Paradigm: In Japan, at the old-fashioned inn, you get up, go to take your morning bath, and you are invisible—no one greets you. Only when you are dressed, combed, ready—only then comes the morning greeting. Unkempt nature, unkempt you, both are equally nonexistent. The garden prepared is acknowledged as natural. What was invisible is now revealed, and everything in it is 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 a slogan we know, and one we now see has extensions-like silicon chips and transistors. Not the same as carved wood or stone, but created by 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 hand-dwarfed trees, the arranged flowers and the massaged beef, but we disapprove when people are given the same attention. 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 unkempt life is equally out of bounds. 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. Or, on the other hand, working at Sony, Toyota, Honda. Or is it the other hand?
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 all of society. The wilderness, nature unformed and hence invisible, is outside the nakama of Japan, and that wilderness includes all nonmembers, among 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 denseness, 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 custom, says Kurt Singer, Japan’s most perspicacious observer, “and he will instantly feel what a cell endowed with 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 the individual and his 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 city, each house and each person is different from all the others yet 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 reconstruct exactly the Ise shrines, then one answer to the external problem of the one and the many (a Western dichotomy), to reconciling the demands of the individual and those of society, is the Japanese self in which the two selves become one. They are not, Japan proves, incompatible. The individual and that individual playing his social role are the same. As the house and the garden are the same. The nakama dissolves fast enough when not wanted—and freezes just as fast when desired. To see Japan then is to see an alternate way of thinking, to entertain thoughts we deem contradictory. Having defined nature to his 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 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 its garden. The hand of the Japanese reaches out and enhances (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 probably the foremost patternmakers. 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 cliche is expected: there are formal phrases not only for meeting and for parting but also for begging pardon, for expressing sorrow, for showing anger, surprise, love itself.
This attachment to pattern is expressed in other ways: Japan is one of the last countries to 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 ensemble 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—in which each piece is marked, moving in a predetemined way, recognized, each capable of just so much.
More than the Arabs, more than the Chinese, the Japanese have felt the need for pattern and, hence, impose it. Confucius with his code of behavior lives on in Japan, not in China; the Japanese would probably have embraced the rigorous Koran had they known about it. The triumph of form remains, however, mainly visual. Ritual is disturbed by the human; spontaneity ruins ethics. Japan thus makes 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 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 America (every man his own creation) because the original model for the patterns of Japan was nature itself.
One