Читать книгу Viewed Sideways - Donald Richie - Страница 8

Japan is entered: the event is marked, as when one enters a Shinto shrine, by passing beneath the torii gateway. There is an outside; then, there is an inside. And once inside—inside the shrine, inside Japan—the experience begins with a new awareness, a way of looking, a way of seeing.

You must truly observe. Go to the garden and look at the rock, the tree. Ah, nature, you say and turn away—then stop. You have just discovered that rock and tree have been placed there, placed by the hand of man, the Japanese hand. A new thought occurs: nature does not happen, it is wrought. A new rule offers itself: nothing is natural until it has been so created.

This comes as a surprise to us of a different culture. The Japanese view is anthropomorphic—unashamedly, triumphantly so. The gods here are human and their mysteries are mundane. If we occasionally find the Japanese scene mysterious, it is only because we find such simplicity mysterious. In the West, cause and effect this clear tend to be invisible. Look again at the torii. The support, the supported—that is all.

Observation, appreciation, and, through these, understanding. Not only in Japan, of course, but everywhere, naturally. But in Japan the invitation to observe is strongest because the apparent is so plain.

Look at the architecture. The floor defines the space; from it the pillars hold the beams; on them the roof contains the whole. Nothing is hidden. Traditionally there is no façade. Take the shrines at Ise. Cut wood, sedge, air—that is all they are made of.

The spatial simplicity extends temporally as well. The shrines have been destroyed and identically rebuilt every twenty years since antiquity. This cycle is an alternative to the Pyramids—a simpler answer to the claims of immortality. Rebuild precisely and time is obliterated. Ise embodies the recipe for infinity: one hundred cubits and two decades. We see what is there, and behind it we glimpse a principle.

Universal principles make up nature, but nature does not reveal those principles in Japan until one has observed nature by shaping it oneself. The garden is not natural until everything in it has been shifted, changed. Flowers are not natural either until so arranged to be. God, man, earth—these are the traditional strata in the flower arrangement, but it is man who is operative, acting as the medium through which earth and heaven meet.

And the arrangement is not only in the branches, the leaves, the flowers. It is also in the spaces in between. Negative space is calculated, too—in the architecture, in the gardens, in the etiquette, in the language itself. The Japanese observe the spaces between the branches, the pillars; they know too when to leave out pronouns and when to be silent.

Negative space has its own weight, and it is through knowing both negative and positive (yin and yang), the specific gravity of each, that one may understand the complete whole, that seamless garment that is life. There are, one sees, no opposites. The ancient Greeks—Heraclitus—knew this, but we in the Western world have forgotten and are only now recalling. Asia never forgot; Japan always remembered.

If there are no true opposites, then man and nature are properly a part of one another. Seen from the garden, the house is another section of the landscape. The traditional roof is sedge, the stuff that flourishes in the fields. The house itself is wood, and the mats are reed—the outside brought in.

The garden is an extension of the house. The grove outside is an enlargement of the flower arrangement in the alcove. Even now, when land prices make private gardens rare, the impulse continues. The pocket of earth outside the door contains a tiny tree or a flowering bush. Or, if that is impossible, then the alcove in the single matted room contains a budding branch, a solitary bloom.

Even now that sedge and reed are rarely used, the shapes they took continue. Man-made nature is made a part of nature, a continuing symbiosis. Even now, the ideal is that the opposites are one.

The garden is not a wilderness. It is only the romantics who find wildness beautiful, and the Japanese are too pragmatic to be romantic. At the same time, a garden is not a geometrical abstraction. It is only the classicist who would find that attractive, and the Japanese are too much creatures of their feelings to be so cerebrally classic. Rather, a garden is created to recreate (they would say “reveal”) nature. Raw nature is simply never there.

Paradigm: In Japan, at the old-fashioned inn, you get up, you go to take your morning bath, and you are invisible. No one greets you. Only when you are washed, dressed, combed, ready—only then comes the morning greeting. Unkempt nature, unkempt you, both are equally just not there. The garden prepared is acknowledged as natural. What was invisible is now revealed and everything in it is now 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 now a slogan well known, and one that we now see has extensions—like silicon chips and transistors. Not the same as carved wood or chiseled stone, but created through 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 dwarfed trees, the arranged flowers, the massaged beef, but we are disapproving when people are given the same attentions. 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 equally unkempt life can also play no useful part. 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 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