The support, the supported. The structure of Japanese society is visible; little is hidden. The unit is among those things most apparent. The module: tatami mats are all of a size, as are fusuma sliding doors and shoji paper panes. Mine fits your house, yours fits mine.
Socially, the module unit is the group. It is called the nakama. Each individual has many: family, school, club, company. Those inside (naka) form the group. This basic unit, the nakama, in its myriad forms, makes up all of society. The wilderness, nature unformed and hence invisible, is outside the nakama of Japan, and that wilderness includes all nonmembers, amongst them, of course, us, the gaijin (foreigners). The West also has its family, its school, its company, but how flaccid, how lax. They lack the Japanese cohesion, the structural density, and at the same time the utter simplicity of design.
Land of the robot? Home of the bee and the ant? Given this functional and pragmatic structure, given this lack of dialectic (no active dichotomies, no good, no bad, no Platonic ideals at all), one might think so. But, no—it is something else.
Let the Westerner sincerely try to live by Japanese customs, says Kurt Singer, Japan’s most perspicacious observer, “and he will instantly feel what a cell endowed with the rudiments of human sensibility must be supposed to feel in a well-coordinated body.”
Does this not sound familiar? It is something we once all knew, we in the West as well. It is something like a balance between individuals and society. One lives within social limitations, to be sure. And if you do not have limitations, how do you define freedom? In Japan the result is individual conformity: each house and each person is different from all the others yet they are also essentially the same. The hand may shape the flower, but it is still a flower.
If one answer to the ambitions of immortality is to tear down and precisely reconstruct the Ise shrines, then one answer to the problem of the one and the many (a Western dichotomy), one way to reconcile the demands of the individual and those of society, is the Japanese self, one in which the two selves become one.
They are not, as Japan proves, incompatible. The individual and that individual playing his or her social role are the same. Just as the house and garden are the same. The nakama dissolves fast enough when not needed—and freezes just as fast when desired. To see Japan then is to apprehend an alternate way of thinking, to entertain thoughts we deem contradictory. Having defined nature to his own satisfaction, the Japanese may now lead what is for him a natural life.
This natural life consists of forming nature, of making reality. Intensely anthropomorphic, the Japanese is, consequently, intensely human. This also means curious, acquisitive, superstitious, conscious of self. There is an old garden concept (still to be seen at, say, Kyoto’s Entsu-ji temple) that is called shakkei. We translate it as “borrowed scenery.”
The garden stops at a hedge. Beyond that hedge, space. Then, in the distance, the mountain, Mount Hiei. It does not belong to the temple, but it is a part of the garden. The hand of the Japanese reaches out and offers (appropriates) that which is most distant. Anything out there can become nature. The world is one, a seamless whole, for those who can see it, for those who can learn to observe, to regard, to understand.
—1984
Japanese Shapes
Man is the only one among the animals to make patterns, and among men the Japanese are among the foremost pattern makers. They are a patterned people who live in a patterned country, a land where habit is exalted to rite; where the exemplar still exists; where there is a model for everything and the ideal is actively sought; where the shape of an idea or an action may be as important as its content; where the configuration of parts depends upon recognized form, and the profile of the country depends upon the shape of living.
The profile is visible—to think of Japan is to think of form. But beneath this, a social pattern also exists. There is a way to pay calls, a way to go shopping, a way to drink tea, a way to arrange flowers, a way to owe money. A formal absolute exists and is aspired to: social form must be satisfied if social chaos is to be avoided. Though other countries also have certain rituals that give the disordered flux of life a kind of order, here these become an art of behavior. It is reflected in the language, a tongue where the cliché is expected; there are formal phrases not only for meeting and for parting but also for begging pardon, for expressing sorrow, for showing anger or surprise or love itself.
This attachment to pattern is expressed in other ways as well. Japan is one of the last countries to still wear costumes. Not only the fireman and the policeman, but also the student and the laborer. There is a suit for hiking, a costume for striking; there is the unmistakable fashion for the gangster and the indubitable ensembles of the fallen woman. In old Japan, the pattern was even more apparent: a fishmonger wore this, a vegetable seller, that; a samurai had his uniform as surely as a geisha had hers.
The country should have resembled one of those picture scrolls of famous gatherings in which everyone is plainly labeled, or one of those formal games—the chess-like shogi perhaps—in which each piece is marked, moving in a manner predetermined, recognized, each capable of just so much.
More than the Chinese, more even than the Arabs, the Japanese have felt the need for pattern and, hence, impose it—Confucius with his codes of behavior lives on in Japan, if not in China; the Japanese would perhaps have embraced that rigorous rule-book, the Koran, had they known about it.
Here, however, the triumph of form remains mainly visual. Ritual is disturbed by the human; spontaneity ruins ethics. Japan thus makes most patterns for the eyes and names are remembered only if read. Hearing is fallible; the eye is sure. Japan is the country of calling cards and whole forests of advertising; it is the land of the amateur artist and the camera. Everyone can draw, everyone can take pictures. The visual is not taught, it is known: it is like having perfect pitch.
To make a pattern is to discover one and copy it; a created form presumes an archetype. In Japan one suffers none of the claustrophobia of the Arab countries (geometrical wildernesses) and none of the dizzying multiplicity of the United States (every man his own creation) because the original model for patterns of Japan was nature itself.
One still sees this from the air, always a good introduction to the patterns of a country. Cultivated Japan is all paddies winding in free-form serpentines between the mountains, or a quilt of checks and triangles in the lowlands—very different from the tidy squares of Germany, or that vast and regular checkerboard of North America.
The Japanese pattern is drawn from nature. The paddy fields assume their shape because mountains are observed and valleys followed, because this is the country where the house was once made to fit into the curve of the landscape and where the farmer used to cut a hole in the roof rather than cut down the tree.
The natural was once seen as the beautiful, and even today, lip service is given to this thought. However, both then and now, the merely natural was never beautiful enough. That nature is grand only when it is natural—Byron’s thought—would never have occurred to a Japanese. No, this ideal is closer to the ordered landscape of Byron’s grandfather: forests become parks, trees are espaliered, flowers are arranged. One does not go against nature, but one does take advantage of it: we smooth, we embellish. Nature is only the potential—man gives it its shape and its meaning.
Since it is the natural forms that are traditionally most admired—the single rock, the spray of bamboo—it is these that are seen more frequently in Japanese art, delivered from the chaotic context of nature and given meaning through their isolation. There are canons, but they derive from nature. Purple and red do not clash as they might in the West because, since they occur often enough in nature, no law of color can suggest that their proximity is unsatisfactory.
A single branch set at one side of the niche-like tokonoma and balanced by nothing is not ill composed because there is a rule that insists that formal balance is not necessarily good. The Japanese garden is not the French: symmetry is something imposed upon nature, not drawn from it; asymmetry is a fine compromise between a complete regularity and an utter chaos.
To think of Japan is to think of form, because these