Japanese Hermeneutics

JAPANESE HERMENEUTICS

CURRENT DEBATES ON AESTHETICS AND INTERPRETATION

EDITED BY MICHAEL F. MARRA JAPANESE HERMENEUTICS

JAPANESE HERMENEUTICS

CURRENT DEBATES ON AESTHETICS AND INTERPRETATION

EDITED BY MICHAEL F. MARRA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Japanese hermeneutics : current debates on aesthetics and interpretation / edited by Michael F. Marra. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8248-2457-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Aesthetics, Japanese. 2. Hermeneutics. 3. Japanese literature— History and criticism. I. Marra, Michele. BH221.J3 J374 2000 111Ј.85Ј0952—dc21 2001040663

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi

Introduction Michael F. Marra 1

HERMENEUTICS AND JAPAN

1. Method, Hermeneutics, Truth Gianni Vattimo 9 2. Poetics of Intransitivity Sasaki Ken’ichi 17 3. The Hermeneutic Approach to Japanese Modernity: “Art-Way,” “Iki,” and “Cut-Continuance” O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke 25 4. Frame and Link: A Philosophy of Japanese Composition Amagasaki Akira 36 5. The Eloquent Stillness of Stone: Rock in the Dry Landscape Garden Graham Parkes 44 6. Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware: The Link between Ideal and Tradition Mark Meli 60 7. Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object, Self and Other: Mediating Watsuji Tetsuro¯’s Hermeneutics John C. Maraldo 76

JAPAN’S AESTHETIC HERMENEUTICS

8. Nishi Amane on Aesthetics: A Japanese Version of Utilitarian Aesthetics Hamashita Masahiro 89

vii viii Contents

9. Hegel in Tokyo: Ernest Fenollosa and His 1882 Lecture on the Truth of Art J. Thomas Rimer 97 10. O¯ gai, Schelling, and Aesthetics Kambayashi Tsunemichi 109 11. Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces in the Formative Years of Japanese Art History, 1880–1900: Historiography in Conﬂict Inaga Shigemi 115 12. Nature—the Naturalization of Experience as National Stefan Tanaka 127 13. Coincidentia Oppositorum: O¯ nishi Yoshinori’s Greek Genealogies of Japan Michael F. Marra 142 14. Representations of “Japaneseness” in Modern Japanese Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Critique of Comparative Reason Otabe Tanehisa 153

JAPAN’S LITERARY HERMENEUTICS

15. Constructing “Japanese Literature”: Global and Ethnic Nationalism Haruo Shirane 165 16. What Is Bungaku? The Reformulation of the Concept of “Literature” in Early Twentieth-Century Japan Suzuki Sadami 176 17. Primitive Vision: Heidegger’s Hermeneutics and Man’yo¯shu¯ Thomas LaMarre 189 18. Saito¯Mokichi’s Poetics of Shasei Haga To¯ru 206

Notes 215 Contributors 241 Index 245 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the sponsors of the UCLA conference, which was funded by a generous grant from the Japan Foundation. Tsujimoto Isao who, at the time, was the director of the Japan Foundation and Language Center in Los Angeles, was instrumental in promoting this conference and the University of California, Los Angeles, as its setting. Additional funds came from the UCLA Center for Japanese Studies thanks to the interest that its director, Professor Fred Notehelfer, took in the project. Professor Massimo Ciavolella, chair of the Depart- ment of Italian at UCLA, was successful in securing funds from the Italian In- stitute of Culture, which enabled me to invite Professor Paolo Fabbri from the University of Bologna. In addition to Professor Fabbri, my colleagues Michael Bourdaghs, Seiji Lippit, and Herbert Plutschow from the UCLA Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures contributed enlightening discussions of the chapters. The event was part of the celebrations for the ﬁftieth anniversary of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Christopher Bush and Michael Dankert made numerous stylistic suggestions on how to improve the chapters’ ﬁnal versions. To them all, and especially to the speakers who traveled from remote parts of the world to deliver and discuss their work, go my warmest thanks.

ABBREVIATIONS

GNBZ Gendai Nihon Bungaku Zenshu¯ MBZ Meiji Bungaku Zenshu¯ MSK Man’yo¯shu¯ no Shizen Kanjo¯ NKST Nihon Kindai Shiso¯Taikei SNKBS Shincho¯Nihon Koten Bungaku Shu¯sei WTZ Watsuji Tetsuro¯Zenshu¯

Introduction

Michael F. Marra

This book contains revised versions of papers originally presented during an international conference that I organized at the University of California, Los Angeles: “Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Inter- pretation.” The immediate purpose of the December 13 –15, 1998, conference was to introduce to an audience in the United States leading Japanese aestheticians, philosophers, and art and literary historians who were thoroughly familiar with European academic thought (especially German, French, and British) but who had limited or no exposure to the American academic scene. The Japanese scholars included aestheticians Amagasaki Akira, Hamashita Masahiro, Kambayashi Tsunemichi, Otabe Tanehisa, and Sasaki Ken’ichi; philosopher O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke; art historians Inaga Shigemi and O¯ ta Takao; and literary historians Haga To¯ru (the only Japanese scholar who was thoroughly familiar with North American universities) and Suzuki Sadami. Counterparts working in the West were also invited: philosophers Paolo Fabbri, John Ma- raldo, Mark Meli, Graham Parkes, and Gianni Vattimo; literary historians Thomas LaMarre, J. Thomas Rimer, Haruo Shirane, and Meera Viswanathan; and intellectual historians Naoki Sakai and Stefan Tanaka. I need to stress the experimental nature of this project, which brought together thinkers from Japan, Europe, and the United States with different backgrounds, interests, and methodologies. That all speakers graciously accepted my invitation attests to their brave willingness to challenge the usual conference format, in which like-minded scholars gather to discuss a narrowly deﬁned area of common expertise. The topic of the conference, however, was broad enough to encourage a meeting of this kind yet was formulated in such a way that certain boundaries were respected. Because most of the speakers—with the exception of Professors Fabbri and Vattimo—were either specialists in Japanese culture or Western culture specialists active in Japan, the conference dealt with the role played by interpretative models in the articulation of cultural discourses on Japan. Why was I interested in discussing issues of interpretation—broadly de-

1 2 Michael F. Marra

fined in this volume as “hermeneutics”—in the formation of cultural images of Japan? Mainly for a biographical reason, one that I must share with the reader to explain why a person trained in medieval Japanese literature like myself would feel the need to enter into a dialogue with philosophers, aestheticians, and historians of consciousness rather than joining other historians of medieval Japan in attempting to reexamine our knowledge of the past. Afew years ago, a reviewer of my Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature (1991) pointed out the fictional nature of scholarly works—“imagined configurations” that border more with the oneiric than with the real.1 The strong reaction of this reviewer made me wonder whether, rather than writing the history of political discontent of major Japanese poets and literati from the ninth to the fourteenth century, I had written a personal history of discontent—a personal resistance against what I perceived as the “aesthetic” approach to the Japanese classics of which the reviewer was representative and which is still with us in full strength, though in modified language, in the postmodern age. I was reminded that all histories are essentially personal histories and that, unless one keeps this truth in mind—the Heideg- gerian truth that we are always already thrown into an interpretative circle— one might fall into the trap of confusing facts with interpretations. This does not diminish the importance of facts— or the need for medievalists to gather to discuss premodern Japan. It simply places at the forefront the importance of interpretation in the transformation of fact into knowledge. (Those who want to go one step further and embrace the Nietzschean idea that there are no facts, only interpretations, including the “fact” of the statement itself, might argue that facts are actually a result of interpretation.) No matter where one stands on the issue, and no matter how indebted one remains to a positivist heritage, after Kant and the Enlightenment it would be hard to deny the “fact” that as representations facts only come into being interpretatively (or, to use a better word, hermeneutically). This truth was well known to a giant of literary studies, the Italian Fran- cesco de Sanctis (1817–1883), who in 1869 almost gave up his plan to write what eventually became a monument in the field of Italian studies—his Sto- ria della Letteratura Italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870)—because of the absence, at this time, of any kind of preliminary hermeneutical studies. How is it possible, De Sanctis asked, to choose a language for describing literary texts without knowing the languages used in the past to describe the same texts (interpretative history) and without at the same time historicizing oneself in the act of interpretation (offering a personal history of the interpreter as “subject”)? How is it possible to talk about and classify literary texts without understanding the mechanisms at work in those texts in the formation and transmission of meaning? How is it possible to begin the difficult task of writ- Introduction 3 ing a literary history without the aid of a history of meaning (rhetoric), a history of taste (aesthetics), and a history of interpretation (hermeneutics)? Or is the notion of history itself a handy way to dispose of the issue of the subject, so that “facts” (“the classical texts”) were all that the scholar needed to provide to justify the existence of literary history? Anyone who is even slightly familiar with premodern Japanese literature knows that to this day major Japanese literary journals, such as Kokugo to Ko- kubungaku (National Language National Literature), Bungaku (Literature), and Kokubungaku (National Literature), continue to classify topics of study around the title of the alleged “Japanese classics” (e.g., The Tale of Genji, The Tales of the Heike, and The Tales of Ise), following a practice that was already in place when these journals began publication in the 1920s and 1930s. It is rare to find an entire issue dealing with problems of interpretation and even more rare to see featured as the main topic the numerous commentaries that interpreters kept adding to the texts, eventually making them “classics.” This does not mean, however, that in Japan no one has ever made interpretation the focus of research. It simply means that interpretation has been systematically subordi- nated to texts, by being viewed as the “skillful means” needed to make texts meaningful, and as something that can be discarded as soon as the interpreter feels that the text’s meaning has been presented. Moreover, the suspicion that colleagues in Japan from different departments (and from the same department of different universities) have traditionally harbored toward one another has not encouraged literary historians to engage philosophers and historians of other disciplines (and vice versa) in a debate that would help create a “history of Japanese hermeneutics.” To this day, such a history remains to be written.2 The UCLA conference and this book are a preliminary step in this direction. The book opens with a paper by Gianni Vattimo, who has written extensively on the subject of “hermeneutics” and who has inspired me to think about the Japanese classics in hermeneutical terms. At the beginning of his Oltre l’In- terpretazione (Beyond Interpretation, 1994), Vattimo mentions the recent hypothesis according to which hermeneutics has become a sort of koine, that is, a common idiom that is pervasive in Western culture and not just in philosophy.3 If we consider the importance of exegetical works in East Asia in the transmission of religious and secular texts, Vattimo’s statement about hermeneutics as a common language might well be extended to Japan. With the broadening of the meaning of “hermeneutics” to encompass a variety of interpretative moves, the argument that “hermeneutics” was originally associated with biblical studies and is therefore not an appropriate term to use in conjunction with Japan’s artistic heritage grows weaker. (The other argument that a Western science should not be used in conjunction with non-Western products is even less supportable, insofar as non-Western realities have consistently 4 Michael F. Marra appropriated Western discourses to formulate themselves.) In contemporary thought hermeneutics has dropped the adjectives that used to accompany it— “biblical hermeneutics,” “literary hermeneutics,” “legal hermeneutics,” suggesting the autonomy the field of hermeneutics has achieved and reminding us of the importance that has been attached to the relationship between truth and interpretation, again, in modern times. Hermeneutics should not be seen as a method that aims at uncovering a specific, objective truth. As Vattimo argues in his interpretation of Heideg- ger, a philosophy of interpretation is the outcome of a series of events—such as theories, or social, cultural, and technological transformations. In a more Gadamerian sense, hermeneutics is attention to the mechanism that makes all statements answers to a series of questions that are always already posited before the formulation of the alleged “first” statement. In this sense, I believe that we are entitled to speak of “Japanese hermeneutics” despite the paradox of explaining otherness with a vocabulary that is alien to the other that is the object of explanation. Maybe this becomes less paradoxical if we pay more attention to how understanding comes into being and become less obsessed with a self-defeating drive to explain specific truths. To return to the Japanese classics, we might want to pay more attention to how an understanding of The Tale of Genji comes into being and not try so much to uncover the “imagined configurations” of The Tale of Genji. Vattimo’s opening chapter in this volume further strengthens the validity of following the hermeneutical method by rel- ativizing the abused notions of East and West and by stressing the commonality of hermeneutic experience and the possibility that hermeneutics has to justify the work of “humanists” (East and West)—and, maybe, rescue the humanities—in a technologized society (chapter 1). The first part, “Hermeneutics and Japan,” deals with the difficulties inherent in the articulation of otherness; if we rely on Western epistemology for explanation and interpretation, how do we avoid falling into the trap of essen- tialization. The notions of “intransitivity” (chapter 2), “cut-continuance” (chapter 3), and “link” (chapter 4) are highlighted as elements of a hermeneutical process in which a strong, local subject is still maintained and analyzed from the viewpoints of linguistics, aesthetics, and poetics. Ecology informs the reading of dry landscape gardens seen as a feature of the local, religious subject, whose religiosity is sustained by aesthetic appreciation (chapter 5). The first part closes with a glimpse of the history of Japanese hermeneutics in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, looking at Motoori Norinaga’s notion of mono no aware (chapter 6) and Watsuji Tetsuro¯’s response to the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger (chapter 7). The second part, “Japan’s Aesthetic Hermeneutics,” examines the role aesthetics has played in shaping discourses on art and nature in Japan, beginning Introduction 5 with Nishi Amane’s introduction of the Western field of “aesthetics” to Japan (chapter 8). Next come analyses of work by Ernest Fenollosa (chapter 9) and Mori O¯ gai (chapter 10) in their introduction to Japan of Western, especially German, aesthetic thought. Aesthetic considerations informed the formation of the canon of Japan’s art history, a canon that varied according to the place where classifications were made—Britain, France, and Japan (chapter 11). Linkages between aesthetics and the creation and development of the Japanese nation-state are examined against the background of the naturalization of aesthetic experience (chapter 12). The impact that Nietzschean thought and other “aesthetic” receptions of Greece had on the creation of Japan’s “ancient” past is also analyzed in connection with the aesthetic hermeneutics of a developing nation-state (chapter 13). The second part concludes with a critique of the comparative method Japanese aestheticians have used in articulating cultural portraits of their country (chapter 14). The last section of the book, “Japan’s Literary Hermeneutics,” rethinks the notion of “Japanese literature” in light of recent findings on the ideological implications of canon formation (chapter 15) and transformations within Ja- pan’s prominent literary circles, or bundan (chapter 16). The third part also presents a condensed exegetical history of a major poetry collection, the Man’yo¯shu¯, which is reexamined from the perspective of Heideggerian hermeneutics (chapter 17). A study of the Western notion of “sketching” and its relationship to modern Japanese poetics brings the volume to a close (chapter 18). If the field of hermeneutics develops between the two opposing poles of “total otherness” and “belonging,” as Vattimo argues in La Fine della Modernità (The End of Modernity, 1985),4 thinking on Japan will inevitably continue to be hermeneutical. Japanese thinkers will continue to face the otherness of a theoretical vocabulary when describing their innermost self, while non- Japanese scholars of Japan will continue to be challenged by an uttermost other when they try to make sense of themselves. There is a lot at stake in this dialogue because words and thoughts deeply transform perceptions (and vice versa) and pervasively inform action. Our ability (or inability) to deal with difference will determine the course of future events. Hermeneutics calls attention to the danger of reducing the other to the self and keeps reminding us of the difficulty of decreasing the tension between other and self while at the same time avoiding its erasure. This is no small challenge to face; hermeneutics might well become an art of survival.

HERMENEUTICS AND JAPAN

Method, Hermeneutics, Truth

Gianni Vattimo

I propose that we do not consider the purely fortuitous fact of our discussing, here, among Western and Japanese scholars, the theme of hermeneutics and criticism. I would like to remind you of Richard Rorty’s treatment of hermeneutics in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty deﬁnes hermeneutics in contrast to epistemology, following Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science. Normal science is the practice of solving problems within the framework of a given paradigm, that is,

against the background of a consensus about what counts as a good explanation of the phenomena and about what it would take for a problem to be solved.... Revo- lutionary science is the introduction of a new paradigm of explanation, and thus of a new set of problems.... Hermeneutics is the study of an abnormal discourse.... We will be epistemological where we understand perfectly well what is happening but want to codify it to extend, or strengthen, or teach, or “ground” it. We must be hermeneutical where we do not understand what is happening but are honest enough to admit it.1

What resounds in this passage, in what we could call an urbanized form, is Heidegger’s idea of a work of art as the disclosure of a new way of experiencing the world, of a new “Wahrheit.” This was also the reason for Heidegger’s “hermeneutic” interest in Japanese language and culture. Although in his dialogue with Baron Kuki on iki 2 he was not explicitly discussing hermeneutics, the effort to ﬁnd a German term for the Japanese experience of art and beauty was deeply inspired by the idea that this would involve an encounter with a radically different culture and, possibly, a different “disclosure” of Being. You may remember that Heidegger had deﬁned “language” as “das Haus des Seins,” the House of Being. Beings, the things of our experience, become “visible” to us only within a horizon that is historically determined (because it would be impossible to attribute to it the immutable objectivity of the “objects” that appear within it). This horizon is given to us with the historical language we share by the very fact of existing in a culture. The geworfener Entwurf, the

9 10 Gianni Vattimo thrown project that is our existence, is always-already (immer schon) thrown into a language. Heidegger would say that experience is made possible by a set of a priori forms of the kind Kant described (time, space, categories); but these a priori are embodied in the language we find ourselves speaking, and language is historically inherited. Its structure as langue—in Saussurian terms—is time and again modified by paroles (uses, classical texts, and so on) that are pronounced within it throughout time. Works of art— or, in Ror- tyan and Kuhnian terms, any “revolutionary approach” to the world, which might also be the invention of a completely different scientific paradigm (such as the Copernican hypothesis against the Ptolemaic cosmology)—are the disclosures that propose new rules, new paradigms, original redescriptions of the world. From a Heideggerian point of view, it is of course possible that a decisive “pa- role” that completely innovates a disclosure of Being (i.e., a horizon that constitutes our historical-existential throwness, so as to change the basic structures of our experience) takes place within the language we naturally speak, in the mother tongue. This is the case with those inaugural events that are great works of art, for example, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Höl- derlin’s poems, and above all the Bible or, for Germans, Luther’s translation of it. However, in these examples Heidegger would probably recognize not only the presentation of an original “content” but also innovations in the very grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of the language (of the kind that Rorty calls a new system of metaphors that make possible a new redescription of the world). This means that even within the same mother tongue, the encounter with an inaugural disclosure of (the truth of ) Being—which in Heidegger’s mind takes place in the work of art—involves a sort of leap into another language, an experience that we make more clearly and radically when we try to translate a text written in a foreign language (the more foreign the better). At this point, we face several possibilities. For instance, we might ask whether in the fields of aesthetic experience and of literary and art criticism there is anything analogous to what Rorty calls the “epistemological”—that is, a way of reading and studying works of art not as encountering a “new” disclosure of Being but as describing, judging, or evaluating an “object” according to given criteria. Although, like Rorty, we prefer to avoid the traditional distinction between Natur and Geisteswissenschaften, it seems that in this case we must return to it. (The epistemological would apply only to the experimental natural sciences, while any “study” of poetic works or of historical events or personalities would be exclusively hermeneutic.) In fact, we do not see any possible “epistemological” way of treating a work of art, be it literary or other, as such, at least nothing that we would qualify as literary criticism. Let’s not miss the vast implications of this question, which are the same as Method, Hermeneutics, Truth 11 those already involved in the discussion about the sciences of nature and the sciences of spirit at the end of the nineteenth century. Can (should) we, above all, consider ourselves—scholars and teachers of literature, philosophy, and similar academic subjects—as scientists who work following a method and who therefore deserve the same respect or financial support, as our colleagues in the natural and applied sciences? Let’s recall another passage from Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

The product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to the study of the unpredictable, or of “creativity.” But hermeneutics is the study of an abnormal discourse from the point of view of some normal discourse—the attempt to make sense of what is going on at a stage where we are still too unsure about it to describe it, and thereby to begin an epistemological account of it.3

I have never tried to draw methodical indications from the pages of Hei- degger’s dialogue with his Japanese visitor, or from other essays Heidegger devoted to literary topics, such as the various essays included in Unterwegs zur Sprache, in Holzwege, or in Vorträge und Aufsätze, but I dare say that this would be a pointless exercise. The same conclusion is explicit in Gadamer’s Truth and Method: The allusion to “method” in the title is purely negative and polemical; Gadamer’s point is that truth is not to be expected exclusively from the scientific method of positivist experimental science.4 In the end, both Heideg- ger and Gadamer would say that the truth of positive sciences is not the “primary” and more authentic one; because these sciences always work within paradigms, they cannot choose and “prove” (for they would then need a further paradigm—criteria, methods, and so on); rather, they must presuppose a “disclosure” of Being that is not an object of their research and into which they are always-already “thrown.” Rorty would not be so radical, but it is clear from all his works that he does not consider philosophy or art or literary criticism as an epistemological task that would apply methodical criteria to the study (description? discussion? explanation?) of the texts and problems it takes as its “objects.” All this is not to say that the study of literature and art does not need any “scientific” support, such as the knowledge of the grammar of a language or of the historical circumstances of a work. You may remember that the emphasis on this aspect of the “understanding” of texts is one of the points of Paul Ricoeur’s contribution to hermeneutics. The relation between “appropriation” and application of existing paradigms on the one hand and the experience of “redescriptions” (both as creation and as interpretation of them, I would say) on the other is rather different in the sciences and in the humanities. In the humanities there is 12 Gianni Vattimo nothing that looks like the fruitful resolution of puzzles within a given paradigm, not even in the field of interpretation and criticism. Appropriation and methodical application of paradigms is also indispensable in this field, but only as an exercise that prepares the hermeneutic act—that is, “opening” new ways of experience, both as the creation of works of art and as the critical encounter with them. This is not only the view of Heidegger and Gadamer but also of Rorty, who can hardly be suspected of sharing a romantic, antiscientific attitude. The diligent application of paradigms to the resolution of puzzles having to do with material existence is completely lacking in the field of art and literary criticism. “Normal” scientific research is “justified” in the eyes of society, governments, and the economic establishment to the extent that it results in useful technical applications. I am not suggesting that literature, art, philosophy, and literary criticism have no practical use, but their use is not comparable to the usefulness of technology. To be clear, they do not solve any practical, economic, or “vital” problem. They affect the way we view our existence and practical problems, the way in which we experience meanings and ends. This is not a purely romantic view of the matter; not only a philosopher such as Rorty but also such thinkers as Habermas and others basically agree. What I would term the “scientific attitude,” Habermas calls “strategic behavior” in the sense that, for him, objective knowledge of nature is to reach goals that belong to the realm of values (moral behavior) or expression (aesthetic behavior). Art, philosophy, criticism, and the “humanities”—insofar as they have nothing directly to do with solving puzzles related to the material problems of survival—generally can be described in the terms Heidegger adopts in his essay “On the Origin of a Work of Art.” 5 They are an “ins Werk setzen der Wahrheit”; they inaugurate a disclosure, a different way of experiencing the world—although not always in the radical and total sense Heidegger had in mind when he commented on Hölderlin, Anaximander, and Rilke. To understand Heidegger’s point (without distorting too much his thought), we may translate it into more “urban” terms by saying, with Mikel Dufrenne, that the work of art (or of philosophy or any “object” of the Geisteswis- senschaften) is a “quasi sujet”—not something that can be arranged within the actually existing world but a different view on the world with which we have to come to terms, readjusting more or less profoundly our previous view of it. At this point, it seems that we have lost any possibility of distinguishing “good” hermeneutic criticism from various kinds of nonsensical re- or deconstruction of texts—and, of course, also any possibility of evaluating what counts or does not count as a work of art, a good poem, or a beautiful musical Method, Hermeneutics, Truth 13 composition. Must we admit that not only avant-garde art but also criticism is nothing but a dadaistic activity whose sense is simply “épater les bourgeois”? As a matter of fact, it is very likely that the novelty of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics and critical theory consists precisely in the recognition of the essential character of the event that belongs to the works of art and to all types of historical experience. Let me go back once more to Heidegger and to his thesis about Being as Ereignis, event, happening, and historical novelty. Being is not a stable eternal structure given once for all that metaphysics should mirror and ethical behavior should respect, reproduce, and actualize time and again. To remain in the field of aesthetics, art is not to be conceived as an imitation of nature (or of classical models) but as an original creation of the artistic genius. This is the main difference between pre- and post-Kantian aesthetics. Moreover, Kant retains the idea that the creations of genius are guided (unconsciously) by nature itself and therefore preserves the principle of imitation at least in a certain sense, while nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetics and theories have increasingly insisted on novelty and originality. The notion of hermeneutic experience as the encounter with an “abnormal” discourse and the difficulty of defining a precise “scientific” methodological status of literary criticism are both related to this transformation in the theory and practice of art. One might object that the structuralism of the 1960s and 1970s was exactly the effort to get rid of this romantic idea of art as the product of genius and of criticism as a further genial activity. As a partisan of hermeneutics, I am not the best judge of the situation, but I think that we can agree that today structuralist criticism is no longer as hegemonic and alive as it was twenty years ago. On the contrary, we still expect much from the application of hermeneutics to criticism, although—as it happens to us in this discussion—it seems very difficult to draw a critical methodology from hermeneutics. As I mentioned earlier in relation to the debate on Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften at the end of the nineteenth century, the question of critical method is not simply a theoretical one; it has much to do with the practical distribution of power in universities and schools and with the general problem of the role and task of the humanities in education and in the whole of social life. How can we legitimate our very existence as scholars and teachers, as professors of literature, history, and philosophy, if we cannot offer precise criteria of evaluation regarding the seriousness of our job and of its “scientific” results? As was the case in the debate on the sciences of the spirit, we need a notion of “science” that is not based exclusively on the models of experimental sciences. Rational truth, and therefore scientific discourse, is any statement that can be argued by referring to reason, evidence, or shared certainties. The experimental proofs of the natural sciences are not the sole kind of reason we can 14 Gianni Vattimo decently present in a discussion. A great part of the reasonable discussion that is so determinant in our everyday life is based not on rigorous experimental proofs but on a vast set of shared convictions. The critical encounter with an “abnormal” discourse is more like coming to terms with another person, another culture, another language, or a different Weltanschauung than setting up a scientific experiment. (By the way, one might reasonably say also that a successful verifying or falsifying experiment shares basically the same structure as coming to terms with “otherness.”) To experience otherness, much more than precise methodological criteria is involved; emotions, taste, and feelings, are as important as the effort to be objective. The model for this idea of truth is Hegel’s dialectic: The encounter with truth is not the fact of being informed on a state of affairs— or not only and mainly that. If one looks for information on a state of affairs, one should have some reason for that research; the objective information is a means to reach an end, to realize a project. It is the project that undergoes modification. Experi- ence is never the impression of traces on the tabula rasa of the mind; it is instead the transformation of the person involved in relation to a project. This “Hegelian” idea of truth covers any experience of truth, including the truth of experimental sciences. In this field, however, the distance between the means (objective description) and the end (project, technique, and so on) is so wide that the means become dominant, and the often very general and remote end of scientific research is forgotten. In the case of the humanities, means and end are too close to allow such a separation: We would never say that we need an objective knowledge of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to have an aesthetic (existential) experience of that work. The character of personal transformation is dominant in aesthetic experience; its truth coincides totally with the “aesthetic,” non-objectively oriented experience we make with the thing (work of art or also historical document). All this is to say that, from a hermeneutic point of view, the rigor and methodological legitimacy of literary criticism—as that of philosophy—will be evaluated in relation to the “edification” it provides. I use the word “edification” not only because it is the term Rorty uses to describe the sense of philosophy but also because, at least in many Romance languages (but I think also in English), it refers to religion, spirituality, the task and field of priests and teachers of spiritual wisdom. One might even imagine that the effort of humanists to establish rigorous methodical criteria of their job is not only a way of struggling for a position and for economical resources in the universities, against the hegemony of the natural sciences. It has also been an effort to “sec- ularize” themselves, getting rid of the “priestly” appearance that humanistic education has always had in the European tradition. I think that our present Method, Hermeneutics, Truth 15 condition is that of someone who has understood that it is “better”—more vi- able, more “realistic” and adequate to the essence of our job—to look like priests than to pretend to be “scientists.” This has very simply to do with the transformations society has undergone after the positivist age: Social development is considered no longer a mere business of the scientists but a democratic enterprise that involves consensus and a shared ability in discussing value op- tions. Society needs “edification” to function as a (democratic) society. Of course, I am not suggesting that we cancel all differences between humanist scholars and priests. First of all, humanists are not educated within a close dogmatic horizon and under the rigid discipline of a church. The humanist tradition to which we refer and that we teach to our students is pluralistic and multiple, open to readjustments when new and different cultures become accessible. It is also true, however, that humanists cannot do their work— “research” and teaching—without a deep personal engagement in the content they handle. A priest who does not believe in his religion is not a good priest. Translated into “hermeneutical” and secular terms, this means that one possible criterion of value for critical activity should be the scholar’s explicit involvement in what he or she studies. I would like to turn briefly to Heidegger’s review of Karl Jaspers’s The Psy- chology of Weltanschauungen (1919).6 A good critical work in the humanities— says Heidegger, criticizing Jaspers—is that which scholars conduct with the purpose of putting their own historical position into discussion while studying the documents and texts they take as their object. Is this just a matter of personal honesty concerning the moral worth of a scholar? Of course not, in Heidegger’s (and my) view. I suggest that personal involvement, the fact of “se mettre en jeu” on the side of the critic, has a much greater meaning. A good piece of literary criticism or historical analysis or any kind of “moral science” would be, from this point of view, one that looks at its “object” (at it and not at another one—this is surely an objective attitude, although totally different from any disinterested description of it) by taking into explicit account the critic’s own historical predicament. So as not to pretend to dispose of a “view from nowhere,” the discourse of the Geisteswissenschaften has to be always a sort of clarification of the critic’s self-consciousness and of the critic’s “situation,” which cannot leave aside an explanation of the relevance of the work for the moment in which the critic decides to re- or deconstruct it. (It is exactly this act of taking responsibility in relation to the concrete situation that is very often lacking in today’s deconstructionist criticism. Decon- structionists, including Derrida himself, do not give any explanation for why they choose one topic over another for their analysis.) The demand for historical and existential responsibility is far from func- 16 Gianni Vattimo tioning as a methodological criterion for a “rigorous” hermeneutic criticism. Indeed, criticism inspired by these principles may run the risk of distancing itself too much from any academic and “scientific” standard. Criticism surely obliges us to reexamine many of our prejudices on the humanities. So what? Spiritus—the spirit of the Geisteswissenschaften—ubi vult spirat . . . 2

Poetics of Intransitivity

Sasaki Ken’ichi

To begin, I should explain the subject of this essay in terms of the general theme of this volume, that is to say, explain what kind of hermeneutics we will be concerned with here. The aim of this essay is not the interpretation of a particular text or hermeneutics as the simple execution of interpretation; rather, since it takes as its subject matter not a text but a theory, our task can be described as a metatheoretical interpretation: It concerns, therefore, philosophical hermeneutics. More precisely, I will take up a traditional idea in Japanese poetics and interpret it in relation to the verbal system of the Japanese language. This hermeneutical reﬂection, therefore, will have quite a broad scope since it will not only clarify the cultural background of the Japanese poetics of intransitivity but also lead to an insight into a strong, yet ordinarily unnoticed, tendency in the Japanese way of thinking and world vision. Accordingly, though philosophical in orientation, hermeneutics here aims not at analyzing the universal dimension of human existence but at describing a horizon peculiar to Japanese culture. In short, my task involves a hermeneutics oriented in terms of cultural philosophy, or cultural hermeneutics. I must now introduce the theme of this hermeneutics—the poetics of intransitivity. For a long time, I have been vaguely sensing a certain tendency in my thinking on aesthetics. I do not know why, but I agree absolutely, for example, with the words of Nietzsche explaining inspiration:

Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it.—If one had the slight- est residue of superstition left, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and over- turns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought ﬂashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed—I have never had any choice. An ecstasy whose tremen- dous tension sometimes discharges itself in a ﬂood of tears.1

17 18 Sasaki Ken’ichi

Having neither seen this “lightning” nor experienced this “ecstasy” myself, I have, however, been convinced that if something truly valuable is brought into being, it must be in this way.2 Because it is apt to be already familiar, I have skipped the first line of the preceding quotation, where Nietzsche presents the conception of inspiration as something completely out of date. With- out alienating (verfremden) my own usual way of thinking, I could hardly understand the philosophical situation of Western aesthetics at the end of the nineteenth century. I am concerned with two opposed conceptions of artistic creation. The intransitive notion, proposed in the title, is naturally defined in opposition to the transitive. Nietzsche describes an intransitive conception of inspiration; modern orthodoxy, a transitive one. The transitive notion considers artistic creation in terms of the relation between subject and object: for instance, “an artist creates an artwork.” The intransitive notion takes the opposite viewpoint and underlines the autocreative character, as it were, of art; in other words, this poetics represents the phenomenon as “an artwork creates itself.” 3 While transitive poetics insists on the leading idea and creative power of the artist, intransitive poetics pretends to avoid the artist’s artifice and intervention and lets the work “be” by its own power of becoming. Taking intransitive poetics as my subject, I want to prove that in Japanese aesthetics intransitive poetics is tightly linked to the verbal system of the Jap- anese language. This thesis derives from Sapir’s and Whorf’s work in linguistics, according to which the structural features in various phases of a language determine the ways of thinking and the world vision of the users of that language, and, conversely, the world vision of a people dominates the structures of their language. French linguist Émile Benveniste’s “Categories of Thought and Categories of Language” offers a penetrating analysis and examination of this thesis. Benveniste takes the Aristotelian ten categories as examples and points out how tightly these are related to the linguistic system of Greek. The Aristotelian categories, he concludes, are only a “transposition of categories of language”; indeed, “language provides the fundamental configuration of the properties that the mind recognizes in things.” 4 I share this viewpoint and intend to demonstrate that in Japanese aesthetics the poetics of intransitivity is, so to speak, “configured” by the verbal system of the Japanese language.

Poetics of Transitivity and Intransitivity I do not mean to argue that the poetics of intransitivity is unique to Japanese aesthetics. Rather, I present the paired concepts of transitive and intransitive poetics as universally valid. The poetics of intransitivity is orthodox in Japan. The transitive notion of human creation has led to modern civilization in the Poetics of Intransitivity 19

West. This tendency is most strikingly expressed in Western art theory: It is not the artwork but the artist and his or her original idea that dominates. However, as Nietzsche testiﬁes, this does not mean that the Western world ig- nores the poetics of intransitivity. Its typical form is found in the address to the Muses in the opening lines of an epic. Homer begins his Iliad with this formula:

The wrath do thou sing, O goddess, of Peleus’ son, Achilles, that baneful wrath which brought countless woes upon the Achaeans, and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls of warriors, and made themselves to be a spoil for dogs and all manner of birds.5

This Homeric address to the Muses became a cliché in the epic genre, which continued to exist in the Western world until modern times.6 More recently, the poetics of intransitivity has found its voice in several philosophers and artists. I will limit myself to just one exemplary statement from Merleau-Ponty: “Apollinaire said that in a poem there are phrases which do not appear to have been created, which seem to have formed themselves. And Henri Michaux said that sometimes Klee’s colours seem to have been born slowly upon the canvas, to have emanated from some primordial ground, ‘exhaled at the right place’ like a patina or a mould.” 7 Not only artists such as Apollinaire and Michaux, and probably Klee, noticed the “autoﬁgurative” 8 character of a masterpiece of art; Merleau-Ponty pointed it out as well in relation to his ontology of Being with a capital “B.” According to Merleau-Ponty, when “we speak of ‘inspiration,’ the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted.” 9

Intransitive Poetics in Japanese Traditional Aesthetics By now it should be clear that a poetics of intransitivity is a theory of artistic creation that insists on the necessity of avoiding and transcending artifice and of letting the work form itself in an “autofigurative” way. If you like, you may take as motto of intransitive poetics Pascal’s famous dictum: “The true eloquence laughs at eloquence.” 10 When I speak of the poetics of intransitivity in Japanese aesthetics, I am referring to exactly the same thing; that is, I mean that you should not expect anything exotic. Indeed, although the spirit of the theory may be quite different, the doctrinal formula is the same. I will limit myself to just one classical text from Japanese aesthetics as an example. I choose a text of Zeami (1363 –1443?), a no¯ play master, playwright, and actor who brought this art form to its highest expression. The text is titled Yu¯gaku shu¯do¯fu¯ken (My views on the system of no¯ training). As in many other 20 Sasaki Ken’ichi texts by Zeami, the author gives a detailed explanation of the training of a no¯ player. In this work, he speaks of the most advanced stages. The first is called “the stage of Perfect Fluency” (yasuki kurai). A no¯ player who has attained this stage can play any piece at ease. However, he should not mistake this stage for the highest stage of mufu¯ (art without style, or art of stylistic indifference) because “the danger of an artistic error that lies beyond the subjective evaluation of the artist is ever present.” 11 The final stage then must be the one where the actor can execute unorthodox as well as standard styles without fear. To explain this stage of absolute indifference, Zeami quotes a famous poem (waka) by Fujiwara Teika (1161–1241), and he says, “The poem is very well known, and of course when we hear it we are touched; yet it is difficult to point out precisely what are the elements in this poem that make it so moving.” 12 Finding in the waka the essence and secret of perfect art, Zeami concludes:

Therefore, as concerns the skill of a truly great artist such as Fujiwara Teika, there must exist some profound and undeﬁnable quality in his art. There is a teaching in Tendai Buddhism that says, “cut off all verbal expression, transcend thought, and enter the Realm of Peerless Charm.” Can we say that this “Realm of Peerless Charm” is represented in Teika’s poem? In our art as well, when a perfected level of accomplishment has been reached, then, just as in this poem by Teika, there will seem to be no artistic craft involved, no concern over theatrical effect; rather, the actor is able to transmit an emotional state to his audiences that cannot be articulated in words.13

The “Peerless Realm,” 14 or “myo¯”in Japanese, is the final stage of perfection in artistic training. At that stage, the artist no longer needs to be concerned about technical details. Moreover, in communicating the religious teachings of Buddhism, no difference exists any longer between poetry and drama. “Myo¯” is originally a religious concept developed by the Tendai school of Buddhism. It points to a universality or indifference that perfect masters achieve in all fields (arts and religion alike) since they have transcended all artifice, which is what differentiates particular arts. A masterpiece is to be realized in absolute intransitivity: It must be as if it forms itself or appears spontaneously, beyond any intervention of the artist, whether technical or conceptual. This is one of the most basic ideas in traditional Japanese aesthetics. We find similar arguments in all Japanese art theory from all periods. I am sure that the same idea is still present today.

Intransitivity in the Japanese Verbal System and Aesthetics There is a key word in traditional Japanese thought that expresses intransitivity: “naturally.” The same word, composed with two Chinese characters, is used Poetics of Intransitivity 21 today mainly as a noun meaning “nature.” The more recent use was established around the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of Western ideas.15 In premodern times, the word was used mainly as an adverb meaning “of itself” or “of its own accord.” 16 Already in medieval times, this concept was an idea common to different cultural fields. It permeates the idea of “original enlightenment” (hongaku) of the Tendai sect, which is at the basis of theories of waka, no¯ plays, the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and so on.17 Zeami’s thought developed against this background. In modern times (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries), the neo-Confucian notion of “natural” as “mui” (inaction, doing nothing) exercised a very strong influence so as to establish the adverbial use “naturally,” which is very familiar to us today.18 Historians of Japanese thought agree that this concept is one of the most fundamental elements in Japanese philosophy.19 However, Buddhism and neo-Confucianism were originally foreign philosophies. There must have existed an indigenous concept of nature for these great philosophies to find a fecund ground in Ja- pan. As a matter of fact, the same spirit can be found in indigenous religious praxis (Shugendo¯), which is permeated with a primitivism that rejects all aspects of “culture” (including vegetables and grains cultivated by human beings) as impure.20 Therefore, intransitivity is one of the most basic moments of the Japanese worldview, and intransitive poetics belongs to this tradition. How, then, can a tradition be supported and transmitted from generation to generation? Sev- eral systems allow such transmission, for example, religion, custom and convention, and literature. However, to constitute a true tradition, these systems of communication must grow on a common ground. Again, let me emphasize that this anonymous philosophy of intransitivity has developed within the verbal system of the Japanese language. When pronouncing a word and writing a phrase, we steep ourselves in the way of thinking embodied in language, and thus we become well versed in it. The famous political philosopher Maruyama Masao opposes the Japanese “logic of becoming” (naru) to the Christian “logic of making” (tsukuru).21 “Naru” (to become) is intransitive, while “tsukuru” (to make) is transitive. If we adopt an older word for “making” and say “nasu,” then we get the pair “nasu” (making) and “naru” (becoming), which represents a most elemental form of the pair of transitive and intransitive verbs, with “na-” as the common stem and “-as-” / “-ar-” as “transitivizer/intransitivitizer.” 22 Linguists of Japanese consider this type of verb unique to the Japanese language 23 and refer to it with a particular term, “jita taio¯do¯shi” (verbs of transitive-intransitive correspondence),24 a technical term currently accepted by specialists. Because of the specificity of this category, it is difficult to present analogies in Western languages. As an approximate example, I mention the English pairs “lay” (transitive) / 22 Sasaki Ken’ichi

“lie” (intransitive) and “raise” (transitive) / “rise” (intransitive). However, these examples are exceptions in English. Syntax determines the differentiation. If it takes a direct object, the verb is transitive; otherwise, it is intransitive. In Japanese, however, this pairing is rather systematic, and the transitive/intransitive differentiation is made from inside, by the distinctive form of the verb ending. These transitive and intransitive verbs have regular ending forms. By changing the ending of a verb, we go from the transitive to the intransitive and vice versa. As a result, we feel that a radical change takes place because of the changing viewpoint. The subject of a transitive verb of this kind is always a person, while the subject of an intransitive verb is a thing. For example, “I lay a brick” is contrasted with “a brick lies.” Therefore, while the transitive verb assumes an egocentric vision, the intransitive represents a vision that takes the world or the objective thing as center or subject. In the life of the Japanese language, the experience of this opposition is fundamental because there are many transitive-intransitive correspondences, especially among basic verbs.25 In Japanese we ﬁnd transitive-intransitive verb pairs that can encompass a range of meanings, for instance, “breaking, cutting, curving, destroying, enlarging, widening, burning, drying, wetting, dyeing, deciding, beginning, stopping, erasing, ﬂowing, removing, dropping, descending, taking, stripping, entering, planting, burying, piling, etc.” 26

Intransitivity as Efficacy It is important to recognize that the change one wishes to produce differs in its efficacy according to whether a transitive or intransitive verb is used. True efficacy is acknowledged in Japanese not by a transitive verb but by an intransitive one. We might want to examine certain formulas combining a transitive verb with its corresponding intransitive pair. Using, for example, the canoni- cal pair “nasu” and “naru,” we get to the proverb “naseba naru,” which is literally translated in English as “if you make/do (transitive), the thing is made/ done (intransitive).” This Japanese expression is equivalent to the English proverb “Man proposes, God disposes” (recall the Homeric address to the Muses), with the difference that the verb “to dispose” is expressed in Japanese with an intransitive verb suggesting that “the thing occurs naturally by itself.” Therefore, this switching from transitive to intransitive implies the idea that man begins and makes efforts to realize something, but it is the thing itself that eventually effectuates the final realization. From a human viewpoint, the realization of an object is given to an individual as a kind of grace. There is an even more striking example: “Kitte mo, kitte mo, en ga kirenai,” which translates into English as “Although I have many times broken [tried to break; transitive] it, the relation is not broken [intransitive].” The transi- Poetics of Intransitivity 23 tive verb expresses only the intentional action of the subject, while the effective result is expressed with the intransitive verb (in this case in a negative form) attributed to the object. This kind of formula is used even for the effect achieved by an instrument or machine. Talking about a photo, we say, “utsu- shita noni utsuranakatta” (literally, “Having taken a photo, it was not taken”). For differences in which results are obtained, the role played by transitive and intransitive verbs in Japanese differs radically from that of Western languages. It might be profitable to refer to the notion of “achievement verbs,” which the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle opposes to “task verbs” in his classic book on the Concept of Mind (1949).27 What interests him in this opposition are “the differences of logical behavior,” or that of their “logical forces.” A task verb signifies only “the performance, if any, of the subservient task activity,” while an achievement verb asserts, over and above, that “some state of affairs is obtained.” 28 It should go without saying that in Western languages the achievement verbs are transitive and are preceded by a human or animal subject. The Japanese language, however, works quite differently. In our example “kitte mo kirenai,” the result is expressed with an intransitive verb. The most interesting examples are perception verbs, especially those that Ryle underlines. For example, “to look” is a task verb, while “to see” is an achievement verb. “To see” is a transitive verb taking a person as its subject. Curi- ously enough, the Japanese translator of Ryle’s book translates them with the “transitive-intransitive corresponding verbs,” “miru /mieru.” Indeed, “mieru” signifies the achievement, but with the fundamental difference that this is not an achievement by a person but rather a realization by the object itself, which “becomes visible.” Therefore, the efficacy of change is not achieved by a human being but is given by the object, or the world. I do not mean to argue that achievement verbs are always intransitive in Japanese. When describing the achievement of a human act, the Japanese language, like Western languages, relies on an active verb. Let me quote the Japa- nese linguist Miyajima Tatsuo on the “logical forces” concerning “task” and “realization” of Japanese verbs. Miyajima’s theory may be summarized as follows: The pure transitive verbs (which have no corresponding intransitive) are “task verbs,” the intransitive verbs having corresponding transitives are “realization verbs,” and the transitive verbs having corresponding intransitives represent the task as well as the realization.29 We should, then, ask why the transitive, having its corresponding intransitive, can express the task and the realization as well. Of course, it would be reckless to ask why this happens, as if it were a real phenomenon, but it seems, at least, as if this kind of transitive gets its connotation of efficacy from its corresponding intransitive because it shares the same stem. In Japanese, as we have seen, real efficacy is expressed not by transitive verbs 24 Sasaki Ken’ichi that have persons as their subject but by intransitive verbs that have things or the world as their subject.30 To conclude, I wish to suggest that the intransitive worldview plays an especially important role in poetics, or the theory of creation, because making/creating is essentially an active act. I think we can symbolize the idea of intransitive poetics with the verb “dekiru” (to become fin- ished). Anyone whose mother tongue is Japanese would say that the meaning of the word “dekiru” is “can” or “to be able to.” It is the verb that most straight- forwardly indicates man’s active power. This verb, whose meaning is “active power,” is, as a matter of fact, an intransitive verb literally signifying “to come out.” True creative power comes from the world and is accorded to human beings as grace. I believe this is the alpha and omega of a poetics of intransitivity. 3

The Hermeneutic Approach to Japanese Modernity “Art-Way,” “Iki,” and “Cut-Continuance”

O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke

Because Japan has modernized and Europeanized itself in the past 140 years, “Europeanness”—that which is intrinsic to “Europe”—has become one of the elements that form “Japaneseness.” Europeanness and Japaneseness no longer stand in dichotomous contrast. A hermeneutics of “Japaneseness” requires first the perception of Europeanness as the “other in itself” for the Japanese self. Kuki Shu¯zo¯’s The Structure of “Iki” offers an excellent example of this hermeneutics of Japaneseness. Kuki understands “iki” as “a remarkable expression of the specific mode of ethnic existence of Japanese folk.” According to Kuki, the hermeneutic study of “iki” should be a “hermeneutics of ethnic existence.” 1 Kuki thus analyzes “iki” not only as an aesthetic phenomenon but also as an expression of the existential mode of Japanese folk; thus, “iki” is essentially “Japanese.” He contrasts it with Europeanness, the “other” located outside itself. Perhaps for this reason he later tended toward cultural nationalism, de- fending Japaneseness against Europeanness. In 1937, for example, he gave a lecture titled “On the Japanese Character,” in which he argues that, although modern Japan has imported European culture and systems, the Japanese people have manipulated them; just as “the Japanese soul” has operated Japan’s westernized armed forces. He argues furthermore that the leading principle of future Japanese culture and future world history will be a Japanistic cosmo- universalism, or a cosmo-universal Japanism.2 One should take into account that this lecture was given during the period in which the Axis powers were organized, the so-called 2.2.6 revolution of young officers in the army occurred, and the situation on the Chinese continent became more and more uneasy. The Structure of “Iki” presents an excellent hermeneutics, and yet, even within its immediate historical context, Kuki’s nationalistic assertions seem too rigid. It

25 26 O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke is hard to believe why the author of such an excellent hermeneutical work would insist on being so rigid. One reason for Kuki’s inclination in his late period toward cultural nationalism lies perhaps in the specific character of his hermeneutics. As a reference point, we might want to consider Heidegger’scriticism of Kuki. Heidegger had found in Kuki a noble personality and a philosophical talent. He invited Kuki often to his home, listened to what Kuki had to say regarding “iki,” and discussed the subject with him before The Structure of “Iki” was published. How- ever, he confessed later that this dialogue was in certain respects strained.3 The tension came from Heidegger’s suspicion that, when Kuki talked about “iki,” he ran the risk that a Japanese phenomenon like “iki” would be “transformed into Europeanness.” 4 Heidegger saw this risk above all in Kuki’s relying on a European-born “aesthetics.” Presumably because of this criticism, Kuki did not use the term “aesthetics” but only “hermeneutics” in The Structure of “Iki.” Heidegger had introduced Kuki to hermeneutics and to his own hermeneutic phenomenology.5 In his fictional dialogue with Kuki, Heidegger says that for his part “the hermeneutic” had prepared the way to Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). Would he then have believed that The Structure of “Iki” would overcome the risk of transferring the Japanese phenomenon into Europeanness? Perhaps not. In his interpretation of “iki,” Kuki used such basic categories of Western metaphysics as “causa formalis” and “causa materialis”; thus, his hermeneutics remained within the sphere of Western metaphysics. Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, however, aimed not at inheriting but at “de-structing” Western metaphysics. Kuki’s hermeneutics remained a methodology, never approaching Heidegger’s sense of “the hermeneutic” as the dynamic nature of “Being.” Heidegger would have been critical of The Structure of “Iki.” We can easily surmise that the cultural nationalism to which Kuki was inclined was surely the reverse side of “orientalism” in its widest sense. Although Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978) is limited to the Islamic world as imagined by the Western world, Said makes it apparent that even in non-European cultural circles, the consciousness of non-European cultures is influenced by a basically European sense of values. Orientalism could be regarded as a kind of Eurocentrism, but it is not exclusive to Europeans. It is found also in non- European cultural circles, whose modernization overlaps with Europeaniza- tion. However, the critique of orientalism should not be considered in absolute terms. We must ask whether orientalism might present a hermeneutics through which Europeanness could be illuminated not only as a historical and political influence but also as a spiritual source fostering modernity. Said indicates rightly that the relation between orientalist and orientalism was “hermeneutic” 6 because the orientalist image of the Orient was formed through Hermeneutic Approach to Japanese Modernity 27 interpretations of Oriental things by Western orientalists. However, Said’s hermeneutics is a merely philological method and not yet a philosophical insight into this philological method. He argues that Western orientalists stood always outside the Orient as the other side of the Occident. Despite the value of his critique, Orientalism does not yet make clear what structure of the self an orientalist must have when the Orient no longer means the other side but is to be found inside the Occident as his or her own world. A hermeneutics through which Japanese modernity and its “other in itself” can be treated without the color of orientalism must be developed as a dialogue of “Japaneseness” with itself instead of contrasting this “Japaneseness” with the Western culture outside it. This self-dialogue will be the other side of the self-dialogue of Europeanness with itself because, in Japanese modernity, this self-dialogue of Europeanness was held in a “Japanese” mode.

The Art-Way (Geido¯) The generic term for traditional Japanese art since the Middle Ages is “art- way” (geido¯). Originating under the rule of the warrior class between the Mu- romachi (1392–1573) and the Edo (1600 –1867) periods, geido¯ includes a broad spectrum of artistic genres: the so-called game arts, or yugei, which include the flower-way and the perfume-way; the theatrical arts, or butai geino¯, which include jo¯ruri (puppet) theater, kabuki, and no¯; and, finally, the martial arts, or bugei, which include sword fighting, archery, lance fighting, and riding. Thus, the genres of the art-way cover most of the fields of “traditional” Japa- nese culture. In each of these genres, geido¯ is an expression of the personal self-awareness of the artist. The “art-way” differs from the theories of art in Greek antiquity, of which Plato and Aristotle can be considered the founding fathers. Although the writings of artists such as Alberti, Leonardo, and Dürer are notable for their expression of artistic experience, they do not, however, develop any clearly defined theory of art. The difference may arise because the fundamental self- awareness of the art-way doctrine is not individual but communal—a sensus conmunis that grew out of the Japanese spiritual /intellectual tradition. The “way” (michi) in the term “art-way” actually refers to the ancient Chinese term tao and derives from Chinese Taoist thought, which was further developed in Japan under the influence of Buddhist ideas and elevated to an art concept. There is, then, a relationship between art and religion in art-way doctrine.7 Thus, one can find in the art-way not only the extension of traditional Japa- nese culture but also its internal, spiritual roots. The intention and extension of the art-way may be clear, but its specific character is not so clear, even though it is regarded as “somehow” specifically 28 O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke

Japanese. Its “Japaneseness” is often believed to exist in a distinctive appearance or style, but this observation is obviously insufficient. Let us turn to a typical example of “traditional Japanese” art, a classic text from the Edo by the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653 –1724). The short piece, Kyojitsu Himaku Ron, is best known under its popular title, The Doctrine of the Interspace of the Skin Membranes, between Unreal and Real Being, which comes from a key phrase in the play: Art lies in the interspace of the skin membranes, between unreal and real beings.8 The interspace between the unreal and the real is logically inconceivable. In a court of law, for example, a clear decision must always be made whether to free or penalize a suspect. However, as soon as this logically inconceivable interspace is expressed as skin membranes, as a part of the organic body, it takes shape as a real image and in- spires us to think of human feeling or will. The expression “the interspace of the skin membranes” seems odd if one is not familiar with its background. Chikamatsu developed a genre of puppet theater known as ningyo¯jo¯ruri. In this genre, the puppets move in harmony with songs, accompanied by a three-string instrument called the shamisen. The ningyo¯jo¯ruri puppets are not stuffed like conventional marionettes. They consist solely of a layer of cloth. One— or sometimes as many as three—puppe- teers insert a hand into the puppet’s body. As a dramatist of the jo¯ruri theater, it was Chikamatsu’s greatest and final wish for his puppets to surpass the per- formances of real actors, especially in kabuki theater. Because jo¯ruri is an art form that, according to Chikamatsu, “competes with the art of living individuals, above all in the kabuki, and uses lifeless puppets to express a range of feelings designed to move the audience, ordinary efforts rarely result in a memo- rable performance.” Gestures that only puppets can make, which may be more moving and realistic than those of a live actor, cannot be achieved through ordinary efforts. The jo¯ruri theater is an art form that expresses these gestures through lifeless puppets consisting only of skin membranes. One may object to Chikamatsu’s using the term “skin membrane” for the skin or dress of otherwise insubstantial puppets; their “skin” is only an aspect of unreal beings, even if the puppets convincingly depict real people. Why did Chikamatsu choose to describe the essence of his art with such a problematic term, which refers to both real and unreal beings? Chikamatsu designated a certain way of reading the characters (kanji) of the term “skin membrane” with the syllabary (kana). In Japanese, Chinese characters are generally used for nouns and verbs; the syllabary, for auxiliaries. The syllabary is also written next to complicated characters, so that the reader can read them effortlessly. From the very first edition of Kyojitsu Himaku Ron, Chikamatsu always wrote the syllables “hiniku,” beside the characters for “skin Hermeneutic Approach to Japanese Modernity 29 membrane.” Only real human beings, however, possess hiniku (skin and flesh), while jo¯ruri puppets have only himaku (the skin membrane). As a human figure, the insubstantial puppet is simply unreal. When not actually performing on stage, it hangs on a nail, reduced to a pathetic and insig- nificant object. However, as soon as the puppeteer sets this pathetic figure in motion, it becomes a human figure that appears more real than real human beings. The otherwise empty outer layer of skin (himaku) appears to envelop real flesh (niku). The puppet begins to possess both skin and flesh (hiniku). Chika- matsu competed with kabuki because he always wanted the performance of puppets, which consist only of himaku, to surpass the performance of kabuki actors, who have hiniku. Behind Chikamatsu’s way of reading the kanji for “skin membrane” as hiniku rather than himaku, we can see his decisive and enthusiastic attitude as a playwright of the puppet theater. The art form that transforms himaku into hiniku, creating an interspace between real and unreal beings, cannot be attributed to jo¯ruri theater alone. Art in general must possess this ability. In fact, without this ability, it would not be “art.” Chikamatsu, who emphasized the uniqueness of jo¯ruri, worked with the famous kabuki actor Sakata To¯ju¯ro¯ (1647–1709), collaborating with him until his fiftieth year on kabuki-kyo¯gen, the comic transition piece in kabuki. In an essay on kabuki performance, Chikamatsu writes:

Today the audience wishes to witness a clever depiction of the real, so that, for example, the actor playing the Minister depicts the real Minister’s gesticulations and speech. But does the real Minister powder his face and paint his lips red like the main ﬁgure on the stage? Is it amusing that the main ﬁgure allows his beard to grow wild and appears with a bald head, since the real Minister does not paint his face? This is precisely the point where we should speak of the interspace of the skin membranes.

Further Examples of the Doctrines of the Art-Way To clarify the meaning of “the interspace of the skin membranes between unreal and real beings” in more general terms, we should turn to the great no¯ actor and no¯ theoretician, Zeami (1364 –1443?). Zeami was the ﬁrst to use the term “art-way.” 9 Like Chikamatsu, Zeami was concerned with the actor’s realization of “nature” or naturalness. Zeami describes how the actor should depict old and young people of various classes on stage. The primary goal should be “to represent the real ﬁgure as accurately as possible. However, it is important to note that various degrees of difference exist between thick and thin.” Zeami’s “thick”—the dense intensity of art—corresponds to Chikamatsu’s “unreal,” while “thin” indicates a less artistic representation, which, like Chi- kamatsu’s “real,” spontaneously attempts to remain true to reality. 30 O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke

Imitation containing this difference between thick and thin is stylized in a particular way in no¯ plays. Known as “kata,” this stylized form of human ges- ticulation is essentially an empty membrane or sheath devoid of content. However, as soon as kata is depicted on the no¯ stage, it acquires “flesh,” expressing human gestures generally hidden from view in everyday life. The titles of a number of Zeami’s writings contain the character for “flower.” The kanji consists of two parts: The upper half means plant or grass; the lower part means incarnation, change, or metamorphosis. The character “flower” thus suggests not only the mortality of a plant but also of all mortal creatures that flourish and die. When a flower or blossom is extremely beautiful, we are tempted to regard it as being almost unreal, even though we know it is real. This beautifully formed flower (fu¯shi kaden) implies the life-way that the actor should follow. In Zeami’s work the flower symbolizes first and foremost the aesthetic play form of the young actor. However, the natural beauty of youth fades with age, so the actor must learn to use his artistic skill to express the flower that never withers. (Zeami, in fact, writes that his father’s performance shortly before his death evoked this flower that never withers.) Zeami’s flower metaphor, which can be understood as another expression of Chikamatsu’s “interspace of skin membranes between unreal and real beings,” can already be found in no¯ performance. Another art-way doctrine, known as the “tea way” (sado¯) also shows quite concretely the characteristics of the art-way. The ceremonial teahouse is separated from the secular world by a path. Known as the “roji,” a “pure and innocent place,” this path leads to the other world into which the soul of the faithful believer will enter. Those who pass through this place on their way to participate in the tea ceremony are, according to the tea-way, cleansed of the dust of the secular world. The events in the tea ceremony room are confined everyday actions. In the teahouse, which the “roji” separates from ordinary life, commonplaceness is reproduced in such a way that the concealed dimensions of everyday life—for example, the inherent mortality and the “once-ness” of individual life—are specifically expressed. The “roji” is thus an interspace between the art world of the tea way and the commonplace secular world. All the elements of the tea ceremony, including the utensils, gestures, the flower display, and the calligraphy wall hangings, are expressions of the discontinuous continuity between noncommonplaceness and commonplaceness. Within the tea-way, life and death are not diametrically opposed. Life—like breathing, inhaling and exhaling, or walking, one foot after the other—is in reality not a simple continuance or “flow” but a moment-by-moment discontinuous continuity, representing the finitude and mortality of life. In the tea way Chika- matsu’s “skin membranes” are realized as a way of life, not as an esoteric teaching of a specific art. Hermeneutic Approach to Japanese Modernity 31

The ideas of the great tea master Rikyu¯ (1522–1591) are recorded in Nan- bo¯roku (Writings of Nanpo¯). Although the identity of the author is uncertain, the record is believed to have been written by Nambo¯So¯kei. Little is known of his career, but the record bears his name. This text expressively and repeatedly demonstrates that the practice of the tea way conforms to “the standard of the pure rules of the Zen monastery.” Although spirit of Zen Buddhism rather than Buddhism in general informs the tea way, this does not mean that the tea way is “specifically” Zen Buddhistic, excluding other spiritual directions. (A genuine specificity is always a space in which and as which the whole specifies itself.) In fact, Zen Buddhism is known to emphasize commonplaceness. The ultimate goal is not the superior experience of awakening or enlightenment but rather practice in everyday life, to which one must come back after one has reached enlightenment. Nanbo¯roku records Rikyu¯’s comment on the simple but deep idea of the tea way, which is “nothing more than boiling water, making tea, followed by tea-drinking.” 10 The following interchange takes place between Rikyu¯and Nambo¯So¯kei:

Rikyu¯ one day quoted a proverb: “One who transcends this world is at home just in this world.” So¯kei could not understand the meaning precisely and was rather confused, and asked Rikyu¯ how he himself realized enlightenment. Rikyu¯ answered: “I am innocent and do not know as much about the enlightenment of the ancient master and Dharma as you. But you are rather confused, because you depend on the Buddhist writings (sutras). I talk only about tea.” 11

The quintessence of the tea way as a realization of the Zen spirit is, according to Rikyu¯, simply presenting tea in everyday life and not an esoteric tradition of enlightenment, as is often believed.

“Cut-Continuance” The Buddhistic sense of the “discontinuous continuity” between the common and deeper senses of “nature” is also to be found in Chikamatsu’s “interspace of skin membranes.” When this interspace is realized in art and as art, the art- world stands in a relation of discontinuous continuity to commonplace reality. The art-world as the unreal can be taken as a higher expression of the real world. Another term for “discontinuous continuity”— “kire” (cut)—will help to free the concept of “art-way” from an esoteric tradition so that we can examine it from the perspective of art in general. Although the term can be extended to other arts, “kire” was ﬁrst applied to a fundamental concept in Japanese poetry, “kire-ji” (cut syllable). The cut syllable interrupts a poem’s ﬂow of expression to create space for a new phase of poetic expression. A haiku by Basho¯will illustrate: 32 O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke

Old pond— Furuike ya a frog jumps in, kawazu tobikomu sound of water mizu no oto

The cut syllable in this poem is “ya,” after the word “furuike.” It corresponds to the short dash after the phrase “old pond.” The old pond— otherwise in- conspicuous—is highlighted by the “cut-continuance,” that is, the cut in the continuance by the cut syllable “ya.” It introduces a new phrase with a frog that jumps into the pond. The tranquility of the pond is emphasized or stressed by the sound of the water. A commonplace natural event is extracted or cut out in this poem and brought to our attention. Through this cut, the commonplaceness or naturalness of ordinary life is suddenly highlighted and expressed anew. The poem itself becomes a “cut” at this point. Basho¯ himself extended the meaning of the cut syllable, writing that “all syllables of the al- phabet are cut syllables.” 12 The original meaning of “cut” is a technical incision by which the immediate naturalness of nature, still untouched by man, is cut off. This, however, means that nature is cut out or isolated from its immediate naturalness and appears in its inner and deeper naturalness. The cut does not merely cease or dissect the flow but connects it to the new flow. The word “kire” (cut) is therefore often combined with the word “tsuzuki” (continuance). The term “kire- tsuzuki” (cut-continuance) has been used not only in poetry but also in art in general. This kind of “cut” is not only a feature of traditional Japanese art but also and above all of “life.” The task of being a poet presupposes a decisive departure from everyday life. This departure is one form of “cut.” Basho¯em- barked on the journey, lived on the journey, and, by making the journey his home, grew to realize that it is precisely the journey that constitutes the real nature of life. By “cutting” through ordinary nature, he discovered the deeper nature of life. Through the journey as cut, he became a poet, and his poems repeatedly convey the experience of mortality. For Basho¯, embarking on the journey and the “cut” from ordinary life represent Zen Buddhistic practice. A more expressive example of the cut- continuance as Zen spirit is to be found in the so-called dry garden (“karesansui”; literally, “arid mountain-and-water”) in Japanese landscape architecture. The most austere form of this garden architecture can be seen in the famous “rock garden” of the Ryo¯an Temple in Kyoto. This simple garden, situated in a rectangular area of 336.6 square meters and surrounded by a plain wall, consists of fifteen stones laid out on gravel—and nothing more. There is no evidence of either plants or sculptures. Rocks and gravel are used to evoke mountains and rivers. The question is, Why choose “arid mountains and rivers,” that is, lifeless rocks and cold gravel, instead of living trees and flowing wa- Hermeneutic Approach to Japanese Modernity 33 ter? The landscape gardener and great Zen master Muso¯ (1275 –1352) intended to “wither” the natural elements of the mountain and river water by cutting off the naturalness of nature. The stillness and motion, austerity and play, of the natural world, are reproduced by cutting off the organic life of the natural world.13 Chikamatsu’s “interspace of the skin membranes,” which is realized through the transformation of “himaku” into “hiniku,” is a field of cut-continuance through which the Japanese art-way was formed. Yet another example shows this cut-continuance clearly: flower displays, or “ikebana” (literally, “living flowers” or “flower invigoration”). A flower in ikebana is “cut” and severed from natural life. However, while it no longer possesses roots and cannot reproduce on its own, its actual finite nature and naturalness is expressed in pure terms.14 Now we can go back to “iki”—the starting point of our reflection—and regard it anew from the perspective of “cut-continuance.” “Iki” is a style of life and art that manifests itself in speaking, walking, sitting, and other movements and gestures as well as in the fields of design, architecture, and music. According to Kuki, “iki” comprises three elements as the basic constituents of these expressions. The first is “idealized coquetry.” Because the tension of the relationship between man and woman in the form of coquetry culminates in the sexual act, idealized coquetry demands moral and ascetic restraint. Kuki discerned behind the idealized coquetry of “iki” the moral idealism of the “way of the warrior” (bushido¯) as well as the practice of renunciation in Bud- dhism. These two are the second and third elements of “iki,” respectively. Kuki saw a typical manifestation of “iki” in the resolute and proud but re- strained and gentle behavior of the yu¯jo (literally, “play-woman”). The popular but misleading name for this occupation is geisha. The yu¯jo is a woman who entertains men with the practice of such arts as music and dance, but she is not a prostitute in the common sense. In early modern Japan she would have lived in a special community informed by a highly refined aesthetic style, which was an important element of the aesthetic life at the time. For this reason, such women often figure in woodblock prints from the period. Many yu¯jo, however, were forced to enter the profession because their parents were poor and had no choice but to sell their daughters. Such circumstances obliged them to renounce worldly happiness in their lives. As I mentioned earlier, for Kuki the study of “iki” was ultimately a matter of explicating the specific way of being of the Japanese people as a whole, in a kind of “hermeneutics of existence as a people.” What then is the relationship between “cut” and the other two elements of “iki”? First the idealism of the warrior class and the renunciation of Buddhism both involve some kind of cutting. A warrior must be constantly ready to die in battle. In the way of the warrior, this readiness for death, which everyday 34 O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke life chooses to forget, becomes everyday life. Everydayness is “cut off,” but precisely through this cutting off there arises a new daily life in which one is aware of one’s own mortality. What Buddhism calls “renunciation” is another decisive cutting. Kuki explains the idea by way of the Japanese term “akirame” (literally, “illuminate”). Renunciation brings an illuminating insight into the processes of the world and into one’s own fate. Egoistic wishes and desires are cut off by means of this insight, and one attains purified life. In this way, the cut-continuance of life is realized. Although it is clear that the principal condition for “iki” lies in a “cut,” we still need to ask what kind of cutting led to the attitude of “iki.” It was apparently not the same radical and severe cut we saw exemplified in the rock garden of Ryo¯anji. The epoch during which “iki” came to prominence as a life- ideal had reached a stage of cultural overripeness, made possible by a long period of peace and economic prosperity. The way of the warrior originated during two centuries without war. With no opportunity for warriors to practice their martial arts in actual combat, readiness for death was idealized in the way of the warrior and refined into an ideal mode of expression. The art of the sword as the art of killing became an art of practicing living and at the same time a “way” as a mode of life. The same is true for Buddhism, which, as a result of the economic and cultural blossoming of feudalistic society in Japan, lost the momentum gained from the tensely creative Kamakura (1185 –1333) and Muromachi (1392– 1573) periods, during which people found themselves constantly exposed to real death. The moral influence had long since passed into the hands of Confu- cianism, which took over the feudalistic social system with its ideas of order. Thus, renunciation as a Buddhist attitude of this period was a “cut” of eased sharpness through which precisely the attitude of “iki” arose.15 In my hermeneutic reflection, the art-way turns out to be the way of “cut- continuance” in various forms and fields of art in which naturalness and commonplaceness in a specific sense are to be realized. How then does the art-way suggest a way to understand Japanese modernity and “Japaneseness”? “Nature,” as the space of discontinuous continuity between the commonplace life-world and the art-world, as was expressed in the art-way,16 suggests that the same cut-continuance will also exist along the axis of the historical world. The life-world or our natural and customary “own-world” always comes into existence through historical development. From the art-way perspective, this development in Japanese culture “cuts” naturalness and expresses it again as an art through this discontinuity. The history of Japanese culture overall can be characterized by a tendency to renew itself by implicating and appropriat- ing a malleable “other-world.” The nationalization of alien cultures that have entered Japanese culture every few centuries has been a source of renewal. Hermeneutic Approach to Japanese Modernity 35

From antiquity until the Middle Ages, this other-world lay in China. Since the modern era, the “West” came to be a new other-world. The process of modernization overlapped with the process of the appropriation of this other- world.17 The history of Japanese culture has thus been the history of a “nature” repeatedly born anew through the cut-continuance relation with the “other in its own self.” “Japaneseness” existed not as something substantive but as a process of metamorphosis of this “nature.” The art-way’s elaboration of “nature” as artistic expression is an excellent example of “Japaneseness” understood in this way. Thus, the risk in Kuki Shu¯zo¯’s interpreting “iki” as the “hermeneutics of the existence of the Japanese folk” lay less in transforming Japaneseness into Europeanness, as Heidegger feared, than in rejecting Europeanness from his own-world. 4

Frame and Link A Philosophy of Japanese Composition

Amagasaki Akira

The pleasure is deduced solely from the sense of identity—of repetition. Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition

I would like to begin by recalling a conversation with a European aesthetician about the structuralist analysis of poetry. Listening to his reasoning, I gradually came to feel uneasy. It took me awhile to realize that his prem- ises about poetry were completely different from mine. He held that parallel structures are among the most distinctive feature of poetry, while for me— and for most Japanese readers—repetition is not a priority in poetry. We must remember that the major form of Japanese poetry, tanka, has thirty-one syllables in five verses, the upper strophe of which has three lines with five, seven, and five syllables, the lower strophe of which has two lines with seven syllables each. It is thus impossible for a tanka to be divided into symmetri- cal parts, and, therefore, normally it cannot have rhyme. For Japanese poets parallelism is not a necessary condition for tanka-esque poetry. In this essay, I will analyze principles of poetry in the Japanese tradition to find whether there are common criteria for discussing poetry in both Japanese and Western traditions.

Frame—Parallelism When we hear or read a text, we can easily tell whether that text is in verse or prose because its composition follows different principles. Roman Jakobson’s discussion of “poetic function” in Linguistics and Poetics offers a description of verse composition: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence

36 Frame and Link 37 from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination.” 1 Verse repeats equivalent words. Repetition attracts its readers or audience to the formal frame rather than the semantic content of the lines of a poem. Jakobson cites as an example the campaign slogan in the 1956 U.S. presidential election: “I like Ike.” 2 Equivalence can be found on either the acoustic or the semantic level. Acoustic equivalence, which plays a significant role in Western tradition, has two phases: the tonal sameness of vowels or consonants and the structural sameness of rhythm. For poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jakobson notes, verse is “speech wholly or partially repeating the same figure of sound.” 3 Let us call acoustic equivalence with this kind of noticeable order an “acoustic pattern.” In the Western tradition, lines with an acoustic pattern are “verse.” Acoustic patterns that are not simply a repetition of the same acoustic figure but also the regular reiteration of equivalent units, can be called “parallelism.” Jakob- son cites Hopkins once more: “The artificial parts of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism.” 4 In the Western tradition, rhyme is a main feature of poetry, and as Jakobson says, “rhyme is only a particular, condensed case of a much more general, we may even say the fundamental, problem of poetry, namely parallelism.” 5 In West- ern culture, a poem might often be regarded as a text constructed under the principle of parallelism. Although I have suggested that Japanese poets tend to avoid parallelism, this does not hold true for the poetry of ancient Japan. In Japan, as in China, poets employed parallelism for verse and prose and was called “tsuiku,” a Chi- nese term meaning “coupled phrases.” Japanese intellectuals in ancient times read the Chinese classics, wrote formal documents in Chinese, and even composed poems in the fixed forms of Chinese classical poetry, where many tsuiku can be found. Parallel constructions occur on a semantic as well as an acoustic level. The following tsuiku was originally written in Chinese by Yoshishige Yasutane in the tenth century:

Togan seigan no yanagi | chisoku onajikarazu Nanshi hokushi no ume | kairaku sudeni kotonari

Willows on the east bank and the west bank | some sway fast and others slow. Plum blossoms on the south branch and the north branch | some bloom and others fall

The parallelism of tsuiku is often semantic rather than acoustic, perhaps because the Japanese language lacks accent and has comparatively few vowels, making it difﬁcult to form strong acoustic patterns. Note that the paired lines contain not only parallelism of semantic content but also syntactic repetition. 38 Amagasaki Akira

This type of parallelism, which we can also find in the famous beginning of the Heike Monogatari (The Tales of the Heike), has been employed quite often in all kinds of Japanese literary writing because it enables tight connections between the elements of tsuiku. In early Japanese poetry, there were two major forms: cho¯ka (long verse) and tanka (short verse). Cho¯ka allows as many lines as the poet chooses, as long as each line has twelve syllables, which must be separable into sets of five and seven, with the exception of the last line, which consists of seven and seven. Many semantically coupled lines are found in cho¯ka. The ritual texts addressed to Shinto gods contain many tsuiku. Tsuiku is, thus, the marker that distinguished poetical and sacred texts from ordinary prose. Tsuiku can also be found in many tanka. Ancient tanka allows several forms of division, and each form has its specific way of making tsuiku. Tanka separable in three parts, which consist of 5 ϩ 7, 5 ϩ 7, and 7 syllables, often contain tsuiku in the first two parts. For example,

Aoniyoshi, Narayamagai yo Shirotae ni, Kono tanabiku wa Harugasumi nari

Beautifully blue | Nara mountains between which Whitely | there drifting are Spring mists

Ancient tanka could also be divided into two parts: 5 ϩ 7 and 5 ϩ 7 ϩ 7 syllables, too. According to Furuhashi Nobutaka, this is an elided form of the supposed “archetype” of tanka, which had two 5 ϩ 7 ϩ 7 syllable sections. In this archetypal form—and in ancient tanka—the ﬁnal seven syllables often repeat the second verse of seven syllables, as we can see in the following example:

Wa re wa moya, Yasumiko etari Mina hito no, egatenisu tou, Yasumiko etari

I have already | got Miss Yasumiko Everyone says | it is difﬁcult to get | Miss Yasumiko I got

Whether we think of the tanka form as the repetition of 5 ϩ 7 with an additional seven syllables or as an abbreviation of the repetition of 5 ϩ 7 ϩ 7, the parallel remains the same. However, by the end of the eighth century, tanka underwent a fundamental change in its inner structure: the “break” Frame and Link 39 shifted from the end of the second to the end of the third verse. This change really marks a uniquely Japanese tanka tradition, established independently from Chinese influence. Tanka’s two parts are now a first strophe of 5 ϩ 7 ϩ 5 (three verses of seventeen syllables) and a second strophe of 7 ϩ 7 (two verses of fourteen syllables). With this development, the aesthetics of Japanese poetry was strictly distinguished from that of ancient days because this form is far less suitable for either semantic or acoustic parallelism. We can even see a strong avoidance of parallelism among the poets in those days. In kahei, the poetic “diseases” to be avoided in composition (one of the major topics of Japa- nese poetics), two kinds of disease were commonly named, despite the diverse positions among theoreticians at that time: do¯shin (same meaning) and seiin (syllabic rhyme). Do¯shin indicates the recurrence of the same meaning in different words, while seiin indicates the recurrence of the same syllabic sound at the end of each strophe. In this case, Japanese aesthetic theory stands in contrast to Western and Chinese traditions, which tend to favor rhyme. I don’t mean to suggest that the Japanese dislike all forms of parallelism. Prose in Japan traditionally includes two styles: a “Japanese style” prose written in kana (the phonetic signs for the Japanese language) with a pure Japanese vocabulary and the “mixed style” with Japanese and Chinese (wakan-konko¯- bun) written in kana and kanji (Chinese characters) with a Japanese and Chi- nese vocabulary (pronounced in the Japanese manner). Certainly, in “Japanese style” prose it was not desirable to use tsuiku too much. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Kamo no Cho¯mei wrote in Mumyo¯sho¯ (Nameless Trea- tise), his book on tanka, that a text with too many tsuiku will look like Chinese, not Japanese. Japanese poets associated parallelism with Chinese literature. However, Cho¯mei himself used many tsuiku in his Ho¯jo¯ki (The Ten-Foot- Square Hut), an essay that has always been popular in Japan for its rhythmical phrasing. The famous Heike Monogatari is full of tsuiku as well. Having accepted Chinese vocabulary into Japanese prose, Japanese poets also accepted the method of tsuiku and loved its sweet rhythm. However, the situation was quite different in tanka. As a specific kind of poetry, tanka is based on a formal principle that is different from—and perhaps even irreconcilable with— parallelism.

Link—The Network of Association In the Middle Ages, a treatise called the Etsumokusho was very famous and in- ﬂuential among beginners in tanka composition because it was believed to be a work by an old master and contained useful instructions for aspiring poets. The Etsumokusho vehemently criticized two wrong types of tanka: “kubi-kire” 40 Amagasaki Akira

(cut off head) and “koshi-ore” (broken hipbone). “Kubi-kire” occurs when the ﬁrst verse of a tanka, metaphorically seen as the head, is badly connected with the second verse. For example,

Samidare ni | shiranu somaki no | nagarekite | onoreto watasu | tani no kakehashi

After the early summer rain | unknown woods | have come down | built by itself | a bridge in the valley

After making the sarcastic remark that you can crawl with a broken hipbone but you will die if your head is cut off, the Etsumokusho improves on the kubi- kire tanka by presenting the following verses:

Samidare wa | furu no takahashi | mizu koete | nami bakari koso | tachiwatarikere

Early summer rain | falls on the high bridge of Furu | waters run over | only waves | come and go across

The homophonic word “furu” plays two roles in the poem: as a verb, “fall,” and as a place name, referring to a high bridge on the Furu River. As a verb, it is connected to the first verse “early summer rain,” and as a place name it is a part of the verse “furu no takahashi” (the high bridge of Furu), which was well known from the classics. In tanka terminology, “furu” is an engo (associated word) for “samidare” (early summer rain) as well as a kake-kotoba (pivot word) for the verb “fall” and the place name “Furu.” Thanks to these devices, the head, “samidare,” is smoothly linked to the body of the poem. In the same way, the last part of the poem’s first section (the third verse) must be smoothly linked to the top part of the second section (the fourth verse) to avoid a broken hipbone. In several ancient tanka, homophones served to link phrases that are semantically alien. The typical structure of tanka in the Man’yo¯shu¯ consists of two sentences: One depicts scenery, the other expresses emotion. They are usually linked by repeating the same figure of sound:

Suminoe no | kishi ni mukaeru | Awaji-shima aware to kimi wo | iwanu hi wa nashi

Against the Suminoe’s coast | there is Awaji-shima Island “aware” I say for you | every day Frame and Link 41

“Aware” is an interjection like “ah!” or “oh!” The phonetic repetition of “awa” links two lines that semantically have no relation. In contrast to Chi- nese and Western poetry, where phonetic repetition such as rhyme constitutes a framework of parallel structures, phonetic repetition in the Man’yo¯shu¯ links two lines that have different structures. It switches the topic of the line from landscape to emotion, just like a railroad switch. According to the Etsumokusho, while composing tanka a poet should con- centrate on ﬁnding phonetic or semantic links (en), namely kake-kotoba or engo. En—relation or association that serves to link words or phrases— was regarded as the most essential syntactical principle of tanka in medieval Japan. Generally speaking, the principle of form is the essential condition of poetry. In tanka such a principle is found in the notions of “frame” and “link.” A “frame” shapes the lines into a pattern through forms of parallelism such as rhyme or tsuiku. A “link,” such as en, combines verses that would otherwise be semantically or grammatically unlinkable. European tropes such as metaphor and metonymy can also be regarded as instruments for links. Any poetic convention in the world may include these two devices, but in the Japanese tradition the “link” played a much more signiﬁcant role than the “frame.” A great many link conventions were created in tanka composition—conventions such as kake-kotoba, engo, uta-makura (conventional place names in the classics), and makura kotoba (pillow words).

Perspective and Transition Frame and link are general principles for organizing elements into a whole. To understand their function, we might want to consider different ways in which individual persons are organized into a group. When establishing a business corporation or an army, for instance, roles and ranks within the overall structure must first be designed, then people must be recruited to fill the posts. When a family member marries, however, the married couple links two fami- lies. Another marriage will link another family to the first, and if these fami- lies make one big family in a society, you may be called on to be a godparent. The first type of organization gives priority to the structure of the whole, or the frame. The number of members cannot increase or decrease unless the structure is redesigned. The second type depends on links—the end of a family chain always remains open. The number of members will change with mar- riages, adoptions, and divorces. Yakuza organizations expand themselves by means of this family link. Within the first type of group, the function of each integrated part can be grasped by regarding the design of the whole, while to 42 Amagasaki Akira understand the second type of group as a whole we must consider how each local group is connected: It is not an organic system but a patchwork. Other illustrative examples can be found in the different ways gardens are designed. The Jardin du Palais de Versailles, designed in a strictly geometric order, must be appreciated from a God’s-eye view, seeing the whole at once, in a single glance or from a single perspective. This type of garden is to be regarded as the art of space. When entering a Japanese garden, however, the visitor is required to walk along the small paths like a wanderer, to view the scenery gradually, step by step, as the scene changes like a picture scroll. While wan- dering, the visitor may find a small bridge on her way and look down to watch her steps, and after crossing it, when she looks up again, she may find that every impression has been changed, even if half the scenery remains the same. The visitor appreciates the transition of scenery as well as the scenery itself. This type of garden, then, must be regarded as an art of time. The organizing principle of the French garden is the frame, in which what matters is the structure of the whole, while the Japanese garden is designed according to the link principle, for which the transition of details is the most important thing. The small bridge, which connects the different scenery, can be compared with kake-kotoba in tanka, which links alien verses. As a visitor to a Japanese garden enjoys the transitions of the scenery, the audience of tanka appreciates not only smooth but also sharp transitions of images. In renga (chained tanka), a game relying on the principle of link, one hundred verses (each one half a tanka)are linked with each other into a single chain. In renga every tanka shares its half with another, connected tanka, although they must not share the same image, which is to say that every half tanka plays a double role, similarly to kake- kotoba. In renga (the most popular form of Japanese literature during the Mid- dle Ages), participants found the drama of overlapping transitions exciting.

Conclusion While meaning is especially important for prose (a medium of communication), form is essential for poetry, which is basically an object of appreciation. Greatness in poetry is achieved with a rhetoric of form, not of content. It is interesting that in Western, Chinese and Japanese traditions the Jakobsonian principle of “equivalence” is employed as the syntax of poetry, although in different ways. There are several classes of equivalence. We can, for instance, distinguish phonetic equivalence (constructed of homophones or meter) from semantic equivalence, such as the conventional association of words or the engo network, whose counterparts in the West would be the synonym, antonym, metonymy, and synecdoche. Parallelism achieved by repeating the same syn- Frame and Link 43 tactic structure can also be added to this class, as we have seen in the example of Yoshishige Yasutane’s tsuiku. In the construction of verses, equivalence used for syntactic repetition should be strictly distinguished from equivalence used for overlapping two lines. The syntactic form of repetition can be further divided into the repetition of such elements as homophones or the succession of engo (for instance, “samidare,” “furu,” “mizu,” or “nami”) and the repetition of structures such as rhyme, meter, and tsuiku (parallelism). With parallelism it is possible to construct a strong frame by following normal grammatical rules, while links through en can, or rather should, be grammatically incorrect. In this case, not the grammar but the semantic equivalence works as the principle for putting the words together into a whole. Similarly, in lines constructed by means of overlap, two text lines are linked by sharing the same element through the tonal equivalence of words or phrases with different meanings. Kake-kotoba and honka-dori are also devices for overlap. Following the chain of words linked by en, we can enjoy a drama of images overlapping and metamorphosing despite grammatical incorrectness. Poetry constructed within the frame of structural repetition, as in Western and Chinese poetry, can be compared to architecture, which has a solid structure. In contrast, tanka based on the links of en, which introduce unexpected images one after another by repeating and overlapping elements, is analogous to dance improvisation with surprising transﬁgurations. Equivalence is surely indispensable in both cases, but poetry built of structural repetition uses it to construct a spatially closed whole, while tanka employs it to articulate the temporal transition of details. 5

The Eloquent Stillness of Stone Rock in the Dry Landscape Garden

Graham Parkes

Japanese studies in the West have often been intoxicated by exoticism to the point of uncritical adulation of their subject, while the corresponding enterprise in Japan has frequently taken the form of Nihonjinron, beginning as discussions of what it means to be Japanese but then degenerating into “theories of Japanese uniqueness.” Some of the writing on Japanese gardens has tended to overemphasize their uniqueness in terms of generalized oppositions of the “Western gardens are this” versus “Japanese gardens are not-this” variety. Recent scholarship on Japan in the United States, however, has sometimes overreacted to the silliness of the Nihonjinron literature by claiming that in fact the Japanese are not as different from us as they like to think, thereby dis- solving all cultural practices (and discourses) into a flat postmodernist mé- lange of indifférance. There is a danger in overlooking features of Japanese culture that make it genuinely different and eminently worth studying. The Japanese dry landscape (karesansui) garden is a distinctive cultural product, significantly different even from its antecedents in China, and full aesthetic appreciation of it depends on understanding some of the philosophical ideas behind the development of the genre. Of particular importance in this context is the way that stone has been understood in the East Asian tradition, which differs significantly from the corresponding conceptions in mainstream Western thought. The history of the Japanese garden is a long and complex one, and the reflections that follow concern only those aspects that will enhance our appreciation of the karesansui style in particular. Because stone has in general been understood differently in the Western traditions from the way it has been regarded in East Asia, a focus on the role of rock in these cultures may be especially helpful for the foreign viewer of— or reflector on—such gardens. Let us begin by considering a concrete case.

44 Eloquent Stillness of Stone 45

1 Saiho¯ji—recently better known as Kokedera, the “Moss Temple”—lies nes- tled against the hills bordering Kyoto on the west and harbors the oldest surviving example of karesansui. When visiting the dry landscape there, the best strategy (after the obligatory calligraphy practice and chanting of the Heart Sutra) is to take up a position at the rear of the phalanx of visitors as it makes its way around the famous pond of the lower garden. This will allow one later to linger for a while in undisturbed contemplation of the upper garden, after the other visitors have moved off down the hill to the main temple buildings and exit. From the steep path that leads up to the garden, one sees to the left a magnificent group of rocks floating on a bed of moss and arranged in the “turtle-island” style, evoking the Daoist Isles of the Immortals. This group was probably set originally on a sea of white gravel, which was dispersed and covered by moss during a period when the temple grounds were left derelict.1 It is a wonderfully down-to-earth rendering of the paradisal Chinese topos. The angular shapes of the rocks together with their arrangement, which leaves spaces among them, make for a composition that looks perfect from whatever angle it is viewed. The turtle-island group is like an overture to the main body of the work, the “dry cascade” (karetaki) in the uppermost part of the garden. Here fifty or so rocks in three tiers descend the hillside, evoking a waterfall deep in the mountains. Most of the rocks are covered with lichen and surrounded by “pools” of moss. They are bordered by some moderate-size trees, several of which describe graceful arcs over the edges of the arrangement. The moss, together with the lichen that clothes the rocks in varying thicknesses, offers a remarkable array of colors: browns, dark grays, mauves, oranges, and many shades of sometimes iridescent green. A few miniature ferns and a scattering of dead pine needles add contrasting touches. The warm colors of the moss pools stand out against the cooler hues of the bare stone, and when wetted by rain all the colors become impressively more saturated. If the sun is shining, its rays filter through the trees and highlight different elements of the composition differentially. When the branches sway in the wind, light and shade play slowly over the entire scene, the movements accentuating at first the stillness of the rocks. Further contemplation brings to mind Zen master Do¯gen’s talk of “mountains flowing and water not flowing.” 2 In corresponding natural settings—what the Japanese call sho¯toku no sansui, landscape “as in life”—adoption of the appropriate perspective can reveal rock configurations of remarkable beauty in which all elements are in proper interrelation. The viewing area at the foot of the dry cascade at Saiho¯ji is now quite 46 Graham Parkes restricted, allowing minimal variation of standpoint, but the composition is nonetheless breathtaking in its “rightness.” Not even Cézanne, that consummate positioner of rocks in relation to trees—albeit in two dimensions— could have effected a more exquisite arrangement. At first sight, the dry cascade gives the impression of being situated in a sacred grove, a place of natural numinosity. The tensions set up by the soaring arcs of the surrounding trees and the angular density of the rock arrangement, between the stillness of the stone and the dynamism of the descending-tiers composition, imbue the site with an almost supernatural power. Anyone ac- quainted with the indigenous Japanese religion of Shinto is going to feel the presence here of kami in high concentrations. Shinto shares with many other religions a view for which the entire natural world is animated and pervaded by spirits. Rocks in particular were thought to be inhabited by various kami, or divinities, and the more impressive ones (iwakura) were treated with special reverence as abodes of divine spirits. It was a natural step to then supplement nature by building piles of rocks to attract kami to a particular place, and these became the prototypes of the arrangements that would grace Japanese gardens in later centuries. Because rocks were regarded as numinous long before the importation of fengshui and garden lore from China, their role in the Japanese garden became ever more important. The upper garden at Saiho¯ji manifests several antinomies. Although the scene looks natural at first sight, the composition instantiates a highly sophisticated design. Whereas the rocks themselves appear natural, though selected for their mainly horizontal shapes, they are in fact hewn (as components of a former burial mound); and, as a dry cascade, the composition presents, and makes strangely present, water that is literally absent. Several of the larger rocks have vertical streaks and striations, like the “waterfall rocks” (taki-ishi) often found in Japanese gardens, where the streaks create the illusion of a cascade. Some water does, of course, run down these rocks in heavy rain; but the mossy ground surrounding absorbs the runoff, so that no actual streams develop to spoil the effect of a cascade that is dry in all seasons. Several commentators have mentioned what is perhaps the most powerful effect of this garden: If one can arrange to contemplate it alone on a windless day, the almost total silence is occasionally interrupted by the deafening roar of a waterfall that is not there.3 One is again reminded of Do¯gen: “When the voices of the valley are heard, waves break back upon themselves and surf crashes high into the sky.” 4 It is perhaps the evocation of an absence through two sensory dimensions at once that accounts for the dry cascade’s strange power. The arrangement of the rocks induces the viewer to see a cataract that is not there, and the imaginative projection of down-flowing water seems to animate the motionless rocks with an unsettling movement. The effect is Eloquent Stillness of Stone 47 enhanced by the auditory hallucination of rushing waters—a disturbing experience for visitors unaccustomed to hearing things that are not there. It is reassuring, however, to know that hearing with the eyes is not regarded as abnormal by Zen masters: In discussing the mystery of how nonsentient beings preach the Buddhist teachings, Do¯gen quotes from a poem by the Zen master To¯zan Ryo¯kai, who says, “If we hear the sound through the eyes, we are able to know [the mystery].” 5 The gardens at Saiho¯ji are attributed to the Zen monk Muso¯ Soseki (1275 – 1351), who lived some three generations after Do¯gen. (The seki in his name is, appropriately, a reading of the graph for “rock.”) Muso¯ wrote a poem with the title “Ode to the dry landscape” (“Karesanzui no in”), which begins,

Without a speck of dust’s being raised, the mountains tower up; without a single drop’s falling, the streams plunge into the valley.6

Simply by arranging rocks in the upper garden of Saiho¯ji, the author transforms a hillside into the face of a mountain, and with not a drop of water in sight, cataracts rush loudly down.

2 The dry cascade at Saiho¯ji is the most famous ancestor of the Zen gardens in the karesansui style, even though dry landscapes date back to the Heian period. The earliest surviving manual for garden design is the Sakuteiki (Notes on garden-making), attributed to the eleventh-century nobleman Tachibana no Toshitsuna. Even though the text deals with the Heian-period pleasure gardens of the nobility with their ponds and streams, a section near the beginning contains the first mention of karesansui in the literature. “Sometimes rocks are placed where there is no pond or running water. This is called a dry landscape. This kind of dry landscape is to be found at the foot of a mountain, or when one wants to furnish the area between hill and plain one sets rocks in it.” 7 This sounds much like the dry cascade at Saiho¯ji, which is often seen as the ultimate example of karesansui as described in the Sakuteiki. (Muso¯’s work at Saiho¯ji is also regarded as representing a break with the tradition by inau- gurating dry landscape as an independent style.) A look at this classic treatise, about one-quarter of which is devoted to the topic of rocks, will help us better understand their role in the Japanese art of garden making. The Sakuteiki begins on a note of stone: “When arranging rocks [in a garden], it is first and foremost necessary to grasp the overall sense.” 8 The garden 48 Graham Parkes maker must first of all cultivate a sense of the genius loci, acquire a sound “feeling for the place.” The relevant term here, fuzei, refers equally to the atmosphere or appearance of the place and to the aesthetic feeling or emotion inspired in the viewer. The garden maker is then encouraged to recall natural landscapes, and indeed the most beautiful among them, to understand how something comparable could be effected in the particular site for the garden. The idea is that nature is already a consummate artist, even though we may have to cultivate our sensibility and modify our customary perspective to fully appreciate this. There is also an injunction to follow the example of the great figures in the traditional art of the garden and adapt what one learns from them to the current task. These are two salient features of the East Asian arts generally, where one follows both nature and tradition so as to make a creative contribution in the present. The garden maker is thus supposed to institute two kinds of movement: a movement in space, whereby the beauty of famous scenic places is invoked in the present site of the garden, and a movement in time, whereby the beauty of famous gardens of the past is emulated.9 The opening words “Ishi o tate ...” literally mean “when placing rocks,” but this locution eventually acquired the broader sense of “when making a garden,” which demonstrates the centrality of rock arranging to the development of that art in Japan. The primary principle to be observed is exemplified in the frequent occurrences of the locution kowan ni shitagau, which means “following the request [of the rock].” It is used to encourage a responsiveness on the part of the garden maker to what we might call the “soul” of the stone: The translator refers in this context to the Japanese term ishigokoro, meaning the “heart,” or “mind,” of the rock.10 Rather than imposing a preconceived design on the site and the elements to be arranged there, the accomplished garden maker will be sensitive to what the particular rocks “want.” If he listens carefully, they will tell him where they best belong. For example, under the heading of “Oral Instructions concerning the Plac- ing of Rocks,” the reader (listener) is advised to position first the “master rock” with its distinct character and then “proceed to set the other rocks in compli- ance with the ‘requesting mood’ of the Master Rock.” 11 The vocabulary of rock arranging was quite sophisticated by the time the Sakuteiki was written, as evidenced by the large number of terms of art applied to different kinds of stone in this short text. They range from the ordinary, such as waki-ishi (side rock) and fuse-ishi (lying rock); through specialized terms used in connection with ponds, streams, and waterfalls, such as namikae-ishi (wave-repelling rock), mizu-kiri-no-ishi (water-cutting rock), and tsutai-ishi (stepping-stone); to the unusual, such as shu-ishi (master rock), sanzon-seki (Buddhist triad rocks), ishigami (demon rock), and ryo¯seki (rock of vengeful spirits). A passage containing advice on the arrangement of rocks at the foot of hill- Eloquent Stillness of Stone 49 sides assimilates them to the animal realm: They should be placed in such a way as to resemble “a pack of dogs crouching on the ground, or a running and scattering group of pigs, or else calves playing beside a recumbent mother cow.” The theriomorphism gives way to personification: “In general, for one or two ‘running away’ rocks one should place seven or eight ‘chasing rocks.’ The rocks may thus resemble, for example, children playing a game of tag.” The dyad of “running” and “chasing” is followed by several others: “For the lean- ing rock there is the supporting rock, for the trampling rock the trampled, for the looking-up rock there is the looking-down one, and for the upright the recumbent.” 12 There is a substantial section of the Sakuteiki titled “Taboos on the Placing of Rocks,” which is full of warnings against violating taboos deriving from fengshui practices. However, a primary prohibition appears to be grounded more generally in a reluctance (not so evident in Chinese treatises on garden making) to infringe on naturalness.

Placing sideways a rock that was originally vertical, or setting up vertically one that was originally lying, is taboo. If this taboo is violated, the rock will surely turn into a “rock of vengeful spirits” and will bring a curse. Do not place any rock as tall as four or ﬁve feet to the north-east of the estate. A rock so placed may become fraught with vengeful spirits, or else may afford a foothold for evil to enter, with the result that the owner will not dwell there for long. However, if the spirits of such a rock are opposed by Buddhist triad rocks set to the south-east corner of the site, evil karma will not gain entry.13

There is a combination of considerations drawn from fengshui (the northeast as the most inauspicious direction) and Buddhism. The author cites a Song- dynasty writer who says that in cases where rocks have ended up in a different orientation as a result of having fallen down the mountainside, these may be repositioned in this way “because the change was effected not by human being but by nature.” However, in some provinces of Japan, the author warns, certain rocks may become demonic simply by being moved. Some configurations are to be avoided because they resemble the forms of Chinese characters with inauspicious meanings (such as the graph for “curse”), while others are to be encouraged for the opposite reason (as with a pattern of three rocks resembling the graph for “goods”—Jpn., shina).14 The misfortunes that will beset the master of the house if taboos are violated are various: He may lose the property, be plagued by illnesses (including skin diseases and epidemics), suffer harm from outsiders, and so forth. Even the women of the household will be adversely affected by transgressions in the layout, as when a valley between hills points toward the house. A later treatise on gardens, Sansui narabini Yakeizu (Illustrations of Land- 50 Graham Parkes scape Scenes and Ground-Forms), dates from the fifteenth century and bears the name of a Zen priest, Zo¯en, as its author. Whereas the Sakuteiki deals with Heian-period pleasure gardens from the point of view of the aristocratic owner, the Sansui manual is based on the experience of workmen “in the field” and treats much smaller medieval gardens designed to be viewed from the building to which they are adjacent—the so-called contemplation gardens (kansho¯- niwa).15 About half the text is devoted to the topic of rock arrangement. Whereas the Sakuteiki eschews the use of proper names for rocks, the San- sui manual speaks in Confucian terms of Master and Attendant Rocks: “The Master Rock looks after its Attendants, and the Attendant Rocks look up to the Master.” The Attendant Rocks are “flat-topped rocks, resembling persons with their heads lowered, respectfully saying something to the Master Rock.” Of similar Confucian origin are the “Respect and Affection Rocks,” which are “two stones set slightly apart with their brows inclined toward one another,” which are said later in the text to “create the impression of a man and a woman engaged in intimate conversation.” Aside from appellations deriving from the Confucian tradition, another section in the Sansui manual with the heading “Names of Rocks” lists dozens of names from the Daoist, Buddhist, and Shinto traditions (the “Rock of the Spirit Kings,” “Twofold World Rocks,” “Torii Rocks,” and so forth).16 The Sansui manual again issues warnings against breaking taboos, especially by reversing the “natural” or “original” position of a rock, which will “anger its spirit and bring bad luck.” 17 By contrast with the Sakuteiki, the later manual is richly illustrated, with numerous drawings and sketches. The brushwork suggests influence from Song-style landscape painting, which was being much imitated in Japan at the time, and some of the techniques and ideas about composing “garden views” and keiseki groups (depicting scenery in condensed form) may well be based on Song landscape theories.18

3 One of the most famous Japanese gardens to be inﬂuenced by Song landscape painting is the garden at Tenryu¯ji, which is also the second masterpiece attributed to Muso¯ Soseki. On the far side of the pond from the main building there is a dry cascade. Although consisting of fewer elements than its precur- sor at Saiho¯ji, it comprises much larger rocks of equally exquisite shape, which are again weathered with bands of lichen that suggest downﬂowing water. In view of the more open nature of this site—the garden at Tenryu¯ji is a beautiful example of shakkei, or “borrowed landscape,” where the composition is designed to include natural landscape beyond the garden—the luxuriant vegetation around the rocks accentuates their stark minerality. Again in contrast Eloquent Stillness of Stone 51 with the upper garden of Saiho¯ji, it is also a consummate example of shukkei, or “concentrated scenery,” in which a vast scene is compressed into a small space in the manner of a Song-dynasty landscape painting. Although their minerality is set into relief by the surrounding plant life, the rocks that make up the dry cascade look anything but lifeless. Nor is what animates them the minimal accommodation, on the part of these beings that have never known life or death, of the simplest life forms, lichen and moss. The longer one contemplates them, the more alive they appear with a life all their own. In the course of the sermon that Muso¯gave at Tenryu¯ji on becoming its founding abbot, he emphasized that dharma is to be found not only in sacred scriptures but also in the physical world around us.

Everything the world contains—grasses and trees, bricks and tile, all creatures, all actions and activities—are nothing but the manifestations of the Dharma [ho¯ ]. Therefore it is said that all phenomena in the universe bear the mark of this Dharma.... Every single person here is precious in himself, and everything here— plaques, paintings, square eaves and round pillars—every single thing is preaching the Dharma.19

Muso¯ is speaking from a venerable tradition of Japanese Buddhist thinking about the natural world (to be discussed in the last section). The idea that all things expound dharma (hosshin seppo¯) is central to Ku¯kai’s Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism, and Zen master Do¯gen is fond of insisting that “tiles and pebbles” are “Buddha-nature” (bussho¯) just as much as so-called sentient beings are.20 Even though the garden is designed to be viewed as a scroll painting from the veranda of the main building, it is a pity that visitors are no longer allowed to take the path that borders the pond around to the far side, so as to be able to see the rocks of the dry cascade at closer quarters. Nevertheless, the distant view allows one to appreciate the most significant contribution of the site at Tenryu¯ji, which is the mirroring effect of the pond. Only on a very windy day can one contemplate the waterless fall of rocks without being aware of its being “doubled” by the reflections in the pool at its base. The substantial rocks that seem to descend majestically down the hillside, harboring an invisible cascade, are mirrored by insubstantial inverted counterparts beneath them. However, rather than suggesting a contrast between the real and the illusory, the juxtaposition of rocks and reflections somehow evokes an interplay on the same ontological level. The natural world and its image, the substantial and its opposite, are both there at the same time. They are both necessary, belonging together: The point is simply to distinguish between them, which one can do only by acknowledging the insubstantial counterpart even when— or especially when—it is not directly presented in a mirror image. 52 Graham Parkes

4 The Japanese understandings of stone considered so far will appear, to a traditional Western perspective informed by Cartesian dualism, as “primitive animism” or, at the very least, crude anthropomorphism. Such a view itself comes, however, from a limited and parochial standpoint. Because Cartesian dualism deflated the “world soul” of antiquity, draining the anima mundi, as it were, and confining all soul to a locus within human beings alone, then any apparent animation of nonhuman phenomena must be seen as a result of anthropomorphic projection. The perspective is parochial in view of the widespread reverence for rocks in most other parts of the world. (The Australian aborigi- nal, Polynesian, and Native American traditions come immediately to mind, but respect for stone seems to come naturally for indigenous cultures.) For those of us who do not subscribe to Cartesian dualism, some such term as “panpsychism” might better denote worldviews that see humans on an unbroken continuum of “animateness” with natural phenomena. This is not to deny that the Cartesian perspective, insofar as it enabled the development of modern technology, has brought many benefits: It is simply to point out that it is only one perspective among many, however practically efficacious it may be. It is also a perspective that, through emphasizing our separateness and difference from the natural world, conduces to environmental degradation—and in part by obscuring our participation in the mineral realm. There are in fact a few figures in the Western tradition who have expressed a respect for stone in its natural state that is comparable to the respect it enjoys in East Asia, but only the names can be mentioned here: Goethe, Emer- son, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.21

5 The best way to approach the rock garden at Ryo¯anji—a later example of the karesansui style and for many its highest consummation—is slowly, avoiding what is today helpfully signposted as the “Usual Route.” It is such a relief to leave behind the commotion of traffic and bustle of the city and walk up the cobblestone pathway leading from the street that one is inclined to head for the famous site directly. However, the grounds of the temple as a whole are exquisite, and one could easily spend a day admiring the ponds, rocks, trees, and other vegetation that make up the environs of the dry landscape garden. To let the rock garden exert its most powerful effect, one does well to experience its context (something to which Buddhist philosophy is always sensitive) by contemplating beforehand the rich profusion of natural—though also arranged—beauty that surrounds it. In numerous subgardens, handsome Eloquent Stillness of Stone 53 rocks stand among elegant trees and bushes, while others lie, apparently slum- bering, in sun-illumined moss that glows green around them. Majestic stands of bamboo sway in the breeze, as if beckoning to shadowy backgrounds. Ex- otic palms thrust sharply skyward among trees that blossom delicately in the spring. Such profusion intensifies the eventual encounter with the distinct lack of profusion at the heart of these gardens, which the philosopher Hisamatsu Shin’ichi has suggested should be called “garden of emptiness” (ku¯tei) rather than “rock garden” (sekitei).22 Getting back to the “Usual Route”: On climbing the broad and gradual gradient of the steps that lead up to the buildings surrounding the rock garden, one might notice underfoot a variety of exquisitely colored cobblestones; and if the male visitor happens to pay a visit to the appropriate facilities before viewing the garden, he can enjoy from the window a unique preliminary perspective, through an opening in the garden wall, on the group of rocks nearest the far end. (I am assured that the angle of vision from the window of the women’s facilities does not, unfortunately, afford a similar view.) This is the time for the returning visitor to prepare to be astonished, on first stepping onto the wooden walkway that runs along the north side, at how small the garden is in area. Although it measures less than thirty meters from east to west and ten from north to south, one tends to remember it as being much larger than it really is. (At least in my own case, despite mental preparation each time, I never fail to be astonished by first seeing it again: Its image in memory remains persistently vast.) At first glance, a profound stillness seems to reign within the frame of the garden, a peace that contrasts at busy times with the hubbub on the walkway and, formerly, with the taped and loudspeakered announcements that used to proclaim the place as “the garden of emptiness.” There is also an overwhelming impression, initially, of sparse sterility—until one notices the moss that surrounds several of the rocks and the thin layer of lichen on some of them. Not much life for a garden, admittedly, but just enough insofar as it provides a striking contrast to the unremittingly inorganic nature of the rest. In summer the bright green of the moss echoes the lush colors of the trees, while in winter its darker greens and mauves match the hues of both the evergreens and the bare branches of the deciduous trees that border the wall. Being surrounded by a sea of gray gravel, the moss emphasizes the effect created by the “elements” of the garden being “cut off” from the nature outside. Without these touches of green life, the place would look quite different—just as the “seed” of white within the black part of the yin-yang figure (and vice versa) perfects the pattern. The “cut-off” is effected by the magnificent wall that runs the length of the garden and around the west side. The wall is a work of art in itself, though in- 54 Graham Parkes advertently so: Thanks to its having been made of clay boiled in oil, fantastic patterns have emerged over the centuries as the oil has gradually seeped out. Throughout most of its length, mysterious landscapes have appeared on the wall’s vertical face, suggesting mist-veiled depths, and its exquisitely weathered hues complement the colors of the rocks and moss it encloses. They are like Song landscape paintings on a horizontal scroll. The “skies” of these landscapes are cut off by a shingled roof running along the wall’s length, the angle of which (at around forty-five degrees) mediates perfectly between the interior space of the garden and the world outside. The wall thus exemplifies a technique known in Japanese aesthetic discourse as kire-tsuzuki, or “cut-continuance.” 23 The topos of the cut derives from Zen Buddhist thinking. The Rinzai master Hakuin urged his students to “cut off the root of life” through giving up the idea that the self is real, so that they can then “return to life” with renewed energies. There is a minor instance of this cut in the life-sustaining process of breathing: The moment between exhalation and inhalation, between contrac- tion and expansion, is a moment of “cut-continuance” (at least until the final cut when one breathes one’s last). Another exemplification is to be found in haiku poetry, which often employs what is called the kireji, or “cutting syllable,” which effects a cut at the end of a line—and at the same time links it to the next. A consummate example occurs in one of Basho¯’s best-known poems that begins,

Furuike ya An ancient pond— and where the ya at the end of the first line is a syllable that “cuts” to the next line—in much the same way as a director cuts from one scene to the next in a film, breaking and maintaining continuity at the same time. At Ryo¯anji, the wall cuts the rock garden off from the outside—and yet is low enough to permit a view of that outside from the viewing platform. This cut (which is itself double because of the angled roof that runs along the top of the wall) is most evident in the contrast between movement and stillness. Above the wall one sees nature in movement: Branches wave and sway, clouds float by, and the occasional bird flies past—though hardly ever, it seems, over the garden proper. Within the garden’s borders (unless rain or snow is falling or a stray leaf is blown across), the only visible movement is shadowed or illusory. In seasons when the sun is low, shadows of branches move slowly across the sea of gravel. This movement tends to accentuate the stillness of the rocks—to the point where even in its absence the rocks themselves seem to be on the move, to be in some sense “under way.” The garden is cut off on the near side, too, by a border of pebbles larger, Eloquent Stillness of Stone 55 darker, and more rounded than the pieces of gravel, which runs along the east and north edges. There is a striking contrast between the severe rectangular- ity of the garden’s borders and the irregular natural forms of the rocks within them. On closer inspection, the border on the east side turns out to have a right-angled kink in it, as if disrupted by the powerful presence of the large group of rocks adjacent to it. The expanse of gravel is also cut through by the upthrust of the rocks from below, earth energies mounting and peaking in irruptions of stone. Each group of rocks is cut off from the others by the expanse of gravel, the separation being enhanced by the ripple patterns in the raking that surrounds each group (and some individual rocks). Yet the overall effect is to intensify the invisible lines of connection among the rocks, whose interrelations exemplify the fundamental Buddhist insight of “dependent co-arising.” A related and more radical cut is to be found in the distinctively Japanese art of flower arrangement called ikebana. The term means literally “making flowers live”—a strange name, on first impression at least, for an art that begins by killing them. There is an exquisite essay by Nishitani Keiji on this marvelous art, in which the life of one of the most beautiful kinds of natural being is cut off, precisely to let the true nature of that being come to the fore.24 There is something curiously deceptive, from the Buddhist viewpoint of the impermanence of all things, about plants, insofar as they sink roots into the earth. In severing the flowers from their roots, Nishitani argues, and placing them in an alcove, one lets them show themselves as they really are: as absolutely rootless as every other being in this world of radical impermanence. Something similar is going on in the rock garden: as the cut-off from the surrounding nature has the effect of drying up its organic life, which then no longer decays in the usual manner. Karesansui literally means “dried up” or “withered” mountains and waters, but when Muso¯writes the word in the title of his “Ode to the Dry Landscape,” he uses a different graph for the kare with the meaning “provisional” or “temporary.” Being dried up, the mountains and waters of the garden at Ryo¯anji appear less temporary than their counterparts outside, which manifest the cyclical changes that natural life is heir to. Just as plants look deceptively permanent, however, thanks to their being rooted in the earth, so the impression of permanence given by the rocks of the dry landscape garden—especially strong for the visitor who returns decade after decade, each time feeling (and looking) distinctly more impermanent—is nevertheless misleading. They too shall pass away. The rocks and gravel are not real mountains and waters: They are just rocks and gravel, even though they are arranged like a landscape. Nishitani has emphasized the significance of this “like”-ness (nyo) in Zen, where each thing, 56 Graham Parkes thanks to its oneness with emptiness, is “an image without an original” and thus “like” itself alone.25 The last stanza of a poem by Do¯gen called “The Point of Zazen” reads,

The water is clean, right down to the ground, Fishes are swimming like [nyo] ﬁshes. The sky is wide, clear through to the heavens, And birds are ﬂying like [nyo] birds.26

The nyo is the Japanese equivalent for the Buddhist term “suchness”: In its oneness with emptiness, a being is what it is in being like what it is, in its “just-like-this-ness.” The rocks and gravel at Ryo¯anji, in being like mountains and waters but cut off from nature and dried up, conceal the mutable outward form of natural phenomena and thereby reveal their true form: suchness, as being one with emptiness. More concretely, Nishitani has explained their enigmatic power in terms of their ability to enlighten and teach.

We are within the garden and are not just spectators, for we have ourselves become part of the actual manifestation of the garden architect’s expression of his own enlightenment experience. The garden is my Zen master now, and it is your Zen master too.27 In a chapter of his major work titled “Voices of the River Valley, Shapes of the Mountain,” Do¯gen writes that while we are seeking a teacher, one may “spring out from the earth” and “make nonsentient beings speak the truth.” The more one contemplates this remarkable garden, and especially the interrelations among the fifteen rocks and the five groups, the more profoundly right the arrangement appears. The way this work generates a space vibrant with manifold energies has been compared to the famous black ink painting of the six persimmons by Mu Chi.28 There is much to justify the claim that these two works constitute the consummate expression of profound Buddhist ideas in the arts of East Asia. There is an aspect, however, of our aesthetic response to these rock gardens that has received insufficient attention in commentaries hitherto: the sense that the arranged rocks somehow “speak to us.” Whereas the aesthetics of Zen rock gardens have been discussed in terms of various concepts and ideas drawn from the Japanese tradition, little has been said about the ontological status of stone as understood in Japanese Buddhism.

6 To dispel the specter of “primitive animism” that tends to haunt any discussions of rock as more than lifeless, I will focus on the two most sophisticated Eloquent Stillness of Stone 57 thinkers in the tradition of Japanese Buddhist philosophy, Ku¯kai and Do¯gen. Their philosophies rank with those of the greatest figures in the Western tradition, from Plato and Augustine to Hegel and Heidegger, though only a brief sketch of the relevant, complex ideas can be given here.29 Anyone familiar with the profundity of Ku¯kai or Do¯gen knows that whatever their talk of the speech of natural phenomena may mean, it is worlds away from any kind of primitivism. The esoteric Shingon school was the first form of Buddhism to influence the development of Japanese gardens, by introducing mandala and other kinds of symbolism into their construction. In several of his writings, the founder of the school, Ku¯kai (744 –835), effects a bold innovation in Maha¯ya¯na Buddhist thinking by revisioning the Dharmakaya (hosshin), which had been previously understood as the formless and timeless Absolute, as the “reality embodiment” of the cosmic Buddha Mahavairochana (Dainichi Nyorai) and nothing other than the physical universe. This means that rocks and stone—indeed all “the four great elements”—are to be included among sentient beings and revered as constituting the highest body of the Tathagata (nyorai in Japanese: “the one come like this”).30 Moreover, with his idea of hosshin seppo¯ (the Dharmakaya expounds dharma), Ku¯kai claims that the physical world, as the cosmic Buddha’s reality embodiment and in the person of Dainichi Nyorai, proclaims the true teachings of Buddhism.31 He also, however, emphasizes that Dainichi expounds the dharma purely “for his own enjoyment” and not for our benefit (there are other em- bodiments of the Buddha, the Nirmanakaya and the Sambhogakaya, which take care of that). So even though the cosmos may in some indirect sense be “speaking” to us, it is not doing so in any human language. Speech is for Ku¯- kai one of the “three mysteries” or “intimacies” (sanmitsu) of Dainichi, and so it takes considerable practice for human beings to be able to hear and understand the teachings of natural phenomena. To the relief of readers who have struggled in vain to comprehend his formidable texts, Ku¯kai says at one point that “the Esoteric Buddhist teachings are so profound as to defy expression in writing.” 32 His teacher in China, Master Huiguo, had told him that “the profound meaning of the esoteric scriptures could be conveyed only through art.” Ku¯kai often maintained that “the medium of painting” was especially effective, but he would also acknowledge the art of the garden. Almost five centuries later, Do¯gen (1200 –1253) develops some very similar ideas to Ku¯kai’s, though in terms of the So¯to¯ Zen tradition, of which he is regarded as the founder. Just as Ku¯kai identifies the Dharmakaya with the phenomenal world, so Do¯gen, inspired by a poem by Su Dongpo, promotes a similar understanding of natural landscape as the body of the Buddha. During a stay in the beautiful landscape around Lushan, Su experienced an epiphany on 58 Graham Parkes hearing the sounds of a mountain stream flowing through the night. He then wrote the following poem on landscape as the body of the Buddha and the sounds of natural phenomena as an abundance of Buddhist sermons:

The voices of the river valley are his Wide and Long Tongue, The form of the mountains is nothing other than his Pure Body. Throughout the night, eighty-four thousand verses. On a later occasion, how can I tell them to others?

Do¯gen cites this poem, which a Chan master authenticated as evidence of Su Dongpo’s enlightenment, in the course of an essay urging his readers to hear and read natural landscapes as Buddhist sermons and scriptures.33 Philosophically speaking, Do¯gen asserts the nonduality of the world of impermanence and the totality of “Buddha-nature” (the idea of shitsu-u as bussho¯). Arguing vehemently against the more “biocentric” standpoint of earlier Bud- dhism, he claims that Buddha-nature is not just sentient beings but also “fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles” (which are much in evidence at Ryo¯anji). Elsewhere he writes that “rocks and stones, large and small, are the Buddha’s own possessions.” 34 Corresponding to Ku¯kai’s notion of hosshin seppo¯, Do¯gen develops the idea of mujo¯ seppo¯, which emphasizes that even insentient beings expound the true teachings, though in a different way from the sentient. “At the time of right practice,” he writes, “the voices and form of river valleys, as well as the form and voices of mountains, generously bestow their eighty-four thousand hymns of praise.” 35 As well as hearing the cosmos as a sermon, one can see, or read, the natural world as scripture. Ku¯kai writes in one of his poems,

Being painted by brushes of mountains, by ink of oceans, Heaven and earth are the bindings of a sutra revealing the truth.36

Again it takes time and effort to learn to read this natural text, but the notion of nature as scripture certainly does justice to the sense we often have that there is something “inscribed” in natural phenomena, and in stone especially, something that means something. Similarly for Do¯gen, sutras are not restricted to writings contained in scrolls, because the natural world too can be read as sacred scripture. This is the burden of the chapter in the Sho¯bo¯genzo¯ titled “San- suigyo¯,”or“Mountains and waters as sutras”; and in another chapter, he writes, “The sutras are the entire universe, mountains and rivers and the great earth, plants and trees.” 37 This brief consideration of Ku¯kai and Do¯gen suggests that we may better understand the powerful effect of the rocks and gravel at Ryo¯anji if we take Eloquent Stillness of Stone 59 them to be proclaiming the teachings and read them as a sutra revealing the truths of Buddhism. Just as contemplation of dry landscape gardens can enhance one’s understanding of Japanese Buddhism, so a sense for the Japanese Buddhist conception of the expressive powers of so-called inanimate nature can help us better appreciate the role of rock in the garden inspired by Zen. We can then understand the rocks at Ryo¯anji as proclaiming the Buddhist teachings of impermanence and dependent co-arising with unparalleled clar- ity, as exemplifying such notions as suchness and the cut, and as pointing to our “original nature,” which may have more rocklike steadfastness to it, at the deepest layers of the self, than we may previously have realized.38 The Chinese tradition reveres rocks for their age and beauty and for their being vitally expressive of the fundamental energies of the earth on which we live. Japanese Buddhism adds pedagogic and esoteric dimensions by inviting us to regard rocks and other natural phenomena as sources of wisdom and companions on the path to deeper understanding. However, today the earth itself is as much in need of saving as are its human inhabitants—and especially of being saved from its human inhabitants. To this extent, there may be practical and not just aesthetic lessons to be learned from our relations with rock and compelling reasons to attend to what Goethe calls “the mute near- ness of great, soft-voiced nature” both inside and beyond the conﬁnes of the dry landscape garden. After viewing the dry landscape garden at Ryo¯anji, one is well advised to linger again on the way out. It is worthwhile, immediately on leaving the main building, to stop and admire the famous clay wall of the garden from the outside, because it is a work of art in its own right from that perspective, too. Again the power of the garden’s effect can be enhanced by experiencing its context after, as well as before, the fact. When one views at leisure the luxuriance of the various subgardens of the temple on the way out with the afterimage of the austere rock garden still in mind, one can appreciate the dual “life- and-death” aspect of reality of which Zen philosophy speaks. It is as if one sees in double exposure, as it were, the life- and deathless source from which all things arise and into which they perish at every moment.39 6

Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware The Link between Ideal and Tradition

Mark Meli

The term “mono no aware” has been often used by both Japanese and Western- ers to exemplify an important aspect of what is seen as a traditional Japanese aesthetic consciousness, or bi-ishiki. In the spoken language, the component “aware” depicts sorrow or misery; “mono no” attributes this “aware” to the things of the world, taken either in the particular or more usually the abstract sense. This literal sorrow or misery of things is taken often to signify a sad, fleeting beauty that is conspicuous in traditional Japanese cultural expressions. Thus regarded, mono no aware is easily connected to the Buddhist notion of transience (Skt., anitya; Jpn., mujo¯ ), which claims that no thing in the world is permanent, that all things, both beautiful and painful, must inevitably pass away. It has been claimed that the Japanese have a special penchant for finding beauty in such incessant change, and their love of the cherry blossom, which blooms brilliantly for about a week and then is quickly scattered by the wind, is often cited as evidence. It is not my intention to attempt to evaluate the function of this term as a general signifier of some kind of fundamental Japanese aesthetic consciousness. Rather, I wish to analyze one important link in the process by which this term came to possess such an important place in the dialogue concerning aesthetics in Japan. The word itself has a long history: aware appears in several poems in the Kojiki (714), and mono no aware is first seen in the Tosa Nikki (935). Both have been used frequently in literature to this day. While investigating the history of such literary usage might indeed give us a clue as to why this term came to be so important, it would also lead to an unending accumulation of passages wherein the term is used in rather variant ways. Thus, a hermeneutic investigation into how the term has been explicitly theorized and

60 Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware 61 interpreted, how certain thinkers have attempted to explicate its meaning and connect it with the Japanese literary tradition, seems to me a better approach. My analysis will focus on the writings of Motoori Norinaga (1730 –1801) on the nature of literature and poetry. I chose Norinaga because he did more than anyone else to thrust this term into the public consciousness in connection with aesthetic feeling. Because the manner in which he used the word is well known by people in the field, I will refrain from giving a general account of his theory and focus instead on a relatively unexplored aspect, his hermeneutic project of recovering this ancient poetic term and making it the corner- stone of his explanation of the origin and purpose of both fiction and poetry.1 To better demonstrate the distinctive character of Norinaga’s hermeneutics, I will first briefly introduce explications of the term by two twentieth-century scholars, WatsujiTetsuro¯and O¯ nishi Yoshinori,both of whom carry their training in Western philosophy into their work. To interpret this word from amidst a tradition, I will focus on methodology. One goal underlying my project is to demonstrate that mono no aware is not a cultural given: However unconscious the understanding of it may be among Japanese to whom it has been taught from childhood, it possesses a hermeneutic history out of which has grown whatever significance it today possesses. Any attempt to theorize this term, then, must inevitably grapple with this history. Therefore, in reading these theories we should ask how this history was appropriated and what new level of meaning was given to the term. Only once this groundwork is laid will we realize the wealth of meaning possessed by this term, and only then will we be able to begin considering what it means to say that mono no aware characterizes a certain important element in Japanese aesthetic consciousness. Watsuji begins his short piece “Mono no Aware ni Tsuite” (Concerning Mono no Aware, 1922) with an explicit consideration of the term as discussed by Norinaga. After looking at Norinaga’s definitions of both “aware” and “mono,” Watsuji analyzes the conditions that Norinaga set for what it means for a person to know mono no aware.2 Watsuji is concerned, however, not so much with the surface meaning of Norinaga’s words as with their underlying support. What, he asks, is the justification for Norinaga’s thought? This is an important question, he claims, because Norinaga makes a normative claim in his theory on mono no aware: knowing mono no aware is not merely an “is” (or a “was”); it is an “ought.” If we are to know it today, claimed Norinaga, our hearts will be purified, and we will know the upright way of the ancients.3 What, Watsuji asks, is the basis for making such a claim? Norinaga himself fails to do it proper justice, and thus Watsuji concludes that Norinaga has merely accepted the worldview of Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Tale of Genji, as the grounding point for his theory—a shaky grounding point from 62 Mark Meli which to create a universal theory and yet one that describes well the view of life of a court woman in Heian Japan.4 Mono no aware, Watsuji then concludes, is the longing for eternity and permanence that is found in the topsy-turvy emotional life of women in the Heian court, such as Murasaki. Not quite de- serving the designation as a universal imperative that Norinaga gave to it and yet still somehow reflecting the lot of all of us, mono no aware is read by Wat- suji as the expression of a frustration and its accompanying sorrow that these women have sublimated into aestheticism and hedonism. He points out that they were politically and economically disenfranchised and, even more important, they were at the mercy of their lovers’ whims, waiting night after night, wondering whether their men would show their faces on the verandas of the estates that were their prisons. O¯ nishi, writing later, makes it clear from the beginning that he wants to find the aesthetic significance of aware, as opposed to some mere linguistic or psychological meaning.5 For him, this means avoiding empirical consideration of the word “aware” as it occurs in literary works 6 and trying rather to uncover what he calls the “aesthetic essence” (biteki honshitsu) of aware as a concept (gainen).7 Revealing the extent to which he was influenced by the aesthetic thought of the phenomenological school, particularly Moritz Geiger, O¯ nishi searches for objective value in aware, value that might be directly intuited in its essential nature. This value is eventually defined as a derivative mode of beauty found in the midst of pain and sorrow. O¯ nishi especially stresses that the intuition of natural beauty is a central part of “aware” significance, a beauty that emerges from the atmosphere of Weltschmertz, or world pain, which constituted the world of the Heian court and can be recognized even today. While both philosophers put forth interesting interpretations of aware, we can easily point to problems when we begin to question the grounding point of their investigations. On what are these theories based? On the surface, Watsuji and O¯ nishi both base their theories on the work of Norinaga. For his part, Wat- suji starts out his essay as if it were simply a discussion of Norinaga’s theory itself. Then, having found that Norinaga provides no adequate justification for his views, Watsuji himself goes on to explain where he thinks Norinaga’s theory does indeed take its base. Watsuji is relatively consistent throughout in using the term as Norinaga explained it and can be seen as having analyzed “mono no aware” as a concept created by Norinaga. Watsuji is to be applauded for staying within recognizable boundaries when dealing with this concept. If he is to be criticized, it is because (this will be clarified later) he takes a very limited and simplistic view of Norinaga’s notion of mono no aware. To reduce it to a presentation of the worldview of Murasaki Shikibu is to limit its range of reference severely and to ignore many of the ways in which Norinaga used the term. To make such a direct link to Murasaki is also tenuous. As much re- Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware 63 cent research has shown, Norinaga did not simply copy what he saw in the Genji and name it mono no aware. The effect of contemporary thought and society on his work is unmistakable.8 The link between O¯ nishi’s theory and the traditional meaning of the term is more tenuous. First characterizing Norinaga as one among many researchers who had sought to uncover the meaning of the term “aware,” O¯ nishi then bases the weight of his argument on certain portions of Norinaga’s theory. He is particularly concerned with the discussion of emotional depth, concentrat- ing on Norinaga’s statement that aware is found more fully in darker emotions such as sorrow, melancholy, and longing than in happy emotions because darker emotions are deeper.9 From here, O¯ nishi’s trajectory leads him into discussions of European poetry and philosophy as well as life and literature in the Heian court. He then argues in general about the relationship between beauty and sorrow. His theory is at all times pulled along by an overarching aim: the notion that aware is what he calls a “derivative aesthetic category,” one phase of the beautiful, with certain aspects that set it apart from other such categories (such as the tragic, comic, and sublime as well as yu¯gen and sabi in the Japa- nese tradition).10 The major problem with O¯ nishi’s account is that his aware has been removed from its historical context. While he quotes freely from classical sources to show how the word has been used, he also quotes just as freely passages where the word does not appear and yet where, he says, aware is demonstrated.11 It is hard to judge what role such quotation is meant to play; it is certainly not a hermeneutic one. O¯ nishi may simply wish to illustrate his own ideas through these passages. We can conclude that the relationship between O¯ nishi’s argument and the tradition from which this concept has emerged is at best unclear. I do not pretend to have done justice to either of these philosopher’s works in this short space. Each does indeed form an important link in the history of the concept and thus deserves fuller consideration. This will have to wait for the time being, however, for I must now move on to look at how Norinaga dealt with the tradition that preceded his own work. We have seen that each of the theorists cited previously based their work to a great extent on Norinaga’s “mono no aware theory.” Such an approach is understandable, as Norinaga was indeed the first to attempt anything close to a theoretical formulation of the meaning of “mono no aware” and as it is this formulation that has come to be most closely associated with the significance of the term. I will now attempt to uncover how Norinaga himself adapted these terms from the Japanese classics and fit them to his own theory—how he interpreted them and attempted to show that the significance he attributed to them was there all along, visible at the heart of the traditions of waka and monogatari. Although many volumes of schol- 64 Mark Meli arship have been produced concerning the way Norinaga conceived and evaluated fiction and poetry, as well as how his ideas fit into the major philosophical trends of his day, little to nothing has been said about the hermeneutic he used in developing his theories. Analyzing that hermeneutic will, I hope, shed some light on the present task of interpreting Japanese aesthetic terminology. We are accustomed in speaking of Norinaga’s theory to calling it his “mono no aware ron,” a phrase that can imply either one or more theories. In fact, however, the prevailing notion suggests that there is but one theory of mono no aware and that it is best represented in his Genji Monogatari Tama no Ogushi, the last work Norinaga wrote in which mono no aware played a major role. In his final work he presents us with an authoritative and compact statement of the meaning of the word “aware,” one that is quite well known:

Regarding this phrase “mono no aware”: first of all, “aware” originally signified the sighing voice felt in and emitted from the heart when one sees, hears, or otherwise touches some object in the world, and as such is no different from the interjections “ah” and “hare” of our common colloquial speech. For example, when we are moved upon the sight of cherry blossoms or the moon, we say things like, “Ah, what beautiful flowers,” and “Hare, isn’t the moon lovely tonight?” “Aware” is formed by the combination of this “ah” and “hare.”

Though this is perhaps Norinaga’s most concise statement concerning the meaning of “aware,” it appears in the last of a number of works in which the term plays a major role, in a work that is something of a consolidation of earlier projects. That all these works are usually read as if they constituted one consistent whole is evident in the way most scholars, including O¯ nishi and, to a lesser extent, Watsuji, quote freely from several of them when relaying Nori- naga’s ideas. Their approach is misleading, however, for we can notice various subtle but important differences in the “theories” presented within each work. The first of these, Aware Ben (1758), is a short set of notes on the meaning of the word “aware” as it is used in classical literary texts, and while it amounts to no “theory” at all, it points out the direction that Norinaga’s more developed thought will later take. Each of the next three works, Shibun Yo¯ryo¯ (1763), Isonokami Sasamegoto (1763), and Genji Monogatari Tama no Ogushi (1796), contains what might be termed its own respective mono no aware ron. The first two were produced in the same year, 1763, while the third, the first two chapters of which are a slightly revised version of Shibun Yo¯ryo¯, was completed more than three decades later. It is unfortunate that many scholars who are interested in tracing Norinaga’s thought seem to focus on this later work; although it may be the most mature work of the three, giving it priority fails to show the process by which the concept was developed. Further, the theory in the Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware 65 later work combines aspects of the two earlier theories and thus tends to take attention away from how the two earlier theories, created for slightly different purposes, present aware somewhat differently and mark distinctly different interpretive trails. Watsuji is one scholar who, though also quoting from the earlier works, based his analysis almost completely on the Tama no Ogushi and by doing so misses out on much of what Norinaga said, in Isonokami Sasamegoto for instance, concerning the relationship between mono no aware and waka poetry. In the following section, I will focus on the theories contained in these two earlier works, paying particular attention to the manner in which Nori- naga makes use of classical literary texts in developing his ideas.

Shibun Yo¯ryo¯: Uncovering Murasaki Shikibu’s Original Intent To create an interpretive scheme by which to counter what he saw as overly ideological, unnatural, and forced Confucian and Buddhistic interpretations of the Tale of Genji, Norinaga sought to describe the essence of monogatari seen in and for itself, without the application of any interpretive apparatus derived from foreign philosophical systems. He sought to uncover this essential nature in the words of the Genji itself, in its references to other literary works, reading such statements as the beliefs of the author Murasaki Shikibu put into the mouths of her characters. The positivistic hermeneutic in which he was engaged was one wherein he sought to let the text speak for itself by lifting out what is said in the work about literature and then applying that on a higher level to interpret the nature of the work itself.12 Norinaga’s stated intention, as seen in the following quote, was not, then, to establish some new theory of his own but to somehow ﬁnd the essence of monogatari by showing the author’s original intent in writing it:

In order to ascertain the ﬂavor (omomuki) of ancient monogatari and the emotional reactions of the people who read them, we ought to look at the various places in the chapters of the Tale of Genji wherein people are reading such tales. (Hino Tatsuo, ed., Motoori Norinaga Shu¯, SNKBS, p. 41 [hereafter cited as MNS])

Norinaga then goes on to quote a number of passages in which characters in the tale give their impressions on reading various other works. A couple examples should sufﬁce:

Hearing the events recorded in old monogatari, when, for instance, some young cour- tesan is reading one aloud, I grasp the kinds of things related and can readily surmise the improbability of such things, with a slight feeling of disgust, when I think 66 Mark Meli

rationally about them. There are also times, however, when my heart is moved, and I am led to think that ours is truly a world in which every nook and cranny is ﬁlled with things of aware. (MNS, p. 43) and

As for those who knew not of the events recorded in the picture diary (which told of Genji’s life in exile), were they persons of even just a little feeling, even they were ﬁlled with aware and shed unrestrained tears upon viewing it. (MNS, p. 45)

Notice that in each of these quotations, the word “aware” is used to relay the emotional reaction of the reader (or hearer) of a fictional work. In each, the word is used quite incidentally, in line with its rather normal Heian-period function as, in this case, an adjective. In both, emotionally charged but otherwise very general events are described as “aware nari,” or “moving.” These are just two of a number of passages Norinaga quotes, all of which display the same notion that fiction has an emotional affect on its readers. It is only in these two, however, that the word “aware” appears. In the other passages, it seems, Murasaki could adequately express such sentiments without reliance on this one term. Next, in briefly summarizing what has been referenced, Norinaga latches onto this term, introducing his notion of “knowing the aware of things” (mono no aware wo shiru koto), which he employs to signify the general mechanism by which people are moved emotionally by fiction:

As shown in these quotations, through reading monogatari we come to compare the present with the past and vice-versa, and by doing so know the way of things and the emotions of the people of the world—we know mono no aware. In fact, knowing mono no aware is the ﬁrst and foremost point to reading such tales; it comes forth through knowing the heart of things, which is born of knowing the ways of the world and being familiar with the emotions of the people of the world. (MNS, p. 46)

Notice that the predication of what is “shown” in the preceding quotations taken from the Tale of Genji is unclear. While they indeed showed people coming to reflect on the past as presented in fiction, they made no claim at all about the nature of knowing mono no aware or about the “foremost point” of reading fiction. Thus, while Norinaga has created a link between his own thought and the literary tradition, using a line of argument that even works to obscure the distinction between Murasaki Shikibu and himself, the positivistic connection he has made between the words of the Tale of Genji and the term “mono no aware” is still tenuous—there is as yet no sound logical link. He proceeds to make a more determined attempt, deepening his ideas by systematically analyzing a debate between Hikaru Genji and Tamakazura on the Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware 67 significance and value of fiction in the “Hotaru” chapter of the work. This debate—more than in the various scattered and fragmentary passages referenced earlier—is where Norinaga locates the clearest statement of the author’s intent in writing the work. He goes so far as to state that the characters’ opinions on monogatari possess a hidden meaning, revealing the author’s true ideas (MNS, p. 47). Though more detailed, the tenor of the “Hotaru” discussion is similar to that seen in the previous passages: Fiction gives us knowledge of the lives of people and their times; this is not, however, merely intellectual knowledge, as it also moves us, emotionally, to feel what they felt. Within the passage this emotional reaction is once again expressed using the word “aware,” this time in a stronger sense than before because it is used as a noun signifying something expressed in the fictional work. Genji states,

Amidst all of these lies, however, sometimes the story is spun in a manner in which aware is shown and we are delighted to think that such events could occur. Though we know all the time that it is the most silly little piece of ﬁction, our hearts are nevertheless moved by it. (MNS, p. 51)

Norinaga uses this quotation to make a positive connection between his use of the term “mono no aware” and what he has read as the original intent of Mura- saki Shikibu. He says that in the statement “aware is shown and we are surprised to think that such an event could occur” lies the very essence of the Tale of Genji and the reason that Murasaki wrote it—she herself merely intended to reveal mono no aware to her readers. Furthermore, Norinaga goes on, “this notion of ‘knowing mono no aware’ (as I have been using it) comes from this quotation [mono no aware wo shiru to iu wa, koko no koto nari]” (MNS, p. 51). That is, he explicitly makes the point that the “aware” that appears in this passage carries the same meaning as the “mono no aware wo shiru” that he seeks to establish as the foundation of his theory and further that he has taken that meaning from this passage. He attributes, then, all that he is saying to Murasaki herself—she has said it already, but all her previous commentators, swayed by foreign ideology, have failed to notice. In summary, we might first judge that the very endeavor to uncover Mura- saki Shikibu’s original intent in writing the Tale of Genji is in itself rather dubious. We have of course been convinced for some time that original intent is to be found neither in literature nor in law. Leaving that aside, however, and even granting for the sake of argument that in the Genji the notion is often expressed that literature exists to move the reader emotionally, we must consider whether Norinaga’s use of the term “mono no aware” has any positive connection to the significance that the term holds in the Genji passages. I think that 68 Mark Meli we must conclude, based on what we have seen, that any connection is rather tenuous. Even if we agree that the emotional experience of readers of fiction is important in the passages, it is hard to see that “mono no aware” or even “aware” alone has more than an incidental connection to it. It is clear that Norinaga’s use of “mono no aware” is vastly underdetermined by its significance in the passages he cites. This fact might then lead us to look elsewhere to discover how Norinaga became attached to this term. Hino Tatsuo, for instance, claims that the term as used in popular Edo culture held the very signification Norinaga ascribes to it, and he quotes from bunraku and kabuki texts to demonstrate this.13 At any rate, we can safely conclude that it was important for Norinaga to somehow attach this key word of his to an older and established authority. To make “mono no aware” Murasaki’s term rather than simply his own seemed to ensure, in his mind, that his readers would accept it. Of course, we can only speculate on his intentions, but Norinaga’s reverence for literary authority becomes even clearer in his next work, Isonokami Sasamegoto, which deals not with the relatively urbane genre of monogatari but with waka, which had from ancient times been held as the supreme Japanese literary art, linked to the very existence of the nation itself.

Isonokami Sasamegoto: Mono no Aware and the Birth of Waka In his major work on waka theory, Isonokami Sasamegoto, written, it is believed, in 1763 after the completion of Shibun Yo¯ryo¯, Norinaga deals even more deeply with the signiﬁcance of his new key word, trying all the more laboriously to link his ideas to literary tradition. Norinaga’s methodology, however, shows a great advance over that seen in the previous work, despite how little time had passed between the two. Eschewing a straightforward positivistic approach, Norinaga links mono no aware to the Japanese poetic tradition through a three- step hermeneutic within which is built a detailed expressivist account of the creation of poetry. First, he introduces his term by drawing an analogy between it and Ki no Tsurayuki’s famous statement on the nature of Japanese poetry in the preface to the Kokin Wakashu¯ and then by imitating Tsurayuki’s conception in his own theory of poetic expression. Second, he traces the meaning of “aware” in classical poems, where it is primarily an interjection spoken out when people are moved by things of the world. Third, he quotes speciﬁc poems and interprets them as demonstrating that the experience that leads us to exclaim “aware,”—that is, in which we know the aware of things—is precisely that which leads to the composition of poetry. When asked, “Just how is it that the individual poem is born?” Norinaga responds, “Poems are born from the knowledge of mono no aware,” and when Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware 69 next asked, “Just what does it mean to ‘know mono no aware?’” he gives the following explanation, borrowing the opening words of Tsurayuki’s well-known preface:

In the preface to the Kokinshu¯ it is written, “Japanese poetry has a single heart as its seed, and grows forth into innumerable leaf-like words.” This heart is the heart that knows mono no aware. It further says, “When people in this world have stimulating experiences, they come to speak out their heart-felt feelings in terms of the things they see and hear.” Likewise does this phrase “heart-felt feelings” refer to the heart that knows mono no aware. (MNS, pp. 280 –281)

Norinaga quoted from the Genji to show the essence of monogatari; now, in discussing waka, he quotes from the ﬁrst and most famous statement in Japanese concerning its nature. Unlike his method in Shibun Yo¯ryo¯, however, Norinaga is not claiming that this previous authority on waka had himself held this position. “Mono no aware” is not supposed to be Tsurayuki’s term; it is Norinaga’s own. The analogy he draws can be read as an attempt to explain the term by linking it to a standard theory familiar to all his readers, one that stood at the fountainhead of all poetic theory in Japan. Thus, Norinaga uses Tsurayuki to get across his point: “What is the heart that knows mono no aware?” he asks rhetorically. “Well, it is the heart that acts like the one Tsurayuki describes, the one that is impressed by the world and is thus led to compose waka.” Thus this notion of a heart from which poetry springs, a notion that had played a key role in virtually all poetic theory in Japan after Tsurayuki, is reexplained by Norinaga in terms of mono no aware. He thereby gives his reader a ﬁrm place to stand, one that would not likely have been provided through the relatively obscure passages he quoted from the Genji that we saw earlier. Although Norinaga’s explanation of how waka is born from the human heart closely follows that of Tsurayuki, Norinaga goes into much more detail. Humans are always perceiving things in the world, and when a thing is somehow emotionally charged and a person comes to recognize that and is emotionally moved by the object, he or she has come to know the essence or “heart” (kokoro) of that thing and can be said to know the aware of it. Especially for people who are particularly good at knowing mono no aware, that is, those who are particularly sensitive to things of the world, this aware builds up within their hearts to the point where they can no longer keep it inside and, in a cathartic act of expression, they are led almost involuntarily to compose poetry. Of course, the act of creation is not involuntary in every sense: It takes knowledge and work to make a good poem, but the desire to compose, the impulse to create, is something that builds up in the heart of the sensitive person naturally in the course of life experience—indeed, mono no aware that guaran- tees this.14 70 Mark Meli

Next, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of his project in Shibun Yo¯ryo¯, No- rinaga proceeds to show why it is that he calls this thing about the world, this ability it has to move people to poetic expression, “mono no aware.” He is not simply borrowing the term from Tsurayuki, but neither will Norinaga reveal it as his original signiﬁcation. He again goes to great lengths to show that mono no aware inheres in the Japanese literary tradition, doing so by drawing a link between his notion of poetic composition as cathartic expression and the signiﬁcance of the word “aware” in classical waka. Thus, in the second stage of his interpretation, Norinaga conducts a meticulous analysis of the syntactical usage of “aware” in waka up through the eleventh century. He begins,

“Aware” was originally an interjection, speaking of things felt deeply in the heart without concern for what in fact occasioned those feelings. Whether one came in contact with something noble or something vulgar, “aware” was the exclamation that was occasioned. (MNS, p. 285)

That poetic exclamation emerges out of spontaneous emotion was something that Norinaga had argued some five years earlier in his first work, Ashiwake Obune. It is to cultivate this thought that he goes on to cite over forty waka in which the word “aware” appears, first showing the term’s original meaning as an interjection or exclamation, as in the following from the Nihon Shoki, wherein the word is clearly used in such a form:

Ohari ni Toward Ohari Tada ni mukaeru Straightaway are you facing, Hitotsu matsu aware One pine—aware Hitotsu matsu One pine. Hito ni ariseba If you were a man, Koromo kimashi wo Clothes I would give to you, Tachi hakemashi wo A sword I would gird you with.

Norinaga then traces the various grammatical forms in which the word appears in later poetry, explaining each in accord with his etymological assertion that the word was originally an interjectory sigh. “Aware cho¯ koto” (the word/ thing aware) speaks directly of the spoken sigh,15 “aware to iu” (say “aware”) indicates the act of saying that exclamation,16 “aware to omou” (think /feel aware) speaks of sighing “aware” in one’s heart on thinking/feeling something,17 and “aware to miru” (see in aware) signiﬁes the same sigh uttered in the heart, this time occasioned by visual experience.18 Thus, no matter what the form, “aware” is always still expressive of a sigh, an exclamation made when one is moved emotionally by some thing in the world. Up to this point, Norinaga’s argument, seen alongside the numerous poetic examples he quotes, is fairly convincing. He traces a consistent line through Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware 71 various actual occurrences of the term. Each of the variations in the usage of the word maintains, according to him, a somatic connection to the act of sighing when coming into contact with some object. He even goes on to explain the adjectival and nominal forms of the word in a similar vein. He reads “aware naru” as a description of an object that has led us to exclaim “aware,” 19 one that refers to that object as “aware-ful.” The nominal form takes the abstraction one step further and labels such an emotionally impressive object itself “aware.” Norinaga is bold in making the point that “aware” can also be seen in noun form, but his explanation of this form is rather disappointing, especially in light of this initial boldness. A good explanation might indeed have cleared up the manner in which he himself has come to use this interjection as a noun. Also disappointing is his failure to explain the signiﬁcance of the “mono no” that occurs alongside “aware” in the following poem, which he quotes:

In Springtime we have the blooming Of the cherries, but that alone. It is in Autumn that the aware of things is truly shown.20

He chooses to make no positive connection between this poem and his own use of the term, instead relying on the following poem by Tsurayuki along with its headnotes to demonstrate why it is that knowing mono no aware is the key to poetic expression:

In a certain place, I was seated in front of a bamboo screen with various others, re- telling old tales, when I heard the voice of a woman, who had been listening to me from behind the screen, say, “Oh, the gentleman with a face that strangely shows he knows mono no aware!”

In the word “aware” lies no special function, It is but the thing that we exclaim In just those times we cannot help but speak it. —Tsurayuki 21

Norinaga then explains the connection between this passage and his notion of mono no aware as the source of poetic composition in the following manner:

Because poems are born out of mono no aware, it is quite interesting that “with a face that strangely shows he knows mono no aware” is said of the man who was so great as to be considered a true “poetic genius.” And “the word aware” which is spoken of in the poem is, like in the cases explained earlier, the word of exclamation that comes forth from the depths of one’s emotion. The poem says that these words “aware aware” which are exclaimed serve no special purpose, but are spoken at times when 72 Mark Meli

the aware of things is unbearable and it is impossible not to say them. By the way, this “with a face that strangely shows he knows mono no aware,” written in the headnotes, which we know refers to Tsurayuki himself, is merely a euphemism for “with the face of a man who can compose poetry.” Tsurayuki’s poetic response shows that he understands this, and the underlying meaning to his words are that while composing poetry serves no special function, we cannot but create poems at times when the mono no aware is more than we can bear. (MNS, p. 302)

In the final analysis, then, Norinaga depicts Tsurayuki composing his own waka after the manner Norinaga has detailed. Tsurayuki, the brilliant poet of his generation, is pictured as a man who knows mono no aware and, furthermore, knows that he knows it. Therefore, whenever he is moved by something in the world, he cannot help but exclaim “aa—hare.” Moreover, he also shows that this exclamatory experience leads to poetic expression in that he responds to the woman’s words with a poem. No response in ordinary language could possibly express all that he felt in his heart or his understanding of what having a mono no aware shiri gao means. Tsurayuki is himself portrayed as subscrib- ing to his own version of a mono no aware ron; he is at least admitting that the act of touching things in the world and being moved by them does indeed have a link to “aware” the exclamation and that knowing these things that move one can, at least in some cases, give birth to poetry. Again, as in Shibun Yo¯ryo¯, we might conclude that Norinaga’s use of the term “mono no aware” is underdetermined by the passages he quotes. He sees the experience of knowing mono no aware as the essence of poetic exclamation, a sufficient condition that borders on being a necessary one as well. For Tsu- rayuki, knowing mono no aware might be said to be a sufficient condition for the composition of poetry, although such a claim is tenuous. Taking the connection between headnotes and poem as a statement of the poet’s conception of poetry, as Norinaga has done, involves a considerable stretch in interpretation. In the case of imperial anthologies, and especially in that of the Gosenshu¯, we know that many of the headnotes were added by the editors. In the most widely used versions of Tsurayuki’s personal collection, this poem appears with no headnote at all.

Conclusion In evaluating Norinaga’s hermeneutic strategy, there are numerous points that should be touched on. We have already seen that as a positive hermeneutic that claims to be discovering mono no aware in the words of Murasaki and Tsurayuki and from there merely elucidating its traditional meaning, Norinaga’s endeavor sounds somewhat dubious to the modern ear. Without a doubt, he has Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware 73 not conclusively demonstrated that “mono no aware,” with all the connotations it possesses as he uses it, is something that he borrowed “right from these quotes.” This said, it also seems to me that it would be strange if indeed we were fully convinced by Norinaga’s logic. He did not write for us. Two other points seem to me more worthy of further consideration. First is the extent to which Norinaga both was cognizant of the tradition that preceded him and incorporated the words of that tradition into his own writings. The second point is the extent to which Norinaga seems not to have wanted to claim responsibility for his own child: mono no aware is never presented as his own concept but always something he has picked up. Both of these points relate to our present task when we attempt to deal with the historical formation of concepts or ideals in Japanese literature and aesthetics. Because of the attention he paid to traditional texts and the extent to which he quoted them, Norinaga’s theory is more helpful in tracing the history of the word and revealing how the concept was formed than are either of the two other theories we saw. His words are in no small measure grounded in the texts he is discussing. The context is clear, the texts are visible, and his interpretations are lined up beside them; it is open and easy for the reader to see the stretches and to judge the end result. We know where all this is coming. The other authors claim to be interpreting a traditional phenomenon, and yet where is the phenomenon? It is certainly not placed before us in any concrete sense. O¯ nishi, for instance, is ostensibly working with this theory of Norinaga as his basis, but in talking about aware as a “derivative aesthetic category” and about its “aesthetic essence,” he has gone in completely new directions, and his link to the past has vanished, only to reappear in the end, in the form of quotations from Heian-period literature that are used to give evidence for a theory already stated. Norinaga—and this is probably closely connected to his reverence for and feeling of the importance of living language—goes right to the words, puts them before us, and tries to grapple with what they signify. It is above all this concern with language that makes his hermeneutic attractive, for all the stretches and ideology that can be found within it. Rather than dealing with concepts, categories, and the emotions of people long since past, the analysis of language is a sure and concrete task, and, in literary analysis, the past is made present to us only through the medium of the language. Norinaga’s mono no aware has a tradition, that much is clear. We might want to know, however, to just what extent he thought he actually found the term in the words of the classics. Of course, we will never know precisely. I have cited others’ research that shows the connection between the term as Norinaga used it and the cultural and social setting of the day. Such theories as these must be taken into consideration, and yet, simply to say, as does Momokawa 74 Mark Meli

Takahito, that Norinaga’s mono no aware merely describes the emotional life of Edo townspeople and has little to no actual connection to the Genji Monogatari (the example he treats) is also less than convincing.22 Signs of Norinaga’s craft- ing of this concept are everywhere visible, and they do show traces of inﬂuence from such things as Edo merchant society, popular literature (see Hino), and waka circles (see Takahashi). However, to deny any positive link whatsoever between Norinaga’s concept and the past is to overlook much evidence. This is, however, evidence that is in fact easily overlooked, as it is not presented by Norinaga in his own works. To quickly take up the case of Tsurayuki, he too has used the term “mono no aware” in his own work. In fact, the ﬁrst extant instance of the term is found in his Tosa Nikki. This diary tells of the return of a courtier and his entourage to the Heian capital from the provinces. On departure, a group comes to see off the entourage, engaging in the customary farewell practices of drinking sake and exchanging poems of parting in both Chinese and Japanese. In the midst of the exchange of poems, however, it is said of the boat’s helmsman, a laborer of the lower classes, “Unknowing of mono no aware, and having guzzled his share of sake, (he) wanted to set out quickly. ‘The tide is high, the wind is rising’ he clamored, and set to board the boat.” The helmsman is chastised for not knowing mono no aware, and it is clear that this criticism is a response to his insensitivity to the parting scene. His heart was unopened to the sorrow of parting, and thus his lack of emotion is being chastised. Moreover, the man is chastised as being boorish and lacking taste. For Heian courtiers, a parting without sake and poetry was simply un- thinkable, yet this man is unable to respond to such a poetic situation. Inter- estingly enough, for Norinaga, knowing mono no aware consists, more than anything else, in feeling the correct emotion and correctly recognizing aesthetic value in the situations one encounters in life. In fact, Tsurayuki’s use of the term has much in common with Norinaga’s later one, and we might be led to wonder why Norinaga did not make use of this passage in his work. An- other statement by Tsurayuki that waka can make even “gods and demons feel aware,” included in the Kokinshu¯ preface, is also consonant with Norinaga’s own use of the term, although Norinaga never mentions it. This is not the place to attempt to show exactly what mono no aware was before Norinaga made it a key word in his literary theories. Such a task, with its implications for the question of mono no aware’s role in a “Japanese aesthetic consciousness,” will have to wait. I hope that I have shown, however, the extent of Norinaga’s historical consciousness in his treatment of the term and, through that, to have given a concrete hint at why our research into Japanese aesthetic concepts must itself be hermeneutic. Mono no aware had some kind of existence before Motoori Norinaga dug it up and restyled it. It had a lin- Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware 75 guistic existence and certainly played a role in the aesthetic perceptions and judgments of earlier writers. Because we have no direct access to the conscious aesthetic experience of such writers, we are limited to focusing on “mono no aware” as it was used and argued in extant texts, such as those of Norinaga, Murasaki, and Tsurayuki. Our hermeneutic is to trace how the word has been used and how the concept has thereby been developed. As we have seen, Nori- naga shared a somewhat similar viewpoint. 7

Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object, Self and Other Mediating Watsuji Tetsuro¯’s Hermeneutics

John C. Maraldo

The philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro¯ (1889–1960) pioneered not only the critical reception of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger in Japan as well as the philosophical study of early Indian Buddhism and of the medieval Zen master Do¯gen but also the discipline of hermeneutics. It was Watsuji’s development of hermeneutics that enabled him to make truly original contributions to the philosophy of climate and culture and to ethical theory. An account of Watsuji’s hermeneutical method will in turn enable us, in an age of deep sus- picions, to move beyond the prejudices of his texts.1 Recent critical scholarship has taken Watsuji’s works on ethics and culture to task for their ethnocentrism and contribution to Japanese nationalism. Such critiques read Watsuji as an author of Nihonjin-ron, works that promote the purported uniqueness of “the Japanese.” His appeal to self-negation and his apparent claim of superiority for the Japanese understanding of the human provided certain military factions during the Paciﬁc War with a rationale for Japanese expansionism and for forced submission, both within the country and without, to the Japanese nation-state.2 Whatever the sins of his complicity and the merits of his own postwar con- version,3 I think it is possible to read Watsuji in a way that avoids the pitfalls of culturalism and racism. He does propose an alternative, if not unique, conception of the human being, one that contrasts with individualistic conceptions of being human. As we will see, however, it would be simplistic to suppose that he takes individualism as the province of “the West” and thus that his alternative speaks for some purported “East.” This essay attempts rather to

76 Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object 77 place Watsuji in a hermeneutical tradition that has become international and to contrast him with his own closest sources, Dilthey and Heidegger, just as Heidegger might be contrasted with Dilthey and Schleiermacher, the founders of that tradition. I will read Watsuji, therefore, not as a “Japanese” thinker in opposition to “Western” philosophers but as an author in a continuing lineage of interpreters. Still, the fact that Watsuji formulated his views in the Japanese language and not, say, in German will not be without significance: It will pose the problem of whether and how a hermeneutics articulated in any specific language can render a theory applicable across linguistic borders. Watsuji calls hermeneutics (kaishakugaku) the method proper to ethics, which in his view is the study of ningen (ningen no gaku), in other words, the study of human being. By using the English term “human being” to translate ningen, I already signal the first challenge faced by any attempt to explicate Watsuji’s hermeneutics in a language other than Japanese. Any translation, of course, insofar as it is an interpretation, poses hermeneutical problems. In the case of Watsuji, however, such problems are doubled by the deliberate linguistic dependency of his theory on the language in which he writes. Watsuji’s hermeneutics is so deeply embedded in the Japanese language that its relevance for cross-cultural hermeneutical theory would seem curtailed from the start. Moreover, by writing of hermeneutics as the method for the study of human being, Watsuji intimates that he will give his readers not a general theory of interpretation at all but rather a way (the way) to present a different theory, a theory of ethics. To discern Watsuji’s own hermeneutical theory, we must look more to his linguistic practices in ethical and cultural theorizing than to the few explicit comments he makes about hermeneutics. From the beginning, then, we face the challenge of explicating a theory that is not formulated as a theory, in a language that is not the language on which its practice depends. I will suggest that these two limitations actually enable rather than handicap the possibility of our critical reflection on Watsuji’s hermeneutics, just as the particular language in which he wrote enabled him to criticize the ethical and hermeneutical presuppositions of European philosophers. The indirect aim of this essay is to suggest how critical understanding is possible not in the form of an overarching hermeneutical theory (such as Gadamer’s) meant to super- sede particular languages but rather in a contrast between practices that are embedded in particular languages. More directly, I will suggest how Watsuji’s hermeneutics questions certain binary terms and priorities inherent in the European traditions that he translates and transforms. These are the polarities of individual and communal, subject and object, self and other, culture and nature. I will read Watsuji not as reversing polarities but rather showing them to be derivative of a prior relation, one that generates the terms it relates before it is ever dependent on 78 John C. Maraldo them. I tentatively call this prior relation the “Between,” to name that which Watsuji does not name but writes in multiple configurations as “aida.” This ordinary sign in the Japanese written language can stand singly by itself as a unit of meaning or can function as a part in a larger unit of meaning. To use the English preposition “between” to translate “aida” is indeed a stretch: The word “between” mediates other terms, does not alone refer to anything, and does not figure as a part of another word. Yet the attempt to translate “aida” can bring to light certain features likely to be read over, unnoticed, by a reader of the Japanese. The very way we use the name “Watsuji” exemplifies the unnoticed priority of this “between”: “Watsuji” denotes something prior to and between the single person and the written language that is the common re- source of a great many people. “Watsuji”names the body of work that is as much the working of a communal language as the outcome of an individual author.

Between Individual and Communal The originality of Watsuji’s hermeneutical theory lies in its formulation as a theory of ethics. It is as an ethics that Watsuji’s hermeneutical work differs most from what appears to be its closest source, Heidegger’s early hermeneutical ontology. Watsuji, born the same year as Heidegger, had read Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) probably within a year of its publication in 1927, when he was spending part of a year and a half abroad in Berlin. Being and Time presents hermeneutics as ontology, to wit, as “the interpretation of the being of Dasein,” 4 which is the word Heidegger uses in place of our word “human being.” Because “Dasein” literally means “being there” (or here), Heidegger’s theory is already set up by his language. This theory shifts the meaning of hermeneutics from its established usage as the “methodology of the historical humanistic disciplines” to what he calls its primary sense as an explication (Aus- legung) of the structures of human existence. To practice hermeneutics in this primary sense means not to apply an external method or principle to the matter under investigation but rather to lay out a structure internal to it, that is, to explicate the structure of the understanding (of being) that Dasein already is. In other words—not Heidegger’s words but words that will anticipate Wat- suji’s theory as well—hermeneutics is a kind of self-explication that realizes an inherent if latent mode of being. Heidegger, of course, explains that each individual must recognize and actualize his or her own unique way of being. “The being of (human beings) is always mine” (“Das Sein [des Daseins] ist je meines”).5 Accordingly, the task for each of us is to be uniquely ourselves, to be authentic (eigentlich) and not fall into the anonymity of being just anyone (das Man). Heidegger’s hermeneutics, the discovery of the meaning of “to be” Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object 79 through an analysis of the being that each of us uniquely is, evidently relies on the interplay of his terms Sein and Dasein. Similarly, Heidegger’s discovery that each of us has his or her own way of being here relies on a reference to the structure of uniqueness that all of us have in common. However, our com- monness or communal nature finds a predominantly negative interpretation in Heidegger; it is the inauthentic, anonymous “anyone” into which we unique individuals tend to fall. As Watsuji’s hermeneutics will make evident, Heideg- ger does not explicate any authentic ways of being with others. To be a fully human being is to be a unique, authentic individual.6 Watsuji’s hermeneutics also relies on an interplay of terms, but his readings will make the case that ethics and not ontology is the proper end of the study of human being. If Heidegger’s interpretation of the term Dasein redefines human being in a way that allows him to discover the meaning of being, Wat- suji’s interpretation of ningen redefines European conceptions of being human in a way that allows him to learn the source of ethical concepts.7 Watsuji’s pro- cedure, like Heidegger’s, is already embedded in his language, but the explication of ningen leads to a radically different view of being human. Watsuji’s reading of the ordinary compound ningen places the emphasis on the second element rather than the first, that is, on the gen (aida), or “between,” rather than on the nin (hito), or person. Ningen might then be translated somewhat more literally as the “interpersonal” or “interhuman.” Watsuji’s remark that “we [ Japanese] possess a deeply significant word, ningen” is not merely an ethnocentric conceit; 8 Chinese literature uses this compound to refer to the world of humans or mortals, but not to persons or human beings as such. Classical Japanese also used ningen to refer to the temporary human abode through which we pass.9 In this sense, it denotes a public, if transitory, world. Watsuji shifts the emphasis from the temporal to the spatial connotation and exploits the range of the modern Japanese usage of the word, namely yo no naka, or the public world, and hito, or the single person. He proposes that ningen expresses the concrete unity of the two, the communal and the individual, our social nature (sekensei/shakaisei) and our individual nature (kojinsei). The individual person hito taken alone to be the human being is an abstraction; the concrete reality is the interhuman, ningen. Putting Watsuji’s point most forcefully in English, we could say that the individual is not, by itself, a human being.10 This proposal may be startling, but the connection to ethics is a matter of course. Insofar as ethics has to do with the interactions between people, it concerns primarily the interpersonal, interhuman realm. This is not the place to elaborate on the specific ethical concepts that Watsuji derives from his interpretation of the human being; suffice it to say that his conception of ethics is also the outcome of the same hermeneutical method that reads out latent, often forgotten meanings in a particular language. By using the established 80 John C. Maraldo term rinrigaku to translate the European term “ethics,” the older meanings of the Sino-Japanese are covered up: rin signifies relationships between people, or human companionship, and ri refers to the normal and normative order, pattern, or laws. Ethics is, properly speaking, the order that makes possible communal existence, that is, the life proper to human beings.11 Even the conception of “study” (gaku) in Watsuji’s “study of human beings” (ningen no gaku) and in ethics as “the study of ordered fellowship” (rinrigaku) receives a hermeneutical reading: Especially in its verbal form, manabu, study denotes for Wat- suji a learning by way of interacting with others, as in acquiring a skill or an ability to think, often by way of imitation (manebu koto). Hence, study involves “a relation of giving and receiving, face to face,” rather than the acquisition of some already settled subject matter.12 Watsuji’s hermeneutical practice reveals the human being to be between the individual and the social, where the priority and the concrete reality are placed squarely in the fluid midst of the two more abstract poles. This human be-ing is, as a colleague of mine once exclaimed in exasperation, a metaphysical nonentity. Watsuji has followed Heidegger’s hermeneutical practice of planting the seed of a whole theory in a single word; the Japanese “ningen” is the counterpart and rival to the German “Dasein.” However, because an entire language also reverberates in the single word, the resulting theories are significantly different. In Watsuji, ethics replaces ontology as first philosophy, and the ordered realm of the interpersonal replaces the authenticity of the singular person. (Before going any further, we would do well to remember that the language of our analysis, English, cannot serve as a neutral arbitrator and translator of Watsuji’s Japanese and Heidegger’s German; at best, this trian- gulation of languages serves to point out the assumptions in such English words as “person” and “human being.”)

Between Subject and Object Watsuji also obstructs the polarity of subject and object, but in a terminology that often seems to belie his theory. Hermeneutics, he writes, as the method proper to ethics, aims to understand something subjective by way of expressions.13 Watsuji’s language here translates Dilthey, Heidegger’s forerunner in hermeneutics; but Watsuji’s theory will not only expose a bias in Dilthey but also suggest a way out of the aporia posed by the postmodern critique of Dil- they and of the philosophy of subjectivity. Once again, Watsuji’s adoption of the hermeneutical method for ethics will entail his divergence from a source very close to him. He writes that he must part company with Dilthey because Dilthey thinks of society as something objective, an external system, rather than the subjective human existence (shutaiteki ningen sonzai) that it is. Fur- Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object 81 thermore, Dilthey fails to see how individualistic are his concepts of life (Leben) and lived experience (Erleben) that supposedly underlie social reality. Lived experience is inherently incommensurable and unique, quite the opposite of communal existence, yet its expression requires communal existence.14 Wat- suji’s criticism is remarkable, for it seems not only to get Dilthey wrong but also to adopt the language of subjectivity that seems at odds with his emphasis on the “between.” It is easy to read Dilthey himself as overcoming the strict dichotomy of subject and object. Dilthey understands the world as a manifestation or, using Hegelian language, an objectification of human activities. The very point of developing hermeneutics as the method appropriate to the historical and cultural sciences is that it challenges any attempt to explain the world as an objective realm independent of human beings and to assume that humans are subjects different in kind from the objects of their study. Insofar as the proper understanding of the world was restricted to the human, social world, it required no stretch of the imagination to see that world as objectifications or expressions of human subjects, that is, to link social and cultural institutions and artifacts to the subjectivity that created them or, better, that expressed itself in them. To take this one step further, in anticipation of a postmodern critique that Dilthey barely anticipated, what if we were to understand the so-called natural world, too, as an expression of the human spirit? Then even the “world of nature” would appear as— or at least be seen as appearing through—human practices such as the sciences, conditioned as they are by other objectifications of the spirit. At its extreme, the world of nature would appear as a social construction. If Dilthey’s thesis is carried to its extreme,15 the world appears as a social construction to be read; and when the divergent ways of reading and the pluralism of readers are acknowledged, then the world fragments into any number of diverse, culturally constructed worlds in our celebrated postmodern condition. Finally, in a self-reflexive moment, we subjects who do the reading are deconstructed to appear as so many effects of diverse social /cultural practices. It is here that Dilthey’s thesis of subjectivity as the source of expressions is overturned: Insofar as the subject turns out to be an effect, it loses its status as a unitary author and causative agent. Taken to its extreme, Dilthey’s project to see the world as an objectification of subjectivity turns back on and desubjectifies its source. Does Watsuji’s hermeneutics present an alternative to the deconstruction of the subject and the postmodern fragmentation of the world that resulted from the breakdown of the subject-object relation? To answer this question, we will need to examine his language once again and the way it encapsulates his thesis. Watsuji also makes ample use of the language of subjectivity (shutaisei) and its 82 John C. Maraldo expressions (hyo¯gen) and claims that hermeneutics is the only method proper to ethics precisely because ethics is an understanding of human existence (ningen sonzai) as subjective. To the extent that there is any object to be grasped in the theoretical study that is ethics, it must be seen as the expressions of subjective human existence. Watsuji’s definition of these terms, however, differs radically from what Dilthey implies. For Watsuji, a “subject” (shutai) is a kind of relation, namely, a “practical interconnection of acts” (jissenteki ko¯iteki renkan), and expressions are constitutive moments of these interconnections 16 rather than objectifications of individual authors and actors. Even what Dil- they calls expressions are possible only because we live in the between (aidagara). It is as if Watsuji wanted to say that individual subjects are themselves expressions of something more basic, that actors and interactors derive from interactions. This sounds something like the direction taken by the postmodern critique of the subject, but with a twist. Watsuji’s explicit criticism of Dilthey’s individualism would seem to have critical implications for the postmodern con- structionist views as well. Although this possibility would have to be examined in much more detail, we can hint at its direction: To the extent that postmodern critiques of the subject and theories of social construction take as their target an individualist, authorial conception of the subject, their conceptions of the “social” tend to be of an anonymous force that lacks unity or that rules behind corporate identities that have subsumed the identities of individuals. Watsuji’s alternative points out the possibility of an authentic way of being communal and social. There is, to be sure, a danger in Watsuji’s conception, equally in need of further examination. His notion of authenticity (a concept he uses only to criticize Heidegger) involves interactive negations of individual will and group will. The danger is a totalism or totalitarianism (zentai- shugi) in which—to use Watsuji’s own terms—a self-negation of the individual is not met halfway by a self-negation of the larger whole. Watsuji paid more attention to the danger of misplacing concreteness in the individual than to that of placing all authority in a larger whole, such as a nation-state. Watsuji’s interpretation of the “world” and its relation to subjectivity also exemplifies his difference from his hermeneutical predecessors and their postmodern successors. Like them, Watsuji does not consider a world apart from human beings. Somewhat different from both of them, the only world for Wat- suji is the natural, historical, and social dimension of humans.17 The actual world is an extension of subjectivity (shutaiteki ni hirogatta mono) in his sense of that term. Watsuji does not need to reach far to find an appropriate word for his conception of world. The ordinary Japanese words seken and yo no naka easily begin to convey his meaning. These Japanese terms denote of course the world in the sense of society at large, the public, the world whose ways one can Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object 83 be versed in or ignorant of (seken nare, seken shirazu). Watsuji notes that the ordinary words seken or yo no naka (the public or society at large) imply something that itself can function as a kind of subject, namely, the community (kyo¯do¯teki na shutai) that transcends individual subjects.18 However, This is not quite the right way to say it, I think. The world seken does not stand opposed to individual people as something that transcends them because it already contains the Between (gen) that is constitutive of being human (ningen). Nor does this world seken for Watsuji demarcate the human from the nonhuman. It is only a slight stretch for Watsuji to interpret seken or yo no naka as a space spread out between individuals (hito) and whatever is taken as other to them. A world construed as objective nature independent of humans would be an abstraction, just as the individual subject is an abstraction from our existence as ningen. On the other hand, the world cannot be not read as a social construction in which objects or phenomena are rendered dependent on the conceptualizations and social practices of distinct groups of people, because the world seken counts as the actual space or interval (ma) of the interactions that constitute us. Following his hermeneutical practice, Watsuji’s thesis is implied more in words than in propositions: There is no world (seken) apart from human being (ningen) anymore than there are interactions without an “inter” (ma). Watsuji models his interpretation of world after Heidegger, but so as to contrast ultimately with Heidegger. Heidegger calls Dasein “Being-in-the- World” (In-der Welt-Sein), a neologism that Watsuji translates with the ordinary word “yo no naka.” Just as worldliness (Weltlichkeit) is a fundamental structure of Being-in-the-World for Heidegger, for Watsuji seken or yo no naka designates the historical, climatic, and social structure of human existence. Heidegger chooses one meaning of “world” (Welt) in German: that “in which” Dasein lives, including the public and one’s surroundings (Sein und Zeit, p. 65). Watsuji, choosing the word seken over sekai, needs only to explicate its ordinary sense. However, Watsuji could speak of seken as the authentic social nature (shakaisei) of human being (ningen), whereas Dasein’s authentic way of being is already restricted to being a unique individual. Along with Karl Loe- with, Watsuji is perhaps the first to point out the ethical limitations of Hei- degger’s Sein und Zeit. The implication of his critique, however, would be that Heidegger’s failure to recognize the positive meaning of social being ironically led him to underestimate how forceful an actor the totality can be.

The Lack of Gap between Self and Other For better or worse, depending on one’s point of view, Watsuji’s notions of human being (ningen) and world (seken) also undermine the priority of the rela- 84 John C. Maraldo tion between self and other and thus the signiﬁcance of alterity. There are two implicit theses to consider. First, Watsuji conceives of self and other (jita) as a disruption (bunretsu) both of human existence and of the subject as the practical interconnection of acts.19 This disruption, however, can be sustained only temporarily, while one is not engaged in actions, for an act is a movement toward a “non-duality of self and other to form the Between (aidagara).” 20 Wat- suji implies that if we begin by looking at differentiated selves, we see that actions reconnect them to others; if we begin with what is more visible, that is, their actions, we see that these are not the product of individuals but the condition for their being human subjects. For self and other to exist as human beings, they must be reunited through interaction. Second, as should already be evident, Watsuji conceives of self and other only as individual selves, which themselves are temporary and partial beings. In other words, there is no sig- niﬁcant Other to the human being. Watsuji writes “self-other” as a single word (jita) that stands on one side of a negative equation whose second side (or negation) is a totality or greater whole. An individual’s other half is not really an other individual but the world (seken) that makes one a human being. In summary, the relevant relationship of opposition for Watsuji is that between individuals and the greater whole; that is, it is the Between of the community, which represents a self-negation of both individual will and group will. The relevant relationship, for better or worse, is not the relation between self and other. Indeed, in his hermeneutical practice, Watsuji does not even place a space between self and other.

Between Culture and Nature Watsuji’s ethics, informed as it was by his hermeneutical method, also expanded and revised his earlier speculations about the relationship between climate and culture, which he began as early as 1927 during his sojourn in Eu- rope and first published as Fu¯do in 1935 (translated as Climate and Culture in 1961). Within the confines of this essay, it will be possible only to suggest how Watsuji’s reading of the famous term fu¯do serves to undermine the traditional distinction between culture and nature. Watsuji’s early speculations began as a criticism of Heidegger’s emphasis on the temporality of human being to the near exclusion of spatiality. An appreciation of spatial existence formed the basis of his work, which he himself understood as a study of the effects of climate and physical environment on the various cultures and civilizations of the world. Although Climate and Culture’s idealized generalizations about monsoon, desert, and pastoral cultures did not stand up to his own later scrutiny, Watsuji stayed with his early insight that human nature is rooted in and particularized by various environments. Then, Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object 85 the reading of ningen in his ethical theory crystallized the insight that human beings exist in spatial relationships and that human existence is fundamentally relational. In contrast to the earlier work, however, the sections in Watsuji’s Ethics on fu¯do should not be read as a kind of geographic determinism.21 In the mature work, different mentalities and social practices are not seen as determined by climatic and environmental conditions. Instead, Watsuji sees the concrete place of our existence as the space of interactions between environment and culture. These interactions differ according to specific localities or types of locality but universally collapse any rigid distinction between nature or the natural world and the human world or culture. The two are formed mutually. Watsuji’s interpretive strategy in the fu¯do sections of the Ethics continues his practice of combining etymological and traditional interpretations: The Sino- Japanese glyphs fu¯do separately signify wind and earth, but in combination the term was used in traditional works called fu¯doki to describe the geophysi- cal conditions, natural resources, economic life, and customs of local regions. Further exploration of this theme in Watsuji might relate his refusal of any ultimate distinction between the human and the natural world to many postmodernist and feminist critiques of the distinction between culture and nature and might also clarify the ethical consequences of such critiques.

Conclusions I have attempted to show how Watsuji’s hermeneutical practice puts the priority of the “Between” over the terms that it relates: individual and communal, subject and object, self and other, culture and nature. Before drawing a tentative conclusion, I would like to remind the reader of what is left out of this essay. I have not discussed any specific ethical values that Watsuji derives from his interpretation of the human being. Nor have I analyzed the specific differences he posits between kinds of communal wholes—such as family and a larger community or a larger community and a nation-state—and the significant question of whether such wholes exist simply in a dialectical relationship with one another or whether there is a hierarchy among them. I have not addressed, nor does Watsuji, the question of how individuals arise by “negat- ing a greater whole.” Is this simply a matter of someone rebelling against the common will of a family, community, society, or state? Finally, neither of us has addressed the question whether undermining alterity invites forms of imperialism—cultural, gender, statist—that we would rather avoid. What lesson might we learn from a hermeneutical theory that seems in- separable from its practice and its embeddedness in a particular language, that makes points that can be made only by reading Japanese words? Is it not the 86 John C. Maraldo case that Watsuji once again tries to make something universal out of something particular, perhaps even parochial and ethnocentric, as he and many Ky- oto school philosophers allegedly did in their political theories? 22 Does he not impose a particular view of what it means to be human and suppose it to be a universal norm? My reading suggests a different conclusion. To speak of the human being is already to speak in a particular language. There is no language between Japanese and English that could somehow supply a neutral or overarching conception. Instead, we should look for the kinds of contrast that a reading across particular languages allows. The particularities of Watsuji’s Japanese are precisely what lets us see the limits of our own language, and that, in my mind, is an indispensable task of any hermeneutical theory. JAPAN’S AESTHETIC HERMENEUTICS

Nishi Amane on Aesthetics A Japanese Version of Utilitarian Aesthetics

Hamashita Masahiro

Nishi Amane’s (1829–1897) great accomplishment in establishing the fun- damentals of Western learning in modern Japan suggests many interesting questions, ranging from the translation of technical terms of Western learning and to the transition from feudalistic, traditional Confucian ways of thinking to those of Western practical ways. In this essay on Nishi’s modern aesthetics Iwill confine myself to two issues: first, Nishi’s studies of aesthetics and the development of the words he used to translate the term “aesthetics” and, second, how the terminology for aesthetics reflects Nishi’s mental attitude toward a Western set of ideas.

Translating “Aesthetics” into Japanese In the East Asian cultural sphere where Chinese characters are still currently used, “aesthetics” is today translated as “bigaku” (literally, “the study of beauty”). The Japanese people imported Chinese characters from China through Korea, while modern Japanese scholars have coined words in Chinese characters for categories taken from Western sciences. Nishi Amane was among those who invented this terminology by arranging and modifying traditional Chinese characters to interpret Western scholarly categories in the humanities. The word “bigaku” is not Nishi’s invention; it is rather the product of a later period. In his 1881 Tetsugaku Jii (Dictionary of Philosophy), Inoue Tet- sujiro¯ still translates “aesthetics” as bimyo¯gaku (science of the beautiful). Nakae Cho¯min’s coinage of bigaku, however, in his 1883 translation of Eugène Véron’s L’Esthétique must have had some inﬂuence, and it is said that by the

89 90 Hamashita Masahiro thirties of the Meiji era (late 1890s), bigaku was the standard word for “aesthetics.” When Nishi Amane translated the word “aesthetics,” he seemed uncon- cerned with ﬁnding a precise Japanese term that would translate literally the original meaning of “aesthetics”—that is, the science of sense perception /sensibility. The following is a chronological list of his translations of “aesthetics”:

1867: zenbigaku (science of the good and the beautiful) 1 1870: shigagaku (ﬁne arts of poetry, music and picture) 2 kashuron (theory of good taste) 3 takubi no gaku (science of supreme beauty) 4 1871(?): bimyo¯gaku (science of the beautiful) 5 1874: zenbigaku 6 bimyo¯no gaku (science of the elegant) 7 1878(?): bimyo¯gakusetsu (treatise on the science of the beautiful).

The dates of these terms are generally accepted. A problem remains, however, with the date of the term “bimyo¯gaku” (science of the beautiful); thus, the question marks for 1871 and 1878. To understand the development of Nishi’s concept of aesthetics, it is very important to establish the exact date of composition of Bimyo¯Gakusetsu (A Treatise on the Science of the Beautiful), the most elaborated among Nishi’s texts. The original draft was apparently a lecture addressed to the Meiji emperor. According to Aso Yoshiteru,it was written in 1871.8 O¯ kubo Toshiaki estimates the date to be around 1876.9 After a thorough examination of the archives of the Takamatsu no Miya Family, Mori Agata has claimed that Bimyo¯Gakusetsu was written in 1878, and not as a lecture to the emperor but as a colloquy with members of the royal family.10 I ﬁnd Mori’s thesis the most persuasive. Although Nishi had already used the term “science of the beautiful” in his 1874 translation of Joseph Haven’s Mental Philosophy, Nishi’s Treatise on the Sci- ence of the Beautiful (Bimyo¯Gakusetsu) represents his most systematic thought on aesthetics. Let us trace the development of Nishi Amane’s aesthetic thought from zenbigaku (the science of the good and the beautiful) to kashuron (the theory of good taste) and, ﬁnally, to bimyo¯gaku (the science of the beautiful).

Zenbigaku In Nishi’s Hyakuichi Shinron (New Theory of the One Hundred and One Prin- ciple), “zenbigaku” (the science of the good and the beautiful) suggests a concept similar to the Greek “kalokagathia” in Western aesthetics. The word “hyakuichi” (one hundred and one) in the title refers to the idea that there must be Nishi Amane on Aesthetics 91 one principle that unifies hundreds of religious and moral ideas. The “principle,” for Nishi, is positivism, which he thought was lacking in Eastern culture. The book distinguishes between law (ho¯) and moral teaching (kyo¯) and between the physical (butsuri) and the mental (shinri). The distinction between politics and morality came to Nishi through his study of Ogyu¯ Sorai who chose to return to Confucius’s original texts 11 and distance himself from the later school of Zhu Xi. In the Edo period Zhu Xi’s school was associated with the support of feudalistic ideology; Nishi, however, had criticized this school since the age of eighteen. His criticism revolved around his belief that Zhu Xi distorted original Confucian thought. His distinction between law and moral teaching and his criticism of Zhu Xi may be a result not of the influence of the Western idea of “Realpolitik” but rather of Ogyu¯ Sorai’s pragmatism and nominalism. According to Zhu Xi, physical reason (butsuri) and moral reason (do¯ri) are aspects of one and the same reason (ri). He claimed the continuity between the physical, natural order and the moral, human order on the basis of the unify- ing principle of universal, heavenly reason (tenri). Countering this argument by adopting Western positive science, Nishi Amane distinguishes between the order of the physical world and the normative principle of human nature. Thus, this conception leads to a further distinction between the physical and the mental. The thesis that law and moral teaching should be differentiated seems to derive from Ogyu¯ Sorai’s nominalism, from the distinctions he draws between religion and law, among law, morality, and etiquette. Nishi Amane thought that it would be impossible to build in his lifetime a well-ordered nation simply by relying on the ruler’s high morality and on the administration of one’s own family; rather, law was required to keep order in society. Law means a norm to coordinate each person’s interest in society; moral teaching is a universal among human beings, controlling the relationship of master and ser- vant, father and son. The affirmative value in law is justice, while in morality it is goodness. As for moral goodness, Nishi Amane states that the idea of goodness appears in the form of beauty. Under the condition of supreme goodness, beauty in form, efficiency in action /result, and grace in quality are all mutually related. This belief led Nishi to devise the term “zenbigaku” (the science of the good and the beautiful) as the translation of “aesthetics.” 12 This choice reminds us of Plato’s notion of “kalokagathia.” Nishi Amane’s idea is not Platonic, of course, because it lacks the transcendental Idea; rather, it may be similar to the ethico-aesthetic thought of a modern version of Platonism articulated in the philosophy and aesthetics of such eighteenth-century British philosophers as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, mixing Platonic and utilitarian 92 Hamashita Masahiro elements. At the same time, Nishi Amane preserved Confucian elements in his thought.

Kashuron Hyakugaku Renkan (System of One Hundred Sciences, 1870) was originally delivered as a lecture at Nishi’s private school. He meant it to be an encyclo- pedic system of science. Although we only know its content in a general form through the notebook of one of Nishi’s disciples, Nagami Yu, it appears to be very similar to that of Hyakuichi Shinron. Intellectual science (shinrigakujo¯no setsu) is clearly differentiated from physical science (butsurijo¯no setsu). Among intellectual sciences, aesthetics is treated as a subclass of philosophy. “Aesthet- ics” is referred to as “kashuron” (theory of good taste), and it is listed together with logic (chichigaku), psychology (seirigaku), ontology (ritaigaku), ethics (mei- kyo¯gaku), philosophy of politics, and philosophy of law. The notebook reads, “This theory of good taste already existed in ancient Greece, but in fact it is only in modern times that it emerged as a science, owing to Baumgarten, a German.” 13 From this explanation, we understand that by the “theory of good taste” Nishi Amane meant modern aesthetics as, primarily, a “theory of taste.” His analysis of aesthetic principles emphasizes the psychological status of aesthetics. Nishi links the three philosophical values—truth, goodness, and beauty— to three active powers—knowing, acting, and feeling. These powers manifest themselves in intellect, will, and sensibility.Each element constitutes a science: logic, ethics, and aesthetics. In short, aesthetics depends on the intellectual power of sensibility, based on feelings, whose object is the beautiful. Aesthet- ics acts as a norm that provides a way to reach the beautiful through feelings. Thus, Nishi introduces the principle of the judgment of taste,14 the principle of “identity in diversity.” For example, according to Nishi, we can appreciate better the cherry blossoms by looking at various trees and ﬂowers rather than by looking only at one and the same tree.15 He explains the principle further, arguing that in Japan there is a great discrepancy between the emperor and the common people, while in Western society kings, subjects, and the common people are all equal as human beings, each with a distinct individuality.16 Ni- shi Amane’s notion of aesthetics as a theory of good sense seems to have been inﬂuenced by Western ways of thinking.

Bimyo¯gaku Bimyo¯Gakusetsu (A Treatise on the Science of the Elegant) can well be called “the first treatise on aesthetics in modern Japan.” 17 The term “bimyo¯gaku” (aes- Nishi Amane on Aesthetics 93 thetics) is more comprehensive than the previously used “zenbigaku” and “kashuron.” “Zenbigaku” keeps aesthetic thought confined within the frame of moral teaching, with no mention of feelings. “Kashuron” treats aesthetics and ethics as independent disciplines under philosophy. In “Bimyo¯gaku” Nishi ex- tends these ideas to include the intellectual power of feelings and the principle of diversity amidst variety. Nishi Amane seems to admit that the autonomy of the aesthetic dimension is distinct from that of morality. He says that our ability to judge the beautiful from the ugly is inherent in human nature.18 The distinction between the aesthetic and the moral is the one important difference between “bimyo¯gaku” and “zenbigaku.” Nishi sets up the beautiful as a third principle along with moral teaching and social law. However, the aesthetic principle still implies an ethical judgment, which means that the distinction between the beautiful and the ugly in “the science of the beautiful” also applies to ordinary society. The degree of aesthetic judgment is indicative of the degree of civilization.19 Nishi also emphasizes the importance of the imagination in the development of civilizations. He believes that humans and animals share the morally binding affection between parents and children, legal justice, and the aesthetic feeling for the beautiful feathers of a peacock.20 The imagination, however, can be found only in human beings.21 This explains why man is horrified by a picture of an ogre or why he can draw an abstract figure of a human being.22 The importance of imagination in aesthetics and other disciplines suggests to Nishi the role that the imagination plays in the promotion of civilization and in distinguishing human beings from animals. Such an evolutionist view indicates Nishi’s effort to present himself as a thinker of the enlightenment, ea- ger to adopt Western ideas. According to Nishi, imagination arouses admiration, which in turn leads to aesthetic feelings. He classifies passions into moral (“good,” “bad,” “pretty,” “hateful”) and aesthetic (“joyful,” “pleasant,” “delightful”).23 Among the passions most relevant to “the science of the beautiful” are “the pleasant” (omoshiroshi) and “the laughable” (okashi).24 These two passions are distinguished because they are unrelated to self-interest;25 as in Kant’s idea of aesthetic disinterestedness, the “pleasant” and the “laughable” are aroused when we look at something as purely pleasing or laughable apart from any direct self- interest. The “pleasant” is caused by “variety amidst uniformity” or “uniformity amidst variety,” that is, by a change in regularity and strangeness in harmony.26 The “laughable” is explained as an effect of unexpected changes in regularity or a lack of appropriateness in a situation, such as when a neatly dressed man who is walking proudly suddenly tumbles or when someone is so tall that he stands out in a crowd of equally short marching people.27 Ni- shi’s idea of the “laughable” is similar to eighteenth-century Scottish philoso- 94 Hamashita Masahiro pher Francis Hutcheson’s notion of “laughter.” According to Hutcheson, the cause of laughter is “the bringing together of images which have contrary additional ideas, as well as some resemblance in the principal idea.” 28 In any case, Nishi’s notion of aesthetic feeling seems to be already dependent on Western aesthetics.29 Nishi also discusses the relativity of beauty or aesthetic judgment. Accord- ing to him, the criterion of beauty and ugliness is not substantial but relative and nominal.30 Beauty is not a mental, objective entity but is always evaluated in terms of practical actuality. In this sense, Nishi’s concept of beauty is rather negative in comparison to fields that directly affect social reality, such as morality, law, politics, and economy. Although he argues that art contributes to the promotion of civilization and human development, Nishi regards art not as a direct end of politics but only its means.31 Some further explanation of Nishi’s utilitarianism is required.

Utilitarian Aesthetics as a Practical Science In the early Meiji era, many intellectuals were deeply interested in the utilitarianism of modern British thought. Nishi Amane translated John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism into Japanese with the title of Rigaku (published in 1877). In the introduction, “Yaku Rigaku Setsu” (An Explanation of Utilitar- ianism), he identifies Mill’s key ideas: utilitarianism is intended to advance the prosperity and glory of the nation and to be a moral philosophy for people in modernity; the principle of human nature is to avoid pain and seek pleasure and happiness.32 We might call “utilitarian aesthetics” the aesthetic thought that Nishi expresses with the word “bimyo¯gaku.” A utilitarian view of aesthetics defines beauty and the fine arts in terms of their utility or end, and conceives of beauty and the fine arts with the purpose of promoting civilization and ideal policies leading to the happiness of the people. This latter concept of utilitarianism is similar to the thought of such post-Enlightenment British utilitarianists as Bentham and Mill. In Nishi’s “science of the beautiful” (bimyo¯gaku), we see utilitarian elements in, for instance, his argument that the distinction between the beautiful and the ugly is realized when a society frees itself of barbarousness and becomes civilized.33 The science of the beautiful, he continues, contributes to the formation of a civilized society, thus building the humanities in collaboration with moral philosophy and law.34 These utilitarian concepts are distinguished from those of “omoshiroshi” and “okashi,” two basic aesthetic affects that are disinterested, “purely aroused by the aesthetic principle.” 35 The utilitarian Nishi Amane on Aesthetics 95 idea of aesthetics and art emerged not only in Nishi Amane’s work but also in most art criticism during the early Meiji era. Novels about political ideas and translations from Western originals never privileged the aestheticism of “l’art pour l’art” but were constant sources of practical knowledge of politics and the sciences.36 Nishi Amane himself embraced the philosophy of utilitarianism. We find in Nishi’s Jinsei Sanpo¯setsu (Three Treasures for Life) his most explicit utilitarian views. According to Nishi, the “three treasures” in life are health, knowledge, and wealth.37 The notion of human happiness led Nishi to articulate the ideas of rights and duties, which imply the need for practical sciences. More- over, I see in Nishi’s utilitarian aesthetics a compromise between his desire to promote the humanities along the line of Western learning and the nation- wide tendency to import from Western countries only practical, useful sciences geared to the formation of a powerful and modern nation-state. Therefore, Nishi had to emphasize that aesthetic feelings are also useful to the promotion of civilization. Presumably, Nishi inherited Ogyu¯ Sorai’s attitude against empty theories and vain rhetoric, traits that Sorai associated with neo-Confucianism (in particular, the school of Zhu Xi). Moved by a desire to avoid empty speculations and to promote social reforms benefiting the people, Ogyu¯ Sorai challenged neo-Confucianism. Ogyu¯ Sorai’s “jitsugaku” (practical learning) may have had an impact on Nishi Amane’s interest in utilitarianism as well. Nishi was also attracted by Western learning, especially Western sciences such as medicine and the military arts that were meant to promote civilization and bring prosperity to the nation-state. Nishi’s utilitarian aesthetics is a blend of local learning (jitsugaku) and modern Western science.38 Nishi stressed the importance of art in terms of its utility. In Chisetsu (A Theory of Knowledge, 1874), he defended “belles lettres” against claims denying the value of literature, arguing that “poetry will make the human mind graceful and people’s custom beautiful, and so will prose and verse do the same.” 39

Conclusion Let me summarize Nishi Amane’s journey from the “science of the good and the beautiful” (zenbigaku) and “the theory of good taste” (kashuron) to “the science of the beautiful” (bimyo¯gaku). He followed a path leading from an ethics related to Confucianism to a Western aesthetics of taste and ﬁnally to a utilitarian type of aesthetics. We notice in Nishi’s thought a shift from ethical realism to utilitarian nominalism that established him as a brilliant thinker of the Meiji government. The changes that took place in Nishi’s aesthetic dictio- 96 Hamashita Masahiro nary run parallel to changes in Nishi’s career from adviser to the Tokugawa ba- kufu to a bureaucrat of the Meiji government. They also seem to indicate Ni- shi’s attitude toward the movement of “rejecting Asia and embracing Europe” (datsua nyu¯o¯). Nishi’s career is typical of modern Japanese intellectuals and indicative of the hermeneutical struggles that Japanese thinkers engaged in at a time of profound transition. 9

Hegel in Tokyo Ernest Fenollosa and His 1882 Lecture on the Truth of Art

J. Thomas Rimer

From a vantage point at the dawn of a new century, the larger contours of the development of a modern Japanese art, which began more than a hundred years ago, now seem possible to discern. Certainly from the 1890s on, with the beginning of instruction at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko¯) in 1889 and the development of various exhibition systems, the creation of museums, and the establishment of other art-related groups and organizations, the ebb and flow of various forces—artistic, political, and cultural —were at last to find a framework to repair to or rebel against. Indeed, such a tentative framework might have been established more than a decade earlier, in 1876, with the establishment of the Technical Art School (Ko¯bu Bijutsu Gakko¯). Yet during that period between the closing of that school in 1883 and the opening of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, the significance of the shifting movements of artists, patrons, and the nascent public, all of which were to help set the direction for a number of crucial activities during the next decades, remains hard to grasp with any certainty. All those who have studied this fascinating period, however in conflict their convictions may be concerning the significance of the actual events that took place, agree on one thing: the need to evaluate the role played during these years by the American teacher and art enthusiast Ernest Fenollosa (1853 –1908). The eminent contemporary Japanese critic Karatani Ko¯jin has summed up Fenol- losa’s career as follows:

A graduate of Harvard, Fenollosa arrived in Japan in 1878 to assume a teaching post in political economy at Tokyo Imperial University. An aesthete by nature, Fenollosa became absorbed by classical Japanese art and grew convinced that the East held

97 98 J. Thomas Rimer

something that could transcend Western modernism. He considered Oriental and Japanese art to be superior to Western art (particularly the then-popular trend of realist painting) and undertook a project of periodizing and recategorizing Japanese art history. His student, Okakura Kakuzo¯ (1862–1913), (more commonly known as Tenshin), who was proﬁcient in English, assisted Fenollosa with this project and joined his campaign to revive traditional styles.1

Fenollosa remained in Japan until 1890 (although he was to return on two later occasions), and the significance, for good or ill, of his various activities has been interpreted in differing fashions by his various admirers and detrac- tors. All seem agreed, however, that nothing during his career remains more significant than the talk he gave in Tokyo in May 1882 to an influential group of politicians and others interested in art named the Ryu¯chikai (roughly, the “Dragon Pond Society”). Published in Japanese translation in November of that year under the auspices of the society, Fenollosa’s Bijutsu Shinsetsu, which might be rendered in English as “An Explanation of the Truth of Art,” was widely circulated and quoted. In his recent and provocative history of modernist Asian art, the British scholar John Clark cites the lecture specifically and indicates that “the most significant Euramerican intervention in the construction of a nontraditional art in Asia occurred in Japan with Ernest Fenollosa and the U.S. collectors to whom he recommended purchases in the 1880s.” 2 Bijutsu Shinsetsu, therefore, appears to serve as an important nodal point in the development of a new consciousness concerning art and aesthetics in Meiji Japan. Along with the works related to aesthetics written at roughly the same period by the Japanese philosopher Nishi Amane (1829–1897), Fenollosa’s contribution, at least to his hagiographers, seems central to a nascent debate concerning the nature of the beautiful. Whatever the reputation of the lecture, however, suitable judgments, at least for foreign observers, have been difficult to make because the English original has been lost. Heretofore, no complete translated version into English of the Japanese text has been made available. The remarks that follow in this essay are based on my initial observations of this text, which I have recently translated— or, perhaps it is best to say, attempted to translate—into English. Reading and studying the document is a fascinating experience and one that, as I will point out shortly, doubtless raises more questions than it answers.

1 Before explaining the context of the document and speculating on the possible reasons for its significance and influence, let me provide a brief account of the contents. This description must be brief, as the text itself is quite long (forty- Hegel in Tokyo 99 one double-spaced pages in English), and to present all the requisite details would require more space than is available here. The lecture is roughly divided into an introduction and three long sections, which I will attempt to describe briefly. In general, one might point out that Fenollosa’s lecture is organized carefully, even a bit pedantically. In his introductory section, Fenollosa asserts that his remarks are firmly based on “scientific principles” (no doubt echoing Spencer, so popular at the time) and are conceived with the premise (perhaps a degraded Hegelian one) that in the life of art, as indeed of civilizations in general (just as in individual human lives), there is a “childhood,” a period of mature flourishing, and an inevitable decay. Given this principle, Fenollosa continues, it is perhaps not surprising that both European painting and Japanese painting are presently in a period of decline. He also indicates that his examples will be drawn from a variety of sources, among them music, lyric poetry, painting, sculpture, the dance, and so forth. In that sense, although the lecture is concerned mainly with the art of painting, it also shifts occasionally into the realm of a more general aesthetic theory. The first long section of the lecture is dedicated to an outline of the nature of art itself. Fenollosa is firm in his wish to refute false ideas concerning any definition of the entity of art. Some persons, he points out, believe that art is something that is skillfully done, but this concept is false; a shoemaker or keeper of financial records may do superb work, but the results do not constitute art. Others believe that art can be defined as something that can move us and bring us pleasure, but, he insists, the argument really goes the other way around: It is only when the work of art in and of itself is excellent that we can feel a sense of pleasure. The sense of pleasure does not create the art. Finally, Fenollosa refutes the idea that art gains its value from imitating nature; if that were so, he concludes, then photographs, even of unpleasant things, would constitute art. Then too, he reminds his audience, there are many things not found in nature, such as the abstractions of music or the painting of a mythical animal such as a dragon, that can certainly be understood as art. To understand the nature of art, Fenollosa continues, we must seek beyond external appearance, for “the character of a work of art lies within the object,” chiefly in the nature of the connections within the work itself. His analogy is with the human body: Each organ is separate and distinct, but the life force of the human being connects everything together and gives beauty to the whole. Another is the circle: If any area of the circle is not perfect, then the whole design fails. It is our intuitive sense of these implicit connections that constitutes the True and the Beautiful. Indeed, he continues, a work of art, as it becomes more beautiful through time, reveals that, in Hegelian terms, it is capable of manifesting the Idea; and, because artists are capable of this high calling, they 100 J. Thomas Rimer deserve status in society far above that of any mere artisan for they can reveal to us a level of perfection that we cannot divine for ourselves. The second long section of the lecture concerns the techniques of the visual arts, in which Fenollosa shows, by using a variety of examples, how the artist intuits the Idea and attempts to render it in various artistic forms, with a different balance of form and subject suitable for each. He describes, based on ideas first suggested earlier, that unity in a work of art gives a sense of beauty, which of course constitutes in turn one element of the Idea. Unity remains a crucial principle and involves the relationship between central and subsidiary elements. When they are arranged and related to each other in proper order, then Beauty, Goodness, and Unity become possible. Fenollosa then goes on to discuss the eight qualities necessary for the existence of Unity and Beauty in a painting. He suggests the following principles and gives examples for each:

1. Unity of line 2. Unity of shading 3. Unity of color 4. Beauty of line 5. Beauty of shading 6. Beauty of color 7. Unity of subject 8. Beauty of subject

In addition, he points out two further qualities required for, in these terms, a successful work of art: force of subject, which allows the Idea to emerge through the power of invention and is not subject to the contrivances of mediocre artists, and force of execution, which requires that all eight of the characteristics he lists are brought into play spontaneously and intuitively. His example, un- likely but somehow effective, is that of the sumo wrestler. Given these general principles, which are universally true, Fenollosa continues, we may then compare Eastern and Western painting. He ﬁnds several differences, among them the following:

1. Western painting attempts to represent objects realistically in nature, but painting is now in a phase of decadence, and artists resort increasingly to mere “tricks.” 2. Western painting uses shading, Japanese painting does not; thus, foreigners tend to scoff at Japanese painting (and presumably Chinese painting as well) because they are unfamiliar with these conventions. 3. Japanese painters use outline in a different fashion from Western painters, who, in their belief that actual nature shows no “outlines,” cannot appreciate the beauty of East- ern techniques. 4. Western pigments are thick; Eastern pigments are thin. One has no greater inher- Hegel in Tokyo 101

ent value than the other, however; choosing the example of pitch, Fenollosa says that music written at a higher pitch is not automatically “better” than that composed at a lower pitch.

For Fenollosa, in the end, the techniques of Japanese painting are preferable to those of Western painting because they allow the artist to manifest the Idea more clearly. He predicts that Western artists will begin to borrow these techniques and use them themselves, citing “a certain English artist” (whom his annotator takes to be Whistler) as a first example. The final section of the lecture takes up quite a different set of topics and deals with Fenollosa’s vision of the practical issues facing the Japanese contemporary arts in general, and painting in particular, at this moment in time. If, he begins, Japanese painting is truly superior, why is it that so few paintings are exported for sale abroad? One reason is that Japanese artists do not yet understand the kinds of painting that Western art lovers, at their own stage of development in the appreciation of Japanese art, might like to purchase and own. Little study has been done concerning this crucial area, Fenollosa reminds his audience, and in his view, only one firm in Nagoya has taken an active role in determining the nature and extent of the potential foreign market. New plans and methods must be created, so that the energies of this generation of Japanese artists can be dedicated to conceptualizing a truly new and authentic Japanese art. As this task is undertaken, Fenollosa insists that one style of Japanese art, developed in the Tokugawa period and still highly popular, is unsuitable and must be set aside. This is the so-called literati art, or bunjinga. This section of the lecture, in which Fenollosa denigrates this style of painting, contains his only intemperate remarks, and, given the generally bland tonality of the lecture, they seem quite startling. His stated reason for his strong dislike of this style of painting is that its impetus is literary and does not grow organically from the principles inherent in the visual arts; therefore, he says, “this would be like judging a painting in terms of music.” This style of painting, for Fe- nollosa, shows no proper relationship or Unity, which must be composed of those appropriate interior connections between central and subsidiary elements. Thus, a painting by such an artist as Ike no Taiga resembles “a jumble of noodles,” and Buson’s work is no better. These observations in turn give rise to Fenollosa’s explications of the problem of the rise of great masters who manifest the Idea for their generation but then are merely copied by their followers, who lack true creative inspiration. Michelangelo is one such artist in the West; Li Lung-mian and Mu Ch’i in China occupy the same role, and in Japan the greatness of the work of such figures as Sesshu¯, Kano¯ Motonobu, and Maruyama O¯ kyo are not repeated in the 102 J. Thomas Rimer imitations that follow. Now it is time, he insists, to move forward to create a new and vibrant art that can capture the Idea of this new age. To progress along these lines, Fenollosa concludes, three issues must be addressed. The first of them concerns the establishment of an official art school. Later Fenollosa was to help create the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but in this earlier stage of his thinking, he saw more dangers than useful possibilities in such a scheme. In the case of Western art, he notes, history shows that the creation of such schools has not automatically produced great artists. In addition, there is a danger should one style of “official art” be accepted in such a school and so dominate the world of art because the Idea may manifest itself in many styles. There is also the problem that, if trained in this European-style system, Japanese artists will not receive the kind of lengthy nurturing they now receive in a traditional Japanese atelier situation but must continue to work and be forced to experiment on their own after finishing their early training. This observation in turn leads Fenollosa to discuss the necessity to develop regular subsidies for artists, providing them with the kind of financial support that will allow them to train and develop themselves so that they can create the kind of new art that must come forth. New kinds of homes are now being built in Japan, Fenollosa points out, and indeed the emperor’s palace in Tokyo, now to be rebuilt after a fire in 1873, should be decorated by young artists of vision. “If you men of influence become excited by such prospects,” he tells his audience, then the general public will follow after. Finally, Fenollosa makes a few trenchant comments on the need to create a public for art and suggests that the demand for art by a larger public will encourage the artists to do their best work. He suggests that a national art association should be established to set up proper exhibition space, sponsor exhibitions, and help draw the public into discussions of the significance of art and its role in the life of the culture, an act that will in and of itself help develop and improve the general level of public taste.

2 Such, in brief outline, are the contents of the text of Fenollosa’s famous contribution. Being able to decipher the text itself is helpful in explicating certain questions, of course, but in turn stimulates many others. Most of them, of course, I cannot answer with any certainty, but raising them may allow me to identify some important issues. At the least we can better appreciate the range of scholarship and informed judgment that will be needed to lay out the first reliable sketch map capable of showing us the origins of modern Japanese art. My questions expand outward from my encounter with the actual text itself. 1. Whose text is it? As I mentioned earlier, we do not have Fenollosa’s origi- Hegel in Tokyo 103 nal English-language text 3 but only the translation into Japanese attributed to O¯ mori Ichu¯ (1844 –1908) and published by the society. O¯ mori himself was a man of considerable interest for our understanding of the arts in the Meiji period, but I have so far been able to find out relatively little about him, other than that he visited the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876 (and so presumably knew some English), was a member of the society, and had a strong interest in the development of the industrial arts, about which he wrote on a number of occasions. Much of his career was devoted to their progress and development in Japan. The text of Fenollosa’s talk, in O¯ mori’s version, is filled with flowery idioms and classical literary expressions and is occasionally obscure in meaning even to modern commentators.4 Most of Fenollosa’s remaining writings in English show a much more laconic and clear means of expression. We have no way of knowing to what extent the Japanese version was intended to “improve” on the English original, either in style or perhaps even in content, but a significant gap is certain. In this context, making my translation (back) into En- glish is particularly problematic. The general meaning of the text is usually clear, but rendering it sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, from early Meiji Japanese into contemporary English has been, at least for me, a difficult task, and I can certainly understand why, despite the fame of the text, there has been no previous attempt to make such a translation, as far as I know. 2. How do the ideas in the text reflect on Fenollosa’s own development of his understandings about Japanese art? Fenollosa arrived in Japan in 1878; now, barely five years later, he is cited in the printed preface to his lecture as an “eminent expert” on Japanese art. How much had he actually come to know at the time, and where did he obtain his information? It is easy to forget that there was as yet no written, synthetic history of Japanese art in any language for him to consult; a first compilation was prepared in connection with the opening of the Paris World’s Fair of 1900.5 He certainly had learned enough to exhibit in his talk a command of the general flow of historical developments, mentioning in an appropriate context such important artistic schools and artists as Sesshu¯ (1420 –1506), Ko¯rin (1658 –1716), the Tosa School, Muromachi ink painting, Kano¯Mononobu, Kano Tanyu¯ (1602–1674), Ike no Taiga (1723–1776), Yosa Buson (1716 –1783), and Maruyama O¯ kyo (1733 –1795). His Western and Chinese references are necessarily fewer, but he is able to provide some useful comparative examples when they serve his purposes. Nevertheless, the reader, however impressed with Fenollosa’s ability to absorb new and alien information, cannot help but wonder to what extent he was expressing his own convictions, which could scarcely be based on his own considered study of actual works of art, and how much he was rather voicing the enthusiasms and prejudices of his Japanese mentors, whomever in this case they might be.6 3. What convictions did his listeners and readers already hold about the nature of 104 J. Thomas Rimer art? It is difficult to posit with accuracy what may have been the precise views of the nature of art held by Fenollosa’s Japanese contemporaries, who as yet knew little or nothing of Western aesthetic theory. Indeed, the term in Japa- nese for “art” itself (bijutsu) was coined during the early Meiji period. There were, of course, painting treatises concerning both Japanese and Chinese art composed during the preceding Tokugawa period and even earlier, but on the whole these documents were not meant for any wide distribution to what we might now term a “general public.” Those who absorbed Fenollosa’s remarks were neither artists nor scholars but most often collectors and connoisseurs, to whom the concept of any such abstract statements would have surely seemed unfamiliar. Christine Guth’s shrewd and informed discussion of how the development of a personalized, socialized connoisseurship was “the mark of a cultivated gentleman” probably comes closest to characterizing the attitudes of these men because, as she remarks, “the advent of the new Meiji regime altered neither the importance traditionally attributed to self-cultivation nor the ways in which it was demonstrated.” 7 4. To whom was Fenollosa useful? One aspect of the larger scenario of the talk concerns the uses to which it was to be put. Because the Dragon Pond Society issued the talk in printed form, then worked to carry out at least certain aspects of the recommendations made by Fenollosa, some knowledge of the dynamics of this particular group with their American “expert” is particularly crucial. To the extent that I have been able to consult Japanese sources, however, the group still remains something of a phantom. A full membership list, for example, would help explain the close ties between business, government, and the arts that the group evidently set out to foster.8 Several of the members who have been identified were very powerful indeed. Sano Tsunetami (1823 – 1902) was a member of the Japanese delegation to the Vienna Exposition in 1873, in which Japan participated, and went on to found the Japanese Red Cross. Kawase Hideji (sometimes read as Hideharu) (1841–1907) was among the first Japanese, according to Uyeno Naoteru,9 with an interest in the arts to visit England, where he learned from the director of the Kensington Museum of the importance of establishing collections of art for the public. Kuki Ryu¯- ichi (1852–1931), who became minister to the United States in 1884, was to be for several generations a powerful figure in Meiji cultural circles.10 It appears that few if any actual artists belonged to the society before 1883, the year after Fenollosa’s lecture, which suggests that Fenollosa had found himself addressing a group resembling more a modern board of powerful museum trust- ees than an assemblage of men of high cultivation and artistic knowledge. The realities of this situation may be suggested by Fenollosa’s having left the group two years later to help in the formation of a new group, the Kangakai (Painting Appreciation Society), with Kawase as president. The new group attempted to Hegel in Tokyo 105 carry out some of the suggestions made in Bijutsu Shinsetsu. The society exhibited works of art in private collections, sponsored lectures (often by Fenollosa) on art history, and provided what was termed expert advice on the authenticity of individual works of art. 5. What is the intellectual level and value of Fenollosa’s lecture? Whatever its fame, the text of the lecture, read over a hundred years later, does not seem particularly profound or insightful. The opening sections can serve at best as only a very general, reductionist version of the grand Hegelian scheme as revealed both in his own Aesthetics (which first appeared in 1835) and elsewhere in his voluminous writings. Even a passing glance at the sections on “Painting” in the Aesthetics 11 reveals a rich and detailed knowledge of classical and European art on every page; in such a context, Fenollosa’s explanations seem virtually barren of equally trenchant examples. It is in fact not clear as to whether Fe- nollosa himself ever read Hegel, either in the original German or in English translation; it is most likely, according to the data provided in the study of Fe- nollosa by Lawrence Chisolm,12 that Fenollosa depended on such nineteenth- century accounts of Hegel as could be found in such works as Charles Carroll Everett’s The Science of Thought: A System of Logic (1869). As yet, I have not been able to consult the volumes that Chisolm cites; they are now difficult to obtain, but some clues to Fenollosa’s level of knowledge can doubtless be found in them. Nevertheless, to dismiss the lecture as Hegel once or twice removed and Fe- nollosa an idiot savant would clearly be wide of the mark. In the first place, Bijutsu Shinsetsu began as a spoken lecture, through an interpreter, and even in such limiting circumstances, Fenollosa does manage to convey a considerable amount of information and in a fashion that would be relatively clear to his listeners and eventually his readers. An explication of the subtleties of continental nineteenth-century philosophy was scarcely called for with an audience who, as yet, knew nothing of Plato and Aristotle, nor of Descartes and Kant. Indeed, it seems to me that Fenollosa’s relative success derives from his ability to gauge the level of knowledge (as well as of the prejudices and enthusiasms) of his audience. He presents his ideas in an enthusiastic, systematic, and logical fashion. He makes references to Chinese and Japanese, as well as to West- ern art, so that his listeners (and readers) might more quickly understand his conviction that Japanese art and culture can (in some sort of loose Hegelian fashion) fit into a larger world scheme, itself in transition. Perhaps most important, he suggests in his methodology, and indeed in his general stance, that a useful kind of art criticism and art history can be created, independent of those traditional writings in support of particular styles (a phrase that might describe certain earlier Japanese treatises on the art of painting) or, in the case of Chinese art, those often general and mystic statements relating art to philoso- 106 J. Thomas Rimer phy and religion. Whatever the ultimate merits of Fenollosa’s arguments, the very fact of his transmission of such Western expectations, concepts, and traditions of aesthetics into the emerging dialogues concerning the nature of art during this period in Japan was of enormous value. He knew enough about Ja- pan to judge his audience and enough about Western art to make his points. In that limited context, then, I believe that Bijutsu Shinsetsu must be judged a success. 6. Looking back, what events did the lecture help bring about? It is always difficult to judge the power of the word in the context of historical developments. Many were to cite this lecture as an inspiration; it may have served that purpose, or it may have served for some as a convenient pretext. Nevertheless, the lecture does seem to have provided at the least a point of convergence for a number of disparate energies in the art world of the time. As mentioned previously, some of the ideas were to be realized in the structure and activities of the Painting Appreciation Society, and the concept of a national art training school for painters went through a complex metamorphosis that resulted in the founding of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts less than a decade later. Fenollosa’s urgings that the Japanese learn more about late nineteenth-century Western tastes in Japanese art may well have led to a strengthening of the Ryu¯chikai’s ties with Siegfried Bing and his associates in Paris, by then the acknowledged art capital of the world.13 As we learn more of the period, it seems less and less likely that Fenollosa actually instituted these various trends, but his lecture certainly helped put some of these issues into focus. 7. Looking back, as a contemporary American observer of modern Japanese art, what is the significance of Fenollosa’s lecture? More than a hundred years later, and with the pleasures and responsibilities of hindsight, the presence of Fenollosa in To- kyo and of his famous lecture suggest other layers of significance as well. In one sense, Bijutsu Shinsetsu, depending on the importance one gives to it, might be seen as an early example gai-atsu, outward pressure for change, a strategy sometimes even welcomed by the Japanese themselves as a means of making changes that would be difficult to achieve from within the internal structure itself. If such is the case, then Fenollosa is, at the least, a distinguished early member of a considerable band of foreign observers who over the decades have insisted that Japan take one particular course or another. Almost thirty years later, the great Japanese writer and intellectual Natsume So¯seki recognized the necessity, perhaps even the inevitability, of such a process:

So, then, the question facing us is this: How does the civilization of modern-day Ja- pan differ from civilization in general as I have been describing it? Simply stated, Western civilization (that is, civilization in general) is internally motivated, whereas Japan’s civilization is externally motivated. Something that is “internally motivated” Hegel in Tokyo 107

develops naturally from within, as a ﬂower opens, the bursting of the buds followed by the outward turning of the petals. Something that is “externally motivated” when it is forced to assume a certain form as the result of pressure applied from the outside.... We were a country that had [until the coming of the West] developed according to our own internal motivation. But then we suddenly lost our ability to be self-centered and were confronted by a situation in which we could not survive unless we began taking orders from the external force that was pushing us around at will. Nor was this by any means a temporary situation. The year is Meiji 44 after all: We’ve been bracing ourselves for close to ﬁfty years. And not only have we been pushed and shoved along from that day to this, but unless we continue to be pushed along for years to come—perhaps forever—Japan will not be able to survive as Japan. What else can we call ourselves but externally motivated? 14

Then too, there is another level of cultural conflict and concern to which Fenollosa’s lecture bears witness. Fenollosa urged that the traditions of Japa- nese art be renewed, revivified, in order that a new Idea come into being. Such an admonishment, at his time, was by no means foolish, and indeed he was doubtless correct in his prediction that a greater East-West exchange would come to take place in the techniques and values in the visual arts. However, to borrow again So¯seki’s insights, Japan retained the impression that the West, in its ideas as well as its guns, was forced on her. The necessary processes of change were too abrupt, too brutal, to provide for a course of natural development. Japanese culture was to reveal unusual disruptions in the development of her cultural forms ever since Meiji, and only now do these rifts seem to be healing over. Indeed, I know of no other culture that, because of the often in- superable difficulties in making such changes, was left with a legacy of “doubled” art forms. In the theater, kabuki, which had been a contemporary form of theater, was by the turn of the twentieth century turned into a classic form of expression in contradistinction to shingeki, the modern spoken theater, based entirely on European models. In poetry, traditional haiku and even waka continued on but vied for attention with poetry composed in modern, Western forms. Western painting (yo¯ga) would soon develop into a European style of painting that coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with the modernized form of traditional Japanese painting, which not so long after Fenollosa’s arrival began to be called Nihonga. Only modern Japanese fiction seemed to develop without this split, but even in this case, the modern Japanese novel—which, as the Meiji critic Shimamura Ho¯getsu (1871–1918) once wrote, should “confess the truth”—was set up in opposition to the Tokugawa novels of the kind of high romance that can be found in the accomplished writings of Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848) a few generations before and in popular fiction ever since. Thus, the urgency and painful difficulties of change revealed themselves in the very fabric of the culture. 108 J. Thomas Rimer

Finally, one might note that there are certain similarities between nineteenth-century Japan and nineteenth-century America, similarities that indeed help inform us both of the contributions and the necessary limitations of a man such as Ernest Fenollosa. This insight is not my own but comes rather from my discussions over a long period of time with such scholars as Ellen Co- nant, Haga To¯ru, Takashina Shu¯ji, and more recently Murakata Akiko, all four of whom have concerned themselves with such matters for many years. The similarities arise from both countries’ feeling that they were on the periphery of world culture, which was situated in Europe; for the visual arts, particularly in France; and for the world of ideas, particularly in Germany. Japan had undergone the traumas of the Meiji Restoration, just as America had endured the Civil War. Both civilizations were now seeking to align themselves with what was newest and best in Europe. Fenollosa’s grasp of, say, Hegel’s philosophy was perhaps no more profound than the Meiji translator and writer Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯’s early knowledge of Shakespeare, but in this case the American served as an enthusiastic, even if imperfect, vessel capable of bringing a whole new and larger set of concerns and hopes to his Japanese colleagues. Indeed, it might even be posited that, in his implicit understanding of his nation’s implicit commonality with Japan and his genuine enthusiasm for Japanese culture as he perceived it, Fenollosa presented a more persuasive account of his enthusiasm for Hegel than a properly trained German intellectual of the period might have done, if the accounts of Mori O¯ gai (1862–1922), another of the great Meiji writers and intellectuals, can be believed; for in his experience in the 1880s, the Germans merely appeared to look down on the Japanese as backward and had no interest in learning about their culture.15 There are many in Japan who doubtless know the answer to at least some of these questions. I myself, at this stage, can only pose them. Examining the significance of Bijutsu Shinsetsu is a little like translating it. The immediate details are sometimes vague and confusing, but the general meaning is clear and the larger significance of the greatest interest. I would hope now that those with greater skill and knowledge than I can explicate that difficult middle ground between the specifics and any larger, useful generalizations. But then, that is always the hardest part, and in this case, it is one yet to be accomplished on either side of the Pacific. 10

O¯ gai, Schelling, and Aesthetics

Kambayashi Tsunemichi

The east tower of Yakushiji Temple in Nishinokyo¯ is known as one of the most beautiful pagodas in Nara. Its rhythmical elegant figure has been praised as “frozen music.” This romantic expression, however, originally derives from Schelling’s Philosophie der Kunst,1 in which the German philosopher symbolically defines architecture in general as music in space. Who was the first to use such a poetic expression to praise the elegance of the East Tower of Yakushiji Temple? Despite the lack of documentary evidence, people in Japan have attributed the phrase to E. F. Fenollosa, who taught economics and political science, as well as Hegelian philosophy, at Tokyo University. As is generally known, Fenollosa rediscovered the traditions of ancient Japanese culture and tried hard to revive them. Since the Meiji era, German philosophy has formed the main current of philosophical study in the Japanese academic world. It is, in fact, in this description of the tower of Yakushiji Temple that we find the first striking influence of German philosophy and aesthetics. In those days, the kernel of philosophical thinking in Japanese academia was related more to English utilitarianism and French positivism than to German idealism. This tradition goes back farther, to Nishi Amane’s lecture Hyakuichi Shinron at his private school in Kyoto. It was Nishi who translated the word “philosophy” into the Japanese word “tetsugaku” for the first time. He was also the first scholar in Japan to refer to the field of aesthetics.2 This and his other remarkable achievements were nevertheless forgotten for a long time. More than half a century later, Nishi was finally acknowledged as the first person to have introduced European philosophy to Ja- pan, when Aso Yoshiteru, who was writing a history of aesthetics in Japan, unexpectedly discovered Nishi’s aesthetic and philosophical manuscripts.3 Nishi’s Bimyo¯Gakusetsu (1872), which historically and systematically introduces European aesthetic theories, is today considered the first work in the history of aesthetics in Japan. Unfortunately,Nishi’saesthetics had little impact on popular thinking during his time. In those days there were two well-known aesthetic theories: Bijutsu Shinsetsu (1882), originally written by Fenollosa in

109 110 Kambayashi Tsunemichi

1882 for his lecture at the Ryu¯chikai,4 and Ishi Bigaku, an 1883 –1884 translation by Nakae Cho¯min of Eugène Véron’s L’Esthétique.5 As is commonly known, Fenollosa’s Bijutsu Shinsetsu had a great impact on the artistic world in Japan. From today’s perspective, however, this lecture seems a mere summary of classical European art theory, appealing at that time to young artists who had known only traditional, conventional Eastern theories of art. In his lecture, Fenollosa had regarded traditional Japanese art as superior to European art in terms of expression of the artistic idea (myo¯so¯). This point of view strongly inspired some Japanese artists who were surprised by European realism and tried to stand against its hisshin, that is, “true-to-life” expression. In the history of Japanese aesthetics, Ishi Bigaku is known essentially for its title, a literal translation of the title of Eugène Véron’s book, Aesthetics. From this title comes the Japanese technical term “bigaku” (aesthetics). Strangely, Véron’s aesthetics is an antiaesthetic theory that condemns and rejects aesthetics as an abstract and practically useless house of cards.6 Later Mori O¯ gai severely criticized this book, whose translation the Japanese Ministry of Educa- tion had commissioned to Nakae Cho¯min. According to O¯ gai, Véron’s original text was not itself academic but journalistic, and its translation had scarcely influenced art and literature within Japan.7 Despite O¯ gai’s comments, some graduates of the Ko¯bu Bijutsu Gakko¯, the first school of fine arts in Japan where young artists could learn Western arts, did read this translation to obtain information about artistic movements in France.8 Fenollosa’s lecture encouraged Japanese artists of the traditional painting style who had been overpowered by their colleagues in the Western style. Since his memorial lecture, Fenollosa, in cooperation with Okakura Tenshin, actively strove to revive and raise the status of traditional Japanese art. In response, in 1889 the Ministry of Education founded a new school of fine arts, the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko¯, which completely excluded the study of Western art from the curriculum. Subsequently, Western-style painting, which had lost its official support, continued to decline. It was during this time of drastic nationalism that artists began to “Japanize” Western-style painting. The following year, 1890, Toyama Masakazu, a professor of Tokyo Univer- sity,gave a lecture titled “Nihon Kaiga no Mirai” (The Future of Japanese Paint- ing) at a meeting of the Meiji Bijutsu Kai. Toyama’s lecture attempted to inspire the discouraged artists of Western-style painting; its impact was equal to that of Fenollosa’s Bijutsu Shinsetsu. Toyama had studied philosophy and natural science in England and America and at that time had lectured on the English philosophical ideas of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. His logic, therefore, was not ambiguous but concrete and practical. People in Japan argued for and against his lecture, which sparked a debate during which the most aggressive protest was countered by O¯ gai’s “An Objection to Toyama’s Art Theory.” 9 O¯ gai, Schelling, and Aesthetics 111

Toyama’s theory seems to be connected with Fenollosa’s theory of the artistic idea (myo¯so¯). Toyama insisted that Japanese painting at that time, whether executed in traditional or Western style, was “all in a fog.” These paintings look only like beautiful art without conceptual basis, like a mere shadow of something. The Western painting style, in particular, seems to be at great pains to modify traditional European artistic themes and to identify them with native Japanese tastes. Toyama persistently criticized Harada Naojiro¯’s work “Kannon on the Flying Dragon” as one of the worst examples in the exhibition of the Meiji Bijutsu Kai. According to Toyama, this work looked like a circus girl walking a tightrope in torchlight. Harada—the painter of the picture that unexpectedly gave rise to the controversy between Toyama and O¯ gai—had studied Western traditional method at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he became friends with O¯ gai. Toyama, therefore, made a great mistake in making such offensive remarks on Harada’s painting. Toyama believed that Japanese painting at that time was based on formally beautiful decorative arts without substance. In the future, he wrote, Japanese artists should try to progress from such “a receptive stage” to “a conceptual stage.” People are no longer interested in religious and historical themes; in modern times their interest has shifted to social and human affairs, a change that reflects the evolution of human society. We can easily point out Toyama’s shallow interpretation of Spencer’s thought on social evolution. In opposition to Toyama’s ideas, O¯ gai explicated the distinction between thematic substantial emotion and artistic aesthetic emotion based on the aesthetic theory of Ed- uard von Hartmann, who was completely unknown in Japan at that time. Toyama illustrated his theory with six appropriate examples based on his own personal experiences. These examples, however, were too banal or theatrical, and their thematic motion originated from sympathy with real human life. O¯ gai, however, made a theoretical distinction between “real emotion” and “aesthetic appearance emotion,” which is always free from real interest. Hart- mann envisioned the universe as a hierarchy of idealistic developments and referred to “realized concrete ideas” as “individual ideas.” According to O¯ gai, it was a representation of this idea—an individual idea—to which Toyama referred in his assertions about “conceptual painting.” This individual idea, which contrasts with the abstract idea or the formal beauty on which it is based, is not in itself beautiful. If, however, we can intuitively discover the reflection of universal substance in it, then the idea reaches the highest grade of beauty. Hartmann called such an aesthetic point of view “microcosmism.” This way of thinking reminds us of Schelling’s work on “aesthetic idealism.” O¯ gai’s 30,000-word critique was divided and classified into twelve items. Japanese journalists at the time sensationalized the controversy, and public opinion was divided. O¯ gai continued to maintain his aggressive objections. 112 Kambayashi Tsunemichi

Strangely, Toyama kept silent. He was most likely confused at the unexpected logic of German idealistic aesthetics, of which he was completely unaware. Eventually, O¯ gai gained fame as the winner of the controversy, and for the first time a new philosophical system— German idealism—captured the interest of the public in Japan. In his memoir on the philosophical development of the Meiji era, Inoue Tetsujiro¯, one of the intellectual leaders of the time, singled out the year 1890 as the turning point, when the influence of German philosophy overtook in Japanese academia the previous dominance of English and French philosophy.10 Except for this controversy, there have been few decisive events in the fields of philosophy and aesthetics. This one, however, may be characterized as a kind of proxy war between English utilitarianism and German idealism. The year following the dispute, O¯ gai challenged Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯—a professor at the To¯kyo¯ Senmon Gakko¯, a pioneer in modern Japanese literature, and an authority of English literature—to a debate. The heated dispute, which continued for almost a year, is referred to as “Botsu Riso¯Ronso¯” (A Dispute about the Existence of Ideal in Literary Works). Relying once more on the difficult logic of Uyu¯Sensei (that is, Eduard von Hartmann), O¯ gai thoroughly refuted Sho¯yo¯. By this time, the name of a new science, “shinbigaku,” or aesthetics, was widely known, and Hartmann’s aesthetic theory had become recognized, yield- ing both practically and theoretically a decisive influence over the Japanese artistic world. Three years later, O¯ gai began to lecture on aesthetics at the Keio¯Gijuku. Shortly thereafter Tokyo University employed one of Hartmann’s followers, Raphael von Koeber, as a professor of philosophy and aesthetics.11 O¯ gai writes in his essay that the nineteenth century had produced two great things: the railway and Hartmann’s philosophy.12 Hartmann’s eclectic philosophical system is not so highly valued at present, but at the time he was the most popular philosopher in Germany. Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer had strongly influenced the formation of Hartmann’s thought. Hartmann was particularly influenced by Schelling’s later work, Positive Philosophy, which Schelling had developed in opposition to Hegel’s “rationalism.” Hartmann intended to unite the antagonistic principles in the dialectic of “what is the world” and “how is the world” (with blind will as the substance of the Universe in Schopenhauer’s philosophy) into the foundations of his own philosophical system. It is often said, therefore, that Hartmann was simultaneously an evo- lutional optimist and a resigned pessimist.13 It is true that Hartmann’s philosophy was the most famous of its time, but I wonder whether O¯ gai embraced his thought after sufficiently understanding the historical context of German idealism. Probably O¯ gai approached Hart- mann’s aesthetics to find a standard artistic judgment that could immediately have an effect on the confusion surrounding Japanese art as it groped its way O¯ gai, Schelling, and Aesthetics 113 through modernization. For that reason, O¯ gai selected not Kant’s or Schell- ing’s or Hegel’s academic aesthetics but Hartmann’s fashionable theory. In this respect, then, we can say that German idealistic philosophy was initially introduced and disseminated through a journalistic process. In the early modern period, Japanese art, whether in the field of painting or literature, was urged to confront Western realism. Against this tendency, O¯ gai was especially interested in the description of the “ideality of aesthetic appearance” (Idealität des ästhetischen Scheins) in Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Beautiful (Philosophie des Schönen). O¯ gai translated this article in his magazine, Shigarami Zo¯shi, writing that “modern people did not believe in aesthetics because almost all theories were founded on an abstract ideal and too much metaphysics and transcendence.” 14 As we have seen, Véron condemned this aspect of earlier aesthetics. O¯ gai continues as follows:

But, since Hegel, a new aesthetic theory based on a concrete ideal was formed and developed. According to it, the beautiful never exists in a metaphysical world, but only a sensible world. Therefore, the substance of the beautiful lies in the aesthetic appearance.15

The ﬁrst part of Hartmann’s aesthetic system, “Aesthetics since Kant,” treats the historical development of German idealistic aesthetics as the starting point of modern aesthetics.16 Regardless of today’s valuation of Hartmann’s work in aesthetics, we cannot deny that the academic approach to aesthetics in Japan originated from O¯ gai’s introduction of Hartmann’s aesthetics. O¯ gai himself apparently took Hartmann’s theory as a practically useful standard for ultimate artistic judgment. O¯ gai attempted to characterize Hartmann’s aesthetics as concrete idealism—in contrast to abstract idealism—and to divide its idealistic development into three stages: general idea, individual idea, and microcosmism. The beautiful appears through the individual and concrete idea. We look not absolutely but individually at the substance of the beautiful or macrocosmos, which is reﬂected in the microcosmic work of art. Herein O¯ gai discovers the point uniting artistic idealism with realism. O¯ gai intended to prove the propriety of this aesthetic theory by experiment, applying it once more to Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯’s literary realism. He re- marked that he had once commented on Toyama’s artistic theory using Hart- mann’s aesthetic theory and would once more like to apply it to Sho¯yo¯’s literary theory.17 As is generally known, Sho¯yo¯’s Sho¯setsu Shinzui (The Essence of the Novel) was at that time looked on as the absolute standard for Japanese writers, who were making efforts to cast away old-fashioned storytelling and to produce a modern literature. In this essay Sho¯yo¯ explained that the emerging 114 Kambayashi Tsunemichi

Japanese literature must reject all fiction and fancy and that literary works apart from realistic expression were no longer worthy of attention. O¯ gai wanted to suggest another possibility for idealistic literature, in opposition to Sho¯yo¯’s theory, which was wholly devoted to realism. The controversy between the two arose on the publication of a newspaper article by Sho¯yo¯. In the article, Sho¯yo¯ divided the styles of novel into three kinds: the “individualist group” (koyu¯-ha), which tries to express events first and human beings second; the “eclectic group” (setchu¯-ha), which tries to express human beings first and events second; and the “people group” (ningen-ha), which aims at the total expression of human affairs. Sho¯yo¯made this division correspond to the classification of three kinds of poetry: epic, lyric, and drama, respectively. The dispute began with O¯ gai’s critique of this article. This time O¯ gai also tried to apply Hartmann’s three categories to Sho¯yo¯’s classification of the novel. According to O¯ gai’s original interpretation, Sho¯yo¯’s three types are equivalent to the three stages of ideas in Hartmann’s aesthetics: general idea, individual idea, and microcosmism. The opposition between idealism and realism will be dissolved in the third stage of microcosmism. This explanation, which slighted the theory of realism, was naturally unacceptable to Sho¯yo¯. Their debate continued for almost a year. The complicated logic of Uyu¯ Sen- sei, of which Sho¯yo¯ had never heard, must have seemed strange and mysterious to him.18 Finally, Sho¯yo¯ declared an end to this dispute by writing, “I want to entrust all of abstract logic, which is the strength of German philosophers, to scholars of wide-ranging knowledge. As for me, I will continue to regard Anglo-Saxon ideas as sound common sense for my own studies.” Through this aggressive battle of words, Hartmann’s aesthetics and the philosophy of German idealism were gradually accepted into Japan. The same year that the controversy between O¯ gai and Sho¯yo¯ ended, a lecture on German aesthetics also began at Waseda University. O¯ nishi Hajime, a graduate student of Tokyo University, was sent as a visiting lecturer there. Concurrently, To- yama seriously planned to engage Hartmann as a foreign professor, but this plan was canceled because of Hartmann’s poor health. In his place Koeber came to Japan and taught German philosophy and aesthetics at Tokyo University. We must remember that at the beginning of his studies, Koeber, like Hart- mann, had concentrated on Schelling’s idealistic system. This was the philosophical bond that united both philosophers. We should, therefore, consider Schelling’s philosophy, rather than the thought of Kant or Hegel, as the first foundation for the transplantation of German idealism into Japan. A few years later, O¯ tsuka Yasuji, who had been studying aesthetics in Germany, came back to Japan and took up his post as the first tenured professor of aesthetics at Tokyo University. Thanks to these efforts, the academic foundation for the study of aesthetics in modern Japan was firmly consolidated. 11

Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces in the Formative Years of Japanese Art History, 1880–1900 Historiography in Conﬂict

Inaga Shigemi

Because it is a Western product, the concept of art history was alien to the East Asian cultural sphere in the nineteenth century. Art history as an institution was not a native Japanese construct but a new category imported from the West. Neither spontaneous nor indigenous, the art history of Japan was conceived by imitating and duplicating Western models. During the Meiji era (1867–1911), in reaction to Western influences, the young empire made major efforts to implant the legal and social apparatuses necessary for implement- ing a westernized constitutional monarchy. It was in accordance with this general consolidation of Japan’s cultural identity as a nation-state that the notion of Japanese art history also took shape. Art history was recognized as an entity and as an indispensable tool for the cultural integration of the newly defined “Japanese subject.” 1 Several cognitive gaps appeared in the very conception of art history in modern Japan. Recognition of representative masters and masterpieces was by no means an autonomous process. In fact, the masterpieces of Japanese art history were to be selected on the basis of two contradictory criteria. On the one hand, they had to be recognized as fitting into the category of the fine arts, conceived and defined by Westerners as universally valid. On the other hand, the objects could not be reduced to mere imitations of Western art. As things Japanese, they had to manifest their own national characteristics and artistic tradition.2 It was in this narrow margin between compatibility with Western stan- dards and irreducibility to Western products and tradition that the selection

115 116 Inaga Shigemi was to be conducted, consciously or unconsciously. Moreover, the selection of “masterpieces” creates rejected objects as their inevitable counterparts, objects that fall out of the “fine arts” category. The interplay between the selected and the rejected reveals hidden mechanisms in the formation of masters and masterpieces in the field of Japanese art history. This essay, therefore, does not intend to celebrate the artists and works that survived the historical challenge of selection. Nor does it aim to rehabilitate forgotten masters or disqualified masterpieces. Instead, it questions the underlying conditions that enabled the politics of nomination, celebration, rehabili- tation, and even rejection of certain masters and masterpieces. It must be noted that the mechanism of rejection itself tends to be repressed and erased by and in the process of canonizing masters and masterpieces. To create the impression that the selection was conducted according to some irrefutable but invisible principle, any traces of arbitrariness must be effaced from official presentation. Investigations into the formative years of Japanese art history (1880 –1900) must reveal not only the hidden side of this canonization as repression but also the implicit aesthetic value judgments it has refused to recognize.3

1 I will begin with a brief look at the position that Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849) was to assume in the appreciation of Japanese art in the West, that of the most famous Japanese master. “Hokusai is the greatest artist that Japan has produced,” the French art critic Théodore Duret (1838 –1927) declares in an article published in Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1882.4 This view is also directly echoed in Art Japonais by Louis Gonse (1841–1926), published in 1883. For this “old man crazy from drawings” (veillard fou de dessins), Gonse sets aside an entire chapter of his ten chapters on Japanese painting. As for his qualities, Hokusai’s “works rise high in the domain of esthetic Japanese art, and . . . they establish for it a deﬁnitive formula.... A talent so complete and so original should belong to humanity.” 5 However, this enthusiastic appreciation of Hokusai among French art critics was not shared at all by Anglo-Saxon specialists. In his Pictorial Art in Ja- pan, published in 1886, William Anderson (1851–1903), an English surgeon with long experience in Japan as an ofﬁcer, openly attacks his French colleagues:

Hokusai’s memory is perhaps exposed to a greater danger from the admiration of his earnest, but too generous European critics than from the neglect of his countrymen. To regard him as the greatest artist of Japan and as the crowning representation of all that is excellent in Japanese art is unjust to this art, and may react unfavorably against the representation of the man who has suddenly been elevated to a position far above his own ambition.6 Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces 117

For Anderson it is unreasonable to compare a simple artisan such as Ho- kusai with Zen master painters. “We have no more right to compare [Hoku- sai] with a Cho¯Densu (1352–1431), a Sesshu¯ (1420 –1506) or a Shu¯bun (1414 –1467?) than to draw a parallel between John Leech (1817–1864) and Fra Angelico (ca. 1400 –1455).” 7 To Anderson’s eye, Hokusai is “vulgar” and best placed in a position comparable to that of the famous English carica- turist John Leech (better known perhaps as “Mr. Punch”). The mention of Fra Angelico also reveals Anderson’s implicit criteria. For Anderson the Ital- ian Renaissance forms the absolute canon, and he tries to understand Japanese art within its framework. Thus, he finds in Japanese Zen painters the Orien- tal Quattrocento.8 Another criticism of the French view comes from Ernest Fenollosa (1853 – 1908). In his review of Gonse’s L’Art Japonais, Fenollosa first points out its lack of proportion. While Gonse gives one hundred pages to the Edo period, “[a] single page is enough for the giants of the fifteenth century.... All those [who] rank far above any artist whatsoever of the last two hundred and fifty years” were completely overlooked by Gonse. Gonse, claims Fenollosa, “neglects the old masters, not because he is unable to understand them, but because he does not really know them.” According to Fenollosa, this ignorance leads the French to misunder- stand Hokusai’s place in Japanese art. “In their ignorance of all else, they look at everything Japanese, and especially Japanese art, only through the eyes of Hokusai.” Fenollosa wonders “how far [Gonse] has been biased by the ex- traordinary over-estimation prevailing” among other French writers on Hoku- sai. For Fenollosa, Hokusai, “the artisan artist,” is at best “an interesting sociological phenomena.” Contrary to Gonse, who supposes that “Hokusai’s influence brought to the highest perfection the whole series of the decorative arts” in Japan, Fenollosa declares that “we cannot too much enforce the fact that the prevailing vulgarity [of Hokusai] lowered the tone” of Japanese decorative art. Fenollosa’s conclusion is merciless: “As a designer whether for engraving or painting, his work cannot be compared for a moment with the great serious conceptions of the masters of either Europe or the East. Hokusai falls very low indeed.” 9 According to Fenollosa, Hokusai’s vulgar caricatures cannot be compared with the “great serious conceptions” of high art. The distinction between vulgarity and nobility and the lower status he assigns to the decorative arts reveal Fenollosa’s dependence on the European academic hierarchy in the fine arts. Both Anderson and Fenollosa judge Japanese art and its history according to classical value judgments, which they do not question. Contrary to this Anglo-Saxon assumption, the “vulgarité” of the ukiyo-e school is positively valorized by French critics. Duret maintains: 118 Inaga Shigemi

Hokusai belonged to the common people; [he was] a sort of industrial artist devoted to reproducing the types and scenes of popular every-day life. Vis-à-vis his contemporary artists who cultivated the great art of Chinese tradition, Hokusai occupied an inferior position, analogous to that of the Lenain brothers with respect to such academicians like Lebrun and Mignard, or the position of Daumier or Gavarni with respect to the laureats of the École des Beaux-Arts.

This passage is also quoted in Gonse’s L’Art Japonais.10 Duret’s intentionally simplified comparison clearly manifests his preference for popular illustrators over academic painters. Implicitly, he even suggests the real superiority of the “l’école vulgaire” to the official masters. According to Duret, “the aristocratic painters in Japan even looked down upon the class of ukiyo-e illustrators, of common people to which Hokusai belonged.” Duret is alluding, by analogy, to the contemporary French academic painters who de- spised the impressionist painters. It now becomes clear why Duret, a famous defender of the “avant-garde,” calls on Hokusai as a hero. Despite his inferior and unfavorable position in the hierarchy of art in Japan, Hokusai surpasses the grand style by grasping the everyday life of the common people with fresh, immediate, and vivid renderings (prise sur la vif). Duret thus sees in Hokusai the ideal predecessor of the French impressionists not only in his artistic achievement but also in his unfavorable social status. By celebrating this antiacademic popular artist in Japan, Duret justifies the French impressionists as an avant-garde, that is, authentic antithesis to the still dominant “bourgeois art.” It must be recalled that Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) also regarded Japanese art from the same “impressionistic” point of view. His Outamaro (1892) and Hokousaï (1896) were published as part of his series of Biographies des Impressionistes Japonais. Duret and Goncourt called their beloved ukiyo-e prints “impressions,” and, according to Duret, the Japanese artists were “the most perfect of the impressionists.” Evidently, this cognitive gap in the recognition of Hokusai symbolically reflects the hermeneutic difference in the aesthetic conception of Japanese art history as a whole. The Anglo-Saxon specialists showed a more precise empirical knowledge than the French art critics, but their value judgments, based on the “classical” canon, were more conservative than those of the French. As a matter of fact, while Duret and Louis Gonse, representing an avant-gardist stance in aesthetic judgment, tried to grasp the whole of Japanese artistic creation without excluding ceramics and bronze decorative arts, Anderson and Fe- nollosa paid attention only to Japan’s pictorial art, faithfully following the Western academy’s hierarchy of the fine arts. Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces 119

2 With this cognitive gap in mind, we have to ask a second question: What was Hokusai’s reputation in Japan at the time? To what extent were the judgments of the Westerners accepted or rejected by contemporary Japanese? And what kind of opinion did Westerners have about the Japanese reactions? On the one hand, the French critics were proud of having rehabilitated Ho- kusai by saving him from the oblivion into which he had fallen in his native country: “It was not until the European judgment placed Hokusai at the head of the artists of [ Japan] that the Japanese universally recognized in him one of their greatest men.” Duret’s opinion, quoted by Gonse with agreement (and later subscribed to by Edmond de Goncourt),11 caused a sarcastic reaction on the other side. Fenollosa refutes the French opinion:

Hardly a Japanese of culture has been really converted to the foreign view. Critics [in Japan] regard with amazement or amusement European estimates. It is hardly to be expected, to be sure, that those genial Japanese gentlemen, who make a business of selling Hokusais, and other ukiyo-e, in the capitals of Europe, should take great pains to oppose the opinions of enthusiasts who pay them such high prices; but their real tastes are shown by what they buy for their own keeping.

Three remarks must be made about Fenollosa’s observation. First, the Japa- nese art merchant alluded to, Hayashi Tadamasa (1853–1906), was going to exhibit what Japanese collectors had reserved “for their own keeping.” Ap- pointed Japan’s general commissioner for the 1900 Exposition Universelle In- ternationale in Paris, Hayashi would take charge of the painstaking job of trans- porting and mounting Japanese classical and historical treasures to exhibit for the European public.12 Second, the selection of these masterpieces was made in Japan, and, when his book review was published in July 1884, Fenollosa himself was actually taking part in the investigative tour in Nara and Kyoto, along with Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) and others.13 Third, despite Fenollosa’s assertion, it cannot be denied that the French critics’ high appreciation of Hokusai did influence, to some extent, Japanese judgment. The first biography of Hokusai in Japan was written by Iijima Kyo- shin and published in 1893. In his postface to Iijima’s book, Kobayashi Bun- shichi, promoter of the book, regrets that Hokusai was not yet fully appreciated in Japan as a master. As a necessary remedy, Kobayashi brings the readers’ attention to Hokusai’s reputation in Europe, and, for the sake of justification, Kobayashi quotes from a famous French “japonisant” art critic, Philippe Burty (1830 –1890). According to Burty, Hokusai’s richness in subject matter and dexterity of brush stroke is comparable only to that of Peter Paul Rubens.14 120 Inaga Shigemi

Still, these circumstances indicate that Hokusai’s reputation was mainly due to the enthusiasm of his Western admirers. When Edmond de Goncourt ﬁnally published his Hokousaï in 1896, William Anderson wrote a private letter to the French writer. In a condescending manner, Anderson blamed Gon- court for having overlooked his pioneering survey on the Japanese painter. “I regret I did not know sooner that you were engaged upon your important task as I could have lent you a copy of the Ukiyo-e Ruiko which I have lately transferred to the British Museum.” 15 Also in 1896, the famous art merchant Sieg- fried Bing publicly protested that his project of translating Hokusai’s biography had been smuggled into the hands of Hayashi and Goncourt. This controversy of priority suggests two things. First, Iijima’s book was at least partly written to satisfy the French need for reliable information on Hokusai’s life and work. Second, the dispute about Hokusai was of primary importance to the ﬁn de siècle European art market.16

3 Such heated controversies concerning the recognition of Hokusai as a master are totally absent from the first official description of Japanese art history. It was only in 1900, ten years after the promulgation of its constitution, that Ja- pan finally devised an official “Art History” on the occasion of the World’s Fair in Paris. Aiming at “enhancing the national dignity,” the Imperial Commis- sion of Japan published in French a lavish and monumental Histoire de l’Art du Japon and also exhibited its cultural treasures in a building imitating the main hall of Ho¯ryu¯ji temple, which was boasted to be the oldest surviving wooden construction in the world. This publication and exhibition clearly show that the Japanese government felt it necessary, effective, and profitable to demonstrate the existence of its national artistic tradition to the rival nations of the world. Underneath the official ostentation lay two important events: the establishment of Japanese art history as a discipline in the humanities and the politics of conservation. It was not until the opening of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (To¯kyo¯ Bijutsu Gakko¯) in 1889 that the word “bijutsushi” (art history) was recognized as an official term. However, “art history” was subordinate to “aesthetics” (bigaku) in the curriculum. That year, Ernest Fenollosa first lectured on “aesthetics and art history”; in 1890, the following year, Okakura Tenshin succeeded Fenollosa and gave lectures on Japanese art history for three years. With Tenshin’s lectures, Japanese art history was established as an academic discipline. Sato¯Do¯shin makes the point that the Western concept of aesthetics and art history was imported into Japan by a state-hired foreigner (o-yatoi gaijin), Fenollosa, and was implanted in Japan by way of translation; further, Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces 121 this framework was applied to Japan by a native scholar, Okakura Tenshin, to create the Japanese equivalent of a Western-style description of art history, articulated by stylistic periodization (which until then had yet not been established).17 Along with the foundation of art history as a discipline in the Japanese national education system, the government sponsored investigations to identify art objects that should be nominated as honorable national historical treasures (Rinji Zenkoku Ho¯motsu Torishirabe-kyoku at the Ministry of the Imperial Household). The project of compilation, which consisted of selecting treasures and classifying them in eight different categories, listed 213,091 works (1888 – 1897). This project advanced hand in hand with conservation politics. In 1897 the Ministry of the Interior put into effect a law for the conservation of old temples and shrines (Koshaji Hozon-ho¯) to prevent further devastation of historical Buddhist monuments (Haibutsu Kishaku) and the uncontrolled exo- dus of treasures to foreign countries that had been taking place since the Meiji Restoration (1867). In short, the publication of the first official art history of Japan in 1900 can be understood as the outcome of these political initiatives. In his study of the formation of an official art history in modern Japan, Ta- kagi Hiroshi points out three strategic policies that the Japanese government followed in the final decade of the nineteenth century.18 First, the rigid Euro- peanization through the pure imitation of Western styles that had characterized Japanese cultural trends in the previous decade (known as the “Rokumei- kan” period, after the Western-style Reception Hall) gave way in the 1890s to the intentional invention and demonstration of characteristic Japaneseness in cultural politics, both in domestic implementations and in manifestations abroad. Second, comparisons with and references to the European tradition were frequently used for the sake of explanation. Okakura Tenshin maintained that the Buddhist sculptures of the Nara period bear comparison with Greek classical sculptures. Fenollosa also regarded the Nara period in Oriental art history as the equivalent of ancient Greece. Kuki Ryu¯ichi saw a parallel between what Kyoto owes to Nara and what Rome owes to Athens. By these analogies between Greco-Roman classical art and Japanese antiquity, one could expect to obtain a tautological effect. On the one hand, it was flattering to the Japa- nese to see Nara and Kyoto enjoy the dignifying comparison to European classical canon. On the other hand, Westerners could find intellectual pleasure in understanding Oriental art by referring to their own aesthetic canon, believed to be universal. Third (and this is a combined effect of the previous two factors), L’Histoire de l’Art du Japon embodied a Japan understood to be the incarnation of The Ideals of the East. Clearly borrowing the idea from Okakura Tenshin, Kuki 122 Inaga Shigemi

Ryu¯ichi proudly declared in the preface that in China and India, despite their history of several millennia, few elements of their cultural heritages survived wars and calamities, while in Japan the lingering perfume of the lost glorious civilizations was preserved intact. “It goes without saying that Japan can boast the finest taste of its own, but it is nonetheless true that the backbone of Japa- nese art is constructed by accumulating all the essences of the Oriental arts.” 19 The English translation, published as late as 1913, is curiously prosaic: “It is not too much to say that Japan, while being a world’s public garden, may also be regarded as a treasure house of Oriental art” (p. ii). The French translation by Emmanuel Tronquois is more explicit: “La conservation de ces epaves uniques nous permets, sans exagération, d’affirmer que notre Empire n’est pas seulement un parc public du monde mais aussi un trésor où tout ce qui reste de l’ancien art oriental s’est gardé” (p. xiii).20 Okakura Tenshin had been fostering the idea that its geographic position allowed Japan to play the historical role of synthesizing India and China, thus incarnating the Ideal(s) of the Orient in art. Tenshin was convinced that Chi- nese philosophy and Indian ethics were synthesized in Japan by way of aesthetic expression. According to Takashina Erika’s hypothesis, Chi-Kan-Jo¯, the enigmatic triptych that Kuroda Seiki presented to the Parisian International Exposition in 1900 was nothing but an audacious illustration of Tenshin’s idea.21 “Chi” (knowledge) represents Chinese philosophy, and “jo¯” (emotion or charity) suggests Indian ethics; “kan” (sensibility), which is located between knowledge and emotion, is realized in Japan as aesthetics. As the metaphor of three major Asian civilizations, this triad can also be a Buddhistic iconogra- phy of the Shaka triad in disguise: Shaka (Buddha Shakyamuni) at the center, representing art, is assisted by Monju¯ (bodhisattva Manjushri), incarnating knowledge, and Fugen (bodhisattva Samantabhadra), the personification of charity. In this megalomaniacal vision, we can certainly detect the self-confidence of Japanese intellectuals after the victory in the Sino-Japanese War. The Em- pire of the Rising Sun was then expected to represent the whole of Asia, reha- bilitating its prestige after the decline of India and China. Yet it is ironic that Kuroda’s ambitious triptych was exhibited in Paris with the simple title of “Étude de Nus” (Study of Nudes). In this gap, between the bravado at home and timidity abroad, can we read an ambivalent expression of the inferiority complex that the awakening Japan was suffering in 1900?

4 The idea of Japan as the culmination of the “Ideal of the East” in artistic expression, synthesizing India and China, is also ambitiously declared Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces 123 at the end of the preface to L’Histoire de l’Art de Japon. The English translation reads:

It is our intention to compile at no distant date a complete history of the art worthy of the name, and which will not only serve as a depository of information on the history of Oriental art but also will supply important contributions to Oriental history in general. The Japanese, for the reasons referred to, are undoubtedly far more qualiﬁed to undertake an ambitious work of this description than either the Chinese or Indian peoples (p. ii).

The French translation better conserves the original idea:

En même temps que l’encyclopédie des arts orientaux, il [the future deﬁnitive version of the “Histoire”] renfermera l’histoire même de l’Orient. Trésor d’art du monde oriental, le Japon est le seul dont on puisse attendre ce magistral ouvrage. Seul, il en a dans ses mains tous les éléments réunis. Seul, il l’accomplira. Ni l’Inde, ni la Chine ne le sauraient (p. xvi).

In this text India and China are deprived of the ability to describe the authentic history of Oriental art, while this capacity is proudly attributed to Japan. Although almost erased from the abbreviated English translation (probably for diplomatic reasons under the Anglo-Japanese Alliance), Kuki’s original text in Japanese clearly echoes Tenshin’s conviction that by describing the outline of Japanese art history, one can understand the essentials of the art of the whole Orient. I will make four remarks on this official version of Japanese art history. First, Hokusai’s importance is totally neglected in the official version. As noted earlier, in his description of Japanese paintings, which is subdivided into ten chapters in his Art Japonais, Louis Gonse dedicates an entire chapter to Hoku- sai (pp. 269–292). William Anderson also devotes six pages to Hokusai in his Pictorial Art in Japan (pp. 94 –101). Although he is concerned mainly with re- futing and rectifying the overestimations of Hokusai made by his French colleagues, the fact remains that Anderson illustrates his book with Hokusai’s painting Tametomo with Demons, which he himself possessed. For Sesshu¯, whom he highly esteemed, Anderson could insert only some poor woodblock copies of drawing models and an image of a dragon, the authenticity of which has now been challenged. By contrast, in L’Histoire de l’Art du Japon, Hokusai is simply placed among forty or so ukiyo-e designers with only a short biographical summary of twelve lines. There is no discussion at all of his meaning for Japanese art. Second, in this official publication, there remain no traces of the controversy about the relative superiority of Hokusai and Zen Buddhist painters. Instead, the works of antiquity—absent in previous publications—take on a prepon- 124 Inaga Shigemi derant weight. Of the whole nine chapters, three are devoted to the reigns of the three emperors, Suiko, Tenchi, and Sho¯mu, ranging from 593 to 748. Of more than 1,500 years of history, one-third of the whole description of art (including the monuments of each epoch) is allocated to these 150 years. Third, this apparent disproportion is fully understandable, however, in the light of the ideology shown in the preface. The Suiko era marks the introduction of Buddhism into Japan, with the bronze statue of the Shaka Sanzon triad at the Ho¯ryu¯ji temple as the representative masterpiece with a strong Korean archaic character. The Tenchi era is characterized by the rigorous Indian and Greek (somewhat “classical”) style, with the wall painting of the Golden Hall of Ho¯ryu¯ji as a typical extant example. The Sho¯mu era is marked by the pre- dominant Chinese influence of the prosperous Tang dynasty; the bronze Yaku- shi Sanzon (Bhe¯cha¯djyagura) triad of the Yakushiji temple and others are singled out as the incarnations of this era’s spirit. Thus, Japan’s antiquity paves the way to the synthesis of Asian artistic heritage—Indian, Chinese, and Korean, to be succeeded by the “nationalization” and naturalization of its art in the flourishing of medieval Fujiwara culture in Kyoto. It is worth adding that, on the one hand, this conception also perfectly matches Okakura Tenshin’slectures on Japanese art at the School of Fine Arts; 22 on the other hand, the masterpieces referred to in this context are works that were investigated by the Office for the Research of National Artistic Treasures and were among the first pieces canonized as “national treasures” in Decem- ber 1897.23 Fourth, the apparent disqualification of Hokusai in this official version does not necessarily mean a total change of perspective. The fact remains that this first official discourse was prepared to meet Western expectations. Just as Hokusai’s high reputation was a product of Western expectations, so too was L’Histoire de l’Art du Japon a product specially made for the Western gaze. The French preface presents its mission precisely in these terms: “Nous avons compris qu’il était de notre devoir de mettre en valeur aux yeux des nations, les merveilles commises à notre garde. C’est le plus sûr moyen pour nous d’exalter notre gloire nationale” (p. xiv).

5 In pointing out the contrast between the “japonisant” interpretation of Japa- nese art and Japan’s official self-portrait for the sake of “national glory,” Sato¯ Do¯shin makes a relevant remark.24 While the official image of Japanese art history was made of ancient treasures of the princes and members of the dominant class, the japonisant vision was based on recent arts and decorative arts made for export, destined for the common people—“homme du peuple,” as Duret put it. The cognitive gap in the recognition of masters and masterpieces Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces 125 stems from these symbolic cross-purposes in the encounter of the East and the West. One typical example of this gap can be found in the so-called Buddha of Meguro. Bought by Duret and Cernuschi during their trip to Japan in 1872, the largest bronze statue taken out of Japan is now conserved at the Cernuschi Museum in Paris. Sumptuously illustrated in Gonse’s book as a reminder of the Great Buddha of Nara, this product of the Edo period had not been seriously taken into account by most Japanese specialists in the study of Buddhist statues. It seems as if the bronze products of the Edo period were found lacking in artistic value and undeserving of a place in any survey of art history. It so happened that the original provenance of this colossal statue remained a mystery until Bernard Frank, a French specialist of Japanese popular beliefs, identified it at the Banryu¯ji temple in Meguro, downtown Tokyo, in 1983.25 Strangely enough, until quite recently, the history of sculpture in Japan has usually been limited to the description and investigation of the Kamakura and Muromachi eras, to the neglect of the later periods (from the seventeenth century). The fate of the Meguro Buddha, fallen into oblivion for more than one hundred years in its native land, probably has something to do with this limitation of interest, which is closely related to the previously mentioned cross-purposes in the formative years of Japan’s art history. Indeed the Law for the Protection of Old Temples and Shrines, put into effect in 1890, covered only those institutions with more than four hundred years of history since their foundation. Since the Meiji period, bronzeware became an important export good, and pieces were purchased with enthusiasm by Western collectors. It was the decorative arts, along with ukiyo-e prints, that represented Japanese art for the Western eye. In its attempt to promote exports, the Japanese government made a special effort at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago to show the range of its art. Arguing that in Japan no substantial difference existed between decorative arts and fine arts, the Japanese delegation in Chi- cago urged the American organizer to classify the bronze works (such as Hawks by Suzuki Cho¯kichi, 1848 –1919) not as decorative art but as sculpture belonging to the fine arts (along with some ceramics and lacquerware). In the Paris Exposition in 1900, however, Japan clearly changed its policies and decided to follow faithfully the Western hierarchy of the fine arts. Almost simultaneously, a clear division of tasks made its appearance in the Japanese administration. While the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce had promoted the export of industrial arts, the preservation of Japanese art treasures now became the exclusive prerogative of the Ministry of the Imperial Household. Hence, another cognitive gap developed between European views and the Japanese official view with regard to the differentiation of industrial bronze- 126 Inaga Shigemi ware productions and European-type artistic sculptures. For example, while the wooden sculpture The Old Monkey by Takamura Ko¯un (1852–1934), exhibited at the Chicago Fair, is considered an epoch-making masterpiece in the history of modern Japanese sculpture, Suzuki Cho¯kichi’s works have been cate- gorized as arts and crafts and thus automatically excluded from the category of the fine arts.26 To conclude, I will formulate a final question. Between the japonisant interpretation of Hokusai as the greatest Japanese artist and Japan’s official neglect— or between the japonisant’s high estimation of the Meguro Buddha and its total neglect by Japanese specialists—which view should we trust as authentic in discussing masters and masterpieces of Japanese art? I think this is a misleading question, for the gap between the two is itself a cultural and historical product. Underneath the truth of the canon in history lies the historical making of the canon as a truth. The cognitive gap in the recognition of a Hokusai or the Meguro Buddha is no exception. The canonization of masters and masterpieces is by no means an ahistorical, true-or-false problem. We should rather recognize in this cognitive gap the historical importance of a Hokusai or the Meguro Buddha as a “sociological phenomena” (as Fenollosa put it), which we have to analyze in the international context of the hermeneutic debate on aesthetic evaluations. Henri Focillon added a new preface to the second edition of his Hokusaï in 1925. He wrote: “From the works of philosophers, poets and artists of all Asia, the Japanese Okakura rescued a continuity that is probably fictive but none the less ingenious as a structure; the continuity of an organic thinking, as a common heritage, constituting the patriotism of the continent encouraged by a race always in tension, holding their virtues tightly.” 27 Focillon was trying to reconcile the cognitive gap that I have been analyzing in this chapter. While following the French japonisant tradition with regard to Hokusai, at the same time Focillon found an affinity between his own idea of “la famille spiri- tuelle” in art history and Okakura’s vision of Asia as a fictional entity of the common consciousness. The cognitive gap in the recognition of masters and masterpieces should be understood as a continuous mirror effect. Created by the crossing between the Western gaze and the Oriental response, masters and masterpieces in Japanese art are asked to play a role defined by the uncertain superimposition of the Western category of fine arts and the fictional identity of the Oriental. 12

Nature—the Naturalization of Experience as National

Stefan Tanaka

The use of nature is a powerful device for authorizing the veracity of one’s position. What is “natural” is accepted as timeless and passed on. Yet nature is not singular, nor is it unchanging. Many years ago, Arthur O. Lovejoy cata- loged the multiplicity of meanings he found in the word “nature” and noted its tendency “to slip more or less insensibly from one connotation to another, and thus in the end to pass from one ethical or aesthetic standard to its very antithesis, while nominally professing the same principles.” 1 It is in this slippage—the reliance on a principle of sameness that occults its excess of meanings—that nature (or more accurately natures) was integral to the definition of a Japanese society during the Meiji period. The transformation— or modernization— of Japanese society in this period is an often repeated story. Yet despite its centrality, it is little understood except within the very terms of the transformation itself. A fundamental problem in discussions on this transformation have been a conflation of self and other into bipolar frameworks—for example, tradition /modernity, Japan / West, rational /emotional. What is ignored is the reemplotment (as opposed to elimination and replacement) of external forms. In my recent readings on society during the Meiji period, I have been struck by the presence of a radical heterogeneity during the early Meiji period. Karatani Ko¯jin points to a nature formerly veiled by diverse prohibitions and significations: the realm of spirits, the outside of the village or household.2 Strangers (ijin)— outsiders, itiner- ants, demons, spirits, and ghosts—lived within and apart from communities. Foreigners were those from another culture, which could have been a different region of the archipelago, a different class, or a different country. And the environment was constituent of society, not separate from it. Tsuda So¯kichi, describing the variability of ideas of nature, recognizes the aristocratic longing in Genroku culture for nature as escape and solitude but notes that “nature” was located in the small and dainty rather than the awesome and sublime

127 128 Stefan Tanaka

(more common in the twentieth century). The singularity with which we use nature as an external form that signiﬁes or symbolizes a “Japan” did not exist. There are myriad issues that are part of the construction of a modern society, but certainly one of the most critical is the tool of history as a means of re- conﬁguring this relation between man and nature. Michel de Certeau writes,

It appears to me that in the West, for the last four centuries, “the making of history” has referred to writing. Little by little it has replaced the myths of yesterday with a practice of meaning. As a practice . . . it symbolizes a society capable of managing the space that it provides for itself, of replacing the obscurity of the lived body with the expression of a “will to know” or a “will to dominate” the body, of changing inherited traditions into a textual product or, in short, of being turned into a blank page that it should itself be able to write.3

If we look, we can ﬁnd a related process in Japan beginning with the Koku- gaku recentering of the world around a mythical origin of Japan and then the modern transformation from the mid-nineteenth century. This essay is part of an inquiry into the delineation of social forms into natures and Nature—that is, the transformation of practices, what we now call “myths of yesterday,” into textual products, the “practice of meaning.” An overriding characteristic of intellectual writings of the Meiji period is the concern with the “managing of space that [it] provides for itself.” However, it is not a management of a business or of government but of knowledge— or constituting, knowing, and thus managing social forms and the environment. In this sense, history, too, is a central agent that turns experience into those blank pages that can then be molded into prescribed forms. History is one of the technologies of modernity; it helps create what Henri Lefebvre has called the “alternative reality” of modernity: “Within this reality an alternative reality emerges, another world within our own. What alternative reality? What other world? Technology and control over nature.” 4 Lefebvre proposes a relation between nature— or, more accurately, natures—and history. The environment or narrative of national unfolding is neither nature nor history. The natures and history that concern me are the products of the practice of the “making of history,” where nature and history today are but textual products of the will to know and a will to dominate. In his article “Japanism” (Nihonshugi), Takayama Chogyu¯ points to such “managing the space”:

For the sake of our nation-state (kokka) I will advocate a Japanism—thoroughly considering the characteristics of our country’s (honpo¯) culture, investigating the historical relationship of religions and morals, pointing to the general principles of human (jinbun) evolution, recognizing the laws of the interrelation between particular and universal in the progress of the nation-state (kokka) and world develop- Naturalization of Experience as National 129

ment, and furthermore, seeing clearly our country’s founding spirit and special national (kokuminteki) nature.5

In Takayama, as in our writings of history today, there is a separation between the given and the created, or nature and culture. This separation has always existed in some form, but the mode of separation in modernity leads to an inversion of earlier meanings. What had been natural—that is, the “myths of yesterday”—are turned into something historical, while what had been social is removed to some abstract and detached realm, such as universality, science, or nature. This inversion—typically rendered within categories of the modern, nature, and tradition, thus remaining within the epistemology of modernity—is where history occults itself, pretending to continuity, immanence, and change. The very transformation described by Takayama suggests that sameness is tied to abstractions that govern social organization and the transformation itself. On the one hand, progress—the “general principles of human evolution”—becomes a transcendent law that provides for a social organization that is no longer human based or experiential. Science becomes an abstract, universalistic norm rather than a very powerful but still historical concept that has been articulated, changes over time, and changes according to emplotment. Even though it is conceived of and constructed by humans, it claims a transcendent, universalistic quality that moves laws beyond humans, beyond questioning of its very historicity. On the other hand, change is constantly grounded in abstractions such as “our country’s culture,” “general principles of evolution,” “founding spirit,” and “special national nature.” In other words, another nature, that of an im- manent national form, is also described as natural and beyond questioning. In other words, this was a period when the world was inverted, where the local, phenomenal, and eschatological practices and habits were turned into texts and where abstractions—new rules, principles, and essences— ordered society.

Alterity The story of Shuten Do¯ji, or the sake-drinking child demon that terrorized Kyoto around the end of the tenth century, unbelievable as it is, is indicative of an epistemology quite alien to us today; it is a space of experience, an eschatological world where the inexplicable is attributed to a hidden humanlike world that mirrors the visible world. The relation between nature and humans (culture) was quite different from ours. For example, according to lore, because Shuten Do¯ji was a child genius, he was expelled from the human world. Like other spirit mediums, some mental or physiological difference rather than a 130 Stefan Tanaka variation of the human body is evidence of spirit possession. Shuten Do¯ji’s abode in the mountains (Oeyama) is typical of early societies on the archipelago for which mountains bore sacred value and were often sites for the souls of dead and angry spirits.6 Ultimately, in this world the cosmos was active; it was not a vast open, always silent space but a world in which all things possessed a spirit that was capable of being acted on and acting on mankind. In short, nature was neither separate from the human nor controllable. Shuten Do¯ji marks out a site of difference, of a radical Other. He is not the boundary, however, for he exists in both worlds, easily entering Kyoto to kid- nap his victims and returning to his mountain palace. Time is not the principal marker. In this world, past and present are not clearly demarcated. Shuten Do¯ji is a ghost of the dead (as a child) and is haunting the present (as a ghost); he is more than two hundred years old yet still a child, and the woman wash- ing clothes has been there for more than two hundred years. This “alter,” or other, provides agency for the unknown: “horror and shuddering, sudden fright and the frantic insanity of dread, all receive their form in the demon.” 7 In pre-Meiji society there was less a fear of death than today, and more the belief that the dead become spirits was more widespread. Hori states that “people were afraid of spirits of the dead, who preyed upon them. All social and personal crises . . . were believed to be the result of the vengeance of angry spirits of the dead.” 8

Exorcism This is the world that Kant believed would be eliminated through enlightenment. In his terse, elegant essay, “What Is Enlightenment?” he writes that “enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity.” The Meiji period was one in which politicians and intellectuals sought to remove themselves, the people, and Japan from what they believed to be that self- incurred immaturity. Inoue Enryo¯’s work on psychology (before the spread of clinical and experimental work led to a separation of psychology from philosophy) was part of this effort to lead the masses away from their anachronistic beliefs. The early application of Inoue’s psychology was directed against ghosts (or more broadly the strange and fantastic). His fushigi kenkyu¯kai and his yo¯- kaigaku were a part of this desire to know and to change through education, that is, to eliminate an element of that self-incurred immaturity. A fundamental distinction within Inoue’s work is the separation between humans and nature. One of the central problematics of Meiji intellectuals— indeed of all nonmodern places confronted by scientific/rationalistic thinking—was delineating the proper relation between humans and nature. While Inoue sees humans as a part of nature, he differentiates between the natural Naturalization of Experience as National 131 and human worlds. Although he considers humans a part of the natural world, he also distances the human from natural: “The human world is between the natural and the mysterious worlds.” 9 Humans have the ability to understand more than their immediate surroundings, to discern those invisible principles in nature and the mysterious worlds. No longer is nature integral to their lives; it is now separate. The mediating organ is the human mind. Proof is in ghosts, the mental images (shinzo¯) that people formulated to connect and explain the interaction between society and nature: “The ghost of the mental image, even though a provisional ghost that is no more than one type of ghost belonging to the natural world, is connected in our minds (kokoro) to the external world (gaikai) and organizes the human world. Moreover, when one uncovers a true ghost through interaction with the internal world (naikai), this mental image straddles false and true ghosts.” 10 Thus, depending on the level of knowledge, people have formulated and learned of images and objects that explain the inexplicable and make sense of society. Ghosts filled varied and unpredictable roles: the humanlike agent who brought both good and evil, of whom people were fearful, and from whom they derived pleasure and fortune. Ghosts were truly alter, the external and internal that constantly shifts back and forth. For Inoue, they are an example of that immaturity, the failure to properly understand the many modes by which phenomena should be apprehended. As suggested previously, Inoue’s conceptual framework shifts from an eschatological order to a developmental process. He connects human knowledge with the idea of progress, shinpo, a concept common during this period and, of course, integral to modernity. He writes: “What we do not know does not signify the strange and unknown (michi). It means that when we experience the strange and unknown, even though we do not know it today we will know [it] in the future.” 11 In other words, most ghosts and mysterious happenings are strange only because people’s knowledge of the universe has not progressed enough to understand the causes.12 For example, spirit possession was blamed for illness, abnormalities, or delusions, before current advances demonstrated the externality of disease; ghosts were blamed for eclipses in the ancient period, when knowledge of astronomy was limited; and a giant catfish was the cause of earthquakes.13 These beliefs constitute one of those sites that history transforms. Ghosts —part of the space of experience when knowledge was based on what one sees, on habits and customs—are severed from the present and located as part of the past, as superstitions that emerged because of insufficient knowledge of the universe. For Inoue, stories of ghosts become a window into past knowledge and beliefs, but the stories are also a window to those beliefs that must be eliminated for society to advance. To relegate ghosts to the past, Inoue places 132 Stefan Tanaka them in various categories that can be explained by science. In addition to psychology, he lists botany, zoology, human physiology, chemistry, physics, geography, and astronomy. These disciplines are the scientific counterpart of his ghostly categories through which he believes the truly inexplicable could be separated from the understandable.14 He concludes, “Thus when one researches false ghosts, one can know the secrets of the human world (ningenkai no him- itsu); when one researches provisional ghosts, one investigates the secrets of the natural world; and when one researches the real ghosts, one can surmise the mysterious world.” 15 Ghosts, then, are silenced— or exorcised—from society into a series of understandable explanations that follow a universal (scientific) principle. These categories serve as containers for Inoue’s collection of stories gathered on his travels, a “gesture of setting aside, of putting together, of transforming certain classified objects into ‘documents.’ ...This gesture consists in ‘isolating’ a body—as in physics—and ‘denaturing’ things in order to turn them into parts which will fill the lacuna inside an a priori totality.” 16 In short, the ghosts now become denatured documents, anachronistic and superstitious beliefs of the past. In the language of my introductory statement, ghosts are turned into textual products that Inoue knows and, thereby, dominates. Such control of ghosts as documents eliminates their alterity in favor of an otherness as the past. As the superstitious or primitive earlier state, this past reinforces both the advanced (enlightened) nature of the present and the continuity of a new space, the nation—Japan. The potential for Inoue’s psychology, especially the separation of human from nature and spirits from nature, is to begin the separations that turn heterogeneous and interactive forms into related but singular objects that we “know” and thus “dominate” —in short, the beginning of the process by which past practices are turned into the blank pages on which society can manage “the space that it provides for itself.”

Blank Pages: Human ( Japanese) Natures Inoue argues that a principle cause for the immaturity of people is their lack of development. To us today, this sounds commonsensical. Inoue’s idea, however, is historical; education and childhood were very different in pre-Meiji society. The naturalness of Inoue’s argument is a result of the removal of historical forms from time as society is historicized. That is, chronology, or History, facilitates a certain kind of shift in which newly formulated (or reformulated) objects and ideas are given normative or timeless status. We need only remember Marx’s phrase, popularized by Marshall Berman—“all that is solid melts in the air”—to be mindful that modernity simultaneously calls for mobility and stability. A condition of modern, enlightened society is constant change Naturalization of Experience as National 133 and improvement. Yet an equally important condition is stability and certainty. Two common ideational and historical forms that are used to establish that stability are nature and the nation. Both nature and history come together in the idea of a human nature. Caro- lyn Merchant points to this conjunction: “Theories about nature and theories about society have a history of interconnections. A view of nature can be seen as a projection of human perceptions of self and society onto the cosmos. Con- versely, theories about nature have historically been interpreted as containing implications about the way individuals or social groups behave or ought to behave.” 17 The description of nature is related to one’s concept of human relations— order, interaction, hierarchies, relation to natural resources—in other words, the political economy of society and, in the late nineteenth century, the nation-state. The question of the inherent characteristics of humans was one of the principal issues that intellectuals focused on during the Meiji period. They were interested in defining the relation between the individual and one’s sociality, and by extension to the international world; thus, the notion of progress raises the question, Is it natural or historical that Japanese are deemed inferior? Human nature becomes that timeless singularity described through the particularity of a national experience, while aspects that formerly constituted a part of nature become distinct but still connected to the whole; for example, the various forms of belief in supernatural being(s) become categories of knowledge, separated as religion, folk belief, or superstition /magic, while nature, too, is separated from humans as the environment—something to control or enjoy but separate from the rational world that increasingly comes to define daily life. Miyake Setsurei (1860 –1945) and Inoue Tetsujiro¯ (1855 – 1944) are two quite important and influential intellectuals who engaged in this inquiry into what is truly natural—and not an artifice that seems to be natural. They share a belief in the separation of nature from culture, yet their differences suggest different Japanese “natures.”

The Writing of Nature Miyake Setsurei’s two essays written in 1891, “Shinzenbi Nihonjin” ( Japanese: Truth, Goodness, Beauty) and “Giakushu¯Nihonjin” ( Japanese: Lies, Evil, Ugliness) are examples of this inquiry into human nature.18 “Truth, Goodness, Beauty” has often been cited as an example of a traditionalist turn among intellectuals around the 1880s; few, however, refer to the other essay, especially in English. Another way to characterize these essays, however, is as inquiries into the relation between cosmos, society, and humans. First, truth (shin)—to discover an ideal—reason and justice—beyond the particularity of Western universalism. It requires the full investigation of all sides of things. Second, 134 Stefan Tanaka goodness (zen)—approaches Miyake’s attempt to eliminate the monologic potential of truth. It is a self-critical quality in which one should doubt the cor- rectness of one’s own position when applied to others. (Truth and goodness suggests an acceptance of rationality, an idealism that thought leads to a perfect society.) And third, beauty (bi)—to find a universal that is prior to such human agency, yet embedded in the human, and cannot be measured or known only through the phenomenal. These three ideals can also be rendered as universal principles, cultivation, and an aesthetic spirit, or universal, history, and nature. The three ideals combine to provide the means by which humans reach what Miyake argues is the ultimate goal—the achievement of happiness (enman ko¯fuku). Miyake’s focus on attaining happiness through the mediation of truth, goodness, and beauty suggests the modernness of his ideas; it recalls a Hegel- ian idealism that assumes the perfect society can be reached only through rational thought. Miyake concludes, “I have no doubt that if we understand the general development through which past art objects have unfolded (shin’un), we can fulfill our hopes for the future.” 19 Above all, Miyake accepts rationality as the basis for knowledge, mechanization and technology as a means for development, progress as the temporal orientation, and the nation-state as the organizing unit. He was well aware, however, that acceptance of progress as prescribed by Western enlightenment is a framework that elevates the West as the norm. If we improve the country by becoming completely Western—importing culture and texts, customs and habits even to the complete adoption of clothes, food, and drink—lamenting only that we do not have the skill to emulate rapidly, the result is a dragonfly state (seiteishu); one sees a Japan of foreigners not the Japan of Japa- nese, and those sites are only the beauty of mountains and scenes of water. But when they look at our pitiful people, they are compared with mediocrity and the vulgar servants in their own country. Thus, emulation turns the country into only an inferior Western one (o¯bei) and the people into inferior Westerners; in the end it only increases the inferior tribes among Westerners.20 To move beyond this particularity, truth is a transcendent principle, what Mi- yake calls reason and justice (rigi). It was not the denial of any particular past but the search for vast information, recognizing the multiplicity of viewpoints: “In collecting the many divergent facts which one acquires from different circumstances and experiences, analyzing the differences and similarities, and distinguishing between right and wrong, the tendency toward reason is the great way to Truth.” Before Truth can be understood, data from the Ori- ent must be taken into consideration. “In other words, for Japanese the urgent task which cannot be put off for one day is to use the new materials of the Ori- ent and discover new reason and principle (rigi).” 21 Naturalization of Experience as National 135

Adding the Orient, however, does not lead to a utopic balance. Instead, Mi- yake sought to understand this relation between the universal and particular in relation to Japan (rather than to accept what had been presented from West- ern sources) by rephrasing the separation of the human from its social and natural environment. Miyake’s strategy describes social development by separating the way peoples apprehend experience into characteristics (tokushoku) and ability (tokuno¯)—in other words, the innate and historical qualities of cultures. This analysis bears some similarities to Herder’s belief in both the universal and the particular. Herder states:

And is [taste] not to be explained by the times, customs and people? And does it not thus always have a ﬁrst principle that has just not been understood well enough, just not felt with the same intensity, just not applied in the correct proportion? And does not even this Proteus of Taste, which changes anew under every stretch of the heavens, in every breath it draws in foreign climes; does it not itself prove by the causes of its transformation that there is only One Beauty, just like Perfection, just like Truth? 22

Like Herder, Miyake believes that an inquiry into the particular, the accumulation of knowledge about one’s cultural and physical development, would lead to an understanding of cultural difference within the same conceptual world. Because all humans are basically the same and have the same ability, differences between Westerners and Japanese are not inherent. Different cultures, however, apprehend and use phenomena differently. In the case of Japan, social and bureaucratic structures impeded the full exercise of abilities in the archipelago. Miyake describes Europeans as losing more and more of their special characteristics as the years have passed. The United States and Europe, according to Miyake, were about to sink into chaos; they had become overly mechanistic.23 Miyake’s comments point implicitly to abstract, external forces. One is the idea of science: the gradual application of technology to society. The second is a notion that some guiding force is necessary to keep societies orderly in the face of such change. Like Herder, Miyake locates this force in beauty. He cites as examples beautiful sites such as mountains, rivers, lakes, the ocean, the high heavens, and the small moon when looking at Mikasayama (east of Nara), and the melodious voices of the plovers that migrate to Awaji island; the comfort of the inns along the major roads; historical objects such as the architecture of Todaiji, Hiei, and Osaka castles; artifacts such as helmets, swords, and statues; paintings by Ho¯gen Motonobu; and poetry beginning with Hitomaru.24 Mi- yake’s use of Nature as the basis for the formulation of society is not unusual; others, such as Okakura Tenshin and Takayama Chogyu¯, wrote extensively on beauty and Japanese society. Indeed, Okakura, considered the modern “dis- 136 Stefan Tanaka coverer” of Japanese art, writes that art is the best source for understanding Japan’s spirit; it transcends the phenomenal and is the closest representation of a universal human spirit. Takayama too sees in beauty a spiritual ideal, prior to human intervention. He states: “Because the aesthetic life is the fulfillment of innate human needs, life itself already possesses absolute value.” 25 Miyake’s happiness, Okakura’s human spirit, and Takayama’s fulfillment of innate needs define a human nature that is located in the body, both collective and individual. Miyake and Takayama were quite critical of the pristine beauty advocated by Okakura and Fenollosa. While beauty for Miyake is manifested through certain objects, he argues that the objects have merit not because they are ex- tolled as art or sublime but because they embody a concept of beauty (bijutsu no shiso¯) without which he finds only vulgarity and superficiality. Miyake’s notion of Japanese beauty is not the majesty, simplicity, mystery (yu¯gen), or melancholy characteristics that most reiterate when thinking of a Japanese aesthetic (see, e.g., Keene, “Japanese Aesthetics”). Miyake complains: “In sum, art in our country today uselessly produces exterior ornamentation. There is no synthesis of interiority and exteriority. In other words it is as if both artists and viewers have abandoned without reflection the concept which should be the basis of beauty.” 26 He does not deny that some of these objects are art, but he does question whether it constitutes the whole. Miyake is lamenting the objectification of art, in which “Japanese nature” becomes defined and known only through certain objects of art, as if it expressed a concept of beauty and is reiterated only because people have been told it is so, not because of any understanding. In his discussion of ugliness, Miyake begins with an allegory of flattery and delusion: When an insincere man lavishly compliments a woman’s beauty, despite her ordinariness, she becomes convinced that she is beautiful and adorns herself with gold and a conspicuous obi. (He frequently uses the word mekki, “gilding.”) In other words, she becomes fixated with a superficial spirit (gaikei seishin) and vulgarity (hiro¯).27 He makes clear the analogy to art, where the flattery of Westerners who have helped Japan “save” art spurred certain Japa- nese to accept a narrow and superficial ideal. Japanese, he says, should not lis- ten to foreigners (such as Fenollosa and Bigelow), whose interest in Japanese art Miyake likens to a temporary infatuation with new things.28 For Miyake, beauty is in the familiar and intimate experiences of everyday life, whether of the elite or the commoner.29 This is one of the areas in which history obscures its own historicity. Now intellectuals were contending to define a nature that would support their view of history. The tactic was to identify others’ ideas as “historical” and claim the “true” or “real” nature for oneself. What is interesting is the use of nature as a Naturalization of Experience as National 137 grounding for certainty in the construction of a historical, ever-changing national identity. First, this formulation was made much easier because Inoue was exorcising ghosts and spirits from mountains, rivers, and villages. The separation of spirits from environment and the intervention of science turned nature into an externality. Nature became another object separated from the human, ready to be admired and exploited. This is evident in a related reconfiguration, the founding of the discipline of geography in Japan through the efforts of writers such as Nishi Amane and Shiga Shigetaka. As something admired, it “explained” the ways that people have coalesced into a particular Japanese culture. It provided that certainty that could retain and activate a memory of the past, but it was not the past of Inoue’s ghosts. It was the removal of pasts from their sociospatial site for an atemporal ideal. Mi- yake criticizes Okakura’s sublime aesthetic because it was consistent with orientalism. Instead, he seeks to locate it in beautiful sites of the everyday. This is almost a contradiction. Because all were appealing to the visual, Miyake failed to make the separation he intended. His was a sophisticated argument, but the mnemonic eliminates complexity for the simple and the sensate. Mary Carruthers cites psychologist George Miller: “Some of the best ‘memory crutches’ we have are called ‘laws of nature,’ for learning can be seen as a process of acquiring smarter and richer mnemonic devices to represent information, encoding similar information into patterns, organizational principles, and rules which represent even material we have never before encountered, but which is ‘like’ what we do know, and thus can be ‘recognized’ or ‘remem- bered.’” 30 Because nature is something that we all “know,” its mention presents a mnemonic for common understanding. What I have called human nature in Japan becomes merged with Nature. Although rooted in different meanings, they combine to speak for the nation, while the slippage, of which Lovejoy warns us, facilitates the naturalization of the nation and the occulta- tion of its historicity.

Dominating the Japanese Body Inoue Tetsujiro¯ also wrote widely on the relation between universality and the particular. Unlike Miyake, however, Inoue uses the idea of will (ishi) as the basis for separating humans from knowledge and morals, or nature from history. For Inoue, human will (ningen no ishi) is that common source of mankind, the nature from which society emanates. According to Inoue, “there is a thing called will in humans, and when one possesses will there is deﬁnitely purpose.” 31 The connection of purpose to will leads humans beyond a survival instinct where purpose and the accumulation of experience endow humans with a progressive nature. “However, by gradually accumulating experience,” 138 Stefan Tanaka

Inoue writes, “the power of will develops on its own, and humans always try to establish purpose beyond the present.” Will is the force that separates human nature from nature. Without will (as in animals, which are limited by their endowed capabilities), there is no progress: “When the complete human being is not led by will, there is no development as a human being.” 32 In other words, will establishes a horizon of expectations as an innate part of human beings. For Inoue, will is a universal inherent in all humans and is the basis of a progressive spirituality rooted in ethics rather than rationality. Inoue states: “In the regulation of humankind, there is a gradual movement—the extrica- tion from narrow religions to the adherence to a general spirituality. I see this as today’s new religion.” 33 Individual development comes from gradually overcoming nature, nurturing the spiritual abilities (reimyo¯ na seino¯), or a general spirituality, through which one overcomes the material and corporeal.34 It is through strong will “that one has sufficient power to control one’s carnal desires with spirit.... It is the power to control a fleeting emotional desire without succumbing to it for a future goal.” 35 In the natural world, there is inevitability; in the human world there is selection and what should or must be. The identification of the inner self, then, facilitates the separation of man from culture or, more accurately, the inversion of “inherited traditions” (which had once been common sense) into “textual products” (anachronistic historical ideas and institutions). Inoue is best known for his criticism of Uchimura Kanzo¯, which is frequently cited as evidence of his anti-Christian conservatism. His criticism of Christianity, however, is part of a broader endeavor to expose the specific socio- historic conditions of institutionalized religions and ethics that are at odds with his notion of modern society. For Inoue, religions and ethical systems such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Confucianism are artifices that make claims to a transhistorical force that grounds their doctrines. Inoue was quite aware that, to paraphrase Kant, they are institutions that are also responsible for the self- incurred immaturity of Japanese. He does not deny their moral and ethical contributions, only that adherence to religion does not ensure ethical behavior. Instead, he argues that morals are prior to religion; “morals are more en- compassing; they are much broader than each religion. It is something that exists in all humankind.” 36 This shift that separates humans as autonomous beings is fully modern. However, Inoue did not accept the potential for an unrestricted self-interest that accompanies this release of the individual. For Inoue, there is will and ultimate will, that of the good for a whole: “That final goal, in other words, an ultimate goal that unifies individual goals, is the ideal. This ideal is the source and basis of morals.” 37 Thus, instead of a will that sees the individual as the Naturalization of Experience as National 139 basic human unit, Inoue argues for the fundamental sociality of humans. In this naturalization of human sociality, Inoue recognizes the diversity of individual wills, but they are combined and superseded by an ultimate will, or the “ultimate ideal as a human being.” In other words, it is natural for individuals to work for this common goal. He states, “Because for society the ultimate ideal of mankind (jinrui) is to strengthen brotherly feeling and gradually to strengthen mutual love, one must clarify more the common characteristics of all mankind.” 38 At the end of his discussion on the relation between will and nature, Inoue concludes that the ultimate will in Japan is bushido¯. By nurturing and gradually developing the ultimate will that appears in the form of bushido¯, Japanese can reach the ideal; this, he believes, is strength of Japanese people. He does not deny the historicity of bushido¯ but essentializes a part—the spirit of acting de- cisively at the risk of one’s life—as the whole. While religions are anachronistic, bushido¯ becomes tied to Japanese human nature as a new “ethical religion” that transcends the human. For Inoue, that spirituality has existed in the everyday throughout Japanese history. In the end, Inoue’s appeal to the body— masses and everyday—served as a way to essentialize the idea of a collective body. Despite his claims, however, it is an idea that determines the body rather than an idea that emerges from it. Ultimately, this human nature restricts the realm of individual action supposedly made possible by modernity. By giving this sociality (daiishi) greater weight than individual will, Inoue relies on a historical idea to authorize what de Certeau calls a naturalization of social relations. This, too, is one of those sites of slippage; because everyone has a conception of nature, history, as part of a natural form, occults itself. The social becomes both historical and timeless. Inoue presents the ultimate will as transcendent of man, yet it is used to reconstitute society where past and present, East and West provide archives for a narrative of the nation-state. The simultaneous separation of pasts, now data, from the present and the prioriti- zation of a social will as natural provide the moment for the return of certain pasts as a transhistorical idea. By incorporating pasts into this human nature, Inoue naturalizes the nation. He does recognize the historicity of the nation and nation-state; he cites imperfections such as the anti-Japanese immigrant movements in the United States. While these are merely political events, data of the nation-state, the reintegration of pasts into these natures (the general will) gives particular moments meaning as manifestations of this spirit and nature. The historical, when part of this general will, becomes evidence of the Same, that is, evidence of a natural condition. One way to naturalize this newly formulated body is through the idea of childhood. I will mention only a few of the most relevant effects of the transformation of childhood and children.39 Childhood becomes a “practice of mean- 140 Stefan Tanaka ing” that replaces the “myths of yesterday.” The “innocent” child serves as that new connection between nature and human or past and future—what Lefebvre calls “mysterious connections with the eternal.” 40 In a sense, this historiciza- tion of society makes History possible. By conflating ontogeny with phylog- eny, the child also “proves” the nation as always existing. The child is a visual reminder; it embodies the physiology of a group of people and cuts across other divisive categories that had existed, such as class (hereditary), wealth, or region, as well as new categories, such as class (economic), knowledge, or putative ability. Difference is now altered into temporal hierarchies of the Same—that is, through the diachrony of human growth and progress—and childhood signifies the immanence of ethnicity or race. While orienting society around a di- achronic epistemology, the child is also a visible form (body and images), the “like us,” that facilitates the construction and maintenance of a national “we.” Inoue describes the centrality of childhood for the construction of a national body: “If all children receive this national education (kokuminteki kyo¯iku), there is no doubt that our land will coalesce into one country.” 41 The combination of learning and children turns the child into an experiential site for a reconfigured space, the nation-state. This brings out one way that ghosts, nature, and children are part of the same process. The society formulated by the end of Meiji was quite different than the worlds that reiterated the story of Shuten Do¯ji, in which world, ghosts, nature, and children were part of the spirits; each manifested the radical heterogeneity of nonmodern society. Ghosts permeated societies; nature was alive with spirits; and children, too, were “among the gods until seven.” In each case, these transmitted forms of knowledge are transformed, given different temporal markers that domesticate them in a way that reinforces the unity of Japan. These alters were first separated from the modern present as past, objectified through scientific discourse, and reintegrated into a human nature to give particular moments meaning as manifestations of a universalistic idea. Ghosts become evidence of the immaturity of a progressing nation and are relegated to the realm of superstition and folklore. Nature takes on an atemporal condition that, because it is unchanging, has always centered a national sensibility, now evident in the fine arts. And childhood embodies through every individual the idea of development, the sameness of the Japa- nese body, and the hope for (and control of ) the future of the nation-state. Each has served as a critical constituent element, obscured because they are deemed “natural,” in the maintenance of a Japanese “we.” The effect of this reduction of alterity to an other of the same was a reorientation of the archipelago into a natural unit, Japan. No longer was society organized around social connections; now abstract ideals oriented the social. Interiority had become the abstract idea of the nation directly tied to the phe- Naturalization of Experience as National 141 nomenal—the body and natural sites. The connection of the human and the environment as Japanese was used to invert previous social structures, such as regions and locales, and to place them as secondary to the nation. The individual—now citizen—was directly tied to the nation-state. Variation and difference were now permitted only within the Same. Thus, at the end of his 1895 Shuten Do¯ji—an adaptation of the traditional tale and one of the first modern children’s books published in Japan—Iwaya Sazanami writes:

In the story, Shuten Do¯ji of Oeyama is a demon, but there were no demons in that world; being an allegory, actually scary thieves like demons who stole and hid in the mountains. Raiko¯, along with the Four Warriors (Shitenno¯) and Ho¯jo¯Yasutomo received orders from the gods and skillfully subdued them. Stories are stories, reality is reality; children you must not mix them up.42

Just as Raiko¯ subdues the sake-drinking child, rationality has subdued the heterogeneity of society.

Acceleration and Contrasts I will end with the following statement by Pierre Nora:

The acceleration of history: let us try to gauge the signiﬁcance, beyond metaphor, of this phrase. An increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear—these indicate a rupture of equilibrium. The remnants of experience still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral, have been displaced under the pressure of a fundamentally historical sensibility. Self-consciousness emerges under the sign of that which has already happened, as the fulﬁllment of something always already begun.43

Nature provided an idea that in Bruno Latour’s words had “the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another.” 44 It served as the grounding that would arrest the slippage into modernity.The folk and folklore, landscapes, and the Japanese body (constantly redeveloped through the child) provide that mobile property. These are the “already begun,” concepts that are constant because of their attachment to nature. As such, nature was enabling; it facilitated the formulation of a modern notion of a Japanese society. However, by orienting experience according to a certain past, now deﬁned within various natural categories, Nature (in all its ambiguous and multiple meanings) obscured a critical part of Japan’s transformation, the reorientation of everyday life according to various abstractions that used the sensate to occult the separation of experience from life. 13

Coincidentia Oppositorum O¯ nishi Yoshinori’s Greek Genealogies of Japan

Michael F. Marra

When we look at the history of Japanese aesthetics beginning from the early writings of Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913), we are faced with the presence of a hermeneutical technique that became a widespread “leitmotif” among aestheticians building up a distinctive “Japanese” subjectivity. We might call this technique “comparison and reduction” because it implies a comparison of local realities with the West and a consequent reduction of the “otherness” of such realities to a foreign “Other.” The move is paradoxical inasmuch as it claims to establish notions of “distinctness” by creating images of Japan that are actually a miniaturized version of what Japan is supposed to be distinguished from. The contemporary reader becomes immediately aware of the basic ﬂaw of such an argument—a ﬂaw of which the authors themselves might well have been aware. What is less known, however, are the reasons behind the use of such techniques, reasons we might want to start searching for in the political arena. We might want to begin by asking how a Third World country—as it could be argued Japan was until recent times—could stand up economically and culturally to the giants of the technologically advanced world. Because this essay is concerned mainly with cultural questions, I could answer by emphasizing the idea of eclecticism that allows the incorporation of the advanced “Other” into the explanation of the backward “self.” One method would be the use in Japan of Hegel’s synthetic process, in which opposites are overcome for the sake of a third, more “universal” alternative. Another method—the one with which I am mainly concerned in this essay—is the erasure of substantive differences between the two opposite terms by making them coincide in the end, a technique known in philosophy as coincidentia oppositorum (the sameness of opposites). Both the Hegelian dialectic and coincidentia oppositorum aim at ac-

142 Coincidentia Oppositorum 143 commodating “difference” by somehow harmonizing the conflicting elements of reality, either through a process of ingestion and digestion, as in the Hegel- ian case, or through a movement of negation and erasure, as in the second case. For a country in search of international recognition, “the sameness of opposites” was not simply an intellectual game. It implied a concerted effort to demonstrate the cultural advances of Japan by arguing that, after all, differences between opposites ( Japan and the West) could not only be reconciled but actually erased, thus leaving the two adversaries on an absolutely equal footing. We find this kind of argument at work in the images of ancient Japan formulated by O¯ nishi Yoshinori (1888 –1959), a professor of aesthetics at the University of Tokyo during the 1930s and 1940s. The present-day successor to O¯ nishi’s post, Sasaki Ken’ichi (b. 1943), has recently explained O¯ nishi’s ob- session with harmonizing conflicts and his arguments about the merely apparent nature of contradictions by reminding us of the fundamental role that the method of coincidentia oppositorum played in the aesthetics of Romantic thinkers, especially G. W. F. Hegel (1770 –1831), F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), and K. W. F. Solger (1780 –1819). Before the development of their systems, he argues, the split between body and soul (the animal /human and the intellectual /divine sides of a human being) was felt as a contradiction that could hardly be healed without the intervention of a redemptive figure from the outside, such as God. With the Romantic movement, however, art was called on to mediate the conflict and to bring harmony to the conflictual moments of human experience that the intervention of aesthetic consciousness would prove to be only apparently contradictory. While acknowledging that O¯ nishi inherited from the metalanguage of his field of expertise (aesthetics) a drive to bring opposites into an orderly dialogue, Sasaki contends that O¯ nishi’s motivations were, however, different from the Western desire to find in this method a means to reconcile the animal side of man with his more spiritual, divine aspects. Desire, in O¯ nishi’s case, should rather be sought in what Sasaki calls the “ethnic dimension” (esunikku no jigen) —that is, a need for intellectual syncretism on the part of a thinker belonging to a “backward” country who struggles to make/create/forge the subjectivity of his own land into a form acceptable to a more powerful “Other” (the West). According to Sasaki, this academic posture, which was intrinsic to the method of aesthetic research and which O¯ nishi absorbed from the West, actually allowed him to maintain some distance from the West (O¯ nishi’s “hermeneutics of distinction”) even while he was enmeshed in a pervasively Western methodology.1 In this essay, I analyze O¯ nishi’s application of the method of coincidentia oppositorum to his reading of ancient Japan (kodai), which O¯ nishi identifies as the time of the compilation of ancient prayers (norito) and poems appearing in the 144 Michael F. Marra collection known as Ten Thousand Leaves (Man’yo¯shu¯)—approximately the seventh and eighth centuries.2 I also point out the price that O¯ nishi had to pay because of his devotion to a method that, once applied to the explanation of Japan, became fraught with paradoxes. By embracing the field of aesthetics as his area of specialization, O¯ nishi was faced with a particular view of the West that was centered around ancient Greece. The abstract discourse on the philosophy of art developed in the West contemporaneously with a practical application of the major principles of aesthetics to an appreciation /construction /idealization of the Greek world, starting from Johann J. Winckelmann’s (1717–1768) work on Greek art. It was inevitable, therefore, that Japanese scholars of aesthetics would bring to bear on Japanese reality the “Grecization” of the world deriving from the inner development of the field of their expertise, even though the construction of a reality such as Japan was only minimally related to the land of Homer. O¯ nishi’s representations of ancient Japan are informed by the metalanguage of aesthetics despite his reticence to clarify to his readers the aporias of a hermeneutical method that—willingly or unwillingly but certainly without the author’s acknowledgment—transforms the time and space of the Man’yo¯shu¯ (the Nara period) into sunny visions of the Mediterranean world. In apparently mutually contradictory interpretations of Greece, O¯ nishi found a key to a reconciliation of two mutually divergent views on Japan that were still current in the 1940s. First is Tsuda So¯kichi’s (1873–1961) view, according to which the Japanese past is characterized by optimism and an exclusive concern for worldly matters as a result of the mildness of the climate, the relative abundance of food, the limited population (and, consequently, the lack of struggles for survival), the homogeneity of the people, and the insular nature of the land, which sheltered it from foreign invasions. Tsuda explains the alleged lack of a metaphysical world in ancient Japan as a result of the people’s satisfaction with their present condition, which did not prompt them to search for a better place to live beyond the boundaries of the present world. He perceives the country as beautiful, sunny, and ethically good. Second is the view sustained by scholars such as Higo Kazuo (1889–1981), who points out that terror, rather than love, is at the root of the relationship binding the ancient Japanese to their gods, including the belief that illnesses and catastro- phes were the result of the deity’s curses (tatari). O¯ nishi denies the mutually contradictory nature of these views of Japan on the ground that the difference is only apparent and that a process of harmo- nization along the lines of Western hermeneutics is possible for interpreting ancient Japan. It suffices to consider how Westerners had reconciled the apparently contradictory views of Greece as (1) the sunny land of harmony, order, and optimism and (2) the tragic land of chaotic natural forces according to the Coincidentia Oppositorum 145 interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 –1900) and Jakob Burckhardt (1818 –1897). Nietzsche himself, O¯ nishi points out, was responsible for solving the apparent contradiction by positing the sunny Apollonian and the tragic Dionysian as the two major principles of Greek civilization.3 Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) provided O¯ nishi with key concepts for developing the two basic categories that he uses to differentiate Japan from the West: “naturism” and “olympianism.” He associates Japanese mythology with naturism, describing it as a moment of fusion between nature and man (spirit), as a lack of conflict between good and evil, which had led to the development in ancient Japan of “natural beauty” (shizenbi). This, according to O¯ nishi, found expression in “the spirit of words” (kotodama), to which he applies the definition current in aesthetics of “intuition of poetic language.” O¯ nishi elicits from ancient prayers (norito) and a few poems from the Man’yo¯- shu¯ the definition of “naturism” as a sort of “Dionysian” attitude centered around the spiritual force of nature.4 By “olympianism,” O¯ nishi indicates the relationship between nature and spirit in Greece. He explains it as a mixture of “idealism” and “anthropomorphism” (words to which we will return) found in the Greek creation of the Olympian gods whose model was Apollo. These gods were the result of the artistic creation of the spirit, and they mediated the space between spirit and nature, being the Greek response to the human confrontation with the fearful power of nature. The “personification” or “humanization” of nature (expressions to which, again, we will return) are actually an attempt at overcoming nature and the mark of culture’s triumph. Such an attitude led to the development in Greece of “artistic beauty” (geijutsu chu¯shin no biteki bunka), which, O¯ nishi continues, was the result of “fantastic intuition” (Phantasieanschauung). This intuition is related to Greece’s Apollonian principle, which resulted in the ability to make things individual (principium individuationis).5 To simplify O¯ nishi’s complex argument, we can say that he grounds the specificity of Japan on a Dionysian fusion of nature and spirit into “oneness” (the naturism of natural beauty) while characterizing Greece as the Apollon- ian land of “fantastic intuition” and “principium individuationis” (the olympianism of artistic beauty). Nietzsche had called Apollo the father of the Olympian world—the god in charge of the art realm of dreams, who reigned over the illusion of man’s inner world of fantasy. Such a world called for the victory of Apollonian illusion over the truth of death and suffering.6 Nietzsche singles out Homer as the champion of aesthetic illusion, whose fantastic power let him create an individuated world of heroes in the image of the gods, first among them Apollo, the god of individuation and just boundaries. Homer’s production of an aesthetic mirror in epic poetry had a redemptive function with regard to the tragic reality of human life.7 Sculpture is another example of an art 146 Michael F. Marra based on the principium individuationis. O¯ nishi refers to Mythologie figurée de la Grèce by Maxime Collignon (1849–1917) 8 to argue that Greek sculptures portraying deities were patterned after views of ideal men and, therefore, that they were close to what Nietzsche calls the “Apollonian.” 9 Principium individuationis, “ideal types,” “anthropomorphization of deities,” are all elements that O¯ nishi finds present in Greek and absent in Japanese mythology. This explains, in his opinion, why Japanese mythology has been labeled “anti-aesthetic” and “anti-artistic.” 10 Rather than presenting the human side of its deities, Japanese mythology tends to portray human nature as a “natural presence” or “natural Being” (shizenteki sonzai). This celebration of natural powers by Shinto scriptures, O¯ nishi reminds us, was underscored by Western scholars of ancient Greece such as Jane Ellen Harrison (1850 –1920) and Robert Ernest Hume (1877–1948), who pointed out the lack of a specific ethical characterization of the Japanese deities and their representation in bio- logical terms. They are born, get married, bear children, become sick, become jealous, kill, and eventually die and find burial. This characterization of Japan’s religious world leads O¯ nishi to argue that Japanese deities are a product of “remembrance” (kioku) rather than of ideals (riso¯), not just a “historical remembrance” attempting to reach the primordial age of human history but also a “mystical remembrance” trying to recapture the movement from man as spiritual entity back to nature.11 Not only did Western interpretations of ancient Greece provide O¯ nishi with representations of an “Other” to which Japan was compared to underline differences and create images of alleged distinction, but such interpretations were paramount to the construction of ancient Japan, as O¯ nishi’s category of “naturism” clearly demonstrates. The experience of the ancient Japanese during the Nara period, then, became a concrete example of Nietzsche’s definition of the Dionysiac—a shattering of the principium individuationis, the individual’s complete forgetting of itself, and the triumph of a mystical oneness, a complete oneness with the essence of the universe.12 The ancient songs collected in the Man’yo¯shu¯ were considered to be examples of Dionysian music, dithyrambs tearing asunder the veil of Maya, so as to sink back into the original oneness of nature.13 The ancient Japanese poet was presented as a Diony- sian artist whose abrogation of subjectivity led him to be one with the heart of the world.14 The alleged oneness of man and nature in ancient Japan was nothing other than Dionysus’ breaking the spell of individuation and opening a path to the maternal womb of being.15 In refining the meaning of “naturism” to portray ancient Japan, O¯ nishi in- curs a series of debts to several Western scholars, beginning with the German thinker Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub (1884 –1963), who in an article published in 1940 used the word naturistisch (naturistic) to define the spiritual character- Coincidentia Oppositorum 147 istics shared by all primitive arts. Hartlaub had chosen this expression over the more common naturalistisch (naturalistic, or, in Japanese, shizenshugiteki) because of its intimate relation with “the reality of nature” (Naturgegebenheiten). Playing on Max Dessoir’s (1867–1947) word “anthropomorphic” (anthropo- morph), Hartlaub had called naturism “cosmomorphic” (kosmomorph)—an abstract formalization experienced in primitive artistic expression that mixed the contingency of the embossed carving of the uneven surface of stones with a “protogenic impressionism,” or the reproduction of a visual act of remembrance. Such a formalization included a network of symbolic relationships between man and the cosmos in which the notion of “relationship” itself was grounded in the conceptual “axis-system” (Axensystem) of the world. “Natur- ism” was nothing but a kind of “nostalgia” (nagori), the “horror of emptiness” (horror vacui) witnessed in primitive art. Hartlaub’s argument was aimed at portraying Greek art as an overcoming of “naturism” and “cosmomorphism” and as a transition from a primitive, archaic age to the Greek discovery of “anthropomorphism,” in which man became the measure of all things (homo mensura).16 O¯ nishi’s dependence on Western representations for his self-representation goes one step further when he tries to refine his definition of ancient Japan by using expressions related to the alleged “cosmomorphism” of Japan’s past. He borrows one of these expressions, “cosmocentric” (Kosmozentrisch)—which O¯ nishi applies to the age of the Man’yo¯shu¯ —from the German philosopher Rudolf Odebrecht (1883 –1952). O¯ nishi relates the notion of “cosmocentrism” to the local aesthetic experience of a mythical past that, he argues, was grounded in the oneness of primordial life. Such oneness was dispersed all over the universe, and it was the source of all natural phenomena, including human consciousness and the deities’ transcendental nature. This primordial aesthetic experience elicited what O¯ nishi calls “interior or internal contemplation,” the result of “the concretion of the spirit” (Geistesverkörperung). The “cosmocentric” aesthetic experience stands in opposition to the “anthropocentric” (An- thropozentrisch) experience of ancient European cultures—foremost among them the Greek—which make “personhood” the privileged aesthetic standard. All natural phenomena, including death and destiny, were given ideal human features, thus eliciting an aesthetic contemplation of idealized forms. In other words, in the West nature became animated (Naturbeseelung).17 O¯ nishi further underlines the difference between cosmocentrism and an- thropocentrism by associating the first type of experience with the notions of “mystic participations” (participations mystiques) and of “entrance back into life” (Einleben) while reserving for the second the concepts of “animation” (ujo¯ka), “personification” (gijin sayo¯), and “empathic transference” (kanjo¯ inyu¯). By “mystic participations,” O¯ nishi means the original nonseparation of “spirit” 148 Michael F. Marra and “nature,” which, he argues, underlines the entire notion of “naturism.” The expression came to him from the work of the French ethnologist Lucien Lévi-Bruhl (1857–1939).18 O¯ nishi argues that the spiritual power of life was expressed in Japanese mythology by the word musubi (literally, “tying”)—the combination of musu (to produce, to create) and bi (spirit)—which meant “spiritual creative force.” 19 He finds in the poetry of the Man’yo¯shu¯ textual examples of the unity of “spirit” and “nature,” or human life and natural phenomenon—a unity exemplified by the rhetorical texture of the poems. O¯ nishi interprets poetic rhetorical techniques such as “pillow words” (makura kotoba), “prefaces” (jo), and “pivot words” (kakekotoba) as hyperlogical statements com- pressing the expression of the poet’s feelings and the description of the natural surroundings into a single, unitary image. The seventh-century poet Hito- maro is presented as the champion of “naturism,” unlike his Greek counterpart Homer, whose similes stand as examples of the separateness of subject and object, interior and exterior, poet and landscape, which the reader must re- compose in an act of aesthetic experience.20 The notion of mystic union also serves for O¯ nishi to explain the apparent contradiction between the argument for a pristine, immediate, and “sympathetic” perception of nature in ancient Japan and the evidence that perceptions were ruled by conventions 21 once they were expressed in poetry—a contradiction solved in the West by relying on the notion of aesthetic experience. O¯ nishi points out that what was called “beauty of nature” (shizenbi) did not refer to a specific natural phenomenon, such as a particular flower or a specific bird, but to the experience deriving from the view of this phenomenon from the perspective of “the totality of nature” (shizen no “zentaisei”). Such a contemplation was predetermined by what conventions had made into traditions. Rather than acting on the object of contemplation, the viewer is acted on by the object, by the conventionalized moment of “production” (Produktion), the colors of a painting, for instance, or the words of a poem, and by the conventionalized reception (Rezeption), how the object comes to be perceived within a specific ethnicity. To use a paradoxical expression, O¯ nishi argues, the beauty of nature (shizenbi) is “a work of art prior to art” (geijutsu izen no geijutsuhin). He states that while in the West man learned to appreciate nature by relying on the conventions developed to admire art, Japan discovered nature through poetic space. The conventions regulating the writing of “poetry” (shibun)— the change of seasons and colors during the same day, impermanence signified by trailing clouds, mist, or smoke—also determined the act of contemplating nature. Because pictorial prevailed over poetic conventions in the West, the Western experience of nature was basically more “visual.” O¯ nishi calls the experience of nature the result of a “formative, productive activity” (keisei sayo¯, or Formung) on the part of the human spirit. As a synonym of “conventions,” Coincidentia Oppositorum 149 he uses the expression “inner form” (naimenteki keishiki, or innere Form), which is at the same time the product of aesthetic consciousness and the producer of the perception of natural objects.22 Returning to O¯ nishi’s argument of “reversals,” the pristine harmony of Ja- pan’s ancient poetic lore was finally reached in the West as a result of an aesthetic contemplation of nature mediated by art. While the Western awakening to naturism during the Romantic era with poets and writers such as Rousseau, Lamartine, Hugo, Byron, Shelley, and Goethe was basically a product of modernism, Japan had made naturism the ground of its artistic and cultural life since the most ancient era. O¯ nishi argues that in the West the experience of artistic beauty (as described by members of the Romantic movement) brought about what in Japan had been perceived in ancient times as an experience of natural beauty. This leads O¯ nishi to argue that Romantic poetry achieves a sympathetic view of and feeling for nature as a result of artistic intervention, the power of art.23 O¯ nishi, however, is careful to avoid the direct consequences that the notion of “aesthetic contemplation” (Kontemplation, Betrachtung) implies. This idea, developed by the phenomenological aesthetician Moritz Geiger (1880 –1937), is premised on a spiritual distance between the observing subject and the observed object. Accordingly, the denial of the existence of such a distance in the spiritual life of the Japanese people in ancient times deprived them of the ability to have aesthetic experiences. O¯ nishi’s entire project aims at demonstrating the opposite, which is that aesthetic experience was the prerequisite for the appreciation of nature in ancient Japan.24 He relates the Man’yo¯ poets’ privileging of naturism to Japan’s delay in developing natural landscapes (Natur- schilderung, or “descriptions of nature”) because nature had not yet become an object of pure observation. Although in ancient Japan the focus of aesthetic experience was never on nature seen as an object of pure vision, or “pure contemplation” (junsui kansho¯), he continues, a feeling for nature (shizen kanjo¯) was very much present in ancient Japanese poetry.25 O¯ nishi goes on the offensive, arguing that Western poetry is trapped in a sort of “parallelism” (heiko¯kankei) in which the subject could not resist the temptation to provide reflections on and explanations of nature instead of presenting nature as an undifferentiated union of subject and object. In his opinion, Western languages are responsible for seeing things from an exclusively human perspective and for anthropomorphizing everything, whereas the Japa- nese language resists the temptation to differentiate between man and nature, the organic and the inorganic. This last argument leads O¯ nishi to stress the “naturalness” (shizenteki ni), “frankness” (sotchoku ni), and “simplicity” (soboku ni) of linguistic expressions appearing in the poetry of the Man’yo¯shu¯.26 In a sense O¯ nishi was reviving an eighteenth-century argument developed 150 Michael F. Marra by members of the National Learning movement (Kokugaku) who saw in the poetry of the Man’yo¯shu¯ an ethical moment of purity (magokoro, or “true heart,” and makoto, or “sincerity”) prior to the contaminating influence of foreign ideologies (Buddhism and Confucianism).27 Reinforcement of this local creed came to O¯ nishi from a famous essay by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” (1795 –1796), which O¯ nishi quotes,28 apparently without paying attention to the paradox of creating “distinctness” by relying on the alleged “distinctions” of the “Other.” Schiller, in fact, associates ancient Greece with simplicity, artfulness, and immediacy (the “naive” of the essay’s title) while charging modern, Romantic poetry with the crime of being technical, distant, and opaque (the sentimental).29 The “naive” quality of the so-called naturism of ancient Japan also implies an “instinctuality” (honno¯teki) of feelings for nature that, according to O¯ nishi, goes a step beyond the “self-conscious” (jikakuteki) appreciation of and “intellectual love” (chiteki no ai) for nature, as is the case with the Romantic poets. O¯ nishi further defines “naturism” as an “entrance into life” (Einleben), a kind of “vitalism” proceeding from nature and moving toward people as a result of what he calls the three “vital forms” (seikatsu yo¯shiki) of clothing, food, and dwelling, which in the past were all directly and closely related to nature.30 As a cosmocentric experience, naturism is based on an unconscious perception of “seimei” (life) in which body and spirit are in a relationship of primordial unity. O¯ nishi points out that the spiritual attitude of the Japanese people toward nature was in those times a “thrownness” (to¯nyu¯), a “projection” (to¯sha) into nature, an entrance of vision, affects, and will into nature.31 Such a mystic and vitalistic experience was grounded in a “hyperspiritual” (cho¯seishinteki) and a “hypersubjective” (cho¯shukanteki) nature. Once the human spirit was in tune with and sympathized with hyperspiritual and hypersubjective nature, O¯ nishi concludes, a subjective aesthetic consciousness could take place among the ancient Japanese.32 The vitalistic argument undoubtedly came to O¯ nishi from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.33 The enormous impact that this trend of thought had on Ja- pan in the first half of the twentieth century has been thoroughly examined and documented.34 The notion of “entrance into life,” however, was set up as an alternative to the Western anthropocentric aesthetic experience, which centered around the spiritual activity of empathic transference, animation, and personification. Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) is the philosopher responsible for providing O¯ nishi with the hermeneutical strategy of transference, which he reverses. In Lipps’s case, O¯ nishi argues, the theory of “empathetic transference” (Einfühlen) is the thrownness/transference/objectification of one’s affects onto the aesthetic object—what the French call “objectivation du moi” (objectification of the self ). In the process, the aesthetic experience becomes objecti- Coincidentia Oppositorum 151

fied, thus allowing the self to become conscious to itself. Because the process of “penetration” is prior to and, therefore, separate from aesthetic consciousness, O¯ nishi continues, rather than talking about “feeling into” (Einfühlung), an idea that also implies “feeling one with” (Einsfühlen), it would be more correct to use the word “feeling out of” (Herausfühlen) with regard to Lipps’s theory. When we turn to Japan, the cosmocentric aesthetic experience of ancient times makes the human heart deeply “engrossed in” (chinsen) the surrounding nature. In this case, O¯ nishi argues, we can truly speak of going from “an entering back to life” (Einleben) to an authentic “feeling into” (Hineinfühlen). The moment of “thrownness,”or “entrance into,” is not consciously spelled out. The self, the spiritual subject, is converted back (kie suru) to nature unconditionally (mujo¯ken ni) in such a way that the self overcomes itself and forgets itself in the wonders of nature. Although in “anthropocentric aesthetic experience” we can still talk of “feeling one with” (Einsfühlen) as “cosmocentric aesthetic experience,” there is a difference. In the anthropocentric attitude we witness the subjectivization of an object and the subject experiencing itself in the object, while the cosmocentric position implies the erasure of the self in nature and the final forgetting of the self.35 O¯ nishi calls this last process “intuition” (chokkan), which, he explains, is the spiritual “thrownness into nature” that takes place through “empathetic transference” (kanjo¯inyu¯),“a transference of the will” (ishi inyu¯), and a “transference of direct vision” (chokkan inyu¯), or “entrance into vision” (kan’nyu¯, or Hineinschauen, Hineinsehen).36 In the end, O¯ nishi supplements Lipps’s philosophy of empathy with the work of Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), especially his Abstraction and Em- pathy (Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 1908), in which Worringer discusses the two basic principles of aesthetic consciousness: “the impulse to abstract” (Ab- straktionstrieb) and “the impulse to empathize” (Einfühlungstrieb). O¯ nishi evidently felt that abstraction rather than empathy could further clarify the world of the Man’yo¯shu¯. However, he also felt that the application of Wor- ringer’s notion of abstraction to the naturism of Japan was fraught with a basic danger. While empathy is premised on a benign relationship of mutual trust between nature and man, abstraction implies that man was originally af- flicted by the chaos of nature. Therefore, in an attempt to escape such a disor- dered reality, man aimed at spiritual tranquillity, which he found in artistic forms: the formalism of abstraction that frees man from the contingency of nature. Because Worringer had a sunny image of ancient Greece, he privileged the empathetic relationship between man and nature. Nietzsche, who supported the view of a tragic Greece, considered its culture an abstraction resulting from the unreliability of nature. If “empathy” is a problematical category for describing the serene and undivided reality of ancient Japan, “abstraction” has to undergo hermeneutical surgery before it can accommodate the world 152 Michael F. Marra of the Man’yo¯shu¯. This O¯ nishi achieves by calling to his aid the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875 –1961), who reconciles the apparent contradiction between empathy and abstraction by arguing that empathy presupposes an unconscious act of abstraction: an ordering of primeval chaos that allows confrontation and identification with nature, or an empathizing with nature as a way to make sense of it and thus tame it. O¯ nishi succeeds in associating abstraction with primeval order and in privileging it over empathy by making abstraction inclusive of empathy. This hermeneutical tour de force eventually allows O¯ nishi to argue that, while empathy leads to the formation of “realistic” (shajitsuteki), “naturalistic” (shizenshugiteki) forms of art characteristic of the West, abstraction explains the “abstract” (chu¯sho¯teki) forms of Oriental art.37 To be true to the method of coincidentia oppositorum, O¯ nishi in the end leaves his readers with a deep doubt as to the feasibility of maintaining and justifying the distinction of categories that, as we have seen, are always only apparently mutually contradictory. He teases his readers by deconstructing his own argument after leading them to believe that ancient Japan could be described as the land of oneness, natural beauty, cosmomorphism, cosmocentricism, mystic participations, naturism, naturalness, frankness, simplicity, naïveté, vitalism, “feeling out of,” and abstraction. After relating Worringer’s notion of abstraction to Hartlaub’s concept of naturism and after pairing Lipps’s theory of empathy with Nietzsche’s description of olympianism, he challenges his readers by concluding that categories of uniqueness are inadequate for analyzing people and that such schemes cannot explain the experience of art. In conclusion, he takes a syncretic view of ancient Greece, according to which Greek art is at the same time realistic and ideal, natural and spiritual.38 Although we might agree with Sasaki’s argument that O¯ nishi used the method of coincidentia oppositorum in an effort to prove the cultural value of Ja- pan to a skeptical Other and to convince the Japanese readership of the intrinsic greatness of Japanese culture, it would be hard to deny the consequences of constructing as intrinsic to a culture what was actually intrinsic to a method. This example of “the hermeneutical fallacy” results from the paradoxical attempt to negotiate one’s own identity by relying on the identity of the Other, believing that one can maintain, by creating images of the self modeled on a mythical Other, an autonomous position with regard to that Other. If I am allowed to pose a question that still deals with facts rather than with interpretations, once Japan is made into Greece, then what remains of Japan? 14

Representations of “Japaneseness” in Modern Japanese Aesthetics An Introduction to the Critique of Comparative Reason

Otabe Tanehisa

The task of this essay is to clarify how in the past ﬁfty years Japanese aestheticians have pursued “Japanese aesthetic qualities” as their subject matter. As is well known, scholarly study in modern Japan mainly took the shape of “imported learning.” The same has been true in the study of aesthetics. In general, the basic attitude of Japanese aestheticians has been “outward.” I do not mean to argue, however, that Japanese scholars of aesthetics have simply imported Western theories. While adopting Western hermeneutical strategies, they have also published comparative studies on Eastern /Western arts and art theories. These two different movements—the importation of the latest Western theories and comparison between East and West (or Japan and the West)— have not been mutually exclusive but rather have complemented each other. In other words, these scholars, like Janus, have shown two faces and in many cases have simply used whichever face suited their objective—a fact that has caused not a few problems peculiar to the ﬁeld of comparative studies in Ja- pan. My essay, therefore, will be a “critique of comparative reason.” The history of comparative studies in Japanese aesthetics can be divided into three periods: from the 1930s to the 1940s, the 1960s to the 1970s, and the 1980s to the present. After surveying how Japanese aestheticians pursued their comparative studies, I will consider the ideological background that has led them to follow the comparative path.

153 154 Otabe Tanehisa

The Study of Eastern Aesthetic Categories One of the most representative scholars of the first period is O¯ nishi Yoshinori (1888 –1959). His works, including Kanto: Handanryoku Hihan (A Study of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, 1931), Gensho¯gakuha no Bigaku (Aesthetics of the Phenomenological School, 1937), and Ro¯manshugi no Bigaku to Geijutsukan (The Aesthetics and Art Views of Romanticism, posthumous, 1968), were explorations mainly of the aesthetics in German-speaking countries, from Kant through the romantics to phenomenology. Meanwhile, O¯ nishi also pursued his comparative research on East and West in studies such as Yu¯gen to Aware (Yu¯gen and Aware, 1939), Fu¯ga Ron: Sabi no Kenkyu¯ (The Theory of Refine- ment: A Study of Sabi, 1940), and Man’yo¯shu¯ ni Okeru Shizen Kanjo¯ (Natural Emotions in the Man’yo¯shu¯, 1943). All these works finally resulted in Bigaku (Aesthetics, the second volume of which includes a “Theory of Aesthetic Cate- gories,” 1959– 60, 1981), and To¯yo¯teki Geijutsu Seishin (The Eastern Artistic Spirit, 1988). A distinctive characteristic of O¯ nishi’s comparative studies can be seen mainly in his “theory of aesthetic categories.” He argues:

Western “aesthetics” which has been imported into our country is originally based on the “aesthetic consciousness” of Western European peoples. In the East, especially in Japan, however, there is a certain aesthetic consciousness that developed independently, and is peculiar to the Eastern or Japanese peoples. Since we must learn Western aesthetics and are obliged to develop it further, we should supplement or expand Western aesthetics by taking into consideration what we consider to be Eastern aesthetics. In Japanese aesthetic consciousness we can discover those East- ern “aesthetic categories” which have not been much recognized by previous West- ern aesthetics.1

O¯ nishi modeled his work after the theories of aesthetic categories developed during the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, particularly those of the Hegelian Friedrich Theodor Vischer and the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen. O¯ nishi argues that there are three fundamental aesthetic categories: the beautiful, the sublime, and the humorous. While following Cohen, O¯ nishi attempts to deduce aesthetic categories that are in line with a priori structures in the “aesthetic experience.” The three categories can be deduced when the aesthetic experience is composed of “an art- aesthetic moment” and “a nature-aesthetic moment.” In other words, if the art-aesthetic moment has the advantage, the humorous will emerge, whereas if the nature-aesthetic moment is stronger, the sublime will dominate. If the two moments are completely harmonized, then the beautiful will emerge.2 Thus, as long as O¯ nishi follows the deductive method, there is in his argu- Representations of “Japaneseness” 155 ment no room for an East-West comparative study. This is because East-West differences are simply impossible to deduce, and that is exactly why O¯ nishi calls some Japanese aesthetic categories (such as “aware,” “yu¯gen,” and “sabi”) “derivative aesthetic categories,” separating them from the “fundamental aesthetic categories.” Even if it is impossible to deduce the derivative aesthetic categories, it does not mean that they can be clariﬁed only historically or em- pirically. O¯ nishi aimed “to incorporate the essence of so-called ‘Japanese aesthetic categories’ into the universal theoretical system of aesthetics,” in other words, to position Japanese aesthetic qualities in a systematic theory based on deduction. About differences in aesthetic consciousness between East and West, O¯ nishi states:

In the aesthetic consciousness developed among Eastern or Japanese peoples, the “nature-aesthetic moment” is developed to a great degree. In this respect, Eastern or Japanese aesthetics is contrasted with Western aesthetics whose emphasis has been placed mainly upon the “art-aesthetic moment.”

Although O¯ nishi does not adopt the deductive method, his basic idea is similar to the deduction of “fundamental aesthetic categories.” Accordingly, the derivation of “derivative aesthetic categories” from “fundamental aesthetic categories” depends on which of the two components of the “aesthetic experience”—the art-aesthetic moment or the nature-aesthetic moment—is the strongest. O¯ nishi concludes with the following remark:

Because of the advantageous position of the art-aesthetic moment in the West, the three fundamental aesthetic categories, “the beautiful,” “the sublime,” and “the humorous,” are transformed into “the graceful,” “the tragic,” and “the comic” respectively, whereas in the East, because of the advantageous position of the nature- aesthetic moment, they are generated as “aware,” “yu¯gen,” and “sabi” respectively.3

O¯ nishi’s argument is considered to be the pinnacle of comparative aesthetic research in Japan during the prewar period. It has unmistakably secured itself the title of locus classicus in the history of Japanese aesthetics. However, as we look at it from the present-day point of view, it seems impossible to conduct an East-West comparative study using O¯ nishi’s method. One reason may be that O¯ nishi’s comparative study depends mainly on his theory of aesthetic categories, which was already becoming outmoded during the 1930s and 1940s, when O¯ nishi was finalizing his theoretical system, as he himself was painfully aware.4 Scholars lost interest in the theory of aesthetic categories because it was based on a certain apriorism, namely deduction, that made it impossible to adapt to diverse historical realities. To begin with, a systematic theory of 156 Otabe Tanehisa aesthetic categories tends to lack insight into the historicity of individual aesthetic categories. In fact, historical studies of styles were undertaken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to compensate for this flaw and to replace the theory of aesthetic categories. Looking back on how the theory of aesthetic categories was established in Europe, we can see that it is closely related to a certain historical consciousness. For example, the concept of “the sublime” was established during the mid-eighteenth century and was supported by the modern consciousness of infinity, as opposed to the classic beauty, which is premised on finiteness. The same situation can be seen with the establishment of “the humorous” by Jean Paul in the early nineteenth century. In other words, the concepts of the sublime and the humorous, established between the mid-eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, are closely linked to modern art movements that sought liberation from the classical ideal of beauty. We see the prototype of the three concepts—the beautiful, the sublime, and the humorous—in Hegel’s Aesthet- ics, which is also based on his own understanding of the historical development of the arts. In this sense, the subsequent attempt at an a priori systematization of aesthetic categories was only an abstract result of the art movements, validated by historical consciousness. When we think of O¯ nishi’s theory of aesthetic categories from a historical perspective, it becomes obvious that his argument was aimed at justifying Japanese traditions against the modern West. While the sublime and the humorous are products of modern art movements aiming to liberate themselves from the aesthetics of classical antiquity, O¯ nishi’s Japanese aesthetic qualities originated in the Middle Ages. In this sense, the coming into being of aesthetic categories in modern Europe and O¯ nishi’s systematization of Japanese aesthetic categories are rooted in completely opposite historical conscious- nesses. We see that the Japanese aesthetic qualities before modernization are juxtaposed against the modern or Western qualities during the process of Jap- anese modernization or westernization. East-West comparative studies can be regarded as variations of the querelle des anciens et des modernes, that took place in Europe between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Modernization—understood as a transformation from a traditional to a modern society—is a universal, worldwide historical phenomenon. However, since Japanese modernization was achieved by separation from East Asia and the introduction of Western civilization, the relationship between a traditional society and a modern one emerges as a spatial issue, the East-West relationship.5 In this sense, people who praise Japa- nese aesthetic qualities belong to the ancients. It goes without saying that in O¯ nishi’s aesthetic system there is no historical consciousness of East-West differences. The reason stems from his unyield- Representations of “Japaneseness” 157 ing apriorism. His ideological position stands in contrast to that of the Kyoto school of the early 1940s, whose focus was on the philosophy of universal history and on searching for Japan’s historical task in “overcoming the modern” (kindai no cho¯koku). In 1940 O¯ nishi made the following statement:

It is necessary to ground the aesthetic essence of concepts such as “aware,” “yu¯gen,” and “sabi” upon the uniform foundation of aesthetics. To aesthetics, the Japanese character per se is irrelevant. That is because “the Japanese” or “the Western” are merely historical issues. “Japanese aesthetics” carries no logical signiﬁcance.6

O¯ nishi’s position is clearly different from nationalistic arguments that were commonly accepted at that time. At the same time, however, we cannot deny that, because of a lack of interest in the historicity of aesthetics and the arts, O¯ nishi’s East-West comparative study is relatively static.

The Study of Historical Developments Among the major scholars in Japan who promoted the comparative study of East and West between the late 1950s and the 1970s was Imamichi Tomo- nobu (b. 1922). Imamichi criticized Japanese scholars, including O¯ nishi, for lacking “original methods” in comparative studies. His idea of original method refers to the need of “clarifying philosophically the complementary relationship between East and West” through “a selection of mutually common and important concepts,” thus seeking “a universal position among human beings.” In the field of aesthetics, he states that there are two authentic artistic ideas: (1) representation in the sense of imitation and (2) expression as a tool to articulate one’s subjective view. According to Imamichi, classic art theory in the West has focused on representation, while expression is a rather modern concept. Conversely, in the East, expression is the only classic, authentic artistic idea, while the concept of representation was introduced for the first time in the nineteenth century. Such an insight into historical transitions is what was lacking in O¯ nishi’s theories. This insight is also linked to the historical outlook that holds that provincialism in the East or West needs to be rejected. This is where we perceive the originality of Imamichi’s argument.7 There are, however, some doubts about this argument. Regarding the artistic idea brought forward as “a commonly important concept,” can we really argue that it is common to both East and West? In particular, is the artistic concept of “expression” that originated in modern Europe applicable to ancient Eastern art? Is it really possible to call it a classic, authentic artistic idea in the East? Speaking of the different meaning that “expression” has in the East and the West, Imamichi indeed points out that the ego that makes expression possible is le moi-nature in the West. In the East, on the other hand, the same ego 158 Otabe Tanehisa appears as le moi-dièse, which is harmonized with the dynamic rhythm of the universe while being internally brought together with the essence of phenomena.8 However, is it really appropriate to combine the two different phenomena in the same concept, “expression”? To compare the two phenomena, we need to have a tertium comparationis. Because the comparison will be made in line with the tertium, it is natural that it should be linked to a certain simplification. However, to carry out the comparative study effectively, it will be necessary to highlight the points that simplification has previously overlooked. Simplification is merely a precon- dition of method, not a goal. Otherwise, simplification will end up either distorting a theory or following common sense and will consequently be seized by provincialism.

Postmodernism and the Reevaluation of “Japaneseness” Since the 1980s, we have come to recognize a new trend in East-West comparative studies, arising from the theory of “postmodernism” in Western Europe. Postmodernism has become a fad in Japan for the following reasons: East-West comparisons often take the shape of comparisons between the modern Westand premodern Japan. This is because modern Japan has become aware of its own premodern aspects (whether it denies them or not) because of its Westerniza- tion, that is, the “modernization” process. Postmodernism is actually a form of the critique of modernity, which was brought forward by the West itself. Although postmodernism was adopted in Japan as the latest Western thought, it was, on the other hand, accepted as something compatible with premodern Japanese aspects. Several Japanese scholars have been dealing with this latter issue, including, for example, Kurasawa Yukihiro (b. 1934) and Kuniyasu Yo¯ (b. 1938). Kurasawa is a well-known scholar of the Japanese arts, especially the art of the tea ceremony. He emphasizes the positive role of the “Eastern view of the world” in the postmodern era: “The fundamental principle of postmodernism should be directed towards Eastern naturalism, neither modern humanism nor medieval theism.” 9 A musicologist, Kuniyasu Yo¯ declares that “the development of ‘Western European modern music’ has led to the collapse of the ‘modern paradigm.’” He demands the creation of a new paradigm: “a cosmology as a new framework after the collapse of the modern paradigm. Cosmology, however, is not a new idea. For one thing, from ancient to modern times music has been debated in Europe in relationship to cosmology. It is also one of the distinctions of Eastern or Japanese artistic views.” 10 Representations of “Japaneseness” 159

I should explain the ideological background behind these positions. The awareness of modernity in Europe can never be interpreted simply as the establishment of progressivism. Rather, it was from the beginning closely connected to a critique of modern Europe. Schiller and Hölderlin found an ideal for modern Europe in ancient Greece, while Schopenhauer did so with India. Thus, the awareness of modernity was strongly linked to the critique of the modern. Yet this process did not result in the de facto justification of nonmodern Europe because this ideal portrait was nothing but a virtual image made as a negative. What is unique about postmodernism, which has assumed the form of a self-critique of modern Europe, is that, although it has no connection to Eastern or Japanese qualities, it can function to justify the premodern aspects of Japan. Augustin Berque (b. 1941) argues that the modern paradigm, which is currently in crisis, will be replaced by a new paradigm that inevitably includes non–Western European traits. We can already recognize such traits in Japan’s cultural traditions. Berque specifically looks at three Japanese cultural traits: (1) “weak subjectivity,” (2) “the attitude of enjoying the present for itself rather than considering it a means for realizing future objectives,” and (3) “the juxtaposition of foreign elements.” He argues that these traditional cultural traits will help formulate a new or postmodern paradigm. We cannot conclude, however, that Japanese qualities alone will overcome the modern paradigm. Berque merely points out that there are some similarities between traditional Japanese cultural traits and those of the new paradigm we will be searching for. He is not offering a slogan demanding a return “from the modern West- ern European paradigm to the traditional Japanese paradigm.” To avoid possible misunderstandings, Berque himself adds the following clarification:

Often, in studies called Nihonjinron (“discourses of Japanese uniqueness”), scholars compare Japanese cultural traits with Western ones using a contrastive and non- historical method. That will not, however, make it possible to formulate future paradigms on a global scale. Only by thoroughly observing Japanese qualities and themes in postmodernism from a historical point of view, will we be able to ﬁnd a clue to the future.11

As Berque points out, it is rare to find historical consciousness in debates that strongly affirm an affinity between postmodernism and Japanese cultural traits. The important thing is to accept that contemporary Japan is caught in the modern paradigm whether we like it or not. The modern paradigm is already within us, not outside. Should we overlook this point, we cannot expect to see anything but a repetition of the earlier East-West comparative studies debates. 160 Otabe Tanehisa

Background behind the Expression “The East or Japan” When comparing the West to other areas of the world, the first thing we think of is the East. In most of the previously mentioned theories, however, scholars implicitly compare the West to Japan. For instance, O¯ nishi often used the expressions “the East, especially Japan,” and “the East or Japan” without explaining his reason for doing so.12 However, there is definitely an asymmetrical relation in comparing a whole region with a country. What does this mean? Let us look at Sato¯Do¯shin’s (b. 1955) studies on paintings. Sato¯ clarifies that Asian countries, including Japan, Korea, and China, have described their country’s paintings based on comparisons to Western paintings, such as “Nihonga” versus “Yo¯ga,” or “Korean painting” versus “Western painting.” 13 Thus, the previously mentioned comparative asymmetry can be seen in several Asian countries. We must therefore ask ourselves how this came to be. The answer can probably be found in the period in which Asian countries were confronted with European countries and sought to modernize themselves. Be- cause the modern nation-states in Asia were formed at different times and in different climates, contrastive concepts such as Japan and the West, Korea and the West, and China and the West came into being without recourse to the corresponding idea of an Asian unity. The expression “the East or Japan,” however, has a different implication. It does not quite say that Japan “equals” the East, but it implies that Japan “represents” the East. O¯ nishi comments on his own choice of terms in The Eastern Artistic Spirit:

“Eastern” is an extremely inaccurate word. It should probably be changed to “East Asian.” But, because there is no doubt that Eastern culture is represented by East Asian culture when contrasted to the Western culture of Europe and the United States, I decided to use the word “Eastern” for “East Asian.” 14

Although the Eastern aesthetic theories in O¯ nishi’s book include Chinese ones, most are traditional Japanese theories, thus conﬁrming the premise that the East is represented by East Asia, which in turn is represented by Japan. For O¯ nishi himself, of course, it was nothing more than a scholarly premise. From the late 1930s to the early 1940s, when O¯ nishi was formulating his aesthetics, however, this kind of “representation” theory had a special meaning whether he intended it or not. I should now raise the argument advanced by Ko¯saka Masaaki (1900 – 1969). In 1942, criticizing conventional imperialism for having exploited other countries as mere means he argued for a co-prosperity sphere: Representations of “Japaneseness” 161

We need to distinguish a mediacy from a means. A means is a way to use the other as a material thing, while a mediacy is a way to recognize the other as a subject. We should not dominate others. We should represent others around us and only remain in the center.15

As a scholar of Kant, Ko¯saka was surely familiar with Kant’s definition of an organism. In the Critique of Judgment (sec. 65), Kant himself raises the possibility of regarding a state as an organism. We cannot, however, overlook the difference between Ko¯saka’s and Kant’s arguments. Reciprocity (a mutual relationship of individual limbs as a means and objective), which is the distinct quality of Kant’s organism, is completely missing in Ko¯saka’s argument. Ac- cording to Kant’s theory, each limb has to represent the other, while in Ko¯- saka’s only one limb (namely Japan) is purposefully given the right to represent the others. Consequently, despite Ko¯saka’s distinction of mediacy from means, his argument turns out to be a confirmation of Japanese imperialism. We should always be aware of this kind of danger in representation theories. Tanabe Hisao (1883 –1984) and his views on the history of music may be cited as a typical example of this danger. Tanabe is considered one of the founders of Eastern musicology.16 Based on the results of his field research in Korea, Taiwan, Sakhalin, and the South Pacific, Tanabe dedicated himself to a systematization of Eastern musicology. He was, of course, aware that, because Eastern music varies greatly between different countries and areas, he faced enormous difficulties. To overcome them, he imagined a substance called “Eastern music” in the ancient East, premising his argument on the belief that the ancient East corresponded to an international moment in history. Further- more, Tanabe states that “since the remains of most music in Eastern countries from ancient to modern times could only be seen in Japan, Japanese music is the museum of Eastern music.” This evidence would seem to affirm the privileged status of Japan in a repetition of the idea originally expressed by Oka- kura Tenshin (1862–1913) in The Ideals of the East (1903). Tanabe reiterates this idea by stating: “I firmly believe that the history of Eastern music, which should be competing with that of Western music, will not be complete unless accomplished by us Japanese.” 17 We need to be fully aware that expressions such as “the East, especially Ja- pan” and “the East or Japan” create all sorts of possible errors. In 1938 Tsuda So¯kichi (1873 –1961) criticized this “hypostacization of the East,” arguing that “it is merely a vulgar belief that in the East there is one integrated East- ern culture, Eastern spirit, or system of Eastern morals.” 18 Even Tanabe ad- mitted in 1969 that “there is no one configuration called Eastern music, which unifies the ethnic musics of individual countries.” 19 162 Otabe Tanehisa

We also need to ask ourselves whether the comparative study of East and West hypostacizes not only the East but also the West. In fact, through the querelle des anciens et des modernes, people in Europe became aware of the conflict between the North and South in Europe, and modernity was established with Northern qualities as its nucleus.20 The East-West or North-South designation, which makes comparative study possible as a frame of reference, is a sys- tematized network of images that is used when people distinguish themselves from others and is not meant to denote, unconditionally, individual substance. We may conclude that comparative studies almost always aim at justifying Japanese national identity in contrast to Western modernization. It is necessary for us to pay attention simultaneously to the frame of reference and to its historical relativity. Then comparative studies will finally escape merely fix- ing common sense and hypostacizing national qualities, becoming instead a means of opening our eyes to the reality of difference and diversity. JAPAN’S LITERARY HERMENEUTICS

Constructing “Japanese Literature” Global and Ethnic Nationalism

Haruo Shirane

Japanese literature, especially classical Japanese literature, is thought by those both in and outside Japan to be the unique product of a nation called Ja- pan, while the texts of Japanese literature are thought to embody the cultural characteristics of the “people” of Japan. Japanese literature as we know it today, however, has been deeply influenced by non-Japanese cultures, particularly that of China up until the late nineteenth century, and by Europe from the late nineteenth century onward. Furthermore, the two key notions of “nation” (kokka) and “literature” (bungaku) that lie behind today’s notion of kokubungaku, or what is now more frequently referred to as “Japanese literature” (Ni- hon bungaku), are in significant part a product of modern, nineteenth-century European notions of literature and nationhood. Needless to say, Chinese and earlier (ancient, medieval, and early modern) Japanese notions of literature and of the nation were critical in the formation of various aspects of what has come to be called “Japanese literature,” but it is of particular significance that modern European notions of “literature” and “nation” have played a major role in the construction of premodern Japanese literature. Today, when we speak of the Japanese literary classics, we think of Man’yo¯shu¯, Kojiki, The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Heike, Tsurezuregusa, no¯ plays, and the works of Matsuo Basho¯, Ihara Saikaku, and Chikamatsu Monzaemon. This canon, however, is as much a result of reception in the medieval period, when the Japanese canon was first formed, as it is the product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which saw a radical reconfiguration of notions of literature and learning under West- ern influence.1

165 166 Haruo Shirane

Nineteenth-Century European Notions of Literature Before the eighteenth century in Europe, “literature” in the broadest sense meant anything that was related to reading and writing. (The Latin word lit- tera means “letter,” and litteratura originally implied knowledge of reading and writing.) Historically, however, the term “literature” was used more re- strictively to refer to writings with intellectual, moral, aesthetic, or political value.2 Literature referred to the humanities broadly defined and to belles lettres, to writings of high quality, including those in the fields of history, theology, philosophy, and even natural science. From around the middle of the eighteenth century, the notion of literature gradually began to narrow even further to what today is referred to as creative or imaginative literature, with particular stress on the genres of poetry, the tale (prose fiction), and drama as opposed to other forms, such as rhetorical persuasion, didactic argumentation, and historical narration. The emergence of the notion of imaginative literature was closely connected to the rise of aesthetics (a term invented by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735) and the system of the arts, which had hitherto been indistinguish- able from the sciences. In the eighteenth century, a major split emerged between the new humanities, associated with aesthetics, and the new sciences, associated with rationalism. By the nineteenth century, a clear distinction had been made between the producers of literature as art, who became the bearers of “imaginative truth,” and the philosophers and historians, who made a claim to a literal, objective, or “scientific” truth.3 In this new context, literature became the textual equivalent of the plastic arts (sculpture, painting, music, and so on). The emergence of this new notion of literature was accompanied by the slow rise in the prestige of the novel, which had hitherto not been considered literature but which came to enforce the notion of literature as imaginative or creative writing. This modern, nineteenth-century European notion of imaginative literature had a profound impact on the construction of both the institution and the field of modern kokubungaku, including the construction of “classical Japanese literature.” Bungaku, the word now used for literature, first appeared in Confu- cius’s Analects, where it meant “learning,” “studies,” or “scholars,” particularly Confucian scholars. In the early 1870s, Nishi Amane (1829–1897), an early Meiji scholar of Western studies, adapted the word to translate the nineteenth- century European term for “literature” in Hyakugaku Renkan (Encyclopedia, 1870), using it for humanities or belles lettres in general. In the Meiji period, the term bungaku embraced two notions: a concept of humanities or belles lettres that fused earlier Japanese and Chinese notions of literature and learning with the broader European conception of literature as humanities, and a more Constructing “Japanese Literature” 167 narrow notion of creative or imaginative writing that derived in large part from Europe. In the second half of the Meiji period, there was a rapid shift toward the narrow notion, a change that corresponded to the shift in Europe from the early eighteenth-century notion of literature as humanities to that of creative or imaginative literature in the nineteenth century. As Tomi Suzuki has noted, Meiji literary historians sometimes referred to the narrow definition of bungaku as bibungaku (elegant literature) or junbungaku (pure literature), stressing in particular not only imagination (so¯zo¯ryoku) but feeling (kanjo¯) and thought (shiso¯).4 The earlier notion of literature as humanities was reflected in the establishment at the University of Tokyo in 1877 of Bunka Daigaku, or the Di- vision of Humanities, which embraced various disciplines, including the department of Japanese and Chinese classics (Wakan Bungaku-ka), which was established in 1870. The nineteenth-century notion of imaginative literature was reflected in the subsequent separation of Japanese literature (eventually called kokubun) and Japanese history into two disciplines in 1888, and in the institutional breakup of what had once been kangaku (Chinese learning) into the programs of philosophy, history, and literature.5 The new disciplinary configurations, derived in large part from the German model, radically altered the premodern literary canon, leaving out texts in such fields as history, philosophy, religion, and political science, all of which had been an integral part of literary learning in the premodern and early modern periods. Throughout the premodern period in Japan, Buddhist studies (butsugaku), Chinese studies (kangaku)—including Confucian studies, Chinese poetry, and history—and Japanese studies (wagaku, centered on waka and monogatari) represented the broader boundaries of literature, of writing valued enough to be the object of study and to be incorporated into the school curriculum. The Genji Ippon Kyo¯ (Genji One Volume Sutra, 1176), a Buddhist text written by priest Cho¯ken in the late twelfth century, reveals that the genre hierarchy as it existed in the late Heian and early medieval periods was, roughly speaking, from top to bottom: (1) Buddhist scriptures; (2) Confucian texts; (3) histories such as the Records of the Historian (Shih-chi, Shiki); (4) Chinese belles lettres (bun) such as Anthology of Literature (Wen-hsüan, Monzen), a collection of Chi- nese poetry and literary prose; (5) Japanese classical poetry (waka); and (6) vernacular tales (monogatari) and so¯shi—nikki (diaries) and related writings in kana. The genre hierarchy follows the Chinese model, with ethical /philosophical texts, histories, and poetry held in highest regard, while fiction is relegated to the bottom. The most highly regarded canon, at least from the Buddhist priest’s point of view, was the Buddhist, followed by the Confucian canon. Next came the two highest Chinese literary genres, history and poetry. The top four categories, the most prestigious genres, were of foreign origin, identified primarily with China (Kara). In the course of the medieval period, 168 Haruo Shirane the status of kana writing, particularly as related to waka, rose, and by the eighteenth century, the scholars of kokugaku, attacking what they perceived to be foreign influences and creating an alternative sphere of learning from kangaku and butsugaku, attempted to invert the genre hierarchy found in texts such as the Genji Ippon Kyo¯. At the han (domain) schools in the Edo period, however, kangaku remained at the center of the curriculum. The inversion finally occurred and texts in kana came to represent the core of the literary canon during the mid-Meiji period with the rise of modern nationalism, the emphasis on a “national literature” and a “national language” (kokugo) based on kana, the defeat of China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), and the influence of the new notion of imaginative literature. The nineteenth-century European unitary notion of literature, with various genres belonging to one larger species, and the European stress on drama, poetry, and the novel, genres considered the epitome of imaginative literature, also had a profound effect on the conception of Japanese literature, which had held poetry in high esteem but not drama and prose fiction. In the Meiji period, the notion of the sho¯setsu (novel), considered the most advanced genre in the Enlightenment /Spencerian (Herbert Spencer, 1820 –1903) scheme as was employed to bring together a wide range of texts—such as monogatari, setsuwa (folk literature), otogizo¯shi (anonymous short tales), ukiyozo¯shi (books of the floating world), and kibyo¯shi (illustrated books)—that had hitherto been treated as separate phenomenon and had not been considered, with the exception of the Heian monogatari, to be serious writing.6 Under the influence of the Western notion of dramatic literature, particularly Greek tragedy, Shake- speare’s plays, and European opera, various forms of drama such as no¯, kyo¯gen, and jo¯ruri (puppet theater) became an integral part of national literature and were raised from mere “performance” (geino¯) to the level of “art” (geijutsu). Chikamatsu’s jo¯ruri plays, which had hitherto focused on jidaimono (historical drama), were transformed into a canon that centered on sewamono (domestic drama), which Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯ considered to be more “advanced,” “realistic,” and truthful in their depiction of human emotions and society, and thus worthy of the new notion of “literature.” With the demise of the Tokugawa military government, no¯, which had become a form of classical theater in the Edo period, almost disappeared, but it was revived, with its name changed from sarugaku (monkey music) and no¯ to the more dignified no¯gaku (no¯ opera), a shift that reflected the nationalist need to match Europe’s operatic tradition.7 This notion of literature—defined in the narrow, nineteenth-century Eu- ropean sense as creative and imaginative literature, excluding history, philosophy, religion, and political science—still remains powerful today. The word koten, used as a translation of the Western term “classic,” has come to imply “classical literature” (koten bungaku), with literature conceived largely as imag- Constructing “Japanese Literature” 169 inative literature. For example, Konjaku Monogatari (Tales of Times Long Past, 1120), long thought to be a kind of historical record, has been labeled “folk literature” (setsuwa bungaku), with the term “bungaku” giving it privileged status. In the Meiji period, The Tale of the Heike (1218, 1309), which existed as a form of history for most of the premodern period, was elevated to the status of literature and became associated with the epic, particularly in the postwar period. This valorization of imaginative literature and its aesthetic dimension has created the false impression in the West that Japan produces poets and novelists but not philosophers and historians. In addition, the reconfiguration of disciplines and the almost complete elimination of Chinese studies, which had concentrated on philosophy, political science, and history, has brought about a shift away from histories and texts that (in the Confucian manner) dealt with public matters toward an intense focus on the domestic and private, on the “lyrical,” and on the nineteenth-century European genre triad of prose fiction, drama, and poetry. This phenomenon is perhaps best reflected in the emphasis on the postwar canonization of the Genroku figures Ihara Saikaku, Chika- matsu Monzaemon, and Matsuo Basho¯—who worked in popular (zoku) genres (ukiyo-zo¯shi, jo¯ruri, and haikai) as opposed to the high (ga) genres, such as kan- shi and waka. The leading literary figures in the Genroku period were all kan- shi and waka poets and scholars of wagaku and kangaku, such as Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725), genres that represented the most prestigious fields of learning.

Cultural Nationalism and National Literature The emergence of the notion of literature as imaginative literature occurred in Europe at the same time as the rise of nationalism, which inextricably linked this literature to the idea of national literature. The notion of national literature began emerging as early as the Renaissance, with the use of Romance languages, but it did not come to the fore until the rise of cultural nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In England, for example, the study of literature generally meant the study of the Greek and Latin classics, and En- glish literature was not accepted into the curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge until World War I, an event that aroused nationalistic sentiments in relation to other rival European nations. Before this point, the study of English literature was regarded as a poor man’s classic, for those without the means or ability to study Greek and Latin, much as Japanese texts, such as waka and monogatari, constituted the curriculum for women who did not have the opportunity to study kangaku. One of the salient characteristics of modern societies has been the frag- menting of the subject, the disintegration of local, regional, or religious communities as the primary source of social identity. As Benedict Anderson has 170 Haruo Shirane argued, the national identities created by modern nation states are “imagined communities,” in which identification has been transferred from regional or local communities or religious groups to a centralized, larger unit of a nation. With the emergence of global nationalism in the modern period, the individual has increasingly come to identify him- or herself as “Japanese” (as opposed to “Chinese” or “Korean” or “French”) rather than as a cho¯nin of a particular city or a samurai of a particular rank in a particular han (domain). Under these circumstances, the literary canon came to function as a vehicle for creating a larger sense of cultural homogeneity, a center of authority uniting disparate groups. In Japan, the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki were both created out of the need of the early Nara state to authenticate the Yamato (imperial) clan’s worldview and its hegemony over other clans; and in the modern period, these same texts were reinterpreted as a means of establishing the Japanese people as a distinct race and as citizens of the modern nation-state. In a similar vein, in the mid- Meiji period the Man’yo¯shu¯ was canonized, at least in part, as a “national poetry anthology” (kokumin kashu¯) written by everyone from the emperor to the lowest commoner. In this view, the Man’yo¯shu¯, which was actually edited and composed by Nara-period aristocrats, reflected the unity of the new nation, particularly the emperor system, in which the emperor and the commoners were perceived as belonging to the same body.8 As Eric Hobsbawm and scholars of nationalism have shown, seemingly nonpolitical spheres such as aesthetics, language, literature, and ethics have been critical—if not even more powerful than political institutions—in the process of building the modern nation, which had to unify its members by constructing a common cultural identity.9 One consequence was that cultural phenomena that had been specific to a particular region or social community, or a particular historical period often became identified with the nation—in this case Japan, with all Japanese people, across time. Works of art from various historical periods were now declared to be “national treasures” (kokuho¯) and arranged in museums as the embodiment of “Japanese culture.” Ukiyoe, which had been regarded as disposable decorations, were suddenly treasured as works representative of “Japanese art.” Genres such as monogatari, setsuwa (folk stories), otogizo¯shi, and kanazo¯shi (kana books), which had hitherto been considered unrelated or had been specific to only certain communities or historical periods, all became part of “national literature,” a common cultural heritage, sharing common national characteristics. One of the most salient characteristics of nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century was the belief that the nation was founded on and unified by a common language.10 In the Meiji period, Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1939), the leading constructor of the notion of kokugo and one of the pioneers of modern kokugogaku (national language study), argued in 1894 that “loyalty to the sov- Constructing “Japanese Literature” 171 ereign and love of the nation” (chu¯kun aikoku) and a common language were the forces that united Japan as a nation, that the “national essence/body” (kokutai) was embodied in the Japanese language.11 This notion of a national language, strengthened by importation of Western phonocentric notions and the genbun- itchi (union of spoken and written languages) movement, was contrasted with kanbun, awritten language associated with China, a country that was in decline and that would succumb to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War. The result was a dramatic pedagogical shift away from the Confucian classics and the devalua- tion of Japanese writing in kanbun, which had been the language of religion, government, and scholarship. The idea of Japan as a nation was significantly different from the Japan that existed in relationship to China in the premodern period. In contrast to the eighteenth-century kokugaku movement, which was a protonational, domestic phenomenon centered on the notion of Yamato versus a largely imaginary Kara, canon formation in the Meiji period was part of global nationalism in which Japan as a nation competed directly with other rival nation-states. The construction of a national culture and tradition was critical to the formation of a strong nation-state, particularly in the face of powerful Western nations, which represented a model for modernization but not one for establishing a national identity. Even as they modernized, new nations had to distinguish themselves from other nations by carefully delineating their own national characteristics, which were perceived to be unique and to have existed over time, especially before Western or foreign influence. One result, which was different from the kind of nationalism found in European nations, was the emergence in Japan of two forms of nationalism, Japanese nationalism and a broader Asian or East Asian nationalism. This may be one reason that kanbun (Chinese writing), while diminished by the rise of modern Japanese nationalism, was not completely abandoned as part of national literature or culture. Both the Chinese writing system and the field of Chinese studies remained an integral part of the school curriculum and continued to have a profound impact, particularly as a means of ethical and moral education, which was critical to modern nation building. In contrast to eighteenth-century kokugaku (nativist learning) scholars, who looked back to the ancient period to find a pure form of Japanese literature and language untarnished by foreign (Confucian and Buddhist) influence, Meiji scholars, following the European, evolutionary, Enlightenment model of history, stressed progress across time, giving value to medieval and Tokugawa texts, especially the “mixed Chinese-Japanese style” (wakan konko¯bun), which they saw as having more “strength” than the more “feminine” style of Heian kana literature. For the first time, both the aristocratic, court-centered literature of the earlier periods and the popular literature of the medieval and Toku- 172 Haruo Shirane gawa periods were treated together as one literature as, in the words of Haga Yaichi, the “treasure of the nation” (kokumin no takara). In Europe and America, the modern discipline of literature has generally been based on the assumption that texts are not equal in value, that only certain texts have the privilege of being called “literature,” just as certain material objects are given the privilege of being called “art.” Another fundamental assumption has been that all such texts exist within a genealogical time frame of a particular people, within a national history.12 The first assumption lies behind the construction of the national canon and school curricula, while the second assumption links the text to particular visions of collective history, privileging texts that are able to communicate certain fundamental truths about the national culture. It is thus no coincidence that the phenomenon of literary histories came to the fore at the same time as the rise of national literatures. Japanese literary histories, which were written for the first time in the Meiji period (in the late 1880s by Haga Yaichi, Tachibana Senzaburo¯, Mikami Sanji, Takatsu Kuwasaburo¯, and others), and which came under the influence of Hippolyte Taine and other European literary historians, stressed national character and spirit like their European counterparts. A similar tactic, which represents a form of protonationalism, had been taken by eighteenth-century kokugaku (nativist learning) scholars such as Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga, who valorized such ancient texts as the Man’yo¯shu¯ and the Kojiki, which they saw as embodying national character (sincerity, direct expression, naturalness, and so on) and which they believed to preexist the influence of Chinese or foreign culture. In this context, texts such as the Kaifu¯so¯ (751), a collection of poetry by Japanese writers in the Six Dynasties poetic style, were doubly devalued because they were written in “non-Japanese” and because they were seen as “imitative” of a foreign culture.

Modern Canon Formation As the view of “literature” and the notion of national identity changed with time and circumstance, so too did the canon and the selection of privileged texts. For example, the Meiji and pre–World War II middle school kokugo curriculum placed an extremely heavy emphasis on warrior texts, which were thought to embody the virtues and moral ideals of devotion, loyalty, and self- sacrifice. After the war, however, over half the wartime curriculum, including almost all gunki monogatari (military chronicles), histories related to Shinto, and numerous Edo-period gabun essays on valorous soldiers and great men, were erased. Postwar textbooks, which reacted negatively to the prewar mili- taristic and ultranationalist use of Japanese texts, constructed a largely “peaceful” and “democratic” Japanese canon, which was largely populist in orienta- Constructing “Japanese Literature” 173 tion and which significantly diminished the role of the warrior culture that had been incorporated into the canon by Meiji textbooks.13 Those writers who had no association with military or imperial history— such as Basho¯ and Kenko¯—maintained their high status from before the war, while the curriculum as a whole shifted from samurai culture to commoner culture, particularly toward popular literature, with a noticeable growth of interest in humor, nonruling classes, and such genres as setsuwa (folk literature), kyo¯gen (comic drama), fiction, haikai, and jo¯ruri. Jinno¯Sho¯to¯ki (Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns), which Kitabatake Chikafusa originally wrote to legitimize Emperor Go-Daigo’s imperial restoration and which was a major text in Meiji and prewar textbooks, was decanonized after the war because of its earlier association with tenno¯ (emperor) ideology. An even more dramatic fate awaited Taiheiki (Record of Great Peace), which was perhaps the single most important text in the entire prewar period, comparable in stature to Tsurezure- gusa and The Tale of the Heike. Many of the Taiheiki selections in prewar textbooks focus on figures such as Kusunoki Masashige or Kusunoki’s son Masat- sura, who exemplify the virtue of loyalty in terms of either filial piety or service to the emperor. However, with the discrediting of the tenno¯ system in the postwar period, Taiheiki suddenly became a minor text and has virtually disappeared from high school textbooks. The Soga Monogatari, a tale of loyalty and revenge in which two brothers pay back the enemy of their father, was popular in prewar textbooks, particularly as a positive example of bravery in war, but after World War II, it too was erased from the canon. The only military chronicle (gunki mono) to survive in the postwar era is the Tale of the Heike (1243), which was recanonized as an epic and as a tragedy, centered on the theme of impermanence (mujo¯).

Ethnic Nationalism and the Notion of the Folk Another salient characteristic of European cultural nationalism, particularly in Germany during the period of nineteenth-century Romanticism, was ethnic nationalism (the sense of a nation bound by blood and kinship ties) based on the idea of an original, pure, often provincial people, or “folk.” In a romantic vein, these commoners were often seen as engaged in a culture that was orally based and that was untainted by the written word. A similar phenomenon occurred belatedly in Japan in the late Meiji and early Taisho¯ periods with the emergence of the notion of minzoku, or folk, and the belief that the spirit of the people could be found in the populace, in commoner culture, often pre- dating writing. In contrast to the earlier mid-Meiji national literature movement, which saw the emperor and the people as one body, this national literature movement, centered in literary journals such as Teikoku Bungaku (Imperial 174 Haruo Shirane

Literature, 1895 –1917) and influenced by German Romantics and folklorists such as Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) and the Brothers Grimm ( Jacob, 1785 – 1863; Wilhelm, 1786 –1859), saw the literature of the nation rising up from below, from the folk. There was an increasing surge of interest in folk literature, folk songs, legends, and myths, all of which were thought to embody the essence of the Japanese people from ancient times. Through much of the Heian period, the Man’yo¯shu¯ was known for two court poets, Hitomaro and Akahito, but in the late Meiji and early Taisho¯ periods, the Man’yo¯shu¯ was recanonized, as Shinada Yoshikazu has revealed, with attention turned for the first time to the Azuma-uta (Songs of the East) and Sakimori-no-uta (Frontier- Guard Songs), which were regarded as min’yo¯, or folk songs, the songs of anonymous commoners.14 The minzokugaku (folk studies) movement, which emerged at the end of the Meiji period, came to the fore in the 1930s, and experienced a revival in the 1960s and 1970s, expanded this movement further. Founded by Yanagita Ku- nio (1875 –1962), minzokugaku initially attempted to valorize the noncanoni- cal, which was thought to be free of the established academic and state institutions of kokubungaku, by seeking culture in “literature before literature,” in oral transmission and in marginalized groups (such as mountain people, women, and children), which Yanagita Kunio believed were the unconscious bedrock of the Japanese tradition. One effect of the earlier folk-oriented movements and the growth of minzokugaku, which was incorporated into kokubungaku by Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953) and others, was to assimilate setsuwa and folk literature into the literary canon—a tendency accelerated by the postwar emphasis on popular literature. The modern construction of “Japanese literature” was complex, reflecting earlier Japanese and Chinese notions of literature as well as modern European literary conceptions. The new canon of national literature combined both the aristocratic, emperor-centered literature (such as Genji Monogatari)—which had been at the heart of medieval wagaku and Edo-period kokugaku—and popular literature, particularly that of the medieval and Edo periods, which was first canonized by Meiji kokubungaku scholars and minzokugaku scholars and then further expanded in the postwar period. A significant part of the modern literary canon was formed through the notion of the nation (kokumin) and the central, higher authority of the emperor, under which the nation was politically unified, but another aspect of the canon was driven, at least in significant part, by popular nationalism, which centered on the notion of minzoku (ethnic nation) and which shared much with the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century romantic, Herderesque notion of the folk, the common people, who were thought to embody the primordial spirit of the nation.15 From as early as the turn of the century, these two strands of nationalism, Constructing “Japanese Literature” 175 while often politically opposed, intertwined and reinforced each other. For example, with the establishment of an emperor-based nation-state, the myths and legends of the Kojiki, which had originally been created to legitimize the world order of the Nara state and which had hitherto been known only to a small group of the intellectual elite, were incorporated into textbooks as part of Japanese history, which was rewritten to stress the “age of the gods” (kami no yo) and Amaterasu, the sun goddess, as the progenitor of an unbroken imperial line. After World War II, however, when emperor-centered nationalism was discredited, the Kojiki was stripped of its sacred status as part of imperial history. Instead, it became the origin of a more broadly construed “folk literature,” the grounds for which had been laid earlier by minzokugaku scholars who had connected the gods, myths, and legends of the Kojiki to a “living,” oral, locally based tradition in the provinces and villages of Japan. As we can see here, our present valuations of Japanese literature, of both “literature” and the “Japanese” aspects of it, are grounded in a larger modern framework that is not unique to Japan but that has appeared in similar variations in the construction of national cultures both in Europe and elsewhere. Ironically, what is now thought to be quintessentially “Japanese” and to represent the essence of Japanese literature is in fact deeply influenced by nineteenth- century European notions of genre, literature, and nationhood. By becoming more conscious of the ideological nature of “Japanese literature,” particularly its modern assumptions concerning “literature” and the “nation,” and by establishing a broader global and historical perspective, we can move beyond the modern disciplinary and institutional boundaries of “literature” that were in large part inherited from European institutions. We can then reconsider Japa- nese literature in the broader sense, as writings of relative value in fields as diverse as history, religion, and political science, and gain a sharper and more complex perspective on the historical function of those texts both privileged by and devalued by the various conceptions of “Japanese literature.” 16

What Is Bungaku? The Reformulation of the Concept of “Literature” in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

Suzuki Sadami

This essay seeks, first, to clarify what is meant by the term bungaku, or literature, in the context of modern Japanese letters. In particular, it seeks to examine the shift in the meaning of this key term from an earlier, broader and more general definition to one that is more narrowly focused on literature as a form of high, or fine, creative, linguistic act. The process of redefining the meaning of bungaku began through the efforts of a few scholars of Western civilization, novelists and literary critics beginning in the mid-1880s. During the 1890s and early 1900s, conceptual conflicts over the older and newer definitions of the term continued, but by 1910 the new meaning had been firmly established. Second, I will discuss three elements that combined to make this reconfiguration possible: (1) changes in the Japanese academic system that led to the reorganization of the Division of Humanities (Bunka Daigaku) at Tokyo Impe- rial University in 1904; (2) changes in the way that the bundan, or “literary world,” came to be constituted in the 1900s; and (3) changes in artistic tastes, or the aesthetic revolution that swept literary journalism in the form of the naturalist movement in literature around 1907. Finally, by examining this reconfiguration process and its historical meaning, I hope to elucidate the ready-made ways in which we have thought about modern Japanese literature in the past and thereby bring about a fundamental change in the way we will talk about literature in the future. The aesthetic revolution is often said to have been incomplete in changing the purpose of art from the pursuit of beauty to the pursuit of truth in human life because it clung to romantic trends and because it was a distorted and warped version of the European naturalism that emerged out of Japan’s delayed modernization.

176 What Is Bungaku? 177

As a matter of fact, Japanese naturalism did cling to a so-called romantic perspective, namely, the core idea of unity of self and “natural life” or source of “life” in the cosmos. In other words, it was a sort of vitalism formed in the vortex of ideas from modern biology and traditional Eastern philosophies. More- over, new philosophies from twentieth-century Europe—Bergsonism, for example—acted as the driving force in its formation. Furthermore, because Bergsonism willed to overcome the modern through mechanism and teleology, we find in it the birth of the will to overcome modernity that brought on the crises of modern Japanese life, such as, for example, competition between nation-states, the Russo-Japanese War, and the rapid development of heavy and chemical industrialization and urbanization, accompanied by a huge consumption of human labor in early twentieth-century Japan. This led to the flowering of arts in the Taisho¯era and afterward to the production of many interesting innovations that sought to advance the modern artistic style. Finally, it came to support the imperial war of Japan. Now we stand at a time when it is necessary to rethink and rewrite the art and cultural history of twentieth-century Japan. Although by 1887 many Japanese scholars of European civilization had embraced the modern concept of literature as a creative “linguistic art” and a group of Japanese novelists and critics sought to catch up with the modern realistic style of the European novel, it was not until the second decade of the twentieth century that bungaku came to be equated in Japan with the concept of artistic production. The reason for this delay or gap is quite clear: There were two competing definitions of literature in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, and the broader and more inclusive definition of literature as incorporating not only creativity but also the “humanities” continued to be dominant. Therefore, literature as linguistic art was specifically identified as “bi-bungaku” (belles lettres) or “jun-bungaku” (pure literature) from the 1890s to around 1910. For example, the novelist Natsume So¯seki (1867–1916) used the word “jun-bungaku” in his novel Gubijinso¯ of 1908 to refer to the subject matter of English and/or German literature then being taught at the Division of Humanities at Tokyo Imperial University. It was early in the Meiji era that the word “bungaku” was first used to translate the English word “literature.” At the time it was seen as an inclusive term that encompassed all books and writings considered of high cultural value, especially belles lettres, works on the humanities, and polite literature. Tradi- tionally in Japan, bungaku had been seen as inclusive because it embraced all of Confucian studies and poetry/prose in the Chinese style (kanshibun). This use of the word continued until 1910. As is well known, the Tokugawa era witnessed the creation and proliferation of many small genres of secular and popular works. Yet, at the same time that the period generated many concep- 178 Suzuki Sadami tual innovations related to poetry, fiction, and drama, it did not produce a single overarching category equivalent to the modern meaning of literature in English. The sole exception to this rule was the concept of yu¯gei, or artistic accomplishments, which included writing poetry in the Chinese style, ink painting (suibokuga), poems in Japanese (waka), calligraphy (shodo¯), the tea ceremony (cha no yu¯), playing the shamisen, and so on. A broadly inclusive term for the fine arts, yu¯gei existed in contrast to bugei, accomplishments in the martial arts. As the new concept of bungaku emerged in Meiji, so did the concept of Ni- hon bungaku, or the “literature of Japan.” In Europe the concept of literature in English—and other European literatures—as a manifestation of original artistic expression had been closely tied not only to the rise of romanticism but also to the concept of national literature as a manifestation of the modern nation- state. The notion of national literature became fashionable in Japan too, and a number of “Japanese literary histories” appeared in the 1890s. Although according to the literary histories of almost all the European states, each of the national literatures was born in the Middle Ages, Japanese literary histories boasted of a longer time span that stretched from ancient times to the present. These histories began to appear in the wake of the Japanese Imperial Consti- tution of 1889 and the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890. It comes as no surprise to find that all these literary histories begin with accounts of ancient myths from the Kojiki, ancient geography from gazetteers (Fudoki), and ancient myths and histories from the Nihon Shoki, even though these works were written in ( Japanized) Chinese and would not be considered “literature” in the modern sense of the term. Between approximately 1887 and 1910, a number of controversies and literary debates ensued over which concept—the older, broader sense of “literature” or its new, modern usage—would prevail. In the 1890s the concept of literature in its inclusive sense was promoted by the so-called Japanese enlightenment thinkers. We should note that the influence of Christian thinking is a special hallmark of Japanese enlightenment thinking and that Meiji enlightenment thinkers—for example, those who belonged to the Min’yu¯sha group led by Tokutomi Soho¯ (1863 –1957)—were invariably sympathetic to Chris- tian ideas. Through their critical essays on politics and history and the writing of political novels, they sought to expand and raise the level of discourse to enlighten the public. At the same time, they attacked the stream of love stories produced by writers such as Yamada Bimyo¯ (1868 –1910), Ozaki Ko¯yo¯ (1867–1903), and Ko¯da Rohan (1869–1947), who followed the realistic approach dictated by Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯ (1859–1935) concerning issues of passion and manners. Meanwhile, other writers, such as Uchida Roan (1868 – 1928) and Kitamura To¯koku (1868 –1894), were interested in religion for the What Is Bungaku? 179 way in which it addressed the inspirational and romantic notion of the creative act of writing as a linguistic art. The emergence of many social problems in the interim years between the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 had the effect of decidedly tilting the debate over the broader and/or narrower uses of literature toward the latter. Writers began to actively address social problems by writing of the lives of the lower class or describing “instinctual” desires. This trend is often referred to as “prenaturalism.” What factors led to the establishment of the modern concept of literature as linguistic art at the beginning of the twentieth century? Let us take a look at three causes: (1) the reorganization of the Faculty of Literature at Tokyo University (1877–1886), the Division of Humanities at the Imperial Univer- sity (1886 –1897) and Tokyo Imperial University (1897–1945); (2) the formation or evolution of a “literary establishment,” the “bundan,” in the 1900s; and (3) the emergence of an aesthetic revolution around 1907, spearheaded by the so-called naturalist writers. The naturalist movement swept through the world of Japanese literary journalism, and it possessed a character that was defined by conditions of thought that were unique to the period at the start of twentieth-century Japan. In 1904 the Division of Humanities, or Bunka Daigaku, underwent extensive structural reorganization. All subjects were organized under three rubrics: philosophy, history, and literature. In the case of literature, the term was understood to refer to the study of linguistics and the study of the literature of each nation-state. Literature was clearly understood to refer to “polite literature,” which is one of the meanings of literature in its modern sense. It was not yet clear, however, whether polite letters would refer solely to outstand- ing works of linguistic production or would still include writing evaluated and appreciated for more general reasons. From 1893 to 1904, the Division of Humanities embraced only one subject, namely kangaku, or Chinese studies, and it had not yet been divided into the three categories. However, another name for Chinese studies, kan bungaku, or Chinese literature, had emerged at the beginning of the Meiji era to set Chinese literature apart from wa bungaku or Nihon bungaku, both meaning “Japanese literature,” as distinct from another national literature, English. The term remained in use until the end of World War II. Its meaning was clearly broad and inclusive, and the meaning of the literature in the Division of Humanities reflected this broad notion of literature until changes took place in 1904. From its inception in 1870, Tokyo University was made of four faculties, one of which was the Faculty of Literature (Bungaku-bu). The faculty of literature was organized after the model of the faculties of philosophy at German universities, and literature was used in three different senses of the term. First, 180 Suzuki Sadami there was literature as a subject name—for example, “English literature”— and it was closest to the narrow, modern usage of the term. Second, it was the name of the faculty of literature or letters. Third, it meant literature as the “wakan bungakka” or Japanese and Chinese literature department. The second and third instances employ literature in its broader sense. The maintenance and persistence of this older usage explains in part why the modern concept of literature did not take root more quickly. Although the reorganization of Tokyo University into Tokyo Imperial Uni- versity in 1893 is a complex story, it is easy to see that the wabungakka (department of Japanese literature) was dissolved into two parts: national history in the form of kokushi gakka and a national literature in the modern sense in the form of the kokubun gakka. What this means is that the dissolution of literature in its older, broader sense began to take place when “polite literature” in English and other European literatures was set up independently. When the College of Literature was reorganized in 1904, kangaku was dissolved into three separate parts: Chinese philosophy, Chinese history, and the study of Chinese literature as the product of a nation-state. Hence, the broad, traditional sense with which “literature” had been used in the past ceased to exist in the university, although it was retained as kanbun, an important subject in high schools, especially for elite, until the end of World War II. We can easily see a marked shift in the meaning of the word “bundan” after 1910. Earlier, when “literature” still retained its broader meaning, the bundan almost always referred to the press. Most writers belonged to one or more “literary circles,” and they commonly wrote articles for newspapers. However, starting around 1900, the word bundan gradually came to be synonymous with literary circles formed by writers and critics interested in literature as a linguistic art. This phenomenon goes hand in hand with the emerging status of the more narrowly defined concept of literature. As a matter of fact, many famous writers of “literature” were invited to meet government ministers in 1907 and 1909, and a committee on literature and art was organized by the Ministry of Education in 1911. A literary “establishment” was clearly in the making. This movement, however, did not produce a heightened status for the literati. The government became increasingly concerned about the role of morality in art, devoting more and more attention after the 1900s to polic- ing what it referred to as the “art problem” (bungei mondai), with “bungei” referring to both the linguistic and the figurative arts. Tension between the government and the bundan mounted as, on the one hand, prenaturalist and naturalist writers pursued the theme of sexual desire as a fundamental human instinct and, on the other hand, intellectuals grew weary of the social costs of the Russo-Japanese War and turned to decadent themes and the composition of erotic scenes. What Is Bungaku? 181

By the beginning of the 1900s, nearly all the critics and writers who identified with the naturalist movement had begun to use the word bungei in the narrower sense of the meaning of literature. Moreover, because they insisted that their linguistic art captured the truth of the human condition and the inner life, they pushed aside any older competing definitions of artistic accomplishment—even in the narrow sense of the term bungei—as mere amusement. For a few years around 1907, naturalism held sway over the world of journalism and stood at the center of the literary world. The narrow definition of literature appeared to have supplanted all other meanings because an aesthetic revolution had taken place. Thus, the years just before and after 1907 can be seen as the pivotal period for a reformulation of the concept of literature. I will now examine the historical meaning of the conceptual reformulation. The conceptual reorganization of literature in Japan led to new ideas that were consonant with the modern conception of literature in Europe. Defined in its narrowest sense, literature tends to be viewed as a closed system that exists independently from the intellectual and cultural currents of the times in which it appears. Just before and after 1907, Japanese literature also came to be evaluated according to this new standard of pure creativity that emanated from trends in modern European literature. At the same time, however, the Meiji era also witnessed the production of Japanese literary histories that, in imitation of modern European histories, saw literature as formed from currents that reflected an evolving story of literary or artistic thought. Iwaki Juntaro¯’s Meiji Bungaku Shi (Literary History of the Meiji Era, 1906) was the first of these comprehensive histories. The modern Japanese literary histories of today follow a similar pattern. However, we find two major problems associated with this kind of history. First is a disregard for the intellectual and cultural foundations on which literary works are produced, as Saeki Sho¯ichi (b. 1922) has pointed out. Second is a teleological viewpoint inherent in the notion of an evolving or developing history. These two major questions, along with the still larger issue of the historical meaning of the conceptual reformulation of Japanese literature around 1907, requires us to ask what yardstick or standard was used to define modernity and to date its birth in Japan. Was it the coming of the industrial revolution to Japan, the building of a modern nation-state, or the arrival of Enlight- enment or positivist thinking? Or was it the notion of objective observation in the natural sciences or the ideas and art of romanticism? Or was it the result of realistic art based on modern civilization? The task before us is to clarify which standard of modernity we must adopt in analyzing literary works and ideas. Of course, many literary works and ideas from modern Europe—especially the movement toward redefining literature in its narrowest sense—influenced 182 Suzuki Sadami

Japanese literature in the Meiji era. Yet modern Japanese thought and culture were not constructed solely from elements imported from European civilization. It would be a mistake to evaluate the literature of the Meiji period only in terms of trends in modern European literature. To do so is to ignore major cultural differences between Japan and Europe in religion, social structure, and traditional thought. Accordingly, we need to consider the Japanese circumstances that apply to the reception of each and every cultural element derived from modern Europe. In examining which factors acted as cultural “receptors” for the introduction of cultural elements from Europe, it is necessary to analyze how those receptors served to give birth to a different concept of literature. Take, for example, the logic of skepticism—a school of thought freed from Christianity—as one standard that can be used to identify modern thinking in Europe. This cannot be applied as a standard of modernity in the case of East Asian culture, especially Japanese culture. Since we do not find in Japan a history of domination by one religion or the concept of absolute faith in God, many kinds of agnostic skepticism developed out of the religious relativism characteristically found in Japan. Even the Buddhist priest Yoshida Kenko¯ (1283?–1350?), writing his famous miscellany Tsurezuregusa in the fourteenth century, states that it is impossible to know by whom the gods were created. For Japanese intellectuals, it was easier to accept skeptical thought than the credo of an absolute God. It is not to say that there is no absolutist strain in Japanese thought. The idea of regarding Japanese deities as absolute is to be found in the writings of Motoori Norinaga (1730 –1801), the most famous scholar of ancient Japanese thought and culture in the Tokugawa period. In his early work, Isonokami no Sasamegoto, Motoori asserts that the Japanese deities exist above and beyond the powers of our reason or intellectual comprehension and that they are different from the Buddha and Confucius. Thus, we also see that even the view of the deities of Japan as absolute is predicated on a kind of agnosticism. More- over, this fundamental agnosticism is a reflection of the powerful wave of intellectual and cultural secularization that swept Japan, affecting even Shintoists and Buddhists. If we use secularism as our standard for identifying the modernization of ideas, we can easily find it in the popular writings of the Toku- gawa era. How should we, then, consider the role played by natural science? Neo- Confucianism, which the Tokugawa shogunate adopted as the moral pillar of its samurai government, rests on a dualist philosophy composed of the spirit of the cosmos (ki) and the laws of nature (ri). We can surmise that the concept of “ri” in neo-Confucianism acted as a receptor when Japanese Confucianists What Is Bungaku? 183 in the Tokugawa era embraced the notion of natural science through the mediation of Dutch studies. The spirit of Confucianism, which respects facts and discriminates against fiction, can also be said to have laid the groundwork for the introduction of realism that developed in the philosophies and artistic methods of nineteenth- century Europe. According to Confucian thought, poetry written in the Chi- nese style must follow the rule that even an imagined scene has to be grounded in the experience of the poet. In the case of the Japanese acceptance of realism as an artistic method, it appears that realism is often linked to traditional notions. Let us look, for example, at the theories thought to be central in determining the course of realism in modern Japan by examining Tsubouchi Sho¯- yo¯’s famous essay Sho¯setsu Shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885). On the one hand, we find it espousing the artistic realism that derives from realistic aesthetics and the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer (1820 –1903). On the other hand, it is also rooted in the authority of Motoori Norinaga’s theory of waka poetry, which, by being different from the sharply moral orientation of Chi- nese verse, emphasized the expression of real human emotion since the time of the gods. In fact, Motoori’s theory is not as nativist as it appears to be. Instead, it derives from an interpretation of a discourse in Confucius’ Analects (Rongo, fifth century b.c.) advanced by Japanese Confucianists such as Kumazawa Banzan (1616 –1691), Ito¯ Jinsai (1627–1705), and Ogyu¯ Sorai (1669–1728), who stood in opposition to the neo-Confucianism of the shogunate and who interpreted the passage as meaning that poetry should be an expression of genuine human emotion. Even the revival of interest in the Japanese classics in the 1880s can be understood as part of a process that anticipated and embraced realism. We could think, for example, of Masaoka Shiki’s (1867–1902) 1897 “sketching theory” (shasei setsu) in haiku. Such a theory appears to have derived from elements gleaned from modern European theories about drawing. At the same time, however, the influence of the realist theory of poetry written in the Chinese style, which flourished as part of a popular revival of the Chinese classics in the 1880s, cannot be denied. With regard to the naive expression of a pure emotion by the poet, Shiki recommended in his Utayomi ni Atahuru Sho (Essays for the Tanka Poet, 1900) that the writer look to both Chinese poetry of the Sung dynasty and the Japanese poetry of the Man’yo¯shu¯ and of Mina- moto no Sanetomo (1192–1219). As a matter of fact, Shiki himself wrote many poems in the Chinese style. A second major problem inherent in examining the new notions of literature coming from Europe is the underlying proposition that the progress of literature automatically goes hand in hand with a teleological view of literary 184 Suzuki Sadami thought as ideas in a state of evolution or development, in which traditional elements are relegated to the status of being old and outmoded. In Japan, however, traditional notions were often revived and revitalized to act as receptors for new concepts coming from Europe or America—as we have already seen in the use that Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯made of Motoori Norinaga’s theory of realism in art to buttress the acceptance of new ideas. The use of traditional elements varies, of course, according to the reasons for which the past is recalled and put into service again. Especially after World War II, when Japan was often seen as an example of culturally backward or warped modernization, the cultural elements coming from Europe were completely neglected or disregarded. At the same time we must remember that traditional cultural elements also acted as a bulwark against the Europeaniza- tion of Japanese thought and culture. A more careful analysis of the elements that lie at the heart of twentieth-century Japan is necessary if literature is to be understood correctly. One example of the use of the past is to be found in the revival of interest in Tokugawa manners and arts after the Russo-Japanese War, when topics associated with the Tokugawa period became akin to a cultural boom. People loved the fashion and arts of that time. The Tokugawa period was idealized as a peaceful and easy time in which life stood in sharp contrast to the harsh realities of wartime living. There was a renewal of popular interest in kimono fabrics and designs that mixed influences from Edo and the art nouveau of Europe. In his short story “Shisei” (Tattoo), Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ (1886 –1965) espoused the “noble virtue of stupidity” (oroka to iu to¯toi toku), or a devotion to beauty even to the point of self-sacrifice, which he presented as typical of Tokugawa Japan and as an alternative to the dominant thrust of Meiji society: shrewdness in competition. The revival of interest in the arts and manners of the Tokugawa era reflected a popular effort to resist the call for more national and social competition. This is not a “living tradition” or a “return to tradition” but rather a historical phenomenon being recalled and invested with new meaning, as in the case of the “invention of tradition.” What is, then, the historical meaning that lies behind the naturalist movement that took journalism by storm and captured the central position in literary circles for a few years around 1907? Naturalism in Japan was a distorted version of the naturalism imported from the second half of nineteenth-century France. Yet it was not distorted because of the delayed modernization of Japan, as it has been often argued in Japan up to the present time. Instead, it is better understood by the way it reflects the zeitgeist within early twentieth-century Japan. Japanese naturalist thought consisted of three major theories, advocated by Hasegawa Tenkei (1876 –1940), Shimamura Ho¯getsu (1871–1918), and Iwano Ho¯mei (1873 –1920). Among these, only Hasegawa insisted in his What Is Bungaku? 185 early writings on the necessity of natural, social, and psychological science as the basis for literature. Later his insistence on this prescription amounted to no more than an advocacy of the need to expose “with tristesse” the shameful aspects of social reality and the secret, shameless mind of the writer. Mean- while, Shimamura Ho¯getsu and Iwano Ho¯mei, who shared similar ideas, insisted on a “new naturalism” (shin shizenshugi) or “pure naturalism” (junsui shizenshugi) (in Ho¯getsu’s case) and a “mysterious Panism” (shinpiteki hanju¯shugi) (in Ho¯mei’s case) that meant, in short, the recording of the natural life. Their core concept of “natural life” was the commonality of human life and external nature. According to their thinking, the inner life of each human being was but one phenomenon in the natural world. As a matter of fact, this idea was not unique to these writers but was widespread throughout Japan at the time. We can say that this idea was the result of the combination of a kind of naturalism involving evolutionism and genetics, with the idea of universal spirit, or “ki,” which is found in Taoism, Con- fucianism, and neo-Confucianism. What resulted was, on the one hand, a so-called scientific naturalism that spread rapidly in late nineteenth-century Japan where Christian creationism took no root. On the other hand, a philosophical trend emerged in which traditional Taoist thought was revitalized under the influence of the organic universalities of German idealist philosophy and Christian or non-Christian spiritualism. Miyake Setsurei (1860 –1945) translated the organic universalities of German idealism in his “Wagakan Sho¯kei” (A Small Sketch of the Self, 1892) on the basis of Oriental philosophy. Under the influence of Christian spiritualism, Kitamura To¯koku wrote “Naibu no Seimei Ron” (Theory of Inner Life, 1893). To add a further example, in his miscellany Musashino (1901), Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908) argued that watching the changing presence of nature was like reading a poem by William Wordsworth (1790 –1850) in its essential beauty. Doppo read the words “the life of things” in Wordsworth’s verse as the essence flowing through external nature and the human mind. Although Christianity banished Wordsworth’s view of nature as a “vain credo,” Doppo’s faith in “the life of things” was easily accepted in Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, new philosophical movements, such as neo-Kantianism and phenomenology in Germany, Henri Bergson’s vitalism in France, and William James’s pragmatism in the United States, began to arrive in Japan. On this new philosophical scene the central issue was “consciousness.” In particular, in wrestling with the problem of human experience, William James defined nonreflective “consciousness” as “pure experience.” This remarkable vortex of ideas—mixing the revived notion of “ki” with Western spiritualism, organic universalities, “scientific” naturalism involving 186 Suzuki Sadami evolutionism and genetics, and the new philosophy of nonreflective “consciousness”—gave birth to philosophical thought that had to will itself to overcome the mechanistic materialism and the binomial theorem of subject and object in nineteenth-century European thought. Japan became engaged in a powerful struggle with the major philosophical orientation of modern thought. As a result, “intuition” and the “unity of subject and object,” or “unity of cosmos or nature and self,” became the special marks of Japanese thinkers in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In Japan this philosophical trend became firmly established with the publication of Nishida Kitaro¯’s (1870 –1945) Zen no Kenkyu¯ (A Study of Good, 1911). Nishida declared his determination to overcome the two modern conflicting trends, philosophical romanticism created by Immanuel Kant (1724 –1804) and mechanistic materialism, which in 1914 he identified as “the problem of contemporary philosophy.” Nishida’s system of thought in A Study of Good starts from “pure experience” or a nonreflective “consciousness” borrowed from William James and posits it as the universal phenomenon of human life. It argues that human beings instinc- tively have the “good” desire to unite themselves with universal life. It is a vitalist philosophy that has the concept of life (seimei) at the source of the universe, like God in traditional Oriental philosophy. This concept of “life” is fundamental to Nishida’s philosophy. If one rejects the fundamental concept of life as presented in Nishida’s thought, then the entire philosophical system proposed in A Study of Good collapses. We are undoubtedly correct in calling this concept Nishida’s “first principle.” In this context I want to point out the fact that Japanese naturalism in the early twentieth century involved the notion of “vitalism” oriented toward the overcoming of modernity. We find the same kind of vitalism in many other sources as well. For example, Abe Jiro¯’s (1883 –1959) Santaro¯ no Nikki (Diary of Santaro¯,1914) and Kurata Hyakuzo¯’s(1891–1943) Ai to Ninshiki to no Shup- patsu (In Search of Love and Recognition, 1921) are representative of Taisho¯ culturalism (Taisho¯kyo¯yo¯shugi). Vitalism is also found in the social activism of the anarchist O¯ sugi Sakae (1885 –1923), who was influenced by Henri Berg- son’s vitalistic philosophy, and in the writings of the feminist Hiratsuka Rai- cho¯(1886 –1971), who came under the influence of Ellen Key (1849–1928). We also find it in many works on the subject of art and literature, for example, the novels and essays by Mushanoko¯ji Saneatsu (1885 –1979) and Arishima Takeo (1878 –1923); the free verse of Takamura Kotaro¯ (1883 –1956), Hagi- wara Sakutaro¯(1889–1942), and Miyazawa Kenji (1898 –1933); the tanka poetry of Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), Maeda Yu¯gure (1883 –1951), Wakayama Bokusui (1885 –1928), and Saito¯Mokichi (1882–1953); the haiku of Ogi- wara Seisensui (1884 –1976); and the paintings and sculptures of Kishida Ryu¯sei (1891–1929), Takamura Kotaro¯, and Ogiwara Morie (1879–1910). What Is Bungaku? 187

Although the early twentieth-century European vitalistic movement is represented by Bergson’s philosophy, especially his Évolution Créatrice (1906), Japanese vitalism (seimeishugi) developed in the Taisho¯era from many different trends. In other words, Taisho¯vitalism was a sort of salad bowl that mixed in many trends—romanticism, symbolism, naturalism, and new philosophies derived from European and Japanese traditional elements. At the time, however, not all vitalist thought adopted as its goal the issue of overcoming the modern. Indeed, some vitalist thinkers happily embraced the mechanistic development of the modern city. Others, however, deplored the development of the machine and willed themselves to return to nature—a trend that we also find in the romantic movement of nineteenth-century Europe. Furthermore, there were literary works that combined a simultaneous adoption and rejection of modern civilization. Their approach to the problem is therefore quite complex, for example, in the case of the avant-garde artist Kanbara Tai (b. 1898), who was influenced by Italian futurism and Bergsonism. Once the narrow definition of literature as a linguistic art or performance began to displace in Japan all the other meanings of “literature,” a habit developed in Japan of thinking of Japanese literature as a late-blooming variation on modern European literature. In reality, from Meiji on, Japanese literature developed by assimilating both directly or indirectly many new trends from modern and contemporary European art and thought and by building on its own cultural basis. In some instances it used traditional elements that were revisited, revived, and reformed to be adapted to new settings. Simultane- ously, there arose an aesthetic revolution that centered on the will to overcome the modern. This will caused the arts to flourish in the Taisho¯era; afterward it produced many interesting methodical challenges that went beyond merely “catching up” with new trends in Europe and America and that recall traditional elements. I am thinking, for example, of certain novels written around 1935, which adopt a so-called postmodern style rich in parodical spirit: the detective stories of Hisao Ju¯ran (1902–1957) or works by Yumeno Kyu¯saku (1889–1936). Japanese novelists even challenged the novelistic genre in the form of the “story within the novelist’s consciously writing the story” with a parodical will to express the “roman of self-reflection of the roman,” such as André Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs of 1926. Such novelists include Ishikawa Jun (1899–1987), Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), and Nagai Kafu¯ (1879–1959). However, Japanese society embraced a move toward mass production— mass propaganda, mass consumption, and mass dumping with the heavy and chemical industrialization of the 1920s. After 1940 the “overcoming modernity” school of thought, especially the young members of the Kyo¯to school influenced by Nishida’s philosophy, began to argue in favor of overcoming Western-style imperialism, capitalism, nationalism, cultural relativism, and 188 Suzuki Sadami individualism. They aimed at building under Japan’s leadership a pluralistic system within the familial hierarchy of Asian nations—the so-called Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In 1942 they completely failed when they praised the Japanese war against the United States and England as a “sacred war.” This is the last manifestation of the “overcoming modernity” thought in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. Now that we are living in another age of mass production, mass propaganda, and mass consumption, we feel a need to reform our basic conceptual framework, including the way we think and perceive the arts and cultural history of twentieth-century Japan. 17

Primitive Vision Heidegger’s Hermeneutics and Man’yo¯shu¯

Thomas LaMarre

Acts of seeing abound in the songs of Man’yo¯shu¯, particularly in the earliest songs of this collection, which is often celebrated as the oldest anthology of Japanese verse (compiled around 759). There are so many evocations of vision, so many different kinds of seeing, and a range of different characters for acts of seeing that become entwined with verbs, nouns, and adjectives to form a series of visual refrains that catch the imagination, even in translation: “gazing to recall fondly” (mitsutsu shinobu), “fair to behold” (mireba sayakeshi), or “never tire of seeing” (miredo akanu). In this song by the legendary bard Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (ﬂ. 689–700), eyes follow the currents of the river as they slide away,

To go back, to go again and see again the slick course of the Yoshino river uninterrupted with eyes never sated (miredo akanu)! 1

The ceaseless flow of the river matches an act of seeing that never ceases to course after the waters, that never knows satiation. Like the waters that never disappear even as their currents slide away, the act of seeing suggested by miredo akanu flows incessantly, insatiably. Visual refrains such as miredo akanu repeat with the force of incantation or invocation. With as many as fifty examples of miredo akanu or related expressions in the Man’yo¯ collection,2 acts of seeing provide a tentative point of departure for making generalizations about an anthology that resists simple characterizations. Man’yo¯shu¯ —the “Collection of Myriad Leaves” or “Collection of Ten Thou- sand Ages”—is a vast collection of poetic forms. Its twenty scrolls with some 4,516 poems present multiple experiments with scripts, songs, commentaries, and principles of organization. What is more, many of its attributions, such as Hitomaro, are apocryphal, an evocation of legendary names that impart an aura or conjure up the style of an era. Apparently,a number of scribes and poets com-

189 190 Thomas LaMarre piled different scrolls at different times with poems from different eras. Finally, around 759, O¯ tomo no Yakamochi gathered various compilations and made his own additions to them. The result is not so much a uniﬁcation of diverse forms as a series of different modes of synthesis. With no single principle of organization, the collection reads as if it were another manifestation of the conﬂicts and interactions among peoples, languages, techniques, forms, and concepts that characterized the emergence of an imperial court on the Japanese archipelago in the seventh and eighth centuries. It is against such a multiplicity of forms that a visual refrain such as miredo akanu promises a point of departure for thinking about the stylistic and conceptual framework of Man’yo¯shu¯ —particularly for songs associated with the two “early” periods, that is, roughly from 645 until the death of Empress Jito¯ in 702, whose passing marked a dramatic shift in poetic composition.3 The mode of seeing associated with “early” Man’yo¯ songs not only promises a way to conceptualize the worldview implicit in ancient poetic styles but also introduces a rough historical framework.

Tribal Histories and “Primitive” Seeing In the first volume of Nihonjin no Kokoro no Rekishi (The History of the Heart of the Japanese), Karaki Junzo¯ characterizes acts of seeing in Man’yo¯shu¯ to de- lineate a history of early Japan. “There is something artless about the usage of miredo akanu,” he writes. “There is a passionate frankness. It sees into nature, that is, into things like the leaves on trees, the bush clover, the seashore, or the moon, the river. It gazes, almost eating into things.” 4 He adds that songs that use miredo akanu “are all thought to be of the early or middle Man’yo¯shu¯.” Yet, by the late Man’yo¯shu¯, a profound transition was under way. No longer did poems entwine seeing into acts of singing, recalling, longing, or thinking or weave visual subjectivity into the phenomenal world. Finally,by the time of Ko- kin Wakashu¯ (c. 905), the verb “to see” was hardly ever used.5 The heart /mind (kokoro) appears in the place of the eye, and instead of seeing, there emerges a world of feeling/thinking (omohu). In short, Karaki maps the historical changes that occurred across the eighth and ninth centuries in terms of visual transformations, and he interprets these changes in terms of a kind of fall from oneness with nature. Already in the songs of the late Man’yo¯shu¯, he notes that the usage of miredo akanu occurs primarily in love poetry, which centers on the opposite sex and thus, in Karaki’s interpretation, lacks the expansiveness found in early songs—a sort of blind- ness sets in, a darkening of the world. He sees this darkening of the world in terms of a separation of seeing (miru) and feeling/thinking (omohu): in the early Man’yo¯ songs, thinking and seeing were so close that no split registered Primitive Vision 191 between subject and object; subsequently, however, thinking came to the fore, and by the Kokin era, radiance had fled the world, leaving poets to feel their way intellectually and blindly through a world of objects. Histories of early Japanese poetry invariably take up the topic of the differences between Man’yo¯shu¯ and Kokin Wakashu¯. Generally, they describe the transition in terms of a distancing from nature. Suzuki Hideo, for instance, notes a number of changes: a shift from community to aristocracy, from direct experience of nature to representations of nature; later poets were nobles clois- tered within gardens and screens.6 He suggests that the usage of poetic devices such as pivot words and kin words in Kokin poetry conveyed a mental-image landscape rather than natural description and constituted a movement away from actual nature into a mental or ideal realm.7 In a similar vein, Yoshimoto Taka’aki writes that Man’yo¯ songs treated nature as having a heart just as people do. Man’yo¯shu¯ entailed a belief in nature, which subsequently faded around the early ninth century, when song lost its public and ritual functions. Song lost its directness, and poets began to recon- struct nature consciously and neutrally as the symbol of a public ethic (related to Confucianism) by expressing personal sentiments. By the time of Kokin Wakashu¯,poets had absorbed a Chinese view of nature, and nature had become external.8 In such accounts, there emerges a series of interrelated transformations— from actual to ideal, from natural to mental, from ritual belief to secular expression, from direct experience to mediated experience—all of which reinforce a sense of transition from nature to culture. In addition, as Yoshimotomakes evident, this movement from nature to culture is also construed in terms of an opposition between the native and the foreign. The distancing effects of culture are attributed to Chinese thought and Chinese modes of representation— in particular, Chinese characters. In this way, commentaries on the transition from nature to culture rely on a common sociohistorical paradigm, namely, that the advent of writing introduces a separation between nature and culture. Later, I will return to this point. At this juncture, it is important to note that it is in these terms—native versus foreign—that the cultural agenda of different commentators is expressed. Karaki, for instance, sees the disappearance of early Man’yo¯ visuality in terms of a fall from an original state of grace, a darkening of the world, which must later be redeemed or recovered. Suzuki finds covert or latent forms of continuity between the Man’yo¯shu¯ and Kokin Wakashu¯: beneath the profound technical and conceptual transformations lay an unbroken line of oral transmission of the Man’yo¯ legacy. Karaki and Suzuki follow a narrative of native resistance and solidarity in response to the apparent threat of foreign domination. Yoshimoto, on the contrary, makes an effort to insist that, no matter how 192 Thomas LaMarre far one looks back into Japanese history, one will always find Chinese characters, which is his way of coming to terms with the omission, degradation, or ossification of China in Japanese literary and intellectual history. In accounts of early Japan, even in Yoshimoto, these identities— China and Japan—are remarkably, and problematically, stable. The insistence on stable and familiar identities derives from an extension and compression of modernity into the institutions and discourses of early Japan. It is commonplace for institutional histories of the early Japanese state to construct a straightforward homology between the emergence of the ancient imperial court and the formation of a modern Japanese nation. Inoue Mitsu- sada begins his account of the seventh century, “the century of reform,” with these remarks:

Japan’s history has been deeply marked by reforms adopted during two long but widely separated periods of contact with expansive foreign cultures. The ﬁrst began around a.d. 587 when Soga no Umako seized control of Japan’s central government, made an extensive use of Chinese techniques for expanding state power, and supported the introduction and spread of Chinese learning. The second came after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 when new leaders moved the country toward industrialization and Western ways.9

Later in his account Inoue returns to this homology, adding, “The imperial edict issued on the first day of the first month of 646 . . . is comparable to the Five-Article Oath of 1868. Each was issued by an emperor at a time when new leaders had decided to make bold and sweeping political changes—in the name of the current emperor—that would help the country to meet the threat of invasion by foreign powers, at first Chinese and then Western.” 10 The effect of this homology is to stabilize identities across history (the foreign is always foreign and Japan is always Japan) and to refuse historicity. Thus, under the sway of such a homology, it becomes impossible to historicize sovereignty, community, or subjectivity. Japan’s history is without historicity; it is always the same encounter of the Japanese self with an Other. In effect, if one adopts José Gil’s definition of tribal societies as those that refuse historicity,11 it could be characterized as a “primitivist” or tribal mode of history, designed to disavow or domesticate modernity by warding off difference. This is a central paradigm for organizing Japanese history. In fact, a book far removed from institutional histories, on magical incantations in Japan—Nihon no No- roi: “Yami no Shin Sei” ga Umidasu Bunka to wa (Japanese Curses, or the Cul- ture That Engenders a “Mind of Darkness”)—adopts the same homology between the Nara court and Meiji Japan, with China and the West as homologous Others,12 simply to impart a semblance of narrative coherence to its exploration of a diverse series of indigenous spells, curses, and incantations. Primitive Vision 193

The upshot of this transhistorical homology is to establish two beginnings for Japanese modernity. Modernity arrived with the Western incursion that forces the formation of a modern Japanese nation, but it had also already arrived with encounters with China, with the full-scale adoption and adaptation of continental techniques in the eighth and ninth centuries. Needless to say, one could fill books with the empirical failures of this homology. Yoshimoto reminds us that, as one delves deeper into Japan’s past, one continues to encounter Chinese techniques and inscriptions. What is more, it is impossible to organize the complex interactions of numerous courts (such as Wu, Ko- guryo, Paekche, Silla, Linye, and Palhae) in terms of a binary relation between a monolithic China and Japan (i.e., Chang-an and Heian-kyo¯). It is difficult to decide which century constituted the moment of the historical rupture, for the emergence of the ancient state involved a series of radical discontinuities in different locales across several centuries, not to mention shifting political alli- ances and interactions among many courts. The persistence of the binary machine in accounts of early Japan cannot be explained by its empirical accuracy. Its appeal lies in its response to Western modernity—that is, if modernity arrived twice in Japan—first in ancient times, then in the late nineteenth century—then a gap opens between the West and modernity. This homology is not a physical fact but rather a response to modernity that entails a certain kind of desire and subjectivity. Western modernity itself is not simply a physical fact but a metaphysical claim, and as a result it always induces ghostly responses and uncanny doubles. There are, of course, as many problems as possibilities implicit in such a doubling of modernity in the context of early Japan. On the one hand, it could enable a refusal or disavowal of modernity and historicity, by stabilizing self/other identities transhistorically (as with Inoue) or by encouraging a reactionary effort to recover the ancient spirit that came before China and the West (as with Karaki). Or, the same identities can be fixed in favor of Japanese modernization rather than resistance to, or ambivalence about, modernity. This was the preferred stance of English-language scholarship in the wake of the American Occupation: to see the transition from Man’yo¯ era to the Kokin era in terms of modernization. Thus, Brower and Miner describe the shift in terms of “changes in literature that . . . entailed a change to modernity.” 13 When they elaborate on their notion of modernity, they add that “the new age was ‘modern’ in its self-consciousness, in its refinement of what seemed to be certain crudities of the older tradition, and in its subjective complexities. Its modernity was the full adulthood of the race.” 14 For them, the transformation in early Japan can be seen as maturation, and the “modernity” evidenced by post-Chinese refinement takes on very different values than those implied in Karaki’s historical imagination. Nevertheless, they 194 Thomas LaMarre share a common strategy: The identity of Japan in ancient times is stabilized by reference to a transition to modernity and a monolithic Other. On the other hand, the doubling of modernity could enable a radical re- thinking of modernity and the violence of foundationalist thought—in short, an extension of critical possibilities of the Heideggerian legacy. Although accounts of early Japan and its poetry tend generally toward a stabilization of Japanese identity and a recovery of the ancient spirit, there are nonetheless critical possibilities implicit in them, which can be drawn out through an exploration of Heidegger’s hermeneutics. Ultimately, however, Heidegger and hermeneutics can not be the heroes of this account. While Heidegger sets up the problem of modernity in ways that are now fairly rote, his response leaves something to be desired. Gianni Vattimo writes that “Heidegger has taught us that modern technology is the direct consequence of Platonic metaphysics.” Which is to say, Hei- degger sets up the problem of modernity (and technoscientific society) in relation to the history of metaphysics. “This does not mean, as some believe,” he hastens to add, “that responsibility for the degeneration in our humanity caused by science and technology must be traced back to Plato.” In the history of metaphysics, modern technoscience displays nonetheless “a certain logic, a guiding thread, to which one can appeal in order to tell what ‘goes’ and what ‘does not go.’” 15 After Heidegger, we might say that there are two critical points of departure for thinking about modernity: technoscientific society (Enlightenment Europe) and the Socratic-Platonic legacy of ancient Greek philosophy. The danger lies in conflating them, as Vattimo cautions. Or, to give the problem its Heideggerian tswist in the manner of Heribert Boeder, “The return from the semblance of the first beginning in the Greeks has taught, however, what a principle of epochal determinacy is, and reveals that depart- edness as a difference from itself is thinkable solely on the basis of the principle which determines the modern era.” 16 Heidegger’s resituation of the problem of modernity within the history of metaphysics sets up a framework analogous to that found in accounts of early Japanese poetry. Thought began to go wrong, so to speak, with Plato and So- cratic metaphysics, which places new emphasis on pre-Socratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Parmenides. In accounts of early Japanese poetry, it is Chinese thought and techniques that mark the moment of degeneration, and pre-Chinese thought—apparently exemplified in early Man’yo¯ songs—becomes an important site for a critique (or disavowal) of modernity, much like pre-Socratic thought. To be precise, it is pre-Confucian or pre- Buddhist modes of thought that are at stake, for the degradation or denaturation that allegedly occurred across the eighth and ninth centuries was coeval with the establishment of Confucian court bureaucracies and the expansion of Primitive Vision 195 a circuit of Buddhist temples. Indeed, early Man’yo¯ poetry is typically celebrated for its lack of Confucian or Buddhist sentiment. In his reflections on Heraclitus, Heidegger relates the subsequent decline and fall to transformations in vision:

The essent becomes object, either to be beheld (view, image) or to be acted upon (product and calculation). The original world-making power, physis, degenerates into a prototype to be copied and imitated.... The original emergence and standing of energies, the phainesthai, or appearance in the great sense of a world epiphany, becomes a visibility of things that are already-there, and can be pointed out. The eye, the vision, which originally projected the project into potency, becomes a mere looking at or looking over or gaping at. Vision has degenerated into mere optics.17

After Heraclitus, the site for his “rediscovery of the authentic Greek spirit,” 18 Heidegger detects a degeneration of seeing into an instrumental optics, in which the subject stands over, and separately from, the object. The relation of thinking (logos) to being (physis) becomes that of subject and object.19 At stake for Heidegger in his rediscovery of Heraclitus is a different relation of subject to object, one that affords a way of being with a seeing that is radically different from modern vision, a mere optics. His is an attempt, according to David Michael Levin, “to see with an ‘aletheic’ gaze, a hermeneutical gaze that rec- ollects the unconcealment of being—truth in this sense.” 20 This is also what is at stake in accounts of early Man’yo¯ poetry: At issue is the modern ascen- dency of subject over object, with an inquiry into (or rediscovery of ) another way of seeing or mode of being in the world.

Toward Hermeneutics In early Man’yo¯ songs, commentators continually remark a kind of intransitive knowledge, a pathic or primitive subjectivity that challenges modern instrumental optics and other forms of objectification of the life-world. Karaki affords an obvious point of departure with his characterization of early Man’yo¯ songs, for he finds a seeing not yet limited in scope to objects, a seeing that was not divided from thinking. The source of this stance is Masaoka Shiki (1868 –1902), the poet credited with the invention of modern haiku. Karaki indicates as much with a subsequent chapter about Shiki titled “The Return from Thinking to Seeing, and the Deepening of Seeing.” Shiki is the source of the now notorious distinction between Man’yo¯shu¯ and Kokin Wakashu¯ on the basis of seeing versus thinking. Basically, Shiki praised Man’yo¯ seeing and characterized Kokin poetry negatively, calling it overly rational and calculating, on account of its thinking.21 Although Shiki generally had little interest in theoretical consistency and made other remarks about the 196 Thomas LaMarre same collections that contradict this characterization, his characterization has become so central to modern poetic commentary that it has accrued a kind of conceptual authority and disciplinary consistency. All commentators on classical Japanese poetry turn to it at some juncture. Both Suzuki and Yoshimoto, for instance, feel obliged to address Shiki’s denigration of Kokin Wakashu¯ simply to reaffirm the value of Kokin poetry. Shiki’s career serves as a reminder that there are certain risks in the affirma- tion of intransitive knowledge and pathic subjectivity, especially in the light of his ultranationalist and militarist enthusiasms. And aspects of Heidegger’s career should also give us pause. There are risks, however, in conflating militarist nationalism and “primitivism” as well. (By primitivism I mean a search for a nonmodern or nontechnological way of being.) It is not a causal relation, and to make it a direct relation tends to foreclose an exploration of interpretative practices. Thus, the question must be raised, if only summarily: Given that a primitive or pathic subjectivity has been linked with militarism and extreme nationalism, how was (or is) the link made? What kind of link is it? Mark Morris sees the problem in terms of an “irrationalist emotionality” that adhered not only in Shiki’s approach to poetry but in poetic scholarship of the Meiji period generally. “Regrettably, if half understandably, as war followed war, a number of tanka poets and waka scholars were able to bend their irrationalist emotionality of lyric interpretation to fascist goals: quite active were Man’yo¯shu¯-inspired poets and Man’yo¯shu¯ scholars,” he writes. “Part of the homefront gearing up for aggressive war, they helped provide what Walter Benjamin, characterizing the Nazi aestheticization of politics, called ‘an apparatus pressed into the production of ritual values.’” 22 Suzuki Hideo is also uncomfortable with the legacy of Man’yo¯ scholarship, albeit in a more roundabout way. In a chapter titled “The Complementary Structure of Heart and Things,” he works through the ways in which different poetics in early Japan differentiate “heart” (kokoro) and “things” (mono). Al- though one might historicize kokoro and mono in ancient poetics and set them against a distinction between subject and object, Suzuki basically uses the terms as roughly analogous to subject and object. For Suzuki, heart is largely synonymous with “human consciousness” and things with “natural phenomena,” which allows a kind of phenomenological framework. In the context of Man’yo¯shu¯, he uses this framework to take issue with the idea that early songs obliterate the subject as an individual. Although Man’yo¯ poems fix the relation between human consciousness and natural phenomena to such an extent that individual expression would seem impossible, Suzuki submits that it nevertheless allows for individual imagination. In Man’yo¯ poems, he finds “abundant imagination with respect to the complementary structure [of heart /thing] and the external world” and that Primitive Vision 197

“the workings of a spirit confronting natural phenomena reconstructs them within an internal unity.” 23 In effect, Suzuki aims to forestall a fusion of poet with nature that would obliterate individual subjectivity in order to construct “a single reflection of a homogeneous society.” 24 Yet to combat the image of Man’yo¯shu¯ as a site of anti-individual collectivity, he affirms a model for subjectivity in which the poet is a transcendent subject who stands over and against what is to be known. For all his emphasis on poetic imagination, his mentalistic bias merely reconstructs the modern subject in ancient song. Morris and Suzuki identify some of the risks inherent in a simple affirma- tion of pathic subjectivity. Morris is in the position of exposing an often ignored dimension of Man’yo¯ commentary, for the lyric apparatus could be easily pressed into the production of ritual values for nationalist expansion. Suzuki, however, is intent on disavowing the apparatus for the production of a homogeneous collectivity so as to void Man’yo¯ songs of any nonmodern or antimod- ern tendencies. Again, if there are risks inherent in the modern elaboration of a primitive seeing, there are risks in a simple exposure or disavowal of it, for such moves tend to remove us from these risks or to make us too comfortable with them. There would be nothing at stake, except perhaps the preservation of poetic authority. If pathic subjectivity in ancient poetry is of interest, it is because it has the potential to challenge our interpretative practices. It raises questions about how one imagines access to the primitive or archaic and how one situates it. Heidegger, according to Hubert Dreyfus, “holds open the possibility that there still exists in our micro-practices an undercurrent of a pretechnological understanding of the meaning of Being, presumably once focused in the Greek temple. Now scattered in our inherited background practices this understanding involves nonobjectifying and nonsubjectifying ways of relating to nature, material objects, and human beings.” 25 In theory then, for Heidegger, it is not easy to discern nontechnological micro-practices—such as “primitive seeing.” For Heidegger, their existence cannot be proved— only our resistance to disciplinary technological society can be taken as a sign of their concealed yet continued efficacy—and they are dispersed by modern objectifying practices. At issue, then, is how one discerns, or constructs access to, “pretechnological understanding.” In comparison to Heidegger’s cautiously philosophical approach to pre- Socratic thought, modern commentators on early Man’yo¯ songs appear down- right hasty. It seems so easy to recover ancient modes of seeing, knowing, and being. Yet this does not mean that such commentaries are any less theoretical in their operations. Man’yo¯ songs are incredibly difficult to read. The original texts, extensively edited and worked over in the early modern era by “nativist” scholars, demand philological expertise as well as inspired guesswork. In prac- 198 Thomas LaMarre tice, commentators largely assume the accuracy of this philological apparatus and do not question the objectifying and subjectifying practices built into the exegetical tradition. The result is a contradictory relation with ancient texts: on the one hand, a recovery of something like nonmodern understanding; on the other, a disciplinary apparatus that assumes and depends on modern ways of relating to texts, humans, and nature. The modern way of dealing with texts often entails an ethnographic perspective, which introduces subjectified objects in the form of self-evident cultures and languages. There are, in a sense, two radically different ways of seeing and knowing: that of ancient poetry and that of modern philology and commentary with its ethnographic way of seeing things. This difference could establish a point of departure for a hermeneutic approach to Man’yo¯shu¯.In such a hermeneutic encounter, it would not be enough to return to the philological apparatus to establish more accurate texts, because this would simply avoid the contradiction, cover it over with data. It is essential then to work through difference. Typically, however, Man’yo¯ commentators tend to conflate the two ways of seeing or to ignore differences between them, which ultimately buries or disavows the relation that philological practices and assumptions bring to bear on our texts and commentaries. I will use Karaki, for he is a prime example, but the same impasse arises in Man’yo¯ commentary on classical Japanese poetry in general. Nonetheless, lest this problem be seen as characteristic of Japanese scholarship alone, I will set his work alongside Walter Ong’s on orality.

Orality and Transparency In Walter Ong’s work on orality and literacy, there is an effort to have readers confront the profound differences between oral cultures and literate cultures. He directs our attention to the problem of writing things down:

Try to imagine a culture where no one has ever “looked up” anything. In a primary oral culture, the expression “to look up something” is an empty phrase.... With- out writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might “call” them back—“recall” them. But there is nowhere to “look” for them. They have no focus and no trace.26

In essence, what Ong does with “oral culture” is to try to imagine a pretechnological understanding of the world. He is especially interested in poetry and notes that the rhetorical devices of oral poetry are additive rather than subor- dinating, aggregative rather than analytic, redundant rather than original 27— all of which could apply nicely to Man’yo¯ song as oral performance. For Ong, Primitive Vision 199 oral poetry thus shows its proximity to the life-world. It does not involve objective distancing but participates empathetically in the world. It is signiﬁcant that, in Ong’s scenario, inscription stands for technological alienation. This is not surprising insofar as historians and sociologists traditionally posit the emergence of writing as the moment of transition from nature to culture. Writing is usually construed as the technological force that then divides society into different castes on the basis of access to writing. More surprising is his view of writing as a distancing and denaturing force:

Oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings. A chirographic (writing) culture and even more typographic (print) culture can distance and in a way denature even the human.28

For Ong, writing entails alienation and denaturation, precisely because it is a form of representation. In his attempt to imagine a nonrepresentational poetics, he associates writing with seeing and inscription with representation, then opts for the immediacy of spoken sounds. Now, although Ong favors speaking over seeing (in contrast to Karaki’s interest in seeing), his account bears a remarkable resemblance with Karaki vis-à-vis Man’yo¯shu¯. It is a matter of imagining an immediate relation to the life-world by challenging representation or mediation. As a result, writing becomes a major problem, for it is construed as the form of representation par excellence. Likewise, in discussions of the poetic transition from Man’yo¯shu¯ to Kokin Wakashu¯, the advent of Chinese modes of representation were said to introduce a separation from nature. The subsequent darkening of the world— often called the “dark ages of native ways” (kokufu¯ ankoku jidai)—is said to have resulted from the use of Chinese writing. Thus, in Karaki, for example, there arises the problem of how to recover pre-Chinese understanding once writing has been introduced. He opts for a rather fantastical solution, but one in keeping with his general project of recovering the Japanese spirit:

Using diacritic marks to read Chinese by omitting the Chinese reading of characters and reading them in Japanese is probably a unique phenomenon, without parallel in the world. And whenever the Japanese wrote Chinese poetry, they wrote using diacritic marks, adding Japanese inﬂections in their hearts. Although its form may have been Chinese poetry, it was actually Japanese poetry.29

To sweep away Chinese writing, Karaki mobilizes a familiar paradigm: foreign technology, native spirit. The paradigm is not without ambivalence and confusion, however. The recovery of native spirit requires another layer of writing 200 Thomas LaMarre in the form of diacritic marks. Although another layer of marks would seem to compound the problem, Karaki sees them as the solution. If diacritic marks save the day, it is because they represent native speech. In other words, he in- vents a transparent writing that conveys native speech, in opposition to an opaque writing that denatures it. His position recalls that of Tokugawa nativism to the extent that it manifests a profound mistrust of Chinese writing. However, there is an important difference. “Nativism,” writes H. D. Harootunian, “was less interested in approaching texts with a theory of reading than in showing conclusively that writing failed to convey the experience of presence and immediacy promised by speech.” 30 Nativism in early modern Japan directed its attention toward demonstrating that writing perverted and suppressed genuine meaning. While Karaki inher- its this nativist paradigm, he clearly is comfortable with the idea of transparent writing. He identifies Chinese uses of writing as degenerate and Japanese adaptations or emendations of it as authentic. (Nativists would not accept Jap- anese script—whether kana or shindai moji or any form of character—as immediate or authentic.) In this respect, Karaki’s stance, simple as it may seem, draws on a well-established theory of reading. He demonstrates his confidence in the philological apparatus that developed out of nativist interventions into and transcriptions of ancient texts. This confidence allows him to glide over an important difference—that between ancient seeing and modern seeing. Which is to say, even though Karaki suggests a nonmodern way of seeing and knowing things, it is not at odds with modern ways of seeing, reading, or writing. Morris’s comments about an apparatus pressed into the production of ritual values comes to mind here, to the extent that nonmodern seeing serves merely to reenchant our established ways of doing things. In the end, the possibility for a radically different seeing becomes associated with phonetic writing—simply because the philological apparatus never comes into question, with its ethnographic way of introducing subjected objects and objectified subjects. Karaki pairs nicely with Ong not only because both deal with oral poetry but also because both treat orality as a form of transparency to speech. Both establish a form of perception that entails a kind of pathic or primitive subjectivity—there are no objects, just events and occurrences; and there are no subjects who would stand over objects, just participation in, and empathetic belonging to, the life-world. Even though Karaki favors seeing while Ong champions hearing, they have a common bias, consolidated in the construction of orality as transparency. Both assume that the experience of speech is one of immediacy. They never question whether the philological or ethnographic apparatus can deliver such immediacy. Orality, imagined as the realm of unme- Primitive Vision 201 diated perception, is a construction that allows them to avoid basic questions about how we are able to perceive other modes of perception. Now, both Karaki and Ong associate orality with being in the life-world— which is resonant with Heidegger, especially early Heidegger, and to some extent Heidegger can be similarly challenged. Yet Heidegger, particularly in his later works, problematizes relations between seeing and speaking and between speaking and being. A great deal depends on the status of language and speech.

Speaking Is Not Seeing In the famous sections of Being and Time, Heidegger shows how a “hermeneutic circle” characterizes all understanding.31 His notion of understanding is different from the traditional model in which the subject as knower stands over and against what is to be known, in which model truth is established in terms of the conformity of statements to reality. Heidegger shows that there must be a clearing or opening within which every conformity and deformity can come about. Gianni Vattimo explains: “The opening is not a stable, transcendental structure of reason, but a legacy, the finite-historical thrownness, Schickung, destiny, provenance of conditions of possibility that Heidegger sees incarnated in the historical conditions of natural languages.” 32 Thus, Heideg- ger shows that we need not take knowledge as primary and see understanding or interpretation as derived. In effect, he reverses the derivation: Knowledge stems from understanding. How, then, does one understand the world? Hei- degger suggests that “unless objects inhere in an interpretative context, they could not be understood.” 33 A hermeneutic circle characterizes understanding, for there must already be a context of intelligibility for any discovery to be made.34 In explaining this circle, Heidegger distinguishes three ways in which understanding involves preunderstanding: Vorhabe, the totality of cultural practices that “have us”; Vorsicht, the vocabulary or conceptual scheme we bring to any problem; and Vorgriff, a specific hypothesis.35 Particularly important is the idea that framing and confirming hypotheses take place on a background of practices (Vorhabe) that need not—and indeed cannot—be included as specific presuppositions of the theory.36 It is for this reason that Heidegger claims that there still exists an undercurrent of a pretechnological understanding, nonobjectifying and nonsubjectifying ways of relating to nature, material objects, and human beings, which are now scattered in our inherited background practices. However, these are not easily identified and accessed. To repeat, Heidegger sees them incarnated in the historical conditions of natural languages.37 Thus, language—which he dubs the “house of Being”—plays a 202 Thomas LaMarre double role. It both conceals and unconceals. It can hide background practices or incarnate them. Vattimo reminds us that “Heidegger has taught us to refuse the untroubled identification of the structures of Being with the structures of our historical grammar and of language as it is in fact given” 38—which is essentially the mistake of Ong and Karaki. Yet it should be noted that Heidegger himself often conflates the two. Notable in this respect is his essay “Dialogue on Lan- guage,” which consists of a dialogue between a German inquirer and a Japa- nese, apparently based on a conversation between Heidegger and Tezuka To- mio.39 In “Dialogue on Language,” on the topic of a conversation that the German had had years before with the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shu¯zo¯, the two speakers acknowledge the dangers of translation:

japanese: The languages of the dialogue shifted everything into European. inquirer: Yet the dialogue tried to say the essential nature of Eastasian art and poetry. j: Now I am beginning to understand where you smell the danger. The language of the dialogue constantly destroyed the possibility of saying what the dialogue was about. i: Sometime ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being. If man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we Euro- peans presumably dwell in an entirely different house than Eastasian man.40

The problems surrounding translation echo some of the general issues in Hei- degger’s hermeneutics. The danger of translation is that one might mistake communication for a simple yet metaphysical presupposition about correspondence between languages (linked to a correspondence of statements to things)—which would place knowledge prior to interpretation. Thus, Hei- degger worries that translation would allow speakers to adopt a metaphysical stance to zone in on objects and ideas, to pursue a line of argument throughout which the end remains in sight. It is a problem of instrumental vision and reason. Speaking becomes nothing but a means of seeing objects and clarifying ends. To avoid the optical closure that instrumental communication insinuates into dialogue, Heidegger’s speakers problematize translation, adopting a speech that meanders, that discloses only in glimmers, gestures, and hints. A meandering dialogue will allow their “essential being” to speak through them, to “say” or “show” what their dialogue cannot:

j: What does “say” mean? i: Probably the same as “show” in the sense of: to let appear and let shine, but in the manner of hinting. j: Saying, then, is not the name for human speaking... Primitive Vision 203

i: ...but for that essential being which your Japanese word Koto ba hints and beck- ons: that which is like a saga... j: ...and in whose beckoning hint I have come to be at home only now through our dialogue...41

Presumably, the near impossibility of translation allows the speakers to move beyond human speaking, beyond a simple equation of language with grammar or usage, and into a kind of figural space replete with hints, glimmers, and gestures that afford a disclosure of Being beyond mere speech. Saying or showing insinuates a perceptual experience that arrives neither actively nor pas- sively and that resonates with Heidegger’s pursuit of an aletheic, pre-Socratic seeing. Appropriately, there is, in “Dialogue on Language,” a glancing, fantastical encounter with something that seems designed to evoke ancient Japa- nese—the word kotoba, aesthetically twisted and poetically turned almost beyond recognition. Some might object that Heidegger’s way of proceeding gives undue emphasis to aesthetic experience, as that which undermines and trumps the metaphysical stance built into modern technosociety. Some might quibble that Heidegger’s pursuit of aesthetic experience allows a rather high-handed and hackneyed rendition of Japanese language and poetics. Such objections are not entirely misplaced, yet it seems to me that the central issue is the persistence of national, ethnolinguistic identities in Heidegger’s movement beyond human speaking. Does German for Germans and Japanese for Japanese constitute a point of departure? Or is it an end point? After all, the Japanese speaker comes to “be at home” only through the dialogue in which Japanese figures summon resonances beyond human speech. In his essay “The Truth of Hermeneutics,” Gianni Vattimo presents the stakes quite clearly. He remarks that “the truth of the opening can, it seems, only be thought on the basis of the metaphor of dwelling,” 42 and if hermeneutic dwelling is not to fall back into the model of truth as correspondence, then truth as opening must also “involve a moment of ‘recognition,’ a ‘sensation’ of incontrovertibility.” 43 Yet this aestheticism becomes suspect insofar as the sensation of objective evidence refers back to “a recognition of integration in the world in which one ‘dwells’ and in which one feels at home, as though in beautiful ethical life.” 44 The danger then is that the critique of truth as correspondence to reality replaces it with truth as sensation of integration into one’s dwelling. “The solution to the problems and discomforts created by life in a society held together only by contractual, mechanical and conventional links,” concludes Vattimo, “is not the reconstruction of an organic community.” 45 In brief, hermeneutics runs the risk of using ethnolinguistic identities to confirm organic belonging to national communities. In this respect, even as Heideg- 204 Thomas LaMarre ger pushes the limits of the framework adopted by Karaki, Suzuki, Ong, and others, his hermeneutics shares certain risks with their projects. How does one work through hermeneutics to face these risks? Vattimo’s essay suggests that the critical potential of hermeneutics “is only possible when aesthetic experience is modified to such a degree that it loses the ‘classical’ characteristics with which it has been associated in the metaphysical tradition.” 46 Vattimo presents the loss of classical aesthetics as a historical transition already under way in Heidegger’s hermeneutics, but clearly it is a movement that is not yet complete. In the light of his comments, in the context of the study of classical Japanese poetry, we would need to modify the aesthetic experience of Man’yo¯ songs in such a way that it loses or at least challenges its classical characteristics—especially as regards the philological conflation of speaking, seeing, and dwelling, which continues to impart an incontrovert- ible sensation of being at home, of being integrated in a Japanese world. Would such an approach still be hermeneutic? After all, in “Dialogue on Language,” Heidegger himself questions the hermeneutic circle. Are there not experiences that do not mobilize a preunderstanding or inherited background practices? This is precisely that question that Naoki Sakai poses when he asks, “What is a foreign language?” The meaning of such a question, Sakai writes, “is not already available to us in an implicit understanding of it—not as in hermeneutic inquiry in which even if we do not know the horizon in terms of which the meaning of what is sought is to be grasped and fixed, some vague understanding of it is an irrefutable fact, our ignorance as to what we seek is absolute.” 47 If our understanding encounters an alterity that it is not somehow preconfigured to understand, then we cannot enter into a hermeneutic circle of interpretation and integrate the experience into a harmonious sensation of being at home. Thus, Sakai queries, “Is it possible to postulate a sphere in which one is securely at home in language?” 48 Only with such a question can we move beyond interpretations of Man’yo¯shu¯ that challenge modernity only to evoke an aesthetic experience in which the sensation of objective evidence refers us back to a recognition of integration in the world in which one “dwells” and in which one feels at home.

Beyond Interpretation The goal of this essay has been to show how commentary on early Man’yo¯ song is not entirely incompatible with Heidegger’s hermeneutics, but in hermeneutic terms, its critical possibilities are foreshortened by an untroubled identification of the structures of Being with the structures of Japanese speech. A series of aligned binarisms—such as native versus foreign, premodern versus modern, nature versus culture, speech versus writing—continue to reinforce this Primitive Vision 205 untroubled identification. We need to move beyond the practice of interpretation as currently established and to pose some of the questions that arise around Heidegger and around hermeneutics itself. Particularly important is the status of language in our disciplines and practices. A number of issues arise around inscription, divination, and ritual in the context of early Man’yo¯ songs that offer ways to intervene in current interpretations and to raise questions about language and hermeneutics. Because these are beyond the scope of this essay (and if presented summarily might appear to offer a simple solution to the questions raised), I would like, by way of conclusion, to make some suggestions about intervening into Man’yo¯shu¯ interpretations. First, Vattimo suggests that aesthetic experience must be modified to such a degree that it loses its classical characteristics. For Man’yo¯shu¯,this means that the philological tradition of harmonious integration of ancient song into classical Japanese speech is suspect. Second, the parameters of language must be expanded beyond the boundaries of speech, which means breaking down the modern boundaries between genres and expanding poetic language to include forms of “writing,” such as calligraphy, inscriptions on ritual mirrors, incan- tatory figures, and the layout of capitals and burial mounds. Finally, it is essential to take seriously the notion that Man’yo¯ poetics constitutes a foreign language—not simply to reference the possibility that ancient Japanese is an extension and transformation of ancient Korean or of classical Chinese poetics. Only by posing Man’yo¯shu¯ as a foreign language can we explore its diasporic ramifications, in which song poses as divination and poets as mediums and in which territories are populated with ghosts that always trouble the sensation of being at home. 18

Saito¯Mokichi’s Poetics of Shasei

Haga To¯ru

To see into the reality of things and represent the life where nature and the self are uniﬁed in the original one. This is shasei, drawing from life, in tanka poetry.1

This is the famous definition of the word “shasei” given by Saito¯Mokichi (1882–1953). The words are all unusual and resist any easy misappropriation. Was this a sort of incantation? No, this was a definition the poet dared to put forward in 1920, at the age of thirty-eight, after many years of experience and reflection on the creation of tanka. It is, therefore, difficult to understand, still unique and spellbinding, endowed with the power of an inner impulse the poet could not contain. Still stressing his belief in “shasei,” he continues his discussion in the following passage, even using the word “setsujitsu” (serious) twice:

Those who do not like “shasei” have no need to discuss it. But for me it is a very serious question and I intend to found the basic principle of my poetic creativity on this notion. For me neither such “isms” as realism, naturalism, expressionism, idealism, symbolism, futurism, nor any theory of psychic elements have any serious appeal.

Mokichi says that his notion of “shasei” differs from any of these contemporary theories and ideologies of art. His Treatise on Shasei in Tanka Poetry (which has this deﬁnition as its pillar) is 120 pages long and appears in volume 9 of the Iwanami edition of his complete works. It was ﬁrst published serially from April 1920 to January 1921 in eight issues of the organ of the tanka association to which Mokichi belonged, Araragi, and then appeared in book form in April 1929, with a postface added. The Treatise had a strong and long lasting

206 Saito¯ Mokichi’s Poetics of Shasei 207 impact on the literary and intellectual milieu of his time and stimulated many polemics and different interpretations into the postwar years. The most important and central essay of poetics by the most representative and the greatest poet of modern Japan, it merits reexamination.

1 It is a well-known fact that in his critical essays and historical studies Saito¯Mo- kichi’s method of tracing the usage of and grasping the meaning of Japanese and Chinese idioms was very idiosyncratic. For instance, a collection of short essays, Doba Mango (Chattering of a Foal), published one year before the Trea- tise on Shasei, contains many interesting surveys and suggestions on the usage of old and new poetic terms, such as “inochi narikeri,” “wadachi” (a rut), “ko-ko- to” (resoundingly), “shin-shin-to” (piercingly), “agaki” (pawing), “kibun” (mood, Stimmung), and so on.2 The same is the case with “shasei,” the central word in his Treatise. Nearly one-third of the discussion in the Treatise is devoted to ci- tations and examinations of earlier usages of the term. This is why the Treatise is not easy to read through and has a peculiar form as a theoretical essay. The essay’s difficulties did not concern the author, however, because his aim was to reconfirm and reinforce his own idea of shasei. Because the word originally came from the field of painting, the first chapter of the Treatise deals with the use of “shasei” in old Chinese and Japanese art treatises. Mokichi did not do any direct survey of original texts but profited from an anthology, titled To¯yo¯Garon Shu¯sei (A Collection of Art Treatises of the Orient). This was a large two-volume work edited by Imazeki Toshimaro and published by Dokuga Shoin in 1915 –1916. The Catalogue of Natsume So¯- seki’s Collection of Books also has this entry and shows So¯seki’s interest in this field in his final years. In the first lines of his essay Mokichi says that, as soon as he had purchased the book by subscription, he began to check and collect the old usages of the term in the book. At the time of the writing of the Trea- tise, Sakazaki Tan’s big volume, Nihon Gadan Taikan (An Anthology of Talks on Art in Japan, 1917), must have been available to the author, but one cannot tell whether he used this book as another source. Mokichi first points out that the Chinese word “shasei” was already used in praise of the works of such painters of flowers and birds as Huang Quan (d. 965) or Xu Xi (937–975) of the Northern Sung dynasty. The word originally designated the technique of figuring things without brush borderings (mogu), then changed to mean the way to grasp the vital spirit of animals and plants and to render the breath of their divine anima. According to Mokichi, the Xiashan Huapu of an artist of the Chin dynasty, Zou Yigui (1686–1772), 208 Haga To¯ru or Notes on Painting of Oko-an, discusses more clearly the meaning of shasei as an expression of “animation” or “the divine soul” and never as a simple linear bordering of objects as contemporary Japanese artists and poets in general took the word to mean. Mokichi then turns his survey toward early modern Japanese writings on art: Motoori Norinaga’s Tamakatsuma (1797), Nakayama Koyo’s Gaden Keiroku (1774), Nakabayashi Chikudo¯’s Chikudo¯Garon (1802), the first volume of Ueda Akinari’s Kakaika, and Tanomura Chikuden’s Sanchu¯jin Jo¯zetsu (1831). Also included is The Questions and Answers on Painting (1841) of Watanabe Ka- zan and his disciple Tsubaki Chinzan, in which the teacher refuses a “terre à terre realism” as vulgar while also criticizing “the empty learning of mountains and waters” of those idealists who pretend to be most concerned with higher, elegant accomplishments. Mokichi agrees with Kazan. Under the influence of Dutch painting, which had been spreading since the mid-eighteenth century, people made much of what was called “sho-utsushi,” a realistic representation in the European style. Mokichi also shows a strong interest in a word that appeared to be very close to what he himself expected from shasei; to his regret, however, sho-utsushi lacks the necessary insight into the depth of nature’s movement. In putting forward his notion of shasei, Mokichi relied on a survey that proved that the word had a much longer history and a much deeper meaning in its usage in East Asia than he had expected.

2 Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) is a man of great importance in the history of the development of the notion of shasei in Japan. During the last years of his short life, the poet practiced Western-style watercolor sketching, inspired by his friends, the artists Nakamura Fusetsu and Asai Chu¯, who belonged to the second generation of Western-style Meiji painters. While practicing watercolor, Shiki tried to extend and to apply shasei to his original domain, poetic composition. Saito¯Mokichi, who had been introduced to tanka poetry in his youth through reading Shiki’s posthumous collection of poems, Take no Sato Uta, valued him very highly as a revolutionary mind who had opened a modern era of shasei in art and poetry. The chapter on Shiki in the Treatise on Shasei is full of quotations from his writings:

Shasei has at least the merit of saving Western-style painting from falling into the banalities of traditional Japanese style painting. It is obvious that without shasei no one can make a good work of art. Japanese painters often say that shasei is a vulgar means of painting, not comparable to the nobleness of idealism. Those who say this do not know the true function of shasei. Of course the ﬁnal goal of painting may not Saito¯ Mokichi’s Poetics of Shasei 209

be a shasei, but without relying on shasei no high ideal can be reached. (Shora Gyoku Eki, 1896)

Placing a vase of ﬂower branches by the side of my pillow, I do an honest sketching of it and, while doing this, I feel as if I gradually understand the secret of nature. (Byosho Rokushaku, August 7, 1902) 3

These passages from Shiki certainly testify to the process Mokichi called “jisso¯- kannyu¯,”(seeing into the reality of things). I do not think that Mokichi had ever seen Shiki’s watercolor sketches of flowers, fruits, and vegetables. The moving beauty of the small sketches, however, convinces us of the truth of his sayings. From his narrow bed of horrible suffering, the poet searches awkwardly with his eyes and hands into the form and colors, and even the tactile feel of the object. One realizes that the Meiji poet’s slow-paced process of drawing and color- ing was a process of reawakening the Japanese to a sense of materiality of things and to the pious respect for nature that they had forgotten for a long time. The passages from Shiki that Mokichi quotes deal only with reflections and practices of shasei in art, however, not poetry. As I have noted, Mokichi had great respect for Shiki as the first Meiji poet who had understood the meaning of shasei and for his attempt to renew Japanese poetry through this new approach to nature. Nevertheless, Mokichi felt somewhat impatient with his mentor’s failure to elaborate the notion sufficiently to make it a new principle. This dis- satisfaction, however, fades away when he reads Shiki’s tanka poems carefully. According to Mokichi’s reading, Shiki, immobilized in his sickbed in his last years, practiced all the more eagerly and courageously shasei—as Mokichi defines it—not only in watercolors but also in his poetry. When Mokichi interprets them, Shiki’s poems shine like dewdrops and disclose their inner dimensions. They are true poems of “shasei” that helped to reinforce his own poetics of “shasei”:

Garasudo no Upon the tinplate roof soto ni suetaru of a bird cage torikago no placed outside buriki no yane ni the sliding door panes tsuki hayuru miyu the moon is shining

Teru-tsuki no The shining moon ichi kawariken must have changed its place torikago no its reﬂection yane ni utsurishi on the roof of the bird cage kage nakunarinu has disappeared 210 Haga To¯ru

Hototogisu As a hototogisu sings naku ni kubi age I raise my head garasudo no and see outside tonomo o mireba the sliding-doors yoki tsukiyo nari a beautiful moonlit night

“These are Masaoka Shiki’spoems,” comments Mokichi, “though ﬂat and plain, how vividly they tell us the living life of the poet! How spontaneous, how true, without any nasty shrieks or affectation or retouching!” One more tanka by Shiki, the best known and most controversial:

Kame ni sasu A tuft of wisteria fuji no hanabusa arranged in a vase mijikakereba was too short tatami no ue ni it couldn’t reach todokazarikeri the surface of the tatami

Mokichi comments on this poem as follows:

This poem of wisteria may be considered “objective” in the ordinary sense of the term. But if someone says that there is not enough subjectivity in it to be a poem, he simply does not understand it. People are not aware that “mijikakereba/tatami no ue ni/todokazarikeri” is a voice of subjectivity the poet could not hold. He complains that the tuft could not reach the tatami as though this were important. It was his true inner voice. The poet, who was totally unable to see the grandeur of mountains or the agitation of the ocean, faced instead a tuft of wisteria at his pillow side and made this song. A deep tune comes from inside the poet and appeals to our mind.

Mokichi’s interpretation is convincing enough to make us understand that this apparently purely objective poem represents “the life where nature and the self are uniﬁed in one.”

3 Another interesting aspect of Saito¯Mokichi’s Treatise on Shasei is that he cor- roborates his theory not only by quoting old writings on art and Masaoka Shiki’s essays and poems but also by referring to contemporary European and Japanese oil paintings. A professional psychiatrist and poet, Mokichi loved painting all his life and, in later years, even painted watercolors himself. In 1921, one year after the completion of the Treatise on Shasei, he sailed to Eu- rope and studied neuropsychiatry in Austria and Germany for more than three years. Profiting from vacations during his stay, he visited almost all the im- Saito¯ Mokichi’s Poetics of Shasei 211 portant museums of big cities in Europe and admired European art, from Re- naissance masters down to Matisse and Picasso. One can retrace his fervent pil- grimage of museums through his tanka poems, essays, diaries, and many other writings. Still, it is striking to see the names of such great artists as Courbet, Cézanne, Rodin, and Kishida Ryu¯sei appear in this Treatise on tanka poetry as comrades of his camp. Many European artists, past and present, were already well known in mid-Taisho¯Japan (1920s) through art magazines, albums, books, and exhibitions. Literary critic Nakayama Masakichi serves as Saito¯ Mokichi’s target for attack and ridicule in the Treatise on Shasei. In a review of Mokichi’s essay, Naka- yama once wrote, “Originally ‘shasei’ meant a means of painting, purely static and without any element of time and rhythm.” This superficial definition pro- voked the polemical Mokichi to write: “I believe he is wrong. Courbet’s La Mer Orageuse, for instance, is it not a painting from nature? Doesn’t it contain strong rhythms of nature? How about his Falaise d’Etretat après l’Orage? Isn’t it a true shasei? Can you deny shasei and rhythms in the still-life works of Cé- zanne?” This surprise attack by quoting names and works of Courbet and Cé- zanne must have been very threatening to the unprepared Nakayama. Courbet seems to have been a favorite artist of Mokichi’s at that time. His name is quoted twice more, and La Mer Orageuse is again discussed as a good example of a work in which “a persistent pursuit of the real, existence, nature, reveals in the end the depth of the life of the artist” and is finally even said to parallel poems by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro and Masaoka Shiki. Kishida Ryu¯sei (1891–1929) was one of few contemporary Japanese artists whom Mokichi knew well and appreciated highly. He mentions Ryu¯sei’s masterpiece, Landscape of a Cut (1915), together with Rodin’s Bust of a Lady in his Treatise and poses the same question as with Courbet about the nonstatic composition of the painting. In another chapter Mokichi again discusses Ryu¯sei’s Landscape of a Cut and mentions other oil paintings from his “So¯dosha” period, such as Landscape near Yoyogi (1915), Landscape near Osaki (1915), A Road on the Cliff in Winter (1915), and An Alley in Early Summer (1917). He even quotes a passage from Ryu¯sei’s essay: “I went out often to the nearby fields to sketch (shasei) and each time I was struck by the mysterious, fresh, living force of black soil and red clay.”

4 It has often been noted that in the Treatise on Shasei in Tanka Poetry, Mokichi’s terminology looks and sounds very German. For instance, to explain the key word “jisso¯” (the real) of that famous definition of shasei, Mokichi simply says, “You may understand it as roughly equivalent to ‘das Reale,’ if you prefer West- 212 Haga To¯ru ern language. Or, in more simple terms, say ‘aspects of reality.’” Mokichi uses German vocabulary quite lightheartedly as if addressing a friendly circle of high school students in prewar Japan. The term “kannyu¯” (to see/look into) has also been frequently used in poets’ and scholars’ circles since Mokichi coined this term, although today the meaning of the word is different from when it was first created. There are authentic Chinese idioms such as “gonyu¯” (to attain enlightenment), “sannyu¯”(to participate in), and “botsunyu¯” (to absorb oneself in) on the one hand and “kansho¯” (contemplation) and “kansatsu” (observation) on the other. Why then did Mokichi have to combine “kan” (to see) and “nyu¯” (to enter) to articulate his thought? Apparently, Mokichi was somehow worried about this coinage. Fourteen years later, in 1934, he wrote a short essay on the word “kannyu¯”in which he reported that he had since discovered three or four earlier uses of the term in old Chinese texts. He recalls that, without knowing these in 1920, he may have had in mind the German noun Anschauung as well as the German verb hinein- shauen (to look into) when creating the word.4 “Kanshu¯” was too passive for him and “kansatsu” too positivistic, so he coined “kannyu¯” to suggest the active, strong grasp of the life of things through poetic, intuitive, and sympathetic projection of the self, while also taking up some of the religious nuances of “gonyu¯”or “sannyu¯.” As a result, the phrase took the verbal form of “jisso¯ni kannyu¯shi” instead of a noun form of “jisso¯no kannyu¯.” The expression “to represent the life where nature and the self are unified in an original one” might also have been better said in German than in Japa- nese. Here it is clear that “shasei” does not mean simple sketching or drawing. Life means much more than daily life, naturalistic scenes of life, or life science. In the Treatise on Shasei, he elaborates on it, saying that “‘life’ here means the breath of the eternal life of nature, the vital animation of all beings of heaven and earth, that is to say ‘inochi.’” Hence, the poet’s vision of life was a sort of amalgam of the native, inner, animistic sense of nature of a farmer’s son and the German philosophers’ concept of Lebens-philosophie. In the Treatise Mokichi quotes a long passage from Watsuji Tetsuro¯ to support his notion of a “life that unifies nature and the self.” Watsuji argues that “this notion of nature contains all sensuous elements and the life active behind them.” Following the quotation, Mokichi says, “My view of nature is quite similar to this.” Indeed, he may have learned much from Watsuji’s essay “To Deepen Nature,” the fourth part of a long essay “Thinking and Arts” included in the book Gu¯zo¯ Saiko¯ (The Revival of Idols, 1918). In the Taisho¯era, Watsuji was a philosopher of “Leben” who represented, along with Abe Jiro¯, the second stage of Nietzsche’s reception in modern Ja- Saito¯ Mokichi’s Poetics of Shasei 213 pan. Nietzsche was interpreted as a thinker of “Leben,” following the first stage of Nietzsche’s introduction as a thinker of individualism and the Übermensch, initiated by Takayama Chogyu¯ and others.5 The time of Mokichi’s Treatise on Shasei is certainly a very interesting period in intellectual history; new thoughts, ideas, and ideologies came into Japan, one after another, from postwar Western Europe, Russia, and America. French and German vitalism was dominant, as Suzuki Sadami has discussed in his recent studies. Nietzsche above all was the most favorite European poet and thinker for Saito¯Mokichi. On his graduation from the Faculty of Medical Science at the Imperial University in December 1910 at the age of twenty-eight, he bought all available volumes of Nietzsche in German Taschenausgabe. According to Hi- kami Hidehiro’s detailed study, “Saito¯Mokichi and Nietzsche,” 6 Mokichi was especially fascinated by Morgenrote, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, and Ge- dichte. His reading of Nietzsche was for many years an inexhaustible source of inspiration for his poetic creativity as well as his studies of tanka poetry. He thought that Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, for instance, whom he admired as the greatest of the Man’yo¯ poets, was the most Dionysian in the Nietzschean sense. In Hitomaro’s long and short poems Mokichi found a “will to life,” a “vital chaos,” a “strong impulse toward life” (Lebensdrang) and the tragic. His essay “Notes of Personal Views on Kakinomoto no Hitomaro” (1934) shows, according to Hikami, the unusual depth and originality of Mokichi’s understanding of Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the poet could not be a simple follower of Nietz- sche in the Far East. Hikami puts it this way:

The sympathy Mokichi kept for Nietzsche all his life is not an adulation nor a naive admiration for a famous European philosopher. Rather, everything came from the fact that the inner belief and will power which were at the base of his creativity were very close to those of Nietzsche. Not that Mokichi learnt from Nietzsche, but the inner logic he was aware of through his creativity led him to Nietzsche and let him feel a sort of blood relation with him.7

Assimilating Nietzsche, German Lebensphilosophie, Courbet, Rodin, Van Gogh, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, Mori O¯ gai, and Kishida Ryu¯sei, the giant poet of twentieth-century Japan continued all his life to open up a shining road of shasei in tanka poetry. One last point: Mokichi seems to have known, although more than ten years after he wrote his Treatise on Shasei, the work of the great German philosophers of life, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. In his First Introduction to Tanka (1933), Mokichi records, “Wilhelm Dilthey says about poetry: ‘Poesie ist Dar- stellung und Ausdruck des Lebens.’ ... This is almost the same as my deﬁnition of shasei. He says also: ‘Sie drückt das Erlebnis aus, und sie stellt die äussere Wirk- 214 Haga To¯ru lichkeit des Lebens dar.’” 8 Mokichi, however, did not go toward philosophic systematization. Instead, he devoted his life of seventy years to create the Mogami River–like or rainbow-like poetic “Ausdruck” of the depth of his inner life:

Mogami-gawa The snow-ﬁlled sakashiranami no twilight has arrived tatsu madeni to where the churning fubuku yube to white-capped waves rise up narinikeru kamo on the Mogami River.9 NOTES

Introduction

1. “At the same time, however, The Aesthetics of Discontent reminded me again and again that much of our scholarly work—especially work on very old literature and authors—is itself a form of fiction: fiction in which dreams of universal humanity, Japanese uniqueness, moral righteousness, hard-nosed practicalness, or theoretical rigor marshal a few facts into more or less plausible but still largely imagined configurations. No experiment can confirm our findings, since the truth vanished long ago.” Royall Tyler, “Review of The Aesthetics of Discontent,” Journal of Japanese Studies 18, no. 2 (1992): 615. 2. I have addressed this issue in a lecture that I gave in Kyoto on April 15, 1997, at the Ja- pan Foundation. The text is published as “Yowaki Shii: Kaishakugaku no Mirai wo Minagara” (Weak Thought: A Look at the Future of Hermeneutics), 95th Nichibunken Forum (December 1997), pp. 1–39. See also my articles “The New as Violence and the Hermeneutics of Slimness,” Proceedings of the Midwest Association for Japanese Literary Studies 4 (summer 1998): 83 –102, and “Japan’s Missing Alternative: Weak Thought and the Hermeneutics of Slimness,” Versus: Re- configuring Cultural Semiotics (1999). I have tried to remedy the situation by addressing the notion of Japanese aesthetics, which I consider an important footnote in the Japanese history of interpretation, in my Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), and A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001). 3. Gianni Vattimo, Oltre l’Interpretazione: Il Significato dell’Ermeneutica per la Filosofia (Bari: Laterza, 1994), p. 3. 4. Gianni Vattimo, La Fine della Modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), p. 163.

Chapter 1: Method, Hermeneutics, Truth

1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 320 –321. 2. Published later in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959). 3. Rorty, pp. 320 –321. 4. Truth and Method (Tübingen: Mohr, 1950). 5. In Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950). 6. The review remained unpublished until 1976, when, shortly before he died, Heidegger included it in the third edition of Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976).

215 216 Notes to Pages 17–19

Chapter 2: Poetics of Intransitivity

1. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra 3,” translated with an introduction and notes by R. J. Holingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 102–103. 2. I want to mention a few papers of mine as indices showing how deeply this way of thinking—which, as will be clarified later, is far from being my personal thought but is something imposed on me by the Japanese language—has been rooted in me. With regard to the theory of creation, “Ethique Propre à l’Artiste,” JTLA 6 (1982), originally published in Japanese in 1962; “Beyond the Analogia Creationis—Structure of Artistic Creation” (in Japanese, 1981); “Acte et Connaissance dans l’Art—Retour de Poiétique à Herméneutique,” JTLA 5 (1981); and “Rhétorique Comme Ars Inveniendi—Une Philosophie des Figures,” JTLA 13 (1989), first published in Japanese in 1983. See also articles in my Dictionary of Aesthetics (in Japanese) (Tokyo: University Tokyo Press, 1995). The idea that “something truly valuable (or beautiful) is not made by man, but given to man” concerns not only the theory of creation but also “aesthetics” as the theory of appreciation. The Western idea that our peculiar, so-called aesthetic (or “disinterested”) attitude makes the object aesthetic (beautiful or beautiful-like) is diametrically opposed view to the view of intransitivity I present in this chapter. In fact, a critical stance against the concept of the aesthetic and modern Western aesthetics has always been the leading idea of my studies in aesthetics. See my “Puissance du Beau, Impuissance de l’Esthétique— Considération sur l’Essence du Beau Na- turel,” JTLA 2 (1978); and “L’Esthétique de l’Intérêt—de d’Aubignac à Sulzer,” JTLA 10 (1986). The first is related to one of the basic ideas developed in my recent publication, Aesthet- ics on Non-Western Principles, version 0.5 (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie, 1998). The second essay constitutes the basis of my doctorate thesis, “Studies of the History of Aesthetics in Eighteenth Century France” (in Japanese, 1997). 3. Grammatically, the middle voice in some Western languages represents the intransitive concept. For example, Greek—in which the middle voice is distinguished morphologically from the active voice—is quite similar to the verbal system of Japanese, as I will explain. I am sure that it is this similarity that makes many Japanese scholars willing to speak “in the sense of a middle voice.” However, according to Benveniste (see note 4), the Greek middle voice expresses the state of things, while the Japanese intransitive verbs express the efficacious change in things (see the conclusion of this chapter). I thank Professor Arnold Berleant, who posed a question on the middle voice when I presented the original version of this chapter at the Fourteenth International Congress for Aesthet- ics in Ljubljana in September 1998, and Professor Gianni Vattimo, who made a similar remark at the “Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation” conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, in December 1998. 4. Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de Linguistique Générale, vol. 1, (Paris: Gallimard, 1996; first published in Les Études Philosophiques, no. 4 [1958]), chap. 6, pp. 63 –74; the quotations are taken from p. 73 and p. 70. 5. Homer, Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, The Loeb Classical Library, 1965), p. 3. 6. See, for example, Pierre de Ronsard’s La Franciade (1572), which begins with the lines “Muse qui tiens les sommets de Parnasse, / Guide ma langue, et me chante la race / Des Roys francoys yssuz de Francion / Enfant d’Hector, Troyen de nation” (ll. 1– 4.). The second example is from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of the Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and Notes to Pages 19–21 217 regain the blissful Seat, / Sing Heav’nly Muse” (ll. 1– 6). The third is from Le Lutrin (1674), a parody by Nicolas Boileau, which represents the transition from the archaic to modernity: “Je chante les combats, et ce Prelat terrible, / Qui par ses longs travaux, et sa force invincible, / Dans une illustre Eglise exerçant son grand coeur, / Fit placer à la fin un Lutrin dans le Choeur. / C’est envain que le Chantre abusant d’un faux titre, / Deux fois le reportant l’en couvrit tout entier, / Muse, redy-moy donc quelle ardeur de vengenance, / De ces Hommes sacrez rompit l’intelligence...” (ll. 1–10). In these lines, the poet distinguishes between his role and that of the Muses. The poet presents the concrete story, and the Muses inspire in him an idea of the subjective motives of the heroes (“quelle ardeur de vengence”). Voltaire offers a further modernized invocation in his Henriade (1728): “Je chante ce héros qui régna sur la France / Et par droit de conquete et par droit de naissance; / Qui par de longs malheurs apprit à gouverner, / Calma les factions, sut vaincre et pardonner, / Confondit et Mayenne, et la Ligue, et l’Ibère, / Et fut de ses sujets le vainqueur et le père. / / Descends du haut des cieux, auguste Vérité! / Re- pands sur mes écrits ta force et ta clarté!” (ll. 1–8) The Muses have left, and in their place the poet relies on the Truth. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in Aesthetics, translated by Carleton Dallery, edited by H. Osborne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 77. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., p. 63. Although the previous quotation presents only Michaux’s understanding of Klee’s paintings, the thought of Klee considerably inspired Merleau-Ponty. 10. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, edited by Brunschwicg, frag. 4. 11. On the Art of the No¯Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, translated by J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 116. In this collection the title of the treatise is translated as “Disciplines for the Joy of Art.” 12. Ibid., p. 117. 13. Ibid., pp. 117–118. 14. I find the word “charm” in Rimer and Masakazu’s translation too strong; it is inappro- priate to the religious meaning in the original text. It seems to me that the translators take the word “myo¯ ” from the viewpoint of modern Western aesthetics. Therefore, I have modified the translation accordingly. 15. See Yanabu Akira, Hon’yaku no Shiso¯ (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1977), p. 75. 16. We find this usage in the work of Shinran (1172–1262), founder of the Jo¯do Shinshu¯ sect of Buddhism, in his discussion of the notion of “jinen ho¯ni” (“let the thing be such by itself”). See Sato M., “Jinen Ho¯ni in Shinran,” in Collection of Japanese Thought (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1983). See also the introduction by Sagara T. in the same book. 17. Tamura, “Hongaku Thought in the History of Japanese Thought,” in Collection of Japa- nese Thought, pp. 127–128. On the notion of hongaku, compare ibid., pp. 123 –127. 18. See Hino Tatsuo, “Nature and Artifice in the Philosophy of Sorai,” in Collection of Japa- nese Thought, pp. 192–195. 19. Note, for instance, that one of the five volumes of the Collection of Japanese Thought is dedicated to “Nature.” See also Sagara To¯ru, The Heart of the Japanese (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984), chap. 8. At the beginning of the chapter, Sagara quotes the three major elements of the Japanese character according to the philosopher Kuki Shu¯zo¯: “naturally,” “(high) spirits,” and “resignation.” Ibid., p. 219. 20. See Gorai Shigeru, “Training of ‘Shugendo¯’ and the Return to the Primitive,” in Collec- tion of Japanese Thought, p. 56. 218 Notes to Pages 21–33

21. Maruyama Masao, “Ancient Layers of the Historical Consciousness,” in Japanese Thought, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1972), pp. 3 – 46. To be more precise, Maruyama’s idea is not dichotomous but tripartite, and it is typological rather than comparativist. His basic categories of cosmogony are “tsukuru” (to make), “umu” (to give birth or to produce), and “naru” (to form itself or to become). Japanese thought and Christianity present two opposite cases. 22. These concepts come from Okutsu Keiichiro¯, “Transitivitization, Intransitivitization, and Polarization,” in Intransitive and Transitive Verbs, edited by Suga K. and Hayatsu E. (Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobo¯, 1995), pp. 73, 65 – 66. The essay was ﬁrst published in 1967. 23. Nishio T., 1954, p. 45; Nomura T., 1987, p. 140; W. M. Jakobsen, 1989, p. 170; Hay- atsu E., 1989, p. 179, all in Intransitive and Transitive Verbs. 24. See Okutsu K., in Suga K. and Hayatsu E., eds., Intransitive and Transitive Verbs, p. 73. Another term, “tairitsu tado¯shi / jido¯shi” (opposing transitive/intransitive verb) is found in Aoki R., “The Causative—with Regard to the Transitive and the Intransitive,” 1977, ibid., p. 115. 25. Hayatsu E., “On the Difference of the Transitive with and without Its Pair Intransitive,” 1989, in ibid., p. 192. 26. Ibid., pp. 181–182. Sometimes it is difﬁcult to identify transitive and intransitive pairs. On this issue, see the Okutsu, Nishio, and Aoki, ibid. 27. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), p. 130. 28. Ibid., pp. 149–150. 29. Miyajima T., “Descriptive Studies of the Meanings and Uses of Verbs” (1972), in In- transitive and Transitive Verbs, p. 228. 30. The linguist Ikegami Y. proposes a typological distinction between “the language of ‘suru’ (to do),” corresponding to English, and “the language of ‘naru’ (to become),” represented by Japanese. See Ikegami, Linguistics of “Do” and “Become” (Tokyo: Taishukan Shoten, 1981).

Chapter 3: The Hermenutic Approach to Japanese Modernity

1. Kuki Shu¯zo¯, “Iki” no Ko¯zo¯, vol. 1 of Kuki Shu¯zo¯ Zenshu¯ (hereafter Zenshu¯), pp. 7–12, 78. 2. Kuki Shu¯zo¯, “Nihonteki Seikaku ni Tsuite,” in Zenshu¯, vol. 3, pp. 367, 399. 3. Martin Heidegger, Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache, vol. 12, of Gesamtausgabe, pp. 79–146. 4. Ibid., p. 85. 5. See Kuki Shu¯zo¯, “Haidegga¯ no Tetsugaku” chapter 8 of Ningen to Jitsuzon, vol. 3 of Zenshu¯. 6. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). 7. On the “art-way,” see O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke, “Zum und aus dem japanischen Kunstweg. Ent- wurf einer ästhetischen Auffassung der Welt,” in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 6 (1996): 995 –1006. 8. The first edition of the text is preserved in the library of Tenri University in Nara. 9. See the chapter “Oku no Dan” in Zeami’s Hanakagami (The Flower Held to the Mirror) and the first section of Kyakuraika (The Returned Flower). 10. See the chapter “Metsugo” (After Death) in Nanbo¯roku. 11. Ibid. 12. See Kyorai Sho¯ (Kyorai’s Record). 13. See O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke, Kire—Das “Schöne” in Japan. Philosophisch-aesthetische Reflexionen zu Geschichte und Moderne (Cologne: DuMont, 1994). Notes to Pages 33– 45 219

14. In his essay “On Ikebana” (1953), Nishitani Keiji points out that this cutting is the essence of the art of ikebana. For a German translation of the essay, see Rolf Elberfeld, trans., “Über die japanische Kunst des Blumensteckens,” in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 98 (1991): 314 –320. 15. On this issue, see O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke, “Kire and Iki,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 2 (New York, 1998), pp. 553 –555. 16. Modern art, which insists on being independent of all outward nature and of course also of religion, would perhaps consider the art-way as merely premodern and classical. If we remark, however, that the concept of nature in modern art is also no more self-evident today, we find ourselves once more confronted with the question of what nature is. Take, for example, Arthur Danto’s discussion of “art-world,” in his essay “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 ( January– December 1964), 571– 684). Danto quotes a Chinese Zen master, Ch’ing Yuan, who wrote: “Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got the very substance I am at rest. For it is just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers” (p. 579). We can see in these words an expression of the discontinuous continuity between the nature that Ch’ing Yuan first saw and the nature that he saw thirty years later. This “cut- continuum” is the essence of the art-way, in which “way” and “nature” mean the same thing, and in which the commonplace life-world and the art-world stand in discontinuous continuity. Danto’s quotes Ch’ing Yuan in connection with his discussion of the “artworld,” that is, the world which is produced through “artistic identifications.” Mountains and rivers in the first sense are artistically identified with the second sense. Danto thinks that the more complex the individual members of the art-world become and the more one knows of the entire population of the artworld, the richer one’s experience with any of its members. He may see in the words of Ch’ing Yuan just this enriching of the population of the art-world. I regard it as a Zen Bud- dhistic background for the art-way. When we look at contemporary discussions on “nature- aesthetics” in Europe, we can see that the “nature” of the art-way is just as traditional as it is a contemporary subject for aesthetic hermeneutics today. 17. See O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke, Kire —Das Schöne in Japan.

Chapter 4: Frame and Link

1. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p. 358. 2. Ibid., p. 357. 3. Cited in ibid., p. 358. 4. Ibid., p. 368. 5. Ibid.

Chapter 5: The Eloquent Stillness of Stone

Much of the material in this chapter is drawn from my essay “The Role of Rock in the Japa- nese Dry Landscape Garden,” in François Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape, trans. Graham Parkes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). I am grateful to the University of Chicago Press for its permission to use the essay in the present discussion. 1. The original setting is Mirei Shigemori’s suggestion, as cited in Pierre and Suzanne Ram- 220 Notes to Pages 45–52 bach, Gardens of Longevity in China and Japan: The Art of the Stone Raisers, trans. André Marling (New York, 1987), p. 180. 2. Do¯gen, Sho¯bo¯genzo¯, “Keisei-sanshiki” (Voices of the River-valley, Shapes of the Mountain). Further references to Do¯gen will appear simply as the title of the relevant chapter title of his major work, Sho¯bo¯genzo¯ (in vol. 1 of Do¯gen Zenji Zenshu¯,ed. O¯ kubo Do¯shu¯[Tokyo, 1969–1970]). I follow, with occasional modiﬁcation, the translations by Nishijima and Cross in Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, 4 vols. (Woking, Surrey, 1994–1999). 3. See, for example, Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks. 4. Do¯gen, “Keisei-sanshiki.” 5. Do¯gen, “Mujo¯Seppo¯” (Nonsentient Beings Expound the Dharma). 6. Cited in Karl Hennig, Der Karesansui-Garten als Ausdruck der Kultur der Muromachi-Zeit (Hamburg, 1982), p. 195. 7. Sakuteiki, as cited in Hennig, Der Karesansui-Garten, p. 193. Compare Shimoyama, Saku- teiki, p. 5. 8. Modiﬁed from Wybe Kuitert’s translation, in his Themes, Scenes, and Taste in the History of Japanese Garden (Amsterdam, 1988), p. 55, in the light of the original, in Mori Osamu, “Saku- teiki” no Sekai: Heiancho¯no Teienbi (Tokyo, 1986), p. 43. 9. See Augustin Berque, “L’Appareillage de l’Ici vers l’Ailleurs dans les Jardins Japonais,” Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident (1999). Berque argues convincingly that this kind of double movement, in which the elsewhere and elsewhen are invoked in the here and now (appareillage means both “installation” and “getting under sail”) is a primary principle of the art of the garden in Japan. 10. Shimoyama Shigemaru, trans., Sakuteiki: The Book of [the] Garden (Tokyo, 1976), p. ix. Yuriko Saito places appropriate emphasis on the importance of “following the request” of the rocks in her essay “Japanese Gardens: The Art of Improving Nature,” Chanoyu Quarterly 83 (1996): 41– 61. 11. Sakuteiki, p. 23. 12. Ibid., pp. 24, 25. 13. Ibid., p. 26. 14. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 15. Kuitert, Themes, Scenes, and Taste, pp. 137–139. 16. Sansui narabini Yakeizu, secs. 4, 14, 31, 78, 84. I follow the translation of the complete work by David A. Slawson in his Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens (Tokyo, 1987), pp. 142–175. Slawson reads the work’s title as Senzui narabi ni Yagyo¯ no Zu and translates it as Illustrations for Designing Mountain, Water, and Hillside Field Landscapes. 17. Sansui manual, sec. 12. 18. See Kuitert, Themes, Scenes, and Tastes, pp. 140 –144. 19. Muso¯ Soseki, “Sermon at the Opening of Tenryu¯ji,” in Ryusaku Tsunoda et al., eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 1 (New York, 1964), pp. 252–255, 254. 20. Ku¯kai, “The Difference between Exoteric and Esoteric Buddhism,” in Ku¯kai: Major Works, trans. Yoshito S. Hakeda (New York, 1972), esp. pp. 151–152; Do¯gen, “Bussho¯” (Buddha- nature). 21. See the section titled “Stone in the Western Tradition” of my essay “The Role of Rock in the Japanese Dry Landscape Garden,” in Reading Zen in the Rocks. Notes to Pages 53– 61 221

22. Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, Zen and the Fine Arts (Tokyo, 1971), p. 88. This interpretation of the garden at Ryo¯anji in terms of Hisamatsu’s “seven characteristics” of Zen aesthetics is somewhat dry. 23. The following discussion is inspired by O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke’s treatment of the aesthetic implications of the cut-continuance in his book Kire no Ko¯zo¯: Nihonbi to Gendai Sekai (Structures of the Cut: The Beautiful in Japan and the Contemporary World) (Tokyo, 1986). There is an excellent German translation by Rolf Elberfeld, Kire: Das Schöne in Japan (Cologne, 1994), which is an expanded edition furnished with fine photographs. For a brief account of the idea of the cut, see O¯ hashi’s essay “Kire and Iki,” in Michael Kelly, ed., The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 553 –555. 24. Nishitani Keiji, “The Japanese Art of Arranged Flowers,” trans. Jeff Shore, in Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, eds., World Philosophy: A Text with Readings (New York, 1995), pp. 23 –27. 25. Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 137– 140, 157–159. O¯ hashi discusses the rock garden at Ryo¯anji in terms of “likeness” in chapter 2 of Kire no Ko¯zo¯ as well as Muso¯’s use of the kanji for “temporary.” 26. Do¯gen, “Zazenshi” (The point of Zazen). 27. Nishitani Keiji, as recounted by Robert Carter in his Becoming Bamboo: Western and East- ern Explorations of the Meaning of Life (Montreal, 1992), p. 95. 28. Dietrich Seckel, Einführung in die Kunst Ostasiens (Munich, 1960), p. 360. 29. For a more detailed discussion, see my essay “Voices of Mountains, Trees, and Rivers: Ku¯kai, Do¯gen, and a Deeper Ecology,” in Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryu¯ken Williams, eds., Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection between Dharma and Deeds (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 111–128. 30. Ku¯kai, “The Difference between Exoteric and Esoteric Buddhism” and “Attaining En- lightenment in This Very Existence,” in Ku¯kai: Major Works. 31. For a fine explication of hosshin seppo¯, see Thomas P. Kasulis, “Reality as Embodiment: An Analysis of Ku¯kai’s Sokushinjo¯butsu and Hosshin Seppo¯,” in Jane Marie Law, ed., Religious Reflec- tions on the Human Body (Bloomington, 1995), pp. 166 –185. 32. Ku¯kai, “Sho¯rai Mokuroku,” in Major Works, p. 145. 33. Do¯gen, Sho¯bo¯genzo¯, “Keisei-sanshiki.” 34. Do¯gen, “Bussho¯” (Buddha-nature); “Sangai-yuishin” (The Triple World Is Mind Only). 35. Do¯gen, “Mujo¯-seppo¯,” “Keisei-sanshiki.” 36. Ku¯kai, in Major Works, p. 91. 37. Do¯gen, “Jisho¯Zammai” (The Sama¯dhi of Self-Enlightenment). 38. See James Hillman’s eloquent essay “In the Gardens—A Psychological Memoir,” in Con- sciousness and Reality: Studies in Memory of Toshihiko Izutsu (Tokyo, 1998), pp. 175 –182. 39. Nishitani speaks of the “double exposure” of the life and death perspectives in Religion and Nothingness, pp. 50 –53. For more on this topic, see my essay “Death and Detachment: Mon- taigne, Zen, Heidegger, and the Rest,” in Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon, eds., Death and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 164 –180.

Chapter 6: Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware

1. A good, concise account in English of Norinaga’s theory of mono no aware and the intellectual currents from which it was born can be found in Peter Nosco, Remembering Paradise: Na- 222 Notes to Pages 61–70 tivism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). See also Matsumoto Shigeru, Motoori Norinaga (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). 2. Watsuji Tetsuro¯, Nihon Seishin Kenkyu¯ (Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1992), pp. 221–226. 3. Ibid., pp. 226 –227. 4. Ibid., p. 227. 5. O¯ nishi Yoshinori, Yu¯gen to Aware (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939), p. 142. 6. Ibid., pp. 219–220. 7. Ibid., p. 106. 8. For instance, sees Norinaga borrowing the term from popular Edo culture, in Hino Tat- suo, Norinaga to Akinari (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1984), chap. 7; Momokawa Takahito explains mono no aware as an emotional phenomenon of Edo merchant townsmen, in Momokawa Taka- hito, Uchi Naru Norinaga (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1987); and Takahashi Toshikazu shows the link between Norinaga’s thought and the tradition of poetry and poetic theory that engulfed him, in Takahashi Toshikazu, Motoori Norinaga no Kagaku (Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 1996). 9. The third chapter of “Aware ni Tsuite” consists of a string of lengthy quotations from Norinaga’s various works. The fourth is a detailed discussion of quotations that focus on the question of emotional depth. 10. For summaries in English of O¯ nishi’s broader theoretical project, consult Ueda Makoto’s “Yu¯gen and Erhabene: O¯ nishi Yoshinori’s Attempt to Synthesize Japanese and Western Aes- thetics,” in J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Culture and Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), and Takeuchi Toshio, “O¯ nishi’s Aesthetics as a Japanese System,” Journal of Aes- thetics and Art Criticism (1965). For an English translation of the section on aware in O¯ nishi’s Bi- gaku (Aesthetics), see Michele Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), pp. 122–140. 11. O¯ nishi’s treatment of classical literature seems to come as an afterthought. He touches on them in the twelfth and thirteenth of the fifteen chapters that constitute Yu¯gen to Aware. By this time, his theory is already consolidated. 12. It has been argued that Norinaga’s positivistic methodology was very likely influenced by the work of Keichu¯,whom he read during his period of study in Kyoto. Keichu¯iswell known for his commentaries on the Man’yo¯shu¯, wherein he raised the level of philological methodology to a height unprecedented in previous studies of Japanese literature. Like Norinaga after him, Keichu¯ also rejected the notion that the value of literature was to be found in the morals it presented. He strove for objectivity in approaching the text, an objectivity that would be obtained only were one to leave behind one’s own age and enter into the language of earlier times. For a good summary of Keichu¯’s life and work, see Nosco, Remembering Paradise, pp. 41–70. For a discussion of his influence on Norinaga, see Motoori Norinaga no Kagaku. 13. Chap. 7. 14. I have written in more detail about this process, particularly concerning the role that the term “aya” plays in Norinaga’s thought, in “The Problem of Defining Japanese Critical Termi- nology: Motoori Norinaga’s Explanation of ‘Aya,’” Shirin, vol. 24 (Osaka: Izumi Shoten, 1998). 15. I will give one poem as an example of each grammatical form in the next several notes.

The dewdrops which rest Upon each and every leaf of the word “aware”: Notes to Pages 70 –76 223

Tears shed in longing for the past. (Anonymous, Kokinshu¯, p. 940)

16. An example:

Here on Awaji Isle, which faces the shore at Suminoe, There is not a single day that passes When I speak not of you, “aware.” (Anonymous, Man’yo¯shu¯, p. 3197)

17. An example:

Is it I alone who feels aware At the chirp of crickets beside the wild pinks Here in these evening shadows? (Sosei Ho¯shi, Kokinshu¯, p. 244)

18. An example:

Seen in aware, though only from afar— Until I broke off a stem I had not yet enough Of the color and fragrance of the plums. (Sosei Ho¯shi, Kokinshu¯, p. 37)

19. An example:

I have no special feelings For the mountains of the capital, But it is truly aware to watch As they fade out of sight. (Yuge no Yoshitoki, Shu¯ishu¯, p. 350)

20. Anonymous, Shu¯ishu¯, p. 511. 21. Gosenshu¯, p. 1271. 22. Uchi Naru Norinaga, pp. 76 –79, 258 –270.

Chapter 7: Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object

1. In the following, I focus on the theoretical part of Watsuji’s ethics, rather than on his writings on the “Japanese spirit” and culture in general because Watsuji’s ethical theory explicitly presents his views on hermeneutics. 2. See, for example, Peter Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). For a more nuanced critique, see the essays of Naoki Sakai, “Return to the West/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsuro¯’s Anthropology and Discussions of Authenticity” and “Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism,” in his book Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 72–116, 153 –176. 224 Notes to Pages 76 – 82

3. For a study that mitigates Watsuji’s position, see William R. LaFleur, “An Ethics of As-Is: State and Society in the Rinrigaku of Watsuji Tetsuro¯,” in Léon Vandermeersch, ed., La Société Civile Face à l’État dans les Traditions Chinoise, Japonaise, Coréenne et Vietnamienne (Paris: École d’Extréme-Orient, 1994), pp. 453 – 464. 4. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1967 [1927]), p. 38. Unless otherwise indicated, all quoted English translations are those of Joan Stambaugh, trans., Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). German pagination is given in the margins of her English translation. 5. Sein und Zeit, p. 41. 6. Critics of Watsuji often point out that section 74 of Sein und Zeit explicitly interprets Das- ein’s ineluctable historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) in terms of being with others: Dasein’s occurrence (Geschehen) is an occurrence-with (Mitgeschehen), a destiny (Geschick) that bears on the community or the people (Volk). “The fateful destiny of Da-sein in and with its ‘generation’ constitutes the complete, authentic, occurrence of Da-sein” (Sein und Zeit, pp. 384 –385). In support of Watsuji’s point, however, we can note that no sooner has Heidegger said this than he connects “authentic historicity” back to one’s authentic and resolute being-toward-death, a way of being that only the individual Dasein can be. However much the total context (ganzer Zusammenhang, translation modified) of Dasein is a matter of historically being with others, Heidegger lapses into describing it “from its birth to its death” (Sein und Zeit, p. 387). The site of authenticity is consistently one’s own unique way of being; “authentic” modifies many terms in Heidegger, but never “being-with.” 7. See Watsuji Tetsuro¯ Zenshu¯ (hereafter WTZ), vol. 10 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1961–1963, reprinted 1976 –1978), pp. 3, 11. 8. WTZ, vol. 10, p. 17. 9. See the entries in such classical dictionaries as Morohashi Tetsuji, Dai Kan-Wa Jiten (To- kyo: Taishu¯kan, 1966 –1968), and various Kokugo Daijiten. The shift in meaning of ningen from the classical to the modern sense corresponds to a change in the Japanese reading of the characters, from jinkan to ningen. Watsuji devotes chapter 2 of his earlier work, Ningen no Gaku to Shite no Rinrigaku (Ethics as the Study of Human Being, 1934), to the shifts in the word’s meaning. See WTZ, vol. 9. 10. This is my paraphrase of points made in WTZ, vol. 10, p. 22; see the translation Wat- suji Tetsuro¯’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan (hereafter Ethics) by Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 19. In reference to his criticism of Heidegger for ignoring an authentic being-with-others, note that Watsuji for his part seems to ignore any inauthentic ways of being with others that his own earlier analysis of the meanings of hito would support. For example, hito in certain contexts can connote “people,” as in “what will people think?”; “hito iu¯”translates as “they say . . .” See WTZ, vol. 9, chap. 2. 11. WTZ, vol. 10, p. 12. 12. Ibid., pp. 31 ff. 13. Ibid., p. 43. 14. Ibid., p. 47. 15. Dilthey himself suggested that all scientific explanation (Erklaren) is grounded in understanding (Verstehen) and hinted at the priority of the cultural sciences over the natural sciences. 16. WTZ, vol. 10, pp. 35, 36, 46; Ethics, pp. 33, 34, 43. 17. See WTZ, vol. 10, p. 22; Ethics, p. 19. Watsuji uses the world “structure” (ko¯zo¯) here in- Notes to Pages 83–93 225 stead of “dimension”; my choice of words makes the connection to the interpretation he will give rather than to the term used by his predecessors. 18. WTZ, vol. 10, p. 21; Ethics, p. 18. 19. WTZ, vol. 10, p. 27; Ethics, p. 24. 20. WTZ, vol. 10, p. 36; Ethics, p. 34. 21. These sections on “the historical-climatic [ fu¯doteki] structure of human existence,” constituting all of WTZ, vol. 11, have not been published in English translation. 22. Naoki Sakai makes this point about Watsuji’s ethical and political writings. See the previously cited articles in his Translation and Subjectivity.

Chapter 8: Nishi Amane on Aesthetics

1. In a draft version of a lecture. 2. In the section on bunjingaku in his Hyakugaku Renkan. 3. In the section on philosophy in Hyakugaku Renkan. 4. Ibid. 5. In Bimyo¯Gakusetsu (A Treatise on the Science of the Beautiful). For an English translation of this text, see Michele Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader, pp. 26 –37. 6. In Hyakuichi Shinron. 7. In Nishi’s Japanese translation of Joseph Haven’s Mental Philosophy. 8. Aso Yoshiteru, ed., Nishi Amane Tetsugaku Cho¯saku Shu¯ (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1933), p. 389; Kinsei Nihon Tetsugaku Shi (Tokyo: Kondo Shoten, 1942), p. 237. 9. O¯ kubo Toshiaki, ed., Nishi Amane Zenshu¯ (Tokyo: Munetaka Shobo¯, 1960), pp. 669 ff. 10. Mori Agata, “Nishi Amane ‘Bimyo¯Gakusetsu’ Seiritsu Nenji no Kosho,” in Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to Kyo¯zai no Kenkyu¯ 14:6. 11. On the importance of Ogyu¯ Sorai’s thought in the transition to the Edo period, see Sam- uel Hideo Yamashita, “Nature and Artiﬁce in the Writings of Ogyu¯ Sorai,” in Peter Nosco ed., Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997). 12. For a further discussion of this topic, see Hamashita Masahiro, “Jitsugaku to Shite no Bigaku” (Aesthetics as Practical Science), in Kambayashi Tsunemichi, ed., Nihon no Geijutsu Ron: Dento¯to Kindai (Kyoto: Mineruva Shobo¯, 2000). 13. Nishi Amane, Nishi Amane Zenshu¯, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Munetaka Shobo¯, 1981), p. 168. 14. Ibid., p. 421. 15. Ibid., p. 169. 16. Ibid. 17. Kaneda Tamio, Nihon Kindai Bigaku Josetsu (Kyoto: Ho¯ritsu Bunkasha, 1990), p. 169. 18. Nishi Amane, Nishi Amane Zenshu¯, vol. 11 (Tokyo: Munetaka Shobo¯, 1960), p. 479. 19. Ibid., p. 481. 20. Ibid., pp. 482 ff. 21. Ibid., p. 484. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 489. 24. Ibid. 226 Notes to Pages 93–103

25. Ibid., p. 490. 26. Ibid., p. 491. 27. Ibid. 28. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry concerning Beauty, Harmony, Design, ed. Peter Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 109. 29. Nishi’s main source of information was probably Haven’s Mental Philosophy. 30. Nishi, Nishi Amane Zenshu¯, vol. 11, pp. 484 ff. 31. Ibid., p. 492. 32. Ibid., pp. 159–164. 33. Ibid., p. 479. 34. Ibid., p. 481. 35. Ibid., p. 490. 36. Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, Nihon Bungaku Hyo¯ron Shi: Kinsei, Sai Kinsei Hen (Tokyo: Shibundo¯, 1936), pp. 1239 ff. 37. Nishi, Nishi Amane Zenshu¯, vol. 11, p. 515. 38. On the difference between Nishi Amane’s thought and Mill’s, see Koizumi Takashi, Nishi Amane to O¯ bei Shiso¯to no Deai (Tokyo: Mitsumine Shobo¯, 1989), pp. 286 ff. 39. Nishi, Nishi Amane Zenshu¯, vol. 11, p. 464.

Chapter 9: Hegel in Tokyo

1. See Karatani Ko¯jin, “Japan as Museum: Okakura Tenshin and Ernest Fenollosa,” in Alex- andra Munroe, ed., Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 33. 2. See John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), p. 76. 3. Thanks to the valiant efforts of Murakata Akiko of Kyoto University, a reconstruction now exists of the notes used for Fenollosa’s lecture, assembled from his papers, which are available at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. For her rigorous analysis of the recon- structed text, see Eibunkanhyo¯ron 49 (December 1983), issued by the Kyo¯ikubu of Kyoto Uni- versity. These notes, however, are only brief sketches and confirm the general outlines of the lecture but not every aspect of the contents. 4. Indeed, it would have been impossible for me to prepare my draft translation without the help of the annotated edition of the text included in Bijutsu, edited by Aoki Shigeru, volume 17 in Nihon Kindai Shiso¯Taikei, published by Iwanami Shoten in 1989. Even the annotator ac- knowledges that there are a number of ambiguous phrases, sentences, and references, some of them attributable to the fluctuating state of Meiji-written Japanese in the early years of the modern period. In this regard, Ellen Conant has been helpful in interpreting certain aspects of the text. 5. For an account of the composition of the first history of Japanese art, see various articles in Modern Japanese Art and the West (Tokyo: Meiji Bijutsu Gakkai, 1992), esp. pp. 257–271. 6. Christine M. E. Guth’s comments are precise and insightful: “That Fenollosa crossed paths with so many collectors and dealers is evidence that the market for traditional art was already active by the time he began collecting. Clearly, Fenollosa, far from teaching the Japanese people to know their own art, as Mary Fenollosa would later claim in her introduction to Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, was totally dependent on Japanese dealers and connoisseurs for both Notes to Pages 104 –112 227 his information and his acquisitions.” See her Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mit- sui Circle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 113. 7. See ibid., p. 31. 8. The most detailed account of the Ryu¯chikai in English is by Sato¯Do¯shin in Ellen Conant et al., Nihonga: Transcending the Past, Japanese-Style Painting, 1868–1968 (St. Louis, Mo.: St. Louis Art Museum and the Japan Foundation, 1995), pp. 78 –79. 9. See Uyeno Naoteru, Japanese Arts and Crafts in the Meiji Era (Tokyo: Tokyo Bunko 1958), p. 16. 10. Kuki’s relations with Fenollosa’s colleague Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) and his son Kuki Shu¯zo¯ (1888 –1941), later to become a famous Japanese philosopher, are of the greatest interest but lie outside the scope of this chapter. 11. I found most helpful T. M. Knox’s translation, published as Hegel’s Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); for the sections on painting, see vol. 2, pp. 797–887. 12. See various entries in Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), esp. p. 26. 13. For details concerning these Paris connections, see the Sato¯Do¯shin article mentioned in note 8. Also of general interest are Gabriel Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), and Elisa Evett, The Critical Reception of Japanese Art in Late 19th Century Europe (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982). 14. A translation by Jay Rubin of the full text of So¯seki’s lecture “The Civilization of Mod- ern Japan” can be found in Kokoro and Selected Essays (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1992). The passage cited can be found on pp. 272–273. 15. For an account on this important dispute with the German geologist Edmund Nau- mann, resident in Japan from 1875 to 1885, see Richard Bowring, Mori O¯ gai and the Moderniza- tion of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 16 –20.

Chapter 10: O¯ gai, Schelling, and Aesthetics

1. Schelling, Samtliche Werke, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Nugsburg, 1856), p. 576. 2. Nishi Amane, Hyakuichi Shinron, in O¯ kubo Toshiaki, ed., Nishi Amane Zenshu¯, vol. 1 (To- kyo: Munetaka Shobo¯, 1960), pp. 288 –289. 3. Ibid., p. 29. Nishi’s Bimyo¯Gakusetsu was published for the ﬁrst time in 1933 in Nishi Amane Tetsugaku Cho¯saku Shu¯. 4. Fenollosa’s text is found in Meiji Geijutsu Bungaku Ronshu¯,MBZ, vol. 79 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1975), pp. 36 – 48. 5. Nakae Cho¯min, Ishi Bigaku: So¯ron, in Meiji Bungaku Zenshu¯, vol. 79, pp. 112–125. 6. Ibid., p. 112. 7. Mori O¯ gai, Tsukikusa Jo¯, in O¯ gai Zenshu¯, vol. 23 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1973), p. 299. 8. Aoki Shigeru, “Kaisetsu,” in Aoki Shigeru and Sakai Tadayasu, eds., Bijutsu, NKST, vol. 17 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989), p. 443. 9. The text of Toyama’s lecture and O¯ gai’s response is found in Meiji Geijutsu Bungaku Ron- shu¯, pp. 149–164 and 202–218. 10. Inoue Tetsujiro¯, “Meiji Tetsugakkai no Kaiko,” in Iwanami Ko¯za: Tetsugaku (Tokyo: Iwa- nami Shoten, 1932), pp. 6 –7. 228 Notes to Pages 112–119

11. Karaki Junzo¯, Beruzu, Mo¯su, Ke¯beru, Voshuban Shu¯, MBZ, vol. 49, pp. 377–378. 12. Mori O¯ gai, “Mo¯so¯,” in O¯ gai Zenshu¯, vol. 8, pp. 203 –204. 13. See Philosophen Lexicon, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1949), pp. 449– 454. 14. Mori O¯ gai, Shinbiron, in O¯ gai Zenshu¯, vol. 21, p. 26. 15. See E. Hartmann, Die deutsche Ästhetik seit Kant, Erster historischer-kritischer Theil der Ästhe- tik (Berlin, 1887). See also M. Schasler, Kritische Geschichte der Ästhetik, Grundlegung für die Äs- thetik als Philosophie des Schönen und der Kunst (Berlin, 1872). 16. O¯ gai Zenshu¯, vol. 23, pp. 5 – 6. 17. Ibid., pp. 1–87. 18. See A. Schwegler, Geschichte der Philosophie im Umriss-Ein Leitfaden zum Übersicht (1887).

Chapter 11: Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces

1. Kitazawa Noriaki, Me no Shinden (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1989). See also Nishikawa Nagao, “Nippongata Kokumin-Kokka no Keisei,” in Bakumatsu Meijiki no Kokumin Kokka Kei- sei to Bunkahenkyo¯ (Tokyo: Shin’yo¯sha, 1995). 2. Inaga Shigemi, “De l’Artisan à l’Artiste au Seuil de la Modernité Japonaise ou l’Implan- tation de la Notion de Beaux-Arts au Japon,” Sociologie de l’Art 8 (1995): 47– 62; Inaga Shigemi, “Bijutsu no Tasha to Shite no Nihon, Nihon no Tasha to Shite no Bijutsu,” international sym- posium on The Other in Art History, December 1996 (forthcoming). 3. Inaga Shigemi, Kaiga no Tasogare: Le Crépuscule de la Peinture, La Lutte Postume d’Édouard Manet (Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 1997), deals with this issue by taking up the case of the mythological making of Manet’s modernism. 4. Théodore Duret, “L’Art Japonais, les Livres Illustrés, les Albumes Imprimés, Hokusai,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2e pér., 1883, pp. 113 ff.; republished in Théodore Duret, Critique d’Avant-garde (Paris: Charpentier, 1885). 5. Louis Gonse, L’Art Japonais (Paris: Quintin, 1883), pp. 289–290, 270. 6. William Anderson, The Pictorial Art in Japan (London: Sampson Law, 1886), pp. 98 –99. 7. Ibid. 8. I already presented portions of the following analysis in part 1 of my paper “Impression- ist Aesthetics and Japanese Aesthetics, around a Controversy,” Kyoto Conference on Japanese Stud- ies, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, vol. 3 (Kyoto: The Japan Foundation, 1994), pp. 307–319, although in a different context. 9. Ernest Fenollosa, “Review of the Chapter on Painting in L’Art Japonais by L. Gonse,” The Japan Weekly Mail, July 12, 1884. 10. Louis Gonse, L’Art Japonais (1883), pp. 272–273. See also Louis Gonse, L’Art Japonais (rev. ed. 1926), p. 90, which, although considerably enlarged, repeats the same quotation without modiﬁcation. 11. Edmond de Goncourt, Hokousaï (1896), preface. 12. Kigi Yasuko, Hayashi Tadamasa to Sono Jidai (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1987); Brigitte Koyama-Richard, “Hayashi Tadamasa et l’Art Décoratif de l’Ère Meiji,” Journal of Human and Cultural Sciences 28, no. 2 (1997): 121–163. 13. Yamaguchi Seiichi, Fenorosa, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Sanseido¯, 1982), pp. 267–276. 14. Kobayashi Bunshichi, “Postface,” in Hanju¯ro¯ Iijima Kyoshin, Katsushika Hokusai Den Notes to Pages 120 –127 229

(Tokyo: Ho¯su¯kaku, 1893). On Philippe Burty, see Gabriel P. Weisberg, The Independent Critic, Philippe Burty and The Visual Arts of Mid-Nineteenth Century France (New York:Peter Lang, 1993). 15. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Nouvelle acquisition française, 2240 ff. 245 –253. Shi- gemi Inaga, Théodore Duret, vol. 3 (Lille: Atelier Nationale des Thèses, 1989), p. 598, gives a detailed account of this dispute. 16. S. Bing, “La Vie et l’Oeuvre de Hokousai,” La Revue Blanche, Nos. 64 – 65 (1896). The correspondence of Hayashi Tadamasa to Edmond de Goncourt on this affair is transcribed and noted by Giovanni Peternolli, “The Unpublished Letters of Hayashi Tadamasa to Edmond de Goncourt,” in Ukiyo-e Geijutsu, pp. 62– 63 (1979). See also Nakajima Kenzo¯, ed., Letters of Ed- mond de Goncourt to Hayashi Tadamasa (Tokyo, 1930, private ed.). 17. Sato¯Do¯shin, “Kindai Shigaku to Shite no Bijutsushi no Seiritsu to Tenkai,” in Nihon Bijutsu Shi no Suimyaku (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1993), pp. 146 –170. 18. National Museum of Nara, Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan no Meiho¯: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Nara National Museum (1997); Takagi Hiroshi, “Nihon Bijutsushi no Seiritsu Shiron,” Nihonshi Kenkyu¯, no. 400 (1995): 74 –98; also included in Takagi Hiroshi, Kindai Ten- no¯sei no Bunkashiteki Kenkyu¯ (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 1997). 19. My translation from the Japanese. 20. No¯sho¯musho¯, Ko¯hon Nippon Teikoku Bijutsu Ryakki (1901), French translation, Commission Impériale du Japon, L’Histoire de l’Art du Japon, trans. Emmanuel Tronquois (Paris: Maurice de Brunoff, 1900). For the English revised edition, see The Imperial Museum, A His- tory of Japanese Arts (Tokyo: Ryu¯bun-kwan Publishing, 1913), where the section on “Architec- ture” is entirely separated and put at the end of the volume by Ito¯Chu¯ta. 21. Takashina Erika, “Kuroda Seiki’s Portrait of Okakura Tenshin: New Light on the Inspi- ration and Theme of Chi Kan Jo¯,” Bijutsushi 139 45, no. 1 (1996): 31– 43. 22. Okakura Tenshin, Tenshin Zenshu¯, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1980). See Inoue Sho¯ichi, Ho¯ryu¯ji he no Seishinshi (Tokyo: Ko¯bundo¯, 1994). However, Ojita Yasunao advances the hypothesis that the Pan-Asian vision in Tenshin’s original conception of L’Histoire de l’Art du Japon was replaced by the more nationalistic interpretation of the Mito School of National Studies in the ﬁnal version published under the direction of Fukuchi Mataichi. See Ojita Yasunao, Nihonshi no Shiso¯ (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo¯, 1997), pp. 31–102. 23. Kuroita Katsumi, ed., Tokken Kokuho¯Mokuroku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1927). 24. Sato¯Do¯shin, Nihon Bijutsu Tanjo¯ (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 1996), p. 218; see also Sato¯Do¯shin, Meiji Kokka to Kindai Bijutsu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1999). 25. Bernard Frank, “L’Intérêt pour les Religions Japonaise dans la France du XIXe siècle et les Collection d’Émile Guimet,” in L’Age du Japonisme (Tokyo: Société Franco-Japonaise d’Art et d’Archéologie; Kinokuniya, 1983), p. 13. 26. Exhibition Catalogue, Umi wo Watatta Meiji Bijutsu (Tokyo: Tokyo National Museum, 1997). 27. Henri Focillon, Hokusaï (1914, 1917) (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1925), rev. ed., preface, p. iii.

Chapter 12: Nature—the Naturalization of Experience as National

1. Arthur O. Lovejoy, “ ‘Nature’ as Aesthetic Norm,” in Essays in the History of Ideas (Balti- more: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), p. 69. 230 Notes to Pages 127–136

2. Karatani Ko¯jin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Brett de Bary (Dur- ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 88. 3. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1988), p. 6. 4. Henri Lefebvre, “What Is Modernity?” in Introduction to Modernity (London: Verso, 1995), p. 181. 5. “Nihonshugi,” in Meiji Bungaku Zenshu¯, vol. 40 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1970), p. 23. 6. Hori Ichiro, Folk Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 141–179. 7. Quoted in Stephen A. Diamond, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic (Albany: State Univer- sity of New York Press, 1996), p. 63. 8. Hori, Folk Religion in Japan, p. 72. 9. “Yo¯kaigaku to Shinrigaku to no Kankei,” in Nakao Soo, Hosui Ronshu¯ (Tokyo: Haku- bunkan, 1902), p. 97. 10. The mental image, provisional ghost, and false and true ghosts are some of the categories of Inoue’s taxonomy of the mysterious and fantastic. “Yo¯kaigaku to Shinrigaku to no Kankei,” pp. 97–98. 11. Quoted in Miyata Noboru, Yo¯kai no Minzokugaku, Nihon no Mienai Ku¯kan (Tokyo: Iwa- nami Shoten, 1990), p. 50. 12. “Yo¯kaigaku to Shinrigaku to no Kankei,” pp. 89–90. 13. Onda Akira, “Inoue Enryo¯ no Shinrigaku no Gyo¯seki,” in Inoue Enryo¯ no Gakuri Shiso¯, ed. Shimizu Tadashi (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Inoue Enryo¯ Kinen Gakujutsu Shinko¯ Kikin, 1989), p. 416. 14. “Yo¯kaigaku to Shinrigaku to no Kankei,” p. 100. 15. Ibid., p. 97. 16. Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 73. 17. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientiﬁc Revolution (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990 [1980]), p. 69. 18. Miyake Setsurei, “Shinzenbi” and “Giakushu¯,” in Miyake Setsurei Shu¯, Gendai Nihon Bun- gaku Zenshu¯, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kaizo¯sha, 1931). 19. Miyake, “Shinzenbi,” pp. 233 –235. 20. Miyake, “Giakushu¯,” p. 257. For a discussion of such hierarchical categorization, see Di- pesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artiﬁce of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts,” in Representations 37 (winter 1992): 1–26. 21. Miyake, “Shinzenbi,” pp. 223, 225 –226, and 227. 22. Quoted in Robert E. Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 73 –74. 23. Miyake, “Shinzenbi,” pp. 218 –219. 24. Ibid., p. 233. 25. Takayama Chogyu¯, “Biteki Seikatsu o Ronzu,” in Meiji Bungaku Zenshu¯, vol. 40, p. 82. 26. Miyake, “Giakushu¯,” p. 256. 27. Ibid., p. 252. 28. Miyake, “Shinzenbi,” p. 238. 29. In the words of Arthur O. Lovejoy, “the ‘natural’ as that which is most congenial to, and Notes to Pages 137–145 231 immediately comprehensible and enjoyable by, each individual—this conceived not as uniform in all men, but as varying with time, race, nationality, and cultural tradition.” “ ‘Nature’ as Aes- thetic Norm,” p. 73. 30. The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 1–2. 31. Inoue Tetsujiro¯, “Shizen to Do¯toku” (speech given on April 26, 1908, published in his Shakai to Do¯toku [Tokyo: Kodo¯kan, 1915], p. 714). 32. Ibid., p. 743. In contrast, Kato¯ Hiroyuki argues that it is not creativity that differentiates humans from animals but the level of that creativity. See his Shizen to Rinri (Tokyo: Jitsu- gyo¯sha no Nihonsha, 1912), pp. 19–20. 33. Inoue, “Shizen to Do¯toku,” p. 735. 34. Ibid., pp. 721–722. 35. Ibid., pp. 748 –749. 36. Ibid., p. 734. 37. Ibid., pp. 719–720. 38. Ibid., pp. 728 –729. 39. For a more detailed analysis, see my “Childhood: The Naturalization of Development into a Japanese Space,” in Cultures of Scholarship, ed. Sally Humphries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 40. Lefebvre, “What Is Modernity?” p. 171. 41. Inoue, “Chokugo Engi,” in Shiryo¯Kyo¯iku Chokugo, ed. Katayama Seiichi (Tokyo: Ko¯r- yo¯sha Shoten, 1974), p. 156. 42. Quoted in Satake Akihiro, Shuten Do¯ji Ibun (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1977), pp. 189–190. 43. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux des Memoire,” Representations 26 (spring 1989): 7. 44. “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 7.

Chapter 13: Coincidentia Oppositorum

1. Sasaki Ken’ichi, Esunikku no Jigen: “Nihon Tetsugaku” So¯shi no Tame ni (Tokyo: Keiso¯ Shobo¯, 1998), pp. 59– 67. 2. My reading of O¯ nishi is based on his Man’yo¯shu¯ no Shizen Kanjo¯ (Feelings for Nature in the Man’yo¯shu¯) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1943). This title is hereafter abbreviated as MSK. 3. Ibid., pp. 49–51. 4. Ibid., pp. 42– 45. 5. Ibid., pp. 68 –71. 6. About Apollo, Nietzsche writes:

Apollo is at once the god of all plastic powers and the soothsaying god. He who is ety- mologically the “lucent” one, the god of light, reigns also over the fair illusion of our inner world of fantasy. The perfection of these conditions in contrast to our imperfectly understood waking reality, as well as our profound awareness of nature’s healing powers during the interval of sleep and dream, furnishes a symbolic analogue to the soothsaying faculty and quite generally to the arts, which make life possible and worth living.... In an eccentric way one might say of Apollo what Schopenhauer says, in the ﬁrst part of 232 Notes to Pages 145–146

The World as Will and Idea, of man caught in the veil of Maya: “Even as on an immense, raging sea, assailed by huge wave crests, a man sits in a little rowboat trusting his frail craft, so, amidst the furious torments of this world, the individual sits tranquilly, supported by the principium individuationis and relying on it.” One might say that the un- shakable conﬁdence in that principle has received its most magniﬁcent expression in Apollo, and that Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis, whose looks and gestures radiate the full delight, wisdom, and beauty of “illusion.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golfﬁng (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 21–22. 7. On Homer, Nietzche writes:

It is this achievement which makes Homer so magnificent—Homer, who, as a single individual, stood to Apollonian popular culture in the same relation as the individual dream artist to the oneiric capacity of a race and of nature generally. The naïveté of Ho- mer must be viewed as a complete victory of Apollonian illusion. Nature often uses il- lusions of this sort in order to accomplish its secret purposes. The true goal is covered over by a phantasm. We stretch out our hands to the latter, while nature, aided by our deception, attains the former. In the case of the Greeks it was the will wishing to behold itself in the work of art, in the transcendence of genius; but in order so to behold itself its creatures had first to view themselves as glorious, to transpose themselves to a higher sphere, without having that sphere of pure contemplation either challenge them or up- braid them with insufficiency. It was in that sphere of beauty that the Greeks saw the Olympians as their mirror images; it was by means of that esthetic mirror that the Greek will opposed suffering and the somber wisdom of suffering which always accompanies artistic talent. As a monument to its victory stands Homer, the naïve artist.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 31–32. 8. The book was published in 1883 in Paris by A. Quantin. 9. MSK, pp. 90 –91. 10. This point might explain the reasons behind the efforts on the part of Japanese artists at the beginning of the century to provide “human portraits” of deities portrayed in the Kojiki. See, for example, Takahashi Yuichi’s (1828–1894) painting of Yamato Takeru (1891), Harada Naojiro¯’s (1863 –1899) portrait of Susanowo slaying the dragon (1895), or Aoki Shigeru’s (1882–1911) representation of O¯ namuchi-no-Mikoto (1905). 11. MSK, pp. 76 –77. 12. Nietzsche writes:

If we add to this awe the glorious transport which arises in man, even from the very depths of nature, at the shattering of the principium individuationis, then we are in a position to apprehend the essence of Dionysiac rapture, whose closest analogy is furnished by physical intoxication. Dionysian stirrings arise either through the inﬂuence of those narcotic potions of which all primitive races speak in their hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, which penetrates with joy the whole frame of nature. So stirred, the individual forgets himself completely.... Now that the gospel of universal harmony is sounded, each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one Notes to Pages 146 –148 233

with him—as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds ﬂoating before the vision of mystical Oneness. Man now expresses himself through song and dance as the member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk, how to speak, and is on the brink of taking wing as he dances.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 22–23. 13. “In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to strain his symbolic faculties to the ut- most; something quite unheard of is now clamoring to be heard: the desire to tear asunder the veil of Maya, to sink back into the original oneness of nature; the desire to express the very essence of nature symbolically.” Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, p. 27. 14. Of the lyrical poet, Nietzsche writes:

He is, first and foremost, a Dionysian artist, become wholly identified with the original Oneness, its pains and contradiction, and producing a replica of that Oneness as music, if music may legitimately be seen as a repetition of the world.... The artist had abro- gated his subjectivity earlier, during the Dionysian phase: the image which now reveals to him his oneness with the heart of the world is a dream scene showing forth vividly, together with original pain, the original delight of illusion.... Being the active center of that world he [the lyrical poet] may boldly speak in the first person, only his “I” is not that of the actual waking man, but the “I” dwelling, truly and eternally, in the ground of being. It is through the reflections of that “I” that the lyric poet beholds the ground of being.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 38 –39. 15. Nietzsche writes:

In opposition to all who would derive the arts from a single vital principle, I wish to keep before me those two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus. They represent to me, most vividly and concretely, two radically dissimilar realms of art. Apollo embodies the transcendent genius of the principium individuationis; through him alone is it possible to achieve redemption in illusion. The mystical jubilation of Dionysus, on the other hand, breaks the spell of individuation and opens a path to the maternal womb of being.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, p. 97. 16. MSK, pp. 77–80. 17. Ibid., pp. 182–186. 18. Lévy-Bruhl writes:

The attitude of the primitive’s mind is very different. The natural world he lives in presents itself in quite another aspect to him. All its objects and all its entities are involved in a system of mystic participations and exclusions; it is these which constitute its co- hesion and its order. They therefore will attract his attention first of all, and they alone will retain it. If a phenomenon interests him, and he does not confine himself to a merely passive perception of it without reaction of any kind, he will immediately conjure up, as by a kind of mental reflex, an occult and invisible power of which this phenomenon is a manifestation. . . . In the midst of this confusion of mystic participations and exclusions, 234 Notes to Pages 148–150

the impressions which the individual has of himself whether living or dead, and of the group to which he “belongs,” have only a far-off resemblance to ideas or concepts. They are felt and lived, rather than thought. Neither their content nor their connections are strictly submitted to the law of contradiction. Consequently neither the personal ego, nor the social group, nor the surrounding world, both seen and unseen, appears to be yet “deﬁnite” in the collective representations, as they seem to be as soon as our conceptual thought tries to grasp them. In spite of the most careful effort, our thought cannot assimilate them with what it knows, as its “ordinary” objects. It therefore despoils them of what there is in them that is elementally concrete, emotional and vital. This it is which renders so difﬁcult, and so frequently uncertain, the comprehension of institutions wherein is expressed the mentality, mystic rather than logical, of primitive peoples.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (New York: Macmillan, 1923; 1st French ed., 1922), pp. 35 –36, 446 – 447. 19. MSK, p. 11. 20. Ibid., pp. 140 –141. 21. O¯ nishi argued that landscapes in the poetry of the Man’yo¯shu¯ were often presented by what he called “convention,” “tradition” (dento¯), and “pattern” (kata). He interpreted “conventions” as mainly the result of a particular climatic situation (fu¯doteki shizen) and as the crystal- lization of form forcing poetic materials into regulated patterns. However, O¯ nishi was concerned mostly with “psychological” conventions that predetermined the aesthetic experience of the observer. He saw in the natural phenomenology of the seasons (temporal movement) a major source of “psychological conventions,” which led to a formalization of the poet’s feelings vis- à-vis nature. Joy and sadness, for example, began to be conventionally associated with speciﬁc natural situations. Speciﬁc natural phenomena also became objects of conventional associations, such as, for example, “plum tree” and “nightingale” or “cherry blossoms” and “spring rain.” Ibid., pp. 244 –260. 22. Ibid., pp. 280 –287. 23. Ibid., pp. 148 –149. 24. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 25. Ibid., pp. 232–235. 26. Ibid., pp. 167–169. 27. See, for example, Kamo no Mabuchi’s (1697–1769) argument on the Man’yo¯shu¯. 28. MSK, pp. 88 –89. 29. Schiller writes:

Recall the beauty of nature surrounding the ancient Greeks. Consider how confidently this people was able, under its serendipitous sky, to live with nature in the wild; consider how very much nearer to the simplicity of nature lay its manner of thinking, its way of feeling, its mores, and what a faithful copy of this is provided by the works of its poets. If one reflects upon these things, then the observation must appear strange that one encounters there so few traces of the sentimental interest we moderns attach to nature’s settings and characteristics.... In the case of the ancient Greeks it was very much different. For them the culture had not degenerated to such a degree that nature was left behind in the process. The entire edifice of the social life was erected on feelings, not on some clumsy work of art. Their theology itself was the inspiration of a naive feeling, born Notes to Pages 150 –155 235

of a joyful imagination and not of brooding reason as is the belief of the churches of modern nations. Hence, since the Greek had not lost the nature in humanity, he also could not be surprised by nature outside humanity, and for that reason could have no pressing need for objects in which he rediscovered nature. One with himself and content in the feeling of his humanity, the Greek had to stand quietly by this humanity as his ultimate and to concern himself with bringing everything else closer to it. We, on the other hand, neither one with ourselves nor happy in our experiences of humanity, have no more pressing interest than to take ﬂight from it and to remove from sight so miscarried a form. The feeling spoken of here is thus not something that the ancients had. It is rather the same as the sort of feeling we have for the ancients. They felt naturally, while we feel the natural.

Friedrich Schiller, Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Con- tinuum, 1993), pp. 194 –195. 30. MSK, p. 187. 31. Ibid., pp. 203 –204. 32. Ibid., p. 206. 33. Nietzsche writes:

Dionysiac art, too, wishes to convince us of the eternal delight of existence, but it insists that we look for this delight not in the phenomena but behind them. It makes us realize that everything that is generated must be prepared to face its ﬁnal dissolution. It forces us to gaze into horror of individual existence, yet without being turned to stone by the vision: a metaphysical solace momentarily lifts us above the whirl of shifting phenomena. For a brief moment we become, ourselves, the primal Being, and we experience its insatiable hunger for existence. Now we see the struggle, the pain, the destruction of appearances, as necessary, because of the constant proliferation of forms pushing into life, because of the extravagant fecundity of the world will. We feel the furious prodding of this travail in the very moment in which we become one with the immense lust for life and are made aware of the eternity and indestructibility of that lust. Pity and terror not- withstanding, we realize our great good fortune in having life—not as individuals, but as part of the life force with whose procreative lust we have become one.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 102–103. 34. See, for example, the detailed study of Suzuki Sadami, “Seimei” de Yomu Nihon Kindai: Taisho¯Seimeishugi no Tanjo¯to Tenkai (Tokyo: Nihon Ho¯so¯ Shuppan Kyo¯kai, 1996). 35. MSK, pp. 204 –211. 36. Ibid., p. 222. 37. Ibid., pp. 81–89. 38. Ibid., p. 90.

Chapter 14: Representations of “Japaneseness”

1. O¯ nishi Yoshinori, Bigaku, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Ko¯bundo¯, 1960), p. 4. 2. Ibid., p. 55. 3. Ibid., pp. 115 –116, 117–121, 125 –126. 236 Notes to Pages 155–168

4. Ibid., p. 4. 5. See Yonetani Tadashi, “Modernization (Kindaika),” in Tetsugaku Shiso¯ Jiten (Tokyo, 1998), p. 369. 6. O¯ nishi Yoshinori, Fu¯ga Ron: Sabi no Kenkyu¯ (Tokyo: Ko¯bundo¯, 1940), pp. 8 –9. 7. Imamichi Tomonobu, To¯zai no Tetsugaku (Tokyo, 1981), pp. 20, 29, 45, 77. See also his article “L’expression et Son Fondement Logique,” Revues Internationales de Philosophie 52 (1961): 1. The English translation of this article appears in Michele Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), pp. 220 –228. 8. Ibid. 9. Kurasawa Yukihiro, To¯yo¯ to Seiyo¯: Sekai Kan, Geido¯ Kan, Geijutsu Kan (Tokyo, 1992), p. 71. 10. Kuniyasu Yo¯, Geijutsu no Shu¯en (Tokyo, 1991), p. 287. 11. Augustin Berque, Nihon no Fu¯kei, Seio¯no Keikan (Tokyo, 1990), pp. 166 –168. 12. O¯ nishi Yoshinori, Bigaku, vol. 2, pp. 4 –5. 13. Sato¯Do¯shin, Nihon Bijutsu no Tanjo¯ (Tokyo, 1996), pp. 102–103. 14. O¯ nishi Yoshinori, To¯yo¯teki Geijutsu Seishin, p. 4. 15. Ko¯saka Masaaki, “Daito¯a Kyo¯eiken e no Michi,” in Minzoku no Tetsugaku (Tokyo, 1942), pp. 130 –131. See also Naoki Sakai, “To¯yo¯noJiritsu to Daito¯aKyo¯eiken,” in Jo¯kyo¯,vol. 12 (1994). 16. See Uemura Yukio, “Tanabe Hisao to To¯yo¯ Ongaku no Gainen,” in Higashi Ajia Chiiki ni Okeru Atarashii Rekishi Hyo¯sho¯o Mezashite (Jo¯etsu University of Education, 1997). 17. Tanabe Hisao, To¯yo¯Ongaku Shi (Tokyo, 1930), pp. 10 –11, 13, 60. 18. Tsuda So¯kichi, Tsuda So¯kichi Zenshu¯, vol. 18 (Tokyo, 1965), pp. 129–130. 19. Tanabe, “To¯yo¯ Ongaku to Seiyo¯ Ongaku no Tairitsu ni Tsuite no Gigi,” in Nihon To¯yo¯ Ongaku Ronko¯ (Tokyo, 1969), p. 9. See also Uemura, “Tanabe Hisao to To¯yo¯ Ongaku no Gainen.” 20. See Otabe Tanehisa, “Entstehung der modernen Kunstauffassung aus dem nordischen Geist,” in JTLA (vol. 22, 1997, and vol. 23, 1998).

Chapter 15: Constructing “Japanese Literature”

1. For more speciﬁc details on this process, see Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Invent- ing the Classics: Canon Formation, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stan- ford University Press, 2000). 2. The English term “literature” ﬁrst came into use in the fourteenth century. 3. For European views of literature, see Rene Wellek, “What Is Literature?” in Paul Hernadi, ed., What Is Literature? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 16 –23. 4. Tomi Suzuki, “Joryu¯Nikki Bungaku,” Bungaku 9, no. 4 (autumn 1998). 5. In 1885 the department of Wakan Bungaku was split into the Wabun Gakka (Japanese literature program) and the Kanbun Gakka (Chinese literature program), and in 1889 the Wabun Gakka was renamed the Kokubun Gakka (national literature program). 6. See Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stan- ford University Press, 1996), pp. 15 –32. 7. Takemoto Hirokazu, “Kume Kunitake to No¯gaku Fukko¯,” in Nishikawa Nagao and Mat- sumiya Hideharu, eds., Bakumatsu Meijiki no Kokumin Keisei to Bunka Henyo¯ (Shin’yo¯sha, 1995), pp. 487–510. Notes to Pages 170 –189 237

8. Shinada Yoshikazu, “Kokumin Kashu¯ to shite no Man’yo¯shu¯,” in Haruo Shirane and Su- zuki Tomi, eds., So¯zo¯sareta Koten: Kanon Keisei, Kokumin Kokka, Nihon Bungaku (Shin’yo¯sha, 1999), pp. 48 –84. 9. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1983). 10. As Partha Chatterjee notes, the notion that “language uniquely deﬁnes a nation is an invention of nineteenth-century European writers, particularly Herder, Schlegel, Fichte and Schleiermacher, which has been subsequently taken up by nationalist intellectuals of the East.” Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 9. 11. Ueda Kazutoshi, “Kokugo to Kokka to” (1894), included in Ochiai Naobumi, Ueda Kazu- toshi, Haga Yaichi, Fujioka Sakutaro¯Shu¯, Meiji Bungaku Zenshu¯ 44 (Chikuma Shobo¯, 1968), p. 110. 12. Donald Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press), p. 21. 13. Interestingly, the postwar high school kokugo curriculum includes Buddhist texts written in the vernacular (kana ho¯go)—for instance, Do¯gen’s Sho¯bo¯genzo¯ (and Sho¯bo¯genzo¯Zuimonki) and Tan’nisho¯ (Shinran’s teachings)—that never appeared in Meiji textbooks. 14. Shinada Yoshikazu, “Kokumin Kashu¯ to shite no Man’yo¯shu¯,” in So¯zo¯sareta Koten, pp. 48 –84. 15. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744 –1803), whose views on the role of the folk had an impact on the Brothers Grimm and other German Romantics, compiled Volkslieder (Folk Songs) in 1778 –1779.

Chapter 16: What Is Bungaku?

This chapter is a brief summary of my book Nihon no “Bungaku” Gainen (The Concept of “Literature” in Japan) (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1998). For further information on Nishida Kitaro¯’s philosophy and the “overcoming of modernity,” see my articles “Nishida Kitaro¯ Zen no Kenkyu¯ wo Yomu—Seimeishugi Tetsugaku no Keisei” (Reading Nishida Kitaro¯’s A Study of Good— Formation of Vitalist Philosophy), Nihon Kenkyu¯ 17 (1998), and “Nishida Kitaro¯ as Vitalist, Part 1—The Ideology of the Imperial Way in Nishida’s The Problem of Japanese Culture and The Symposia on ‘The Word-Historical Standpoint and Japan,’” Nichibunken Japan Review 9 (1997). On the issue of “vitalism” during the Taisho¯period, see also my book “Seimei” de YomuNihon Kin- dai: Taisho¯Seimeishugi no Tanjo¯ to Tenkai (Reading Modern Japan from the View Point of “Life”: The Birth and Development of Taisho¯Vitalism) (Tokyo: Nihon Ho¯so¯ Shuppan Kyo¯kai, 1996).

Chapter 17: Primitive Vision

This project received funding from Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l’Aide à la Recherche (FCAR) and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). 1. Man’yo¯shu¯ (1971), 4 vols., ed. Kojima Noriyuki, Kinoshita Masatoshi, and Satake Aki- hiro. Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshu¯, vols. 2–5 (Tokyo: Sho¯gakukan), vol. 1, p. 37. 2. Shirakawa Shizuka, Shoki Man’yo¯Ron(Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ko¯ronsha, 1979), p. 137. 238 Notes to Pages 190 –200

3. Donald Keene, Seeds on the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 118. 4. Karaki Junzo¯, Nihon no Kokoro no Rekishi, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1976), p. 45. 5. Ibid., p. 56. 6. Suzuki Hideo, Kodai WakaShiron (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppansha, 1990), pp. 84 –85. 7. Ibid., p. 17. 8. Yoshimoto Taka’aki, Shoki Kayo Ron (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯seihan, 1977), pp. 468 –72. 9. Inoue Mitsusada, “The Century of Reform,” in Cambridge History of Japan: Ancient Japan, ed. Delmer Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 163. 10. Ibid., p. 197. 11. José Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, trans. Stephen Muecke (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 5. 12. Komatsu Kazuhiko, Nihon no Noroi: “Yami no Shin Sei” ga Umidasu Bunka to wa (Tokyo: Ko¯bunsha, 1988), p. 131. 13. Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 1961), p. 156. 14. Ibid. 15. Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 40. 16. Heribert Boeder, Seditions: Heidegger and the Limits of Modernity (Albany: State Univer- sity of New York Press, 1997), p. 177. 17. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 63. 18. Ibid., p. 126. 19. Ibid., p. 135. 20. David Michael Levin, “Decline and Fall: Ocularcentrism in Heidegger’s Reading of the History of Metaphysics,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), p. 212. 21. Masaoka Shiki, “Futatabi Utayomi ni Atafuru Sho,” in Shiki Zenshu¯,vol. 12, ed. Masaoka Chu¯zaburo¯(Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 1974), p. 23. 22. Mark Morris, “Waka and Form, Waka and History,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46 (1986): 562. 23. Suzuki, Kodai Waka Shiron, p. 74. 24. Takagi Ichinosuke, cited in ibid., p. 71. 25. Hubert Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. Robert Hollinger (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), p. 245. 26. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 31. 27. Ibid., pp. 36 – 49. 28. Ibid., p. 42. 29. Ibid., p. 63. 30. H. D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 44. Notes to Pages 201–213 239

31. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit,” trans. Joan Stam- baugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 1.v.32–33. 32. Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, p. 16. 33. David Couzens Hoy, “Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn,” in Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 183. 34. Ibid., p. 185. 35. See Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 140 –141; Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” p. 233. 36. Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” p. 234. 37. Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, p. 16. 38. Ibid., p. 77. 39. See Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Inﬂuences on His Work, trans. Gra- ham Parkes (London: Routledge, 1996). 40. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), pp. 4 –5. 41. Ibid., p. 47. 42. Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, pp. 81–82. 43. Ibid., p. 83. 44. Ibid., p. 85. 45. Ibid., p. 86. 46. Ibid., p. 87. 47. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 32. 48. Ibid., p. 28.

Chapter 18: Saito¯Mokichi’s Poetics of Shasei

1. Saito¯ Mokichi, Tanka ni Okeru Shasei no Setsu (Treatise on the Notion of Shasei in Tanka Poetry), in Saito¯Mokichi Zenshu¯, vol. 9 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1973), pp. 763 –885. All quotations from the treatise are from this edition. The English translation is mine. For a complete version of this essay, see Saito¯ Mokichi, GNBZ, vol. 123 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1953), pp. 184 –223. 2. Saito¯ Mokichi, Doba Mango, Saito¯ Mokichi Zenshu¯, vol. 9, pp. 2–229, originally published serially in Araragi from 1910 to 1918. Saito¯ Mokichi Senshu¯, vol. 14 (Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1981), also contains this collection of essays. 3. Quotations of Masaoka Shiki are taken from Mokichi’s Treatise. Translations are mine. 4. “Kannyu¯ to Iu Go ni Tsuite” (On the Word Kannyu¯), in Saito¯ Mokichi Senshu¯, vol. 17 (To- kyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), pp. 232–236. 5. Hikami Hidehiro, “Saito¯ Mokichi to Nietzsche: Nihon ni Okeru Nietzsche Eikyo¯ Shi e no Ichi Kiyo to Shite,” Hikaku Bungaku Kenkyu¯ 11 (September 1966): 25. 6. Ibid., pp. 4 ff. This essay, short but unusually rich in insight and information, is now included in Hikami’s book Nı¯che to no Taiwa (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988). Hikami was one of the best Nietzsche scholars in contemporary Japan. 7. Ibid., p. 14. 240 Notes to Page 214

8. “Tanka Shogaku Mon,” in Saito¯Mokichi Senshu¯, vol. 20 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), p. 17. Compare Kobori Keiichiro¯, “Shasei Tsuiko Nietzsche no Tetsugaku ni Terashite Mitaru Saito¯ Mokichi,” in Hirano and Motobayashi eds., Saito¯Mokichi Kenkyu¯ (Tokyo: Yubun Shoin, 1980), pp. 61–84. Quotations of Dilthey are taken from his Dichtung und Erlebnis (Poetry and Experience). 9. Translation by Amy Vladeck Heinrich in her Fragments of Rainbow: The Life and Poetry of Saito¯Mokichi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 130. CONTRIBUTORS

Amagasaki Akira is professor of Japanese aesthetics at Gakushuin Women’s Col- lege. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Tokyo. He is the author of Kacho¯ no Tsukai: Uta no Michi no Shigaku 1 (Messenger to Flowers and Birds: The Poetics of the Way of Poetry 1, 1983), Nihon no Retorikku (Japanese Rhetoric, 1988), Kotoba to Shintai (The Body of Words, 1990), and En no Bigaku: Uta no Michi no Shigaku 2 (The Aesthetics of Links: The Poetics of the Way of Po- etry 2, 1995).

Haga To¯ru, professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Tokyo and at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, is currently president of Kyoto University of Art and Design. He is the author of Midaregami no Keifu: Shi to E no Hikaku Bungaku (The Genealogy of Tangled Hairs: A Com- parative Literature of Poetry and Painting, 1981), Hiraga Gennai (1981), Kaiga no Ryo¯bun: Kindai Nihon Hikaku Bunkashi Kenkyu¯ (The Sphere of Paintings: A Com- parative Cultural Study of Modern Japan, 1984), Yosa Buson no Chiisana Sekai (The Small World of Yosa Buson, 1986), and Shi no Kuni Shijin no Kuni (Land of Poetry, Land of Poets, 1997).

Hamashita Masahiro is professor of aesthetics at Kobe College. A graduate of the University of Tokyo, he has coauthored the books Rococo (1995) and Geijutsu Riron no Genzai (The Contemporary World of Art Theories, 1999).

Inaga Shigemi is associate professor of comparative art history at the Interna- tional Research Center for Japanese Studies. A graduate from the Department of Comparative Literature of the University of Tokyo, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris. His book Kaiga no Tasogare: Edua¯ru Mane Botsugo no To¯so¯ (The Twilight of Painting: Edouard Manet’s Posthumous Struggle, 1997) was awarded the Shibusawa-Claudel Prize, the Suntory Scholarly Prize, and the Ringa Prize.

241 242 Contributors

He is also the author of Kaiga no To¯ho¯: Orientarizumu kara Japonizumu e (The Ori- ent of Painting: From Orientalism to Japonisme, 1999).

Kambayashi Tsunemichi is professor of aesthetics at the University of Osaka and the president of the Japanese Society for Aesthetics. He is the author of Gendai Geijutsu no Toporojı¯ (Topology of Contemporary Art, 1987), Doitsu Romanshugi no Sekai (The World of German Romanticism, 1990), and Geijutsu Gendai Ron (Con- temporary Essays on Art, 1991). He has edited the volumes Nihon no Bi no Katachi (Forms of Japanese Beauty, 1991) and Nihon no Geijutsu Ron: Dento¯ to Kindai (Es- says on Japanese Art: Tradition and Modernity, 2000).

Thomas LaMarre is associate professor of East Asian studies at McGill Univer- sity and the author of Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archeology of Sensation and Inscrip- tion (2000).

John C. Maraldo is professor of philosophy at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. He is the author of Der hermeneutische Zirkel: Untersuchungen zu Schleiermacher, Dilthey und Heidegger (The Hermeneutical Circle: Investigations on Schleiermacher, Dilthey and Heidegger), coauthor (with James G. Hart) of The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heidegger with Notes and Commentary, and coedi- tor (with James W. Heisig) of Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Ques- tion of Nationalism (1995).

Michael F. Marra is professor of Japanese literature at the University of Califor- nia, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclu- sion in Medieval Japanese Literature (1991), Representations of Power: The Literary Poli- tics of Medieval Japan (1993), Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (1999), and A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (2001).

Mark Meli has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is presently a visiting researcher of Japanese aesthetics and poetics at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto.

O¯ hashi Ryo¯suke is professor of philosophy at the Institute of Technology in Kyoto. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich. He is the author of Ekstase und Gelassenheit: Zu Schelling und Heidegger (Ecstasy and Tranquillity: On Schelling and Heidegger, 1975), “Kire” no Ko¯zo¯: Nihonbi to Gendai Sekai (The Structure of Cuts: Japanese Beauty and the Contemporary World, 1986), Nihon- teki na Mono, Yo¯roppateki na Mono (Things Japanese Things European, 1992), and Zettaisha no Yukue: Doitsu Kannenron to Gendai Sekai (Whereabouts of the Absolute: German Idealism and the Contemporary World, 1993). Contributors 243

Otabe Tanehisa is associate professor of aesthetics at the University of Tokyo and the author of Sho¯cho¯ no Bigaku (The Aesthetics of Symbols, 1995).

Graham Parkes is professor of philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i and senior fellow at the Center for Study of World Religions, Harvard University. He is the author of Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology and the editor of Heideg- ger and Asian Thought (1987) and Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991). Together with Setsuko Aihara, he has edited and translated Nishitani Keiji’s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990). He has also produced the English version of Reinhard May’s Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Inﬂuences on His Work (1996).

J. Thomas Rimer is professor of Japanese literature and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written widely on various aspects of Japanese literature, theater, and culture. He has been involved in two exhibitions concerning modern Japanese art: Paris in Ja- pan, shown in St. Louis, New York, and Los Angeles (1987–1988), and Nihonga: Transcending the Past, shown in St. Louis (1995).

Sasaki Ken’ichi is professor of aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of Serifu no Ko¯zo¯ (The Structure of Speech, 1982), Sakuhin no Tetsugaku (The Philosophy of the Work, 1985), Bigaku Jiten (A Dictionary of Aesthetics, 1995), and Mimoza Genso¯ (The Mimosa Fantasy, 1998). In English he has published Aes- thetics on Non-Western Principles (1998).

Haruo Shirane is Shincho professor of Japanese literature and culture in the De- partment of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of the Tale of Genji (1987) and Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho¯ (1998). He is editor of the multivolume Columbia Anthology of Japanese Literature (forthcoming) and coed- itor and author of Inventing the Classics: Canon Formation, National Identity, and Jap- anese Literature (2000).

Suzuki Sadami is professor of Japanese literature at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. He is the author of Nihon no “Bungaku” wo Kangaeru (Thinking Japanese “Literature,” 1994), “Seimei” de Yomu Nihon Kindai: Taisho¯ Seimeishugi no Tanjo¯ to Tenkai (A Reading of Japanese Modernity through “Life”: The Birth and Development of Taisho¯Vitalism, 1996), and Nihon no “Bungaku” Gainen (The Concept of Japanese “Literature,” 1998). He has edited the collected works of Kajii Motojiro¯(Kajii Motojiro¯Zenshu¯, 1999). 244 Contributors

Stefan Tanaka is associate professor of Japanese history at the University of Cali- fornia, San Diego, and the author of Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993).

Gianni Vattimo is professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Turin and a member of the European Parliament. He is the author of The Adventure of Difference (1980), The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture (1985), The Transparent Society (1989), Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (1994), and Belief (1999). INDEX

Abe Jiro¯, 186, 212 Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), 3 – 4, 61, Anderson, William, 116 –117, 120, 123 165, 174; and Motoori Norinaga, 65 – 68 Arai Hakuseki, 169 Gide, André, 187 Arishima Takeo, 186 Goncourt, Edmond de, 118, 119, 120 Asai Chu¯, 208 Gonse, Louis, 116 –117, 118, 123, 125 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 174 Basho¯, 31–32, 165, 169, 173 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 166 Habermas, Jürgen, 12 Benveniste, Émile, 18 Haga Yaichi, 172 Bergson, Henri-Louis, 177, 185 –187 Hagiwara Sakutaro¯, 186 Berque, Augustin, 159 Hakuin, 54 Bing, Siegfried, 120 Harada Naojiro¯, 111 Burckardt, Jakob, 145 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 146 Burty, Philippe, 119 Hartlaub, Gustav Friedrich, 146 Hartmann, Eduard von, 111, 112–114 Certeau, Michel de, 128, 139 Hasegawa Tenkei, 184 –185 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 28 –29, 30, 31, 33, 165, Haven, Joseph, 90 168, 169 Hayashi Tadamasa, 119 Cho¯ken, 167 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 14, 105, 112, Cohen, Hermann, 154 113, 142–143, 156 Collignon, Maxime, 146 Heidegger, Martin, 12, 80, 82, 83, 194 –195, 197, 201–205; critique of Jaspers, 15; Ereig- Dazai Osamu, 187 nis, 13; hermeneutics, 78 –79; and Kuki Derrida, Jacques, 15 Shu¯zo¯, 9, 11, 26; language, 10 De Sanctis, Francesco, 2–3 Heike Monogatari (The Tales of the Heike), 3, 38, 39, Dessoir, Max, 147 165, 169, 173 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 77, 80 –81, 213 Heine, Heinrich, 174 Do¯gen, 45, 46, 51, 56, 57–58 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 135, 174 Dufrenne, Mikel, 12 Higo Kazuo, 144 Duret, Théodore, 116, 117–118, 119, 124 –125 Hiratsuka Raicho¯, 186 Fenollosa, Ernest, 5, 97, 109–110, 120 –121, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, 53 126, 136; and Bijutsu Shinsetsu (An Explana- Hisao Ju¯ran, 187 tion of the Truth of Art), 98 –108; and Hoku- Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 159 sai, 117–118, 119 Homer, 144 –145, 148 Focillon, Henri, 126 Hume, Robert Ernest, 146 Fujiwara Teika, 20 Hutcheson, Francis, 94

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 11, 12 Ihara Saikaku, 165, 169 Geiger, Moritz, 62, 149 Iijima Kyoshin, 119–120

245 246 Index

Imamichi Tomonobu, 157–158 Kurata Hyakuzo¯, 186 Inoue Enryo¯, 130 –132, 137 Kuroda Seiki, 122 Inoue Mitsusada, 192, 193 Inoue Tetsujiro¯, 89, 112, 133, 137–139 Lefebvre, Henri, 128, 140 Ise Monogatari (The Tales of Ise), 3 Lévi-Bruhl, Lucien, 148 Ishikawa Jun, 187 Lipps, Theodor, 150 –151 Ito¯ Jinsai, 183 Loewith, Karl, 83 Iwaki Juntaro¯, 181 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 127 Iwano Ho¯mei, 184 –185 Iwaya Sazanami, 141 Maeda Yu¯gure, 186 Man’yo¯shu¯, 40 – 41, 144, 146 –147, 149–152, Jakobson, Roman, 36 –37, 42 165, 170, 172, 174, 189–191, 194 –205 James, William, 185, 186 Maruyama Masao, 21 Jaspers, Karl, 15 Masaoka Shiki, 183, 195 –196, 208 –210 Jean Paul (Friedrich Richter), 156 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 19 Jinno¯Sho¯to¯ki (Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns), Mikami Sanji, 172 173 Mill, John Stuart, 94, 110 Jung, Carl, 152 Miyajima Tatsuo, 23 Miyake Setsurei, 133 –137, 185 Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, 148, 174, 189, 211, Miyazawa Kenji, 186 213 Mori O¯ gai, 5, 108; debate with Toyama Masa- Kamo no Cho¯mei, 39 kazu, 110 –112; debate with Tsubouchi Kamo no Mabuchi, 172 Sho¯yo¯, 112, 114; and Hartmann’s philoso- Kanbara Tai, 187 phy, 112–113 Kant, Immanuel, 130, 138, 154, 161, 186 Morris, Mark, 196 –197 Karaki Junzo¯, 190 –191, 193, 195, 198 –201, Motoori Norinaga, 4, 61, 62, 72–75, 172, 182, 204 183, 184, 208; and mono no aware, 63 – 64; and Karatani Ko¯jin, 97–98, 127 monogatari, 65 – 68; and waka, 68 –72 Katsushika Hokusai, 116 –120, 123 Mushanoko¯ji Saneatsu, 186 Kawase Hideji, 104 Muso¯Soseki, 33, 55; and Saiho¯ji, 47; and Tenryu¯ji, Key, Ellen, 186 50 –51 Ki no Tsurayuki, 68 – 69, 70, 71, 74, 75 Kishida Ryu¯sei, 186, 211 Nagai Kafu¯, 187 Kitabatake Chikafusa, 173 Nakae Cho¯min, 110 Kitamura To¯koku, 178, 185 Nakamura Fusetsu, 208 Ko¯da Rohan, 178 Nakayama Masakichi, 211 Koeber, Raphael von, 112, 114 Nambo¯So¯kei, 31 Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), 60, 165, 170, Natsume So¯seki, 106 –107, 207; jun-bungaku 172, 175, 178 (pure literature), 177 Kokin Wakashu¯ (Collection of Ancient and Modern Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19, 76, 212–213; The Birth Poems), 68 – 69, 190 –191, 195 –196 of Tragedy, 145 –146, 150; inspiration, 17–18 Konjaku Monogatari (Tales of Times Long Past), Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan), 70, 170, 178 169 Nishi Amane, 5, 98, 109, 137, 166; bimyo¯gaku Ko¯saka Masaaki, 160 –161 (aesthetics), 92–94; kashuron (theory of good Kuhn, Thomas, 9 taste), 92; utilitarianism, 94 –95; zenbigaku Ku¯kai, 51, 57, 58 (science of the good and the beautiful), 90 –92 Kuki Ryu¯ichi, 104, 121–123 Nishida Kitaro¯, 186 Kuki Shu¯zo¯, 9, 202; and Iki no Ko¯zo¯ (The Structure Nishitani Keiji, 55 –56 of “Iki”), 25 –26, 33 –35 Kumazawa Banzan, 183 Odebrecht, Rudolf, 147 Kunikida Doppo, 185 Ogiwara Morie, 186 Kuniyasu Yo¯, 158 Ogiwara Seisensui, 186 Kurasawa Yukihiro, 158 Ogyu¯Sorai, 91, 95, 183 Index 247

Okakura Kakuzo¯(Tenshin), 98, 110, 119, 120 – Taine, Hippolyte, 172 123, 124, 126, 135 –137, 142, 161 Takamura Kotaro¯, 186 O¯ mori Ichu¯, 103 Takamura Ko¯un, 126 Ong, Walter, 198 –201, 204 Takatsu Kuwasaburo¯, 172 O¯ nishi Hajime, 114 Takayama Chogyu¯, 128 –129, 135, 213 O¯ nishi Yoshinori, 61, 160; aesthetic categories, Takizawa Bakin, 107 154 –157; and aware, 62– 63, 73; and Man’yo¯- Tanabe Hisao, 161 shu¯no Shizen Kanjo¯ (Feelings for Nature in the Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, 184 Man’yo¯shu¯), 143 –152 Tokutomi Soho¯, 178 Orikuchi Shinobu, 174 Tosa Nikki (Tosa Diary), 60, 74 O¯ sugi Sakae, 186 Toyama Masakazu, 110 –112, 114 O¯ tomo no Yakamochi, 190 Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯, 108, 112, 168, 178, 184; and O¯ tsuka Yasuji, 114 Sho¯setsu Shinzui (The Essence of the Novel), Ozaki Ko¯yo¯, 178 113 –114, 183 Tsuda So¯kichi, 127, 144, 161 Pascal, Blaise, 19 Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), 173, 182

Ricoeur, Paul, 11 Uchida Roan, 178 Rikyu¯, 31 Uchimura Kanzo¯, 138 Rorty, Richard, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 Ueda Kazutoshi, 170 –171 Ryle, Gilbert, 23 Vattimo, Gianni, 194, 201–205; and Beyond Inter- Said, Edward W., 26–27 pretation, 3; and The End of Modernity, 5 Saito¯Mokichi, 186, 206 –214 Véron, Eugène, 110, 113 Sakai Naoki, 204 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 154 Sakuteiki (Notes on garden-making), 47– 49 Sano Tsunetami, 104 Sansui narabini Yakeizu (Illustrations of Landscape Wakayama Bokusui, 186 Scenes and Ground-Forms), 50 Watanabe Kazan, 208 Sasaki Ken’ichi, 143 Watsuji Tetsuro¯, 61, 65, 76 –78, 212; alterity, Sato¯Do¯shin, 160 83 –84; critique of Dilthey, 80–82; critique Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 111– of Heidegger, 83, 84; culture and nature, 84 – 113, 114, 143 85; hermeneutical theory, 79–80; and mono no Schiller, Friedrich, 150, 159 aware, 61– 62 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 112, 159 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 144 Shiga Shigetaka, 137 Worringer, Wilhelm, 151 Shimamura Ho¯getsu, 107, 184 –185 Simmel, Georg, 213 Yamada Bimyo¯, 178 Solger, K. W. F., 143 Yanagita Kunio, 174 Spencer, Herbert, 110, 168, 183 Yosano Akiko, 186 Suzuki Cho¯kichi, 125 –126 Yoshida Kenko¯, 173, 182 Suzuki Hideo, 191, 196 –197, 204 Yoshimoto Taka’aki, 191–193, 196 Yoshishige Yasutane, 37, 43 Tachibana Senzaburo¯, 172 Yumeno Kyu¯saku, 187 Tachibana no Toshitsuna, 47 Taiheiki (Record of Great Peace), 173 Zeami, 19–20, 21, 29–30