Japanese Design. Patricia Graham

values implicit in wabi and sabi already existed prior to Zen’s introduction to Japan. The word sabi appeared in Japan’s earliest native language (waka) poetry anthology of the eighth century, the Manyōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves), where it described a wistful melancholia for exquisite beauty that vanished with the vicissitudes of time. By the eleventh century, this sentiment came to be expressed with the term mono no aware (the “pathos of things”). A fourteenth-century Kamakura period courtly poet and Buddhist hermit, Yoshida Kenkō (1283?–1350?), made this aesthetic the basis of his influential Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), and his writing was well known and quoted by the early chanoyu tea masters.

      Difficult to translate, wabi and sabi are today acclaimed, along with shibui and suki, as the “essence of Japanese beauty.”²¹ Wabi means desolate or lonely, and embodies appreciation of a rustic beauty in natural imperfections, and celebrates the noble spirit of poverty and humility. Sabi means rusted, lonesome, or dreary, and aesthetically evokes sorrow for the fragility of life.

      Plate 1-15 Machiai (waiting shelter) in a tea house garden, early 20^th century, Toyama Memorial Museum, Kawashima, Hiki-gun, Saitama Prefecture. Guests reach the tea house by passing through a garden laid out along a path (roji) designed as a transition space between the everyday world and the sanctuary of the tea room. The main architectural feature within these gardens is a small rustic shelter (machiai), a bench protected by three walls, and an open front. There, guests wait to enter the tea room or rest during gaps between tea services.

      Plate 1-16 Stone water basin in the garden of the Jōnangu Shrine, Kyoto. Within tea gardens, guests stop to purify their hands and mouth at a stone water basin (chōzubachi), often of a type placed low to the ground (tsukubai) and sometimes, as here, formed from a natural boulder. In addition, this basin features a bamboo pipe (suikinkutsu) through which water courses and hits the basin with a pleasing, splashing sound, creating an aural component to the experience.

      Plate 1-17 Tea room at the Rakusuien, Fukuoka, 1995. Tea gardens lead guests along a path to the tea house where they enter via a nijiri guchi, a small “crawl door” through which they must bow to enter.

      Plate 1-18 a & b Two views of the four and a half tatami mat tea room in the “Kitchen House” of artist Jinzenji Yoshiko, Kyoto, Japan, 2008. Designed by Ms Jinzenji. This small contemporary tea room evokes purity in keeping with the principles of wabi and sabi, evident in the muted coloration of the earthen walls, the unpainted wooden ceiling slats and posts, and a naturally twisted tree trunk to the right of the tokonoma alcove. The weathered looking leather-covered zabuton cushions and the light streaming through the paper-covered shōji sliding doors impart an air of modernity.

      Plate 1-19 Karatsu ware tea bowl of the Okugōrai (Old Korean) type, late 16^th–early 17^th century. Glazed stoneware, 7.6 x 14 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 32-62/6. Photo: Joshua Ferdinand. Yanagi Sōetsu described the wabi-sabi beauty found in tea bowls as “the beauty of the imperfect and the beauty that deliberately rejects the perfect … a beauty lurking within.”²⁹ Chanoyu tea bowls endowed with wabi-sabi aesthetics generally lack decorative embellishment and emphasize the tactile forms of the bowls themselves with natural or minimal application of glazes in subdued, earthy colors. The understated beauty of Karatsu tea bowls are among those most revered by chanoyu tea masters. The long, natural drip of glaze at the front of this magnificent bowl is particularly cherished. (For other tea bowls, see Plates 2-30 and 2-37.)

      Plate 1-20 Detail of the perimeter wall at Shōfukuji, Fukuoka, Japan’s first Zen temple, founded in Japan in 1195. Made of mud embedded with old broken clay tiles and rocks for structural support, walls like this are a common sight at Japanese Zen temples and traditional residences, especially in the Fukuoka area, when they were first made during the late sixteenth century as part of reconstruction efforts after Japan’s conflicts with the Korean peninsula. Their incorporation of old and broken pieces of roof tiles expresses the aesthetic of sabi.

      Plate 1-21 Moss-covered garden lantern at the Ōkōchi Sansō Villa, Arashiyama, Kyoto. This lantern, old at the time it was installed in its present location in the garden surrounding the villa of the Japanese film actor Ōkōchi Denjirō (1898–1962), helps to infuse the estate grounds with the spirit of wabi and sabi.

      Westerners first became enamored with the aesthetic concepts of wabi and sabi through the writings of Okakura Kakuzō (see page 136), especially The Book of Tea (1906), in which he explained how chanoyu owed its values to Zen Buddhist monastic practices. Okakura did not use the words wabi and sabi, however. Instead, he described these aesthetics as “Zennism.” Writing several decades later, D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966; see page 137) avowed these same values in his book, Zen and Japanese Culture, where he defined wabi as “the worshipping of poverty” and sabi as “rustic unpretentiousness or archaic imperfection, apparent simplicity or effortlessness in execution, and richness in historical associations.”²² Yanagi Sōetsu (see page 138), champion of Japan’s folk art aesthetics, also wrote about wabi and sabi, describing them as a hidden “irregular,” and imperfect beauty, and also linked them to shibui.²³

      Influenced by Yanagi, Elizabeth Gordon helped to popularize the concepts through her inclusion of a short article about them in her House Beautiful magazine Shibui issue, where she explained wabi and sabi as underlying principles of shibui.²⁴ Gordon noted the presence of sabi in gardens that possess a “tranquil and serene atmosphere,” and wabi as a design concept in which “nothing is over-emphasized or extravagant or exaggerated.” She further noted that “the humility in wabi, the hint of sadness in the recognition of perfection in any human achievement, springs from the knowledge that with the bloom of time comes the first embrace of oblivion.”²⁵

      The words wabi and sabi are perhaps the most familiar, and also overused, Japanese aesthetic terms in the present day. Leonard Koren (b. 1948), a consultant and prolific writer specializing in design and aesthetics, helped to popularize these words in his 1994 book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, which contrasted Japanese and Western ideals of beauty.²⁶ They “became a talking point for a wasteful culture intent on penitence and a touchstone for designers of all stripes, including some makers of luxury goods.”²⁷ More recently, these words have been applied to a wide variety of crafts, fine arts, commercial products, architectural designs, and even interpersonal relationships.²⁸ Clearly, usage of these terms has strayed far from their original meanings. Nowadays, it has become popular to associate wabi-sabi with virtually anything having abbreviated and suggestive qualities, and products created from rustic and tactile, seemingly old, natural materials.

      Plate 1-22 Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?–1806), Folding Fan Seller, Round Fan Seller, Barley Pounder (Ogi Uri, Uchiwa Uri, Mugi Tsuki), from the series Female Geisha Section of the Yoshiwara Niwaka Festival (Seiro niwaka onna geisha no bu). Polychrome woodblock print, ink and color on paper with mica ground, 37.5 x 24.8 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 32-143/139. Photo: Mel McLean. In this print, a genre known as mitate (humorous visual allusions to classical themes in ukiyoe prints), a group of geisha entertain attendees at a festival by parodying various types of merchants.

      IKI