before break dancing

from THE TALES OF ISE (Ise Monogatari)

In the past, there was a prince known as Prince Koretaka. He had a palace at a place called Minase, on the far side of Yamazaki. Every year when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, he went to that palace. On those occasions he always took along a person who was the director of the right imperial stables. It was long ago and I have forgotten his name.

Not enthusiastic about hunting, they just drank saké continuously and turned to composing poems in Japanese. The cherry blossoms at the Nagisa residence in Katano, where they often hunted, were especially beautiful. They dismounted under the trees, and breaking off blossoms to decorate themselves, everyone, of high, middle, and low rank, composed poems. The director of the stables composed this:

If only this world
were without cherry blossoms
then would our hearts
be at ease
in springtime.

Another person composed this:

It is because they fall soon
that the cherry blossoms
are so admired.
What can stay long
in this fleeting world?

When they left the trees to return to Minase, it already was dark. The prince's attendants came from the fields with servants bringing the saké. Seeking out a good place to drink it, they came to a place called Amanokawa. The director of the stables gave the prince a cup of saké. The prince said, “When you hand me the cup, compose a poem on coming to the banks of Amanokawa after hunting at Katano.” The director of the stables composed this and handed it to him:

I've spent the day hunting
and now will seek lodging
from the Weaver Maid
for I have come
to the River of Heaven.

The prince recited this over and over but could not come up with a response. Ki no Aritsune was attending the prince. He responded:

She who waits patiently
for a lord who comes
but once a year
will not, I am sure,
lodge any other.

They went back to Minase, and the prince entered his palace. They drank and conversed until deep in the night, and then the prince prepared to sleep, somewhat drunk. As the moon of the eleventh day of the month began to sink behind the mountains, the director of the stables composed this:

How can the moon
hide itself
before we are satisfied?
I wish the mountain rim would flee
so the moon might stay in view.

In place of the prince, Ki no Aritsune replied:

I wish the peaks
one and all
might be leveled:
if there were no mountain rims
the moon would not hide.

Narihira (Ariwara no Narihira) (825–80)

translation by Lewis Cook and Jamie Newhard

the 17th century

we have seen what landscape painting looked like in japan and the netherlands before 1600, when the two met, so now we shall look at the 17th century's products, and question who influenced whom.

a booklet i have from the national gallery of art reads, "The Dutch school of painting, arising in the early seventeenth century and already in decline by its end, is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of art.

"Unusual, first of all, is the abrupt- ness with which it appears; suddenly, about 1620, there is a Dutch school, fully-developed, a school which has its origins in sixteenth-century Netherlandsish painting to be sure, but which is quite unexpectedly original.

"Unusual, too, is the extraordinary number of great artists who worked in such a small country during so short a period of time. Finally, the solid excellence of their painting is remarkable and what might be called the homogeneity of their view of life and their interpretation of it, the consistent way in which they express their land and its people.

"They are, in fact, so Dutch! They stand apart from the artists of the other schools of seventeenth-century painting in Europe, even that of the Spanish Netherlands, just to the south. Dutch painting of the great age reveals the period and place of its origin in every passage of paint as legibly as they may be read in the label on the picture frame." 1

now we also read, "Folding screens called the Namban-byobu were produced in great number by artists of the Kano School from the end of the sixteenth through the seventeenth century. These screens were Japanese in style and technique.

"On the other hand, Church taught Western art techniques for the production of icons and other works of religious art which were necessary for the propagation of Christianity.

"But the Western-style of expression seen in the Edo period, the adoption of a realistic style of expression employing methods of perspective and shading, is in a different category from Namban-byobu and those religious works." 2

we read, "some suggest that "In the late 1620s van Goyen shifted to simpler motifs -- a few cottages along a village road or in the dunes, like in this painting -- and he achieved unification and depth by a leading diagonal and by a tonal treatment that subdues the local color and is expressive of atmospheric life." 3

this sounds to my ears like the very description of japanese art.

i'm very curious about your impression to these; did the japanese influence the dutch as much as the dutch influenced the japanese?

we may get more clues as we progress further into the edo period, and the beginnings of ukiyo-e. the dutch created everything we've defined as japanese? let's see what you think.

i want you to understand that i really do not like any of this at all. it throws so much of what i think i know into question. hokusai, hiroshige, so not japanese-y? stay tuned.

trees III

although its practice was known in china and korea before it was seen in japan, the art of bonsai, as we in the west have come to know it, is certainly the japanese strain. though it is said that the practice originated as an easy way to transport medicinal herbs, it must be added that the singularization and stylization of nature occurred not only on a miniature scale.

as seen in yesterday's examples from japan, art was never limited to the creations of humans, but was included as well the creations outside the hands of humans. gardens featured stylized mountains and oceans; and real trees were stylized as well. though what we see in the western images of stylized trees were inspired by those in the japanese prints, in the japanese prints themselves they were often featuring what they literally saw.

The most frequently cited example of mono no aware in contemporary Japan is the traditional love of cherry blossoms, as manifested by the huge crowds of people that go out every year to view (and picnic under) the cherry trees. The blossoms of the Japanese cherry trees are intrinsically no more beautiful than those of, say, the pear or the apple tree: they are more highly valued because of their transience, since they usually begin to fall within a week of their first appearing. It is precisely the evanescence of their beauty that evokes the wistful feeling of mono no aware in the viewer. 1

A distinctive Japanese convention is to depict a single environment transitioning from spring to summer to autumn to winter in one painting. For example, spring might be indicated by a few blossoming trees or plants and summer by a hazy and humid atmosphere and densely foliated trees, while a flock of geese typically suggests autumn and snow, and barren trees evoke winter. (Because this convention was so common, seasonal attributes could be quite subtle.) In this way, Japanese painters expressed not only their fondness for this natural cycle but also captured an awareness of the inevitability of change, a fundamental Buddhist concept. 2

As previously noted, the garden as we know it came to Japan from China. During the Han Dynasty, the emperor Wu Di (140-87 BC) established a garden containing three small islands, mimicking the Isles of the Immortals, who were the principle Taoist deities. These gardens of lakes and mountains became the standard of the day, always representing (in abstract) the fabled lands of legend. There was no effort made to approximate nature; it was stylized into something otherworldly. In 607AD, the emperor Yang Di opened relations with Japan, and received the first envoy, Ono no Imoko, at his lavish park. Imoko returned to Japan with many ideas (including Buddhism), and four years after his return, the first hill and pond garden was established in Japan. 3