three man's opinion

Colour-printing in Japan has lost its individuality. It is no longer the peculiar art of the lower orders, and tends more and more to sink to the level of a mere process of reproduction.

To this use it has been put in some notable modern instances the painter, Watanabe Seitei, for example, has had a number of sketches beautifully reproduced by its means but they have nothing in common with the old nishikiye [woodblock prints] and might as well have been drawn for chromo-lithography, or the three-colour process.

Perhaps this is the most fitting place for the author to venture on a brief appeal to Japanese artists to avoid imitations of European work. Of late years some among them have seen fit, naturally enough, perhaps, to try their hands at the Western methods of painting; and Japanese Impressionists, Japanese of the Barbizon school, Japanese of the Art Nouveau, and of the wilder sects of Southern Germany, have come again to their own land with pride and misunderstanding, bearing with them sheaves of pictures curiously wrought in the fashions of the masters of their choice.

Others have tried to blend the Eastern and Western arts, so radically and immovably opposite. Always the result is failure. It could not be otherwise. Their art has a noble history and a place supreme in the love and literature of their country. In the name of all that is beautiful let them keep it there, and not adulterate and defile it with the scraps and off-scourings of the alien.
Edward F. Strange 1906

We see in Watanabe Seitei that art has been vulgarised. The coloured print has become chiefly a child's toy. Artists can no longer afford to superintend the technical processes of its production, and cheap flaring, violent pigments imported from abroad have taken the place of the delicate, rich, and costly colours of old Japan.

Frank Brinkley 1902

The modern Japan found a satisfactory expression of art in Seitei Watanabe. The imagi- nation of Japan has been growing wider and wider under the influence of Western art. You will find here and there in Watanabe the sure trace of a certain classic school; a graceful solitariness, like that of Tosa; a far away imaginativeness, like that of Kano; the memory, as it were, of an old lover, which will not be put aside.

Again, in Wata- nabe, the old conven- tion- alism turns delight- fully into a hint of dignity, and unin- telli- gible symbolism into deep poetry. This artist would keep the essence of each school for his own use. Basho Matsuo, the great Japanese poet, once compared the poets and artists to a beggar's bag, because they gather whatever beauty and truth they may, from anything. Seitei Watanabe used to laugh at the artists of particular schools. He declared that he did not belong to any one.

Yone Noguchi 1903

as eve said....

EVE OVERLOOKING THE GARDEN

The garden has ignited.
It’s feverish. Even the white clematis
flutters with sun,

and the red lilies and coral bells
burn back at it. Windblown petals
of cardinals flash

across the buttery primroses:
a good year for gardens.
Everything shines.

I write this standing at my window.
I don’t go down into the garden.
From here I see everything

at once, all the flowers trapped
in color, in their showy, slow
ignition — petal, pistil, leaf and stamen

separating off. Perhaps
there is a way
out of such fiery

gorgeousness. It must
be wearing. Even at night
when I’ve gone blind
I hear this splendid confusion

of harmonics, what only can be
the sharp yellowing
of gloriosas, the speckle-

throated oranging
of the Canada lilies.

—© John Engels


Is there anything new under the sun?
Certainly there is.
See how a bird flies, how flowers smile!

—© yone noguchi

(source)

(i think it is also worth mentioning that since in both cultures, what was most often being painted were the upper classes, it is not surprising that this interest was shared.)

is it easy?

translations

The old pond!
A frog leapt into --
List, the water sound!
--Yone Noguchi




Ah! le vieil etang!
Et le bruit de l'eau
Ou saute la grenouille!
--Michel Revon


An ancient pond!
A frog leaps in;
The sound of the water!
--Minoru Toyoda



Into an old pond
A frog took a sudden plunge,
Then is heard a splash
--Inazo Nitobe











these translations are from here. yone noguchi we already talked about with regards to the friendship he had with yeats. michel revon was among the earliest french poets to become enamoured with and influenced by haiku and other forms of japanese poetry.


(outtakes here)

Yone Noguchi in Yeats's Japan

Ezra Pound has long been credited with introducing William Butler Yeats to the Noh in 1913, but it was actually the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi (1875-1947) who first proposed Yeats should study the Noh, as early as 1907, when he published an article, “Mr Yeats and the No” in the Japan Times.

My discovery of this article, along with a group of hokku poems Yeats plagiarized from Noguchi, should significantly change our understanding of the intertextual dynamics of Yeats's Japanese interests. Although Yeats neglected to publicly acknowledge Noguchi, his cultural borrowings were not a one-sided “appropriation” or “discovery” as scholars have suggested, but part of a complex interchange in which both Noguchi and Yeats exploited cross-cultural commonalities toward analogous projects of cultural nationalism.

Noh and hokku provided Yeats with useful poetic and dramatic models rooted in an exotic tradition, while Noguchi credited Yeats's poems with ‘the sudden awakening of Celtic temperament in my Japanese mind’ and learned from the Irish poet how traditional forms could be revived, reinvented, and made relevant to modern audiences.

Dr. Edward Marx, Associate Professor of Euro-American Culture, Faculty of Law and Letters, Ehime University, JAPAN 1