Plate 1-36 Elegant Amusements at a Mansion, second half 17th century. Pair of six-panel screens, ink, colors, and gold leaf on paper, each screen 106.7 x 260.35 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 32-83/14,15. Photo: Tiffany Matson. This imaginary view of a mansion portrays the wide variety of kabuku spirit leisure activities, some refined and others boisterous, enjoyed by affluent warriors and merchants in the privacy of their walled-off residences or in the houses of entertainment and assignation that they frequented.
Plate 1-37 Mino ware, Oribe-type set of five serving dishes with persimmon design, 1600–1620s. Stoneware with underglaze iron oxide design and copper green glaze, each 9.8 x 5.7 x 6.4 cm. Collection of John C. Weber, New York. Photo: John Bigelow Taylor. Tea ceremony aesthetics also succumbed to the influence of the new kabuku aesthetic, as seen here in newly popular Oribe wares, whose style is characterized by the application of bright green, spontaneous looking glazes and quirky, playful asymmetrical designs.
Plate 1-38 Suit of Armor (marudō tōsei gusoku type), made for daimyō Abe Masayoshi (1700–1769). Suit ca. 1730–1740; helmet bowl by Neo-Masanobu, early 18th century. Lacquer, silver, gold, whale baleen, silver gilded washi (paper), silk, rasha (textile), bear fur, leather, iron, copper alloy, gilt copper, silks, shakudō (alloy of copper and gold patinated to a rich black), wood, crystal, doe skin, gilded metal, ink stone. Crow Collection of Asian Art, 2013.1. The best craftsmen of the day created this armor for a samurai of refined taste, who wore it during formal processions. It typifies the outlandish warrior (kabuku or basara) taste. Intricate floral scroll patterns and family crest designs cover the surface. A red lacquered wood dragon perches between gilded wood hoe-shaped decorations atop the helmet (kabuto). The face mask projects a fierce expression, while in contrast, the breast plate features delicate maple leaves. The forearm sleeves hide hinged compartments for medicines and writing implements.
Plate 1-39 Tenmyouya Hisashi (b. 1966), Archery, 2008. Acrylic on wood, 90 x 70 cm. Photo © Tenmyouya Hisashi, courtesy of Mizuma Art Gallery. In this painting, Tenmyouya has created a personification of the basara aesthetic by combining the fierce stance of the warrior with the tattooed body of a gangster, juxtaposed with a vibrantly-colored bird and snake.
Plate 1-40 Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800), New Year’s Sun, late 18th century. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 101 x 39.7 cm. Gift from the Clark Center for Japanese Arts & Culture to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2013.29.9. Jakuchū’s art, the epitome of eccentricity, is exemplified in this painting by the artist’s bold, dramatic brushwork, asymmetrical composition, and truncated view of his subject.
Plate 1-41 Kano Kazunobu (1815–1863), Five Rakan Saving Sinners from Hell, 1862–1863, scroll number 23 from a set of One Hundred Scrolls of the Five Hundred Rakan, Zōjōji, Tokyo. Hanging scroll, ink, gold, and colors on silk, 172.3 x 85.3 cm. This graphic, gruesome scene of sinners trapped in an ice-filled pool is one Tenmyouya included in his basara exhibition. It exemplifies the penchant for violence during the mid-19th century.
MA
AN INTERVAL IN TIME AND SPACE
The term ma has become a popular buzzword for defining a whole cluster of Japanese aesthetics in the post-war period among Japanese architects and cultural critics. Literally translated as “an interval in time and/or space,” ma describes the partiality in Japanese design for empty spaces, vagueness, abstraction, asymmetrical balance, and irregularity.
The earliest reference to ma in Japanese occurs in the eighth century Manyōshū anthology. There, poets used it to express the misty spaces between mountains and as a marker of the passage of time. By the eleventh century, the word defined the gaps between pillars in Japanese rooms and the in-between spaces of verandas that separated the interiors of buildings from their adjacent gardens. By the nineteenth century, it described the pauses in action in Kabuki theatrical performances. Until the post-war period, it had never been used as an aesthetic term.
Soon after World War II, Kawai Hayao (1928–2007), Japan’s first Western-trained Jungian psychoanalyst, incorporated Buddhist values into his ideas about psychology, describing the key to understanding the Japanese psyche as a “hollow center,” a reference to the Buddhist concept of mushin (emptiness). Kumakura Isao, writing in 2007, equated Kawai’s concept with the word ma, although he does not make it clear if Kawai actually used the word.42 Architect Isozaki Arata is largely responsible for the current popularity of ma as an aesthetic trope, which began in the late 1970s following a major exhibition on modern Japanese design he organized, titled Ma: Space-Time in Japan.43 The exhibition situated ma within the context of other traditional Japanese aesthetic terms, among them sabi and suki discussed above, and presented it as a shorthand explanation for describing the “Japan-ness” of a wide variety of contemporary avant-garde Japanese performing, martial, and visual arts, music, fashion, and garden and architecture design.44 The exhibition explored ma in relation to the cosmology of kami, the unseen deities of Japan’s indigenous Shinto religion, and in the acting style and stage set of the stylized Nō theater. It is important to note though that in pre-modern times neither Shinto nor Nō theater was ever described with the word ma. Nō, for example, in traditional aesthetic terminology is always described as infused with the Buddhist spirit of yūgen (“mysterious beauty”), discussed further in Chapter 2).
Plate 1-42 Veranda of the Mani’in subtemple at Kongōji, Osaka Prefecture, 14th century. Photo: David M. Dunfield, 1991.
Plate 1-43 Prefectural Nō Theater, Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture. Photo © Ishikawa Prefecture Tourist Association and Kanazawa Convention Bureau/© JNTO. Nō theater is characterized by the stylized dance movements and gestures of its actors, hypnotic music, recitation, and chanting, all set against a bare stage set featuring a lone pine tree. The interplay of these elements creates a sedate yet emotionally charged aura (see also Plate 2-15).
Plate 1-44 View of the Inland Sea from Mount Mikasa, Itsukushima. Photo: Patricia J. Graham, October 2006.
Isozaki explained that he chose ma as the exhibition’s unifying theme because the concepts behind it represent the foundation of almost all aspects of Japanese life. He saw it as a uniquely Japanese perception of spatial and temporal reality that resonated with contemporary theories of the universe as defined by quantum physicists who understand space and time not as separate categories but as interdependent dimensions.45 As Gian Carlo Calza has recently observed, this idea had first been suggested by Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), the Nobel laureate theoretical physicist who pioneered the study of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg wondered if Japanese scientists’ great contributions to theoretical physics stemmed from philosophical ideas of the Far East.46 Calza also echoed Isozaki in his observations that “it is precisely this kind of aesthetic model—flexible, open, attentive to every change and variation,