such times, memories come welling up of a child unwrapping straw rope from Imari plates in Motomachi long ago.
Ubu objects are the ultimate risky venture for an art collector. There are no guarantees, and huge problems of repair and restoration. But this is where the excitement lies. David Kidd once said to me, ‘Having a lot of money and using it to buy great pieces of art on the world market – anyone can do that. Not having money, but still being able to buy great pieces – that’s fun.’
Which brings me to the secret of how ‘the impossible was possible’ for David and me. Neither of us had much money at first, but we were able to build art collections wildly out of proportion to our means. And we didn’t achieve this in some poverty-stricken third-world country, but in an advanced economic superpower. It was possible because of the lack of interest of the Japanese in their own cultural heritage. Chinese art maintains its value on the world market because as the Chinese get rich, the first thing they do is invest in traditional cultural objects; there is a large community of Chinese art collectors. In prewar Japan there existed such a community, in which Japanese collectors vied with each other for fine paintings, calligraphies and ceramics. They were the ones who stocked the kura.
After the war, this community evaporated, so today there are almost no significant private collectors of Japanese art. The only exception is tea masters. The tea-ceremony world is still very active, so utensils such as tea bowls, scoops and scrolls for the tearoom are highly valued; in fact, they are very often overvalued, and command ridiculous prices. But step outside the world of tea, and Japanese artworks sell for a song. For example, I made quite a collection of handscrolls, some of them with calligraphy by artists greatly prized by tea masters. Handscrolls roll sideways and can be ten or even twenty meters long. Unlike hanging scrolls, they are difficult to use in the tearoom. So they sell for a fraction of the cost of hanging scrolls, although they have equivalent, or even greater, artistic and historical value.
I once acquired a handscroll of the Kabuki play Chushingura (The Forty-Seven Samurai), an enormous piece just over one meter high and ten meters long. It was originally a banner illustrating each of
the eleven acts of the play, and was probably used by a traveling Kabuki troupe in the mid-nineteenth century. On doing some research, I found there was nothing comparable in any of Japan’s museums, and that possibly I had chanced into ownership of the finest Chushingura scroll in all Japan. But being young and very poor I had no choice but to sell the work.
I first approached my friends in the Kabuki world. But these actors spend their daily life immersed in Kabuki trappings, and they told me that the scroll was hardly what they would want to relax with at home. I could see their point, so I then tried selling the piece to Shochiku Inc, the entertainment giant that produces movies and manages Kabuki. They weren’t interested. Foreign companies in Japan often display gold screens or folk art in their lobbies, so I thought Japanese firms might do the same. I took every opportunity to look around the premises when I happened to be visiting an office building. But everywhere I turned, Western Impressionists hung from the walls, and I could only conclude that Japanese companies had zero interest in the traditional art of their country.
Next, I decided to try my luck with Japan’s art museums. However, on hearing of this, my veteran art-dealer friends in Kyoto were quick to dissuade me. Without proper introductions, there was virtually no chance that these museums would give a young foreigner like me a hearing. I tried other avenues, such as approaching the Sengaku-ji Temple in Tokyo, which is dedicated to the memory of the forty-seven samurai, but received only a brusque rebuff on the telephone. In the end, an American friend bought the scroll for the absurdly low price of $4000, and it went to Fargo, North Dakota.
Most people assume that Japan’s cultural properties left the country during the nineteenth century, when people such as Ernest Fenollosa, who helped to create the collection of the Boston Museum, saved Nara-period statues from destruction in the wake of the haibutsu anti-Buddhist movement. There is also a belief that foreigners capitalized on Japan’s disastrous situation after World War II, which is true to some extent. But what few people realize is that the flow of cultural assets out of Japan continues today.
