To see the full in the empty can be defined, I think, as a creative act. From nothing, something is created. And Japan has traditionally been elevated by the invention of the fullness that invests the empty. Examples spin out from this central idea. Lots of mud and no money? Then create, like the Chinese and the Koreans, superb pottery. Lots of room and no furniture? Then make an aesthetic of space itself and invent the concept of ma to account for it. Lots of time for unemployed samurai? Then elevate manners into a ritual and create a space where temporal routine is so heightened that it becomes transparent—invent the tea ceremony where guests with time on their hands sit and savor the emptiness.
From the tea ceremony came an entire celebration of the empty as reflected in the carefully shabby, the ostentatiously poor, the expensively maigre. Wabi, sabi—things made of very little, of a striking simplicity: the cracked pot holding the field flower.
Such invention, no matter its resultant chic, is created from want. From nothing something is created because it is necessary. The Japanese woodworker creates in his otherwise empty box an artful disclosing of the very grain of his materials. The Japanese gardener, with only stones and trees at hand, hones out of this emptiness something ideal, which he necessarily calls nature but which is nonetheless his aesthetic.
Emptiness can be a virtue in other ways as well. What else is the Zen koan but a riddle constructed to be empty? It is up to you to fill it. As Barthes himself notes: Zen wages a war against the prevarication of meaning.
It does so because meaning fixes fully and for all time just one single meaning. All those overtones that so resounded before this naming are now still. Meaning closes. Emptiness, on the other hand, leaves open, all options still hanging. Meaning, wanting to fill this fruitful emptiness, prevaricates because it opts for the single rather than for the burgeoning multiple.
Emptiness can also be celebrated. Look at the films of Ozu. His world is created of very little: the frames of domestic architecture; a single camera position, low; one form of punctuation only, the straight cut; no plot, simply layered scenes of single, haiku-like cause and effect. Often his scenes are empty. People have not yet entered, or have already left. The camera gazes, in a sleeping, half-dark room, at a common vase holding nothing. And we fill this vessel with the emotions we have been holding, emotions generated by the film itself. We fill the empty scene with meanings just as we fill the empty koan with insight.
Meanings flow and disappear as the film fades, as the guests bow at the end of the tea ceremony and go home. Here is the temporal equivalent of a nutritious emptiness—an immortal perishability, an eternal transience. Examples abound: the carefully mended tea bowl, the cherished tarnish of the silver caddy, the haiku that freezes forever a single moment. These are the things created from the stuff of time itself.
Even now, much is made of the cherry blossom—not in full bloom but when the petals begin to flutter down. The transient moment thus symbolized is seized upon and visible perishability is openly prized. Thus transience is traditionally celebrated, just as emptiness is traditionally commemorated. Finding nourishment in the void is truly creative, but you have to have the void before you can find the nourishment. And what if this fruitful void fills up?
Something like this is occurring in modern Japan. As I write, emptiness is draining away. A civilization traditionally predicated upon the virtues of being empty is becoming full. The ideals of poverty have been superseded by the ideals of wealth. Since the end of World War II, this traditionally poverty-stricken country has become progressively more wealthy—that is, the government, not the people themselves. But the people have been easy to lead away from the void of poverty when shown the mountain of things for them to buy.
The empty room is no longer filled with the riches of emptiness. Instead, it now contains the television set, the tape/DVD player, the cassette deck, the deep-freeze, the home computer, the microwave, the answering machine, and much, much more.
There is a glut of time, too—a democratic distribution for everyone. Stretches of time are no longer creative voids to be filled with contemplation. Time is now to be killed and taxidermized with pachinko, or with brand-name shopping, or with karaoke. A nation of creators has become a nation of consumers.
This consumerism is the result of a kind of demoralization. Imagine a nation, the culture of which was predicated on the creative use of want. Now remove the want. If the void no longer nourishes, this is because it is no longer there; nor are the master carpenters or the artist masons, and the tea ceremony and the art of arranging flowers have both been transformed from celebrations of emptiness into big businesses.
As to why this should have occurred in a country famed for wringing nourishment from emptiness, I think that the reason—one of the reasons—is that Japanese culture, perhaps because of its long competitive bias, is one of the most pragmatic.
Everything is for use, hardly anything exists for its own intrinsic self. Nature becomes the garden and flowers become ikebana. This surge to create is extremely strong. When there is little to create with, and scant material upon which the searching, pragmatic spirit can exercise itself, ma and the tea ceremony come into being. When more material comes to hand, as at present, there is a natural swing toward the methods of consumption—a lesser destination.
As the empty world implodes in the midst of excess, it carries away with it a certain necessary creativity—a special and precious ability that in large part brought into being that fast-receding culture recognized as traditionally Japanese.
The empty center is still there, but it supports less and less. Its immaculate transparency turns opaque. A new Barthes, in Japan for the first time, might not even notice it. And as the emptiness vanishes, a kind of creativity vanishes with it.
—1992
The Coming Collapse of Cultural Internationalization
The Tokyo taxi driver taking me home was talking away. We were having the kind of conversation that Japanese often have with foreigners. What is your country? Are you married? When are you going home?
Then he suddenly said, “Well, I sure hope you people keep it up. Just keep on pushing. That’s the only way things are going to get any better for people like me who don’t work for the government or for the big companies.”
I was startled. Japan can seem so uniform, so bland, phrases so expected coming from faces so neutral. And yet the people are not really like this, as my driver had just let me know.
Japan is not a homogeneous monolith. There is as much individuality here as there is anywhere else. But it is harder to see and that is why the taxi driver surprised me. He suddenly became visible.
The reason that this diversity is difficult to see is that society—and its spokesperson, the government—doesn’t want it to be seen. From the early reigns of the warlords right down through the various postwar cabinets, Japanese governments have been parental, authoritarian, dictatorial. All have been concerned with the tasks of maintaining public order, of creating harmony and, as they put it, of avoiding confusion.
There have been correspondingly closed ranks to present undivided fronts and to stifle disagreement. Some of these—the centuries of Tokugawa rule, the decade of the Pacific War cabinet—were police states.
These operated through open coercion. This is a process that became learned. Over centuries, overt pressure becomes unnecessary. Under the house of Tokugawa, the Japanese people were repeatedly invited to internalize the expectancies of their rulers and to do so for the sake of creating a unified and peaceful state.
Such pressure is to be observed in other countries as well but perhaps only in Japan is it so visible. There are signs of it everywhere—historical remains cropping up through the surface of everyday life.
A simple example is the continuing prevalence of such a can’t-be-helped expression as shikata ga nai. That, contrarily, it actually can be helped, however, is a thought incapable of expression