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THE MEANING of BONSAI: TRADITION and the JAPANESE ESTHETIC Ōkuma Toshiyuki

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THE MEANING of BONSAI: TRADITION and the JAPANESE ESTHETIC Ōkuma Toshiyuki THE MEANING OF BONSAI: TRADITION AND THE JAPANESE ESTHETIC Ōkuma Toshiyuki The Ōmiya Bonsai Art Museum, Saitama, opened on March 28 in Saitama City, not far from Tokyo. It is the first publicly run institution in Japan dedicated to the art of bonsai. The museum is located in an exclusive residential area known as the Ōmiya Bonsai Village. The Bonsai Village developed in the years following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, when a number of established professional bonsai cultivators moved here from Tokyo, drawn to Ōmiya by its clean air and the prospect of spacious premises suitable for use as bonsai nurseries. In the years that followed, Ōmiya grew into an important suburb under the influence of the “garden city” philosophy of urban planning then prevalent in the commuter belt around Tokyo, making it a place of considerable interest in terms of Japanese social history. The building and grounds of the recently opened Ōmiya Bonsai Art Museum in Saitama. (C) Ōmiya Bonsai Art Museum, Saitama Despite the survival of the name, however, it is undeniable that today’s Ōmiya Bonsai Village has lost some of the vitality it formerly enjoyed as a major center of the bonsai industry. A pamphlet titled Ōmiya’s Famous Bonsai Village published early in the Showa era (1925–89), shows fifteen bonsai nurseries in the area; just five of these are still in business today. Several factors can be put forward as explanations for this decline. One is Japan’s unusually high real estate inheritance taxes, which make it extremely difficult for the owner of a bonsai nursery to hand down the premises intact to a successor. Deteriorating economic No. 2 August–September 2010 1 conditions in the years since the end of the bubble have meant smaller numbers of the people who might otherwise have been interested in collecting expensive high-class bonsai trees: affluent people with a certain kind of traditional esthetic sensibility and taste. This in turn has made it increasingly difficult for the children of bonsai nursery owners to find sufficient satisfaction and promise in the business to make up for the stresses and strains inherent in running a bonsai nursery. The idea behind the Ōmiya Bonsai Art Museum was to halt the decline of the Ōmiya Bonsai Village and restore a sense of vitality to area, reviving Ōmiya as a tourist destination of historical interest. At the same time, Saitama City hopes that the museum will act as a catalyst for reviving the Ōmiya bonsai industry and enabling the nurseries to continue as viable businesses into the future. I was appointed as the museum’s first director on a part-time basis. In my regular job, I am a member of the faculty at one of Japan’s national universities, where I teach classes on the history of Japanese art, craft and design, and the development of Japan’s traditional plastic arts. Interior display area at the museum. (C) Ōmiya A museum employee explains the displays to Bonsai Art Museum, Saitama visitors. (C) Ōmiya Bonsai Art Museum, Saitama None of the above should be taken to suggest that the Japanese bonsai industry as a whole or the number of people practicing the art as a hobby is in inexorable decline. Japan’s biggest annual bonsai show, the Kokufū Bonsai Exhibition, continues to attract huge numbers of visitors, while the Bonsai Festival draws tremendous crowds to the Bonsai Village from all over Japan during the Golden Week holidays in May every year. A lot of people think of bonsai as an expensive hobby indulged in by prosperous people in their autumn years, but the truth is that bonsai’s appeal is far from limited to the older generation. While some people born into bonsai families may feel uneasy about continuing the family business, their numbers are more than made up for by newcomers to the industry, young people from ordinary middle-class backgrounds who have grown up with no connection to bonsai. These people suddenly fall in love with bonsai one day and resolve to look for creative work with plants, moving from the horticultural industry to landscaping and finally arriving in the bonsai trade, often entering a No. 2 August–September 2010 2 nursery as an apprentice in their mid-twenties. In fact, this phenomenon is well illustrated by the staff at the Ōmiya museum. In addition to three curators with doctoral degrees, we have three professional bonsai growers on staff as full-time specialist bonsai curators. All three are young people in their thirties who grew up without any particular connection to the bonsai world. Similarly, it would be mistaken to assume that all bonsai enthusiasts—the people who appreciate and study the art, though they may not grow trees themselves—are all in their later years. As a matter of fact, when the museum was still at the planning stages, some people did suggest its appeal would be limited to a small number of dedicated enthusiasts, most of them elderly, and that visitor numbers would sooner or later start to decline. People expected that a museum like ours would have a much more limited appeal than a regular museum, botanical garden, or park. In fact, though, since we opened we have had positive coverage in popular young people’s magazine, glamorous women’s monthlies, and TV, describing the museum as a stylish and revitalizing place well worth visiting. Our visitors these days include many men and women in their twenties, people with young families, women in their thirties and forties, and middle-aged couples. The Three Kinds of Bonsai Fans Looked at on a national level, therefore, it would be wrong to think of bonsai as being in a state of decline. The next generation of bonsai enthusiasts is growing all the time. But it certainly true that this new generation sometimes has interests and priorities that differ from the traditional esthetics and tastes that prevailed in the past. The answers to our visitor questionnaires suggest that, broadly speaking, bonsai enthusiasts today fit into three main categories. The first group is made up of people who visit the museum looking for a kind of bonsai completely divorced from its stuffy, old-fashioned cultural context. Many of them think of bonsai as a touch of greenery to brighten up a room. These people often leave the museum disappointed. Their idea of bonsai is limited to commercial versions that fit the bright, Western-style spaces of their modern interiors: relatively easy-to-cultivate small potted trees, seedlings in balls of moss, and assortments of plants and flowers in pots. They are looking for something soothing and stylish, and tend to be turned off by the dignity and gravitas of traditional bonsai—large and aged trees of the kind that well-to-do families used to put on display in imposing gardens or in Japanese-style rooms on special occasions. There is significant crossover between this group and the young women who decorate their rooms with the little moss balls and other so-called “bonsai” they pick up on their way home from work at railway station concourses or gardening supply shops. The second group comprises people who initially visit the museum expecting the same kind of ersatz bonsai as the first group, but end up being overwhelmed by the beauty of the No. 2 August–September 2010 3 traditional bonsai and write vividly in their comments of their excitement. The people in this group tend to be men and women in their thirties and forties, and almost without exception they seem to visit one of the privately run bonsai nurseries directly after leaving the museum. The third group is made up of people who really have come to the museum to see the noble old trees and great masterpieces of bonsai, painstakingly cultivated by generations of famous bonsai masters. These people will typically spend several hours here, taking their time and appreciating the traditional Japanese esthetic as it is expressed in the trees. Many people in this group are hardcore enthusiasts who raise trees themselves, though some simply enjoy looking are not involved in growing the trees themselves. Also in this group are visitors from Europe and the Americas with a keen interest in traditional Japanese culture and esthetics. Most of the Japanese visitors in this group are in their forties or older, but it is not unusual to see people in their twenties among the overseas visitors. One last thing I should mention in this respect is the reaction to the museum of tourists from China and Korea. The truth is that ever since the museum opened, visitors from other countries in East Asia have been an extremely rare sight in the museum. We have pamphlets in six different languages and scripts: Japanese, English, Spanish, traditional and simplified Chinese, and Korean. The piles of Chinese and Korean leaflets are not getting smaller at all. Although increasing numbers of rich Chinese have started to visit bonsai nurseries in this country to buy Japanese bonsai as investments in recent years, by and large people in China seem to take it for granted that Japanese bonsai developed from Chinese penjing. By this logic, China represents the headquarters of the mainstream tradition—so why should Chinese people bother to visit an upstart tradition in Japan? And in recent years people in Korea have started to claim that in fact the origin of both bonsai and penjing lies in the Korean peninsula. But if Japanese bonsai is merely a local variation on a continental tradition, then what is the “traditional Japanese” esthetic that so many of our middle-aged Japanese visitors and people from Europe and the Americas find in Japanese bonsai? Can it really be the case that bonsai is nothing more than an offshoot of Chinese penjing? Chinese Penjing and the Beginnings of Japanese Bonsai In fact it is not known for certain when Chinese penjing was first introduced to Japan.
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