Shinsui Ito: A Passionate Embrace of Nihon

Shinsui Ito (1898-1972) was a central figure in Japan's artistic identity crisis during the 20th century. As wave after wave of artistic 'Isms' from overseas broke upon these shores, native artists felt compelled to either abandon their own rich artistic traditions or embrace them even more strongly. Ito, whose works are briefly on display at the Takashimaya Gallery in Nihonbashi, was one of those artists who chose the latter course, joining the Nihonga movement, which looked to Japan’s past for inspiration rather than the confusing plethora of ideas pouring in from abroad.

When he was 18, he joined Shinhanga Undo, a group which aimed to revive the methods and styles of ukiyo-e. This had a profound influence on the style and themes of his paintings which abound with the images of nature and feminine beauty found in traditional Japanese wood block prints. "Joshin (Unsullied Morning)" (1930), a beautiful picture depicting a group of naked women bathing in a natural hot spring combines both of these aesthetics. The color of the bathers is so softened by the steam and blended into the surrounding nature, that it is only the blackness of their hair that first alerts us to their presence.

Nihonga differs markedly from Western painting in the materials used. The emphasis, as with so much in Japanese culture, is on the use of entirely natural materials. Paper and silk, mounted on board, wall scrolls or on folding screens, are used instead of canvas. Perhaps the most important difference, however, is in the paints. Instead of thick oils, Nihonga uses ground mineral pigments suspended in animal glue thinned with water. This gives the paint a sandy, smoky texture. The effects of this can be seen in ‘Yubi (Fingers)’ 1922) which shows the almost ghostlike figure of a lady delicately examine her fingertips.

A Western viewer might be disappointed by the lack of expression in the faces of the women, most of whom seem to be hiding their feelings under a mask. But by paying close attention to other details, we are given enough clues to project our own feelings into these mysterious faces. ‘Ideyu (Out of the Bath)’ (1950) shows a beautiful girl who has just emerged from a hot bath. She wears a yukata and dabs the sweat on her neck with a towel. Instead of having a relaxed face, however, her mouth remains closed and her hair is tied up in an elaborate hairdo. The only clue that she is really relaxed is given by two little strands of hair that hang down on either side of her face emphasizing her slight drooping posture. This is so subtle you might miss it if you blink!

‘Sakurabana　(Cherry Blossoms)’ (1950) shows a young girl with the regulation poker face struck by the sudden beauty of the blossoms. The slight backwards tilt of her body combined with the hand raised to a pair of incredibly small, tight lips gives us a sense that a gasp of delight will escape from her the very next instant.

Ito tends to idealize women. The flip side of this, however, is that sometimes his paintings seem fetishistic, like ‘Asagao to Shohjo (Morning Glory with Young Girls)’ (1948), a work depicting two young girls sucking on some flowers. A much more accomplished blending of the feminine and the natural is ‘Reijitsu (Beautiful Day)’ (1934), a vast work stretching over 12 panels of a folding screen. Showing a woman looking at something lost in the tangled branches of an old plum tree, it is only by carefully following her gaze that we discover the small bird she is quietly watching.

Japanese art inspired by the imported artistic movements of the 20th century often looks derivative and dated, but the work of Shinsui Ito retains its sincere beauty and timeless appeal.


Paintings by Shinsui Ito ran until Feb. 6, 2001, at the Gallery of Takashimaya Dept. Store in Nihonbashi.

Japan Times
February 3, 2001

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June 15, 2007

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Ikuo Hirayama: solace on the silk road

Ikuo Hirayama clearly represents how the Japanese like to see — and project — themselves. His paintings, located in the strong traditions of nihonga (Japanese-style painting), are unmistakably Japanese, but they look outwards to the rest of the world and express the spirit of peaceful cooperation and appreciation of our common world heritage that is a popular theme on Japanese TV travel programs. For this, he has been noticed and honored abroad, most notably when he was made a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 1988.

This must be one reason why "Ikuo Hirayama: A Retrospective — Pilgrimage for Peace," a major show of his paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, has been so well attended. Others include his skill as an artist, as well as how his career touches on themes that are central to postwar Japan's sense of itself — redemption, regeneration and respect for the past.

The story dramatically opens with Hirayama, born in 1930, witnessing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a junior high-school student mobilized for the war effort. In his autobiography he described the bombing, which he was lucky to survive, as "the greatest mistake mankind ever made." It had an undeniably enormous impact on him, but it was his inability to face it directly that shaped much of his artistic career.

After graduating from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1952, Hirayama became a disciple of nihonga painter Seison Maeda. Like many painters who felt the threat of social chaos in the post-World War II period — and the criticism that nihonga was out of touch with reality — Hirayama originally created scenes that emphasized everyday life's traditional aspects and order. But these early works are not included in the exhibition, as his ultimate style lay in the opposite direction.

In 1959, while suffering from an illness caused by radiation from the A-bomb, he painted scenes based on Buddhist themes, such as "The Transmission of Buddhism" (1959). Buddhist subjects gave him the freedom to paint symbolically, abstractly or figuratively, and develop a luminous, lyrical style characterized by muted-but-glowing colors, unclear lines and ambiguous forms.

Compared to the great canon of Christian art, Buddhism, in purely artistic terms, lags far behind. This is partly the result of an otherworldliness that puts little value on the realms of sense and "illusion," and partly the effect of a stoicism that eschews passion and drama. Hirayama's Buddhist works, though, show the marks of a trip he made to Europe in the early '60s to study Western religious art. "Fantasy of Nirvana" (1961) and "The Jetavana Monastery" (1981) have an element of the religious dramas more typical of Christian Renaissance paintings.

While Japan was in the throes of rampant modernization and materialism, Hirayama headed in the opposite direction, going back to the roots of Japanese culture and spirituality. He traced it to its sources in China and India, as the scholar Tenshin Okakura, one of the founders of the nihonga movement, had done in the 19th century when Japan faced the first onslaught of Westernization. This meant that Hirayama went looking for Japan in the wilds of Central Asia, as he developed a fascination for the Silk Road and the seventh-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who spent 17 years traveling between Tang Dynasty China and India in search of Sanskrit sutras.

The works from Hirayama's extensive travels around Asia form the largest part of the exhibition. In the bleakness of the landscapes with their ruins, there is a feeling he was facing up to the cataclysm he witnessed at Hiroshima.

"Glowing Ruins in Turkestan" (1970) shows Bamiyan, the famous Buddhist site destroyed by Genghis Khan, and finished off by the Taliban, as a scene of desolation. Despite this, it is infused with a light that seems to recall the history of the place and its people.

The paintings of scenes along the Silk Road often have the sublimity and spirituality that comes naturally to the vast and the ancient. This reflects that, in essence, spirituality is about how far we can remove ourselves from the here and now. In visiting and painting such vistas, there's a palpable sense of Hirayama finding the perspective that allowed him to look once again at his country and the unbearable events of Aug. 6, 1945.

In "The Glorious Imperial Palace of Fujiwara-kyo" (1969) the grandeur and simplicity of his Silk Road paintings are transposed to Japan, as the great city glows golden among the greenery — a vast, living Utopia rather than the mix of petty hopes, dreams and irritations that make up any city.

The vision he nurtured in Central Asia allowed him to paint what his art had been slowly moving toward for decades. "The Holocaust of Hiroshima" (1979) avoids the hysterics and shrill condemnation in other works dealing with the atrocities of the 20th-century, such as Picasso's "Guernica" (1937).

In Hirayama's work, the red inferno fills six panels above a suggestion of the Hiroshima skyline. Painted in rich, soft waves of powdered pigment with occasional flecks of gold, it becomes, surprisingly, a thing of beauty. Riding in the flames is Acalanatha, the Buddhist deity whose function is to destroy delusion. As well as representing the integrity of the longstanding Japanese culture, the painting shows the new maturity found in postwar Japan.

"Ikuo Hirayama: A Retrospective — Pilgrimage for Peace" ran till October 21, 2007 at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Japan Times
September 27, 2007

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Neoteny: The Japanese really are forever young

General Douglas MacArthur famously said that Japan was a nation of 12-year-olds. Well, he wasn’t talking about fighting abilities, as the Japanese gave the Allies the fright of their lives in World War II. Nor could such a remark have applied to their level of intelligence, as Japanese consistently outscore Westerners by an average of 5 to 6 points in international IQ comparisons. Nor was it their business acumen, as, starting from the bombed out ruins of 1945, these “12-year-olds” built their economy into the second biggest in the world in a few decades. So, what the heck was MacArthur talking about? Whether he knew it or not, he was probably talking about neoteny.

Neoteny is a biological term that describes the retention of juvenile characteristics in adults, something that is widely recognized in the animal world. For example, we know that tadpoles mature into frogs, losing their juvenile aquatic character along the way. However, the axolotl species of salamander remains fully aquatic throughout its life, merely becoming a large version of a tadpole. A better known example of neoteny is the giant panda, which retains its baby-like cuteness into adulthood. Indeed, humans have juvenile characteristics relative to other primates. Our sparse body hair and enlarged heads are in fact reminiscent of baby primates.

Now, many of the physical characteristics we associate with the Japanese are also characteristics we associate with children: smoother, less hairy skin; lack of physical stature; slenderness; less voluptuous curves in women; large head-to-body ratio; flatter faces; and higher pitched voices. Very few people would argue with the idea that the Japanese are cuter than most other races.

But neoteny doesn’t stop at physical characteristics. The Japanese clearly behave in more childlike ways, the most obvious examples being the cult of cute, as exemplified by Hello Kitty (who herself shows remarkable symptoms of neoteny). They tend to be shy, read comics rather than books, and lack initiative — all this despite their higher average IQs.

No one can deny the neoteny apparent in the physical characteristics and behavior of the Japanese, but what is the mechanism that drives it? How can the Japanese be so different from Westerners — I mean, the scientific consensus is that humans only branched out from Africa about 60,000 years ago, while evolution clearly takes millions of years. How could such differences arise in such a short time?

The answer can be found by looking to another famous example of neoteny: the many types of dogs that have been bred from the common wolf in the last few thousand, or even few hundred, years. Almost all dog breeds exhibit immature mannerisms and physical features when compared with wolves, to which they are so closely related that even a laboratory DNA analysis cannot tell them apart. Neoteny, by using the differences that exist between an adult and a child of a species as its template of change, is able to act as an alternative form of adaptation to evolution, and one that can be rapidly passed on and increased from generation to generation. By utilizing the characteristics of young wolves — like softer hair, floppier ears, looser skin, smaller legs, more playful dispositions, etc. — remarkably different breeds of dogs have developed over incredibly short periods.

I am convinced that something very similar has been at work with humans. In this case, though, it isn’t dog breeders but differences in geography and population density that have played the key role. The Japanese, along with several other Asian races that share similar characteristics, have long been a rice-eating nation. This is relevant because intense cultivation of rice is capable of supporting a much denser population than wheat cultivation or pastoralism. In other words, the Japanese have for thousands of years lived with far higher population density than the peoples of Africa, Europe or the Middle East.

In the animal world, aggression rises in direct proportion to how crowded a species is. This applies especially to adult males. However, among mammals, it is common for juvenile males to live together in relative peace and harmony until they reach maturity. It seems probable that, as rice-eating peoples started to live at unprecedented population densities, they started to increasingly take advantage of the juvenile characteristics of appearance and behavior offered by neoteny as a means of defusing the rising tensions and aggression inherent in the new situation. The fact that Japan became an overcrowded island meant that this process was not only intensified, but also that its neotenized population was sheltered from less neotenized populations from outside the rice-growing areas, developing into perhaps the most neotenized race on Earth.

Since developing this idea, I’ve been applying it left, right and center to explain everything I see around me in this unique society. And, I can tell you, it’s all starting to make sense now—especially that comment by General MacArthur.

Tokyo Classified
November 18, 2005

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Pearl Harbor: How Japan Saved the World for Democracy

December 2001 marks the 60th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Once again we have the opportunity to either look back in anger or, now that the embers of history have grown cold, to rake through them and ask what was the real significance of that fateful day.

It is often said that history is written by the winners. Although every nation committed horrendous atrocities in World War II, Japan is still cast as one of the pure villains. But, considering that many historians now believe the Japanese were unwitting dupes in one of the most complicated games of propaganda, espionage and diplomacy ever played out across the world stage, isn’t it time to revise the Hollywood version of history and admit the existence of gray areas, especially as the Americans would have been unable to play their full part in the defeat of Nazism without the cooperation of Japan?

The well-planned and devastating strike that crippled America's Pacific battle fleet and killed 2,403 Americans, was the decisive act of the war, but not in the way the Japanese intended. Although it gave the Japanese navy control of the Pacific for six vital months, enabling the Imperial army to conquer a vast area and establish a formidable defensive perimeter, it did little to aid Japan's allies, Germany and Italy. The main effect of launching a surprise attack on American soil was simply to resolve the disagreements inherent in any democratic system, divisions that in America's case threatened to prevent its participation in the war until it was too late.

Anyone who believes that Pearl Harbor was incidental to the war should ask two key questions:
(1) Did America's entry into the war make a decisive difference?
(2) Could America have entered the war in time to make a decisive difference if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor?
The answers are 'yes' and 'probably not.'

THE WOLVES AT THE DOOR

At the start of December 1941 the two powers actively opposing Nazism, the British Empire and the Soviet Union were both close to collapse. Britain, after consecutive defeats was reduced to military impotence and was so threatened with starvation by Germany's U-boat campaign that even a form of cannibalism was being advocated in government circles: In 1941 nutritional scientist Dr. Magnus Pyke submitted a proposal for making black pudding from discarded blood plasma to help boost protein levels, a suggestion that was thankfully vetoed by the British PM, Winston Churchill, who was interested in blood – along with sweat and tears - purely in a rhetorical sense.

Russia was in even worse straits. Since the German invasion of June that year, they had lost 2.5 million of their original 4-million-man army; while, of an original 15,000 planes in their air force, only 700 remained. Both the capital city, Moscow, and Leningrad, home of the 1917 revolution, seemed on the verge of falling. The Soviet government had already fled to Kuibyshev, some 500 miles to the East.

The only thing that could prevent the defeat of these powers was the entry of America into the war. Many Americans, including President Roosevelt, were sympathetic, but, ominously for democracy's prospects, many more Americans wanted nothing to do with a European war. Americans viewed the pacts and alliances of European politics with deep distaste, and feared the high financial cost of entangling alliances and a large military. Many were also convinced that the country had been maneuvered into World War One to support the interests of profiteering bankers and munitions makers. This feeling was recognized in the Neutrality Act of 1935, which explicitly banned loans and the export of war implements to belligerents.

Also, despite general sympathy for Britain and its short-lived French ally, a sizable minority of Americans were sympathetic to the Axis powers, including tens of millions of Americans of German, Italian and Irish descent. When Roosevelt strongly criticized Mussolini for his stab in the back attack on a defeated France in June 1940, it lost him the votes of many Italian Americans at the polls later that year.

KEEPING THE GIANT SLEEPING

These antiwar sentiments, mobilized in groups like America First, led by the famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh, were strongly represented in Congress, which stubbornly maintained America's neutrality. As world-shaping events unfolded, Roosevelt, who fervently believed in fighting side-by-side with Britain, was forced to sit on his hands. Any concessions he wrung from Congress to provide material support for the Allies, such as Lend-Lease were paid for by increasingly explicit pledges to "keep American boys out of the war."

Interestingly, US isolationism was directed more towards Europe than Asia. Here, the US traditionally took a more active role. Despite fears of greater vulnerability to attack, the main base of the Pacific fleet had been moved to Hawaii, while a large US military presence was maintained as far forward as the Philippines. Following Japan's invasion of China in 1937, the US provided extensive military aid, including advisors and volunteers to assist Nationalist China. Also, with the occupation of France and Holland, the US extended its protection to their Asian colonies, secretly collaborating with the British and the Dutch in a common defense plan against possible Japanese action. In negotiations with Japan, the USA, while it exercised hegemony over the entire New World under the Monroe Doctrine, attempted to deny Japan any rights or influence outside its own borders.

Although the Roosevelt administration saw Germany as the main threat to democracy, it took more active steps against Japan. With far fewer Japanese Americans than Italian or German Americans, an aggressive approach towards Japan was more politically acceptable. Also racist attitudes led the US government and military to underestimate the ability of the Japanese military.

After the fall of France in 1940, there was a widespread fear that Hitler would soon be reaching across the Atlantic. Despite this, an opinion poll in July found that only 15% of Americans were prepared to go to war. With isolationist sentiment still strong, the key to winning the war for the Axis powers was to resist any provocation offered by President Roosevelt that might escalate into a full war. In Japan, the Prime Minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoe was well aware of this danger and was prepared to make important concessions to appease the USA, including withdrawing Japanese troops from China.

Hitler knew that America's entry into World War One in 1917 had shifted the balance of power decisively against Germany. To avoid a repeat of this, he was prepared to tolerate a great deal of provocation: By 1941 America had frozen German assets; given 50 destroyers to aid Britain's wartime effort; and supplied the British with easy credit and vital war materials under the Lend/Lease agreement. Also, using the extremely elastic concept of America's defensive waters, FDR had extended American naval patrols far out into the Atlantic with a policy to shoot-on-sight, resulting in unprovoked depth-charging of German U-boats. All this, it should be remembered, was from a country that was officially at peace with Germany. Despite this, Hitler ordered his U-boats to only fire if fired upon.

It is often assumed that Japan had to take the gamble of attacking Pearl Harbor if it was to preserve its ascendancy in Asia, but there were other options available. Japan could have avoided Americas oil embargo by not occupying French Indo-China, and even if it had, there were other sources of fuel. When Japanese-American negotiations reached the danger point, President Suzuki of the Japanese Planning Board reported that petroleum was the only item which posed a serious problem and that even here, major investment in the synthetic oil industry, would produce more than could be obtained from the Dutch East Indies under wartime conditions.

Japan's best chance of success lay in the general victory of the Axis powers. This was something understood by Konoe's foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka. Although a hawk who wouldn't flinch from war with the United States, Matsuoka strongly advocated turning Japan’s military might against the weakening Soviet Union, a move which Konoe rejected because he felt it might upset the Americans.

THE SORGE SPY RING

If the Japanese had decided to attack the Soviet Far East instead of Pearl Harbor, not only would the details of the war have been altered but also its final outcome. Although the vital regions of Russia were located thousands of miles to the West, a Japanese attack or even a threat of one at this crucial moment would have sapped the Soviets of the strength they needed to survive. Luckily for the Soviets, they had established an effective spy ring in Japan that gave them vital intelligence.

This was led by Dr. Richard Sorge, the son of a German father and a Russian mother, who used his cover as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, to gather information both from Germans and Japanese. A dedicated Communist since his time in the German army in World War One, Sorge had been operating in Japan since 1933. In early May 1941, he warned Moscow of the coming German blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. Stalin, relying on his political instincts, ignored this information with the result that the Soviet army was taken by surprise and nearly annihilated, but after this debacle the Kremlin started to take their man in Tokyo much more seriously.

Although he had several sources of information, Sorges most important one was undoubtedly Hotsumi Ozaki, a correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun and a secret Communist sympathizer, whom Sorge had met in China. As a recognized authority on China, Ozaki was employed as a government advisor. More importantly, he was also a member of Japan's equivalent of the Old Boy network, with many of his associates active in the highest circles of power.

It was through Ozaki that Sorge was in a position to assure Moscow by early September that, barring a total collapse on the Russian front or a complete withdrawal of Soviet forces from Siberia, there would be no Japanese attack on the Soviet Far East that year. This news came just in time for the Soviets to switch 11 rifle divisions to the West, a move which military analysts believe saved Moscow from falling into German hands.

RAISING THE STAKES

Sorge's spy ring also gave the Soviets an inside view of the internal power struggles in the Japanese government between those, like Konoe, who wished to compromise and negotiate, and hardliners like the War Minister Tojo, who believed that America was essentially insincere in its claim to be seeking a peaceful solution. Frustrated by America's unbending attitude and foreseeing a future conflict, the Japanese occupied French Indo-China in July, 1941, to use as a base against China, and as a stepping stone to the oil producing Dutch East Indies.

America responded by freezing Japanese assets and imposing an oil embargo. This strong stance did nothing to help the moderates in the Japanese government. In early October, PM Konoe was still suggesting that confrontation with America could be averted by withdrawing troops from China. Tojo opposed him, insisting that such a move would destroy the army's morale. The result of this argument was the resignation of Konoe and the appointment of Tojo as his successor.

Informed of matters by Ozaki, Sorge was able to tell Moscow well in advance that the Japanese would strike at the Americans probably in November. With a high degree of certainty that the Japanese army would be fully committed elsewhere, the Soviets now transferred further divisions from the East to the West to launch their winter offensive. It is no coincidence that at exactly the same moment the Japanese army struck South at the Philippines and South East Asia, the Siberian divisions of the Red Army were striking West, pushing the German panzer divisions back from the gates of Moscow.

Although some of the wilder allegations about Roosevelt having precise foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack are rightly dismissed as ridiculous, it seems clear from the general pattern of his administration's actions that FDR had decided to provoke Japan as an adjunct of his policy towards Germany.

One danger this raised, however, was the possibility of war breaking out in the Pacific, while the USA remained at peace with Germany. Although they were allies, Germany had no real obligation to assist Japan in the event of a war with America. After all Japan hadn't joined Germany's attack on Russia. To prevent this danger, Roosevelt had adopted a much more aggressive Atlantic policy towards Germany. The Germans steadfastly refused to take Roosevelt's bait, but with a high state of tension between the two countries, there was a good chance that war with Japan would lead automatically to war with Germany. Japan now became the back door to the international war that Roosevelt so keenly desired and the new Japanese Premier Hideki Tojo was the perfect fall guy.

THE GAME ENDS

With close ties to the Imperial army in China, Tojo was much less willing to consider withdrawing from China or even slowing down the war there. Blindly ignorant of the important role that public opinion played in American politics, Tojo's government decided to snap at the bait of the American Pacific fleet lying at its moorings.

Roosevelt had always justified his caution in not bringing America into the war sooner on the grounds that he dared not get too far ahead of public opinion. When the first wave of 214 Japanese aircraft struck at 7:50 a.m. on the morning of the 7th of December, 1941, President and public were finally united in the same opinion: a great crusade would have to be fought. Given the strict legalism of American foreign policy, the question of whether the crusade would also include Germany continued to hang in the balance for a few days until Hitler, impatient of the game in the North Atlantic and confident of crushing the Russians before America could make a difference, declared war on Dec. 11, giving Roosevelt the war he had always wanted.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was the first large scale, long distance attack by carrier planes in history. It was a military achievement of such rare distinction, that until it happened almost any other course of action seemed more probable. Studying this particular event, it is possible to feel that we are now living in a parallel universe where the least likely course of events prevailed. If instead of taking a long shot with Pearl Harbor, Japan had pitched in to help its German ally in its war against the beleagured Soviet Union, or just waited for America to strike the first blow, American intervention in World War II would probably have been delayed until it was too late, with the result that we would be living in a world dominated by the ideals of Nazism.

This December 7th freedom-loving people everywhere should join together to thank those brave Japanese pilots who knew not what they did, but in doing it helped save the world for democracy.

Tokyo Journal
December 2001

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Zen and the Roundabout Road to Enlightenment

In his classic book “Yen in the Art of Archery,” Eugen Herrigel makes it clear that trying too hard to hit the target is a sure way to miss it. This paradox struck me recently at the Suntory Museum’s exhibition of art and artifacts from Kyoto’s 800-year-old Kennin-ji Zen Buddhist temple; an exhibition that is surprisingly less about the didacticism and preaching of religion than the aesthetics of pure artistic enjoyment.

“For most Buddhist sects, the focus was to make people believe that Buddhism would save them,” museum curator, Nobue Mito explains. “The thing that distinguished the Zen monks from the other sects is that they didn’t think that directly saving people was the most important thing.”

Rather than the short route of proselytizing, Zen monks preferred to take a longer, more scenic route to spiritual redemption; one that involved intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic activities, like studying, writing poetry, performing the tea ceremony, and producing and collecting beautiful works of arts. All these aspects are in evidence with examples of calligraphy, poems, and other documents, as well as beautiful paintings executed on various surfaces.

The portraits of the Buddhist monks, like the 15th century hanging scroll depicting Kennin-ji’s founder, Myoan Yosai (1141-1215), characteristically depict Zen monks seated on chairs with their legs folded under their robes in the lotus position, and their empty shoes below on the ground as if they were levitating. These scrolls are now sadly much besmirched with incense smoke.

A portrait that has stood the test of time much better is the 14th century painted wooden statue of the monk Chugan Engetsu (pictured). Although most of the color has now faded, the hard, lifelike stare emitted by the crystal eyeballs and the tension with which the figure appears to hold the rod used to discipline monks during zazen breathing exercises, makes you almost expect a sudden admonitory thwack.

With its strong links to Sung Dynasty China, Zen Buddhism was a natural conduit of Chinese culture. This is seen in the Temmoku tea bowls on display. Although made in Japan, the name recalls a mountain in China famous for Zen monasteries and the growing of tea.

“During the Tang dynasty in China, the best tea bowls were celadon ware, as this made the tea seem greener,” Mito explains. “But in the Sung dynasty, foamy tea with a rather white surface became popular so tea bowls with a contrasting black glaze were preferred.”
Introducing Chinese fashions into Japan also helped to make Zen popular with the elites, who invariably viewed foreign culture with a sense of wonder and emulation.

The imagery in Buddhist art sometimes seems an amalgam of Oriental myths and legends. Among the fabled creatures on loan from the temple the most impressive is Kaiho Yusho’s series of eight vast hanging scrolls from the Momoyama period, depicting two enormous, brooding, storm-like dragons. While the motif of the most famous object on display, Tawaraya Sotatsu’s folding screen, ‘Wind God and Thunder God’ has more relevance to Shintoism than Buddhism. This astounding 17th-century national treasure will be displayed from the 25th of June, in the meantime being represented by a copy.

Westerners with their history of holy wars are often amazed by the apparent degree of tolerance and mutual acceptance in Oriental religion. A triptych of hanging scrolls from the 17th century by Kano Tan’yu shows the Buddha harmoniously flanked by Confucius and Lao-tzu. Mito suggests that the true reason for such tolerance was the fact that both Confucianism and Taoism were regarded more as philosophies than religions. This is symbolized by the fact that only the Buddha directly faces the viewer, while the two sages, like the portraits of the Zen monks, are all three quarter views.

Just like other religions, Buddhism was occasionally guilty of intolerance and sectarianism. Persecution by the established Buddhist sects meant that Myoan Yosai was only able to establish the temple of his new sect in Kyoto after he won the support of the shogun, Minamoto-no-Yori’ie. While a letter from Oda Nobunaga dated 1574 to one of Kennin-ji’s sub-temples, assuring it that it could still raise taxes on the land it owned, testifies to the continued importance of patronage.

By not aiming directly at the target of religious salvation, Zen Buddhism through its intellectualism and aestheticism greatly enhanced and enriched the spirit and culture of Japan. But the sect’s popularity with the political elite and the benefits it reaped leaves the suspicion that part of Zen’s mission, like that of other great religious sects, was to curry favor with the politically powerful.

Kennin-ji: the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto ran until July 7, 2002 at the Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo.

Japan Times
June 12, 2002

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The chrysanthemum and the rose

LONDON -- Anybody turning up at London's Hyde Park to walk their dog on the morning of Saturday, May 19, could have been forgiven for thinking they'd wandered into some kind of space and time warp. Instead of a few squirrels and strollers enjoying the pale, watery sunshine, they would have found a full-blown Japanese matsuri in progress. If they weren't surprised to see taiko drummers smashing open sake barrels, they might have been shocked by the sight of a group of bald, middle-aged Japanese men in traditional robes carrying a golden mikoshi around at an admirable trot with dozens of excitable British kids in tow, or a host of other events that have no real business being in your average London park.

If our hypothetical dog-walker had stopped to think, he or she might have remembered a few warning signs, such as the posters and TV programs announcing the countless events and exhibitions which, along with the Matsuri in the Park, are part of Japan 2001, a 12-month series of cultural events being held around Britain with the object of promoting and developing an awareness of Japan.

These events include everything the average person might expect, including Japanese gardening, kabuki, noh and martial arts. But, as Christopher Purvis, chief executive of Japan 2001, has planned it, the festival isn't merely perpetuating the stereotypes of Japan.

"The program is, I believe, a well-balanced mixture of the new and the traditional," Purvis said. "We thought it was important to have an element of the great traditional arts. It has been wonderful, for example, to have the great kabuki actor Ganjiro III here. What is happening is that people may first go to see something traditional and then be drawn onto something else in the program perhaps more contemporary."

Adding to the distinctly traditional hue of the Hyde Park events was the presence of Prince Charles and Japan's Crown Prince, who declared the event open and then joined in an Awa odori, a traditional rice-growing dance that hopefully won't disrupt the park's ecology too much. Afterward they stayed to watch the yabusame (traditional horseback archery).

However, the two-day event, which drew 215,000 people, also had contemporary elements to offer.

"Most of what I've seen today is traditional stuff that you'd associate with Japan," one 23-year-old English woman said, "but the street fashions and pop music were pretty cool. It's like they copy things from here but when you see it, it comes over as weird and funny at the same time."

The street fashions she was referring to were the cyberpunk threads sported by a group of Japanese female art students. Although spectators themselves, they became for a short time a kind of sideshow. Taking an excited interest in a quaint-looking Muji van, they circled round it squealing "kawaii" and snapping photos, in the process attracting a small crowd with their antics.

Much has changed since the last Japanese festival held 10 years ago. Funding, for one.

"There is less sponsorship freely available than there was then," Purvis explained. "That is not necessarily a bad thing, as we and other organizers have been concentrating on making an impact with lower-budget events. Also, so much has been initiated by enthusiasts around the country."

In fact this "bottom up" approach, in part dictated by the economic slowdown, contrasts nicely with the "top down" centralized corporate organization of the previous festival - which famously featured a sumo tournament at the Royal Albert Hall.

"Japan is undergoing dramatic change," Purvis observed. "But this is a positive change. The political and business model of the last 50 years served the country well after the war. But now everything is changing. Companies are changing. The political scene is changing. All this is reflected in lifestyle and culture."

If Japan 2001 achieves anything lasting then it could be to break the rather stubborn and preconceived notions about Japan and its inhabitants. The image of Japan needs updating. "An obvious myth is that all Japanese men wear blue suits and work for major Japanese corporations. In fact there is a huge diversity in occupations and lifestyles," Purvis said.

These themes of diversity are being explored at JAM: a Tokyo/London exhibition running at London's Barbican Centre from May to July. Presenting cutting-edge works from around 100 artists working in both cities in the fields of fashion, graphics, photography, the media, music and art, the exhibition delves into the creative synergy between the two metropolises to show Londoners that Tokyo is just as hip as the capital of "Cool Britannia."

The urge to show the modern Japan was also seen in the mascot used to promote the monthlong Tokyo Life exhibition held

at the majestic Selfridges department store on Oxford Street, London's main shopping drag, throughout May. Instead of a crowd-pleasing cliche of a samurai, sumo or geisha, a cartoon character of a funky Japanese teenager was used. The exhibition itself featured a kaleidoscope of Japanese fashion and other products, ranging from furniture and home appliances to traditional kimono and mini skirts, along with karaoke in the basement coffee shop.

Apart from the clear attempt to dismantle outdated notions inhabiting popular consciousness, Japan 2001 is also encouraging crosscultural exchange at many levels. The clearest example of this is Shakespeare in Japan, an event using the traditional Japanese theatrical forms of noh, kyogen and kabuki to reinterpret and illuminate the Bard's plays, set against the backdrop of the Globe Theatre built by the River Thames. Nakamura Ganjiro III took a break from playing in "Love Suicides at Sonezaki" at London's Sadler's Wells to appear on the Globe's stage for one night.

Although many Japan 2001 events are in London, Purvis is keen to point out that there are also 750 events outside the capital, including a mini version of the Matsuri in the Park traveling to 22 towns and cities throughout the land. Another major initiative is Homestay U.K., which will give British children a chance to experience life with Japanese families. This reflects the grassroots approach favored by Japan 2001, with groups all over the country spontaneously contributing and Japan 2001 acting as an umbrella organization.

Helping foster a modern and positive awareness of itself in other countries is vital to Japan's national interests. Compared to some other locations in Europe, it already has a head start in Britain.

"There is an enormous interest in Japan here," Purvis enthused. "I don't believe there are many other countries where such a Japan year could be held."

Reasons for this might include the fact that Britain has Europe's largest Japanese population (more than 100,000) and that about 1,000 graduates from British universities go to Japan each year to teach English.

Island states of roughly equal size, preserving tradition and monarchies, the U.K. and Japan appear to share a pulse of sympathy that reverberates between them. British fashion and music are as big as ever in Japan, from yesterday's mod and punk scenes to today's clubland DJs. In the other direction, Japanese style and cuisine have made big inroads into the U.K. Who'd have thought you could find sushi at a local supermarket or ramen shop on the corner? While no one expects the British to suddenly start bowing to each other, or the Japanese to take to Marmite and warm beer, mutual interest between the two countries can only grow as a result of Japan 2001.

Japan Times
(co-written with my brother Marc Liddell)
June 27, 2001

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Tohaku Hasegawa

The exhibition at the Idemitsu Museum, “New Discovery: The Beauty of Hasegawa Tohaku,” has quite a tale to tell, one that adds much interest to the stunning screen paintings on display. It is a tale of rivalry and skullduggery that stretches beyond the grave and has seen one of the great artists of Japan’s Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568-1600), deprived of his full glory. Until now, that is.

As museum curator, Hirokazu Yatsunami, explains, recent scholarship is revolutionizing the way Hasegawa is regarded.
“This exhibition is to present these new views and the most representative works among these new discoveries,” he says.

Up until now, Tohaku Hasegawa has been considered primarily a sumi-e (monochromatic ink) painter, who suffused his screen paintings with an emotionalism absent from the work of rivals, like Eitoku Kano (1543-1590) with whom he competed for the favor of the great men of the day, like the Shoguns, Nobunaga Oda and Hideyoshi Toyotomi.

Although striving for emotion, Tohaku Hasegawa skillfully avoided sentimentality in his work by using animal subjects. This can be seen in “Cranes and Bamboo” (ca. 1590), a pair of screens, like most of the works at this exhibition. In one set of panels, the male crane appears to be crying out for his mate, while in the other the female crane looks coyly round, creating a subtle but powerful emotional impact.

Another pair of ink screen paintings, the smouldering “Tigers and Bamboo” (ca. 1590), is not only a testament to Hasegawa’s genius, but is also evidence of artistic chicanery, Yatsunami explains.

“This screen painting was damaged, therefore these two panels on the left were added by Tanyu Kano,” he mentions. “He has reattributed this work to Tensho Shubun, the grandfather of Japanese ink paintings. Because of the time difference, which is so close, it seems likely that he intentionally changed attribution.”

As the Kano family dominated the Japanese art world in the years following Hasegawa’s death, Yatsunami believes this is evidence of a concerted attempt by the family to erase Hasegawa’s legacy. Another example of reattribution is the atmospheric “Crows on Pine, Egrets on Willow” (ca. 1593) where Hasegawa’s seal has been crudely scraped off so that the screen can be reattributed to Sesshu, the most famous name in Japanese ink painting.

In addition to his ink works being reattributed, Hasegawa’s polychrome works were all but forgotten, except for one example “Cherry and Maple Trees” at Chishakuin Temple in Kyoto. So much was his reputation for color paintings forgotten that even a work that bore his seal, like “Japanese Bush Clover and Eulalia” (ca. 1602) was suspected to be by someone else. Partly, this was because traditional Japanese polychrome painting is more of a technique-based, craft-like art than the more expressive sumi-e, in which the personal styles of great artists tend to as unmistakable as signatures.

Due to close analysis of the one clear example of his polychrome work at Chishakuin Temple, scholars can now state for the first time that three large color screens are definitely by Hasegawa. The most impressive of these is “Willow Trees by the Bridge” (ca. 1603), an extravaganza of gold leaf and paint that is said to depict Uji Bridge, a symbol of the connection between this world and the next.

Such gorgeous works, using expensive materials, were a sign that an artist had truly arrived. While Eitoku Kano was alive, the two painters competed for the patronage of the greatest in the land, but after Eitoku's death in 1590, Tohaku stood alone as the greatest living master of his time, something the successors of Eitoku found hard to accept. The Kano family may have helped to suppress the legacy of their great rival, but this fascinating exhibition at least ensures that Hasegawa will have the last laugh.

International Herald Tribune Asahi Shimbun
March 18, 2005

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Book Review: Urayasu Tekkin Kazoku

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Art Brief: Jakuchu and the Age of Imagination

The good thing about this exhibition – centering on Japanese painting from the 18th and early 19th centuries – is that it presents art collected without an agenda. Most of the works on display come from the collection of Joe Price, an American collector who started collecting over 50 years ago. Rather than reading up on the subject or consulting ‘art experts,’ he merely bought whatever appealed to his visual sense.

In Joe’s case this was not the ‘wabi sabi’ or dull Zen stuff that was creeping into artistic respectability even back in the fifties, but rather the livelier, plebian art of Itoh Jakuchu (1716 – 1800) and other Kansai painters. These brightly decorated works, like Jakuchu’s astounding pictures of gamecocks and other animals, were snubbed by art cognoscenti until relatively recently. This exhibition presents 101 works chosen jointly by Joe and the museum from more than 600 works in his collection.

Ran to August 27, 2006, Tokyo National Museum.

Japanzine
(under the name Marius Gombrich)
August, 2006

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Art Brief: Shinji Ogawa

The great modernist cheapskate architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously said, “Less is more.” This is also the ruling principle in this exhibition of paintings by Shinji Ogawa, a 47–year–old Japanese painter who meticulously reproduces famous paintings from the canon of Western art, like Vermeer’s “Milk Maid” (ca. 1658) or Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” (ca. 1656), but with the people or some of them missing.

While this is a useful tool for deconstructing famous paintings, and highly enjoyable for professional art critics like me, who perhaps know these paintings rather too well, I suspect that it has less appeal for the general public, who like to have a good look at their milkmaids. For his next project I suggest Ogawa aims closer to home and attempts a “36 Views of Mt. Fuji” without Mt. Fuji.

Runs to Dec. 24, National Museum of Art, Osaka.

Japanzine
(under the name Marius Gombrich)
December 2006

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Art Brief: Asae Soya

Perspective, by its invocation of distance, divides things and people from each other. While such divisions help us to organize things on a mental and visual level, it can also deaden the sensuousness and warmth we feel for those things around us. This has always been the main drawback of the Western artistic tradition.

33-year-old Asae Soya, who recently earned a doctorate in art from the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, paints in a style that uses elements of Western perspective, but seeks to overcome its drawbacks by, as she says, “employing the five senses to the full.”

In her first solo exhibition since 2003, she pursues this agenda in the 15 paintings and 10 drawing on show (two thirds sold on the first day) by employing a number of distorting factors that visually simulate at least two of the other four senses. Shimmering, rainbow-refracted colors and watery effects painted in oil on panel-mounted cotton give her works a warmth and wetness that you can almost feel, while her ripples seem to emit the sounds of water drops dropping.

Many of her works have hitherto focused on impressions from the bathroom, but the present exhibition reveals a growing ambition with a number of works based on airports. Here the motifs of water are used to bring distance closer and to make the impersonal intimate. The water droplets and the blurred lights of “Airport Eastgate” (2007) turn the soulless environment of these portals of distance into something resembling an inner psychic soulscape.

Japan Times
November 1, 2007

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Storyboarding the Worlds of Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa is the Sir Walter Scott of Japan. Just as the Scottish writer created a fascinating picture of Scotland, based on romantic figures of highlanders and windswept crags, that defined his nation for the rest of the world, so the Japanese director created a colorful vision of his country, employing feudal samurai and richly painted geisha, that has stuck in the international mind. How much this world was envisioned and imagined by Kurosawa was displayed at a recent exhibition of his storyboard illustrations held at the Mori Arts Center Gallery in Tokyo.

Although he may have been Japan’s greatest movie director, it seems that Kurosawa was also very much a frustrated painter as the artistic qualities of these stroryboards make clear. He also painted, sketched, and crayoned a great number, as Seiju Toda, the show’s curator tells me. For his 1985-movie Ran he reportedly created over 800 full-color storyboard images that meticulously worked out details of costume and armor as well explored the visual language of the period.

“Wherever he went, he always carried his painting instruments with him,” Seiju Toda points out, “even when he was staying in ryokans. I think it’s clear he intended these pictures to exist as paintings because he signed so many of them.”

While normal storyboard illustrations tend to be precise pictures, devoid of extraneous detail, drawn by professional graphic artists to assist camera location and actor positioning, Kurosawa’s illustrations are vivid, expressive, and rich in color and emotive details. These qualities give viewers a foretaste of the movie’s atmosphere, such as the lush hues of “The Field: A Rainbow Goes Away from Me” from his 1990-movie, Dreams, or the dramatic heroism of the soldier pierced by a tangle of arrows in “Fall of the Third Castle: A Hedgehog” from Ran.

As a young man, Kurosawa greatly admired Vincent van Gogh and dreamt of becoming an artist, but had to push his painterly aspirations firmly to one side as he worked his way up in the Japanese movie industry of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. In the beginning, it seems he relied little on storyboards, and there are no examples of storyboards earlier than Kagemusha (1980). It was this movie, however, that was to prove the catalyst in combining his youthful interest in painting with his mature career as a director.

“He painted many storyboards for this movie because it had a very big budget and, at first, the movie company didn’t agree with his ideas,” Toda recalls. “He used the storyboards to convince them it would work. Also, famous friends and admirers, like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola in America, were so impressed by the storyboards that they helped to get American financing and distribution for the movie.”

Although the storyboards at the exhibition were produced when Kurosawa was already an old man, they retain the influences of his youth. “I Fly: My Shadow Calls Me” an illustration for a sequence that was later dropped from Dreams recalls the lyrical, dreamlike quality of Marc Chagall, while “Village of the Watermills: An Old Man of A Watermill” from Dreams shows much of the intensity and expressiveness of color for which van Gogh was justly famous.

A special feature of the exhibition was that many of the storyboards were enlarged to a ‘screen size’ of several square meters.
“Although these works became his paintings, they also served as storyboards,” Toda explains. “In his mind, they must have been screen-sized. That’s why we decided to enlarge them to screen size”

One of the most attractive of these enlargements is “The Roof of Ashinoya House: Starry Sky after a Storm” from The Sea Watches, in which two kimono-clad figures look up at the sky, while the dark flood waters lap at the eaves of the house. That this movie was successfully filmed in 2002, four years after the death of Kurosawa, is testament to the power these images have in communicating the vision of this great artist and director.

New York Arts Magazine
March, 2005

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Simple tea, the soul-soother

Japan, a hectic, densely-populated country, has always been guilty of overloading the senses. It is only natural that here too an ameliorating aesthetic should have developed. This is best expressed by the calmness and simplicity of the tea ceremony.

Although chanoyu, or the way of tea, leads out of the comfort zone of accessible Japanese culture, this path also brings us to a more profound understanding of that culture.

You know you are on the right path when you enter Tokyo's Gotoh Museum and experience that first feeling of anticlimax. Although it has an extensive and impressive Japanese garden hidden behind the museum building, the current exhibition markedly lacks visual fireworks.

That's the point.

The exhibition consists of 70 utensils used in tea ceremonies over the centuries, including bowls, vases, water pots, kettles and tea caddies. Many of the items actually belonged to the famous tea master, Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591), who did so much to evolve this unique and mysterious ritual.

One of the most challenging pieces is "Yaburebukuro (Burst Pouch)" a 16th-century Iga-ware freshwater jar in natural-ash-glazed stoneware (pictured).

It has a comical shape, with a wide, top-heavy neck pressing down on a small body that seems to be cracking under the pressure. Despite looking like a potter's mistake, it is revered as an important cultural property.

Although there are several conventionally beautiful objects, such as the pale green celadon flower vase from the Southern Song Dynasty, whose form subtly hints at the shape of a gourd, many of the items reveal the tendency to construe imperfections as charms.

This is evident in the cast-iron Ashiya kettle with its hailstone pattern from the Momoyama Period (1573-1615). The fact that a large part of the lower surface has since cracked off has only ensured this piece's reputation as a unique work of beauty.

To understand why such unlikely works are so highly regarded, it is vital to understand the ideas behind chanoyu. Rules concerning the preparation and consumption of the humble beverage had already been formulated when tea masters like Murata Shuko in the 15th century started to incorporate Zen concepts and artistic ideas.

Sen no Rikyu completed the process by further formalizing the rules of behavior and identifying the tea ceremony's spirit with the four Buddhist principles of harmony, respect, purity and tranquility, creating the highly evolved wabi-cha style of tea ceremony that is most admired today.

The aim is simplicity and serenity. With regard to the attendant ceramics, art, gardening and architecture of the tea ceremony, it is held that these objectives can best be achieved by suggesting nature.

This is done by the avoidance of symmetry and pretentiousness and by stressing the intimate and down-to-earth aspects. The aesthetic is clearly at work in another unassuming masterpiece from the exhibition: "Mine no Momiji (Maple on the Peak)," a gray Shino-ware tea bowl also from the Momoyama Period.

Although it is easy to understand how this austere aesthetic appealed to Zen priests and samurai warriors, chanoyu was also very popular among the rich merchant class, particularly in the commercial hub of Sakai. Sen no Rikyu himself came from such a background.

Merchants were renowned for their gaudy extravagance and wild parties, and it seems surprising that they had a penchant for such a rarefied pleasure. But, then, after a night of hedonism, what could be more soothing for a rich merchant with a hangover than the subdued colors, silence and reassuring ritual of the tea ceremony?

Japan Times
December 30, 2000

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Book Review: 'Out' by Natsuo Kirino

The best mysteries are those that reflect deep psychological and social tensions, and have a higher agenda. In fact, without these resonating elements, a mystery novel can so easily become just a shallow and superficial mechanism. Luckily, Natsuo Kirino's Out, now translated into English, is full of deep, dark resonances and - along the way of a thrilling and engrossing read - makes some profound points about Japanese society.

The novel opens the door on the lives some ordinary women, working part time on the night shift at a lunch-box processing plant, a dead end job that only emphasizes the domestic drudgery of the protagonists, and can be seen as a symbol of the frustration and subjugation of higher female aspirations.

Though their backgrounds and situations differ, the four women share a vague but potent desire to escape the confines of their daily lives. Out of this apparently humdrum situation, Kirino creates a real page turner, as one of the women is driven to murder her husband, and her colleagues decide to rally round.

Turning their job to their advantage, the women work together to cut the body up into small pieces and dispose of it. From that moment on, their lives begin spinning out of control, either towards destruction or liberation.

With incisive prose and telling descriptions, Kirino achieves a taut level of anxiety. She deals expertly with the motives that got the women involved in such a heinous crime, and maintains the suspense about what will happen next with unpredictable plot developments that make the reader want to finish the entire story in one sitting.

The characters deal with issues that are of real importance in contemporary Japan - domestic violence, the care of the elderly, the consumeristic allure of famous brands, and the silently impaired family ties that result in stolid apathy.

While the women in the novel wish to break their chains, there is no easy escape, and they have to tough it out, day by day, like so many people in Japan, caught on a complex web of obligations and expectations. It is these resonating factors that give "Out" its unique darkness and make it a Japanese mystery novel of the highest quality.

Tokyo Journal
July, 2004

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The Dutch in Dejima

During the almost two and a half centuries when Japan shunned the rest of the World, the one Western country that remained on nodding terms was the Netherlands. This year the two countries celebrate 400 years of continuous contact in what must be one of the strangest international relationships ever. The current exhibition at the Edo Tokyo Museum focuses on this connection through documents, artwork and items collected and prized by the Dutch traders, offering a miscellaneous time capsule view of Japan during its hermit stage.

Japan in this period is often portrayed as a country under the heel of a paranoid regime of xenophobic Luddites, stifling every innovation with ruthless efficiency, however, the Tokugawas retained a keen interest in the outside world. One of the exhibits is “News of the World Reported by the Dutch” (1797) one of a regular series of documents compiled to keep the Tokugawas up to date with World events. Also, throughout this period, there was a growing enthusiasm among the learned classes for “Rangaku” or “Dutch knowledge” as the quickly developing Western sciences were known.

The reason for the nation’s isolation was clearly not hatred of foreigners. Following the victory of the Tokugawas, Japan was controlled by a delicately balanced feudal system of clans affiliated with the Tokugawa family counterbalanced by those that only owed token allegiance, a system that could easily be toppled by foreign intervention. It was because of these factors that foreigners were distrusted.

One of the exhibits is a wood carving of the Dutch humanist philosopher Erasmus that decorated the De Liefde, the first Dutch ship to reach Japanese shores. The rationalist, humanist attitude symbolized by this relic, as well as the restrained, businesslike demeanor of the Dutch, was obviously more to the taste of the Japanese than the Catholic fanaticism of the Spanish and Portuguese or the piratical enterprise of the English.

First contact was made on the 19th of April, 1600, when the De Liefde, piloted by the Englishman, William Adams, ran aground in Kyushu. A few years later, the Dutch set up a trading station on the island of Hirado and were still there when other Westerners were expelled from Japan. A few years later, in 1641 they were asked to relocate to a tiny man-made, fan-shaped island in the bay of Nagasaki, about the size of a soccer field. Here, under the rule of their Kapitans, the Hollanders traded European wool, and sugar, spices, sharkskin, and sappanwood from Southeast Asia, for Japanese precious metals, camphor, ceramics and lacquerware, many of which are on display along with more exotic items designed to impress the local potentates, like the “Unicorn’s horn” from a narwhal.

Many of the items in the exhibition show good taste, however, it must be remembered that the bottom line was profit. The great cabinet covered in ray skins and gold lacquer, and the intricate mother-of-pearl inlaid desk with a flower and bird motif are clearly items of great beauty, showing touches of the rococo style which excelled at presenting exotic foreign influences to European taste. Nevertheless, both pieces are practical and seem intended to serve as show items, displaying the high quality of Japanese craftsmanship to the customers back home.

This prosaicness of the Dutch is nowhere more evident than in the great amount of artwork commissioned by the Kapitans, in particular, the hundreds of works on display by the extremely gifted Japanese artist, Keiga Kawahara. Although an artist capable of great delicacy – see his picture of a lady visiting an icebound well – he was instructed by the Kapitans who employed him to depict a wide variety of scenes employing accuracy of perspective and clarity of line more common to a European draftsman than a Japanese artist.

So numerous and detailed are Kawahara’s paintings, that he was obviously playing the role of a human camera. There are detailed representations of Nagasaki Bay, delineations of the various capes and headlands around the coast, and zoological pictures of Japanese sea life and wildlife. But perhaps his most interesting pictures are his precise color views of everyday life focusing on various economic activities, such as tea picking, and noodle making. He shows craftsmen at work, making tatami mats or cutting tobacco using techniques and tools that had disappeared before they could be recorded by camera. Although beautiful and charming, the beauty of these pictures is quite incidental with the focus being firmly on the economic aspects, as the Kapitans, sensing the country’s immense economic potential, strove to gather commercially useful information.

With such an unerring eye for detail and prodigious output it is no wonder that Kawahara was accused by the Shogunate in 1828 of being a spy and forbidden further contact with the Dutch. The influence of European perspective was not lost on such bright and impressionable artists, however, also leaving a mark in the work of Kawahara’s contemporary, Katsushika Hokusai.

The Dutch, apart from showing an interest in anything that smelled of money, such as lacquerware or porcelain, also had a keen interest in the grotesque. Jan Cock Blomhoff, Kapitan from 1817 to 1823, seemed to rejoice in his exotic posting by collecting all manner of oddities such as the heads of ‘Ogres’ and mummified ‘mermaids’ constructed by charlatans out of fish skin, animal bones, and washi paper.

One of the items that he collected is a ‘peeping box’ through which pictures could be viewed through a small aperture. This is exactly what Dejima was for over 200 years - a peeping box through which the outside World watched Japan and Japan kept its eye on the outside World.

Japan Times
18th Nov 2000

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20 Years of Tokyo Journal (1981 - 2001)

When the first thin and decidedly unglossy issue of Tokyo Journal was launched on the magazine racks of the city back in April 1981, Reagan was in power in America, Thatcher in the UK, and Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. The cold war was at its height with Soviet tanks having recently rolled into Afghanistan against protests from the West. Here in Japan, the prime minister was Zenko Suzuki, and those gaijins that you think have been here far too long were just starting to arrive.

Over 13 prime ministers later, Tokyo Journal is still here. In terms of British PMs or US Presidents, 13 takes you back as far as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Despite the minimal effect that most of Japan's leaders have had, this still represents an enormous amount of water under the bridge.

In that time TJ’s ever busy staff has covered just about every aspect of Tokyo life you would dare to mention, and a few others you wouldn’t. All this with a multinational crew of misfits, oddballs, and stowaways lacking in local language skills, journalistic training, or even the ability to read their own notes. Luckily they knew how to write. After twenty years on the loose, it’s time to round up the usual suspects.

In the Beginning

The first issue cost 200 yen, a veritable fortune in those days, and contained 24 fun-packed black and white pages. But even in those days this was a rag distinguished by its good taste and love of fine writing. Gordon Hunter's article from July 1982, "The Obama Connection," focused on the perpetual gaijin fantasy of sleeping with a Geisha. Of course, in those days, your average journalist still had a few hang ups about reporting racy stuff like this. Luckily Gordon wasn’t one of them. All he needed was a little warming up:

I forgot just who did what, but once we got down to ‘Business’ and were doing what we both did best, the situation eased considerably. I wasn’t out to make my quota, but I was determined to live up to my reputation as a gaijin, not to mention getting my benefactor’s money’s worth. For her part, it was her first time in the business to break ten minutes at a stretch, having been fed a steady diet of Japanese men, who are rated among the world’s worst lovers. (Ask any hooker in New York.) Anyway, we broke a lot more than the ten-minute mark. Between the two of us, we might have put an appendix on the Kama Sutra. She threw caution and professional ethics to the winds; in the end, she swore she wouldn’t be able to work for the next two nights. And if my claim to fame as the size king of Obama had been dashed that night, I soon became the undisputed top tekunishan. Not that I kissed and told, but apparently she was seen ambling bow-leggedly down the hall to her room the next morning and this story became the talk of Obama within the week.

The editor who let this thinly disguised piece of jism slip through was none other than Don Morton, who now writes film reviews for Metropolis magazine. Besides his editing duties, Don was also one of the top contributing writers in the early days of TJ. His article from July, 1983, ‘Take a Little Dandelion Root and Call Me in the Morning,’ shows the positive attitude to the Orient that has kept him here for so long:

Consider the Western doctor in a rowboat on a pond. By rowing, the doctor can effectively create movement and can eventually cross the pond. In contrast, the oriental doctor’s boat is beached by a river. With a simple, judicial push, the boat is launched into the river, here representing the body’s life force, and moves along with it.

This is also a fine example of the use of metaphor, a device which TJ writers have constantly fallen back on in a desperate attempt to get a handle on the often inexplicable nature of reality here in Japan.

But words are cheap. What the readers want is blood, sweat, and tears. Accordingly, Don felt he had to go the whole hog with Oriental medicine and have himself turned into a human pin cushion, visiting an acupuncture doctor, a sobering experience for most squeamish Westerners.
'That’s it. Your first sample acupuncture session.’ says Ron as he pulls out the last needles. ‘You may, during the rest of the day, think that I left one or two of the needles in. But tomorrow you’ll feel great!’ I did feel great the next day. But I often feel great.

The Bubble Years

By November 1986, when Maggie Kinser’s less complimentary article on Japanese medicine appeared, TJ had a different editor, Glenn Davis, and reflecting the optimism of the Bubble Years had swelled to a glossy 500-yen mag with 128 pages, some of them in color.

Kinser’s article ‘Getting High in ‘Drug-Free’ Japan’ had everything to do with the high costs of this economic success, comparing ‘pick-me-up’ drinks like Yunkeru and Lipovitan D to hard drugs:

Japan says 'No!' to doragus. But on their own terms, the Japanese are no innocents. If you want to get high in Japan, without getting busted, the only term you need to know is kusuri. It’s a convenient term, doubling as both the English word ‘medicine’ and the more sinister word 'Drug.'

But viewing small bottles with caffeine-charged vitamins as on a par with crack cocaine tells us maybe more about the writer than the phenomenon described. Perhaps Kinser’s problem was culture shock, the phenomenon of being unable to cope with what is considered normal in foreign environs. Robert J. Collins’ ‘More About Culture Shock’ from May, 1987, tried to introduce some scientific method into this fuzzy realm:

Now then, do people moving to Japan for the first time experience ‘culture shock’? Yes. How do we know? Because everyone says so. There you go. Proof.

Now, if only quantum mechanics or string theory could be so lucidly explained!

Collins broke the idea of culture shock into two factors - level of involvement and anticipation. The highest degree of his 10 levels of involvement would be a foreign wife of a Japanese husband, probably a fisherman. The weakest degree of his 3 levels of anticipation could be expected from someone who had never been outside their own hometown before:

The 5-B person, wife of a foreign businessman in residence who arrived in Japan with at least conceptual foreknowledge (or foreboding) of what to expect, will probably survive. The realities, compared to theoretical expectations, at least provide a standard for measurement. (‘I knew it would be crowded on the subways, but I’m now being fondled by eleven people.’) Yet, that’s only ten more than anticipated.

A complex and scholarly thesis, then, that could have stretched into an academic career. But ultimately, Collins spiked his own guns by focusing on the one factor we know cancels out all the others:

My grandfather, a wise and well-traveled man, put the issue in perspective for me many years ago: ‘If you can’t eat the food, go home.’ I find myself considering his advice more often than I care to admit. I’m still here, but I despise natto.

East was increasingly meeting West as Davis Barrager’s article in the August 1987 issue, ‘Love is a Many-Cultured Thing,’ explored the phenomenon of intercultural relationships and mixed marriages, and the way that some traditional parents try to stand in the way:

An educated young Caucasian of good family, for example, and the daughter of his Japanese landlord fell in love and went to his homeland, where they lived together. Discovering this, her parents sent her sister to persuade her to come home and care for her suddenly ‘Ailing’ mother. And home she went.

The Japanese film industry was also trying to muddy the waters of international romance. Jim Bailey’s ‘Lifting the Lid on Japanese Movies’ from November 1988, looked at, among other things, the way the movie industry consistently portrayed the Japanese as, willingly or unwillingly, a race apart:

Seen through Japanese eyes, World War II is but another link in a long chain of victimizations and misunderstandings, a chain which now lengthens to include kaigei rokei (foreign location) films depicting the modern, postwar Japanese as a naive people at the mercy of the outside world. In Kamisama, Naze Ai ni mo Kokkyo ga Aru No? (God, Why is There a Border in Love?), a Japanese photographer in love with a girl he meets in Switzerland, is deported from the country on trumped up charges. In Howaito Rabu (White Love). a Japanese woman goes to Spain to study flamenco dancing, bears a child out of wedlock, becomes a common prostitute, and meets a violent end. The photojournalist hero of Yoroppa Tokkyo (Trans-Europe Express) endures insults to the Japanese as ‘yellow monkeys,’ survives a roughing-up by a muscle-bound bouncer, and is even refused by a Parisian prostitute who tells him, 'No Asians.'

Old fashioned parents and the movie industry were not strong enough to hold back the flood of international love breaking down the borders of Japan. Gaijins, mainly men, were falling head over heels for Japanese women. The problem was the sweet, demure image Japanese females had overseas. The only way to combat this was to show Japanese womanhood in a new, brutal light. For the July 1989 issue, Don Morton decided to take a close-up look at the bone-crunching world of Japanese Women’s wrestling, running into the antithesis of Madame Butterfly in his article, ‘Bubblegum and Blood’:

Up the walkway came the lady wrestler you thought they’d stop short of. Hair done stylishly up in a razored lightning pattern on her bare head, and her trademark, a swastika ‘tattoo’ on her forehead, the legendary Dump Matsumoto. swaggered into the arena. Dump’s swagger makes Sylvester Stallone look like he’s in a ladies’ kimono.

About to Burst

Just when the Bubble looked like it was about to pop, TJ focused on another example of the Japanese female shuffling out of her demure, kimono-clad role. This time the rise, in the face of enormous opposition, of Japan’s career women.

In his article for the June 1990 issue, ‘The Pink Collar Noose,’ Richard Kaufmann painted a bleak picture of Japanese industry’s continued sexual inequality despite the fact of massive labor shortages for career-path openings:

Most women enter a Japanese company as ippan shoku: an employment umbrella that indicates less pay, shorter hours (8-5) and short-term expectations. It is virtually synonymous with OL-dom: the ubiquitous, uniformed Office Lady whose major tasks include serving tea and decorating the office (with her presence). She has an unwritten agreement with her employer to work for a maximum of five years and, when not otherwise engaged, to focus her energies on finding a husband.

To succeed as a career woman, Noriko Nakamura, the founder of the Japan Association for Female Executives, suggested habits of mind that flew in the face of Japanese society:

Put a high value on yourself, your own ideas and opinions; make eye contact; develop your own interests outside of work and family; cultivate your talents and skill, because if you expect the company to do it for you, you’ll never make it.


POP!

But rather than allow this to happen, Japan's male business elite decided to put women back in their place by having a massive economic coronary, thus increasing the pressure on womenfok to stay at home and leave the diminishing number of jobs to the menfolk.

January 1991’s TJ had Gregory Starr at the editor’s desk and the new logo with the backward 'K’ This issue also featured Rachel Swanger’s ‘Princess of the City,’ a look at the Miss Tokyo beauty pageant. Sanctioned by the metropolitan government, this was a confused beauty contest located somewhere in the no-man’s land of sexual politics. After fighting off an attempt to ban it by a socialist deputy in the Tokyo Assembly, the competition got into full swing. Instead of raw sex appeal, which was re-categorized as ‘Health,’ more civilized virtues, like ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘Internationalism,’ were required:

Miss Shibuya, a gutsy little Waseda student with shoulder-length hair and the support of the crowd, which seems composed primarily of her friends, heeds the call of internationalism: ‘I give you my speech in terrible English. I am so nervous. I am so glad to enter this important contest.’ But when the actress-turned-professor Eiko Muramatsu asks her for her favorite English proverb, her eyes squint and then widen with confusion. Hers is not high-tea English. It’s the English of Roppongi record shops. She nearly faints before blurting out, 'Don’t worry, be happy.'

Needless to say the poor wee thing didn’t win. But that didn’t stop internationalization. One of the greatest forces here, as usual, was sport. In the March, 1991 issue TJ carried an excerpt from ‘Slugging it out in Japan’ a book written by Warren Cromartie of Tokyo Giants fame with the help of TJ staffer Robert Whiting. Even in 1985 attitudes were changing:

Our best pitcher and coolest dude was the round-faced plumpish Suguru Egawa. He was a nice guy and his attitude was more like an American major leaguer than any other Japanese player I’d met. He thought that all the training and all the strict rules of the Giants – ‘no beards, no long hair, suits and ties on the road – were basically bullshit. He thought that words like ‘fighting spirit’ and ‘guts’ were nonsense. He was a real professional.

The glamour of baseball was seriously overrated, however:

I had a little chair in front of my little locker which I could hardly sit on. Guys were taking off their clothes a few inches away from my nose. A guy named Komada, a 6' 3" outfielder, had the next locker. He would be standing next to me, changing into his uniform; then, all of a sudden, he would bend over and moon me unintentionally. I’d be putting on my socks and there would be his big rear end six inches from my nose.

July 1992’s TJ was also interested in naked rear ends with Swede, Kjell Fornander’s expose on Japan’s porn industry, ‘Risque Business,’ in which he met Kenji Hayami a veteran of over 1,200 porno shoots:

"You meet each other in the morning," Hayami told Fornander, "Say hello, work, then say goodbye. They pass by like dolls. I’ve become a kind of Pavlovian dog: I know when it’s time, but otherwise I don’t think about it."

The article also tried to explain why women were gravitating towards the porn industry. Some even saw it as fashionable:

Yoshimura at CineMagic has a simpler reason for AV’s popularity as even a short-term career: he believes today’s youth have no morals. The desk in his Shinjuku office is thick with applications, each with a photo attached.
Many of the women are remarkably beautiful. A few show their breasts or pose in underwear. ‘These are from only the past few months,’ Yoshimura says. He holds up one of the applications. ‘This one is from a housewife with two children.

Bubble Hangover

Perhaps it was this decline in moral values that Kokichi Saito and Koji Kogo were concerned about, or maybe they just saw the economic downturn as an opportunity for their extreme brand of politics. The leaders of the Seishinkan – ‘Organization for a Clean Country,’ one of Japan’s far right parties, were however kind enough to allow Dan Papia to clamber aboard their sound trucks for his August 1992 article, ‘The Right Stuff.’ Keeping an open mind, Papia found, with true TJ journalistic integrity, that this wasn’t such a black and white story as you might imagine, but then again maybe he had other reasons for presenting both sides of the argument:

On one of my visits to the Seishinkan, I meet a member named Namiki, who wears a punch-perm and has only four and a half fingers on one of his hands. Saito introduces him as a Seishinkan member but his official title is ‘Adviser.’
“He used to be a yakuza, but he quit,” says Kogo. He pauses, apparently lost in some melancholic thought. “The problem is that even when you quit you can’t get your fingers back again.”

A different kind of fascism was on display in David Duckett’s ‘Animal House’ article from October, 1993. Going under cover for a week, Duckett reported on the living hell of a particularly bad gaijin house. You couldn’t get more blood, sweat, and tears than this.

Following the murder of Poncho, the former manager’s pet monkey, a new, tougher manager, Ken, was drafted in:

Ken is a real doll. A sturdy six-foot-four, he looks like Barbie’s Ken and was dubbed ‘G.I. Joe’ by residents. He likes the job title of ‘Fascist Troubleshooter.’ Ken is the very antithesis of his charges, most of whom are a Techno crowd who survive by hostessing, busking, or street selling, and have no qualms about living in a pigsty.

Ken, whose agenda, consisted of turning the house into ‘A home for good people with working visas’ had his work cut out for him with the kind of oddball characters the house was famous for. One girl tenant remembered a not untypical incident:

"A woman, four-foot-eight and blonde, knocked on my door at 3am. I opened it bleary-eyed and saw this woman with a blonde wig down to her knees, wearing rubber shorts with a massive dildo attached, high heels and a whip. She said, 'So, what does it take to get your attention?'"

Of course, critics might say this is merely muck-raking, sewer rat journalism, but in David Duckett’s hands such muck invariably turned to gold.

With Japan’s economy slowing down, Tokyo lost much of its appeal as the place to drop in and make a fast buck. As for Tokyo Journal, the tone became a little more serious, reflecting the changing times. One of the most serious and well-researched articles we ever ran was ‘Bad Blood,’ Philippa Bourke’s expose of the AIDS-infected blood scandal that blighted the lives of up to 2000 hemophiliacs. This article reveals how terrifyingly short-sighted and complacent medical professionals can be. Dr Takeshi Abe, one of the country’s top hematology specialists, was reluctant to admit that Japanese could even contract the AIDS virus at the Fourth International Symposium on Hemophilia Treatment:

Included in his report for the congress was the fact that there were no other reported cases in Japan, and an almost xenophobic statement. ‘It was suggested,’ Abe wrote, ‘As a possibility that this obvious difference between Western and oriental countries might be caused by some racial factors in sensitivity.’

After the Kobe Earthquake and Aum Shinrikyo

With the Kobe Earthquake and the Sarin Gas Incident striking Japan in quick succession in 1995, the flavor was definitely for serious news stories. In the March 1996 issue another hard-hitting article focused on the problem of Tokyo’s homeless. Joji Sakurai’s ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’ dealt with the City’s two-faced attempts to clear the homeless from West Shinjuku’s ‘Corridor 4’ tunnel, where dozens had been living in makeshift cardboard homes sometimes for over a year.

Instead of just brutally kicking them out, the Metropolitan government decided to build a 1.3 billion-yen moving walkway as a pretext for removing the homeless. Sakurai described the heavy-handed police action:

One by one, the protesters are dragged out of the passageway into the cold morning air, where a crowd of onlookers has gathered to observe a truly bizarre scenario: 850 battle-ready cops and security guards flailing at some 200 sick and aging homeless people.

Besides such in-depth reporting, one of Tokyo Journal’s main functions has been to enable our readers to get the best out of the city in cultural terms. Over the years, we have featured some fine musical and artistic events, such as the unlikely collaboration of the world renowned celloist, Yo-Yo Ma and the legendary kabuki dancer, Tamasaburo Bando performing Bach’s music for the film.

‘Flash of Genius,’ Martin Richardson’s article and pictures, in the December, 1995 issue, captured the unusual chemistry at work that day:

Roll camera. Action. The notes rose and Tamasaburo uncoiled. Soon the discussions, the interviews, the ‘hemming and hawing’ as Ma put it, made sense in the collaborative performance. Forgotten were Tamasaburo’s troubled musings on the Bach pulse: for the rhythmic ‘Gavotte’ movement, he actually made a virtue of the beat by wearing a drum and striking it with unbridled glee. In the poignant ‘Sarabande,’ the kabuki master was at his tragic best. Then in the ‘Courante’ he was a whirl of movement, snapping with his fan before finishing. ‘With a flash in his eyes,’ Ma recalls. ‘That was frightening as it should be. That was an amazing dramatic movement.’

One art that Tokyo Journal has supported perhaps more than anyone else has been the unique dance form of Butoh. In August 1998, Mayumi Saito investigated ‘The Changing Face of Butoh,’ talking to some of the top practitioners such as Ippei Yamada, as well as foreign collaborators like the Russian ballerina, Ksenie Ivanenko:

‘Butoh released me from the strict rules of classical ballet. Maintaining high tension on stage was a norm I had always taken for granted. However, as Yamada told me to relax, I started to reconsider the meaning of dancing and my definition of self.’

Someone else who can relax a lot more than before is yokozuna and sumo legend, Akebono, who recently retired from the game. When TJ spoke to him in October, 1999, he was still at the peak of his powers. James Nelligan asked him about the highlight of his career:

'The first time I wrestled Takanohana. I was new and guys in my stable said: 'You cannot beat him.' I went out there and one crack to his jaw and it was all over.'

To Infinity and Beyond

Blood, sweat and tears - and plenty of smiles - Tokyo Journal has seen them all. The English-speaking community in Tokyo may come and go, with people leaving and arriving every day of the week, but through 20 years of change, one thing has remained constant ‘Tokyo Journal’s mission to keep a handle firmly fixed on this, one of the World’s most exciting cities.

Tokyo Journal
April 2001

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