The Real Demon
Comments: 4
It’s raining hard today so I can’t photograph all of the tiles properly, but I simply have to show you this one; it gave me quite a shock when I got it home and looked at it properly.
It’s almost impossible to see in this picture, but there’s something very strange going – something that provides a wonderful insight into a remark M. Sinclair Stevens made in response to my original post. She wrote:
There was an interview with Donald Ritchie in the Japan Times the other day in which he said that now that Japan was no longer an economic power, that its currency was aethetics.
Now Donald Ritchie is a name familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in Japan’s cultural life and his opinions deserve the highest consideration. But he is wrong in this case. Very wrong.
What follows is a gross simplification, of course, and I should be the first to admit that I do not have the knowledge or skill to present this argument in a way that could really convince anyone. Lest anything smack of Japan-bashing let me also say that the problem I describe is by no means unique to Japan. This country simply provides a dramatic and especially heart-breaking example.
Take a good look at the picture below:
Love hearts, I can assure you, are not part of the traditional Japanese decorative vocabulary! Swastikas, for example, caught the Great Buddhist Express from India via China many centuries ago, but hearts are a much more recent – and insidious – adoption.
I haven’t been able to confirm when they first started appearing, but the earliest would probably be in the Taisho Era (1911 – 1924 from memory) when Japan really started to open up to Western influences in art, fashion and music. The rise of nationalist fervour during the 1930s quelled this somewhat, and then came World War II, so I’m guessing that things really started to go down the drain in the late ’40s and after.
Certainly today it’s hard to buy anything without little love hearts all over it, or Kitty-chan’s face, or some Pokemon or other (this is only a slight exaggeration). In Japan today kawaii rules.
Kawaii (pron. ka-WHY-ee, or ka-WHYYYYYYYYY-eeeeeeeeeeee! more usually) is an adjective usually translated as cute, pretty or charming. I’d add that an essential component is “cloying.” Imagine a world in which every product, from cell phones to cars to clothing to packaged food – everything, is designed to appeal primarily to 12-year-old girls with somewhat less-than-average IQs and you begin to get an idea of aesthetics in Japan today.
This is why Donald Ritchie is wrong (and would that it were otherwise). Japan’s historical contribution to cultural life is inestimable (and, as I’ve mentioned, now safely locked away in museums where it can’t get dirty), but it’s contemporary contribution is almost non-existent. There are no artists of international importance, no writers (with the exception perhaps of Oe Kenzaburo – and no, Murakami Haruki certainly does not count), no architects (Ando Tadao? Isozaki Arata? No. Ban Shigeru? Not yet and probably never. Almost anything of recognition built in Japan in the last 2 decades has been by foreign architects like Piano, Eisenman and Foster), no film directors, no composers, no musicians, no graphic artists. Yokoo Tadanori, one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century anywhere has simply repeated himself (or, more correctly, had his studio assistants do it for him) for the last 20 years. There are no critics, no sculptors, no fashion designers (the big three, Kawakubo, Miyake and Yamamoto are all old figureheads now; haute couture in Japan, or prêt-à-porter at least, means Prada).
Western ‘culture’ and Japan’s peculiar assimilation of it have leached any real aesthetic understanding from people. A process begun a century ago is now in its final stages of decay, and nothing short of a Renaissance could fill Japan’s aesthetic coffers again.
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Posted to Architecture • 2002.09.06 (Fri) • 16:26
Comments
Posted by Christopher Walker 2002.09.06, 20:17
A well-written piece, and I can find no fault with it. I am not, however, an expert in these matters, but my own investigations and readings (such as Joe Joseph’s “The Japanese”) would suggest a cultural void in contemporary Japan.
There are some fleeting moments of beauty though. If you have ever had the chance to experience the PS2 game “Ico”, then you will have some faith in the future of Japanese art, but it is consolation rather than victory.
As for the future, I hope Japan enters a period of Renaissance, but when you look at the crassly commercial or shocking art that is coming out of the West these days, all we can hope for is a backlash.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens 2002.09.06, 21:54
I wasn’t directly quoting Ritchie and I hope I haven’t created a false impression—the “currency of aethetics” line is my own, the sense I got when reading the article.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20020901a1.htm
I think that Ritchie is also referring to traditional (not contemporary) Japanese culture, to showing the world how much can be done with little. He says, “This has been Japan’s traditional role, and so now it can go back to it.”
He may be overly optimistic, but I hope that someday some generation of Japanese will begin to realize what they have lost and work to save it. When I visit my husband’s family in England, I’m amazed at the preservation effort and the restrictions on building. But here in Austin (Texas) a score of beautiful Victorian houses was demolished in the 1970s to make way for glass office towers and concrete parking lots downtown before an outcry was raised and a preservation society formed.
I’m so, so glad you were able to save what you did. I don’t know enough about art to add to the discussion. For me, Japan’s contribution to aesthetics is in finding the beauty in everyday life, or as one book I have termed it “the radiance of the ordinary”.
Posted by OnceWritten 2005.02.24, 09:14
There is plenty of art left in Japan,but like in every “mindustrialized” country it is not so immediately apparent, in danger of being drowned by the crass and commercial, and being crowded out by the concrete waves of the “New Japan”. Kawaii is an aethetic of the nouveau riche, but there are some people still maintaining the traditional arts of ceramics, doll-making, lacquerware making, and textile and kimono arts that are not just traditional but which blend traditional excellence with modern esthetics. These are to be seen in the yearly exhibitions of the crafts associations in Japan, and the work is often so clearly pure and so finely crafted that it is better than any I have seen in any part of the world.
As well, I believe there are young ( and older) artists, photographers, and musicians who are innovative and exciting. You have to look a little deeper than on the surface, but they are there. And to give Japan its due, I have never seen such well-attended exhibitions of ancient calligraphy and art as well as modern artsts’ work, as I have in Japan. People flock to see traditional arts. If an accomplished Jiuta-mai dancer comes to the country area where I live, her performances are sold out to the point of people having to stand up and watch, which they do. The local kabuki theatre is sold out for its yearly spring performances.
Kitty-chan may rule on the kids notebooks and schoolbags but I think we can liken her to ubiquitous Disney images in other nations. Usually by the time we outgrow them we have learned to see not only bright colours but shades of grey.
Posted by riccard0 2006.08.30, 21:40
Actually, I spotted an heart shape adorning the hilt of a katana in the Nagoya castle (unfortunately it was on the “no-photo floor”, so I cannot give any evidence). But maybe it was simply Taisho.
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