JAPAN GOES MOD(ERN)
3 REVIEWS BY LAUREN W. DEUTSCH
KYOTO JOURNAL 58
Turning
Point: Oribe and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan
Miyeko Murase, ed. (Yale
University Press, New Haven, 2003)
Mavo: Japanese Artists and The Avant-Garde 1905-1931
Gennifer Weisenfeld
(University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002)
Mirror
of Modernity: Invented Traditions of
Modern Japan
Stephen Vlastos, Ed.
(University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998)
Imagine … It's early
1924. Furuta Oribe XII's 20-something only son, Oribe xiii, is deep into an
early mid-life crisis. Life as an heir-apparent is not cutting it. Endlessly
attending and holding those stuffy tea gatherings every time a cherry blossom
petal takes to wind or a maple leaf blushes. He's full-up-to-here with the
pretentiousness of emptiness, with a capital "EMPTY". Besides, no one
sits seiza anymore.
His family's legacy of
quirky ceramics and interior design, so beloved by generations of aesthetes of
yore, has not transitioned into the new social economy. The Western hungry
ghosts have insatiable appetites for Japanese oldies-but-goodies Chinoiserie
knock-offs. The nouveau riche
industrialists are good to go 24/7 with assembly line versions of his
great-great-great-etc. granddaddy's classics, but the output is so much vulgar
stuttering, diluting the genius of
spontaneity. They think a whack of a paddle, a swish of brown slip and a splat
of green glaze and … a masterpiece. Ha!
Very soon he'll be
installed with full rights as Mr. XIII. This will mean managing and supporting
the dreary household staff. It's not his cup of tea.
Wriggling out of the
nijiriguchi, he hangs up the "Sorry We Missed You!" sign on the roji
gate and heads for the sento.
In the genkan, the front page
of the morning's shinbun blasts
an editorial about the decline of morals of youth due to a dangerous and
growing sense of individualism among the intelligentsia. Women are cutting
their hair short, exposing their skin in public, and men are wearing unisex
fashion. There's a notice about a group of artists who are staging an art show
and poetry reading at a café in support of a petition for more affordable
housing. Another about the round up of students hanging out at that same joint.
Slipping into his new
brown hounds-tooth jodhpur, cream mohair jacket and forest green leather boots,
he heads shitamachi to find
that little café. His soul is dry. And he's very thirsty. Thirsty for a fresh
look at the world.
Consider what might
transpire if xiii had met the modernists of his own time, Picasso for sure …
But this fantasy must serve this review, so he meets Murayama Tomoyoshi and his
band of merry Taisho pranksters, the artists of the Mavo movement.
Turning
Point is the long awaited book on
about the impact of Momoyama generalissimo chajin Furuta Oribe on Japanese
aesthetics. Hideaki Furukawa, the director of The Museum of Fine Arts in Gifu,
offers in its early pages, "The impulse to challenge and defy convention
could be called the defining theme of Japan's Momoyama period. 'Oribe' neatly
captures this sprit of creative nonconformity…" The Oribe book made its
debut in sync with the block-buster one-stop exhibition of the same name held
at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art staged at the end
of 2003 through early 2004.
Weisenfeld's dense opus,
Mavo, is a chronicle of
the activities, inspirations and impact of Mavo, the Japanese sociopolitical aesthetic movement
dated 1905 - 1931. It primarily focuses on Murayama Tomoyoshi, the movement's
mastermind, who seemed to have a whole lot of fun stirring up the already
turbulent Taisho status quo, with a capital QUO. While a bit dense to casually,
the narrative would serve very well if complementing an exhibition.
"Mavo was a
self-proclaimed avant-garde constellation of artists and writers collaborating
in a dynamic and rebellious movement that not only shook up the art
establishment, but also made an indelible imprint on the art criticism of the
period," she outlines.
Rigorous narratives
supported by copious illustrations fill these two volumes. By re- and
de-constructing reputations, myths and the physical remnants of the times, they
address philosophy and production of art in a multitude of methods -- from clay
and oil painting and sculpture, to architecture, theatre and the mass media.
They also give us images of how Japan deals with errant aesthetes.
During each period,
evolutions of artistic styles were inseparable from developments in Japanese
enterprise, hegemony and industrialization, mass consumer culture, and social
order. Bookending three centuries of isolationism, it may be argued that the
volumes under consideration reflect "modernist" trends within its own time period, providing an interesting spectrum from which to
explore the premise of Vlastos' book Mirror of Modernity: Invented
Traditions of Modern Japan.
"Artists are too
often omitted from sociopolitical studies [of the Japanese intelligentsia],
here they gain their rightful place in the debates of the early twentieth
century. Including those who dealt with art: educators, bureaucrats, dealers,
collectors and publishers," notes Weisenfeld.
As an exhibition
catalog, Turning Point is a
font of illustrations of stunning dogu for chanoyu. It also
contains generous helpings of mind -candy about the who / how / huh of Oribe.
In addition, it offers literary works, screen painting and even Portuguese maps
and diaries. Each points to Oribe's impact as a major "player" in
volatile and changing political, social and cultural landscapes of his time …
and now.
A major focus of the book
and exhibition is the new archeological scholarship being undertaken at
historic Seto kiln sites. Sifting through household waste and layers of
potsherds, they are documenting the popularity and mass production of Oribe-ness. What is lacking in both book and exhibition is a sampling of today's
Oribe-ish ephemera such as
plastic sushi bar shoyu dishes.
Do I ask too much?
The editor states,
"During the era of Oribe, a common aesthetic language bound all the visual
arts more strongly than any other time in Japan before or since, and intimate
working relationships existed among artists in different media." Until the
advent of Mavo, perhaps.
Like the French
impressionists in the late 19th century, Murayama and his
avant-garde cronies took on the gadan (art establishment) of their time, unabashedly challenging
conventional taste and social norms. And like Oribe, Murayama was charismatic
and drew tremendous inspiration from his collaborations with others.
Where Oribe's jazzy
naturalistic designs were to be "seen" mostly dimly lit tea rooms set
to promote harmony and tranquilly, purity and respect, MaVo was a brash, in-your-face under-
and-above-ground collective tour de force affront to the bitter reality of life
Meiji / Taisho.
The origin and
significance of the "Mavo" name itself seems to be contested
among the group members. The most widely disseminated story has it coming from
a random selection within a collective process with representation of the
membershipitself. While a hotly disputed conclusion, it proved to be a useful
"brand", replete with mystery. The actual composition of
"membership" also waxes and wanes with opinions, however scholarly,
but consensus contends it fluctuated.
What is quite clear,
however, is that they played turned everything upside down and backwards.. For
example, The "V" in Mavo on their publication covers is mimicked in
several of the members' (men and women) hair styles … or is it vice versa? Like
Andy Warhol's "Factory" in New York of the 1960s, the group of young,
largely self-trained Mavo men and women spent as much energy promoting its
manifesto as making the "art" itself.
"While drawn
together because of a 'constructivist inclination,'" states the author,
"the Mavo artists did not assert ideological solidarity. Rather, they
maintained distinct convictions, respecting each other's personal goals."
On the serious art side,
Mavo was deeply imprinted by German Abstract Expressionism and the
"happenings" of Dada and other modernist movements in Europe and the
USA. Illustrations include architectural designs catering to the lifestyle of
the proletariat. Graphic designs for leftist literary works, periodicals and
promotional materials for Mavo events incorporated typographic influences of
Europe (including classic Germanic script and Hebrew!).
Weisenfeld writes:
"They strived to revolutionize the form, function and intent of
Japanese art. They aimed to reestablish a connection they felt had been broken
in the Meiji period with the codification of autonomous "fine art' based
on the Western model … reintegrating art into the social (and political)
practice of everyday life."
As a friend living in
Japan said, it would take an exhibition in New York or Paris for Furuta Oribe
to be publicly claimed by the Japanese as a favorite son in "mixed" (gai and Nihon-jin) company. And then there's Mavo. Can't imagine the
French keeping Picasso a secret for 400 years, much less declaring the
uniqueness of analytical cubism.
If you're reading Kyoto
Journal, you have undoubtedly been
in this situation: You're in the market check-out line; your basket includes
tofu. The Japanese customer in front of you turns and, eyeing the tofu, says,
"You can eat?" You nod, perhaps a polite grunt, and say, "Do you eat this?" "Yes, but I am
Japanese."
In Mirror of Modernity his excellent collection of essays on an
eclectic assortment of "modernisms", Stephen Vlastos writes,
"Modern Japan is widely regarded as a society saturated with customs,
values and social relationships that organically link present generations of
Japanese to past generations." (The accompanying article, "En Avant
Garde" attempts to exercise
this notion.)
A confession: I fell for
it when I was a teenager. I believed in Japan's reverence for the traditional. I shunned rock 'n' roll for
origami. I completely missed the party scene in the 60s and am trying to make
up for lost time by getting high on matcha and eating dried breakfast cereal called
"Zen".
An easy, entertaining
read (with a great index, glossary and bibliography), the book takes us
backstage to view the artifices of the Meiji and Taisho with compelling
arguments to support his conclusion that there may be no there
"there". It's done with mirrors.
Vlastos central question
is, "How, by whom, under what circumstances, and to what social and
political effect are certain practices and ideas formulated, institutionalized
and propagated as tradition?"
While it is stated that
Ito Hirobumi was the principal architect of Japan's modernization project in
the latter part of the 19th Century, we are told that Yanagita Kunio
invented the "tradition of Japanese tradition" by claiming,
"Japan's preservation of its original culture made Japan unique among
modern nations. Japan alone had achieved modernity without cutting itself off from
its original culture."
"Every tradition
trades between two poles: imagination and contrivance, creation and deception,
he says."
The explosive growth of
Japanese capitalism after World War I sparked new media technologies, new forms
of entertainment and pleasure seeking, and the mass markets with their items of
personal consumption. It's how the Daimyos became princes and evolved into
CEOs.
Vlastos' selection of 16
essays by which to explore the social and cultural chaos is eclectic: the
fundamental notion of wa, harmony,
is hit head-on. Other checkpoints include labor management, shifting gender
roles as reflected in the café waitress as moga (modern girl), the development of sentimentality
for folksy village life, the challenges to tame colonial Manchuko with Imperial
loyalty. At the same time the archipelago was evolving into a
"modern" nation state, newly contrived prefectural identities were
galvanized with neo-religious fervor.
One of the most
intriguing discussions is the morphing of the classic warrior skills into more
broadly accessible martial arts, budo, represented here by Kokudan judo. This provided a safe way to
address the threat of the growing popularity of sports and the penultimate
expression of world harmony, the Olympics -- a Western construct which
was considered dangerous to the populace as it could infect society with
"individualism and liberalism". Author Inoue Shun notes,
"Ideologues argued that sports must be "Japanized" through budo." These "games" became a much-needed
"safe" expression of national identity and was consumable casually or
otherwise by everyman.
Another intriguing piece
deconstructs the notion of "home", the architecture of domestic life,
in post-Meiji. Its author, Jordan Sands, notes one of the big jumps from the
feudal to a modern, social construct could be found in the new practice of
family dining. This meant synchronizing mealtimes and sharing an eating place.
It required replacing individual meal trays with a dining table. He goes on to
address other elements of domesticity such as interior design as it imposes and
implies social status and carves out the possibility of privacy.
The author's own essay
focuses on agrarianism. "At the end of the 1920s embattled farmers and
rustic intellectuals transformed agrarianism into a movement of economic
renewal and political activism. Farmers, desperately searching for practical
solutions to the very real problem of economic survival, and rural polemicists,
certain that capitalism and city culture were the root cause of the crisis,
developed their own brand of agrarianism." Capitalism's
"erosion of social authority" was thwarted by "the enshrinement
of the agricultural village as the well-spring of authentic Japanese
culture." As a result of the social turmoil of the 1930s, the
reassuring image of harmonious and productive farm families served the
ideological needs of many sectors of Japanese society, he concludes."
Vlastos calls upon to
Miriam Silverberg for a glimpse of that new “traditional” phenomenon: the café
waitress as representative of moga.
Not to be confused with geisha
and the kissaten, coffeehouse,
staff, she was "bourgeois woman's challenge to established gender
norms".
[The café was itself a
modern construct. Unlike the coffeehouse, which is said to have been
established in 1888 and could be considered a version of the pre-modern
teahouse, the café, was considered a "modern success of the Taisho-period
milk halls," the author says, but does not describe further. Puratan (Printemps) is considered the first Japanese café,
modeled after the male-staffed French hangout. Puratan was
opened in the spring of 1911 by the artist Matsuyama Shozo, a painter in the yoga (Western style) who served food and wine to go
with the graffiti he had painted on the café walls. It catered mainly to the
salaried middle class and intellectuals.]
Going back to the front
of this article, it attempts to demonstrate how Japan draws upon the past to
create and validate the present and uses this energy to illuminate the past.
Sounds like a flawed plan for a perpetual motion machine. I maintain that one
must go back as far as possible and cite the source. Rand Castile, the American
scholar of chanoyu, once
observed that Rikyu created wabi.
Sabi, on the other hand, cannot
be created. "Perhaps wabi
exists only in opposition to something." I maintain this tension is
similar for the notion of "modernity."
Taking Vlastos at his
word, I can't help but look at the Momoyama's chado explosion, with its nostalgic bow to the artifice
of wabi and chashitsu -as-cosmos construct. Are these any less contrived
than the café and sumo's
yokuzono system discussed in his
book? Aren't the former "modern" for their time?
When asked why, despite
the unbroken lineage and impeccability of presentation of the art, the oiemoto
of a major chanoyu school is not designated a "living national
treasure", I was told that no one can tell him he isn't.
I would suggest that
this practice of self-alignment has something to do with encounters with gaijin.
Perhaps it was an act of
purification, much like the Biblical Exodus period of isolation and wandering
in the desert to galvanize identity. While not discussed, it seems necessary to
determine whether there was a lack
of fabrication of tradition during the 300 years of Japan's isolation until
"opening up".
The second “leaf” of the pick is not merely the finger pointing at the plant, but the plant itself — yes, camellia sinensis in glorious profusion — bursting anecdotes about ancestors, encompassing provenance to politics and philosophies and, most importantly, asks pointed question about the sustainability of the product and those whose livelihoods are dependent upon it.