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

by J. Thomas Rimer

  Taut was once one of about ten guests hosted by a certain Japanese millionaire, an avid admirer of Chikuden. The host dismissed the maids, and he himself went back and forth between the tatami parlor and the storeroom, each time returning with a hanging scroll to display in the alcove before leaving once again to fetch the next. He took great delight in having the famous paintings please those assembled. The host then moved the group to another room, where he provided a tea ceremony followed by a formal banquet. Now, to claim that this lifestyle is spiritually rich because it “does not lose sight of the traditions of ancient culture” is absurd—the standards for the spiritual are so very low. This is not to say, though, that my lifestyle, which has lost sight of cultural traditions, is, for that reason, necessarily rich.

  During his visit to Japan, the French writer Jean Cocteau asked why the Japanese no longer wore kimono, and he lamented Japan’s forgetting the traditions of the motherland in its efforts to Westernize. . . .

  What, then, is “tradition”? What do we mean by the words “national character”? Is there some primary factor that determines national character, that makes the Japanese destined to invent and wear the kimono? In the tales of old we find that our ancestors’ desire for revenge was so strong that they would pose as beggars and leave no stone unturned as they hunted down their enemies.2 It has been only seventy or eighty years since the end of these “samurai,” but the stories seem like fairy tales to us now, and the Japanese of today can be counted among the least malicious peoples of the world. . . .

  The concepts of “tradition” and “national character” often mislead us in just this way. They imply that regardless of personality, an individual is driven by some innate urge to abide by certain customs and traditions. However, it does not stand to reason that simply because a practice existed in Japan long ago, it is somehow innately Japanese. On the contrary, it is quite conceivable that customs followed in foreign countries and not in Japan are, in fact, better suited to the Japanese. Adopting such foreign customs would not be an act of imitation but, rather, one of discovery. Even in the arts, a field with the utmost respect for originality, the progression from imitation to discovery is a common occurrence, as we see in Goethe’s completing masterpieces of his own after having taken his cues from Shakespeare. Inspiration often has its roots in an imitative spirit and bears fruit in an original discovery.3

  So, then, what is the real significance of the “kimono”? Well, its existence means nothing more than that Japan encountered Western clothing a thousand years later than the rest of the world. The “kimono” exists simply because our craftsmanship was limited, and we were not exposed to an alternative technology that would have prompted the invention of something new. It is not the case that the scrawny build of the Japanese gave birth to the “kimono,” nor is it true that the “kimono” is the only garment that looks beautiful on the Japanese. It goes without saying that a brawny foreigner looks far grander in Japanese dress than we do. . . .

  Rather than grieve, most Japanese today rejoice each time an old piece of their hometown is destroyed and a Western-style building springs up. We need new transportation facilities, we need elevators. More than traditional beauty or intrinsically Japanese forms, we need more convenience in our daily lives. The destruction of the temples in Kyoto or the Buddhist statues in Nara wouldn’t bother us in the least, but we’d be in real trouble if the streetcars stopped running. The only things that matter to us are “the necessities of life.” Even though the ancient culture may be destroyed, our day-to-day lives would not come to an end, and as long as these are intact, our uniqueness is assured. It is safeguarded by the fact that we would have lost neither the needs that belong to us alone nor the desires that spring from those needs. . . .

  . . . [T]here exists a gap greater than Taut ever imagined between his discovering Japan with all its traditional beauty and our actually being Japanese, though we may have lost sight of the traditions of Japan. In other words, whereas Taut had to discover Japan, we have no such need, for we are Japanese. Even though we may have lost sight of our ancient culture, surely we have not lost sight of Japan itself. “What is the essence of the Japanese spirit?” We, of all people, do not need to theorize that. Japan does not arise from some explication of its spirit, nor can something like the Japanese spirit be explained. If the everyday life of the Japanese is healthy, Japan itself is in good health. We yank trousers over our stubby bowlegs, deck ourselves out in Western clothes, waddle about, dance the jitterbug, toss out the tatami, and strike our affected poses amid tacky chairs and tables. That this appears completely absurd to the Western eye has no bearing on the fact that we ourselves are satisfied with the convenience of it all. There is a fundamental difference between their standpoint, from which they chuckle pitifully at us, and ours, from which we go on with our everyday lives. As long as our day-to-day lives are rooted in proper desires, their condescending smiles don’t mean a damn thing. They laugh because we look funny waddling along with our short bowlegs draped in trousers. That’s just fine. As long as we don’t obsess over that kind of thing but instead set our sights on more lofty goals, the last laugh might not be theirs after all.

  As I went so far as to confess a moment ago, I’ve never laid eyes on the Katsura Detached Palace, nor am I familiar with Sesshū, Sesson, Chikuden, Ike Taiga, Gyokusen, or Tessai. I know nothing about the Kanō school or Unkei.4 In spite of this, I’d like to try my hand at relating my own “Personal View of Japanese Culture.” You may think it odd that some guy would speak of Japanese culture when he knows nothing about the traditions of his homeland and is familiar instead with nothing but neon lights and jazz. Well, at the very least, there has been no need for me to “discover” Japanese culture.

  Vulgarity (Humans Love What Is Human)

  From the start of winter 1937 to the early summer of the next year, I lived in Kyoto.5 Since I had set out with no particular purpose in mind, I took along a half-written novel, a thousand sheets of manuscript paper, and nothing more—not even a towel or a toothbrush. I thought I’d look up Oki Kazuo, have him find me a place to stay, and, in my solitude, finish up the novel.6 Looking back on it now, I guess it was really just the solitude I was longing for. . . .

  For the three weeks it took me to find a room in Fushimi, I stayed in Oki’s second house in Saga. Although the skies over Kyoto proper might be clear, nearby Mount Atago attracts clouds, and there are snow flurries in the area daily.7 About sixty yards from Oki’s second house stands a bizarre shrine called Kurumazaki jinja. Even though it supposedly is dedicated to the memory of somebody-or-other Kiyohara, a scholar it seems, the real object of veneration is quite obviously the almighty yen.8 In a fenced-in area in front of the main building is a mountain of small, smooth stones—thousands of them. People offer their prayers by writing their names and dates of birth on these stones and then adding requests for cash. They then place their stone on the pile. Some stones include requests for fifty thousand yen; other pitiful stones ask for a measly thirty. Occasionally one finds a stone with very detailed accounting—a salary increase of so much plus periodic bonuses raised to such-and-such an amount. I picked up these stones one evening after the ceremonies marking the spring equinox, and I read them by the fading light of the shrine’s sacred fire. They were quite unsettling, these stones, especially to someone like me—on a journey and without a place to call home, battling a shaky sense of selfconfidence and with nothing but a pen to support me. . . .

  I don’t imagine the stones represented particularly deep or powerful sentiments or emotions, and yet I remember them all as if it were yesterday. Conversely, though day after day I toured the temples in Saga and Arashiyama as the snow settled on the bamboo groves, and though I meandered beyond Mount Kiyotaki and the cemeteries of Mount Ogurayama, I found it all—even the Tenryūji and Daikakuji temples—unpleasantly cold and lifeless. I don’t remember a thing about them today.9

  Directly behind Kurumazaki Shrine was an old shack, run-down
but with a name that inspired confidence: the Arashiyama Theater. It was surrounded by nothing but fields with a few houses scattered among them. At dusk an empty oxcart would trundle along the road by the theater, a drunk farmer asleep in the back as the ox found its own way home. When I first arrived in Kyoto, a taxi driver and I trudged through the area looking for Oki’s second home. Posters for the Arashiyama Theater were hanging on the telephone poles, advertising Nekohachi of the Byōyūken and promising fifty sacks of rice if he proved to be an imposter. He wasn’t, of course, because the Nekohachi known in Tokyo was the Nekohachi of the Edoya.10

  Needless to say, I wasted no time in going to see the Byōyūken Nekohachi. He was fabulous. . . . These traveling performers would usually perform for a day or, at most, do a three-day run. Not all of them were rowdy brawlers; Nekohachi was, in fact, an exception. I would attend every time the performers changed or even go to see the same performance two or three times in some extreme cases. I remember the farmers from a mountain village in Fukui Prefecture who would only put together a show and go on the road during the slow winter months. They did some comedy routines, some skits, and a magic act, every last one of which was too terrible for words. The entire troupe was pitiful, with just one experienced old-timer doing his best to keep up morale while simultaneously mortified over their clumsy performances. The troupe did have a pretty girl of about eighteen, and she seemed to be their only draw. During the day they drummed up business by parading her through the area, more fields than houses, with just a single chaperone. And they used her in the comedy routines, put her in the skits, and had her dance, trying to get her on stage at every possible opportunity. This only made it worse, though, as she still needed a lot of practice. I went back on the second day of their run. There were only fifteen or sixteen people in the audience that night, so the troupe canceled their third date in order to move on to the next town. Passing behind the theater late that night after the show on my way for a bowl of hot noodles, I saw they had the wooden door ajar and were loading the gear onto a large wagon. The head of the troupe was there grilling some sardines by the side of the road.

  Just over the Togetsukyō Bridge in Arashiyama stands a string of tea houses. The area is teeming with people in the spring, when the tour buses stop here for lunch, and the places plug along even through the winter. While out for a walk one night, Oki and I decided to stop for a drink but went door-to-door without finding a light burning or any sign of life. Apparently customers don’t just wander in randomly on a winter’s night. At long last we did find a place. Because they didn’t have a fire burning in the tea house itself, the gentle, forty-something owner and her nineteen-year-old maid led us into the family room out back, where we drank our saké while warming ourselves by a single hibachi. The maid, it turns out, had once been a dancer with an animal act, and all of a sudden she launched into a description of the Arashiyama Theater. I knew about the theater’s only toilet—it was perpetually drenched in urine, and the stench was unbearable. Before I could take care of my business, I would have to tortuously pick my way through where the damage was least, and even so, at times I’d be wading through an ocean of urine just to make my way to the piss pot. Since we in the audience were stuck with a toilet like this, it wasn’t hard to imagine the filth backstage in the changing rooms. “Can you imagine how disgusting it was?” the ex-dancer suddenly blurted out, a real edge to her voice. She spoke very candidly about her experience: the hardest thing about being in the act, she said, was being forced to drink soy sauce in the winter. Every time she was about to go on the stage nude, they forced her to toss back a glass, since it would supposedly keep her warm. Apparently that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  So while I spent my days in Saga totally immersed in writing my novel, at night I usually made my way to the Arashiyama Theater. The city of Kyoto, its shrines and temples, its famous places and ancient ruins—none of these moved me in the least. I was content just to be with the other freezing spectators, fewer than a hundred of them, enveloped in the stench of piss in the Arashiyama Theater, half yawning and half laughing at the ridiculous gags. . . .

  I know absolutely nothing about the engineering aspects of architecture, but one thing I do know is that the distinguishing feature of temple construction is that first and foremost the buildings are not designed to serve as homes. This means more than the elimination of all things that allude to an everyday life in this everyday world. In the construction of a temple, attention must be focused on expressing a lifestyle and philosophy diametrically opposed to the worldly and profane. This being the case, it is no surprise that the True Pure Land sect, which affirms a worldly lifestyle fully in keeping with its religious beliefs, maintains temple compounds that reek of the vulgar and routine.11 Its temples (such as the two Honganji temples of Kyoto) take ancient temple architecture, evocative of a philosophy of austerity and self-denial, adopt it whole cloth, and attempt to employ it in its own beliefs, which affirm life in this world. The result is entirely unsettling and vulgar. Don’t misunderstand me—I have no objections to vulgarity in things that are meant to be vulgar. My point is that vulgarity calls for applications unique to the circumstances. . . .

  Contrary to popular belief, the Japanese landscape garden cannot possibly have been modeled on nature itself. It seems instead to be an attempt to give concrete expression, in the form of a garden, to the stark, minimalist ideals or spirit that we see expressed in paintings of the Southern school.12 The same is true of the architecture of the tearoom (or of temples, for that matter): all these are expressions of concepts, manipulations of nature rather than replications of it. The limits imposed by the confines of space are the equivalent of those imposed on a painting in accordance with the size of the canvas. But think for a moment of the stark austerity of the boundless sea, of the desert, or of the forests and plains. In comparison we become painfully aware of just how twisted and perverse, how trifling, the stark austerity of the landscape garden is.

  What is the rock garden of Ryōanji trying to express?13 What sorts of concepts is it attempting to weave together? Taut, for his part, showered praise on the black-and-white checked wallpaper in the library of the Shugakuin Detached Palace, claiming that it represented the sound of a waterfall.14 Forcing an appreciation to the point of such tortured explanations is downright embarrassing. Landscape gardens and tearooms, like the enlightenment of a Zen monk, are castles in the air. They have nothing but Zen-like hypotheses to support them. “Wherein lies the Buddha nature?” one asks. The answer: “In a shit scoop.” Someone puts a rock in a garden and says, “This is indeed a shit scoop, but it also has the Buddha nature.” That works just fine as long as people are willing to cooperate and consider the thing to be Buddha-like. But the minute somebody sees the shit scoop as just a shit scoop, well, that’s the end of that. The obvious, self-evident observation that a shit scoop is just a shit scoop and nothing more makes for a more persuasive argument than any following the conventions of the Zen dialogue.

  The profound stillness and the minimalist beauty expressed by the rock garden at the Ryōanji, its link to unfathomable Zen mysteries—none of this matters. The ideals and philosophy behind the placement of the rocks, too, are beside the point. When the emotions evoked by the rock garden do not compare with those summoned up by a grand sunset over the desert or with the overwhelming melancholy prompted by a boundless sea, we can just as well dismiss the garden without giving it a second thought. To defend it on the grounds that it is impossible to capture the boundless seas and plateaus within the confines of a garden is just plain nonsense. . . .

  Ike Taiga did not have a studio; Ryōkan had no need for even a temple.15 This is not to say that these men made a vow of poverty a defining principle of their lives. On the contrary, the fact is that spiritually speaking, their desires were too deep, too extravagant, too aristocratic for ordinary material goods. Studios and temples were not meaningless to them; rather, they realized that the absolute was unobta
inable, and rejecting the idea of compromise, they chose instead a purity in which nothingness was the absolute value.16

  The tearoom is designed around the idea of simplicity. It is not, however, a product of the spirit in which nothingness is the ultimate value. For this spirit every last ounce of energy deliberately expended to produce simplicity is impure and garrulous. However much the tokonoma may be manipulated to give the impression of rustic simplicity, the efforts invested in producing that result render it, by definition, inferior to nothingness, less authentic than that which might occur spontaneously. From the perspective of the spirit in which nothingness reigns supreme, the simple tearoom and the gaudy Tōshōgū of Nikkō are birds of a feather, both similarly being products of “presence.”17 Viewed from this perspective, the distinction between the simple, refined Katsura Detached Palace and the vulgar Tōshōgū is invalid. Both are just so much chatter; neither is a structure that can stand an eternal appreciation from the “spiritual aristocracy.”

  However, although that harsh critical spirit centered on nothingness as an ultimate value may itself exist, an art based on this ideal is inconceivable. There is no such thing as art without form. Now, if one were to accept both this fact and the belief that nothingness is the ultimate value, in a renewed attempt to create material beauty it would make more sense to reject the contrived simplicity of something like the tearoom in favor of attempting to bring the ideal to fruition in the greatest extravagance humanly possible, pushing a worldly vulgarity to its very limits. If both simplicity and ostentation are ultimately vulgar, then surely one is better off adopting a magnanimity capable of embracing a vulgarity that revels in its vulgarity rather than clinging to a pettiness that remains vulgar despite attempts to transcend that state.