Review of Japanese Culture and Society

I must admit that when our British friends suggested the title of this exhibition should be "Japan Style", we had certain reservations about accepting the phrase as it stood. Supposing we could climb aboard a time machine and travel back to nineteenth century Japan, we would probably find, it is true, that the words "Japan Style" aptly described the life being lived then; again, if we were to climb aboard the famous Bullet Train and travel from Tokyo (the modern capital) to Kyoto (the former capital, with a proud history going back more than a millennium), I think we would realise that the life of the latter city still had a certain unity and harmony, which justified the use of the same expression. I know, however, that if I were to speak of modern Kyoto, a city with a population of over one million, as being no more than a cultural relic, I should probably incur the wrath of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, the weight of history and the force of tradition have given the streets of the city an undeniably unified and harmonious atmosphere. Even though Kyoto has yielded to Tokyo the role of political and financial capital, there remains, underlying the complex psychology of her citizens, a certain pride in the fact that, when it comes to traditional life and culture, their city is still at the centre of things.

Everywhere in Japan there may be found old castle-towns, which retain something of the flavour of days gone by (although not in such perfect form as Kyoto itself), and some years ago the Japan National Railways ran a publicity campaign with the English title "Discover Japan" in an effort to get tourists of the younger generation to visit these little Kyotos. As a result, every holiday large charabancs disgorged crowds of young people who strolled around the ancient streets of such towns in brightly coloured T-shirts and jeans. So essential has it become for us to draw attention to the fact that the fine old traditions and cultural patterns of Japan are being lost or destroyed that we have to make deliberate use of the English word "discover" in appealing to the young people who will shape the future of our country. And yet the "Japanese things" in which our foreign [End Page 57] friends show most interest almost all pertain to that fine old tradition. Woodblock prints, shoji (translucent sliding paper screens), noren (decorative curtains), monsho (heraldic crests), tatami matting, bonsai trees, kimono, kabuki theatre, sumo wrestling—all of them developed in the Edo period (1615–1868), and we have done no more than inherit them in an already perfected state and repeat and perpetuate them without alteration.

Japan in the Edo period occupied a peculiar position in the general history of the world: just when the countries of Europe and America were embracing mercantilism and plunging headlong into the industrial revolution, the Tokugawa government was virtually cutting Japan off from the outside world by a conscious policy of national isolation. Apart from maintaining commercial relations with Chinese and Dutch merchants via the single port of Nagasaki, to which the foreigners were confined, the authorities allowed no external trade of any kind. By way of compensation they pursued a domestic policy of strengthening the feudal system and encouraging cultural unity and in so doing they managed to keep the country at peace for more than 250 years.

At the end of the seventeenth century the city of Edo (the old name for Tokyo) already had a million inhabitants, and it is not often realized that the government was forced to adopt a number of measures to stem the drift of population away from the provinces towards this large city. It is estimated that there were about thirty million people in Japan at the time; on the one hand the government introduced measures to prevent any further increase, and on the other hand it encouraged the stepping up of food production to meet the needs of the existing population. James Clavell's best-selling historical novel Shogun performed an eminently useful task in drawing the world's attention to this important and hitherto hidden chapter in Japanese history.

But the new government that overthrew the Tokugawa regime in 1868 (the year of the so-called Meiji Restoration) decided to reverse the existing policy of national isolation and encourage population increase and contacts with the outside world. The radical approach of the Meiji government, which aimed to establish a modern state by introducing science and technology from advanced Western nations, is reflected in the contemporary slogan bummei kaika ("civilization and enlightenment"), while another phrase fashionable at the time, jato hakurai ("high-class imports"), is a vivid illustration of the susceptibility of ordinary people to the novel goods that were being imported from the industrialised countries of Europe and America. But the traditional life and culture referred to above, which had grown to maturity and refinement over the previous 250 years, were not so powerless nor so lacking in practical value as to be easily swept away by this new tide of "civilization and enlightenment" and "high-class imports". The result was a kind of dichotomy—dichotomy by which, for the past hundred years, we have been in a state of perpetual oscillation between the opposed phenomena of tradition and progress, Japanese and Western.

Such oppositions have of course been experienced in the West as well, but there the choice has been between the maintenance or rejection of traditions based on a [End Page 58] continuous and homogeneous historical process. This guarantee of historical continuity does not exist in Japan, and so the opposition between modernism and traditionalism has tended to be equated with two quite different historical experiences, that of the West and that of Japan. The resulting, peculiarly Japanese, brand of dualism has invaded every aspect of our life, from clothes, food and houses to art and culture in general. We make distinctions between Japanese rooms and Western rooms, Japanese clothes and Western clothes, Japanese food and Western food.

We Japanese have grown quite used to this kind of dualism and as a rule we are quite unconscious of these distinctions, but it seems that they can raise problems for foreign visitors to Japan. For example, because of the quite obvious difference between modern Japanese-style painting (Nihonga) and modern Japanese Western-style painting (Yōga), it has become customary to display the two types in separate rooms when exhibitions are set up. But it was not until some German friends raised the matter that I noticed our failure to make such a distinction in the case of sculpture.

In spite of this kind of inconsistency and vagueness, which may in any case be a specially Japanese trait, it is an undeniable fact that there does exist a dualistic tendency to make distinctions between the Western and the Japanese aspects of our lives. Since the Meiji period (1868–1912) we have been through all manner of trials and errors in our efforts to overcome this kind of dualism and achieve a unified cultural pattern, but so far none of our experiments has been entirely successful. In fact the position we have reached after a century of struggle seems to be more a kind of resourceful eclecticism, which admits the existence of the dualism I have described and makes best use of Japanese or Western things according to time and circumstance. This sensitive realization and practical acceptance of the situation may be seen as an eloquent expression of the positive outlook of the Japanese people: they turn eclecticism to their advantage and use it as a means of adding variety and enjoyment to their lives.

To give a well-known example, a commuter who wears a convenient Western-style suit at the office during the day relaxes in a Japanese yukata (light cotton kimono) when he gets home in the evening. In the same way, girls who normally prefer to wear Western-style clothes choose to put on splendid kimonos for weddings and other formal occasions. The sight of young women, who up until the day before were in hippy-style clothes, gathering all dressed in formal kimonos for a coming-of-age ceremony is a modern spectacle on a par with the traditional folk festivals of old. Before the war, middle-class households preferred to live in one-family houses, which included, as a status symbol, at least one room in Western style complete with piano and sofa. Post-war apartment blocks are, generally speaking, in Western style, but the planners of such buildings have always to bear in mind the fondness of the people who will live in them for rooms floored in Japanese style with tatami straw matting.

To turn to our eating habits, it seems that the heterogeneous nature of modern Japanese food is such that it is not possible to make an analysis in terms of "native" and [End Page 59] "foreign". In Tokyo there are countless restaurants, serving dishes from throughout the world, and every one of them seems to be doing good business. One never hears of a restaurant going bankrupt. If an article recommending one of these places appears in a mass-circulation newspaper, you can be sure that it will be packed from then on. These are simple proofs of the fact that the snobbishness of the Japanese people is by no means confined to art and music alone.

Some years ago an able ceramic designer by the name of Masahiro Mori decided he would try to design a "national tableware", but he has since come to realize that this task is far more difficult than he originally expected it to be. In response to the advice and suggestions of various consultants, Mori has continued to add new items to his set of tableware until now there are more than two hundred different pieces, but he has still not finished. He has held exhibitions of work in which he divided the tableware into three groups—breakfast, lunch and dinner. In fact, there are quite a few Japanese who eat a Western-style breakfast, a lunch consisting of Japanese snacks, and an evening meal that is a combination of Japanese and Western food.

Perhaps the most obvious instance of the Japanese tendency to dualism is the Japanese writing system. More than a thousand years ago we imported the ideographic script (called kanji in Japanese) from China and from it we developed two separate sets of syllabic symbols called hiragana and katakana. Nowadays we use all three systems in conjunction, according to context. All three scripts are written vertically and the columns arranged from right to left, but since the Meiji period we have adopted Arabic numerals and Roman script as well, and when these are used it is necessary to make a choice between writing horizontally or vertically. Probably the first attempts at writing pure Japanese horizontally were inspired by the notes taken by Japanese learning English or French or by bank and company ledgers that made use of Arabic numerals. But even when a decision has been made to write Japanese horizontally, there remains another choice—whether to write from right to left or from left to right. Traditionally, when large signs (for example, the framed notices put up at the entrances to Buddhist temples) were written horizontally, they were written from right to left. To begin with, placards and street signs followed the same practice, but inconsistencies occurred when Roman and Japanese script were used together—for instance, in signs giving the names of railway stations—since the Japanese read from right to left and the Roman script from left to right; such inconsistencies often gave rise to argument and debate. It was not until after the last war that we finally decided on a consistent policy of writing from left to right in such situations. This problem even has a fundamental effect on the binding of books, for whether a magazine or book should open from right to left (Western style) or from left to right depends on whether the writing inside is vertical or horizontal and whether the lines are arranged from right to left or from left to right. Except in publications where illustrations have most importance and there is not much text, it is rare to find the Western style of binding from right to left in use. It is worth noting that even ephemeral, unbound [End Page 60] publications of Western origin such as newspapers open in the traditional way, though people do not notice the fact because newspapers are not bound. This can be seen as yet another instance of Japanese dualism.

Japan's great newspapers are read all over the country, and there are several with a circulation of more than five million; consequently their influence on the population is enormous. But although these great newspapers are basically printed vertically, special headlines, passages involving many Arabic numerals and pages giving details of radio and T.V. programmes are written horizontally, while the advertisements are a veritable jungle of Roman and Japanese, vertical and horizontal. I have wondered for a long time why on earth this dualism is allowed. It is partly due, of course, to the positive outlook of the Japanese people, but it is also true that we have behind us a thousand years and more of indigenous culture: the hundred years or so that have elapsed since the Meiji Restoration are nowhere near long enough for us to absorb a civilization imported from the West. Furthermore, our writing system has one distinct advantage, which should not be overlooked: Japanese script is usually arranged in a grid layout, which takes the uniformly square shape of the Chinese-derived kanji as its basic unit, and this layout permits free interchange between vertical and horizontal writing. It is not possible at present to be certain if this will prove to be much of an advantage in the long run, but, for the time being, the acceptance of a mixed writing system has a powerful effect on our modern culture in general.

The Kojiki ("Record of Ancient Matters"), which holds a position in Japanese culture analogous to that of the Norse sagas or the Old Testament in the West, describes the creation of the universe in terms of a giant jellyfish. I sometimes wonder whether modern Japan, these four small islands holding a population of more than a hundred million, may not itself be rather like a giant jellyfish, drifting helplessly on the sea of civilization. Will we ever achieve a culture unified and homogeneous enough to justify us calling it "Japan Style"? All we can do for the moment is to ask our British friends to look at Japan as it is.

Of course we Japanese have not been idle in our efforts to establish a "Japan Style". I remember how at one time we argued furiously among ourselves about the comparative merits of "Japanese Modern" and "Japonica". The debate was sparked off by an article by Rose Slivka in the American magazine Craft Horizons (July–August 1956, special issue on Japan, Finland and Italy), in which she expressed the view that "to America ... has come the old from Japan, the new from Finland and a combination of the old and the new from Italy". I cannot remember who it was who gave Mrs. Slivka her material, but it must be admitted that when we feel that we are playing to an international audience, we Japanese tend to be too self-conscious about Japan, and as a result when we send material to be displayed at international exhibitions we continue ad nauseam to choose objects executed in traditional Japanese techniques, which can easily be recognized as "Japanese" in style. If you ask me, this is essentially an expression of the same attitude [End Page 61] as is manifested in the calculated exoticism of souvenir—shop "Japonica". We are still searching for a "Japanese modern style"; although this style is still incomplete and imperfect in many ways, it is my sincere wish that our friends in the international community will acknowledge the validity of our efforts.

I should like to recount in this connection a most interesting anecdote concerning Walter Gropius and Yūsaku Kamekura. Kamekura was more strongly influenced than any other Japanese graphic designer by the Bauhaus movement, and he is famous for the functionalist style of his work; yet when Gropius happened to visit Japan and see a logo designed by Kamekura, he (Gropius) asked if its shape did not derive from some Japanese folk implement. I would not be surprised if Kamekura was a little upset by this totally unexpected enquiry. Be that as it may, the lesson of this story, in my view, is that a logo that Kamekura designed with no consciousness of his Japanese background should appear in Gropius's eyes to have something Japanese about it.

Even the so-called pictograms, whose use I have been striving to encourage since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and which have recently begun to receive international support, were not conceived with the traditional Japanese heraldic crests (monsho) particularly in mind. In fact it was because of my previous experience of the serious language barriers existing in the international community that I resolved to become an advocate of the use of these pictograms. I was motivated by a sincere desire to make it just a little easier for the people who assembled for the 1964 Olympics and 1970 Osaka Expo to overcome the language barriers; if I was conscious of any particular background inspiration at the time, it was not the tradition of the Japanese monsho but the isotypes (International System of Typographic Picture Education) of Otto Neurath in the 1930s or the 1949 United Nations Geneva Protocol on International Communication Signs.

I should like to believe that when we conceive a design in an international context but unconsciously adopt a Japanese approach, the result is something worthy of the description "Japan Style". For the time being, however, we have no choice but to go through an arduous and repetitious process of selection and rejection in our pursuit of this goal. All the same, I should like to conclude by saying how very grateful we are to our British friends for their great kindness in giving us a valuable opportunity to indulge in this rigorous self-analysis. [End Page 62]