by Alex Kerr
As in the case of Kabuki dance, an exhibit or demonstration of flowers is called a kai. Recently, Kawase held a flower kai in Kyoto. He rented an old house, the last literati academy left in Kyoto, and completely transformed it. He covered the air conditioners with boxes made of rice paper, and had new fusuma sliding doors made because the hand-pulls of the old ones were not properly in literati style. Next, he borrowed handscrolls, hossu whisks and calligraphy utensils from friends, and decorated the room with silver folding screens and blue Nabeshima rugs. Finally, he arranged the flowers and invited the guests.
The most remarkable thing about this exhibition was the expression of amazement on the faces of the Kyotoites. They live in a city which gives every promise of beauty, but thwarts you at every turn; these are people who are starving for beauty. In Kawase’s world, as carefully arranged as the Katsura Detached Palace, there was, for once, not a single jarring note. People were shocked to find a Kyoto they longed for but which they could hardly believe existed.
In addition to being an artist, Kawase is a philosopher. Listening to him discourse on tatebana (which according to him are phallic) and nageire (vaginal) gives you an entirely new point of view on something as seemingly innocent as flower-arranging. Unlike the ikebana masters in Nagoya, Kawase has a very clear idea of what he is doing. Once, he helped with one of the calligraphy kai I have given over the years. He offered to repair a flower arrangement, and I watched as he deftly turned the leaves and branches, transforming them into a thing of ineffable charm. ‘Turn this leaf outwards,’ he said, ‘so that it faces the viewer. All Japanese things have a men’ (a word meaning ‘front’ or ‘face’). It was a simple comment, but one with huge ramifications for Japanese art. From gardens to tea bowls, all objects are designed to be seen from one particular point of view. I think of this every time I see a dining table set with a Western-style flower arrangement – to my eyes, a chaotic mass of twigs, leaves and flowers, lacking in drama because it looks exactly the same from any angle.
At the time of the Kyoto kai, Kawase said this to me: ‘Showing something natural, in its native state, is not art. Artifice piled on artifice, giving you the illusion of the natural – that’s art. If you are going to draw people into your dream, then you must make it completely convincing. If the dream is not perfect, then it will feel unnatural. Only the most perfect dream approaches reality.’ What was so shocking to the Kyoto guests at Kawase’s kai was the fact that at a time when Kyoto’s culture has degenerated practically beyond hope, he showed them the ‘dream’ of Kyoto in perfection.
With its many wealthy institutions dedicated to preserving traditional arts, Japan will have no trouble maintaining outward forms. The Kintetsu department store will go on renting its exhibition hall to ikebana masters, and on the surface ikebana will appear to be well and thriving. In this sense, Japan is doing better than most other nations in East Asia. But the drastic decline in the quality of the environment – the mountains and rivers covered with wires and concrete, the old wooden houses replaced with aluminum and plastic – is having an effect: the fossilized forms remain, but people are forgetting the purpose behind them.
The other day I attended a rehearsal for a dance performance by a Kabuki actor. He was performing the dance ‘Orochi’, about a princess who turns out to be a serpent in disguise. There is a point where the princess dances with only the tsutsumi shoulder drum as accompaniment. Depending on how you strike it, the drum produces two notes: a deep pon and a light ta. The princess is listening to the sound of a waterfall in the mountains, and she brings her fan to one ear – pon – to the other ear – pon – and after a moment, she breaks into a flowing dance with rapid fan movements – ta, ta, ta, ta, ta.
The special appeal of Japanese music lies almost completely in its rhythms, which involve delicate variations and delays between notes, known as ma (spaces). Ma are everything. Traditionally, there were no musical scores; performers and musicians worked together and figured out the ma on the spot. But now there are scores, recordings and videos, and so the musicians have the ma all decided for them in advance. As a result, they do not need to think about why the ma are as they are.
The actor said to the musician, ‘Would you please wait until just an instant after the fan reaches my shoulder – a moment while I am listening – before you strike pon? Another pause before the second pon. And then a longer pause – a yearning, almost unbearable pause – before ta, ta, ta, ta, ta.’ But the musician simply could not do it: he was locked into a pattern he had learned without understanding its purpose. Later, the actor said to me, ‘Have you ever been in the mountains and listened to the cuckoo? It says, cuckoo, cuckoo, with the slightest pause between syllables. It doesn’t say kuku kuku like a metronome.’
The closeness with nature, the moment of unbearable yearning – this is what the whole performance is about. There is no particular value in preserving the art of the shoulder drum for historical and academic purposes alone. This is why the mass of the population has turned away from the traditional arts: whatever the scholars and experts may tell them, the people know in their hearts that these ‘dead’ arts have become a bore. Having lost their way, the practitioners of these arts rely on bombast to make them interesting again. Hence the popularity of keren acrobatic stunts in Kabuki, or masses of bizarrely twisted flowers in ikebana. Shirasu Masako has in her study a tanzaku calligraphy plaque which reads, ‘Dogs and horses are difficult; demons and fascinating things are easy’. The idea is that painting dogs and horses is difficult because they are so ordinary; demons and grotesque objects, on the other hand, are quite easily depicted. The same applies to flowers: one camellia in a vase is infinitely harder to get right than a huge mass of modern ikebana.
It also applies to city planning. Japan is becoming a nation of monuments. The trend began back in the 1960s with Kyoto Tower and the Tower of the Sun at the Osaka Expo. In recent years, every city and town must have a museum or a ‘multipurpose cultural hall’, even though there may be nothing of importance to put into the museum, and not much use for the hall. Tens of billions of dollars have been budgeted for these monuments, of which, it is said, three or four open each week. In my own town of Kameoka there is a plan to build a multipurpose cultural hall, despite the fact that the city does not even have a municipal hospital.
‘A multipurpose hall is a no-purpose hall,’ says Tamasaburo. But in fact there is a purpose to these buildings, which is to assuage the conscience of civic administrators who feel they should be doing something, but don’t know what to do. ‘Dogs and horses’ – that is, the quiet, invisible part of city planning – would be to establish zoning, regulate signs, bury telephone wires and restore the ecosystems of lakes and rivers. But instead, vast sums are squandered on ‘demons and fascinating things’: museums and halls designed by famous architects for which there is no use, but which symbolize culture.
As may be gathered from the fact that pachinko is Japan’s largest industry, Japan is a nation in deep trouble. After fifty years of control by monopolies and bureaucracies, the problems experienced in Japanese music or city planning also exist in technical fields. For instance, Japan has lagged badly in jumping onto the information highway. The reasons lie in artificially high telephone charges, and in the tradition of secrecy which makes it so hard to get real information from government agencies or universities. But rather than deal with these fundamental ‘dogs and horses’ problems, the government is spending tens of millions of dollars to build ‘experimental information centers’ in provincial towns.
As a result of the ‘demons and fascinating things’ approach, Japan is losing the edge in fields where it was once expected to lead. It is falling behind in computer software, entertainment, advanced education, tourism, financial services, communications and medicine – that is, in almost every field that will grow in the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, traditional culture is in a state of crisis. Hosomi Minoru, Tamasaburo and Shirasu Masako are the last great figures of their r
espective lines. Many of the experiences I describe in this book come from worlds that are dead or dying. Even people who have lived in Japan for years may find these worlds unrecognizable. It’s as if I were describing a trip to the moon.
The question is: what comes next? In ancient China, when the Mandate of Heaven passed from one dynasty to the next, the very first task of the new dynasty was to record the history of the previous one. Sung scholars wrote of T’ang, Yuan scholars wrote of Sung, and so on. It is only when a culture has been superseded that it can be summed up. Early Edo was exactly such an age: its artists, like Totetsu, were able to create works summing up the best of Muromachi. The current time is another such summing up. The very fact that Japan’s culture is breathing its last gasp is allowing artists of unprecedented genius to flourish.
Like Tamasaburo. Onnagata of Tamasaburo’s beauty probably never existed before. When I look at photos of past actors and listen to the recollections of old-timers, it seems that onnagata were never as attractive as Tamasaburo; they didn’t need to be. Kabuki was alive: audiences were able to project an image of beauty and didn’t need to see beauty with their own eyes. But the Kabuki stage is very far away from the daily lives of today’s audiences: it is a ‘dream world’. As Kawase puts it, ‘Only the most perfect dream approaches reality’, and so today’s onnagata must possess dream-like beauty. Hence Tamasaburo’s popularity.
Today, there is at least one extraordinary person active in every field. In design, there is Issey Miyake; in architecture, Tadao Ando; in Kabuki, Tamasaburo; in flowers, Kawase. They are all in their forties or early fifties, and have in common the fact that in their youth, Japan’s culture and natural environment were more or less intact. They saw a world which can never be known by today’s young people. But merely growing up when the culture is intact is not enough: it is also important to be free. In the 1960s and ’70s, when these artists were maturing, they had the freedom to experiment with modern forms and break away from suffocating ancient rules and restrictions. All of them are international in outlook, and some, like Miyake or Ando, are resolute modernists. Thanks to this freedom, they surpassed their predecessors in the early twentieth century, and the result today is an explosion of talent. What we are seeing now is an exciting grand finale – these artists are producing some of the best work to ever come out of Japan.
To the degree that these artists are both a part of tradition and free from it, they resemble Totetsu. Born into the Unkoku family, Totetsu had access to paintings, possibly some by Sesshu himself, which outsiders could never have seen; at the same time, he lived outside the moat – removed from the official mainstream. Kawase is in the same position: he was born and raised in a flower shop right next to Ikenobo, the famous flower-arranging school headquarters, and in his youth he studied with an Ikenobo master; but now Kawase is independent, neither affiliated with an established school, nor aiming to start his own.
None of the great ‘artists of the summing up’ have successors: the next generation, raised in the era of pachinko, does not have the cultural background to draw upon. In mountains planted with a monoculture of industrial pines, they will never hear the birds singing cuckoo, cuckoo. Nor do they have the same sort of freedom that Tamasaburo, Kawase and Miyake had, since the lives of young people today are so dominated by bureaucracies and systems which had not yet solidified in the 1960s and ’70s.
The artists of Totetsu’s period thought that they were summing up the past, but actually they were laying the foundation stones for the future. The kata, or characteristic ‘forms’, of tea ceremony, calligraphy, architecture and many other arts were laid in late Muromachi and early Edo. The chance to create new kata comes around only once every three or four hundred years, and the present time is such an opportunity. The challenge is how to bring the ancient wisdom encapsulated in the traditional arts into the modern world. This is the work that these artists are now engaged in, and the kata they create will possibly stand for another three hundred years.
‘The reason why people end up as “blind mules”,’ says Tamasaburo, ‘is that they are trying to succeed a genius. You never can. All you can do is to take a hint from their work, and create something completely new yourself.’ That is why it is not so important that Kawase and the others do not have successors; they are leaving kata as building blocks for the future. In coming generations, when artists look back at Japan’s traditions, they will have no choice but to turn to the work of the present period.
The other day somebody asked me, ‘Why have you spent so many years in Japan? Especially nowadays, there must be so many other more interesting places?’ The only answer I could give was to describe the story of the Kabuki dance Kasane. In it, Kasane and her lover Yoemon are walking along the bank of a river at night. A strange transformation takes place in which she reverts to the ghastly crippled form of the woman Yoemon had murdered in his former life. He pulls out his scythe, and tries to murder her again. There is a struggle, he slashes her with the scythe, and Kasane falls dead. Yoemon rushes off the stage via the hanamichi walkway through the audience. Lights out.
But the play is not over. In the pale light of the stage, Kasane’s hand can be seen rising. She turns ghostly fingers towards the hanamichi as if grabbing and pulling. Soon Yoemon reappears, pulled backwards by a magic power along the hanamichi, back onto the stage. There, he and Kasane meet once more.
Japan has been like this for me. Just at the moment when I am poised to move elsewhere, ghostly fingers reach out and pull me back. In college, when I had my doubts as to whether Japan was a country in which I wanted to spend my life, I discovered Iya Valley. When Iya seemed threatened, I stumbled through the secret door to Kabuki. When my studies at Oxford were drawing me towards China instead of Japan, David Kidd yanked me back to the Oomoto arts seminar. Later, when I was considering taking up a position in the art world in New York, I met Trammell Crow, and he diverted me into the business world, paying me to stay in Japan.
Today, just at the moment when Japan has lost much of its appeal in both natural landscape and culture, it is artists such as Tamasaburo and Kawase and the ferment of creativity surrounding them which draws me back. The present time, it turns out, is the best of all times to be in Japan. The changes taking place in the cultural world, the rumblings of revolution in the bureaucracy and in business – all of this is exciting in a way in which Japan has not been exciting for decades.
‘If you think it’s not there, it is. If you think it’s there, it isn’t.’ At the very moment of its disappearance, Japanese traditional culture is having its greatest flowering.
Afterword: About Alex
By Bando Tamasaburo
I remember that I must have first met Alex in 1978. It was at Shinbashi Enbujo Theatre, the first time that I danced ‘Sagi Musume’ (The Heron Girl). Alex arrived with an introduction from Kabuki onnagata Kawarazaki Kunitaro and a bouquet of roses, and right from the beginning he was someone I could talk to with complete ease.
Around this time I had just traveled to Europe and was suffering from culture shock. At university Alex had studied not only Japanese Studies and Chinese Studies, but he had also traveled widely around America and Europe, and so he taught my culture-shocked self much about foreign countries. In particular, we both loved Italy and that was a true meeting of minds. After this I brought Alex as interpreter with me on trips such as my American tour. His wide-ranging knowledge of unique foreign sayings and culture was very educational and useful to me when I came to do work abroad, and I still feel grateful to him for it.
Unusually for an American, Alex is the type of person who judges things more by intuition than by logic. This has allowed him to ably come to terms with the quality that flows at the base of Japanese culture – an embrace of vagueness and uncertainty. We’re people who value things that can’t be explained just with clever words. No matter how well the reasons for something are explained to us we’re not able to pay much attention to what’s being talked about. Both o
f us have a tendency to respect only what feels right to our intuition about things. I think that’s the reason we got on so well together.
Tamasaburo and Alex, at a performance of The Heron Girl, 1980
Alex once said, ‘The two of us, let’s not end up as cognoscenti.’ The word originally came from Italian and suggests someone who knows a lot but doesn’t accomplish anything. But that very same Alex, who had such a rich store of knowledge – beginning with Greek sculpture and expanding via the Silk Road to a fascination with the Far East – was rather an unworldly innocent when it came to making his own living. He lived in the general belief that money would just spring up from somewhere. What changed him completely was working for the American real estate company Trammell Crow for a period of about six years. Through his experience in business he acquired knowledge of the world and gained the techniques of a well-managed life.
That said, Alex’s basic qualities – love of humour, preferring intuition over logic, and free-spirited living – have never changed up to this day. He once told me: ‘Leonardo da Vinci said, “Beauty lies in the mystery of balance”.’ In this respect, I’d say Alex has achieved a first-class state of ‘balance’. While never losing his original qualities, he gained a mature perspective as a member of society, and this was the first book written by that mature Alex.
Looking at Japan with mature eyes as a person knowledgeable of the outside world, what is the landscape that he sees? This is the selfless Alex who sought only beauty, and that’s why he’s been able to capture Japan as it is now in such a feat of writing. I hope as many people as possible can read this book, which arose from Alex’s passion to preserve Japan’s beauty and his love for Japan.
