Viewed Sideways. Donald Richie
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ways to encompass (and subject) the distant other is through what is often called the act of love but in this context should probably be called the act of sex. When this urge meets the seemingly pliable “native” with her or his “different mores” the result is a kind of infatuation. It can go both ways and often does. But the major consideration is that Japanese have to “live” in their country, and foreigners cannot.
Foreigners, says Alastair Reid, are curable romantics. They retain an illusion from childhood that there might be some place into which they can finally sink to rest: some magic land, some golden age, some significantly other self. Yet the foreigners’ own oddness keeps them separate from every encounter. Unless they regard this as something fruitful, they cannot be considered cured.
This is the great lesson of expatriation. In Japan I sit on the lonely heights of my own peculiarities and gaze back at the flat plains of Ohio whose quaint folkways no longer have any power over me, and then turn and gaze at the islands of Japan, whose quaint folkways are equally powerless in that they insist that I am no part of them. This I regard as the best seat in the house. Because from here I can compare, and comparison is the first step toward understanding.
I have learned to regard freedom as more important than belonging. This is what my years of expatriation have taught me. I have not yet graduated, but Japan with its rigorous combination of invitation and exclusion has promised me a degree. For it I have adopted as motto a paragraph quoted by Said from the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.”
—1993
Japan: A Description
Japan is entered: the event is marked, as when one enters a Shinto shrine, by passing beneath the torii gateway. There is an outside; then, there is an inside. And once inside—inside the shrine, inside Japan—the experience begins with a new awareness, a way of looking, a way of seeing.
You must truly observe. Go to the garden and look at the rock, the tree. Ah, nature, you say and turn away—then stop. You have just discovered that rock and tree have been placed there, placed by the hand of man, the Japanese hand. A new thought occurs: nature does not happen, it is wrought. A new rule offers itself: nothing is natural until it has been so created.
This comes as a surprise to us of a different culture. The Japanese view is anthropomorphic—unashamedly, triumphantly so. The gods here are human and their mysteries are mundane. If we occasionally find the Japanese scene mysterious, it is only because we find such simplicity mysterious. In the West, cause and effect this clear tend to be invisible. Look again at the torii. The support, the supported—that is all.
Observation, appreciation, and, through these, understanding. Not only in Japan, of course, but everywhere, naturally. But in Japan the invitation to observe is strongest because the apparent is so plain.
Look at the architecture. The floor defines the space; from it the pillars hold the beams; on them the roof contains the whole. Nothing is hidden. Traditionally there is no façade. Take the shrines at Ise. Cut wood, sedge, air—that is all they are made of.
The spatial simplicity extends temporally as well. The shrines have been destroyed and identically rebuilt every twenty years since antiquity. This cycle is an alternative to the Pyramids—a simpler answer to the claims of immortality. Rebuild precisely and time is obliterated. Ise embodies the recipe for infinity: one hundred cubits and two decades. We see what is there, and behind it we glimpse a principle.
Universal principles make up nature, but nature does not reveal those principles in Japan until one has observed nature by shaping it oneself. The garden is not natural until everything in it has been shifted, changed. Flowers are not natural either until so arranged to be. God, man, earth—these are the traditional strata in the flower arrangement, but it is man who is operative, acting as the medium through which earth and heaven meet.
And the arrangement is not only in the branches, the leaves, the flowers. It is also in the spaces in between. Negative space is calculated, too—in the architecture, in the gardens, in the etiquette, in the language itself. The Japanese observe the spaces between the branches, the pillars; they know too when to leave out pronouns and when to be silent.
Negative space has its own weight, and it is through knowing both negative and positive (yin and yang), the specific gravity of each, that one may understand the complete whole, that seamless garment that is life. There are, one sees, no opposites. The ancient Greeks—Heraclitus—knew this, but we in the Western world have forgotten and are only now recalling. Asia never forgot; Japan always remembered.
If there are no true opposites, then man and nature are properly a part of one another. Seen from the garden, the house is another section of the landscape. The traditional roof is sedge, the stuff that flourishes in the fields. The house itself is wood, and the mats are reed—the outside brought in.
The garden is an extension of the house. The grove outside is an enlargement of the flower arrangement in the alcove. Even now, when land prices make private gardens rare, the impulse continues. The pocket of earth outside the door contains a tiny tree or a flowering bush. Or, if that is impossible, then the alcove in the single matted room contains a budding branch, a solitary bloom.
Even now that sedge and reed are rarely used, the shapes they took continue. Man-made nature is made a part of nature, a continuing symbiosis. Even now, the ideal is that the opposites are one.
The garden is not a wilderness. It is only the romantics who find wildness beautiful, and the Japanese are too pragmatic to be romantic. At the same time, a garden is not a geometrical abstraction. It is only the classicist who would find that attractive, and the Japanese are too much creatures of their feelings to be so cerebrally classic. Rather, a garden is created to recreate (they would say “reveal”) nature. Raw nature is simply never there.
Paradigm: In Japan, at the old-fashioned inn, you get up, you go to take your morning bath, and you are invisible. No one greets you. Only when you are washed, dressed, combed, ready—only then comes the morning greeting. Unkempt nature, unkempt you, both are equally just not there. The garden prepared is acknowledged as natural. What was invisible is now revealed and everything in it is now in “natural” alignment.
Thus, too, the materials of nature, once invisible, are now truly seen. Formerly mute, they are now “heard.” The rock, the stone, are placed in view; textures (bark, leaf, flower) are suddenly there. From this worked-over nature emerge the natural elements. Wood is carved with the grain so that the natural shape can assert itself. In the way the master sculptor Michelangelo said he worked, the Japanese carpenter finds the shape within the tree. Or, within the rock, for stone too has grain, and this the mason finds, chipping away to reveal the form beneath.
“Made in Japan” is now a slogan well known, and one that we now see has extensions—like silicon chips and transistors. Not the same as carved wood or chiseled stone, but created through a similar impulse. And with such an unformulated national philosophy (“Nature is for use”) this is not surprising. Everything is raw material, inanimate and animate as well.
Not only is nature so shaped, but human nature, too, is molded. We of the West may approve of the dwarfed trees, the arranged flowers, the massaged beef, but we are disapproving when people are given the same attentions. Our tradition is against such control. Japan’s, however, is not. It welcomes it.
Society is supposed to form. Such is its function. We are (they would say) all of one family, all more or less alike. So we have our duties, our obligations. If we are to live contentedly, if society (our own construct) is to serve, then we must subject ourselves to its guiding pressures.
As the single finger bends the branch, so the social hand inclines the individual. If the unkempt tree is not considered natural, then the equally unkempt life can also play no useful part. So, the Japanese do not struggle against the inevitable. And, as they say, alas, things cannot be helped—even when they can be. This simplified life allows them to follow their pursuits. These may be flower arranging, or Zen, or kendo fencing.