by Alex Kerr
And indeed, the ring of powdered green tea on the tatami was beautiful. Sawada told us to gather around and look at it. ‘You may never see this again in all your lives,’ he said. ‘It’s almost impossible for the caddy to land perfectly on its bottom like that. Look, and admire!’ Then, after we had looked, Sawada kept us on for a lesson in how to clean the tatami, which involved painstakingly tapping the surface inch by inch to force the tea out of the grooves. We worked on that tatami for three or four hours.
Although it was created by the literati, tea ceremony has been overtaken by the militarist spirit and codified to the point where the wit and spontaneity have been largely stamped out. Tea masters are not usually very interesting people, bound as they are by a lot of rules and restrictions; someone like Sawada, who combines Confucian strictness with Taoist freedom, is very rare. It is my theory that only the badly behaved become truly great literati. You have to be the sort of person who would break windows or rattle your cigarette holder in Evelyn Waugh’s ear trumpet.
In addition to tea, Sawada also plays Noh flute, wields the martial arts sword, writes professional calligraphy and carves seals. He has mastered not only Three Perfections, but six or seven. Sawada is often to be found around the Oomoto grounds, climbing trees, clipping hedges or heaving rocks into place to make a path. In these activities lies the critical difference between the literati of the East and West. The free spirits, the light touch, the indolence, the love of literature and the arts – these are universal literati traits. However, John Sparrow and Ann Fleming were essentially people of words, written or spoken. They appreciated the arts, but except for an occasional go at the piano, they did not practice the arts themselves. They enjoyed walking on the grass and admiring the roses, but they did not plant the roses or mow the grass themselves – they were truly ‘people of literature’. But the Chinese ideal was much broader than just literature: from the Taoist side, it included an intense love of nature; from the Confucian side came the mastery of arts.
The Confucian influence can be seen clearly in Japan today, where it is expected that politicians, bureaucrats and business executives be reasonably proficient in some art. In my Trammell Crow days I was constantly surprised by the number of bankers and stockbrokers who turned out to be expert in kendo, judo or haiku. At the very least, people in positions of authority need to polish their calligraphy, as wherever they go they will be presented with brush and paper, and they cannot treat requests for autographs in the cavalier way that Garbo did. The number of people who are proficient in tea, poetry or some other art is staggering – there are millions of them. From this point of view, the impact of the literati has been enormous.
Probably the supreme literati alive in Japan today is a woman in her eighties named Shirasu Masako, who lives just outside Tokyo. She is a writer, an art collector and an expert on Noh drama, having begun her study of Noh very early, at a time when women were not allowed to perform on the stage with mask. But she managed to break through this barrier in the 1920s, to become the first woman in history to officially dance Noh.
Shirasu was the daughter of Meiji nobility, and her husband helped to write the Japanese constitution. But although she had a privileged upbringing, Shirasu is a strong-minded type, who does things in her own way. For instance, she was a friend of the legendary potter Rosanjin, active in the 1930s and ’40s; everyone who knew him was in awe of Rosanjin’s eccentric personality, except Shirasu, who took her fists to him when he overdid the design for her kimono. Once when I visited her, the subject of Rosanjin came up. ‘If you really love ceramics or painting,’ she said, ‘then you will get angry about them.’ When dinner arrived, and I admitted that I was not much of a gourmet, she smiled and said, ‘You should get angry about food too!’
Shirasu has the ability to judge talent, having discovered artists such as the flower master Kawase Toshiro and the designer Issey Miyake when they were still unknowns in their twenties. Tough-spirited as she is, her conversation displays the literati’s classic simplicity. Kawase once described to me an evening when he was visiting her house and the conversation turned to ceramics. He was asking her about shape, texture, the spirit of the potter, and so forth. She brought out a Momoyama-period Shino-ware cup, and filled it with whiskey. ‘Drink,’ she ordered him. He put it to his lips. ‘And then,’ said Kawase, ‘I felt as though I had been pulled into a deep kiss. A sense of nobility rose from that cup, consuming my entire body. And Shirasu turned to me and said quietly, “That’s ceramics.” ’
This is how the literati live and teach. The flavor is so subtle that there is almost no flavor at all. I think that might explain why the world of the Japanese literati is so little known nowadays – there are no comfortable definitions like ‘Harmony, Respect, Purity, Solitude’ that can sum it all up. Had I not known John Sparrow and his circle, I never would have known what to look for.
However, although the literati tradition may be little known, it has shown uncommon strength over the ages. In particular, the role of foreigners in Japan has been tied up with its fate. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that almost the entire thrust of Chinese influence between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the transference of literati thought to Japan; Ingen and Manpuku-ji were just one part of a process that lasted into the 1930s. The role of Westerners in Japan is also connected to the issue of literati; in the twentieth century, the two Westerners to have had the greatest cultural influence here were the writer Lafcadio Hearn and the art expert Ernest Fenollosa – both of whom were literati types.
The ideal of the literati was utterly incompatible with traditional Japanese culture, yet it took root and grew, resulting in a flourishing of the arts of the sort the world has rarely seen. This suggests that traditions such as Zen or tea ceremony may have an easier time of it in the West than one might expect. The people bringing these things to the West are a modern breed of literati such as Sawada, who has spent years traveling and teaching in Europe, America and China. Meanwhile, Japan’s cultural decadence today is on a par with Myoshin-ji Temple at the time Ingen arrived. This is why so many leading Japanese artists, such as the conductor Seiji Ozawa or movie-soundtrack composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, are forced to base themselves abroad. The times cry out for fresh influences from outside, for someone with an international outlook to wave a stick and shout fiercely. The story of the interaction between literati and foreigners may be about to begin a completely new chapter.
But a literati would say, ‘Who cares? The next generation are only a pack of blind mules.’ It doesn’t matter whether a particular tradition gets passed on or not, since the most important thing about the literati was the pleasure they took in the mountains and lakes, the moon, poetry, tea and talk. Their great achievement was the way they enjoyed themselves.
CHAPTER 14
Last Glimpse
The Moment after Glory
I’d like to tell an art-collecting mystery story.
Eight or nine years ago, I bought a pair of landscape ink paintings. They were extremely abstract: across an expanse of twelve panels of white paper there was only a slight amount of ink – a few dashes to indicate a rooftop, a mountainside emerging from a splatter of ink, as though ‘thrown’ from the brush. It was in the style known as haboku (‘splashed ink’), popular in the Muromachi period.
Old screens rarely survive the centuries untouched; they almost always have been remounted once or twice. My screens appeared to have been repaired once around mid-Edo. By that time the abstraction of Muromachi had long since given way to the colorful ‘floating world’ of Kabuki and block prints. All that empty white space was seen as unsatisfactory, so the mounter brushed gold paint over the wide-open expanses in order to liven up the screens. At the same time, he erased the name of the original artist and wrote in the signature of Kano Tan’yu, a famous painter much in demand with Edo merchants. But there was no way that the screens could be by Tan’yu. Disguised by their layer of gold paint, they sat as
a ‘mystery piece’ in a corner of my house for several years.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of me. I took the screens to my mounter Kusaka and asked him what he thought of them. He looked at the paper and said, ‘These screens have been completely changed from their original intent. Just removing the gold ink is going to take two years. Perhaps you ought to leave them as they are.’ By which, being a Kyotoite, he meant that they should be restored at once. He also suggested that we erase the spurious Tan’yu signature, which I agreed to on the spot; it came off easily with a sponge.
When the screens came back to me two years later, I got quite a shock: this was no ordinary ink landscape. The screens were almost identical in style to the work of the legendary fifteenth-century painter Sesshu, who first brought haboku from China to Japan. The wide, open white spaces of the painting were awash with the same air of meditative emptiness found in the classic Zen gardens of Ryoan-ji and Daisen-in.
I began to study haboku, but the research proved to be no easy matter. Sesshu’s work is so famous that I expected to find that a great number of paintings had been done in this style, but I found that such works were surprisingly rare. Haboku was most popular between 1470 and 1550 during Muromachi, but by the end of Momoyama it was fading, and in mid-Edo it had died out completely. I looked for another screen done in the Sesshu style to compare mine with, but found only hanging scrolls, not screens. I began to wonder: was it possible that there existed only one haboku folding screen?
I consulted various scholars, but I could find no experts in haboku screens; people tend not to specialize in something of which there are no examples, or only one. The mystery remained.
As I delved further, I found that the history of haboku is connected to the ‘Higashiyama Culture’ of the mid-fifteenth century. In 1467, a battle between rival samurai clans known as the Onin War enveloped Kyoto. During the ensuing thirteen years of chaos, the capital was utterly destroyed, and as a result there are only a handful of buildings in Kyoto that pre-date this war. Once, at the Kaika teahouse in Kyoto, I met an elderly woman and we got to talking of antiques. ‘My family used to have a wonderful collection of antiques,’ she sighed, ‘but they were all destroyed in the last war.’ ‘But I thought Kyoto escaped bombing in the war,’ I began to say. Before I could expose my ignorance any further, the master of Kaika leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘By “the last war”, she means the Onin War.’
The Onin War, still remembered five hundred years later, was a major shock in Japanese history, second only to the country’s defeat in World War II. Kyoto was turned into a charred wasteland. Every Zen temple was razed, the kuge nobles fled to the provinces, and the Shogun abandoned the center of the city, taking up residence in Higashiyama’s eastern hills.
From long before the start of the Onin War, the Zen teachings of ‘nothingness’ and ‘void’ had taken deep root in the hearts of the Japanese people. ‘The world is the same as the Void. The Void is the same as the world’ – so goes a famous line from the Heart Sutra, which even today many Japanese can recite from memory. But ‘nothingness’ had never been anything more than a literary conceit; with the Onin War, Kyoto’s cultural elite had a shocking first meeting with the void.
The painter Sesshu left for China the year the war broke out, and when he returned he brought with him the technique of haboku. Its extreme abstraction and spontaneity perfectly matched the desperate tenor of the age. People wanted something simple, something fast. Instead of large-scale gardens requiring lakes and tall, exotically shaped stones, they created small sand gardens. The low, dark rocks scattered on sheets of white sand were the three-dimensional equivalent of ‘splashed ink’. In flowers they favored nageire (‘thrown flowers’) dropped in a basket, rather than tatebana (‘standing flowers’) arranged formally in a vase. In time, the move towards simplicity gave birth to the idea of wabi.
The concept of ‘the void’ even influenced popular art forms such as Kabuki, where, in the play Dojoji, the lines from the Heart Sutra were rephrased for popular consumption: ‘If you think it’s not there, it is. If you think it’s there, it isn’t.’ From the Onin War rose the culture of abstraction that defines Japanese art today. If Japan had nothing but the colorful side of its culture, there would be relatively little for foreigners to study here. Beijing’s Forbidden City, Bangkok’s palaces, Balinese dance – the rest of Asia is full of sights far more spectacular than anything found in Japan. But thanks to the ‘meeting with the void’, Japan developed arts of stark simplicity that have gone on to have a major impact on the rest of the world.
Back to the mystery of the folding screens. The style was more Sesshu than Sesshu himself, but the screens were not from his time. This placed them as a work of the Unkoku School. Sesshu built an atelier called Unkoku-an in the town of Hagi on the Sea of Japan coast, and his lineage came to be known as the Unkoku School. However, over the years the Unkoku painters gradually drifted away from Sesshu’s spirit and created a wholly different painting style; I could not find a single Unkoku painting that resembled my screens.
Just at this juncture I met Hosomi Minoru. His father was an Osaka entrepreneur, a blanket manufacturer whose business was located south of the city near the old seaport of Sakai; he began collecting art in the years after World War II, and there are many stories told of his blunt Osaka ways. Once he learned of a fine screen in Nagoya which a dealer was offering for ten million yen. He drove all the way to Nagoya, and handed the dealer a packet containing eight million yen in cash. The dealer was so startled by the sight of all that money that he handed over the screen on the spot. Old Hosomi drove home with the screen, leaving the dealer to wonder what had happened.
Hosomi Minoru continued his father’s work, and today the Hosomi Collection ranges from Nara-period Buddhist art to Edo Rinpa painting, and includes a great number of designated cultural properties. There are plans to build a museum, but for the moment Hosomi Minoru remains Japan’s last great private collector. Aware that collectors often know more than museum curators, I went to ask Hosomi’s advice. He knew a scholar, the highest authority on the Unkoku School, who identified the screens as the work of the early Edo painter Unkoku Totetsu (1631–1683). I also learned that haboku was almost exclusively executed in small formats. My pair of screens, it appears, are the sole extant Sesshu-style haboku screens.
Nevertheless, the mystery of the screens was not completely solved. There was now another problem: in Totetsu’s time, the Muromachi period had already drawn to a close, and the prevailing culture was shifting to Edo mercantilism. How was it that Totetsu had managed to create a masterwork of Higashiyama culture, when the Higashiyama period was already a thing of the past? This led me to focus on early Edo, and I discovered that it was a period of summing up of former glories. There was a feeling that something had been lost, and with it came a desire to recapture the Muromachi spirit. The result was that early tea ceremony and the Katsura Detached Palace, while they belonged to early Edo, were vastly removed from the lively world of Kabuki and prints: they were more Muromachi than Edo.
Actually, they were better than Muromachi: nothing as perfect as the Katsura Detached Palace was built when Muromachi culture was still alive. Muromachi style was effortless, natural – if the rocks surrounding a temple were not perfectly aligned, no matter. But with the coming of Edo, this effortless Muromachi sensibility vanished and become a nostalgic dream. To turn David Kidd’s words around, this period was ‘the moment after glory’. In order to recapture it, Edo artists had to become infinitely skillful, to the point that at Katsura, tea masters would meditate for years before setting each stone in position. Totetsu’s work took place in this context.
There was another thing about Totetsu: he was the third son of the house. His older brothers went on to inherit the leadership of the Unkoku School, but Totetsu was forced out. Looking at a map of Hagi that dates from that time, you can see that Totetsu’s brothers lived inside the castle walls, while Totetsu’s house stood
outside the moat. This explains why he did not follow the later Unkoku style that had been developed by his family. Rejected by them, he leapfrogged their tradition, and went straight back to the founder, Sesshu.
This was the history of my screens; now, back to the present. Until meeting flower master Kawase Toshiro, I had never been particularly interested in flowers. Ikebana is governed by strict rules – a central stalk rising upwards, with accompanying flowers bent awkwardly to the right or twisted to the left. The effect is thoroughly unnatural. Add to this the modern approach, which is to use heaps of flowers bent and twisted even more bizarrely, and the effect verges on the grotesque. Both old and new schools are afflicted with the ugliness that is modern Japan, and the vases they use and the environments they place them in are painful to behold.
Recently, a Japanese college student who attended the Oomoto seminar told me that he had been called in as temporary help to install an ikebana show at the Kintetsu department store in Nagoya. ‘First we cleared the room, and then the ikebana masters made row upon row of arrangements on long tables. I overheard one lady say to another, “Your branch is leaning into my space. Would you please do something about it?” The other lady said, “I’m sorry,” and without a second thought, clipped off the whole branch. If she could cut that branch off so easily, why had she arranged it there in the first place? It’s clear that these masters had no thought-out policy about what they were doing. When the flowers were all laid out, we stood on the side and thought, “This room looked so much better when there was nothing in it!” ’
But Kawase’s flowers are different: they literally bring tears to the eyes. They have the dignity of classical-style ikebana, but the branches are not artificially bent or twisted to left and right. They spread elegantly, with a curve so natural they seem to say ‘this is how we want to be’. Kawase’s aim is to go back in time and re-create the spirit of Muromachi and Edo flowers. The implements he uses, whether antique or modern, are all works of art, and he chooses the sites for his flowers with the utmost care. As a result, Kawase’s flowers radiate an otherworldly beauty.
