Lost Japan (26 page)

Ann Fleming with her pink nightgown and ivory cigarette holder, the lawn sparkling in the afternoon sun, the eyes of John Sparrow as he laughed – it was truly a world of exquisite indolence. At that time I had no very clear concept of ‘literati', although through Sparrow I had already entered into that world. They were people whose whole lives were devoted to art and literature, but for whom nothing was too exalted to question or laugh at. They were free spirits.

I returned soon afterwards to Japan to start work at Oomoto, resigned to the knowledge that I would never meet people like John Sparrow and his circle again. However, the learned but witty comments I found on old calligraphy scrolls and the concept of ‘pure conversation' symbolized by the
hossu
whisks in my collection seemed suspiciously close to what I had seen at Oxford. It was clear that literati had once thrived in Japan, and I later found that they still exist today. However, when I delved further I found that the Japanese literati were very different from their counterparts in the West.

The roots of the tradition in Japan went back to the Chinese literati, who were a hybrid of Confucianism and Taoism. From Confucianism came the serious side, the basis of which was a love of learning, exemplified by the first line of the
Analects
: ‘To study and at times put your learning into practice, is that not a joy?' The Confucianist scholar was expected to study the wisdom of the past, and in the process acquire a mysterious ‘virtue'
that would influence all around him. This virtue radiated outwards, and according to ancient teachings, its mere possession was enough to transform the world. That was the logic behind the text I saw the first day I opened a book of Chinese philosophy in the Kanda market: ‘If you wish to rule the state, first pacify your family. If you wish to pacify your family, first discipline yourself. If you wish to discipline yourself, first make right your heart.'

The first step was to discover how to make right the heart: the answer, as it developed in China, was to practice the arts. In addition to a wide knowledge of literature, the literati were expected to master the Three Perfections of poetry, painting and calligraphy. In time this grew to encompass all the fine arts involved in the scholar's studio: bamboo work, ceramics, metalwork, stone carving, paper, ink, brushes, inkstones, and much more.

The drawback to Confucianism, however, was the heavy emphasis on virtue. Although we are taught that ‘the virtuous man is not alone', a life devoted solely to virtue does not seem very appealing. This is where Taoism came in. Taoism was the world of untrammeled sages walking in the hills. ‘The sage has his wanderings,' said the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi; ‘for him, knowledge is an offshoot.' Taoists saw life as free as water or wind – who cared about virtue? They loved mountains, waterfalls and the moon so much that the poet Li Bo drowned one night at a boating party, when he reached out over the water to embrace the moon. They were hermits who wanted nothing more than to withdraw from the dust of the world and enjoy ‘pure conversations' with their friends.

In time, these two opposite images – the cultured scholar and the free-spirited nature lover – coalesced into one ideal: the literati. By the Ming dynasty a clearly distinguishable literati culture had grown up. It centered around the
inkyo
, or hermitage, where the literati were supposed to live in semi-retirement. There were
clear guidelines for what the hermitage was to be like. According to one Ming writer's advice: ‘It is best to live deep in the mountains. Then the rural countryside. Failing that, the suburbs. Even if you can't live among cliffs and valleys, the literati cottage must have an air of retirement away from the mundane world. Ancient trees and exotic flowers in the garden; artworks and books in the study. Dwellers in this house will not know the passage of years, and guests will forget to leave.'

The development of the literati up until the fifteenth century took place entirely in China; Japan, in the meantime, had become the land of martial, as opposed to literary, arts. Warriors ruled from the headquarters of the Shogunate, which was called the
bakufu
(‘tent government'). Centuries later, when the Shogun lived in a magnificent palace in Edo dozens of times larger than the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, the word
bakufu
was still used, as a reminder that the country was basically under the administration of soldiers in tents.

This military ethos is still a dominant force in Japanese society. Before coming to Japan, Trevor and Edan asked me what life in Kameoka was going to be like. I answered, ‘Like joining the army.' It turned out to be even truer than I suspected. The very first word of Japanese that Edan learned in third grade was
Kiritsu!
– ‘Attention!' On arriving in class, all the students had to stand up smartly with their hands at their sides and bow in unison to the teacher, like soldiers on review. When you read the many books written by foreigners who played baseball in Japan, or practiced Zen, or worked for a stock brokerage, the army-style discipline is the one unifying thread in their experiences.

This was brought home to me in a visual way when I helped translate for a photographer involved in the production of the book
A Day in the Life of Japan
. To create the ‘Day in the Life' series, several dozen photographers descend on a certain country to take photos during a twenty-four-hour period. When the book on Japan came out, there was an astonishing number of
photos in which people were lined up in rows: police, students, department-store service attendants, businessmen.

Japan would thus seem to be the last place that the literati ideal could take root, but by the 1600s the centuries of warfare were drawing to a close. It became possible to enjoy a life of leisure, and leisure is fertile ground for the literati. In fact, it is indispensable – the literati will allow nothing to get in the way of their life of leisure. The ‘exquisite indolence' of Ann Fleming and her friends was not a mere fluke of the British class system – it was an essential ingredient of literati culture, in both the East and West. Literati are rarely great academics, because their curiosity leads them into odd byways that tend to disqualify them from serious scholarship. Likewise, they may not be the greatest of artists or writers, because they rarely have the ambition to build reputations in society or establish themselves commercially. In short, they are amateurs, those whom the Chinese called
hogai
(‘outside the system'). It is for this reason that they have been so little studied and are so hard to find.

The first literati to surface in Japan were the tea masters of the sixteenth century, sheltered from the war and turmoil of their age by the Zen establishments of Kyoto. They took the Ming ideal of the
inkyo
hermitage and developed
wabi
teahouses. The teahouse was a place to escape the mundane world, and in it were all the arts of the literati: calligraphy in the
tokonoma
, poetry, ceramics, bamboo, stone and iron. Tea came out of Zen, which has not only a pronounced military side but also a witty irreverent one, going back to Lin-chi and the shocking and humorous things he said to his disciples. The tea masters applied their wit to everything around them, producing a world of fantastically varied play. Oribe created off beat tea bowls with twisted, lopsided edges; Enshu surprised his guests after a heavy downpour of rain by throwing a bucket of water into the
tokonoma
instead of setting out the usual flower arrangement.

By the early 1600s, literati culture stepped out from under the
umbrella of Zen and a true flowering began. One of the first great literati was Ishikawa Jozan, a failed military commander who retired to Kyoto and built himself a hermitage, called Shisen-do, which still survives. He had absolutely no interests other than amusing himself inside his hermitage, and it is said that even when the retired Emperor Go-Mizunoo came to visit, Jozan refused to come out and greet him. To paraphrase Jozan's philosophy, ‘At times I pick a garden flower; at times I listen to the cry of the geese. At times I sweep fallen leaves; at times I plant chrysanthemums. Climbing the eastern hill, I sing to the moon; at the northern window, I read books and recite poetry. Other than this, I do nothing.'

Soon there were hundreds and thousands of literati doing nothing the length and breadth of Japan. Doing nothing is only one step away from subversion. The Shogun had established a university at Yushima Confucian Hall in Edo, the purpose of which was to educate schoolmasters to train the nation in Confucian loyalty and good manners. The graduates of Yushima were expected to return to their native districts and set up academies in their native towns. However, the policy backfired, because many of these local scholars became literati, and the literati are loyal to no system. In their leisure they began to study ancient Shinto. Soon they were publishing books denouncing the Shogun and calling for the return of the Emperor, thus laying the groundwork for the fall of the Shogunate. Meanwhile they traveled constantly, exchanging letters, poems and calligraphy.

Right in the midst of all this ferment, Ingen arrived, bringing with him Ming calligraphy and
sencha
– Chinese-style tea ceremony, which was anything but
wabi. Sencha
involves ordinary green tea such as is still drunk in most places today, rather than the thick powdered kind used in Japanese tea ceremony, so it was much more relaxed and manageable.
Sencha
had a minimum of ceremony, and a maximum of play; it was tailored perfectly
to the tastes of the newly wealthy Edo merchants, and it swept the nation. Today, there are dozens of
sencha
schools with tens of thousands of adherents, the national headquarters being at Manpuku-ji.

Two of the most remarkable of the Edo literati were Beian and Bosai, whose calligraphies I collect. As in China, the Japanese literati were an unstable combination of two opposites – Confucian scholar and free-minded Taoist – so they tended to lean to one side or the other. Beian and Bosai represent the two poles. Beian was a strict moralist who refused to teach dubious people like geisha or Kabuki actors, and as the result of his high standards of conduct attracted thousands of disciples, including many feudal lords. He was a great art collector and scholar, and wrote a book of calligraphy quotations that is still a standard text today. He wrote a crisp, classic style of calligraphy which he learned from a Chinese merchant in Nagasaki.

Bosai, sometimes called ‘the literati of the downtown', was constantly drunk, and his calligraphy was completely unreadable. He loved to give parties, to which geisha and Kabuki actors came in great numbers. Bosai habitually walked around his home naked, even when guests were present, and he definitely did not get on well with feudal lords. Once he was called to the Shogun's palace for an interview with the chief minister, Lord Matsudaira Sadanobu. But Bosai was in the habit of buying his clothes second-hand, so the crests on his upper kimono did not match his lower kimono. Sadanobu dismissed him in disgust, and that was the end of Bosai's official career.

The first Japanese literati I met was Sawada Minoru, the tea master at Oomoto. Sawada grew up in a poverty-stricken farming village on the Sea of Japan coast, coming to Oomoto as a young man to work as a gardener. He was a wild youth, famed for once smashing all the windows in the headquarters on a drunken spree. One day, Sawada was invited to the residence of Naohi, the old Mother Goddess of Oomoto, and as he sat there
talking, he had a cigarette. When he was finished, he looked around for an ashtray and found none. Luckily, nearby was a floor hearth, just like the ones he had grown up with in his village, so he stubbed his cigarette out in it. ‘Don't you realize that is a tea-ceremony hearth?' scolded one of the other guests. Sawada was so ashamed of his ignorance that he decided to learn tea ceremony just to get the better of the man who had scolded him. Today, he is one of the famed tea masters of the Kyoto area.

Sawada's approach can be seen in the following story. The tea used in the ceremony is finely powdered green tea, carried in a lacquered caddy called a
natsume
, which is shaped like an egg with a flat bottom and top. One day, a student failed to support the body of the caddy, taking only the lid in his hands, and the caddy dropped from the height of about one meter directly onto the tatami. The powdered tea puffed up high into the air in a cloud, and tea settled in a green ring on the mat before our startled eyes. Everyone was petrified. In the silence, Sawada asked us, ‘What is the appropriate thing to say at a time like this?' Nobody could answer. He said, ‘You should say, “How beautiful!” '

And indeed, the ring of powdered green tea on the tatami
was
beautiful. Sawada told us to gather around and look at it. ‘You may never see this again in all your lives,' he said. ‘It's almost impossible for the caddy to land perfectly on its bottom like that. Look, and admire!' Then, after we had looked, Sawada kept us on for a lesson in how to clean the tatami, which involved painstakingly tapping the surface inch by inch to force the tea out of the grooves. We worked on that tatami for three or four hours.

Although it was created by the literati, tea ceremony has been overtaken by the militarist spirit and codified to the point where the wit and spontaneity have been largely stamped out. Tea masters are not usually very interesting people, bound as they are by a lot of rules and restrictions; someone like Sawada,
who combines Confucian strictness with Taoist freedom, is very rare. It is my theory that only the badly behaved become truly great literati. You have to be the sort of person who would break windows or rattle your cigarette holder in Evelyn Waugh's ear trumpet.

In addition to tea, Sawada also plays Noh flute, wields the martial arts sword, writes professional calligraphy and carves seals. He has mastered not only Three Perfections, but six or seven. Sawada is often to be found around the Oomoto grounds, climbing trees, clipping hedges or heaving rocks into place to make a path. In these activities lies the critical difference between the literati of the East and West. The free spirits, the light touch, the indolence, the love of literature and the arts – these are universal literati traits. However, John Sparrow and Ann Fleming were essentially people of words, written or spoken. They appreciated the arts, but except for an occasional go at the piano, they did not practice the arts themselves. They enjoyed walking on the grass and admiring the roses, but they did not plant the roses or mow the grass themselves – they were truly ‘people of literature'. But the Chinese ideal was much broader than just literature: from the Taoist side, it included an intense love of nature; from the Confucian side came the mastery of arts.