Imitation and creativity in Japanese arts: from Kishida Ryusei to Miyazaki Hayao 9780231172929, 9780231540544, 023154054X

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IMITATION AND CREATIVITY

IN JAPANESE ARTS

From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao

MICHAEL LUCKEN

Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts

ASIA PERSPECTIVES: HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

A S I A P E R S P E C T I V E S : H I S T O R Y, S O C I E T Y, A N D C U LT U R E A series of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University Carol Gluck, Editor Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, trans. Suzanne O’Brien The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society, by Pierre François Souyri, trans. Kathe Roth Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan, by Donald Keene Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: The Story of a Woman, Sex, and Moral Values in Modern Japan, by William Johnston Lhasa: Streets with Memories, by Robert Barnett Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793–1841, by Donald Keene The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan, ed. and trans. Rebecca L. Copeland and Melek Ortabasi So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers, by Donald Keene Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop, by Michael K. Bourdaghs The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki, by Donald Keene Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy: The Story of Kawashima Yoshiko, the Cross-Dressing Spy Who Commanded Her Own Army, by Phyllis Birnbaum

Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao

M I CHAE L L UCKE N Translated by Francesca Simkin

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Suntory Foundation toward the cost of publishing this book. Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lucken, Michael, author. Imitation and creativity in Japanese arts from Kishida Ryusei to Miyazaki Hayao / Michael Lucken ; Translated by Francesca Simkin. pages cm.—(Asia perspectives : history, society, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-17292-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-231-54054-4(e-book) 1. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 2. Imitation in art. 3. Kishida, Ryusei, 1891–1929—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Kurosawa, Akira, 1910–1998— Criticism and interpretation. 5. Araki, Nobuyoshi, 1940– —Criticism and interpretation. 6. Miyazaki, Hayao, 1941– —Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. nx160.l83 2016 701′.15—dc23 2015027592

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 cover image: Sadamasa Motonaga, Untitled, 1959. Oil on panel, 35⅞ × 28¾ inches (91 × 73 cm). (© The Estate of Sadamasa Motonaga; Courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey, New York/St. Barth) cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Contents

Introduction PART I

1

A Historical Construction

1

Copycat Japan

2

The West and the Invention of Creation

20

3

The Denial, Rejection, and Sublimation of Imitation

29

4

No Poaching

37

5

Seen from Japan

43

6

The Logic of Reflection in Nakai Masakazu

61

PART II

9

A New Place for Imitation

7

Kishida Ryūsei’s Portraits of Reiko, or, How Can Ghosts Be at Work?

8

Kurosawa Akira’s Ikiru, or, the Impossibility of Metaphor

75

107

v

CONTENTS

9

Araki Nobuyoshi’s Sentimental Journey—Winter, or, Eternal Bones

137

10

Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away, or, the Adventure of the Obliques

175

Conclusion

201

Notes Select Bibliography Index

207 231 237

vi

Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts

Introduction

In Kitano Takeshi’s film Achilles and the Tortoise, a Japanese painter successively attempts to reproduce a number of twentieth-century art styles, from Cubism via Abstract Expressionism to body art.1 Although he starts off with an undeniable gift for drawing, his talent gets progressively lost as he immerses himself in imitating Western art movements that he only superficially understands; his life then gets mired in a yo-yo of burlesque failures and family crises. Japan is often described as a nation of imitators and has—albeit with a measure of irony—assimilated this externally imposed image. And yet Japan’s is perhaps the only culture without Western roots that can boast a global reach; so often criticized for its proclivity for imitation, it has, paradoxically, become a model itself, and its artists are famous well beyond the archipelago’s borders. The history of this reversal reveals a great deal about modernity’s values, the way culture works, and the creative process. In contrast to the common perception, the relationship between copy and original, or among copies themselves, is rather complex. Mimesis, imitation, and the copy are fundamental components of human culture that, along with the notions of creation, invention, and originality, form a set that is in practice hard to divide. Anthropologists are familiar with this logic, as are specialists in classical art. “Man, maker of tools, cannot begin from nothing,” said Marcel Jousse. “We cannot apply to ourselves the Judeo-Christian concept of creation ex nihilo. We are, in reality, mere reenactors.”2 But in the modern world, imitation and creation have 1

Introduction

nonetheless been prized apart; the former has gained a largely negative connotation while the latter is put forward as humanity’s highest ideal: artistic creation, value creation, job creation, and so on. This is particularly apparent in the evolution of intellectual property laws, whose increasing need for frequent alteration raises important questions. For historical and cultural reasons that will be discussed later, modern and contemporary Japanese art is less likely to hide its debt to imitation than its Western counterpart. In order to show the reluctance of twentiethcentury Japanese art to polarize imitation and creation—in other words, to show its plasticity—I explore in this book two separate avenues. In the first, I use a selection of essays, novels, and travelogues dating from the seventeenth century to the present to examine the history of the stereotype of the Japanese as habitual imitators—and the consequences that this kind of representation has had on the way they positioned themselves vis-à-vis the West and the world. For it is important to note that Japan has not only tried to oppose the European discourse on imitation in a number of ways—including by explicit rejection, revival of traditional know-how, and the invocation of national spirit—but also assimilated and recycled this discourse, notably in relation to China. We cannot, however, simply make note of Japan’s assimilation of modern Western logic as if the value of creation were self-evident. Such a starting point could lead only to the conclusion—consistently reached in the early twentieth century—that the Japanese acculturation process was based on mere imitation, or to the parallel idea that behind this mimetic endeavor actually lies a much more creative dynamic, as maintained for example by D. Eleanor Westney, Sheridan Tatsuno, and Alain Peyrefitte in the 1980s and 1990s.3 At best, as for instance in Bert Winther-Tamaki’s Maximum Embodiment, the assimilation process can be explained on this basis: Japanese artists embodied in their art, sometimes painfully, a search for novelty and self-assertion.4 But even if this approach represents the expression of a new and welcome empathy toward them, it leaves untouched the conceptual background of the relations between East and West. The Japanese reaction has to be looked at from the perspective of a critical analysis of both the aesthetic and the political stakes of the rejection of imitation in Europe and the United States at a time that corresponds precisely to the rise and development of modern colonialism. In other

2

Introduction

words, the purpose here is neither to analyze the Japanese as scientific objects nor to discover among them such-and-such a creative skill—since that goal implies a notion of science and innovation that a priori forbids an in-depth examination of the subject—but to relativize and compare, through a historical approach, the dominant values of the modern era in Japan and the West. Thinking of Japanese culture as an entity divided “between tradition and modernity,” between a propensity to reproduce old models and a capacity to open new paths, however much a commonplace, is not yet completely outdated. There is a conceptual issue here that needs to be addressed. I contend that although contemporary Japanese artists have largely rejected explicitly mimetic devices and instead adopted the idea that they must do what has never been done before,5 they have never espoused a purely subjective attitude to creativity. This manifests itself through a taste for anything in physical matter that cannot be sublimated—that is, for its residual component. This observation, which I made a number of years ago in L’art du Japon au vingtième siècle (2001), brings me to consider now that modern Japanese art depends on a heuristic that fits into neither the classical scheme of imitation → individuation → creation, where creation is the result of the self’s maturation process through a prolonged contact with its models, nor into the modern agenda of rejecting imitation → creation → individuation, where it is only after breaking from his models that the artist can expect to find his way. In order to highlight the characteristics of the modern Japanese approach, I have focused on a selection of seminally important works: the series of portraits of Reiko (1914–1929) by painter Kishida Ryūsei; the film Ikiru (1952) by Kurosawa Akira; the photographic novel Sentimental Journey—Winter (1991) by Araki Nobuyoshi; and, finally, the renowned anime Spirited Away (2001) by Miyazaki Hayao. The use of masterpieces in a critique of creative genius may seem paradoxical, but it is not. A work’s distinctiveness and prominence do not necessarily reflect an idealization of its author’s uniqueness; they are first of all the result of a basic cognitive process,6 which is why in all cultures there are works that are considered more significant, valuable, and effective than others. But most of all, the very notion of the masterpiece allows the value judgment to be applied to the object, thus following the logic of the thing rather than of the subject.

3

Introduction

Kishida Ryūsei is a major modern Japanese painter who pioneered Fauvism in his country and later shifted his attention to European Renaissance painting. The series of portraits of his daughter Reiko, which depicts the complete development of a child from the age of three to fifteen, constitutes a remarkable attempt to explore the possibilities offered by realism at a time marked by the rapid turnover of avant-garde movements. In Kishida Ryūsei’s works, it appears that the “move to the real” took the shape of the “ghostly,” which is a recurrent phenomenon in twentiethcentury Japanese art that he arguably initiated. Ikiru (literally, “live”) is one of Kurosawa’s most striking creations. This film, which follows the last months of a man who has no hope of surviving his recently diagnosed cancer, brings to the foreground the question of “traces,” at both the thematic level (what is left from a human life?) and the aesthetic level (is an image anything other than a shadow?). Although Kurosawa possesses a consistent talent for dramatic display, the importance he gives to traces in this particular film seems like a reaction to the idea that man can overcome his fate through his own effort (labor, art . . .). The exploration of traces and shadows is another characteristic trend of Japanese modern aesthetics. Araki Nobuyoshi is famous abroad for the part of his oeuvre dealing with the gaze, sex, and desire. But Sentimental Journey—Winter does not belong to this category. This picture album, which follows the deterioration and death of his wife, Yōko, is stretched between two poles: on the one hand, the chronological movement of the huge artistic project he launched in 1971 with the first version of Sentimental Journey, in which Winter fits perfectly; on the other, a statement that says there is always something in reality that resists historical or fictional projection. That Araki chose to challenge the conceptual framework of his art project with a sentimental attachment to “residuum”—here, the bones, a primordial materiality—constitutes the third pattern that Japanese modern art developed in order to reduce the Romantic polarization between imitation and creation. Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away is structured around the opposition of two planes: the vertical realm of the Bathhouse, which refers to an artificial, violent, and anxious modernity, and the horizontal realm of the train scene, reflecting a period of calm and serenity. It is only after this

4

Introduction

two-step sequence that there is a possibility of restoring true relations between beings who, as a result, will manage to get free from their shackles. The discovery of the social link value (or en, in Japanese) is the fourth signature dimension of twentieth-century Japanese art. These four works of art, which collectively constitute a kind of system, were the starting point for this book. They set a thought process in motion, kindled a desire to describe them, and prompted critical comparisons. They generated a momentum that I have sought to maintain and not quell. This is why I will not at present delve further into the theoretical relationship between them—the theoretical level must emerge as the works are discovered and not be defined until the end of the process. As Homi Bhabha astutely points out, Montesquieu’s Turkish Despot, Barthes’s Japan, Kristeva’s China, Derrida’s Nambikwara Indians, Lyotard’s Cashinahua pagans are part of this strategy of containment where the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation. The Other is cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot / reverse-shot strategy of a serial enlightenment. Narrative and the cultural politics of difference become the closed circle of interpretation. The Other loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse.7

The best way to escape this phenomenon is probably not to implement an alternative theory in the sense in which postcolonialism is often understood. Any attempt to theorize in advance only reinforces the logic of domination, whether this be social at the national level or cultural at the international level. The unveiling of the Other’s meaning can be perfected only using a performative method. It implies working in situ and is embodied in the new works that result from it. The point here is obviously not to return to the naive idea that works of art speak for themselves, expressing a univocal and constant message; the meaning of works emanates from complex and fluid fields of force. The idea is to allow the otherness embodied by these works to avoid being instantly looked down on or subjected to the logic of appropriation, and instead to provide a space where, in a mediated form, they continue

5

Introduction

to affect and pollinate what lies around them—in other words, continue to live. Theoretical ambition must give way to humble description, to a relationship based on contact. The four works in some sense cover the twentieth century. Each has its unique traits and its own forces, but there are still links between them. The first link is the historical sequence they represent, which in turn allows this book to be read as an aesthetic history of modern Japan. But there are also internal and hidden links that were at first difficult to pinpoint and articulate but that ultimately made me realize that, despite the diversity of genres and contexts, I was dealing with a coherent group, woven through with similar sensitivities and issues.8

6

PA RT I A Historical Construction

1

Copycat Japan

There is a substantial body of work in English, French, and German that depicts Japanese culture as one based on copying. Such portrayals can be found in everything from eighteenth-century texts to contemporary newspapers and magazines, in works about Asia in particular or in articles on ethnology in general. “Japan’s strength is its proclivity for compilation, or as others would have it, its ‘spirit of imitation,’ ” observed André Leroi-Gourhan.1 Using the word “Japan” or “Japanese” in a passage stigmatizing a lack of imagination when it comes to action, or a lack of initiative when it comes to behavior, has virtually taken on the status of metaphor. In Les lois de l’imitation (The laws of imitation), Gabriel Tarde describes “sociable” people as having “the Chinese or Japanese capacity to mold themselves very quickly to their surroundings.”2 “Japanese,” then, just as one might say “copycat” or “chameleon.” And yet it is not so much Japanese culture that seems wedded to imitation and repetition as Western discourse about Japan. Michaël Ferrier bewails French writing on Japan, noting that it often consists of nothing more than “old stereotypes compounded by new ones—ignorance and platitudes—and a relentless recycling of outdated theories and ideas, endlessly rehashed and repeated.”3 Going back in history, one notes that neither the letters of Francis Xavier’s companions, which are some of the first European eyewitness accounts of Japan, nor the descriptions provided by François Caron, who lived in Hirado and then Nagasaki from 1619 to 1641, report any such tendency.4 Nor do Jean Crasset’s Histoire de l’église du Japon (History of the 9

A HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION

Japanese church, 1689)5 or Engelbert Kaempfer’s seminal study Histoire naturelle, civile et ecclésiastique de l’empire du Japon (Natural, civil, and ecclesiastical history of the Japanese empire, 1727). The latter work certainly mentions the importance of Japan’s debts to China on more than one occasion, but always in a purely factual light. Kaempfer thus posits that “it is [to the Chinese] that the Japanese owe their polish and civilization”6 and explains that Buddhism and Confucianism came to Japan from the Chinese mainland.7 His only comment guilty of generalizing on this topic regards the city of Kyoto, about which he notes that “there is nothing that a foreigner can bring, that some artist or other inhabitant of this city will not undertake to imitate.”8 But in its context the comment has no negative connotations—the learned German is only attempting to showcase the vigor of industry and richness of trade in the capital of the empire. He paints a laudatory portrait of the diversity of Japanese arts, underlining their “imagination” and “unusual” character.9 More generally, he confidently credits China and Japan with “having invented early on the most useful of arts and sciences.”10 It therefore seems clear that, before 1700, the cliché of the Japanese as slavish imitators had not yet taken root. During the course of the eighteenth century, however, the emphasis on manual dexterity and intellectual tenacity got suddenly transformed into a criticism—even though this was a period when, Japan being closed to virtually all foreigners, it was difficult for Europeans to learn anything new about it. In Histoire de l’établissement, des progrès et de la décadence du christianisme dans l’empire du Japon (History of the establishment, progress, and decadence of Christianity in the Japanese empire, 1715), we therefore read that “the Japanese, who have always acknowledged themselves to be [China’s] disciples, have in virtually no area the power of invention, but everything they produce is polished.”11 The basic idea remains the same, but the angle has changed. Whereas Kaempfer was showcasing the intelligence of the Japanese and their capacity for reason, this author, Pierre de Charlevoix, reduces Japanese “ingenuity” to mere technical competence, an opinion that was to resurface in almost exactly the same terms in Histoire générale des voyages (General history of travel, 1752): “Although the Japanese have invented almost nothing, when they put their hand to something, they make it perfect.”12 This sentence was to witness considerable success, since it is reproduced exactly not only in J.-F. La Harpe’s Abrégé de l’histoire générale des voyages (Concise general 10

Copycat Japan

history of travel, 1786), which was a great publishing success, but also under the entry for “Japanese” in Abbé Migne’s Dictionnaire d’ethnographie moderne (Dictionary of modern ethnography, 1853).13 Charlevoix’s work thus seems at the root of the stereotype, but what we are dealing with here is a much broader phenomenon than the specific case of either Charlevoix or Japan. Of real importance is that, on the one hand, this comment got repeated and amplified throughout the course of the eighteenth century and, on the other, it can be found, expressed in virtually identical terms, in connection with most other peoples. The introduction to the General History of Travel thus tells us that “the Arabs did not have minds geared toward invention. They added almost nothing to the knowledge they got from the Greeks,”14 and in a slightly later work we are informed that “the Russian people are natural imitators. They imitate well and seem inclined toward everything. I know of no nation that is comparable in that respect.”15 Even the Americans were for a long time the target of acerbic comments on their inability to invent.16 Thus there is no evidence that Japan is being singled out. Discourse on the imitative nature of the Japanese is merely a reflection of Europe’s awareness of its own military and technological superiority, a fact that frequently found expression during the eighteenth century.17 It also suggests the relinquishment of the evangelical project, since imitation—primarily of Jesus—was something the missionaries sought to encourage; whereas in the sixteenth century, Francis Xavier’s companions rejoiced that the Japanese were “soft and gentle” and that their spirit was “very ready to receive the Gospel,”18 some of James Cook’s contemporaries felt only irritation and disdain, a feeling exacerbated by the related emergence of two typically orientalist themes: denial of a Japanese capacity to be individuals in their own right and a critique of the “despotism” of the Japanese princes, for whom to reign meant “taunting, persecuting, and murdering millions of men, only to then meet the same fate themselves.”19 The French Revolution and the success of Romanticism gradually quashed the advocates of classical imitation. So when Japan was brought to open its borders in 1854, no one apart from a few Christian missionaries was still suggesting that mimeticism was a good thing, and the stereotype of the Japanese as servile imitators had free rein to develop. All forms of borrowing were taken to be synonymous with degeneration and seen as inherently contemptible. Jules Michelet, writing in Le peuple (The people) 11

A HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION

in 1846, neatly captures the short shrift given to imitation and its practitioners: “You poor imitators, do you really believe in imitation? You take from a neighboring people something that thrives there and appropriate it as best you can despite its reluctance to be adapted—but it is a foreign body that you are trying to render into flesh, it is something dead and inert; you are merely adopting death.”20 Given such a view, there was no chance of crediting the efforts of nations trying to use learning and study to narrow the scientific and technological gap separating them from Western countries. The reports of the first diplomatic missions thus mockingly portrayed Japan as sniffing out and hastily copying everything that related to foreign countries.21 In an issue of Le correspondant of 1864, an editor describes “the wonderful aptitude of its people to imitate what it sees”: According to travelers, who can illustrate it with countless instances, the faculty of imitation is carried to excess in the Japanese. Thus, for example, when foreign consuls arrived with their retinues, they bought horses and harnessed them in the European style. Just a few months later, all the natives in their service used only such harnesses instead of the ancient straw stirrups common to the country. Soon thereafter the saddler refused to take on work, saying all his time was occupied making English-style saddles for the Japanese aristocracy. These saddles were examined; they had been made exactly as they would have been by the best workers of Paris or London. And such it was with everything that was trusted to the ingenious minds and skilled hands of the Japanese.22

The stories taken from tourist accounts are similar, as we can see in Pierre Loti, who, with his usual outrageousness, writes in L’exilée, “All this servile imitation, admittedly amusing for passing foreigners, betrays in this people a fundamental absence of taste and even an absolute lack of national pride; no European race would accept to toss aside, from one day to the next, all its traditions, customs, and dress.”23 The image depicted by writers of the latter half of the nineteenth century constitutes a hyperbolic variation on that of the eighteenth. Japan is no longer just dependent on China—it imitates all and sundry. From this period onward, there is no longer just one stereotype but a whole host of stereotypes unfolding around this theme.

12

Copycat Japan

The mimetic disposition of the Japanese is not merely commented on but explicitly mocked, with mockery and ridicule basically dressing a feeling of superiority in humor. We mock what we dominate physically or symbolically and, by extension, flatter our own ego. Criticism of Japanese imitation thus belongs very clearly in a power struggle. Of course, not all Western writers gave way to caricature. Félicien Challaye, Sergei Eliseev, and Émile Hovelaque, in France, and William E. Griffis and Sidney Gulick, in the United States, all lent subtlety to, not to say refuted, the idea that Japanese culture revolved around imitation of external models. Hovelaque, for example, notes that “Japanese art is never a simple representation of reality but rather the result of the forces that create it.”24 Most of the time, however, such statements are defensive, consisting of attempts by experts to counter the dominant vision prevailing most conspicuously in novels and the general press. When it is not mocked, Japanese imitation is presented as a threat, especially in texts on military and economic topics. When, between 1895 and 1905, assertions of Japanese power and the rebellions in China called the colonial order into question, Europe got scared, worrying that the Asians would manage to turn the weapons it had given them against it. The “yellow peril” was an upset of international order, because the student had overtaken the master.25 Meanwhile, manufacturers constantly complained that the Japanese were “insuppressible counterfeiters,” whether this was in the realm of textiles, photography, equipment, or automobiles.26 “This prodigious faculty of imitation constitutes, at least for the time being, a serious danger for some of our industries,” wrote a French engineer in 1898, adding, “The Japanese are instinctively counterfeiters, and their patent legislation, far from trying to suppress this tendency, does everything to promote it.”27 The Western attitude toward Japan was thus disdainful in principle, but downright piqued and offended when its interests were at stake. The two moral weapons used alternately by imitation’s critics were contempt and a claim to exclusivity. There are even cases where the two ideas combined, as witnessed by the many American propaganda images during World War II in which the Japanese are represented as threatening gorillas or chimpanzees.28 They are ridiculous, because they are only apes, but they are dangerous, because they are beasts. In truth, it is their

13

A HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION

“dangerousness” that, from the end of the nineteenth century onward, sets Japanese imitators apart in the Western imagination, while other nations, most of which were occupied or conquered, had been led to obedience by colonial powers. The annoyance caused by the Japanese capacity to appropriate Western models was proportional to their capacity to remain independent. In other words, it is paradoxically because they were autonomous that they were particularly reviled as imitators. This last point serves as a reminder of the political and ideological nature of the critique of imitation. Old-style colonization, underpinned by an evangelical mission, had a predatory dimension but granted imitation an important role. “Imitate us to imitate God,” it basically said. In missionary accounts, vernacular designations were avoided whenever possible; Japanese converts to Christianity were called Michael, Matthias, Joachim, and Bartholomew, and the descriptions of their lives left no room for exoticism.29 Instead, everything was done to give the reader a sense of closeness and the impression that the faithful across the world shared a communal destiny and were members of the same church. In contrast, modern colonization relegated imitation to a subordinate position. A country like France certainly attempted to transmit its history and culture to the populations under its control, often quite clumsily, but the essence of modern colonialism was the “creation” of territorial empires and trade based on the exchange of primary material for finished products. Dominated populations could not, on principle, be assimilated to the dominant group because it was not possible to concede value to the mimetic project, especially following the end of the nineteenth century and the spread of evolutionary racialism. There is thus a direct correlation between disparagement of imitation and the form that colonialism took in the modern era. This link has not always been clearly perceived, however, which is why many artists and intellectuals—often those with the best of intentions— have enjoined non-Western peoples to reject the path of imitation: “Stay Japanese!” Olivier Messiaen told his Japanese students,30 while Elian-J. Finbert exhorted, “Don’t do like us. . . . Don’t imitate us. Seek in your own history the wisdom that will nourish your soul. You will get the better of foreign domination the day that you feel masters of your own fate. We can do nothing for you. You are rich in your own right.”31 Even though these artists and authors genuinely wanted the best for the na14

Copycat Japan

tions and individuals they were addressing, they not only failed to see that their conclusions were biased from the outset by their own prejudices about imitation but also failed to understand that these prejudices were inherently related to the demiurgic compulsion at the root of modern colonialism. Denying the virtues of mimeticism and claiming the power to create a new world are two sides of the same coin. A similar mode of thought seemed to inform Annie Besant, one of the instigators of the Indian national liberation movement: “The artists of today,” she said in 1907, “lack ideals. They are more often copyists than creators. The true artist is a creator. He is original. It is not the work of a creator to simply copy.”32 On the one hand, she was campaigning for autodetermination; on the other, she was urging colonized countries to adopt a purely Western conceptual framework. The people were thus confronted with the basically insurmountable problem of knowing that in order to be authentically themselves, they had to espouse a system of logic and hierarchies that was not their own and, moreover, was the cause of their enslavement. Even though the world has seen considerable changes since the end of World War II and decolonization, the stereotype of the Japanese as imitators is far from having disappeared, especially since China’s emergence on the global economic scene at the end of the 1990s has tended to resuscitate this idea of Asia in general.33 In 1991, a sociologist recorded the following comment made by a young Frenchman working in a clothing store: “Japan is a world of copies. The Japanese have a knack for improving things imported from abroad but don’t know how to create things themselves.”34 The image born at the beginning of the eighteenth century is thus still alive, notably among the petty bourgeoisie and general public. It has also been made to conform to intellectual fads. The most characteristic example is captured in this excerpt from a work published in 1970: “Japan brashly copies and recopies. The child of a civilization based on wood, a perishable material, the Japanese make no distinction between copy and original.”35 For this author, the point is not merely to mock or show outrage at the use of imitation but also to grasp the essence of the phenomenon and attribute it to the natural order. Since Japanese imitation can no longer be explained as an attempt to catch up with the West— this phase being finished—a deeper reason must be found to explain it. It is clear, however, that the Japanese can and do distinguish copies from originals, as their museums’ acquisition policies, heritage classification 15

A HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION

system, or simply their art market bear ample witness. The direct violence of colonial discourse was thus replaced by a form of structural fascination that can still be found in recent best-selling authors such as Arthur Golden and Amélie Nothomb. Japan no longer copies, but it has a relationship with imitation that is special, not to say rather difficult to fathom. After Japan became the world’s second-biggest economy in 1968, and also, or especially, after the appearance of postmodern theory and postcolonial studies, new discourses began to emerge. Among scholars in the humanities and social sciences, no one would now dare say that Japanese culture is by its very essence mimetic. “How can we assert that the Japanese are mere copiers?” asked Alfred Smoular in 1992.36 More recently, Alain-Marc Rieu quipped, “Japan the imitator? A contradiction made by those who believe themselves to be the model or the norm.”37 Qualifying, refuting, or criticizing the idea that non-Western people have a propensity for imitation is now standard practice in scholarly circles. And judging by the views of current students—that is, the generations born after 1980, for whom Japanese-produced manga, anime, and computer games are key cultural references—the association between the Japanese and imitation makes no sense. That stereotype is in the process of disappearing and being replaced by the opposite idea: that Japan is a creative country. It is not certain, however, that the conceptual framework that currently prevails in Japanese studies marks a complete break from the one that reigned at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the archipelago was immersed in the process of acculturation; imitation has a more negative connotation than ever, and everything is done to lower its value ever further. So much so that, wherever it appears too conspicuously, convention favors turning a blind eye to it. It therefore tends to get reversed or transformed into something positive, by explaining, for example, that it is just a preliminary stage or the expression of a sophisticated method: “Contrary to popular belief, the creative refinement of the Japanese is not merely product imitation or copying. It is a disciplined method for transforming an idea into something new and valuable,” explains Sheridan Tatsuno.38 In the 1990s, Alain Peyrefitte thus maintained that Japan had been driven for centuries by a principle of “creative imitation,” adding, “True imitation consists of mastering re-creation, genuine change is below the surface.”39 So this must mean one of two things: either this type of argument indicates a new definition of imitation and creation, or it 16

Copycat Japan

marks a new stage in the polarization of imitation and creation whereby imitation, finding itself reduced to the status of a subsidiary modality of individual and national genius, no longer exists as such, being in its “true” form necessarily “creative.” Even though these arguments tend in this case to rehabilitate Japanese culture, one must be careful to assess whether any given instance is not more of a headlong rush into fanciful speculation than a conceptual change. Certain aspects seem to call for cynicism, particularly the enduring popularity of the descriptive mode that is summarized by the well-known characterization of Japan as lying “between tradition and modernity.” This idea has been particularly popular since the 1970s. Even today, it remains one of the key frames of reference for French secondary-school students. From an ethnological point of view, it is a trite and facile commonplace; cultures are almost always the result of interactions between internal and external forces. In order to understand what lies behind this perception, it is necessary to look to the past. We can begin with Basil Hall Chamberlain, one of the first great European Japanologists. In a work of 1890, he wrote that “the ingrained tendency of the national mind towards the imitation of foreign models does but repeat today, on an equally large scale, its exploit of twelve centuries ago.”40 Following the example of most of the authors cited earlier, Chamberlain emphasizes the Japanese propensity to transpose foreign realities into a local context. But this is not the only way to couple Japan with the idea of imitation. In 1947, Robert Guillain, director of Agence France-Presse’s Tokyo office during World War II, was able to assert that Japan “belongs to a civilization whose main concern has been, for thousands of years, to neither invent nor progress, but instead to keep the world still and just as it has been bequeathed to each generation by that which preceded it. To create, for the Asian artisan, means to copy. He cannot imagine that an object could be anything other than the copy of a model. The student who invents rather than imitates is rejected by his master.”41 This perception of Japan is far from having disappeared: political essayist Jacques Attali still speaks of Japanese civilization as an ancient and immutable one.42 It is thus asserted, on the one hand, that the Japanese spend their time copying other nations—which implies permanent change: the Japanese are “novelty addicts,” claims André Bellessort— while, on the other, that they never invent anything and aspire only to keep repeating themselves.43 Unbothered by this absence of coherence, 17

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the priority of its critics seems to be to link Japanese culture to a paradigm of imitation with negative connotations. During a large part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the picture proposed by Japan experts, and intellectuals in general, followed one or the other of these two main branches of the mimetic paradigm summarized by Chamberlain’s and Guillain’s quotations. The first sees the consequences of espionage, counterfeit, versatility, and modernity, and from the second derive the concepts of immutability, conservatism, tradition, and a lack of originality. Contrary to appearance, they are not unrelated. They stem from the same root. Over the years, a number of authors have noted the existence of these two dynamics—without, however, seeing what they had in common. As early as the turn of the twentieth century, Michel Revon proposed a complex blueprint to describe Japanese culture: “Japan strikes us as an extraordinary creature that has fed by turns off the Eastern and then Western cultures without, for all that, losing its own native culture—which is precisely the crux of Japan’s genius: to assimilate completely what it has drawn in from the outside and render all foreign importations its own.”44 Revon drew attention to the combination of the two types of imitation that I have identified: one external and synchronic, the other internal and diachronic. But the coexistence of the “copies-modernization” and “repetition-tradition” pairings at the heart of Japanese culture strikes him as extraordinary. Such a reaction is normal if the debate is framed in this way, but what we are dealing with here is in fact not a real dialectical opposition. If we compare these two types of imitation, or measure the distance between them, what emerges is a schizophrenic effect, as if they were two autonomous forces working in opposite directions.45 History shows that this apparent opposition merely conceals two ways of saying the same thing: that Japan harbors a culture that is noncreative, imitative, and servile. In other words, the concepts of “tradition” and “modernity” are neither contradictory nor unrelated, but rather proceed from the same reasoning and are structurally linked. We have now seen that the theme of imitation in Western critiques of Japan has a history; it has an origin and various phases, even if we cannot yet know where they will lead, and this topic is complex in any case because it allows the articulation of contradictory-looking positions. The issue of imitation and the negative connotations it carries are the nodes 18

Copycat Japan

around which Roland Barthes’s “ideological occultation” of Japan has secretly and unconsciously taken shape—that is, the refusal to let this culture be part of history and, more generally, to be appreciated in a subtle and reasoned way.46 The question of imitation does not, however, merely probe the Western outlook on Japan, Asia, and all things foreign. It is also one of the blind spots in the West’s examination of itself, which we will now explore in both its aesthetic and historical dimensions.

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2

The West and the Invention of Creation

Although the history of art and literature since the eighteenth century has developed on the basis of showing the “originality” of classical masterpieces, many French painters of the seventeenth century followed rules of representation that differed little from those of the same period in Japan. In his discussion of the transmission of artistic skill during the Edo period  (1603–1867), Christophe Marquet notes, “The recommendation to rely on the example of great masters of the past to achieve mastery of one’s art is in fact fitting to all academic traditions. It is formulated in a roughly identical way in Europe during this same period.”1 Among the painters of the Kanō school, as with many painters of the Académie royale de peinture, respect for the master and for models was an essential and nonnegotiable element in an artist’s training and career. The similarity between two painters or poets had to be, to use Petrarch’s image, akin to the similarity between a father and son, immediately recognizable as being related and yet different.2 Likewise, the Chinese maxim wēngù zhīxīn (Learn new things by reviewing the old) was applicable on both sides of the Eurasian continent. But by the nineteenth century, the parallel between Europe and Japan no longer holds. Whereas the Kanō school pursued its slow rhythm of transforming models, European art had changed its pace and direction. Although this is something of a paradox, one might say that the Europeans invented the process of creation, just as, to use Max Weber’s expression, they invented tradition—two phenomena that are in fact connected.

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The archaeology of the idea of creation, like those of genius, invention, originality, and imagination with which it is associated, was undertaken at the beginning of the twentieth century by Edgar Zilsel.3 Since then, it has been developed by a number of philosophers, historians, and sociologists, most notably Michel Foucault, Thomas McFarland, and JeanMarie Schaeffer.4 All agree that a fundamental change took place during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Schaeffer, it is during the “ancients versus moderns” debate at the end of the seventeenth century that “people begin to entertain the idea that working within established rules might be incompatible with the development of a great work of art.”5 This would corroborate the theory that negative commentary on the imitative nature of the Japanese (and East Asians in general) began to emerge at the beginning of the following century. There is here, as so often, a direct correspondence between the aesthetic and the political. On the philosophical level, this phenomenon can be linked to attempts to demonstrate man’s capacity to be the heir of God’s omnipotence. By maintaining the self’s a priori existence, Descartes had given conceptual autonomy to the idea of creation, simultaneously relegating imitation, whether Platonic or Christian, to the premodern order. He thus opened the way not only for the philosophy of the Enlightenment but also for Romanticism—two movements that, despite all their differences, share the idea of the creative individual freed from the duties of theological imitation. However, although the idea that human beings have not only the possibility but also a form of moral and spiritual duty to produce “new” and “original” things took root in the seventeenth century, it was still first and foremost through and for God. “Creator,” written with a capital  C, was still God’s exclusive prerogative. The most decisive step on the path to asserting man’s free creation took place toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, at the time of the French Revolution and the advent of German Romanticism. “Genius,” wrote Kant, “is the exemplary originality of the natural gifts of a subject in the free  employment of his cognitive faculties.”6 Hegel, eliminating nature, reformulated this as follows: “The artist must act creatively and, in his own imagination and with knowledge of the corresponding forms, with

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profound sense and serious feeling, give form and shape throughout and from a single casting to the meaning which animates him.”7 Hegel’s aesthetics, which sees art and the ability to create as two of the highest capacities of the human mind, is foundational to the contemporary world. But its corollary is to question the value of imitation, since it implies that models can be given only as examples, in Kant’s words, “to be followed” and “not to be imitated.”8 From his predecessors, an artist can adopt only an attitude or a type of heuristic positioning, but not form or even methods. Since all forms are integrated as and when they arise in the finite realm, it is necessary to be continually original in order for the mind to free itself and maintain its own ideal. Oddly, Kant and Hegel use the same example to illustrate this point, that of the nightingale’s song. The argument of the two philosophers is that the beauty of the bird’s song is linked to its natural origin, and that the same sound produced by an imitator cannot be enjoyed once one knows it does not have natural origins. “As soon as it is discovered that it is a man who is producing the notes,” writes Hegel, “we are at once weary of the song. We then recognize in it nothing but a trick, neither the free production of nature, nor a work of art.”9 This parable is not used to question the effects of imitation (one can certainly be fooled) but rather its principle. The very fact of knowing that a work is an imitation a priori ruins its aesthetic value. Only the free creation of the mind by itself, or of nature by itself—here, the nightingale—earns inclusion. The feeling of being able to enjoy only an original work and not its reproduction is directly linked to this concept of art. What we see at the philosophical level can also be found in artists’ discourse and practice. What happened between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and in certain respects up to the present day, is an uncoupling, a growing imbalance between and polarization of concepts— conservation and invention, imitation and creation—that were originally conceived of as inextricably linked and were generally inversely hierarchized. It is not until the end of the nineteenth century, and especially the beginning of the twentieth, that we see a radical rejection of imitation and the possibilities it offers, both at the level of discourse and in the works of art themselves. “I am not capable of servile copy,” wrote Matisse, “for me, everything lies in the conception.”10 This trend, which reflects the idolization of the human mind and a disenchantment with nature, is particularly 22

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noticeable in the realm of fine arts. Expressionism, and then its abstract version after World War II, as well as all the work based on it, developed in accordance with the principle of “creativity.”11 Its implications are much broader, however. Modern science exists only on the basis of discoveries and inventions. At the social and educational levels, France’s civil unrest of May 1968 and similar protest movements demonstrated a desire to break with teaching methods that relied too heavily on reproducing models and not enough on the imagination. The paradigm manifests itself again and again in all manner of contexts. In terms of its symbolic value, imitation keeps losing ground, chased from one domain to another, while the promotion of creation is becoming hegemonic and universal. It is a long process—a real civilizational axiom—that has its own history, heroes, and mythological dimension. Let us return to Kant and Hegel, who played a significant role in establishing the philosophical terms of this development. Their position is not without contradictions, which is particularly apparent in the way they choose to express themselves. Kant makes an especially revealing choice of words, declaring, “Every one is agreed that genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation.”12 To highlight the power of “genius” and belittle what he later refers to as “aping,”13 Kant uses the argument that he is not alone in seeing things this way and that everyone thinks as he does. In other words, he criticizes imitation by claiming that his view is commonplace. The subtext of this somewhat oxymoronic stance is that Kant sees social value in the concept of genius, and that pure creation needs to be validated by a collective authority. The same process obtains in Hegel, but in the more transparent and fearsome form of “we,” of the plural and impersonal pronoun (wir, uns). With the Romantic “we,” the Cartesian ego gets detached from divine reason and recycles its transcendence in a collective form. And yet both Kant and Hegel are aware that attitudes to imitation were not always as they described them. This is particularly true of Hegel, who compares the Romanticism of painting since the Renaissance with Greek sculpture, in which the material is always the essential principle; sticking to the material world was part of classical art’s agenda. The collective authority to which they refer, although founded on a form of deification of subjectivity, is thus not absolute. It postulates a form of universality and transcendence, following the example of the ecclesiastical “we,” but 23

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in practice the Romantic “we” is fundamentally relative. It does not refer to man regardless of his era and location but, on the contrary, actually implies a “them.” This “them” refers as much to an Otherness stemming from diachrony—we the moderns, them the ancients—as to a spatial Otherness: us here, them over there. Le tour du monde, a travel magazine published in the second half of the nineteenth century, is packed with comments associating ancient and distant civilizations with imitation.14 One traveler passing through Mesopotamia noted that in Assyrian art of the past “the spirit of imitation . . . is visible in all the major monuments.”15 Another, having made a stop in Fiji, enjoyed the dances performed by young villagers, “which proved their advanced faculty of imitation.”16 We thus arrive at what Dominique Château said of orientalism in painting: “The notion of exoticism bridges distance across space just as well as distance across time; they are interchangeable.”17 The faraway and the ancient overlap in the colonial imaginary, and the mimetic mind-set is perceived to be one of the main traits that unites them. To make a distinction between “we” or “us” and “them” is to perceive a discrepancy that is essentially vertical and hierarchical. In this respect, the Romantic “we” is not greatly different from the basic anthropological system that always tries to link feelings of collective identity to a sense of opposition to a neighboring group. The difference is that the Romantic version gets conceptually recast, systematized, and extended. Beginning in the nineteenth century, a perfectly graduated scale stretches from the here and now of the “we,” associated with positive values and progress, to the distant world of the “them,” considered negative, primitive, and backward. This separatist mind-set will find application in a large number of fields: in history and geography, where the idea of the West gets honed and reinforced; in linguistics, through the concepts of Indo-European language and “Nostratic” language; and, a little later, in physical anthropology, with the theory of the Aryan race. Debates about imitation are one of the theoretical keys to this process. In this respect, the following excerpt from Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology is not only typical but also almost absurd in its failure to see that quoting, reporting hearsay, and repeating oneself are nothing but different modes of imitation: There was but little originality in the middle ages; and there was but little tendency to deviate from the modes of living established for the various 24

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ranks. Still more was it so in the extinct societies of the East. Ideas were fixed; and prescription was irresistible. Among the partially-civilized races, we find imitativeness a marked trait. Everyone has heard of the ways in which Negroes, when they have opportunities, dress and swagger in grotesque mimicry of the whites. A characteristic of the New Zealanders is an aptitude for imitation. The Dyaks, too, show “love of imitation”; and of other Malayo-Polynesians the  like is alleged. Mason says that “while the Karens originate nothing they show as great a capability to imitate as the Chinese.” We read that the Kamschadales have a “peculiar talent of mimicking men and animals”; that the Nootka-Sound people “are very ingenious in imitating”; that the Mountain Snake Indians imitate animal sounds “to the utmost perfection.” South America yields like evidence. Herndon was astonished at the mimetic powers of the Brazilian Indians. Wilkes speaks of the Patagonians as “admirable mimics.” And Dobrizhoffer joins with his remark that the Guaranis can imitate exactly, the further remark that they bungle stupidly if you leave anything to their intelligence. But it is among the lowest races that proneness to mimicry is most conspicuous. Several travellers have commented on the “extraordinary tendency to imitate” shown by the Fuegians. They will repeat with perfect correctness each word in any sentence addressed to them mimicking the manner and attitude of the speaker. So, too, according to Mouat, the Andamanese show high imitative powers; and, like the Fuegians, repeat a question instead of answering it.18

From this description, Spencer reaches the conclusion that there is an “antagonism” between the different races and periods of humanity, and that on one side of the evolutionary schema there is a “we” that rejects imitation and is drawn to originality and, on the other, nations that show “a smaller departure from the brute type of mind.”19 One group is caught up in the movement of history, the other remains in an ahistorical suspension. However, in order to get a complete vision of the world of mimesis that implicitly defines the territory of the Hegelian “we,” one needs to add to temporal and spatial difference sexual difference, on the one hand, and an intellectual and social difference, on the other—we the refined people, them the vulgar ones. Indeed, one finds in some nineteenthcentury authors the idea that women are “very susceptible to imitation.”20 25

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More commonly, we hear that women are not capable of acting on the world: “In intellectual constitution as in physical constitution, women are passive,” writes a doctor in 1853.21 Similarly, the general public, the masses, are described as inclined to appreciate only the imitative arts. Baudelaire thus lambastes photography at the end of the 1850s in the following terms: Where painting and sculpture are concerned, the current credo of the general public, especially in France, is as follows: “I believe in nature and I believe only in nature. I believe that art is and can be only an exact reproduction of nature. So any method that could give us a result identical to nature would be absolute art.” A vengeful God granted the wishes of this multitude, and Daguerre was his Messiah. So the multitude said, “Since photography gives us a guarantee of accuracy, then art is photography.” From that moment onward, the vile people rushed, like a unified Narcissus, to contemplate their trivial reflection on metal.22

The rejection of institutions like waxwork museums or realist innovations like three-dimensional cinema, common among intellectuals, is of a similar nature. All critical discourse on imitation from the nineteenth century to today contrasts an inferior historical, geographical, or sociocultural referent with a superior “we,” whose characteristics, discernable through contrast, are to be evolved (temporal superiority), imperial (spatial superiority), male (sexual superiority), and bourgeois (intellectual and social superiority).23 Emphasis on discrepancy is what motivates all the claims of temporal, spatial, and social difference. The invention of creation consisted in placing the modern individual at a distance from both God and nature. From that point onward, two approaches—two modernities—became available. The first, based on poetic order, plays on the different possibilities of positioning the ego vis-à-vis the world, leaving it undetermined. This is how all great artists have lived their art. The second, which derives from political order and is of more interest here, tends on the contrary to define the ego, to establish its parameters and calibrate it. The role of the artist is objectivized within frameworks such as the nation, a social class, or even a style.24 Once again, this is not without contradiction. But the contradiction relates to the object and the relationship established with it and not to the subject. According to this reasoning, that which is proximate 26

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cannot be imitated or serve as a model. The proximate is not conducive to creation. Indeed, that which is proximate is protected: someone, who is likewise nearby, holds the rights to it. What is far away can, however, be used as a model. When Van Gogh copies Hiroshige or when Picasso uses the shapes of African sculpture, they are thought to be creating. But that which is far away is not itself a creator. The faraway does not invent or progress; it imitates slavishly. The contradiction is therefore as follows: that which is far away is the product of the sterile and negative mimicry of the Other, but it can be imitated in a positive and creative way by “us.” This contradiction was made possible by the Hegelian exchange of attributes between “I” and “we,” with the “I” lending transcendence to the “we” and the “we” conferring worldliness on the “I.”25 At once transcendent and relative, the modern Western bourgeois “we”—in other words, the Romantic “we”—gives sanctuary to the works of the individuals of which it consists because they are the guarantors of its sacredness, but precisely because it is the agent of the sacredness of individuals, it has trouble accepting that somewhere else there is another, similar “we.” The relationship between “we” or “us” and “them” is necessarily asymmetric. A French artist in 1900 cannot come too close to copying the work of another French artist, because the latter is protected by society, but he can take a contemporary Japanese work, or one from ancient Greece, and breathe life into it. Non-Western artists, though, are confined to either imitating their own pasts or imitating the West. In neither case, of course, can they be credited with a capacity to create. In the modern context, imitation is an inherently degrading action, whereas being imitated, imposing on others a certain way of thinking or doing things, is perceived in a positive light. The one who forms another in his image—these days, we should perhaps say who informs—not only holds the political and social power but also fulfills the requirements of human genius. By putting himself forward as a model, by rejecting imitation, and by framing his knowledge of others at a conceptual level, the genius-model can admire himself and feel reassured of his divine nature. Conversely, those who do the imitating only increase their models’ contempt for them. Moreover, if the Romantic “we” tends to deny everything that, outside itself, could claim to resemble it, it is not internally appeased for all that. The individuals who make it up are in effect rivals in the quest for 27

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what can allay their metaphysical fears and flatter their pride. In the universe of what René Girard dubs internal mediation, where “each imitates the other while declaring the precedence of his own desire,” the foreign, the elsewhere, the distant past, and the popular masses are particularly prized conquests.26 When Edmond de Goncourt related his discovery of Japanese art, he wrote, “At the very beginning it was a few eccentrics, like my brother and myself, then Baudelaire, then Burty, then Villot . . . , then, after us, the painter gang.”27 The orientalists hunted in packs, but with each new catch competition set in, as Goncourt’s use of anaphora suggests. Everyone strives to be original, but everyone keeps a keen eye on everyone else. Romantic creation implies both imitation of the rival’s desire and a fantasy of discovering, or rather violating, the world. Affirmation of the creative power of “I” and “we”—“I” and “we” understood in a political sense, like a fixed, stable worldly power that places objects at a set distance, and not in the poetic sense—is a powerfully effective cultural device. It speeds up the temporality of experience in that it postulates the uselessness of waiting for the master and student to agree that the former has nothing more to teach the latter. Denying alterity, it also opens the way for conquest, and it allows quick profit, fulfillment of pride, and the illusion of salvation through inscription in history. It is the basis for the mechanization and calibration of social time, modern colonialism, and the assaults imposed on a version of “nature” that is its passive and objectified corollary. In other words, it is what we are. This must be our starting point. It would be a mistake to think we could turn the power of this logic against its own effects, that we could, by affirming individual or collective will, remove ourselves from a world based on the expression of individual or collective will. It would be naive and hypocritical, and all nineteenth- and twentieth-century art history shows that it serves no purpose. Conversely, thinking about the concept of imitation and examining it in situ is another step in the lengthy journey toward a reformulation of the relationship between the “we” and the “other.” The goal here is neither to return to imitation or classicism nor to surmount the imitation–creation dichotomy, but lies in the very process of reconfiguring the relationship between the subject and object.

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3

The Denial, Rejection, and Sublimation of Imitation

In the industrial and postindustrial universe, the individual considered to be most creative imposes his model and wins a competition that operates simultaneously at the material, symbolic, and ontological levels. The same applies essentially to corporations and countries. The question of creation and imitation, in other words, incorporates high-stakes issues on which the power dynamics between people are based. Anyone acknowledged as a creator is in a position of strength; anyone subjected to a model must be dominated. In the arts, this latter type is generally disregarded; in the salaried world, he labors under humdrum conditions and has limited possibilities of development. In both cases, he is economically disadvantaged. At the same time, professions like the artisan and craftsman, which resist this polarization and the nature of whose work involves both creation and reproduction, are kept in a precarious and subordinated position. The difficulties faced by computer programmers—the artisans of today— in getting decision-making responsibilities in companies stems from the same reasoning. However, despite creation’s symbolic value, “creators” depend on words and concepts that have been forged by others. Similarly, production practices, whether artistic, artisanal, or industrial, depend on codified locations, temporalities, and routines. It is also necessary to know what has already been done, if only to differentiate oneself from it, just as it is difficult not to resort to reproduction in order to disseminate and publicize one’s work. Not only is creation ex nihilo a utopian fantasy, but there is not a single step in the production of a work that can be achieved 29

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outside the mimetic economy. The position of creator is thus entirely relative. This reality does not, however, correspond with the demand for genius and difference engendered by history and required by society, which is why it is necessary for artists and critics to resort to legitimization strategies aimed at obscuring or distracting attention from the role of imitation in art. The first of the strategies aimed at asserting one’s creativity is both the most crude and the most widely practiced. It consists in denying or belittling the creativity of others—of which we have already seen several examples—all while concealing in one’s own work anything that might stem from imitation. This is the case, for example, of painter Franz Kline, who always refused to admit even the slightest influence of Far Eastern calligraphy on his work. His position can be explained first and foremost by a desire to defend the “originality” of his painting at a time when American art was still concerned with emancipating itself from French art; unsurprisingly, denial is often preferred to an admission of weakness. Nineteenth-century stories of the efforts made by European workshops to acquire the secrets of Far Eastern ceramics reveal a fundamentally identical attitude, if in a slightly different form. When it comes to saying that the Chinese or Japanese copy a given technique or method, the tone is contemptuous, but when the imitative relationship is reversed, the tone is everything but. Léon de Rosny thus made a glowing tribute to a book that, as he wrote enthusiastically, “will soon allow the imitation of all Chinese ceramic works, and the reproduction in the West of the decorations, the magnificent and infinitely varied colors, that have been the despair of the artists of our workshops.”1 The effort to imitate is described with warmth and enthusiasm. Émile Bergerat, meanwhile, preferred to emphasize that, with regard to production at Longwy, the imitative stage was short-lived: “Far from seeking to turn the tide, they followed it, and, taking advantage of the lessons that were reaching us from the East, they determined to battle with China, Japan, and Persia. First they imitated, then they became the ones to create. Today, Longwy pottery is one of France’s foremost institutions.”2 Such methods of asserting creativity are unquestionably crude but extremely common in practice: imitation is either hidden or presented as positive or temporary. A second, barely more sophisticated method depends on the arbitrary partitioning of geographies and the covering of one’s tracks and is par30

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ticularly apparent in the history of artistic avant-gardes. To stick with the Franco-Japanese theme, let us look at the critical works of Théodore Duret. Duret was among the first to suggest that the avant-garde phenomenon was a spur to cultural development. In an essay on the Salon of 1870, he unequivocally states his selection criterion: What will be our guiding principle in choosing a limited number of artists from among the vast army that invades the Palais de l’Industrie? It will be the possession of originality. Among beginners and the young, we will single out only those who show boldness in the way they see and feel, and in the way they represent what they have seen and felt, and who produce works imbued with a character distinct from those of earlier painters. We will systematically spurn all artists where we find only the reproduction of known types.3

Inscribing himself as a direct descendant of Romanticism, he prohibits imitation and endorses novelty. It is for this reason that he supported Monet, Renoir, and the Impressionist school in general. However, like many artists and intellectuals of his generation, Duret was also very taken by Japanese art and contributed to the phenomenon of japonisme and the taste for ukiyo-e prints. From October 1871 to February 1872, he traveled to Japan with Henri Cernuschi. Duret must have been aware, however, of the paradox inherent in praising, on the one hand, an artist’s free creation and, on the other, the beauty of multiples obtained by largely standardized methods. He therefore had to find originality in ukiyo-e. Following the principle just articulated, he began by rejecting the country’s other characteristic art forms, such as Buddhist sculpture, in which he detected Greek origins and which, to his mind, was “the least Japanese thing to be found on Japanese soil.”4 He also rejects contemporary works made under Western influence as “a horrible combination of the old Japanese style bastardized and the European style poorly understood.”5 Having cleared the way, he has only to attribute to ukiyo-e a method of production and a value system conforming to his criteria.6 The simplest solution was to consider the painters as the sole creators of the prints. He therefore ignores what editors generally asked for in their commissions—that works draw on a known model—and relegates engravers and printers to a marginal role. As for the role of writers 31

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in the production of illustrated books, it is quite simply ignored, as had long been the case. For Duret, an ukiyo-e print is the product of an artist obeying only his “imagination”—fantaisie—a word that recurs repeatedly in all the literature of japonisme.7 In his view, Hokusai and Hiroshige are first and foremost masters of freedom, “applying directly and by themselves the forms hatched in their imaginations.”8 Duret idealizes Japanese artists in accordance with his own values, such that their works can qualify as avant-garde, like those of the Impressionists. This goal leads to ever more imprecision. On the one hand, he takes Buddhist sculpture to be a bad imitation of Greek art on the basis that realism was exclusive to the West, and, on the other, he transforms the prints into modern and original paintings, simultaneously hiding their (notably Dutch) influences and the value they had in Japan. Duret does not, however, put ukiyo-e and Impressionism on quite the same plane. He acknowledges that Japanese art “strongly influenced the Impressionists” at the level of coloration9 and clearly articulates a parent–child relationship between the two. However, to resolve the paradox in which Impressionism is fundamentally original while simultaneously having Japanese art as a model, Duret takes care to disconnect the geographies—Japanese art may well be “original” and “imaginative,” but it does not belong to the same universe as Impressionism. “The appearance in our midst of Japanese albums and images completed the transformation by introducing us to an absolutely new coloration system,” he writes tellingly.10 The Japanese works ultimately remain nonnative references, which is why they can still serve as models. In fact, for Duret, such models are the path to the “new.” It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the principle of imitation to which avant-garde artists and critics can under certain circumstances subscribe and a discourse on imitation that participates in a legitimation strategy. Recourse to models is allowed if they are outside the usual references; in other words, if, in a purely empirical way, they give a greater impression of novelty than those already known. However, all forms of art can be criticized for their mimetic character if this bolsters the value of what they are being contrasted with. This phenomenon is not limited to the end of the nineteenth century. Although the influence of the East, Japan, and Buddhism was claimed in a positive way by a number of major twentieth-century artists like Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Yves Klein, the influence of the West on 32

The Denial, Rejection, and Sublimation of Imitation

Japanese artists, conversely, took on a negative value, as we can see from the collections of the major public European and American museums, where modern Japanese art is rarely to be seen and seldom highly valued. At this juncture, it is tempting to object that the two movements should not be considered on the same footing, since the Asians adopted techniques, notably oil painting, whereas the Western artists took inspiration from a mind-set that freed them from the shackles of representation. The former would thus have imitated in a mechanical way, while the latter would have made a superior work of creation. Besides the fact that this distinction makes sense only from a West-centric viewpoint, it is clear that numerous Western artists have borrowed formal techniques from Asian art. This is particularly apparent in the works of Mark Tobey, Willi Baumeister, Pierre Alechinsky, and Jean Degottex. But as we have seen, it is rare for this to be plainly admitted. It is also clear that Asian artists did not adopt only techniques. Behind the techniques, there was often a desire to reformulate the idea of freedom, a search for the sublime and, more generally, for spirituality. The most obvious sign of this is the considerable interest in Christianity shown by Japanese writers and artists at the beginning of the twentieth century.11 In fact, this asymmetry of perspective is the expression of a system: in order for the avant-garde, who renew themselves by borrowing from the outside, to be considered as the guarantors of creativity and originality despite the taboo on imitation, it is necessary for the other party’s imitative mode to be the defective one. The third method used to transform imitation into something acceptable consists in passing the model through a filter of reasoned thought or a rational technical process designed to transform the mimesis into a cosa mentale that bestows on it a form of elevation. This solution works as an extension of classicism, for which imitation had a preliminary function and corresponded to childhood, apprenticeship, and the first stage of all production, whereas genius—that is, the affirmation of difference—was perceived to be the privilege of maturity. Aimé Humbert’s famous travelogue, Le Japon illustré, was published in the magazine Le tour du monde between July 1866 and the end of 1869.12 There is a particularly large number of illustrations in this work, and they have two striking traits: they appear quite un-Japanese, or as un-Japanese as possible, and they are relatively lacking in signature distinctiveness—it is difficult to work out whom each is by. And indeed, the artists who 33

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made them feature in various issues of Le tour du monde that explore quite different geographical regions (the most famous being probably the academic painter and Delacroix student Alphonse de Neuville). Although often privileging subjects that might appear strange and mysterious to its readers,13 the magazine’s illustrators peddle a vision, in the very construction of their images, of a world unified by technique. Regardless of the geographic or temporal distance—whether the scene shown represents Europe or Japan, the Middle Ages or the contemporary era—everything is seen from the same perspective, from the same and single frontal point of view: the level of an easel or camera. However, despite the graphic and conceptual homogeneity of Le tour du monde in general and Humbert’s narrative in particular, the designers almost always followed models that were necessarily heterogeneous. In this case, of the 475 illustrations that accompanied Le Japon illustré, only half a dozen have captions that do not mention a visual source. All the rest are explicitly said to be “based on” documents brought back from Japan. But in the resulting picture, the model has all but vanished. Technique has swept away all difference; the strangeness has been domesticated. As Gustave Le Bon wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, on the very topic of drawings reproducing Asian arts, “It makes you wonder whether the artist, rather than see things as they are, perceives them through a specific idea that has been fixed both in his mind and especially in the movements of his hand by his classical education.”14 The artist does not so much seem to be imitating the model as overlaying it with a system of representation stemming from the Renaissance, whose foundations are “scientific.” Rationalization untaints imitation and renders it acceptable, even transparent. Taken to a more general level, this phenomenon explains the paradox, which we have witnessed in several authors, that the rejection of mimesis usually takes a rather repetitive form. The whole nineteenth century is marked by a desire to domesticate mimesis using reason. Several of the era’s ideas, like the notion of an Aryan race or an Indo-European language, not to mention the grammar of styles in art history, depend on homologous analyses. Caught in the mesh of the attempt at logical reorganization, similarity, imitation, and everything connected with them lose their negative connotations and become the theories’ helpful allies. In the 1880s, the idea that one could potentially generate a work without human intervention, using an entirely mechanical reproduction 34

The Denial, Rejection, and Sublimation of Imitation

method, was still very far from apparent. For Siegfried Bing, who published a pioneering magazine on Japanese art from 1888 to 1891, people had to start thinking differently about this: It seems to me that to give a precise sense of things, there is only one real way: to present to the eye a faithful reproduction of the original. It is the implementation of such a system to which the task I undertake today is dedicated. It will consist in showing the amateur, with the help of the best engraving methods, an uninterrupted series of varied documents drawn from all branches of art and borrowed from the widest diversity of eras.15

Bing felt that reproducing works in the most faithful way possible was novel, even daring. And yet his project was hardly revolutionary. Fundamentally, Bing still considered art to be a matter of intellectual and spiritual achievement. However, he produced a fresh look at the nature of mechanical tools. He thus added, “We note in these engravings and their imprints that Mr. [Claude] Gillot has succeeded to perfection. He has demonstrated that mechanical means have ceased to be art’s irreconcilable enemy for those who have managed to make them docile helpers whose flexibility equals the artist’s fingers working under the immediate inspiration of the brain.”16 Whereas for Baudelaire, a few decades earlier, the analogical nature of photography and the applied arts prevented them from aspiring to any artistic value, Bing, like many others at the end of the nineteenth century, believed that the machine had become an extension of the artist’s hand and possessed an intrinsic form of genius. As soon as it was admitted that cameras were not magical instruments but rather products of intelligence obeying instructions, they were able to fill the role of the rational filter played up to that point by classical knowledge, and what they produced could gradually be thought of as emanations of the mind, while their imitative nature receded to the background. The three discursive tools that we have examined here, aimed at enabling the use of imitation within a system founded on the primacy of creation, appeared and then spread during the nineteenth century. But they continue to be used and are by no means mutually exclusive. One of the reasons why this process of legitimization is so important stems from the fact that artists have never ceased exploring the perilous realm 35

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of imitation. In La ressemblance par contact, Georges Didi-Huberman shows how Rodin secretly, but in a decisive and productive way, relied on a collection of cast fragments that he assembled in various ways, adapting and transforming them as he went along, and how Marcel Duchamp never stopped exploring, not only ironically but also from something like sensory pleasure, the different possibilities of projection, casting, and mounting.17 Among a number of others, Yves Klein, in his Anthropométries (where naked bodies served as paintbrushes), and Jasper Johns, in his Flag series, also abundantly used borrowing, thereby questioning the common hierarchical dichotomies of imitation and creation, copy and original. Other artists, notably René Magritte, played on the limits of imitation, on the gaps existing between the sensory and the intelligible, showing in a subversive way the inadequacy of both. In the wake of Duchamp’s “readymades,” several works were presented as transpositions of the real, like Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and César’s Compressions. This notion emerges even in artists who place themselves in the lineage of Expressionism. Pollock always spoke of his works as visible reflections of invisible forces.18 All major modern works can be traced to the question of imitation, a phenomenon that is not limited to fine arts but can also be found in both literature and music, not to mention industrial production, for which it is an essential characteristic. Such productions are creative insofar as they reformulate the relationship with the real and thus the way in which it can be understood.

36

4

No Poaching

The West likes to see itself as an entity composed of liberated and enlightened individuals driven by a creative force, while Japan and the East in general supposedly imitate in a slavish and immature way. Let us now look at how this “creative force” projected itself outward by examining its historical progress, specifically in the context of France’s relations with Japan. Analyzing the phenomena resulting from the Romantic conception of imitation should allow us to uncover several complex mechanisms, especially when we approach the issue from the perspective of the Other. Assertion of man’s creative power was tantamount to a profound questioning of religion, and in France at the beginning of the twentieth century this led to the establishment of political power based on strictly secular foundations. Nonetheless, Christianity was still powerful during the period of modern colonization (and remains so to this day in quite a number of countries). Prior to 1850, most histories of Japan in French or English centered on the question of Christianity and the persecution of Christians, and despite the various qualities that these works attributed to the Japanese, their main focus was on Japanese ignorance of God as well as on the physical, moral, and social differences separating “them” from “us.” It is to this ignorant world that the missionaries planned to bring light in accordance with the edicts of holy writ; as Francis Xavier explained, they were determined to make all necessary sacrifice for the sake of “drawing the Japanese out of all the darkness of their superstitions into the light of the Gospel.”1 37

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Despite the best efforts of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, who were more keen to emphasize the similarities between Asia and Europe than focus on their differences, the rhetoric of symbolically opposing Western enlightenment with foreign darkness persisted throughout the eighteenth century and was taken up unquestioned by the Romantics.2 Victor Hugo, guided by a magic notion of the Spirit and the Word, wrote, “Nations are not all enlightened to the same extent and in the same way: in Asia it is night, in Europe, day.”3 In nineteenth-century France, this image was accepted on both the Left and the Right, by both republicans and Catholic conservatives.4 The vision that Westerners had of Asia, and specifically Japan, therefore retained Christian values, structure, and motifs. As JeanMarie Schaeffer points out, “The distinctive feature of the modern (Western) concept of individuality resides in the fact that it manages to avoid a divine basis only by projecting all the divine attributes onto the individual himself. In other words, our concept of subjectivity remains dependent on what it pretends to distinguish itself from—that is, the Christian concept of the Divine Subject.”5 The model put forward by the West thus not only is composite and multilayered but also, seen from the outside—in this case, from Japan—carries contradictions regarding the place and roles of the individual, “us,” and God. Although deeply dependent on Christian notions, the modern world did not adopt the prudent policy of adhering to separate evangelical jurisdictions, a policy that the Church had tried to establish at the end of the fifteenth century. On the contrary, the countries of Europe remained in direct competition for the whole of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They copied one another in their desire for conquest, all the while trying to distinguish themselves from all the others. Each country asserted its possession of universal genius but claimed its own specific kind. Even if countries exposed to colonialism had known how to identify the elements in the Western model derived from Christian tradition and those belonging to modernity, the fact that the great powers had each adopted a different position and were rivals would have made the new truth even more complex and opaque. French colonial strategy, like that of several other countries, placed particular emphasis on the realm of ideas. The genius that France suggested Japan should follow and assimilate was that of reason and humanism. It was, however, rarely seen in action on the ground (in contrast to the un38

No Poaching

dertakings of the Americans, who both promoted education and invested hugely in it). Since the seventeenth century, political and intellectual authorities in France have idealized French language and thought, associating them with a set of positive ideals. Language teaching, “the best way to conquer the natives”—as it says in the founding text of the Alliance française—is thus one of the bases of France’s cultural politics.6 Whereas the Jesuits, who understood the need for strategy in getting people to imitate Christ, believed that it was important to imitate host nations and know their language and customs, colonial France refused to stoop to such an effort, which it thought not only useless but also contrary to its vision of the world and its symbolic and material interests—whence their haughty, supercilious outlook.7 This is also why the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs rarely concerned itself with appointing linguistically skilled staff to foreign placements, and even less in Asia and Africa than elsewhere. Let us look at the consequences and corollaries of this system in the world of art. Needless to say, a model and copy form an inseparable pair: there is no such thing as an inherent model—if a model or prototype can be said to exist, it is because there are replicas. It is the replica that gives the model its function. Similarly, the rank of masterpiece in the modern sense is determined by a work’s capacity to serve as a model—by its “exhibition value,” to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase.8 The Mona Lisa is the most famous example. The work that becomes a model becomes a masterpiece and symbolically reigns over other works. Following this reasoning, when a person or community presents the fruit of its labor to the public, the most hoped for outcome is that the work will be recognized as a model, and every attempt is made to initiate an imitation process that is as broad and sustained as possible. For a painter, the challenge is to get one’s work reproduced in catalogues and newspapers in order to grow one’s reputation, while the engineer or industrial firm that displays a prototype in the hope of selling a succession of identical machines deploys the same reasoning. The industrial and world’s fairs developed in the nineteenth century had first and foremost this symbolic function, which plays an essential part in determining the exchange value of goods. For all the Western exhibitors, this was obvious. The Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale, founded in 1801, was the origin of these exhibitions. It is interesting to note that its aims were, on the one hand, to “collect useful discoveries and inventions for the advancement of the arts” and, on the 39

A HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION

other, to contribute by proffering support that “broadened the application of new methods” and propagating awareness through publicity.9 It thus valued objects solely on the basis of their novelty and then immediately put them forward as models—in other words, as objects that could be publicized and serially reproduced. In this way the cycle of creation was restarted—by nonwinners, because they were spurred on by a desire to have their turn at putting forward a model, and by winners, because they wanted to maintain their dominant and symbolically advantageous position. This process, which melds worldly interests and the hankering for eternity or salvation through inscription in history, is at the root of how progress operates. Japan, however, took a certain amount of time to embrace this reasoning. At the end of the nineteenth century, its system of industrial (re)production was largely undeveloped and the works of art exhibited did not subscribe to the Romantic blueprint. The Old Monkey presented in 1893 in Chicago is thus a typical example of the lack of understanding of how imitation was viewed in the Western system and, more generally, of the new system of the arts. Carved out of a block of chestnut using maximal realism, Takamura Kōun’s sculpture reproduces a monkey, as its title indicates.10 Through this sculpture, in other words, Japan not only humorously admitted to the act of copying but also claimed priority in the field. Underpinning the work, one perceives the classic Sino-Japanese conceptual system, according to which only imitation and technical perfection can ultimately allow one to surpass the model or, in this case, to compete with nature. But these ideas no longer made sense in the Western setting at the end of the nineteenth century. The Old Monkey was taken notice of and honored with a prize, but only for its technical merit—a way of saying that it was not art. For a long time France managed to remain the authority on the value of artworks. Artists flocked there from all over the world in the hope of getting ahead. But the rules for penetrating the inner circle were both draconian and opaque—it was a real process of initiation. Moreover, foreign artists could not hope to win recognition if they used techniques and subject matter specific to their culture of origin, and no Asian painter in France who presented Chinese-style ink paintings gained even the slightest lasting success, much less historical recognition. Many tried notwithstanding, like Takeuchi Seihō, and some occasionally won prizes in 40

No Poaching

international exhibitions, but their art was always perceived as exotic and traditional—which is to say, guilty of adhering to the logic of repetition. In order to avoid rejection, it was therefore necessary for subject matter and technique to have an acceptable level of familiarity. At some point during his training, whether in his country of origin or elsewhere, the artist had to have made a conscious effort to extricate himself from the norms of his own culture and imitate those of Europe. Such was the case of Fujita Tsuguharu, to take the example of a Japanese painter residing in France who had undergone his artistic training in Japan.11 When Fujita arrived in France in 1913, he had just finished an apprenticeship in oil painting, a technique that, in his eyes as in those of his masters, had fundamentally modern connotations. However, unlike many of his compatriots, he quickly realized that painting skillfully in a post-Impressionist style would open no doors. He understood that he had to be “new” and “creative,” and he intuited that what he needed to imitate was not the forms but the spirit, which he managed by taking techniques from Japanese art and marrying them with oil painting. In other words, he had to • • • •

Imitate on the technical level in order for his work to be acceptable Find a way to differentiate himself Be original using technical methods that were not in his eyes new Mentally conform to a model of creativity that valued nonconformity

It was only on these four conditions that he was able to gain recognition and success. The complexity of the intellectual and especially psychological efforts involved explains why cases like Fujita’s remained the exception. A certain degree of amorality was necessary for success. The West was structured concentrically with, depending on the period, one or more centers that defined its polarities. From these centers emerged art forms that immediately acquired symbolic influence and became models. But the individuals, groups, or countries that adopted them were de facto relegated to a position of vassalage. This is apparent from critical works’ use of condescending phrases (which were all the more pointed for masquerading as praise). Thus, for example, one account of the exhibition of Japanese art at the Salon of the Société nationale des beaux-arts in 1922 reads, “We have been genuinely touched to see there the names of artists who, having been students of our most renowned painters, are now 41

A HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION

masters in their turn and transmit the learning they received in France to their young compatriots.”12 The merit attributed to Japanese artists was predominantly their being faithful to those who trained them and proving their allegiance by obediently returning to show their progress. The Romantic “we” ideally disallowed imitation of objects or masters, since all models were by definition transient, elusive, and in a state of permanent transformation. As an imaginary space, it could not be grasped through physical forms; it could be inhabited only at the level of principle by accepting the premise that art means not imitating. However, for anyone who did not spontaneously identify with this “we,” whether for cultural, ethnic, or social reasons, the very adoption of this idea entailed a form of imitation. Such is the paradoxical experience—a real conceptual wall—faced by innumerable Japanese and Chinese artists until the 1960s: learning not to imitate brought them back to a form of imitation (although, to be fair, reaching that point implied having come a long way already). In France and elsewhere, many academies and salons offered training in “modern art,” which, in practice, followed an essentially imitative logic. In the studios of the Académie Julian in Paris, just as in the White Horse Society (Hakubakai) in Tokyo, one learned first of all to copy nature and one’s master’s technique, while the possibility of “pure” creation was deferred to a later stage. Not only did the training process thus conceal the real criteria of evaluation from foreign artists, but, if these artists managed to overcome language barriers and understand the actual hierarchy of values, they nonetheless found themselves in the position of imitators. Moreover, although individual originality was certainly showcased, works in the Romantic system usually came in waves. That is how Impressionism was followed by Pointillism and then Fauvism and Expressionism. Their serial value outweighed the criteria allowing the isolation of any specific single work. This principle, which transposes the laws of consumer society into the aesthetic realm, introduced internal competition while limiting the external kind; no sooner had others discovered and assimilated the rules of a given style than a new style came to replace it. This meant that artists had to get back to work and continue to imitate and were thus held in a state of permanent subjection. Whether at the level of society or that of international relations, constantly modifying artistic criteria was for the Western bourgeois “us” a means of retaining control of the norm. 42

5

Seen from Japan

While there are innumerable Western works that mention the imitative nature of foreigners in general and the Japanese in particular, there are also quite a few in which the Japanese themselves acknowledge the imitative dimension of their civilization. The Ōtsuka Museum in Shikoku, where a thousand European paintings are reproduced on ceramic plaques, is a typical example of the shape this awareness takes. However, this discourse also has its own history: it crystallized at a particular time, was discussed, and then gave rise to a certain kind of culture. Furthermore, admission of the imitative trait has often been accompanied by attempts to reevaluate imitation or calls to overcome it through creation. Before proceeding, let us briefly consider the artistic notions and practices of early Japan that influenced the way in which the Japanese reacted to the introduction of Western thought. Such an undertaking is not without its epistemological problems, however; not only is interpretation of period sources challenging by virtue of cultural and linguistic distance, but it is always difficult to distinguish between analysis and interpretation in the writings of contemporary specialists. This phenomenon is particularly relevant to this case, because there is often a certain inconsistency among Japanese intellectuals, whose thinking is heavily indebted to Romantic concepts of imitation but who claim a legitimacy and special capacity to understand Japan’s premodern culture. We see this, for example, in Yamaguchi Masao, whose study of the idea of mitate (metaphor; layered, often parodic allusion) analyzes Edo-period art and literature and explicitly 43

A HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION

constructs an argument with reference to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum.1 His analysis of mitate must therefore in the first instance be considered a reflection on postmodernism. Several terms in Japanese refer to the subject of imitation and creation. Just deciding whether or not to render them in English affects their meaning, which is why I will begin with actual practices and try to bring them back to concepts as I go along. In art of the Edo period as a whole, there are three major types of practice that fall into the category of imitation and creation. The first, which can be seen in all areas of knowledge and the arts, consists in taking an object as a model and copying it; what matters in this is the mimetic act. The second consists in transposing part of an object onto another such that the contact brings the latter to life—as, for example, the effect a relic has on the place where it is kept—while the third involves imposing on an object the meaning or value of a referent to uncover similarities and correspondences. The three can combine to give rise to an infinite number of forms. At the structural level, then, there is nothing specifically Japanese. 1. Taking an object and copying it: the mimetic act In the eighteenth century, the education system valued repetition and copying. Such teaching and aesthetics served the interests of the feudal order. Even if, as Brenda Jordan points out, “a strictly ‘classic’ model for learning painting may not have existed in fact,” training in painting workshops was based not only on copying but also on repetition of the copy.2 To designate this process in Japanese, one could use—depending on the field—the verbs utsusu (to transpose from one place to another; to paint; to write), narau (to take as a model), maneru (formerly manebu; to imitate, to learn), and several associated or derivative verbs. Before copying, however, it is necessary to have defined a model. In the painting workshops, exempla were gathered as notebooks called edehon or funpon. In general, the word hon, which we translate today as “book,” etymologically refers to a root and, by extension, to what one relies on to understand something and develop oneself. From approximately the sixteenth century onward, one also finds the word kata (set form, pattern, mold). The importance granted in that era to models, whether in the realm of the art of combat, performance, or visual arts, relies on the idea that the mind is fundamentally shapeless and that there is no 44

Seen from Japan

ideational correspondence to objects, as there is in the Platonic tradition. The mind, says early-eighteenth-century Confucian thinker Ogyū Sorai, “cannot get a hold of itself to shape itself.”3 For him, as for a number of his contemporaries, there is no Other Place, no God, no organized and transcending power that can help us judge the beauty or truth of things. Sorai’s thinking is an affirmation of life and, at the same time, a recognition of its tragedy.4 There can be no improvement or progress, at least at the ontological level. This is why only what already exists and is recognized as empirically beautiful has the legitimacy to serve as a standard of aesthetic judgment. Apprenticeship and repetition of the original model are accompanied by the more or less conscious feeling that the model exists only as something historical and transient and, by extension, by the feeling of being the temporary vector of perpetuation. This is particularly noticeable in Motoori Norinaga, who insists on the performative relationship that must be established with ancient poetry, which, he claims, must not only be read out loud but also be done so in accordance with tradition, “by projecting the voice” in order to imbue oneself with the weightiness of time and better “contemplate” present reality.5 The to-and-fro between model and copy allows one to feel both life’s flux and its discontinuity, an aporia that separates the mind from disorder and thereby gives rise to powerful emotions. 2. Physically or spiritually transposing part of an object onto another: animation through contact At the cultural level, one of the characteristics of the Edo period is the proliferation of commemorative stelae and the development of funerary structures, of which the Okunoin Cemetery on Mount Kōya is probably the most striking example. The commemorative stela is generally placed in an area where the dedicatee spent time; it can mark an anniversary, suggesting a return of the past, and include an epigraph in the person’s hand or that of a loved one—the stelae in memory of the poet Bashō provide a good example. This aesthetic, which plays on metonymy, developed mainly in the context of Buddhism, a religion that emphasizes the equal value of all living beings and of course, more fundamentally, the equivalence of emptiness and phenomena. Only an understanding of the equal nature of all things, derived from Buddhist law and the figure of the Buddha himself, can enable one to conquer false identities and sterile dichotomies. Buddhist imitatio therefore values everything that 45

A HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION

demonstrates the idea of transference or mutually beneficial interaction. As Bernard Faure suggests, “The Buddhist solution consists perhaps not so much in mediating between the two realms [sacred and profane] as in effecting a transposition: the creation of a copy that is at once same and other.”6 The images passed from master to disciple, and the statues and monuments brought to life by the insertion of relics—of which tombs are a secularized version—correspond to this iconic agenda. “In every case,” Faure notes, “the work harbors a flexible logic that combines metonymy and synecdoche, a logic of pars pro toto and identity through resemblance.”7 In Japanese, the notion of rei (or ryō), which is commonly translated as “soul,” “spirit,” or “ghost,” belongs first and foremost in this aesthetic framework.8 Besides Buddhist images and funerary or commemorative monuments, we can also put in this category all the works designed to give the impression of being alive, such as the rooster that was so well painted that another jealously kicked him.9 From rapid, lifelike sketches (shasei) to living dolls (iki ningyō), via animal statuettes, the art of the Edo period is extremely rich in works of this kind. 3. Impressing on an object the value of a referent: the discovery of similarities In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings, prints, and ornamental motifs in general, as well as in gardens and literature, the use of metaphor, symbols, and coded representation was widespread. The meaning given to objects exceeds that suggested by a first impression and is enriched by poetical, historic, political, comic, or simply playful references. In contrast to European art, where the title and composition usually make the symbolic dimension explicit, in Japan the reference tends to be allusive or hidden, which gives works a parodic dimension. This kind of representation, known in Japanese as mitate, intersects with two modalities of imitation: imitation of the real (or the norm) and reproduction of cultural motifs with symbolic value. In a work like Hokusai’s Parody of Sanbasō, the spectator is invited to appreciate the youthfulness and elegance of three  modernlooking women but also is given to understand, thanks to the presence of several details such as the kanji for “old man” on the middle woman’s fan, that the scene is a transposition of the three main characters of a famous Noh play (Sanbasō). The spectator must not only be aware of the work’s formal qualities and the suitability of the form to the content but also

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appreciate for itself the identification game as well as the effect caused by the juxtaposed references. The concepts of kata, rei, and mitate allow us to describe all the methods of artistic representation and industrial reproduction. The first implies repetition and imitation of forms, the second refers to metonymic processes, and the third alludes to metaphorical processes. Their differentiation, while not always very precise, shows that early Japan had a complex relationship with the question of mimesis and that different solutions were adopted according to the social or intellectual context. Animating through contact was often the most sacred art form, while mitate, when not underpinned by a metonymic process, had a more playful and popular character. Consequently, not all forms of imitation were on the same level. Although the Japanese adopted certain aspects of the West, it was obviously not an automatic reflex or by virtue of some natural disposition but rather consciously, through concepts that one is tempted to call universal. Only the manifestations of and value given to these concepts are exceptional. Let us now turn to the historical level. Japan has always had to contend with the power of Chinese civilization. Certain periods, notably around the eighth and twelfth centuries, were marked by extensive contact and the rapid penetration of Chinese models. Other periods are characterized by the archipelago’s isolation and a slower penetration of continental models. Deciding whether or not to imitate China was a perennial debate, but the late eighteenth century nonetheless constituted a turning point. The trend in kokugaku (national studies), of which Norinaga was the principal figure, was that in the realm of thought, religion, and the arts, Japan was manifesting a renewed infatuation with China despite the large number of trade barriers, while Western studies also witnessed a boom. As early as the 1760s, Norinaga advocated rejecting the Chinese model, arguing against a degeneration of Confucianism, which he saw as constantly reinterpreted and no longer stable. He therefore pleaded with Japan to stop imitating China and to turn instead to its own most distant past, which had witnessed the emergence of the mythic thought associated with the imperial system. In other words, he asked that Japan extricate itself from the historical dynamic of change and recapture a pure

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and unchanging time when mind, actions, and speech were closely linked. To recapture this period, however, it was necessary to reconstruct the mythical model that had gradually been forgotten, something Norinaga attempted to do in his philological works. Japan could thus, through a single effort of reactivating the past, break the unending cycle of synchronic imitation that was perceived as a cause of instability and disorder. Whereas Western historians made no distinction in terms of value between the different modalities of imitation among the Japanese, and attributed them all to a single source—a supposed incapacity to control their own destiny—Norinaga contrasted the shallow imitation of historical modes with an active, willed exit from history that was also an assertion of the simultaneously tragic and pathetic nature of life (Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald had similar ideas about France at the time of the Bourbon Restoration). Norinaga’s views are a further sign that imitation in Japan was not an instinctive or unconscious activity but, on the contrary, a problem on which a substantial amount of important political, philosophical, and artistic thinking was based. The imitation of the West in the late nineteenth century was the result of a decision process that underwent a series of oscillations before settling. Let us not forget that in the second half of the eighteenth century and until the very beginning of the nineteenth, Dutch studies were already quite developed. Scholars reproduced European illustrations and translated texts from a number of fields. But, as they noted explicitly and frequently, what interested them in, say, Western painting was not that it was Western, and thus distant and different. They did not feel any kind of mystical or purely aesthetic attraction to it. For Satake Shōzan, its “particular purpose” was to convey “the similarity of forms and distribution of colors, the distance between near and far as well as the movement of life, such that even a young child or a simpleton, upon opening an illustrated book and seeing an image, understands from what he sees that it corresponds to such and such a thing.”10 For Honda Toshiaki, its “use” was to “convey in the greatest detail a faithful likeness of the objects represented,”11 while for Shiba Kōkan, “these images are, in truth, an effective technique, an instrument of healing.”12 Their relationship with oil painting was thus based on knowledge, rather than being poetic, even if their knowledge did include a kind of ravishment. Imitation of the West was thus not an end in itself but the means to a true imitation of reality. 48

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It was the first stage on the path to acquiring a scientific method that allowed the organization and transmission of knowledge. This use of Western painting was therefore not only a discovery, an invention—as when it is said that Columbus invented America—but also revealing of a positivist and enthusiastic openness to the world that was very similar to that seen at this time in Europe in other fields. What of the Meiji period (1868–1912), which tends to be a focus of the West’s sarcasm and jibes? Without a doubt, the penetration of European and American arts and ideas accelerated considerably during this period. From food and economy to arts and religion, there was not a single area of Japanese life that remained insensitive to the possibilities opened by the new geopolitical order. However, despite the distortive effect of transposing models into a different cultural context and the comic effect this could create—as when the emperor, to show his worldly power and modernity, had himself depicted in an armchair on wheels like Abraham Lincoln in his 1863 portraits—one does not need in-depth study to see that Meiji Japan maintained a complex relationship with the ideas and arts of the West. The years between 1853, when Matthew Perry’s squadron arrived, and approximately 1877, the date of the last great rebellion of the old fiefdoms, was a period of intense debate about how and how far to adopt foreign models. In An Encouragement of Learning (Gakumon no susume, 1872–1876), Fukuzawa Yukichi advocated a definite opening to the world, but he also repeatedly warned his compatriots against irrational imitation of the West, mocking, for example, those who “on very hot nights, regretting their yukatas and fans, suffer and sweat in narrow sleeves to be like Westerners.”13 Even among the main exponents of modernization, limits were always advocated. For some, like Fukuzawa, the limit is set by common sense. For others, it is determined by political interests or religious issues. Even the 1880s, which are often regarded as the most caricatured years in terms of imitation of foreign customs, display not only resistance to Westernization but also the suggestion of alternative models. In the arts, Japanese intellectuals and painters relied on the American philosopher and historian Ernest Fenollosa to claim the “maintenance” and “preservation” of national art forms, which led to a reevaluation of Buddhist art; in the literary world, the same decade was marked by a return to Chinese studies.14 There have always been forces aiming to prevent, restrain, or control imitation, whether on the general 49

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level or on the level of individuals. The majority of painters between 1870 and 1910 either rejected oil painting, explored it in tandem with the possibilities of Sino-Japanese ink painting, or tried to limit their borrowing from the West to the technical level while maintaining themes and motifs they deemed purely Japanese. Complete imitation of the West, the blind and slavish kind that Westerners liked emphasizing and the Japanese even attributed to themselves, never existed. At the beginning of the twentieth century, not only did many Japanese authors continue to criticize excessive Westernization, but they began to characterize their own culture, in a sweeping and negative way, as a culture of imitation. Very significantly, this “awareness” coincided with the appearance of the artistic and literary realms of the avant-garde, as well as with the emergence of folklore movements—two phenomena with opposing goals but structural links. The Meiji period saw the arrival of a number of foreigners who came to teach or work in Japan. It also prompted some Japanese to study in Germany, France, or the United States. An apprenticeship dynamic developed, with the Japanese keen to narrow the technological and scientific gaps separating them from the West and the West aspiring to be a model—an aspiration that combined humanist ideals, vanity, and hopes of profit. This special relationship, which lasted until World War I, helped to channel Western thought into Japan. In 1888, an essay appeared in Tokyo on the philosophy of imitation citing Aristotle, Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and Herbert Spencer. “Anyone who reads this book carefully,” the author writes in the introduction, “will not only understand imitation in our country today but also, more generally, be able to deduce how it is considered in every country and society.”15 From this period, a time we can situate around 1900, emerged the idea that not only had the country sometimes imitated the West excessively since it had opened its borders, but also, and more fundamentally, it had a propensity to model itself on others. In other words, if this self-image took root, it is because the Japanese, more than the inhabitants of other nations also considered in the nineteenth century to be imitators, were keen to learn and widely translated texts and information from abroad. Another paradox, then: it is their thirst for discovery that led the Japanese to see themselves as imitators in the mirror of the West.

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A form of spontaneous and superficial imitation certainly played a part in the emergence of this phenomenon, but it was accompanied by a thorough assimilation of the Romantic paradigm of decoupling imitation and creation. After half a century of observation and absorption, but also of cynicism and rejection of Western civilization, the new generation of Japanese elites, raised with the ambition to build a strong and independent country, already cherished the values of independence and growth that led them to identify with Western reasoning. So when historian Hara Katsurō writes, “When a relatively uncivilized nation comes into contact with a highly developed one, it has a tendency to want to imitate it. This imitation is sometimes of a lower order, which is to say it is a mere grimace that has the effect of diminishing the energy of the mimic race,”16 it sounds a lot like Jules Michelet, whose supercilious outlook on imitators, expressed in Le peuple, we saw earlier. The Japanese scholar adopted the templates of European historiography but exploited them and made them apply to new material such that they managed to appropriate them. The tripartite model suggested by Hara to describe Japanese history—classical-period imitation, medieval assimilation, premodern uniqueness—is not the same, for example, as that which nineteenth-century France used to describe its own past, characterized by the sequence primitive chaos, medieval stabilization, and modern expansion. This process is even more apparent in another important historian of the period, Tsuda Sōkichi, whose interest focused more on cultural phenomena than on political issues. Like those of Hara, one of the goals in his early works was to determine just how original Japanese civilization was. But unlike Hara, and partly for political reasons, he did not espouse a linear and progressivist view of Japan’s development. The Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867) in particular was not, for him, synonymous with peaceful and autonomous development but was characterized by decline. It is therefore unsurprising that he concluded his study of popular culture with the following comment: “Literature of this period relies in great measure and regardless of the domain on imitation and reproduction.”17 Tsuda completely integrated the fact that, in the modern system of reasoning, emphasizing a culture’s or an artist’s imitative nature is the best way to indicate one’s disapproval. To be sure, he concedes that this period saw “a new synthesis of earlier themes,” but he draws particular attention

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to the fact that in the absence of revolutionary spirit, novelty took the form of only sensationalism and technical virtuosity.18 His views were palpably different from what Westerners, under the influence of japonisme, thought of Edo-period art. Tsuda had adopted the logic underlying the Western critique of imitation and used it to defend his own interpretation. Not only his methodology, then, but also his very concept of history and its goals—that is, a key part of his way of thinking—were modern. It is in this intellectual context of assimilating Romantic concepts of history that the Japanese began to think of themselves as born imitators. In a speech given at the end of 1913, Natsume Sōseki explained to a group of students, “We Japanese have a tendency to see ourselves as a nation that imitates others. And indeed such has become the case. We used to just imitate China, now we just imitate the West.”19 From this period onward, both sides of the Eurasian continent shared the view that Japanese culture was characterized by imitation, a phenomenon that was reinforced by the tautological effect of speeches that echoed one another. Time only increased this image. “It is said that we Japanese are good at imitating others. And indeed, we have taken European and American ways and swallowed them whole, introducing them in droves into everyday life,” notes the report of a provincial cultural association in the early 1940s.20 Repetition transformed this type of assertion into truth across the entire country. The Japanese taste for photography often served as an example of this orientation. “One day while I was traveling in the West, someone told me that when you encounter a yellow face, a simple criterion that tells you whether he is Japanese or Chinese is, does he or doesn’t he have a camera around his neck?” reported critic Terada Torahiko, who explains this phenomenon as his compatriots’ taste for miniature reproductions.21 However, although this stereotype was well entrenched, it rarely took the form of a definitive statement, as it did in the mouths of European authors. But in any case, such opinions were often issued as an encouragement to do better or as reflections on the difficulty of quickly acquiring new knowledge. Sōseki thus followed his comment with, “But when you think about it, it is possible that a time will come when, far from just imitating, we will have our own originality, our own independence. It must be!”22 In 1926, dramaturge Kishida Kunio had a similar reaction: “We have imitated very different people. But particularly Westerners. Or Japanese authors who had themselves imitated Westerners. To begin with 52

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we were just mimicking like monkeys. But recently we have progressed. The imitation aspect is no longer all that visible.”23 For all concerned, the assertion of the mimetic character of modern Japanese culture was a rhetorical device designed to highlight what was important to them, the articulation of a national originality, which went hand in hand with asserting a properly Japanese “we” (wareware). It is a concession that serves merely to place more emphasis on the importance of creation. World War II tended to heighten claims of originality. The violent confrontation with the Anglo-Saxon world was not, for Japan, an effort to impose a cultural model radically different from that inherited from Romanticism. As I explain in an earlier study, it actually boiled down in many ways to a war of succession.24 The Pacific War was the clash of two creative wills driven by the same values. Japan knew that to reach its goal, it had to stop imitating. This was the main driving force behind the government’s campaign of 1938/1939 for artists to abandon Western pseudonyms and for women to do their hair in Japanese styles. Kawatsura Ryūzō, the official who headed the Cultural and Artistic Affairs division of the Cabinet Information Bureau during the war, expressed it very clearly in an article of 1942: It has often been said that the Japanese have long had a talent for imitation. I am certainly not suggesting that imitation is always a bad thing, but limiting oneself to it prevents creativity. We the Japanese—coming from East Asia, a region that was once the global origin of culture—must choose the broad avenue of production rather than the little path of unconsciously forgetting who we are; we must choose to create rather than imitate.25

This clamor for creation was, however, double-edged, for if it could be interpreted literally as a desire to develop a dynamic and original culture, it could also be seen as a sign that Japan borrowed not only forms and techniques from the West but also conceptual systems and a way of thinking. Even though Japan has often boasted of having managed to learn from the West without sacrificing its own soul, as encapsulated in the aphorism “Japanese spirit, Western technique,” there can be no doubt that modern Western thought was adopted at the very deepest level. This profound Westernization and modernization is evident in the relationship established by the archipelago with other Asian countries. Japan 53

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took the threats and criticisms it received from the major Western powers and applied them lock, stock, and barrel to its neighbors. At the very moment when the idea of creation and progress as conditions for historical modernity was taking root, Japan launched new colonial conquests, and intellectuals tried to highlight China’s and Korea’s static natures. The “orientalist” Kuwabara Jitsuzō, a professor at Kyoto University, wrote in 1927, “The Chinese are generally adept at imitation, but not implementation. The reasons for this stem from innate [that is, innately conservative, as he explains earlier] characteristics, but it seems to me that acquired propensities also play an important role, as for example the tendency to refer only to the canons of the ancients, in accordance with the maxim ‘Paint your pumpkins to look like the model.’ ”26 He continues with several behavioral examples meant to illustrate his thesis, using a method of argumentation that recalls the works of nineteenth-century European scholars. However, this kind of analysis is not only what Said would call the opportunistic and superficial repercussion of the domination that Japan was enduring inflicted on a weaker country;27 Kuwabara is every bit as sincere as a French ethnologist of the same period would have been. Notice the nuance at work in the assertion that the Chinese do not have the capacity to “implement.” The subtext is that the Japanese, too, are good imitators—as the West never tires of telling them—but that, in contrast to the Chinese, they are capable of making the most of this and adapting the model to their needs and therefore to manage an act of creation. What separates the Japanese from the Chinese is not at the level of technique, then, but is a question of national character. “The Japanese have a Japanese spirit. It is bushidō. But there is nothing that corresponds to a Chinese spirit among the Chinese. That is why the Japanese are strong and the Chinese are weak,” Kuwabara opined.28 By this logic, Japanese superiority and the country’s capacity to create new things were emanations of the collective soul, of the country’s Volksgeist—a typically Romantic notion. It is clear that since the early twentieth century, the Japanese have thought of their relationship to history and to others according to the values of modern thought, the main currents of which I have outlined in the preceding. All the criticisms of Western culture that the Japanese could make, as well as all the dichotomies based on opposing a “Japanese mind” and a “Western mind,” are thus biased, since the conceptual premises behind heuristics and epistemology in Japan—that is, everything that precedes the work of 54

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creation and knowledge—are the same as in Europe or America, at least at the level of general trends. No kind of scientific discourse can escape this logic, and that of the “specificity” of the Japanese mind no more than any other. On the contrary, the very intensity of these discourses highlights the extent of their saturation in this logic. And yet, although the West and Japan shared a similar attitude to creation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japan was not content to simply import a model. Or, more particularly, in order to import this model, it had to have the intellectual, economic, and political means to do so, so it could not in that sense be all that distant from the West. As Hartmut Rotermund notes, “Without a very strong culture, Japan would not have been able to adopt Western civilization.”29 As we have seen, critical thinking about imitation and modernity had already begun in Japan at the end of the Edo period, as the development of the idea of independence (dokuritsu) plainly shows. Unlike a large number of words that were coined or given new meaning during the Meiji period, the term dokuritsu was already in use during the Edo period, and its literal meaning basically did not change. Its use, however, gradually expanded. Between 1850 and 1870, while the threat of colonization by Western powers remained real, independence was a crucial issue. It is ubiquitous in An Encouragement of Learning, for example. From the very opening of the book, Fukuzawa endorses the idea that acculturation is desirable only if it allows “the independence of people, the independence of families, and the independence of the state and the nation.”30 The word thus refers primarily to a form of political and social freedom. It is also often used with a moral connotation, as when Fukuzawa defends independent scholarship.31 However, Sōseki would use it in a slightly different sense a few decades later, as an antonym of “imitation” (mohō, imitēshon) and as a synonym of “original” (orijinaru), conveying the values of modern Western aesthetics. The expansion of this crucial political and ethical concept to the aesthetic realm—despite the profound changes of the period’s thinking and the multitude of neologisms available—shows that Japan did not import  the concepts of originality and creation belonging to Romantic modernity in the way one imports goods, but rather that it reinvented them both with and against the West. Throughout the twentieth century, one finds discussions aimed at relativizing the criticism of mimesis from within. For writer Akutagawa 55

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Ryūnosuke, for example, it was the negativity associated with the very principle of imitation that made no sense: The term “natural mimics” is used today to pejoratively describe the Japanese people. But in order to imitate something, you first have to understand it, even if the understanding is a little superficial. If things are poorly understood, one is just aping. If they are well understood, one can act as a great artist. In other words, the point is not whether one imitates or not but rather to fully understand what one is doing.32

According to Akutagawa, the problem does not revolve around the question of imitation, which for him is just a technical fact, but on the way in which it is done. Specifically, he puts the emphasis on the talent, intelligence, and energy that artists impart to their work. He is thus not at odds with Romantic idealism but only trying to overcome what he judges to be a sterile dichotomy, a position that we also find in his fiction. In a vitalist vein, a similar view is expressed by writer Sakaguchi Ango: “Even if you’re proud to have copied the Westerners’ two-bit houses,” he writes toward the end of a renowned work of 1943, “as long as our way of life is wholesome, our culture will be as well. And likewise our traditions. If we have to, we’ll transform our parks into allotments! There is a true beauty that comes from real necessity. As long as we are living in a genuine way, we do not have to be ashamed of aping. Because as long as genuine life is here, there is as much nobility in aping as in creating.”33 Just like Akutagawa, Sakaguchi refuses to pit imitation against creation. However, this is true from only a subjective point of view. For Sakaguchi, men in general, and artists in particular, do not need to proclaim their creativity; it is sufficient to let life be expressed for novelty to inevitably manifest itself. This is why the examples he gives of his aesthetic are of a dry-ice factory and a modern prison—that is, human enterprises that are first and foremost functional. To his mind, creation is inherent to the world’s dynamic, an organic vision that has Buddhist roots, as Karatani Kōjin shows, but that does not contradict the Romantic model, as we see, for example, in Walt Whitman, whose influence in Japan was considerable.34 The majority of criticisms leveled against the avant-garde came from intellectuals and artists who were very close to the movement and who shared, despite any reservations they may have expressed, a key aspect of its agenda. 56

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Since the 1960s, the study of Japanese exceptionalism (Nihonjin-ron) has seen a change in the way imitation is considered. According to authors like Umesao Tadao, copying, preserving tradition, and curbing the assertion of individuality are no longer faults that need to be concealed or weaknesses that need to be overcome but rather national characteristics linked to the country’s geographically peripheral location.35 So although it is still disparaged by some,36 Japanese “imitativeness” tends to be considered a positive attribute. At first glance, it may look as if contemporary Japan is content to value imitation more highly than modernity normally allows, but in fact it does not, because what matters in culturalist-type discourses is not practices defined as unique but the assertion of uniqueness, regardless of content. The goal is to prove that Japan is inherently different. And, of course, inherent difference is one of the modern genius’s key traits. If individual originality is denied, it is only to better sublimate it at the collective or national level. In return, the individuals who project this message can derive a double benefit, first at the social level when they are in a position of dominance but also and especially where identity is concerned, since their stance implies a different positioning from that of Westerners and therefore allows escape from the impression of mimetic subordination. Culturalist discourse remains potent and has permeated Japanese studies outside the archipelago. Sheridan Tatsuno sees in this “national character” the fuel of the country’s creativity.37 In other words, it is because Japan had a particular relationship to copying that it is today so innovative. The effectiveness of such representations, which have had a considerable influence on contemporary Japanese culture, cannot be denied. They generated artistic techniques and forms that did not exist either previously or elsewhere. Yamada Shōji’s Imitation and Creation in Japanese Culture can be read as Japan’s most recent line of thought on the issue. Yamada notes that the promotion of creation is a recent phenomenon in Japan and that it developed in parallel with the assertion of the nation-state and implementation of imperialist policy.38 He also shows that the copyright law never held bolstering culture to be a primary goal but was imported for political reasons and currently serves only an economic purpose. Finally, he bemoans that the Japanese are “prisoners of a strange value scale that consists in seeing in the copy a reprehensible act that lacks creativity.”39 From this observation, Yamada draws the conclusion that his compatriots 57

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should stop wanting to be creative and original and think rather in terms of re-creation, a concept he defines as the fact of “creating based on what is already there, by copying it and adding something in your turn.”40 To support his thesis, he shows how Edo-period art was not a victim of a taboo regarding imitation and that the period’s richness stems precisely from a capacity to play on its sources. He therefore contrasts a violent and negative Western type of modernity to be avoided with a premodernism that should serve as a model, thereby adhering to a view recurrent in Japanese thought since the 1960s. The extraordinary Ōtsuka Museum of Art in Naruto seems to be a concrete manifestation of this kind of thinking. Founded in 1998 on the initiative of an industrialist from the Tokushima region of Shikoku, it brings together in a vast building more than a thousand masterpieces of Western art, ranging from frescoes from the Scrovegni Chapel by Giotto to Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) by Jackson Pollock, via Goya’s Black Paintings and Picasso’s Guernica. Even though the works are identical replicas, including their frames and the 1:1 scale, they are not paintings but very high-quality photographic prints on ceramic panels, each of whose perimeters is easily distinguishable. Beyond the cynical cautiousness that this museum will inevitably instill in any museumgoer, one cannot help but acknowledge the project’s originality and effectiveness at the pedagogical, aesthetic, and even sensory levels. The museum, which allows touching the images (the technique used manages to render a bit of the paint’s dimensionality), is like an enormous stone book in which one can wander without supervision or any prohibition signs. It enables a unique degree of observation while leaving open the possibility that the original is even more beautiful than the copy. The solution of using an innovative method of reproduction allows a simple and nonviolent appropriation of the Other’s culture, thereby refreshing the laws of modernity. In the end, we can consider Japanese modernity from two points of view. A philosophical perspective would insist on the fact that it is a form of consciousness, a relationship to creation and objects that is unquestionably determined by history but also transcends it. A historical or an anthropological perspective, however, would find it difficult to ignore the conditions under which this new form of consciousness crystallized and would insist on the cause-and-effect relationship that allowed its emergence. Experience suggests that these two approaches work in tandem. In 58

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other words, although the Japanese developed a modern form of being in the world they inhabit in everyday life, they cannot forget that this modernity is linked to a foreign culture. This feeling is all the more forceful because the encounter of Western and Japanese phenomena often gives rise to a strong impression of difference and otherness, rendering all attempts at reproduction or transposition particularly obvious. Imitation cannot be discreet even if its negative image requires it to be. It is thus a trait of Japanese modernity to be simultaneously entirely natural and allowing a sense of the artificial. Even though this process is not unique to Japan, the tension between the two poles—the natural (an adopted structural modernity) and the artificial (a historicized and degrading modernity)—is particularly apparent there. It should now be clear that the devaluing of imitation, while being the cornerstone of the dominant mind-set in Japan, harms the way in which many Japanese represent themselves and their relations with other nations. However, they neither claim a particular mastery of mimesis nor have enacted its rejection. Instead, Japan’s most innovative artists and intellectuals have managed to explore and take advantage of this critical knot. Among them are Kishida Ryūsei, Kurosawa Akira, Araki Nobuyoshi, and Miyazaki Hayao, whose works are discussed in the second part of this book. Also among their number is Nakai Masakazu (Nakai Shōichi, 1900–1952), a thinker known for his resistance to fascism in the 1930s and his involvement in the birth of cultural movements in Hiroshima between 1945 and 1948. His body of work has been the object of rediscovery for the past fifteen years in Japan as well as in America, in disciplines as varied as aesthetics, history of political thought, and archival science.41 Nakai was not the first Japanese philosopher to have taken an interest in the issue of imitation; several authors before him tried to identify its value within the system of modern thought. But Nakai, whom Hasumi Shigehiko refers to as “the forerunner of all that is called in Japan contemporary thought,” proposed a new pact that allowed the reconciliation of modernity, imitation, and poetics.42 He did not merely exalt the creative impulse, like the many partisans of the avant-garde, or insist on the artist’s abandoning himself to mere repetition of gesture, like the folklorists. He also dropped the classical system’s making of imitation into a precursor of creation, just as he refused the logic of proletarian realism that places the reproducibility of forms in the service of the revolution and subordinates 59

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art to politics. The formulation suggested by Nakai was dynamic and nonhierarchical. Imitation and creation were to him not subjective values but rather two processes forming an intrinsic part of the world’s mechanics, which life in general and human power in particular set in motion. His work therefore allows us to articulate the heuristic model that I am trying to outline using a contemporary Japanese theoretical frame.

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6

The Logic of Reflection in Nakai Masakazu

There once was an Indian king—this is how most stories start—who asked two artists to paint murals on a set of facing stone walls. The big day arrived, and the first painter undertook to represent the bounty of paradise in sumptuous colors. The other painter, meanwhile, did not so much as pick up his paintbrush but merely polished the wall and prepared his drawing materials. Eventually the allocated time was up. The king eagerly came to see what had become of the walls. On the first was painted the Grove of Seven Treasures and the Virtuous Water of the Eight Accomplishments on ground strewn with gold and silver, lapis lazuli and crystal. It made one feel one had left the torments of the Three Worlds and entered the serenity of the Pure Land.1 The king seemed suspended in ecstasy. Eventually he turned around and looked at the other wall. A chilling atmosphere instantly fell over the audience—the wall was blank. The king’s face darkened with displeasure. “Why is there nothing?” But it was the painter’s answer, rather than the king’s inquiry, that stunned the audience. “Look carefully,” he replied three times to the same question. A long silence hung over the stone wall. Then a murmur arose, though no one could tell from where or whose mouth, and gradually grew into a chorus of praise that gripped everyone. It is said that even the king extolled the work at length before leaving. And indeed, on the wall polished like a mirror, one could see not only the reflection of the glorious landscape painted on the other wall but also the silhouette of

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the king shimmering in the middle—it seemed to be a real version of the country inhabited by the myriads of Buddhas. Regardless of the painter’s adeptness, it seems to me there is a profound meaning to this myth that reveals the fundamental structure of the artistic phenomenon.2

This Buddhism-inflected story straightaway raises the issue of imitation in a number of ways: it is about a painter who captures another’s work by means of a mirror, it is the adaptation of an Indian story into Japanese, and it is a repetition of a legend that begins, says the author, like all legends. One starts with one object and finishes with another. For Nakai Masakazu, who wrote this piece for a photography magazine in 1932, this parable contrasts two conceptions of art. The first corresponds to Romanticism; the second, which he endorses, adopts a form of functionalism inspired by the work of the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer. The reference to Romanticism may seem surprising, but in the context of 1930s Japan, there is in fact nothing surprising about it. Introduced to Japan in the 1880s, Romanticism had become an integral and thriving dimension of Japanese culture by the early twentieth century. From Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin) to Kitamura Tōkoku, a number of poets and intellectuals drew on the legacy of European Romanticism to rethink the concept of the individual, of art, and of the relationship between man and nature. As Kitamura wrote in his characteristic style, “I repeat: what is missing today from the realm of thought is the creative impulse! Imitation, crude imitation—this is the people’s most unfortunate trait.”3 In the field of aesthetics, Romanticism was received essentially in its Hegelian form. In The Ideals of the East, Okakura talks of Romanticism in art during Ashikaga rule (1336–1573), just as Hegel speaks of the Romanticism of Christian art or of Dürer and Raphael’s paintings. “The Spirit must vanquish Matter,” wrote the Japanese art historian, “and even though the idiosyncrasies of Eastern and Western thought have led to different forms of expression, modern thought all over the world tends inevitably towards Romanticism.”4 Romanticism, which goes hand in hand with modernity, thus emerged in spirit in the Middle Ages and followed on from classicism. It corresponds to a phase of humanity in which the mind is reconciled with itself and is freed through a struggle against the constraints of matter. In Japan, this view had a considerable influence 62

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on artistic creation, particularly during the early twentieth century. From Blake to Van Gogh via Max Klinger and Rodin, all the significant Western artists of the period could, from this perspective, be considered Romantic artists. Nevertheless, even though Okakura tried to give Romanticism Eastern roots, it remained an imported form of thought. This sends us back to the question of mimesis in general and specifically the hierarchy of its various manifestations. Imitation was a major theme in aesthetics in 1920s Japan. The thinking, led by writers such as Fukada Kōsan and Nakai Masakazu, had a triple goal (the hierarchy of which is difficult to determine): to critique national contemporary art, a field dominated by different forms of Expressionism; to shed light on the contradictions of the acculturation process started in the mid-nineteenth century; and to challenge the radical dualism introduced by the polarization of imitation and creation. I will focus on the last of these, which incorporates the two others. Fukada Kōsan, Nakai’s master, was a professor of aesthetics and art history at Kyoto University.5 In 1921, when the country was in a state of uncertainty in light of the Russian Revolution’s aftermath, he published one of his most important works, “Art as Imitation,” which was the leading piece in the second issue of the journal Shisō (Thought).6 This monthly publication was to become the main journal of Japanese philosophy of the twentieth century. If only because Fukada’s article launched one of the first significant lines of thought in this prestigious publication’s long history, it warrants a closer look. In the article, Fukada straightaway contrasts a concept of art “founded uniquely on the Muses,” which is that of the modern world, with the Platonic concept in which art is primarily an “imitative technique.”7 For Plato, he reminds us, art is Apollonian and must capture thought by means of imitation.8 In contrast, the modern world—that of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde9—reverses these values, placing art in the service of “genius” and “creation” and going so far as to suggest that “it is in fact nature that imitates art.”10 Bemoaning the fact that there is no longer any legitimacy to considering art outside the genius-creation pairing, Fukada makes an initial, aporetic assessment: “If we acknowledge the idea of genius as the ultimate principle of art, then imitation must be completely excluded (a fortiori in the case where imitation is considered only in terms of copying).”11 Such an idea, which he considers Romantic, must 63

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be fought, since it rests on the spurious image of the artist as prophet. For all that, he sees no future in Platonic idealism. Refusing the label of nostalgic, he advocates a rebalancing of modernity, which Nietzsche had caused to go too far. It is in this context that he decides to turn to Aristotle, for whom imitation is not just imitation of forms but first and foremost of “feelings” and “moods.”12 Such a resuscitation of Aristotle implies a twofold demand: the rejection of Romanticism understood as an exaltation of magical feeling and the development of an aesthetics that focuses on mundane phenomena and processes.13 Considering Nakai’s admiration for Fukada, whose complete works he edited after the latter’s death in 1928, these arguments on imitation were certainly his starting point. “Structure of the Machine’s Beauty” appeared in Shisō in February 1930.14 This title immediately inscribed Nakai’s work on a different plane from Fukada’s. In the field of aesthetics, the article was among the first in Japan to take a resolutely modernist perspective. It opens with a quotation from Le Corbusier in which Nakai detects the Aristotelian version of mimesis that Fukada had based his own work on: a mimesis not just of forms but also of pathos, ethos, and praxis; one that privileges rules, relationships, and unification and opposes laissez-faire, individualism, and the aestheticism of Romantic thought.15 Nakai, however, has a more subtle reading of Romanticism than Fukada. To his mind, it is an exaltation not merely of subjectivity but of the idea that man dominates history by virtue of the power of his will, which is the pivot around which the world operates; in other words, it is a more philosophical and less artistic view. Extending this logic, what Nakai fears is not so much Expressionism as a Romanticism in the style of the Futurists—for whom the machine is the expression of man’s all-powerful superior genius,16 the political consequence of which is that it “tends to organize all individuals among themselves and establish dark collective structures within these cell systems.”17 In Nakai’s mind, Romanticism is clearly associated with fascism, or more broadly with what he calls the “logic of blood” that seeks something where there are just functional dynamics.18 This is why nothing can be more urgent than undermining its foundations by putting the topic of imitation back on the table. This same reasoning also gives rise to his ambition of seeing the emergence of a less-threatening world, where humanity, technology, and nature discover a new interoperability: “Technology (under 64

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the name of modern science) and imitation (in the form of a universal imitation and thus going by the name of harmony), like the phoenix, are just starting to rise from the ashes in new finery,” he wrote in an article of the same period.19 The restitution of imitation is, in his opinion, one of the best ways to escape modernity’s dangers and contradictions. “Utsusu” was published in the August 1932 issue of the photography journal Kōga. This journal, founded in May of the same year, took a modernist view of photography and thus ruptured with pictorialism.20 The term utsusu as highlighted by Nakai is multivalent; it can be written using a number of kanji that each give it a specific meaning. It can variously mean to move (displace); to replace; to steep in a color, smell, or emotion; to cast a spell; to spread an illness; to copy or reproduce an image; to depict an idea; to reflect; to photograph; and to film.21 In the field of art and aesthetics, the lexical scope of this term is crucial. In Nakai’s summary, “What we term utsusu means to move something in space from one point to another where there is a relational equivalence corresponding to this operation.”22 Even though utsusu designates the act of transposition in a general sense and enacts the principle of functionality, it is inseparable from the shape, form, or image on which it relies. Consistent with this approach, Nakai does not mention objects. He uses the word kata—well known to those who practice Japanese martial arts—a term that forms a pair with the verb utsusu and also has a very broad range of meanings, depending on the character used to write it: it can designate the image of a thing or person understood as its outward appearance, which is to say the way in which reality appears—or one’s “reflection,” to use Buddhist terminology; it can also mean a model, template, printing film, rule of conduct (or even a pledge), something from which replicas can be obtained. Conversely, it can also refer to the imprint itself. As Nakai points out, these different meanings have in common the fact of not designating “the thing in its being but its exterior form symbolized in an abstract way, or the projection of its exterior form as an equivalence in some other thing, or even a different kind of reality that could be substituted for it as an equivalent.”23 These kata, these images or shapes or forms, can by turn be either the model or the impression: they are thus on opposite ends of the relational chain. Between the two poles—one positive, the other negative—the toand-fro of the transpositions operates to its full extent. 65

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In Substance and Function, Cassirer deployed considerable energy refuting the subject–object distinction of classical Western thought. Nakai, despite being a very careful reader of the German philosopher, had no such concern.24 He preferred putting his approach into action, finding relevant examples and a suitable style, whereas Cassirer maintained the position of the thinker who masters his object through thought. The examples chosen by Nakai in “Utsusu” are drawn at random from nature and technology, and within nature he does not distinguish between what does and does not pertain to humans. Things, whether they belong to nature, humanity, or technology, cannot do otherwise than return the forces they experience in accordance with their properties; crystal diffracts the rays that hit it, the eye transforms light into nerve impulses, photosensitive film takes on images according to the light frequency. Things have no choice when it comes to reacting, but they all react in their own way. What is known as “transposing” is ultimately therefore the predetermined outcome of a precoded reaction, regardless of whether it operates in the internal or external world. “One must consider that transposition— whether it takes place on water, gold, silver, steel, the eye’s lens, or the camera’s—constitutes the fundamental model of art,” he observes.25 There is no a priori hierarchy among the world’s different categories; humans do not have a special place by virtue of their unique degree of consciousness. On the contrary, the logic of reflection and the dynamic it implies allow Nakai to envisage consciousness in a radically immanent light. As he notes, “One could even go so far as to think that the first model of consciousness in general resides in a projective and equivalent relationship between all living things.”26 This would mean that in the reflection of the stones there is an embryo of consciousness, and in consciousness something of the stones’ reflection. The photographic lens—a crystal lens—was one of the main examples used by Nakai to explain and develop his thinking, and he makes use of it to varying degrees in most of his works on aesthetics between 1930 and 1934. He particularly uses it to show how mechanical productions awaken our sensory and intellectual faculties. However, as one can sense in “Utsusu,” the role he grants the photographic lens bears similarities to the image of the mirror in Buddhist thought. In Buddhism, the mirror is a metaphor for the enlightened mind—on which the thusness of things (the way things are) is reflected without being blurred by passions—and 66

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represents the unmediated version of consciousness. In the Pure Land Buddhism with which Nakai was familiar, it was common to repeat the monk Shinran’s saying that “the religion of Buddhas is the mirror of the Law.” In the purity of its reflection, the mirror of the Law offers humans the possibility to know their true, nonintellectualized form, which is open to the world and outside the intentionality that keeps everyone blind. Nakai certainly did not feel that he was a Buddhist thinker in the way we might describe Nishida Kitarō. At around eighteen, after spending a year in a monastery, he had chosen to pursue philosophy rather than a religious life. To his mind, the mystical feeling of adherence to the world was tantamount to realism. “In the depths of true realism, it is common to find only a dream. Where all apparitions, in their confusion, turn into mirages, one could say there is a mode of religious thinking that has repeated itself unendingly since the beginning of time,” he wrote in “Contribution to an Aesthetics of Function.”27 More generally, he always associated the religious with negative values such as “the feudal.”28 Nonetheless, the mirror clearly has positive connotations in his work, alluding to the concepts of nondualism and inner peace. Unlike Buddhism, however, which associates the mirror with purity, Nakai willingly accepts that the medium entails a certain amount of distortion, like an echo that “gradually swells and alters before getting lost in infinite space.”29 And by accepting the alterations caused by an object’s reaction to the forces to which it is subject, Nakai does away with the problem of resemblance: “To transpose is simply to pivot from being the object of reflection to being the subject of reflection; it is to pass into the mirror and transform into a positive image.”30 Transposing comes down to effecting an “equivalent projection.” This applies to inert structures (rocks, camera lenses, machines), which have no option but to react in accordance with their physical properties, but also to the process of human creation. The will is nothing but a suitable reaction, equivalent to a conscious mirror endowed with a given set of characteristics; mediation is part of the process. There is in Nakai no transcendent movement but instead full acceptance of the worldliness of reflections and consciousness. Art is a return to universal order, a harmonization of the gesture with physical matter through a feeling of pleasure.31 But it is also a historical harmonization, a matching of the individual to the rhythm of the period, to the constant oscillation between projections and reflections.32 The assertion 67

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of difference is thus not assigned a specific position as in classical thought, where it is fundamentally subsequent to imitation. It can intervene at any level, emerging in the distortions of the medium and the fractures of the unconscious rather than exclusively in the projections of the will. As Kinoshita Nagahiro points out, “Nakai’s thinking cannot be reduced to some ideas about new forms of media, cinema, and photography.”33 Just as his academic career was always accompanied by some form of political engagement, his thinking on aesthetics was always connected to theories of social order. When, therefore, with reference to Heidegger, Nakai contrasts painting—which confronts the individual with the emptiness of the canvas and the necessity for expression, and which consequently introduces “disquiet,” or alienation from oneself—with photography, which is conversely a “realignment” of the gaze, he contrasts the Romantic individual with a new social man.34 Because it dispels the anxiety of the blank page, photography is soothing to the eye. In return, the images it produces give new meaning to the individual’s existential questions. But while it is beneficial to the individual, its effect is even more significant at the collective level; produced by machines whose design required the intelligence of many engineers and experts, photography is present in newspapers, interrogation rooms, and people’s pockets. It contributes to scrutinizing the nation while structuring it at the same time. For Nakai, it embodies the collective gaze and soothes not only the individual but society as well. Positive validation of logical and functional links between the individual and society was in direct opposition to the ideas of the Japan Romantic school, created in 1935 around Yasuda Yojūrō, who had a considerable influence on the younger generation and contributed to the exaltation of war as heroic.35 In this tense environment, Nakai turned to a more political approach, where his reading of Marx’s and Lenin’s philosophical writings can be clearly felt. One of the more memorable of the resulting essays is “The Logic of Committees” (Iinkai no ronri, 1936), a very dense and complex text, which Kuno Osamu describes as marking Nakai’s “peak in terms of intellectual achievement.”36 In the opening pages of “The Logic of Committees,” Nakai distinguishes two fundamental spaces. The first is expressed by the word “topos,” which carries two meanings in Aristotle. In the Physics, it refers to “the boundary between a body that surrounds and a body that is sur68

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rounded, and, temporally, a limited lapse of time.” Conversely, in the Topics, it designates the moment of transition between two logical arguments. “Topos” therefore refers to a scientific conception of space (a space that can be measured and divided), but it is also a shifting space that Nakai calls the “device” (baikai) of dialectic.37 The second space is the mesos (medium; milieu), which Nakai translates in Japanese as baitai. It refers to a closed and essentialized space that has nothing to do with science. It conjures another Greek word, temenos, a term built from the Indo-European radical tem- (cut; split), and designates a sanctuary—in other words, a realm separated from the ordinary world. It is also related to the Latin templum (temple), which has the same etymology and from which we get the word “contemplation.” This reflection on spaces in Greek thought had, of course, aesthetic implications. The Romantic assessment of “originality” includes the ability to see in an object something that is not visible to the naked eye but depends on a piece of knowledge or a belief. A painting of this character, for example, can be considered beautiful one day and devoid of interest the next, depending on whether it is seen as a work by the artist’s hand or a reproduction by a forger. What matters is not what is perceptible through the senses but a “supplement of soul” that is given to the work by the sympathetic relation that binds it to some particular person, time, or place. We are thus dealing with the same phenomenon of space embodiment by a spiritual force, as in the case of religious sanctuaries. Behind this interpretation of Aristotle, Nakai probably had in mind Marx’s warning: cut off from reality, any idea tends to become “contemplation” (Anschauung), which is characterized by the “longing for content” (Sehnsucht nach einem Inhalt) and the illusion that “something exists” (Etwas wird) because conscience says it can be differentiated from other things, which is the conceptual ground of nationalism and racism.38 For even if Nakai was not a Communist, he had carefully read Marx, particularly his early manuscripts, then recently discovered. From that point of view, he has a lot in common with the Frankfurt school thinkers (Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin), whom he helped introduce in Japan through his journal Sekai bunka. Nakai was arrested in November 1937 along with several of his friends. Accused of being a Communist sympathizer, Nakai became one of the many victims of a regime that gradually banned all overt criticism. He 69

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went to trial in October 1940 and was found guilty of participation in an antifascist movement and condemned to two years in prison (served while awaiting the verdict) and two years of probation. He also accepted to pledge in writing never to break the terms of the law, to reject Communism (to which he had never adhered), and to support the nation. In accordance with the practice of the time, it is likely that one of his relatives countersigned the document as a guarantee.39 In January 1945, Nakai left Kyoto with his family for the safer environment of Onomichi, in his home region, and found a job as director of the municipal library. As soon as the war was over, he took advantage of the new possibilities of freedom to spread a democratic message. With deliberate symbolism, he launched his postwar activity with a series of talks on philosophy, and Kant in particular. In 1946 and 1947, he devoted his energies to ambitious cultural renewal, asking university scholars to give lectures directly to the people of Hiroshima and other cities in the region.40 At the same time, he became involved in various civic, political, and administrative tasks and was one of the first, when addressing the issue of war responsibility, to explain “how the everyday lives of farmers and laborers in Hiroshima Prefecture intersected with larger historical issues, particularly Japan’s fifteen-year war in Asia,” as Leslie Pincus has put it.41 After World War II, Nakai carried on his work on new media, particularly cinema, which then became the focus of his consideration. He believed that the cinema—even more than photography and in contrast to the fine arts—was fundamentally a collective art: its tools (lenses, film) were mass-produced, anonymous objects, while making a movie required a team effort. The collective, manufactured aspect was both the economic level that enabled its production and the ethical level at which subjectivity had to learn to develop. For Nakai, cinema was not the art of shooting. The director, he said, should not try to maximize effects at the moment of filming or use clever camera tricks or expressionist staging. Rather, he should simply open himself to the real and yield to the transparency of the camera’s mirrors.42 It was only in a second phase that the director could usefully enact his will: when editing, at which point he could decide on sequencing, splicing, and the order of the images. In other words, it was only when he had recognized the primacy of the medium that man could discover his autonomy (shutaisei). Nakai’s analysis of cinema, which melded aesthetic 70

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and political issues, had a remarkable influence on the Japanese New Wave directors, in particular Yoshida Kijū.43 Nakai’s proposals on the reflective nature of modern media; the necessity of collectivity; the different forms of aesthetic, political, and social engagement; and the theory that we must not try to bring space to life, as had the Romantics, but rather develop a critical view on things constitute one of the most exciting sets of ideas to emerge from the field of aesthetics in modern Japan. Indeed, the spectacular growth the country witnessed in the photographic and robotic industries was linked partly to the absorption of this mode of thought. More specifically, Nakai Masakazu allows us to reconsider the place of imitation in the artistic process. Imitation is no longer necessarily primary, as in classicism, or detrimental, as in Romanticism; it could be second, third, fifth. . . . The order does not matter, because imitation always returns; it is a crucial and permanent feature of the world’s dynamic. In fact, it is possible that the refusal to assign imitation a fixed position is the secret engine of twentieth-century Japanese art.

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7

Kishida Ryūsei’s Portraits of Reiko, or, How Can Ghosts Be at Work?

There is no country in the world where the exercise of my profession as a painter is received with more regard or courteous attention than Japan, where everyone—right down to the last peasant—knows what an image is. No one could fail to be aware that you do not have to go very far out of Paris to see “one of those fancy artist types” pursued by the pitchforks of the gathered mob, and even if these country folk no longer suspect the artist of being “some kind of sorcerer” and take a more down-to-earth view, they suspect him of being the feared representative of an imaginary, cursed railroad company. And yet, for the Parisian crowd, we are still the civilized nation par excellence, and the Japanese? Monkeys!1

This passage appears in a travel narrative, published around 1905, by the French draftsman Félix Régamey shortly after his second visit to Japan; his first trip had taken place in 1876, when he was accompanied by Émile Guimet, founder of the Paris museum that bears his name. Later in the book, Régamey focuses specifically on the “artistic Japanese”: “Everything his hand produces is lively, colorful, vibrant, and whimsical; it displays creativity and flexibility. His imagination is unparalleled for fantastical invention and delicate and subtle subjects. He is a master of both the monstrous and the exquisite.”2 Régamey’s description, which posits Japanese culture as a tension between simian imitation and unbridled imagination, begs the 75

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following question: How, in early-twentieth-century Japan, do copy and monstrosity get articulated in images? Kishida Ryūsei (1891–1929) was one of the greatest painters of modern Japan. He was a pioneer of both modern painting and the avant-garde movement, as well as an important art critic and an impassioned collector. His body of work, although largely unknown outside Japan because it bears too great a resemblance to European painting, has been familiar to the Japanese for decades, especially the portraits of his daughter Reiko, which are “among the paintings that everyone keeps imprinted in a corner of their mind.”3 Scores of books have been written about him, and a large number of contemporary artists take their inspiration from him, including, for example, Murakami Takashi.4 Unfortunately, his paintings are valued at such high prices that insurance costs render the exhibition of his works abroad prohibitive. This paradox, which makes a work’s value a constraint on its chances of being recognized, recalls the age-old problem that however much they seem to want our attention, ghosts always avoid the light . . . But in all seriousness, art criticism in Japan, generation after generation, felt obliged to define the place he occupies, both in his own time and in the contemporary context.5 The unique approach that led him to reject post-Impressionism and the avant-gardes—that is, to stop following the West—in favor of Chinese painting and the realism of the German Renaissance places the question of imitation and reproduction at center stage. Study of Kishida’s work shows that the development of realism in Japanese art in the early twentieth century was not a mere reaction to the avant-gardes or a “return” to some idealized past but rather a choice allowing him to bridge modernity’s values and a mostly incremental and nondualist understanding of the genesis of the world.

Series, Difference, Strangeness The portraits of Reiko are even more famous than their creator, with the girl’s childlike or adolescent figure appearing in countless publications— textbooks, art history books, museum posters, advertisements, novel covers, and so on. The last important canvas that went to auction, Portrait of Reiko, a Shawl on Her Shoulders (1920), sold for ¥360 million (approximately $3.6 million), a record for a modern Japanese work (figure 1). 76

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FIGURE 1 Kishida Ryūsei, Portrait of Reiko, a Shawl on Her Shoulders, 1920. Oil on canvas, 45.2 × 38 cm. (Wood One Museum of Art, Hiroshima)

By definition, the portraits of Reiko—like Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji, or Cézanne’s of Sainte-Victoire—exist collectively. Although some of the paintings are reproduced more often than others, none has a status that allows it to stand alone. The ensemble comes to mind like a stacking of images that differ only slightly from one another. Reiko’s face has no stability; indeed, it seems to change with 77

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each painting one calls to mind. This uncertainty regarding the girl’s features, born from the series’ variations, is accentuated by the unstable expression—somewhere between seriousness and malice—that the painter gives his model. So much so, in fact, that these portraits, although extremely famous, often make people uncomfortable or even downright disgusted—a gallerist from Tokyo once told me that she hated the Reiko portraits, adding “they look like ghosts.” Art historian Tsuji Nobuo makes a similar comment; looking at these strange and meticulous paintings, he notes, “we are struck by the uneasy feeling that this might be an otherworldly specter [yōkai] showing her face.”6 Paradoxically, their monstrous and larvalike character is also what makes them so compelling. And without a doubt, the ghostly aspect of these images of Reiko is at least partly deliberate. The painter began exploring the theme of supernatural creatures around 1917, at about the same time that he made the first of his daughter’s portraits. More generally, the topic of the ghostly was a major preoccupation of early-twentieth-century Japanese art. The portrait series, produced over the course of a dozen years between 1917 and 1929, made the painter’s daughter’s face one of the most famous in Japanese art.7 But the first of Kishida’s paintings to take Reiko as its subject was not, paradoxically, a painting of her. Dating from the end of 1913, four months before her birth, it shows the heavy belly of his wife, Shigeru (figure 2). We can take this work, executed in earthy tones, to be the first portrait of the series because the artist does not in fact depict his wife—her face is cut off. He shows only the manifestation of a life in the making, the very matrix of creation. Looking at the portraits of Reiko as an extension of this painting highlights their representation of impermanence. The first drawing directly representing the young girl is dated 1914; the next one, 1916. This latter is a sketch on paper showing the face of the child sleeping in her bed. The artist then waited a year before again taking his daughter as a model, in two watercolors titled Reiko, an Apple in Her Hand, dated respectively April 5 and 15, 1917 (figure 3). With the exception of the very first of these drawings, they were all made around her birthday (she was born on April 10, 1914). This is not a coincidence, since Kishida attached a lot of importance to anniversary days, whether his own birthday, the day he met his wife, or that of his daughter’s birth. “The fact of being able to celebrate Reiko’s birth and our encounter with 78

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FIGURE 2 Kishida Ryūsei, Nude: Study, 1913. Oil on canvas, 61 × 46 cm. (Nichidō Museum of Art, Kasama)

her at this time every year fills me with a strange feeling of happiness,” he wrote in 1914.8 More generally, a number of the portraits include Reiko’s age in their title: Portrait at Five, at Eight, at Sixteen, and so on (figure 4).9 They therefore belong to the birthday-portrait genre and should be considered in tandem with the photographs that the artist commissioned every year on this occasion.10 Two concurrent temporalities thus run through the series as a whole: the biological and the commemorative, with the latter by its nature 79

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FIGURE 3 (left) Kishida Ryūsei, Reiko, an Apple in Her Hand (Drawing by Her Father), 1917. Color and ink on paper, 26 × 16 cm. (Wood One Museum of Art, Hiroshima) FIGURE 4 (right) Kishida Ryūsei, Reiko, Portrait at Sixteen, 1929. Oil on canvas, 45.3 × 23 cm. (Nichidō Museum of Art, Kasama)

resisting the former. Considered in the order of their creation and from the painter’s point of view, the series appears to be a way of struggling, drawing by drawing, against the passage of time; each canvas is an attempt to halt time and freeze the figure. Conversely, seen a posteriori and from an overarching perspective, the series gives a disturbing sense of instability. The effort made by Kishida to escape the movement of nature ultimately engenders a different kind of time, uncertain and ghostly. 80

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The fame of some of the portraits makes it difficult to have a stable and unified vision of the young girl’s face. On the one hand, the portraits resemble one another: the young girl is generally painted as a bust with the face seen from the right at a three-quarter angle;11 the size of the canvases is relatively consistent, with the oils ranging from approximately 40 × 20 centimeters (15.7 × 7.8 inches) to 90 × 70 centimeters (35.4 × 27.5 inches); the palette and textures vary little, with the exception of the watercolors; and, finally, several of the decorative elements, like a flower held in the hand—a staple motif in Kishida’s work—frequently recur (figure 5). However, there is also dissimilarity and transformation. Despite maintaining substantial consistency in his portraiture, Kishida constantly changed the way in which he introduced distance to his model: in Reiko, Five Years Old (1918), the oddity of the image is caused by peripheral elements (awkward inscriptions, strange motifs); in Reiko, Hanshan-Style (1922–1923), it is the explicit reference to a distinctly grotesque painting by Yan Hui (late thirteenth– early fourteenth century) (figure 6); in Bust of Smiling Girl in Western-Style Clothes (1922), it is the fluid color clouding the model’s face; and in others, a slight distortion of her features (overly elongated eyes, hairy down on her upper lip) or outright alterations to her body’s proportions (arms too slender, flattened skull) that cause the sense of inaccuracy. None of the canvases is free from some kind of effect, and despite a general sense of sumptuousness, no single effect is systematically deployed.

Ghosts and Modernity The philosopher Inoue Enryō (1858–1919) is inscribed in Japanese history as one of the first scholars to undertake a reappraisal of the supernatural and, in particular, the subject of ghosts. His work is nonetheless relatively unknown, either in Japan or abroad. He was a man of untiring activity, and in that respect he coheres with our image of scholars of the time. His father was a priest of the Ōtani sect, and after completing his studies in philosophy at the Imperial University in Tokyo, Inoue could, as the oldest son, have started on the path toward taking over the family temple.12 Instead, he chose to continue his scholarly work as a regular monk, pursuing his pioneering work on Buddhist thought and religion in general. Despite the fact that the government had rejected Buddhism in favor of Shinto in the 1870s, Inoue founded the Federation for the Great Way 81

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FIGURE 5 Kishida Ryūsei, Little Girl (Reiko Standing Up), 1923. Oil on canvas, 53.2 × 45.5 cm. (Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura)

of Venerating the Emperor and Repaying the Buddha (Sonnō hōbutsu daidōdan) in 1886, a movement with nationwide impact that promoted the compatibility of Buddhism and national interests.13 In parallel, he undertook a vast critical project that he named yōkai-gaku, which literally translates as “study of supernatural creatures” but actually included the study of all strange phenomena. The same year, together with a group of important 82

FIGURE 6 Kishida Ryūsei, Reiko, Hanshan-Style, 1922–1923. Color on paper, 62.5 × 39.1 cm. (Nichidō Museum of Art, Kasama)

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intellectuals and scientists, he created the Mystery Research Society (Fushigi kenkyūkai), whose operation and goals were based on those of the Society for Psychical Research, founded a few years earlier in London.14 For Inoue, yōkai were not limited to cultural or artistic motifs present in legends or paintings: “Yōkai are not just spirits, bewitching creatures, or tengu [long-nosed monsters]; they are also climate changes, natural disasters, madness, and disease.”15 In other words, anything that troubled men’s minds—such as illness, disasters, or death—could also, according to Inoue, be considered yōkai. The word thus functioned as a comprehensive term for anything that people cannot fully comprehend, as well as anything that deprives the mind of access to spiritual purity, such as optical illusions, misconceptions, fallacious beliefs, and changing appearances. Yōkai were essentially therefore representations or images that only logic, philosophy, and the sustained pursuit of truth could hope to overcome. This is why Inoue rejected the methods of Chinese divination. Similarly, confronted with photographs showing “spirits,” he explained that they were certainly not supernatural phenomena but only the consequence of a poorly cleaned photographic plate.16 However, as he stated on numerous occasions, the goal of his work was not to demystify all beliefs and illusions from a positivist standpoint. He considered all the fields he examined in his book Monsterology (or Study of Yōkai) to be just so many misleading manifestations from the world of appearances as understood in the Buddhist sense.17 Rather like Henri Bergson, who, at the end of his analysis of psychic phenomena in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, concluded that the great Christian mystics, far from being lunatics suffering from hallucinations, were the only ones to have reached the stage of definitive deification,18 Inoue saw in Western logic and philosophy the principles that would allow him “to dissipate the doubts and explain the errors” and thereby come to “the true mystery”—that is, the very essence of Buddhism—which, he said, most of the different local schools had lost sight of.19 As Gerald Figal has noted, Inoue’s approach was a form of “Buddhist Kantianism” that aimed for an “awareness of the ultimate reality of the universe.”20 At the same time, Inoue professed the importance of “forgetting techniques” that allowed the mind to rid itself of old errors and be renewed and revived.21 From this perspective the arts had to stop stimulating the imagination and fantasies and should instead conform to the principle of 84

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rationality, given that the world of reason was synonymous with the civilized world.22 In Inoue’s mind, the search for a superior ideal demanded this effort of disillusionment. Provoking forgetfulness was thus one of the pivotal tasks that he conferred on art: “Contact with fine arts prompts the highest ideal to come to mind, and in extreme cases, makes you forget sadness, forget to eat, forget time, and forget to sleep, until you no longer know who you are.”23 A demand, then, for “sculpture, painting, weaving, ikebana, the arts of bonsai and gardening, architecture,” theater, prose and poetry, “and even the tea ceremony and calligraphy”—to name just some of the genres he included in fine arts—to make people forget the world of material pleasure and vulgar illusion sufficiently for each individual to “touch the brilliance of the ultimate mystery and walk the paths of the world of marvels” for the benefit of the whole nation.24 In a Japan that, since World War II, continues to question its past, Inoue’s work remains under a largely negative light: the Western-inspired progressive idealism he subscribed to is perceived to be the source of Japan’s industrial, colonial, and military expansion. Ema Tsutomu (1884– 1979), who published A History of Japan’s Fantastic Creatures in 1923, was Inoue’s successor. The son of a Kyoto doctor, Ema was one of the pioneers of popular history in Japan. But his approach to monsters was narrower than Inoue’s in that he considered them uniquely as historical figures and motifs. And although he did not question his predecessor’s work, Ema’s own work, aiming to show how the nation’s ancestors perceived ghosts, ultimately served to give ghosts a place in modern culture. In other words, if for Inoue the goal of studying supernatural phenomena was to make image and knowledge correspond, Ema wanted to redeploy image in an autonomous capacity and highlight its magical component. A few months after Ema, it would be Kishida’s turn to publish several articles on the subject in quick succession. In September 1923, Kishida, whose house had been destroyed in the Great Kantō Earthquake, moved to Kyoto to escape the chaos ruling the capital and its surroundings. At this juncture, he had already painted most of his portraits of Reiko, but he nevertheless continued to explore his daughter’s face by accentuating the distortion of her features, openly nudging his representations toward the grotesque and fantastical. Indeed, Kishida drew fantastical creatures on a number of occasions. In addition to the astonishing illustrations he made for his Ghost Stories (1924), he produced several books of illustrations in 85

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which there were around fifty drawings of demons, monsters, and strange men and animals,25 and in 1925 he made a series of ten drawings, titled All About Ghosts (figure 7). Based on this series, which can be read as a set of scenes of family life, his relationship with ghosts appears both playful and decadent. Kishida was not, however, the only one to be interested in the liminal; in all realms of expression, artists produced an increasing number of works focused on illness, disability, and old age that took the prostitute, dancer, or self-portrait as subject or that broached themes highlighting man’s mutable, transient, and monstrous character. In Ghost Stories, Kishida made a relatively new selection among Japan’s fantastical bestiary; even though he devoted several pages to specters (yūrei), which are famously important in Edo art and theater, his preference went to the yōkai that he defined, like Ema Tsutomu, as a set of monsters found in iconography.26 To his mind, these yōkai, often associated with specific objects or places, had “an incomparably more powerful presence” than the specters.27 In particular, they were prone to appearing anywhere: “When you look intently at an object, it sometimes happens that you see in it a mysterious form of existence that can at times become truly frightening. The object metamorphoses, grows hands and feet, a face appears. . . . One could describe it as a process of physical embodiment of the feeling of a presence.”28 Yōkai was the aspect of disquiet that the object imprinted on humans, formalized by a name and physical traits. An interest in these creatures, then considered marginal by artists and intellectuals, shows Kishida’s desire to reenchant the world at a time beset by postdisaster uncertainty. This is a far cry from Inoue, who, like Kant a century before him, had hoped that critiquing reason would, in the short term, wipe out all illusions. Although some intellectuals, such as Yanagi Sōetsu, took a serious interest in occult phenomena, the artists of early-twentieth-century Japan did not, on the whole, take to exploring specters in the same way that some Romantic writers in Europe had done a century earlier.29 On several occasions, Kishida firmly asserted that he did not believe in ghosts, spirits, or other supernatural forces.30 He thought of them at one level as mere notions—the lessons of Meiji-period intellectuals having borne fruit—on another level as a form of cultural heritage needing to be rehabilitated, and, finally, as a good way to think about what art and images are.

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FIGURE 7 Kishida Ryūsei, All About Ghosts No. 8: Bogle Looking Through the Window, 1925. Ink on paper, 32.6 × 11 cm. (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto)

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In Ghost Stories, Kishida showed a deeply historicized notion of the nature and appearance of supernatural creatures. Having once stated that ghosts were the expression of a “need for mystery” and man’s “instinctive terror” in the face of death—two hypotheses that are put forward but not explored—he discussed only problems linked with their representation in either physical or mental form. The truly central issue (death’s inevitability and the fear that accompanies it) being insoluble, Kishida turned away from it in favor of aesthetic questions. Even though he clearly harbored a mystical and religious inclination, his was a far from spiritualist perspective. For Kishida, the inner nature of ghosts was fundamentally immaterial outside the specific shapes they took. This is why ghosts were capable of all kinds of metamorphoses and could take many shapes other than the one usually attributed to them; even a text or film could be seen in a fantastical or monstrous light. Rather than attempt to reintegrate the strange into the boundaries of its historical forms, Kishida tried to redefine it in the framework of contemporary culture. Between 1880 and the early Taishō period (1912–1926), the Japanese undertook a drastic rationalization of their representation. This constituted a fundamental shift, equivalent to the exaltation of creativity understood as a scientific discovery of the world. The reaction that followed was not, however, on a comparable scale; the return of the fantastical was a merely marginal development during the course of Japanese modernity. Like Kishida’s yōkai, the ghosts of the Taishō period were essentially national. They were thus different, specific. Serving to distinguish the national culture from other cultures, they fit perfectly into Romantic reasoning, especially since the nationalization of ghosts reflected more broadly the nationalization of the “people’s spirit,” just as in nineteenthcentury Europe.

The Depth of Realism Of the critics who helped to channel European art’s modern ideas to Japan, C. Lewis Hind is probably, along with Julius Meier-Graefe, the one whose work had the most important effect on artists and intellectuals. Breaking with the classical idea that art was a quest for the beautiful, Hind, whose work first reached Japan around 1910, moved aesthetics to88

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ward expression, which he presented as an adventure that allowed man to fulfill individual development and collective progress.31 Kishida, who was twenty in 1911, was very receptive to this approach, which fit with his break from Christianity, and launched into the production of work that contrasted with the plein air painting in which he had been trained. He turned with passion to the work of Van Gogh (believing for a while that he was born on the day after the Dutch painter’s death):32 Van Gogh suffered from an excess of energy, but he did not try to resist it. Everything drove him to paint. He was able to create his own life by basing himself on every kind of reality, whatever it was. He did not think of beauty at a conceptual level. It was his very existence and energy that were beautiful.  .  .  . No one has ever known how to make the most of things the way he did. He dived headlong into all aspects of reality without trying to avoid anything. By the same token, there is not a single inch of his canvases that does not pulsate with energy. His substantial creative power pours off each painting.33

Meanwhile, Kishida’s taste for oddity began to appear around this time. Foreign Settlement at Tsukiji is a small painting of 1912; on a background of harsh but washed-out colors, black shapes (human silhouettes, trees, lampposts) create a disconcerting atmosphere (figure 8). With its imprecise contours and garish colors, this painting is at once modern monster and Western monster, a sort of apparition making a violent break from the comfort of historical continuity’s solutions. Rather than reference points in local history, Kishida focused on foreign specters as they appeared in photographic reproduction, generally in black and white, in magazines of the time. He preferred the logic of spatial transposition to that of historical mutation, a paradigm that had only a lesser role in the West, where formal rupture had been a prevailing heuristic mode since the end of the eighteenth century. This first period (if we put aside the canvases of his early youth) came to an abrupt end during the course of 1913, when Kishida experienced the realization, like a religious awakening, that what interested him was not to “express himself” but rather to seek the ideal through painting. He then began exploring the possibilities of realism through a meticulously detailed series of portraits of men that recall those by Holbein and Dürer. The portraits of Reiko are an extension of this series. Although finding 89

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FIGURE 8 Kishida Ryūsei, Foreign Settlement at Tsukiji, 1912. Oil on canvas, 31.7 × 40.3 cm. (Private collection)

inspiration in European art, Kishida chose to do so loosely, free from the constraints of fashion. Nonetheless, this radical change did not revamp his outlook on art, which remained driven by an appetite for the mystical. As his friend Kimura Shōhachi, who was one of the first to introduce Hind to Japan, expressed it, “Art is not a game, not an experience, not a demonstration, and not a discovery; art is the intelligence of the man who sees supreme beauty, knows truth, and spreads goodness. It is the guarantee, mission, and supreme reward of life. Cultivating the Beautiful, the True, and the Good is the task of the genius who, seeing nature in man’s individual existence, shines his light on life’s darkness.”34 According to this line of thought, history is of no interest and progress is not possible. The only thing that matters is the pull of the artist toward his ideal. Because for these artists there was as much novelty in turning to the German Renaissance as there was for Picasso in African art, their distancing from the Western avant-garde should not be seen as a conservative instinct; on the contrary, it was a headlong rush into risking the individ90

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ual against the absolute of nature, a position that recalls the Nietzschean dream of man at his zenith that was just being discovered in Japan. Kishida Ryūsei’s and Kimura Shōhachi’s new modernity, inspired by Christianity and with an ahistorical bent, led to a rapport with works (models) where only the immediate relationship mattered. As Yanagi Sōetsu says in the introduction to his book on William Blake, which had a considerable influence on the art world, “The very essence of life is heliotropism.”35 The solar orb became, around 1912 to 1914, the apparition par excellence, revitalizing the national order and the dynamics of progress. In the Japanese context, declarations of love to the sun are not synonymous with a love of reason, and the Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy does not work very well. The sun is not perceived as an abstraction but as the source of biological growth. The list of artists and movements that Kimura said he admired is very instructive: Michelangelo, Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, El Greco, Rubens, Goya, Blake, Delacroix, Van Gogh, and Rodin; those he did not esteem include Velázquez, Van Dyck, the Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Gauguin, and Matisse.36 In short, the ones that Kimura associates with a solar energy are those we would call painters of feeling or emotion, while the ones he rejects are the painters we might call “cold,” those who privilege calculation and a more theoretical approach. André Malraux, whose tastes were similar, would have attributed to the first group a “connection with the sacred” and lamented in the second the inability to give shape to spiritual values.37 But neither would he have hesitated to speak of, regarding Rembrandt or El Greco, the “ghosts,” “apparitions,” “metamorphoses,” “haunted presences,” or “voices of silence” that he perceived in their works.38 In any event, around 1913 to 1915, Kishida and Kimura were searching for an absolute art, the most compact form of the strange and mysterious, but were also sensitive to the vibrations of matter. This dual orientation defined the perimeter in which their interest in ghosts would be reborn a few years later. It was a small but extremely dense space that tightly encircled the inaccessible kernel of their ideal. Kishida and his circle’s use of a figurative style was not a return to the status quo ante; no one in Japan had ever painted anything in the manner of Holbein. To begin with, it was a rejection of the abstract orientation of European artistic currents—a desire to remain engaged with events—but particularly a desire to find from within the power, effectiveness, and depth 91

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that were for the Japanese the foundations of Western civilization—that is, realism understood as a discovery of the world through technique. Adhering to the real through the greatest masters while maintaining a feeling of freedom (since they were not imitating anyone of their own period), they thus felt an even greater elevation of the spirit. From an “Eastern” point of view, this attitude was perfectly consistent with Western reasoning, and thus entirely “modern.”

The Secrets of Photography Shirakaba (White birch) was the name of a journal launched in 1910 to which Kishida contributed extensively. It was not the first journal dedicated to both literature and the arts; Hototogisu (The cuckoo) and Subaru (The Pleiades) had already done so. But Shirakaba had the distinction, from its very first issues, of using photogravures.39 Even though our familiarity with illustrated books prevents us from realizing it right away, for someone of Kishida’s period, the full-page reproduction of Western artworks in photogravure would have been an immediate sign of novelty, even in black and white. Over the course of the journal’s thirteen years, the number of illustrations in Shirakaba varied. There are seventeen in the Rodin special issue of November 1910 but only three in the Renoir issue of March of the following year. Meanwhile, color would not make an appearance until November 1915, with a reproduction of Cézanne’s The Uphill Road (La route montante, 1881). Color remained rare because of the cost; only very occasionally were there more than three or four color plates per year. The search for and dissemination of reproductions of Western works was an unavoidable part of the lives of artists and writers of this movement. Some, like Yanagi and Kimura, were veritable image hunters. The latter’s diary is full of mentions of visits to bookshops specializing in foreign art books, “picture postcard sellers,” and friends whom he knew had just found this or that reproduction.40 Indeed, a whole economy and social network were created around these images from the West. Kimura’s diary thus includes the following story: “August 7, 1911. I continued painting yesterday’s flowers. I was in good form, but I’m not very pleased with what I did. Then I went to sell the two issues of Jugend and Studio at Ishikawa’s, after having cut out what I wanted to keep: that makes 92

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170 sen [¥1.70]. On the way, I went to Maruzen bookshop and bought the Goya with the leather cover.”41 Part of the entry for July 11, 1912, reads: “Kishida dropped by. Then we went to his place, and then to see Mr.  Yanagi with Seimiya and Okamoto. There were I don’t know how many paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso—it was incredible. I bought a Matisse that happened to be left, 350 sen.”42 It was common during this period for art exhibitions to show only reproductions or copies. The Shirakaba group, for example, organized a widely publicized display of 189 Western engravings. Even if some were original prints, the majority would have been photoengraved plates of works by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, and so on. Although the collections of Western works in Japan began to develop in the 1920s—the first original Van Gogh in Japan was acquired and introduced in 1920—photographic reproductions were the site where, in the decade before, the art and sensibilities of Japan were transformed. These examples confirm, if there was any need, Walter Benjamin’s observation that “the effect of the photographic reproduction of works of art is very much more important as regards the function of art than the greater or lesser artistic quality of photography.”43 No one, for all that, confused originals and reproductions. On several occasions, Kimura expressed a desire to go to France so he could see actual works, and in an article published in 1910, the sculptor Asakura Fumio lamented that his only access to Rodin was through “incomplete photographic plates.”44 In another article, the poet Kinoshita Mokutarō explained that although the appraisal of a statue usually demanded four dimensions—the three that make up volume plus knowledge of “the material and intellectual culture” of the place where the work was created— he, alas, knew only two since his exposure was through photographs and descriptions.45 However, even if the artists of the period were fully aware of the nature of the photographic medium, simultaneously regretting its limitations and trying to exploit its potential, in many ways they did not really grasp it, or inadvertently attributed to it a magical transparency. As Mitsuda Yuri noted, “It is curious that despite regular visits to the photo studio to commemorate every special occasion, Kishida remained completely indifferent to the connections between his painting—with its heightened realism—and photography.”46 Kishida never expressed his views on photography in any detail. He wrote only, in 1918, “There is in photography absolutely no power of the 93

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soul [kokoro].”47 And yet a number of clues, notably in his diary, reveal a keen search for reproduced images, not only in newspapers but also directly through his activities as a painter. In May 1916, regarding a portrait of his wife, he wrote, “Today, I mainly painted her hair on the right-hand side of the canvas and her face on the left. Sometimes, when I manage to stop looking at the Dürer book, I can get a bit of distance.”48 In October 1923, he mentions having based work on a Van Eyck drawing and in June 1924 makes note of having been inspired by a Yuan painting he had seen a picture of.49 Documented examples are isolated, but one can nonetheless imagine that he often painted with one eye on a reproduction, especially when, starting in approximately 1919, he began painting in ink and wash. His diary is full of references to illustrated magazines, albums, catalogues, and notebooks of photographs or reproductions. However, he spent little time in museums, with the exception of the Kyoto museum around 1923 to 1925, and never made the trip to the West that would have allowed him to see the works that had influenced him. He could wax quite lyrical in front of a reproduction of a Cézanne or Van Gogh: “Looking at the paintings, I practically yelped with excitement. The emotion brought tears to my eyes.”50 On a different occasion, he exclaimed, “Today at Musha’s51 I saw some Masaccios, Van Eycks, Fra Angelicos, [Pierre] Puvis de Chavannes—it was amazing!”52 He sounds as if he had seen originals, though he had seen only small reproductions. He also talks of his “enthusiasm” in discovering a photograph of a screen attributed to Iwasa Matabei that became one of the jewels of his collection. In other words, some of his most powerful aesthetic experiences, and notably his discovery of Van Gogh, Dürer, and Matabei, his three main models, were based on photographic reproductions. We can extend this observation to all the members of the Shirakaba group. As Tsuchida Maki noted in a critique of Benjaminian doxa, “If we compare the group’s attitude to reproductions and Rodin’s originals, it appears there is for them only a difference of degree and not a categorical distinction.”53 In their eyes, the qualitative damage was minor, the aura of the originals still largely transpired, and they considered themselves to be in the position of viewers or transmitters of the image. Photography even seemed to enhance the original’s aura. “One can imagine that reproductions were more to them than just substitutes for the originals; they possessed a kind of exactness, the experience of which was that of the here and 94

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FIGURE 9 (left) On Her Fifth Birthday (Reiko), 1918. Black-and-white photograph. (Private collection) FIGURE 10 (right) On Her Twelfth Birthday (Reiko): At Home at Nanzenji-Kusagawachō, Kyoto, 1925. Black-and-white photograph. (Private collection)

now of the unique encounter,” Tsuchida added.54 Through its delocalized nature and strange materiality, and because it engendered an expectation, the reproduction reinforced the perception of images as a shining force.55 The photographs that meant the most to Kishida were those that reproduced paintings, but he also very much enjoyed going to the photographer’s studio to capture moments of family life like birthdays. As I mentioned previously, there are a number of extant photographs of Reiko that, as a group, form a counterpart series to the painted portraits (figures 9 and 10). Kishida occasionally mentions a visit to a photographer, to take pictures of his own works or others in his collection, but his relationships with the photographers themselves always seem to have remained distant.56 Even with Nojima Yasuzō, the pioneer of Japanese pictorialism in whose gallery Kishida exhibited, the interaction remained formal.57 Or to be precise, while Nojima admired Kishida, Kishida never showed any 95

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interest in the photographer’s work, as if he could not so much as see it. Generally speaking, Kishida seems to have treated the photographic image as a transparent medium. But it is nonetheless likely that his encounters with photography, often mundane but sometimes highly emotional, played a decisive role in the evolution of his ideas about images, art, and beauty. It taught him, indirectly, that analogy was the primary and best means of channeling aesthetic emotion and that it had a binding power and survived the passage of time. Even though he refused to see it as art, photography was for him a key conceptual tool, especially since it always operated in a blind spot of his consciousness.

The Principle of Imitation What makes photography’s absence from Kishida’s field of thought even more surprising is that he wrote quite a lot about realism. His three major texts on the topic were two articles (“On Realism” and “Thoughts on Realism’s Inadequacy” [both 1922]) and the book that marked the culmination of his exploration, The Beginning of Ukiyo-e–Style Painting (1926).58 The central argument of this book, which incorporates an essay written initially for the magazine Shisō, is presented in a chapter titled “Taste in Ukiyo-e.” Kishida’s starting point is a reminder that ukiyo-e, as its name suggests, is a painting of the floating (uki) world (yo), which is to say a genre that revolves around one-off events (jishō)—around facts, not things.59 He thus invokes from the outset Japanese’s distinction between mono (a “thing” in the sense of tangible object) and koto (fact; action; nontangible thing). For Kishida, however, only tangible objects (mono) have the capacity to elicit aesthetic feeling because they harbor order, balance, and harmony; it is what he calls elsewhere “the beauty of nature.”60 In contrast, facts and actions do not have this capacity; an act can be effective, but not beautiful. That is why an art form that focuses on the world as it is, like ukiyo-e, cannot separate itself from representation. Kishida is thus in agreement with the Aristotelian idea that there is a “spirit of imitation” that drives man to copy the objects that confront his senses. But he does not concur with Kant, for whom imitation is fundamentally negative, as we saw in the example of the nightingale that was also used by Hegel. In Kant’s words,

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What is more highly praised by poets than the bewitching and beautiful note of the nightingale . . . ? And yet we have instances of a merry host, where no such songster was to be found, deceiving to their great contentment the guests who were staying with him to enjoy the country air, by hiding in a bush a mischievous boy who knew how to produce this sound exactly like nature. . . . But as soon as we are aware that it is a cheat, no one will remain long listening to the song which before was counted so charming. And it is just the same with the songs of all other birds.61

Kishida never mentions any German philosophers, but not only is it likely that he knew this passage, but it is probable that it inspired his own view: When you walk down the street, you see all kinds of articles laid out in shop windows. In a toy shop, you might see windmills, little metal trains, plastic figurines  .  .  .  , and there is in each of these objects a beauty of “fact,” a beauty of realisticness that is expressed through their many shapes and colors. . . . It is, counterintuitively, in the mundane things of everyday life that we perceive this most clearly. It certainly does not depend on the aesthetic value of the object itself; rather, it stems from the emotion elicited from seeing a well-known object perfectly copied. The more familiar we are with the subject, the more strongly this effect will be. Even if a prankster can perfectly imitate a bird of paradise, how can people get the pleasure of recognition from that? However, they would feel a special pleasure from an imitation of the garden sparrow.62

In Kishida, the nightingale becomes both the sparrow and the bird of paradise. In his eyes, imitation evokes neither boredom nor irritation but interest and pleasure. He adds, To take the example of the prankster, he must, when trying his hand at imitation, choose something ordinary, familiar, and unimportant, so as to elicit in himself, as in others, the pleasure inherent in likeness. If he tried to arouse curiosity about a likeness without using something familiar, it would be difficult for him to so much as communicate his inspiration, the basis of what he is trying to imitate.63

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According to Kishida, true realism derives from the encounter between a sensitivity to the intrinsic beauty of objects one encounters and a sensitivity to action that stems from analogical instinct. There is in raw imitation a basic pleasure that is inseparable from all artistic enterprise. This pleasure is not due to technical skill but rather to the thrill caused by the “likeness,” a phenomenon that Kishida attributes more broadly to a taste for matching and suitability, whether this be solving a puzzle, drawing the right combination of cards, or making a good play on words. Conversely, all mismatching provokes a feeling of frustration, irritation, and expectation. Needless to say, like the “garden sparrow,” Reiko was a perfect candidate for this: not only does the image of a child evoke a general feeling of familiarity, but the artist was perfectly familiar with his model and could study her at leisure. On several occasions, Kishida concedes that imitation is not yet art, and that at such a stage beauty is in a latent state and can emerge only if the artist introduces his own sense of ornamentation. For him imitation is not, however, a primitive or crude taste. Or rather, it is because imitation is the expression of a primitive and crude taste that it becomes essential. This is why Kishida parodies the example of the nightingale: The effect of similarity, of truth, has nothing fundamentally unpleasant; on the contrary, it would be accurate to say that it brings with it a certain feeling of pleasure. Even though this is a little odd, let us take as an example those extremely well-imitated turds that children use as toys to play pranks. These are objects that give a genuine impression of ugliness and elicit disgust. However, as soon as we know they are imitations, we think they are quite funny. Such mimeticism evokes a kind of aesthetic pleasure. This must be distinguished from entertainment or amusement prompted by a technical interest in the copy.64

Through this image of the turd, Kishida continues to link the pleasure of imitation to familiar and trivial objects. In any case, we know that he liked this kind of prank and is thus anchoring his critique in his own experience. He also identifies two levels of imitation: the principle of conformity of a being to itself and the result of a technique. In Europe, the importance of imitation was brought back into focus at the end of the nineteenth century by biologists following Darwin and by 98

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sociologists like Gabriel Tarde. Although Kishida probably had no direct knowledge of it, Tarde’s major work, The Laws of Imitation, had been translated into Japanese in 1924, two years before he published his book. If we compare the two men’s views, it is immediately clear that they do not grant imitation the same value. Whereas what Tarde calls “the aesthetic life”—the true, individual, and creative life—ultimately remains a sublimation of the “subordinating functions” of imitation, and imitation remains for him something from nature, primitive, negative,65 for Kishida imitation is a positive, fresh, and joyous force on the path to creation. Far from being the last resort of the man controlled from below by his instincts and blocked from above by the absolute beauty of the ideal, it is a mystique of the immanence that replays the creation of the world each time it manifests itself: “It is important to see that there is something divine in order and balance, and that this is what pierces the unfathomable charm contained in similarity, faithfulness, true attachment to the real, and everything that pertains to the substance of things.”66 Kishida seemed to be on a quest for an archlikeness, but it could not be contained within the frame that Jacques Rancière gives to this concept, that of “a [Saint] Veronica to whom comes the image of the god made flesh.”67 What is important in Kishida’s eyes is neither the beauty of a shape nor a technical quality but the very principle of imitation, which encapsulates both likeness—an object whose appearance conjures another—and mimeticism, the creative movement that recalls the very origins of the development of life. “Realism seeks and uses the effects of similitude, but there is in this simple ‘state’ of conformity a kind of aesthetic pleasure,” he writes.68 This particular understanding of the effect of imitation could explain the ambiguous relationship that Kishida had with photography, as if he recognized that the camera’s operation, although mechanical and in competition with his own work, sprang from the same movement.

Aesthetics and Viscosity Kishida was deeply influenced by the Bible, and especially by Genesis, his favorite book. The biblical description of man’s creation from a piece of clay might therefore help to explain the thematic importance of mud in his work. It appears distinctly in his series The Creation of Heaven and Earth (1914), where contorted human bodies fight to extract themselves from 99

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the mud’s grip. Similarly, the series of landscapes he produced around Yoyogi in 1915 seems like a variation on the biblical image, or in fact like a turning of the image on itself. Focused on the earth motif, Kishida highlighted its coarse malleability using glistening tones and at the same time took oil painting back to its muddy origins. He was thus not only a spectator of divine creation but also willing to step into the Creator’s shoes. But as one commentator notes, “One can smell mud and by extension earth in all his works” and not just in the landscapes.69 Reiko, Five Years Old (1918) and Reiko Sitting (1919) were indeed executed using mud. Kishida used oil paint as if he were a potter, so much so that the faces he painted have an earthy aspect and sometimes evoke terra-cotta. So although he opted for realism, it was a realism that went beyond the mimetic representation of forms. The material he used to paint with simulated or, more precisely, identified with what it was giving shape to: oil and flesh came together, since they both proceeded from original mud. In this way, the painter could relive each day the original creation, inject movement, and bring forth the energy of objects—to use the terms that Kishida deployed most frequently to describe his works of this period. Even though he expressed himself at length regarding his aesthetic ambitions, Kishida virtually never spoke about his painting at a technical level; at only very few moments did he explore the physical specificity of the different materials he used. Rather, he alternated between very abstract descriptions and a factual and deliberately plodding account of his activity. For this reason, the medium—whether oil or photography—has a ghostly status in Kishida’s work; it is very often hidden by the motif that parallels it, and its ability to mimic is infused with a mystical dimension. The medium is the spring that secretly brings to life—or at least, like a shadow, brings proof of life to the surface. The years 1919 to 1921 mark a turning point in his work that is accompanied by a gradual rejection of his dream of an absolute. In his paintings, notably the Portrait of Reiko (1921) in the Tokyo National Museum, his technique gets looser, probably through the influence of engaging in Chinese-style ink paintings. The theme of mud and earth does not completely vanish, however. It reappears a few months after he has written his essay on ghosts, chiefly in the form of the word derori 70—a new concept that extends his earlier thoughts and which he used to describe Matabei and Moronobu’s ukiyo-e paintings.71 A neologism coined by Kishida, the 100

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word derori falls into the rich category of subjective or experience-based Japanese words that includes, for example, onomatopoeia. It is composed of the root dero (or doro), meaning “mud,” and the suffix -ri, which often characterizes this type of word but also helps to evoke the word dereri, used “to describe a person keen to engage with the opposite sex, who acts in an unworthy or ungentlemanly way.”72 Derori therefore conjures mud as not just an organic substance but also a way of being. In the passages in Kishida where this term appears, “derori is the negation of ‘seriousness, refinement, quiet profoundness, and elevation’ . . . of ‘that which is pleasant to the eye and sober without dullness, of that which is harmonious, easy to understand, well ordered’ and ‘elegant.’ ”73 The word thus denotes not only a kind of behavior but also and more generally an aesthetic feeling and a specific perception of things. Whenever he uses the term, Kishida generally adds other qualifiers, such as “trivial,” “licentious,” “thick,” “sticky,” “slimy,” “ignorant,” “populist,” and “vulgar.”74 The feeling of derori, he notes, stems from “the uncleanliness of a creature teeming with life.” We can thus say that mud, as far as it is expressed in this term and words associated with it, evokes a stubborn materiality (sticky, slimy, thick) but also the fact of teeming with life, and especially with life as a social phenomenon (populist, licentious, coarse). Because this term conjures a view of the world that unites human life and the most profound materiality, it participates in the aesthetic of the monstrous. In this underwordly universe, the boundaries between beings are unclear, and facts mingle in a continuous flux. In fact, one can see a similarity between derori and the description of yōkai that Kishida had made a few months before he used the term derori for the first time, as when he speaks of the “living and disturbing nature” of yōkai or of “the morbid feeling of deformity that inevitably appears as soon as you begin painting something disturbing.”75 The One-Eyed Novice Monk and the Filth Licker, two monsters whom Kishida was particularly keen on, also have derori traits. As do most of the Reiko portraits. Reading Bergson helped Kishida elaborate this aesthetic. The French philosopher’s name appears in the painter’s diary in the spring of 1913, a period in which Kishida gradually moved away from Expressionism and toward a realist style.76 He mentions having bought a Japanese translation of “The Perception of Change,” a lecture given by Bergson at Oxford in May 1911 and incorporated into The Creative Mind.77 The essay, 101

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which was a major success in Japan, began with a refutation of Zeno’s paradox, in which Bergson puts forward his famous formulation, “There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change: change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not imply a mobile.”78 In the Japanese version, it is the nonopposition of mono (the thing) and henka (the change) that is expressed here; in other words, the withdrawal of mono into koto—into “fact,” as I defined it earlier. In Kishida, references to mud and the notion of derori are an expression of the subsumption of matter into the flow of life. Bergson’s ideas and vocabulary resonated with Japanese readers’ assumptions and expectations. In Japanese, the word used to translate “change” is henka (変化), a term that is fundamentally associated with strangeness. Hen by itself is a common term that means “strange” or “weird”; Kishida uses it a lot. The associated Chinese character’s Japanese (kun) reading—as opposed to its Sino-Japanese (on) reading—is kawaru (to change), a verb whose past form (kawatta) can be used to mean “peculiar,” “unusual,” or “crazy.” The second character used in representing the term, ka, is composed of two graphemes, a man standing and a man slumped or lounging, hence the meaning “to be transformed.” It is also found pronounced bake in obake, the general term for a ghost or spirit. Finally, the same combination of two characters can be read henge and in that case designates metamorphoses and strange apparitions. This little lexical detour shows that the idea of change in Japan is very closely linked with that of metamorphosis, and that the Japanese language anticipates Bergson’s argument and resists the opposition of an unchanging substrate (time, being) to a mutable form (duration, appearance). This system of thinking, which follows directly from Platonic idealism, had taken root during the modernization and Westernization of the country. The work undertaken by Inoue Enryō, aiming, as we saw, to separate the “real mystery” of infinite essence from all false beliefs, is one example of this. As a consequence, using Bergson no doubt allowed Kishida to revive the idea of the consubstantiality of the being and the mutable that late-nineteenthcentury idealism had not had time to whisk away. So whereas between 1913 and approximately 1919 Kishida had been fascinated by the power of matter, of which oil paint was the secret incarnation, he seems to have gradually switched his interest to its effect, as if he had come to feel that 102

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the important aspect of creation was not replication in clay but the giving of breath. This effort at emancipation led to some intellectual reflection. Kishida began writing theoretical essays at exactly the same time as he started questioning his own use of realism. Having exhausted the reproductive possibilities of pictorial matter, and not being able to take hyperrealism any further, he began a long process of reflection that led him to two, mutually exclusive conclusions: 1. It is impossible to express in a work everything that the heart would like to see there; there will always be a discrepancy between the “demands of the beautiful” and what the artist’s hand can achieve. 2. Once realism has shown its limits, only a step outside it will allow the pursuit of creation. This stepping outside realism is what Kishida called “the decorative.” The decorative is a palliative substitute for the divine breath and gives the appearance of life. No reconciliation with the divine is historically possible; human creation exists only in the exhaustion of events and the combustion of effects.

Life on Trial What principally distinguishes the Reiko series from other works, such as the earthy landscapes of Yoyogi, is evidence of the model’s own transformation. In other words, it is an exercise in variation on a model that is itself varying. Made between 1917 and June 1929, this series gives an overarching view of a child’s physical development, since Reiko is a baby at the time of the first sketches but appears as a young lady in the last few portraits. Reiko never looks the same, either because she has physically altered or because she has changed clothing in accordance with the seasons or her age. In a way, the artist is always a step behind a model whose appearance he can never manage to stabilize; change always makes a failure of art. For Kishida, discrepancy and distortion do not need to be sought in an abstract way since they are inherent to the process. A child is the very picture of change, and that is its connection to ghosts. “If the larva is a living dead or half dead, the child is a dying 103

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life or half alive,” writes Giorgio Agamben.79 However, the image of the child, just like the images of ghosts and yōkai, should not be understood in Kishida as a bridge between the continuous (the world of adults, history) and the discontinuous (death). It is, on the contrary, the hyperbole of the dissolution of continuity and discontinuity into mutation or metamorphosis. It recalls the mutable in every respect, even in the varnish on portraits, which cracks like the glaze on a piece of pottery. In the introduction to his book on the beginnings of ukiyo-e painting, Kishida writes, It has been about seven or eight years since I have been seized by a fervent interest in the beginnings of ukiyo-e–style painting. Of course when I started, I lazily believed that everything stemmed from Iwasa Matabei; in his paintings, I saw the strangely animated faces of men and women in mysterious poses evoking a kind of primitive simplicity, but also a profound sense of reality. It was a way of drawing faces as flat and smooth well suited to Asians, and with an almost evil look—so many exquisite elements of what I call derori.80

The word derori is here associated with the idea of namanamashii, an adjective meaning “fresh,” “lively,” “animated.” Formed using a repetition of the character 生, meaning “life,” it can be applied to a freshly caught fish at a market stall or the look from twinkling eyes. It can also convey the impression of “pulsating” flesh, to take a recurrent image in nineteenthcentury French writing about art.81 Central to Kishida, it denotes everything, whether beings or objects, that seems to quiver or pulsate. Indeed, Kishida believed that there is a sympathetic resonance between objects and the mind, a notion that is reflected in his work; some of the ink paintings he did between 1922 and 1927, for example, clearly coax natural shapes into enchanted beings. In their convulsions, the rocks come to life—sometimes even seeming to have eyes and a mouth—a trick that has a long history in Sino-Japanese painting. However, in contrast to Chinese painting, which professes the identity of all living things—as the maxim says, “To have hills and valleys in one’s breast”82—there is in principle nothing in Kishida that unites the exterior and interior. Under the influence of Western thought, he tends to isolate thought and feeling from

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“phenomena” (genshō), the “breath of life” (ki), and “nature” (shizen). Or, to put it more exactly, he sees the two as clones: thought does not participate in the real in an immanent way; rather, it is its duplicate. There is no continuity between the two, just quasi continuity and transitivity. This very small distinction—the brief moment of cessation, of rest, before it begins again—is crucial. The word namanamashii is based on repetition of the root word nama. This stuttering effect is precisely what this word, so ubiquitous in Kishida, denotes: the essence of life is a chronic movement of repetition. As in a heart or watch, there is a pulse at the basis of everything. Each beat is similar to the previous one and yet distinct. The pulsing vibration is the basic principle according to which the world perpetuates and by the same token creates itself. There is no continuous breath or ideal essence but rather a constant mimetic renewal of the world. Nothing is truly stable, even the most solid items owe the retention of their integrity to a strenuous effort on the part of their constitutive matter. The portraits of Reiko—the painter’s own daughter—represent an expanded form of this principle. Kishida’s vivid sense of life is based on a temporality that is similar to Bergson’s “pure duration,” but this pure duration is neither immanent nor transcendent. Divided into an infinite number of points jostled by the constant movement of replication, it is fundamentally historical within an eternal present. In other words, life produces dissimilarity, but its originating movement tends toward the identical. It is therefore necessary to begin by adapting to the originating movement—and thereby to go through replication and repetition, which are the essence of the life force—before, in a second phase, giving way to difference; that is, allowing effects to occur. Each period has a specific way of thinking about the ghostly. During the Meiji period, Inoue Enryō tried to link it with God or a Supreme Truth. In the early 1920s, Kishida understood it as the essence of the analogical process in its dual spatial and temporal dimension. In this line of thought, ghosts are both the principle and the margins of the movement of universal replication. Art consists in seizing life’s pulsating movement— which involves complying with it and reproducing it—while maintaining an approximation of the earlier state, because the actual movement of

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permanent replication creates a hubbub, a throng of competition that makes it impossible for all the players to reach their goal. This explains the arrangements with the real—in other words, what already exists—and the transformations. The portraits of Reiko, which mark Kishida’s break with the European avant-gardes, are the sign of modern thought taking root in Japan. Confronted with the impossibility of assimilating discreetly with the Western “we,” Kishida adopted the method of openly distancing himself from both local traditions and European fashions. In this way, he inscribed Japanese art (and, more generally, East Asian art, since his style was copied as far as the continental mainland) in a logic of rupture necessary for the assertion of a local and autonomous genius. Kishida allowed Japan to adopt a modernity that was all the more genuine for being indigenous. It is, however, not insignificant that the visual idiom chosen for this was a kind of “magical realism,” a method of representation pushed to the point where it spills into the realm of the strange. After all, Kishida could have adopted a radicalization of his early Expressionism, by turning, for example, toward a gestural abstraction latent in the history of Sino-Japanese calligraphy, and which developed in the United States after World War II. But this is not the direction that his work took. Through their realism, the portraits of Reiko signify at a historical level a desire to reconnect the lost threads of the European Renaissance. But through their strangeness, they highlight that at the heart of an inchoate conception of the world’s formation, without purpose or genuine metaphysical authority, mimesis is simultaneously both deviant and unavoidable. The success in Japan of photography—which is, by its nature, an art of the eternal moment that changes—must be seen from this angle. The fascination with which a whole generation of photographers, from Nojima Yasuzō to Ueda Shōji, regarded Kishida Ryūsei certainly invites such an approach, as do recent works such as Nara Yoshimoto’s paintings of bug-eyed children, in which it is hard to avoid seeing Reiko’s reflection.

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8

Kurosawa Akira’s Ikiru, or, the Impossibility of Metaphor

In contrast to several other of Kurosawa Akira’s works, Ikiru features no demobilized soldiers, no ruins, and no black market.1 For anyone living in Japan at the time, however, the plot—the determination of the protagonist, Watanabe Kanji, to construct a small children’s playground in Kuroe, one of Tokyo’s less-affluent neighborhoods—evoked both the current issue of urban redevelopment and the memory of the war’s destruction. In 1952, the problems of sewage and squalid and overcrowded areas, and questions of urbanism in general, very much carried with them a dual temporality: that of reconstruction in the present and devastation in the recent past. Kuroe is situated in the heart of the shitamachi (literally, “lower town,” in the sense of “not uptown”), which was particularly affected by the U.S. bombing of March 10, 1945. Like all public facilities, children’s playgrounds suffered extensive damage; there had been 182 before the war, and there were only 82 after. It was for this reason that in 1947 municipal authorities launched a specific plan to rebuild play areas.2 Ikiru is thus based on a small area of current events, but because it was a direct consequence of World War II, the microhistory ties in with the global, and the local and specific have roots in events that concerned the whole of humanity. Ikiru is not a film that made a mark on its era for having captured the aspirations of a generation (figure 11). Nonetheless, it continues to move people wherever it is screened.3 “The effect Ikiru can have on audiences is almost religious. Is it possible to watch Ikiru and not have it change 107

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you?” wrote film historian Stuart Galbraith IV just a few years ago.4 Endorsed as soon as it was released—in France notably by André Bazin, in the United States by Donald Richie—the film’s importance has only grown over time.5 When it comes to writing about the film’s emotional effect, critics like to use images of impact, imprinting, marking, and leaving traces. It so happens that Ikiru deliberately plays on the theme of reflection and marks or imprints, as is made apparent from the outset by the opening shot of the X-ray of the hero’s stomach (figure 12).6 The spectator’s reaction thus echoes the film’s thematic and formal content. This continuity between the work and its reception makes sense; leaving marks and creating reflections are part of the film’s themes. This begs the question: What purpose did Kurosawa attribute to echoes and traces, knowing that the modern value system privileges original creation and the capacity to make a departure from one’s model? At the transition point between the film’s two main parts, Kurosawa inserts a remarkable set of shots. We have just seen Watanabe, who has returned to his office after several days off, firmly determined to fight for his playground project. The camera shows him getting ready to leave the ward office followed by his two assistants. You then see a still shot, filmed through the municipal building’s glass entrance door. The door makes a to-and-fro swing behind them as they leave, and then another—two swings back and forth—and on the sheet of glass we briefly catch the reflection of a building and a tree located a few degrees from the camera’s line of sight (figure 13). The next shot, bearing no thematic link to it, is of the hero’s funeral portrait (figure 14). From this point, the wake begins and the story takes up after Watanabe’s death. Kurosawa thus chooses to mark the moment of his hero’s death by a sort of shutter moment, a photographic “click-click.” This is, of course, an entirely deliberate analogical link. Although the passage from life to death is not shown, it is suggested in a particularly effective way: it takes place in the extremely brief moment, two strokes, of a captured reflection (the photograph) in the plane of a mirror (the door)—a cinematographic death par excellence. The device is subtle, because not only do we, as it says in the screenplay, catch sight in the window of Watanabe’s silhouette from behind,7 but the reflection prompts us to look—in vain—for the cameraman in the act of squaring his hero away. Death becomes an image-making process, an act of 108

FIGURE 11 (top) “Ikiru.” Kurosawa Akira, Ikiru, 1952. (Tōhō Studios, Tokyo) FIGURE 12 (bottom) X-ray of Watanabe Kanji’s stomach. Kurosawa Akira, Ikiru, 1952. (Tōhō Studios, Tokyo)

FIGURE 13 (top) Last image of Watanabe before his death. Kurosawa Akira, Ikiru, 1952. (Tōhō Studios, Tokyo) FIGURE 14 (bottom) Fu neral portrait of Watanabe. Kurosawa Akira, Ikiru, 1952. (Tōhō Studios, Tokyo)

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recording and preserving. This is why, if we can say that the film questions the purpose of life and suggests that what counts is what we achieve, it is not just in order to advocate individual action and draw attention to the story’s meaning but to explore traces and reflections, of which cinema is a notable development.

The Hero’s Role As one scholar put it, “Kurosawa is perhaps the most ‘Western’ of any Japanese filmmaker of that era.”8 Kurosawa has been seen in this same way in his own country, where his references to Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare, as well as a proclivity, in his early work, for current events, all contribute to his reputation as a Westernizing artist.9 Yet it has often been observed that his films reveal a lot about Japan, and that beginning with Rashōmon his work becomes much more “Japanese.” But even if we make allowances for exoticism, which has led some to overestimate or conversely underestimate his Japaneseness, there is a tendency to characterize his work using extremely broad cultural references. Kurosawa belongs to the group of directors who, like John Ford and Marcel Carné, tend to prompt identification, generalization, and a universalizing perspective. This is what gives most of his films the ability to touch a very wide audience and separates him from more ideosyncratic filmmakers whose style cannot easily be labeled as Asian, Western, German, Italian, and so on. This aspect is particularly noticeable in Ikiru. As Bazin, who considered the film to be a masterpiece, wrote, “Ikiru is specifically a Japanese film, but what is so striking about it is the universality of its message.”10 The power of Kurosawa’s films derives from, among other things, the presence of a hero with whom everyone can identify but who nonetheless has a distinct personality. Such heroes, like Murakami in Stray Dog and Watanabe in Ikiru, have to battle society to achieve their goals.11 Satō Tadao interprets this phenomenon as a reaction to history: “No doubt we should see in this a warning on the part of the director, who, from his experience of World War II, is convinced that we have to take a stand against the Japanese tendency of consensus.”12 In other words, Kurosawa’s heroes are an endorsement of the individual, of a new subjectivity born of the postwar context as well as of a kind of Westernization.

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It is always something of a paradox that hero films, which rely on audience identification, should be seen as an endorsement of subjectivity and autonomy. Although the dynamic alters slightly, depending on whether the hero is fighting with society or against it, this does not really make a fundamental difference; as long as the struggle is presented in a positive light, as it is in most Kurosawa films, it stimulates a desire for emulation and takes on the role of exemplum. Putting too much emphasis on subjectivity in the telling of the story is a confusion of perspective that entertainment companies always extensively exploit; while pandering to the myth of the creative individual, they try to unite the audience, which in turn stabilizes society. With a bit of distance, it is easy to see that the paintings of, say, Kazimir Malevich or El Lissitzky, which rely on the art being objective and normalizing, are much more liberating than the heroic compositions of proletarian realism, whose purpose is explicitly didactic. The staging of solitary heroes in Kurosawa’s films is not a sign of subjectivity’s triumph but a reformulation of the social contract: Kurosawa’s solitary heroes served as an outlet for the imagination at a time when material constraints were extremely severe, all while helping to unite society in accepting differences. This premise should enable a break with the reasoning that systematically conflates Westernization or Americanization and the promotion of individualism. Indeed in many cases, Asian references to the West have nothing to do with the desire to empower the individual, and many cultural projects objecting to social consensus were undertaken and completed without reference to the West or with at most only very superficial allusions. The critical reception of Ikiru in America serves as a good illustration of the confusion surrounding subject and subjectivity in Kurosawa’s films. For Richie, Watanabe’s dedication to building the little park in the last months of his life, when he knows he is terminally ill, is to be interpreted as a defense of individual will and action. In Richie’s mind, the moral of the film is “A man is what he does.”13 Borrowing from another critic, he adds, “The meaning of life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be.”14 The picture of Watanabe that emerges is of a Promethean and, if we are to be honest, very American hero. In addition to the general issue of the slippery relationship between empowerment of the individual and heroism, many aspects of the film call this interpretation into question: although Watanabe faces his cancer alone and deals with the tedium of 112

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bureaucracy alone, in terms of his job he does not in fact go above and beyond the position’s requirements. And far from escaping the social order to fulfill a dream, he contributes to the completion of a public facility, in accordance with what he was always meant to do as the section chief of a ward office. As he says himself, “Who will do it if we don’t?” His mission is thus not at odds with society; it jostles the habitual way of doing things and requires perseverance, but it gets done through conventional channels and, ultimately, with the system. Indeed, the system even forgets that Watanabe was the project’s initiator, which does not seem to offend him. Thus not only is the hero’s action the rightful result of the democratic will, but it is invisible and does not seek to be recognized. We can tackle the problem in a different way by asking whether Watanabe’s heroic dimension would have been the same if his project had not succeeded. Probably not. His wake makes sense only because he has left his mark, starting with the park that he helped build. His greatness is the consequence of completing the project; it is only after that has happened that he becomes a hero. In contrast to a film like John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), which ends with the famous words “We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, cos we’re the people” and in which heroism is the embodiment of the world without end, Watanabe’s mission has no value in itself; it has value because it yields something, and specifically, a public facility. It is worth noting that all the scenes of Watanabe working on his project are flashbacks; in other words, they occur when everyone knows the park has been built. The action exists only from the point of view of the completed object. The hero of Ikiru is thus not as Richie describes him. He is not a man who does what his free will demands of him but a man who efficiently and transparently effects what society ideally wants of him.

The Reflection of War Ikiru is not a film solidly rooted in time, even though the action takes place in a specific location and the circumstances refer to the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s. The frequent flashbacks and the spatial confinement of most of the scenes blur the chronology. It is not a postwar film in the sense of Drunken Angel (1948), which extensively documents the state of the capital after the defeat, and the references to the American 113

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Occupation, then nearing its end, are only allusive. The temporal haziness perhaps stems from the fact that Ikiru transposes to the early 1950s a question that the whole country had to ask itself in 1944 and 1945: how to face impending death and what meaning to give it. Kurosawa places the initial design of the project for Ikiru around 1948.15 He notes elsewhere that his starting point was the feeling of not taking sufficient advantage of the time he had left: “I sometimes, without knowing why, think about my death. Since I could not possibly leave in peace now, I am thrown into a frenzy. There are so many things I have to do while I am still alive. I have lived so little. My heart tightens just thinking about it.”16 In 1990, he added, “Ikiru is probably the film in which my feelings are best represented. The question I asked myself in this film was, ‘how can one die with a serene heart?’ The answer is to have always done one’s best.”17 The film’s origin is thus a universal feeling: the desire to raise one’s vitality as an antidote to the fear of death. This dimension is undeniably central and partly explains the film’s ability to cross cultural barriers and eras. And yet even if everyone can identify with this inner state, its use in the film is quite particular: between this anxiety and the screenplay are stretched the threads of history, both personal and collective. Kurosawa, like most of his generation, experienced some extremely violent and harsh events: the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, whose aftermath he saw firsthand as he walked through the ruins of Tokyo when he was thirteen;18 the injuries and illnesses that claimed two of his siblings;19 the suicide of his brother Heigo in 1933;20 and, finally, the bombing of Tokyo, which he only narrowly survived.21 It is impossible to rank these events by their measure of trauma; all of them must have contributed to his fear of death. However, the thrust of the drama in Ikiru, and its social and moral dimension, seem to refer specifically to the war era, especially given that the film is part of a larger framework.22 As Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto points out, “There is a very strong sense of continuity among Kurosawa’s films during and after the war, and this continuity undermines all simplistic distinctions between what have been defined as the humanism of his postwar films and the militarism of his wartime ones.”23 The war is a major theme in Kurosawa’s work; from Seven Samurai (1954) to Rhapsody in August (1991), through I Live in Fear (1955), Throne of Blood (1957), Kagemusha (1980), and Ran (1985), more than one-third of his films broach this question either directly or obliquely. In Ikiru, 114

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FIGURE 15 Mitsuo departing for war. Kurosawa Akira, Ikiru, 1952. (Tōhō Studios, Tokyo)

there is just one explicit reference to the war, in the scene where Mitsuo, Watanabe’s son, leaves for the front (figure 15). This scene is presented in a nostalgic light, whereas the present-day action is blackened at every level: the Public Affairs Department seems like a useless and bureaucratic creation; American-style leisure activities seem repulsive; and modern life is hectic and alienating.24 At first sight, however, the historical reference to World War II seems slight. The early 1940s were extremely active for Kurosawa. Having escaped conscription, he managed to become a director at Tōhō and made four films between 1943 and the end of hostilities: Sugata Sanshirō I and II (1943 and 1945), The Most Beautiful (1944), and The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945). At this late stage in the conflict, the Cabinet Information Bureau, which was in charge of regulating and censoring film, approved only projects that glorified national values and directly served the interests of the war. Kurosawa was therefore trusted by his superiors and the military authorities. Indeed, he was one of the few directors who was given the opportunity to complete two projects in 1945, a year of total 115

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mobilization of the nation’s resources. All the films he made at the beginning of his career were thus designed as propaganda films. At the time, he did not attempt to hide it: National people’s cinema must absolutely triumph over American cinema.25 For us civilians, this is where the battle lies. But how to win? The Japanese who destroy Americans  .  .  . It is absolutely crucial to take inspiration from whatever drives them. What drives Japanese people? Selflessness, service for the greater good—those Japanese know how to live beyond the gates of death. There can be no national people’s cinema without the return of this Japanese nobility.26

Although Kurosawa did not make any films staging the war, we know that he gave the possibility some thought because he developed several screenplays on military subjects, such as Three Hundred Miles Through Enemy Lines.27 He certainly thought of war films as important and was an ardent supporter of that kind of filmmaking. As he wrote in 1944, Until now, I think we have been quite restrained regarding films that promote hatred of the enemy. . . . As everyone who has experience of conflict knows, hatred of the enemy is the feeling that suddenly comes over you when exchanging blows with an opponent. It is a feeling that only increases when fighting passionately against your enemy’s immorality, because you know you are in the right. It gives you an energy that makes you want to knock him down. The whole point of promoting hatred of the enemy is to inspire such an energy. Films that are effective are necessarily, therefore, those that show Americans and British troops getting trounced.28

If Kurosawa did not make any war films, it is because they were expensive and prestigious enterprises whose production was conferred on more experienced directors, like his mentor and friend Yamamoto Kajirō, who directed one of the era’s major feature films, Naval Battles Offshore of Hawaii and Malay, in 1942. 116

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Kurosawa was not dragged into the propaganda effort unwillingly, as we often read—and as he himself suggested in his autobiography by emphasizing his conflicts with the censors. He was, like many great artists and intellectuals of the time, an unequivocal participant in the militarist agenda, which is why this period was emotionally and psychologically very fraught for him. In the closing months of the war, he thought his life might soon be ending. In the spring of 1945, he told his soon-to-be wife, “It looks as if we may well lose the war, and if everyone therefore has to die, then so will we.”29 He was not alone in feeling this way; it was a thought shared by a large part of the population, whom the government was readying for combat. In June 1945, it had been declared that all men aged fifteen to sixty and all women aged seventeen to forty could be mobilized in the event of an Allied landing. It is in this context that the photographs of serious and probably somewhat desperate mothers practicing throwing bamboo spears were taken. Slogans of the period, such as “One hundred million kamikaze!,” and the intense media campaign around the sacrifices of soldiers in suicide operations profoundly affected a whole generation, all the more because of the long literary tradition glorifying self-sacrifice. Watanabe’s experience of having only a short time to live was thus shared by millions in the months preceding Japan’s surrender. In the fiction of 1952, as in the reality of 1945, the immediate prospect was death, and death was held aloft because it spurred a sense of morality and courageous action. Ikiru does not provide explicit evidence that this comparison was intended, but it is worth noting that among the few criticisms of the film following its release, most focused on its sentimental side—in other words, on the fatalistic and aestheticizing view of death that prevailed during the war. “Even though the construction of a small park cannot seem very important to a man whose path is soon to be barred by death, this is not at all explained,” wrote the novelist Shiina Rinzō. “People call it Kurosawa’s goodness and see in it evidence of his humanity. But to my mind it is mere sentimentalism. Even if nothing could triumphantly come to Watanabe Kanji’s rescue, it is obvious that he would have had to try to do something rather than do nothing at all. I’d like Mr. Kurosawa to think about that. Since death causes the destruction of the subject, it makes life lose all meaning,” he continued.30 Ikiru annoyed Shiina because rather than try to survive, the hero wears himself out in a final effort that 117

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may not even bear fruit. This annoyance is linked to the memory of the war’s final months, during which the army repeatedly called on soldiers and the general population to die rather than surrender. Kurosawa liked adapting stories, whether they were fictional or real. His first film, Sugata Sanshirō, was based partly on a novel inspired by the life and works of Kanō Jigorō, the founder of judo. Its purpose was not, however, to eulogize this founding figure of sport in Japan; through a portrayal of this rough but pure man throwing himself into “mortal combat,” the audience was led to see a representation of the Japanese soldier idealized by propaganda. The following exchange is typical of the atmosphere of the war’s closing months: Master, I am willing to die immediately if you tell me to! Be quiet! The point is not to put your life on the line lightly for a lawless, faithless good-for-nothing. What I’m talking about is profoundly understanding how to sacrifice yourself for the Great Cause.31 Master, I am capable of dying, whether out of loyalty or virtue!32

Kurosawa continually relied on existing texts to write his screenplays. An example is The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, which is an adaptation of The Subscription List, a famous Kabuki play. When he undertook Ikiru, therefore, he was already familiar with this technique. According to its general definition, mitate is a process of transposal that relies on cultural references. It can have a parodic or playful dimension, but not necessarily. The key is that the referent is not so much an object as a situation, whether this be fictitious, as in the case of a literary work, or geographic if it refers to a place—in the way that people might call Bruges or Amsterdam the Venice of the North or refer to Shinobazu Pond in Ueno as a replica of Lake Biwa. Recognition of actual forms is of little or no use; a dog in mitate is not a dog—but neither is it a symbol, understood in the sense of a vector of meaning in a mythology. Or to be exact, between the sign and the mythology there is a specific referent through which we are asked to pass. This kind of transposal is coded, though it might variously be quite widely understood or decipherable by only a small circle of the initiated. In either case, it has a fundamentally social and collective dimension that is reinforced by the technique’s prevalence in Japan, which can sometimes be found even in such things as board 118

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games. In this case, Ikiru presents a rather esoteric transposal, since not only does the plot fail to echo any news item from the early 1940s or any behavior that characterizes the period, but Kurosawa goes to great lengths to show that the action takes place after the war. Under cover of a minor official in the Occupation, Kurosawa revived the topic of self-sacrifice, not out of nostalgia for the early 1940s but in order to put a positive spin—in the peaceful context of postwar economic renewal—on the experience of a whole generation: being prepared to die.

The Sense of Collectivity Collectivization of the responsibilities of production and direction was one of the strikers’ main demands during the violent social action that shook up Tōhō between 1946 and 1948. They wanted to establish committees made up of representatives of the various jobs in cinema based on a model inspired by the Soviets. Posterity’s image of Kurosawa is the very opposite of this way of operating. In Japanese, as in English, he is routinely described as an emperor or a king in reference to both his need to control everything and his at times authoritarian behavior toward actors and technicians. The fact that he disassociated himself from the Communists during the strikes helped add to this image. He is consequently described as an individualist and, as such, a filmmaker with a Western notion of the director’s job. This view is highly questionable, however, not only because the term “Western” is extremely slippery and the process of creation as it applies to cinema in general requires careful treatment of the question of individualism, but especially because of what Kurosawa’s career and films serve to demonstrate. Japanese uses the same word, kantoku, to designate film directors, football coaches, and mine inspectors. If we consider the meaning of the individual characters used to write the term, then a kantoku could be said to be someone who oversees and directs a collective activity. In English, we might use the word “supervisor.” The point is that his function is not so much imagined in direct relation to the product as in relation to a team; his primary duty is to lead other people. More even than “director,” kantoku emphasizes the director’s social role. The collective or industrial aspect of filmmaking is something that Kurosawa never tried to undermine. He never, for example, resorted to 119

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making short films that required less money but allowed more freedom. He shot some very audacious films, like Dodesukaden (1970) and Dreams (1990), but always supported the idea of an all-encompassing cinema that combined originality with box-office success. And it is well known that he liked to work with the same actors, notably Shimura Takashi, Mifune Toshirō, and Nakadai Tatsuya. Even though his co-workers necessarily changed somewhat over the course of his long career, there was always a visible “Kurosawa clan” in the world of Japanese cinema. The fact that Kurosawa was demanding does not mean he was averse to collaboration, a sense of community, or shared experience. During the war, Kurosawa ardently championed the idea of putting the collective above the individual, in keeping with the ideal of the time: “In a project, it is the life of the whole team that has to beat strongly. . . . Because understanding one’s team is precisely the first step in engaging the nation’s masses,” he wrote in 1943.33 After the surrender, Kurosawa certainly featured unusual heroes, but he remained very attached to the collective dimension of filmmaking. “I never do anything alone,” he explained in 1952, “I always work with others, whether I am writing a screenplay or producing a storyboard. I actually think it is dangerous to think in an isolated way.”34 He thus did not so much change his perspective after 1945 as adapt his art to the new political reality. Being comfortable in a group setting can allow progress at both the individual and collective levels. This is the kind of relationship that Kurosawa maintained with Shimura Takashi, who appeared in almost all his films from 1943 to 1952. Although he had up to that point used Shimura for only supporting roles, in Ikiru Kurosawa bestowed on him a new responsibility: the leading part. But it is also because there was this history between them that Shimura’s performance has the intensity so appropriate to the character, and that his commitment is exactly the commitment required by the part. Shimura’s performance in Ikiru was the performance of a lifetime, in the sense that, just as for Watanabe, what was at stake was his capacity to make a mark on history by giving the best of himself. There are in Ikiru other mises en abyme of artistic endeavor. For example, the hero’s task of overseeing the construction of a small park is similar to that of a kantoku, who must also choose the best project from among all those suggested, secure financing and all necessary permits, mobilize

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various people and trades, and persevere at every level despite the many obstacles. Watanabe is clearly a double of the director. Indeed, the scene in which the deputy mayor downplays the hero’s part in the creation of the park can be mapped onto one of Kurosawa’s own experiences. When Rashōmon was released, he was apparently not told that the film was being shown at the Venice Film Festival, and when it won the Golden Lion, the president of the production company took all the credit.35 By emphasizing in Ikiru the contempt of powerful men for men like Watanabe, who are entirely devoted to their projects, Kurosawa stages in a pathetic mode the socially contingent nature of the artist’s influence on his work. These different elements counter Kurosawa’s image as someone who saw the work of filmmaking as a vertical structure. Finally, from the point of view within the fiction, Watanabe seems to embody multiple subjectivities: he channels the American desire for democratic government, he serves the interests of a popularity-conscious politician, and he fulfills the hopes of mothers wishing for a better environment. The hero is not, however, merely at the junction of concurrent desires. At a level that extends beyond the framework of the narration, he also enables the expression of analogous feelings: Watanabe wants to achieve the completion of a project that will benefit society; the actor who plays him wants to succeed in his first major role and fulfill the media’s expectations of him; the director wants to give the best of himself to the widest possible audience; the audience comes to see it because they like films about an individual’s efforts for the public good. Each of these desires is similar to the others, and they are not in competition but work together to create synergy. At a general level, the economy of desire in Ikiru functions organically insofar as everyone attempts to fulfill the expectations placed on him by society. This system, in which everyone forms part of an organic whole, is certainly not the same as in The Most Beautiful, where mechanization is presented as the apex of human effort, but the principle is the same. It has simply been adjusted for peace and the postwar democratic system. On this issue, Kurosawa’s outlook is similar to philosopher Nakai Masakazu’s. Despite their differences, neither bases the relationship between the individual and society on rupture and rivalry; rather, both men are motivated by a harmonious outlook and tend to suggest solutions.

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Original Work or Adaptation? A lot of ink has been spilled by critics in trying to determine whether Ikiru’s screenplay is original or adapted. We know that Kurosawa often used existing stories. The film he completed just before Ikiru, The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1951), is said to be an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same (English) name. Likewise Rashōmon, released in 1950, combines elements borrowed from two of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s short stories: “Rashōmon” (1915) and “In a Thicket” (1921).36 Kurosawa had constant recourse to literature, particularly Russian literature, in designing his films. He does not, however, make any mention of basing Ikiru on any other work and indeed made relatively few comments about Ikiru in any regard. In 1952, while the film was being shot, a journalist asked Kurosawa about the originality of his screenplays, to which the director responded, “It is easier to express how one feels in an original work. I do not understand why they say that a director should focus only on staging. If he can, it’s best if he also does the screenplay.”37 To his mind, Ikiru is thus fundamentally an art film. However, he does make a point of acknowledging Oguni Hideo and Hashimoto Shinobu’s collaboration, both of whom appear as the screenplay’s coauthors. According to Hashimoto, Ikiru’s screenplay was created in three stages. In the first, Kurosawa initially supplied just a brief guiding idea, in this case, “a man who has only seventy-five days to live.” Hashimoto then developed this idea on his own, suggesting that the hero be a municipal bureaucrat struck by cancer who tries to escape his fate by seeking refuge in late-night revelry and putting all his strength in the construction of a small public park. Kurosawa decided to stick with this plot, and the three men began writing the script. Oguni then suggested using a nonlinear narrative and making the hero die halfway through, which was of course a crucial contribution.38 So even though Kurosawa had the initial idea and oversaw and assessed each stage, he seems to have had a relatively minor part in the screenplay’s development. The originality that Kurosawa lays claim to is the result of an exercise in collective creation. In 1960, Stanley Kauffmann was one of the first writers to draw attention to the connection between Ikiru and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy’s short novel of 1886.39 A few years later, Ronald Simone developed this interpretation in the journal Literature / Film Quarterly.40 Since then, 122

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the idea that Kurosawa took inspiration from the Russian novel has become widely accepted, with the notable exception, among Western critics, of Donald Richie. Tolstoy’s novel describes the life of a minor magistrate from his wedding to his death, as it follows an inexorable descent after a bland and brief heyday.41 Prematurely struck by gastric cancer, Ivan Ilyich witnesses his colleagues trying to oust him while his wife proves incapable of understanding his anguish. Only Gerasim, a solid and simple boy, occasionally manages to bring him comfort. Death interrupts this narrative, which presents life as a growing decline and merciless fall. The main characters of Ikiru—the ailing bureaucrat, the young lady who infuses him with energy, and his self-absorbed son—each have their counterpart in Tolstoy’s story. Similarly, some of the issues tackled by the film were raised by the Russian novelist. “It cannot be that life has been so senseless, so loathsome? And if it really was so loathsome and senseless, then why die, and die in agony?” Ivan Ilyich asks himself a few weeks before his death.42 The title of Kurosawa’s film also basically occurs as is in the novel, when the Russian hero exclaims on two occasions, “To live? Live how?”43 In Japan, Kauffmann’s interpretation was aired in the magazine Kinema junpō, but it did not inspire much discussion.44 And yet Oguni confirmed its accuracy in the 1970s when he said that Kurosawa had Tolstoy’s story in mind when the three men got together and discussed the screenplay for the first time.45 Notwithstanding, Japanese critics virtually never bring it up. Following Kauffmann and Simone, other scholars have tried to show that Ikiru borrowed from Western works. Barbara Carr analyzed the film’s allusions to Goethe’s Faust, starting with the black dog and the writer that the screenplay compares with Mephistopheles,46 while Yi Hyangsoon explored the film’s connection with Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat.”47 But here again, nothing was made of these theories in Japan, where they went completely unheeded. There is thus a clear asymmetry between Japanese and non-Japanese approaches. In Japan, Ikiru is treated as a true art film, whereas in the United States in particular, it is considered as part of an essentially Western network of references. Fundamentally, the two approaches are obviously not mutually exclusive: Ikiru can be an art film even if it adapts existing themes or motifs. However, the difference between them clearly shows the symbolic power at stake in this question of influence. In regarding Ikiru as a work inspired by the West, 123

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American critics have transformed it into something they control, whereas in defending the screenplay’s originality, Japanese critics have asserted the independent character of the country’s filmmaking. Use of the concepts of inspiration and influence in critical discourse is, at the general level, an expression of a kind of idealism. The former term suggests that appropriation and reuse of elements from another work are a matter of spiritus, life force and spirit. The latter, which is originally a term from medieval astrology—a flow supposed to come from the stars and act on people and things—also implies a mutable, nonsolid, dematerialized phenomenon. They are therefore synonyms of “partial imitation,” “reuse,” or “adaptation,” but they confer on these actions a higher, metaphysical dimension. And both suggest a continuity between the source of inspiration and the person or work being inspired, since the breath and the flow, not things that can easily be cut into portions, pass from the outside to the inside. In Japanese, “inspiration” is usually translated by kanka or by the more modern, English-based insupirēshon. Kanka literally means “transformation of feeling,” such that in Japanese someone who has been inspired (kanka sareta) has had his perception of things modified through contact with an external object or another person, but there is no reference to the flow of a breath or spirit. “Influence,” meanwhile, is most often equated with eikyō, a word represented by two characters meaning, respectively, “shadow” (ei) and “echo” (kyō). To be influenced is to receive the shadow and echo of something. It therefore involves a physical reflection. In neither case is there any continuity between the emitting source and the object in question but rather a movement of translation, of transformation between separate entities. Ikiru is not an intimately psychological film that belongs in the same category as autobiographical novels, a particularly popular genre in Japan. Rather, it is a work that resonates with other works. In his comments, however, Kurosawa avoids this issue, preferring to emphasize the music or acting. This attitude reveals an ambiguous relationship to the film’s models, which are both present and denied. It is even possible that this was a tactical maneuver on Kurosawa’s part, at a time when he was just tasting success on the international scene. By increasing the number of allusions while claiming the work’s complete originality, he ensured that the film would have familiar elements to both Japanese and foreign audiences while still participating in modernity. However, in addition to the skillfulness 124

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of this technique, which is beyond question, Kurosawa enjoyed playing on his works’ allusive dimension. He was certainly determined to remain vague regarding Ikiru’s echoes in light of the critical response to The Idiot, which had focused so doggedly on its relation to Dostoyevsky’s novel. Throughout his career, Kurosawa explored different uses of source material. In Sugata Sanshirō, he faithfully follows the plot of a novel by Tomita Tsuneo, whereas in Ran, forty years later, he uses elements of King Lear but is careful to avoid direct links. “It is basically impossible to determine to what extent it’s from Shakespeare or a personal invention,” he noted in a 1984 interview.48 In this regard Kurosawa is no different from John Ford or Roberto Rossellini, who like him put themselves on the same footing as the greatest writers. However, the way that Kurosawa marks out his territory and protects himself from criticism reveals a certain fragility— especially since his work, and particularly Ikiru, shows a taste for echoes, traces, and metonymy that goes against the idea of the modern genius, an idea of genius that privileges symbol and the mind’s capacity for synthesis.

A Sense of the Negative Ikiru can be characterized as taking on one of the biggest possible subjects and illustrating it with a simple, everyday story. In this sense, it resembles a kind of fable, especially since it is laden with symbolism. But Ikiru is not a fable. It does not have a moral. Watanabe’s determination inspires his colleague Kimura, but no one else, and even Kimura’s admiration eventually cools. And although Watanabe is a touching character, there is something slightly ridiculous about him that detracts from the exemplarity of his actions. All the more reason to see Ikiru as a modernist work, in the sense that it is not so much the plot that carries the film but a formal system whose main constituents are the gap, the symbol, and the allusion or trace. The gap reveals the way the world works, the symbol signals the human and Romantic attempt to sidestep one’s fate, and the allusion or trace is the minimum attainment that reality ultimately demands. Holes are ubiquitous in Ikiru, making their appearance with the very first image, of a stomach; the organ is white on a black background. X-rays in themselves instantly conjure the idea of illness and threat to a person’s physical well-being, and a voice announces the presence of cancer, confirming this initial thought. The film thus opens with the image of 125

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damaged flesh on the cusp of being perforated because of the ulceration caused by the tumor. Kurosawa had used a similar idea in Drunken Angel. On several occasions in that film, the hero, who is a doctor, looks at the lungs of a man suffering from tuberculosis. The parallel operates not only through the images’ being X-rays but also through what they show: lumps that strain and perforate organs. After this initial appearance of the theme of hollowing out something, there follows a scene that develops the idea metaphorically. Women clamor at the customer windows of the Department of Public Affairs, demanding municipal services. But all the employees dismiss them, sending them to other service windows; no one takes responsibility. Even though the city government should address its citizens’ concerns, the individual employees are hollow, slippery, and insubstantial. The narrator’s voice tells us that there is no point in taking an interest in Watanabe, because he does “nothing but waste time.” The city itself is also full of holes, not the least of which is the leak in the sewage system that the housewives want fixed. Holes appear at all levels of the story, in bodies, in the passage of time, in social relations, in the urban fabric. The backdrop that Kurosawa hangs as a background to life is gnawed through everywhere. The theme of holes is not new in Kurosawa’s work. Drunken Angel ’s center of gravity is a cesspool that acts as a tangible manifestation of the shady and decadent world in which the ailing hero lives. Indeed, the film ends on a series of scenes in which we pass from the muddy hole in the city to the individual pierced by the anxiety about his tuberculosis to a dive into the black hole that is the criminal underworld—like a virus, the theme spreads everywhere you look. Until the end of the 1950s, Kurosawa was very preoccupied with the idea of holes. Indeed, one could almost interpret the recurrence of sewers in his films as a kind of signature, Kurosawa’s name literally meaning “black stream” or “black swamp.” In many ways, Ikiru is an extension of Drunken Angel, which Kurosawa had filmed with the same production company.49 Drunken Angel ends with a shot of the pool of dirty water that figures as an ulcer in the city and society, while Ikiru opens with a close-up of the X-ray of a cancerous tumor and continues with a plotline about a cesspool that needs draining. But whereas Drunken Angel closes on a sinking into the world’s muck, Ikiru begins on a clinical note. The tone is immediately set; it is governed by the fact that the reality whereby nothing is stable, consistent, 126

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or eternal and everything escapes, falls, or collapses is an implacable dictate. That needs to be our starting point. Images of sewers, cancer, debauchery, and neglect belong to different realities, but they all express negativity. The emphasis on negativity in Ikiru, as in a large number of other films of the period, is due substantially to Japan’s defeat in 1945. Millions of families had lost loved ones during the war, and many neighborhoods had been completely obliterated by the bombing. Seven years after the end of the conflict, many visible traces remained both in the urban space and at the psychological level. This is why a cesspool in the middle of a city recalls the bombs that had ravaged the sewage systems. And this is why the smell of death that emanates from Watanabe blends with what the war left behind. Likewise, Mitsuo’s lack of affection for his father is perceived as characteristic of the postwar period (in Japanese, apure gēru, based on the French après-guerre) and its supposed moral decadence. The ubiquity of holes, the standard and repetitive symbol of disappearance, is first and foremost a historical fact that recent events had (once again) forced the Japanese to recognize. However, even though Ikiru uses history to indirectly reveal the finite nature of things and people, Kurosawa does not just document the human condition but also uses negativity in a heuristic way. The silences, the scene cuts, the monochrome shots, and the contrasts that hollow out spaces, as well as all the parataxic processes and chronological interruptions, are stylistic manifestations of the idea of the hole. The silences are particularly important. A notable example is the scene in which Watanabe walks home from the clinic after having been told that he is terminally ill. The camera follows him for a moment as he walks. There is no sound at all, reflecting the hero’s anguished withdrawal into his thoughts. As he approaches a crossing, a truck suddenly appears and just misses him, forcing Watanabe back to an awareness of his surroundings while the city noise becomes abruptly audible. Flashbacks are equally important, as are the recurring shots (of Watanabe’s portrait, for example) and over- or underexposed shots—devices that interrupt the linearity of the narrative or strain the eye. Also worth noting is the close-up on the swinging door shortly after Watanabe has left the clinic, a moment that poignantly conveys that a hole is always an opening onto another side of reality. But at least history’s negative legacy leads to something positive, the creation of a work. “A good part of our life is passed in plugging up holes, in filling empty places, in realizing and 127

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symbolically establishing a plenitude,” wrote Sartre in Being and Nothingness.50 In this case, it is because he has time that Watanabe does nothing; it is because he has none that he starts to work. Likewise, it is because there is a small empty lot that a park can be envisioned, and going backward from there, it is because the city has been destroyed that there is an empty lot. Each hollow carries the thing that will fit it, each fullness attracts the force that will eviscerate it. Ikiru is based on a vision of the world that invokes on the one hand existentialism, which was then in vogue in Japan, and, on the other, Buddhism, notably at the level of rhetorical system. The only positive that emerges in the first half of the film is the doing, the action, which the stream of negatives seems to render ever more necessary.

The Failures of Metamorphosis Ikiru is divided into two main parts. The first ends with the hero’s decision to achieve one last thing before he dies. The second, which takes place during the course of the wake, relates in retrospect how he managed to complete the project. At the semiotic level, we can say—using the distinction formulated by Roman Jakobson in the 1950s—that the first half is mainly metaphorical and the second, metonymic. The first part of the film stages a series of scenes in which the hero establishes his relationship with characters who symbolize the various ways in which he could survive. The doctor, representative of science, holds Watanabe’s literal survival in his hands; the son is the face of his genetic continuity; the writer offers him the opportunity to adhere to the material world by keeping him distracted from his thoughts; and the young woman embodies the root of the life force. The first two are realistic, while the second two have a markedly literary dimension, but they all represent a means of survival and are primarily symbols. The point of these scenes is to examine the hero’s options for communicating with these various characters and for perpetuating himself in or through them. The device that ought to allow the hero to combine with the people he encounters is metaphor. Metaphor allows the assimilation of one entity by another following a relationship determined by a formal analogy or an allotopic behavior. It enables the perception of a subject that is not explicit, allowing it a form of remote survival, whereas metonymy keeps the object within the limits of what it is constituted of or adjoins. 128

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Metaphorical constructions in which “substitutive associations dominate” are frequent in the first half of the film.51 The initial scene in which we see the ward office employees repeatedly passing the buck is made up of a succession of fade-outs, a process that Jakobson held up as the typical example of filmic metaphor.52 Similarly, zooming in from the outdoors to an interior space through an opening also has a pronounced metaphorical dimension. There are also a number of shots, notably the festive scene with the writer, where a simultaneously musical and visual rhythm unifies people and machines. And finally there are a number of classic metaphors and comparisons, such as the mummy and the black dog, which punctuate the narrative and sustain the hope of a metamorphosis. The whole first half comes down to a quest for a sign that would allow the hero to escape from himself and be grafted onto an external reality. Despite repeated efforts, the process of substitution never gets completed. Even though Watanabe would have liked to communicate with the doctor, to entrust himself to his knowledge, he encounters only lies. He is neither physically nor symbolically taken care of. In the scene where he desperately cranes his head toward the physician, hoping to get an honest response from him (which could be hard, but would allow him to rely on science or at least to share the concerns he has about himself), the shot/ countershot formally signals the impossibility of transfer from one man to the other (figure 16). Science cannot take on Watanabe’s decline and solitude, suggested indirectly by the shot where the nurse puts his fallen coat back on his chair. His relationship with Mitsuo works along the same lines. Watanabe would like to be listened to and comforted by his son, but most of all he yearns to feel that he will continue to live through him and thereby receive his reward for the sacrifice he has made, since he chose not to get remarried in order to better take care of his child. This is why he goes directly to his son’s room as soon as he learns that he is terminally ill and then runs to his son when he hears Mitsuo’s voice. But there is no meaningful contact; the connection is not there, only a feeling of embarrassment. The static shot of the baseball bat that is keeping the door wedged open mirrors Watanabe’s imprisonment and his inability to share his pain or to escape his own mind. The scene in which Mitsuo deliberately opens a newspaper when his father is trying to talk to him operates in exactly the same way (figure 17). 129

FIGURE 16 (top) Watanabe with the doctor. Kurosawa Akira, Ikiru, 1952. (Tōhō Studios,

Tokyo) FIGURE 17 (bottom) Watanabe with his son, Mitsuo. Kurosawa Akira, Ikiru, 1952. (Tōhō Studios, Tokyo)

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The third character that Watanabe meets is a novelist, a figure inspired by the idea of the shunned artist, resuscitated after the war by writers such as Oda Sakunosuke, who died in 1947. Unlike in the previous two cases, a channel of communication gets established between the two men. Spurred by alcohol, Watanabe confides in his interlocutor. The writer takes an interest in his story, encourages him to make the most of life, and takes him to a series of nightclubs. But the men are operating under a misunderstanding. In the writer’s eyes, Watanabe’s pain is potential novel material; it is “interesting,” he says, and “makes him think” of what it means to be a novelist. The thoughts he has are on the aesthetic plane. “It is true that there is something beautiful in unhappiness. That is where man finds truth. . . . Having stomach cancer opens your eyes to your existence. Man is a frivolous creature. It is only when he comes face-to-face with death that he realizes how beautiful life is,” he explains in a scene where the two men’s postures highlight the discrepancy of their outlooks.53 The writer frames his thoughts from a theoretical perspective without considering Watanabe’s pain. As the evening progresses, the men stop being able to talk to each other, a silence that makes for a stark contrast with the effervescence that surrounds them (figure 18). The attempt at Romantic identification between Watanabe and the figure of the shunned artist ends in failure. Neither literary images nor material pleasures are of any help to Watanabe in escaping from himself. His series of meetings with the young office worker Tōyō, which conclude the end of the first part, have a similar outcome. But the direction is reversed, as Yoshimoto notes: “Watanabe repeats the writer’s mistake, for whom he was just a fictional character.”54 The ailing old man sees the young woman as just a fount of youth, without seeing that she is artful, naive, and proud enough not to want to look poor and unhappy. He considers her like a mythological female figure, both maternal and erotic, into whom he would like to dissolve. The touching and yet repulsive scene in which he leans eagerly toward her crystallizes his desire to escape from himself and melt into the feminine image (figure 19). Nonetheless, Tōyō is not exactly on the same continuum as the others, as her distinctive voice immediately signals. Although she cannot take on Watanabe’s distress, she provides him with a model—the mechanical rabbit—that puts a positive spin on the repetitive nature of both work and life.

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FIGURE 18 (top) Watanabe and the novelist. Kurosawa Akira, Ikiru, 1952. (Tōhō Studios,

Tokyo) FIGURE 19 (bottom) Watanabe and Tōyō. Kurosawa Akira, Ikiru, 1952. (Tōhō Studios,

Tokyo)

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The first half of the screenplay is organized as a panoramic view of the possibilities of life outside oneself. But neither science, children, worldly pleasure, nor the figure of the woman can function as a support for the projection of a person. These attempts at incorporation consistently fail. No symbolic sign, whether words, gestures, or images, manages to bridge the gap. Conversation always leads to misunderstanding and highlights the gap between people. Bodies have a mass that can never coincide. Symbolic figures, such as the dog eating the meat that Watanabe throws to him, are essentially negative. The metaphorical register is just an illusion that elicits nausea, like red-light districts. In this sense, the film includes a critique of Romanticism, the metaphorical nature of which is clear.

The Function of Traces Ikiru contains a profusion of metonymic signs as well as traces and echoes. Metonymy, to use Marc Bonhomme’s definition, indicates a designatory cotopic transfer.55 It allows a given object to be associated with the value of the whole of which it is a part. The “trace,” however, implies a physical contact and acquires circumstantial value. Both metonymy and the trace bear witness to the survival of the referent through fragmentation or impregnation. Ikiru confers considerable importance on the graphical, from the opening X-ray (radiography) to the funeral photographs (the portrait of Watanabe and that of his wife) via the calligraphic penmanship and seal imprint on the certificate. These various images occur throughout the film and do not have a predetermined valence; they can denote something negative (Watanabe is just a rubber-stamper in the eyes of his colleagues) or positive (the portrait on the altar recalls the loved one). But in either case, the staging confers on them a particular power and semantic and emotional effectiveness: an X-ray opens the film, Watanabe’s portrait serves as a thematic thread at the end of the narrative, and on several occasions the new hat calls the hero to mind, in both the first and second halves of the film. Ikiru is not Kurosawa’s first film to play explicitly on traces, reflections, and other signs of contact. The Most Beautiful—a work that Richie thinks shares something with Ikiru56—opens with a scene in which Shimura Takashi, playing the manager of an optical-lens factory, addresses his employees through a megaphone. A fault in the amplifier causes a stuttering 133

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effect, “Here’s the factory director. . . . Here’s the factory director,” and a small adjustment is needed before the machine can handle the human voice; media are by nature not perfect. It is the mind that animates matter—even with the right material, only the will can make it high quality. Such is the message of the film in the context of the war. But at a more general level, reflections and traces are vitally important because they embody people’s emotions, like the parental portrait that the young girls greet every evening. Attempts at metamorphosis or escape from oneself through another person always end in failure in Ikiru. These attempts are emphasized through the inclusion of metonymic and indicial motifs that capture the attention and contrast with the disintegration of metaphor. They are especially clear in the second half of the film, which contrasts with the first; a good example is the use of the funeral portrait, which appears in about thirty shots. It not only punctuates the story but also contributes to structuring the space, since it is used as the vanishing point each time the narration restarts following a flashback. Funeral portraits became widespread in Japan in the 1930s and are now de rigueur. They work in conjunction with a number of objects placed on the altar: a tablet penned with the deceased’s Buddhist (or Shinto) name, flowers, and some personal objects belonging to the deceased (in this case, the hat [figure 20]). Today, most funerals are governed by the idea of the trace. One might even say that in modern Japan, most traces have a funerary connotation. This is certainly the case in Ikiru: the X-ray portends death, the two photographs are funeral portraits, the seal is presented as belonging to a man who is “not alive.” Traces and reflections belong to the world of negativity but at the same time work against it. They denote absence but also, by their very materiality, confirm existence; they are thus positive images of negation. This is admittedly a rather minimal positivity, but it is all the more likely to engender emotion precisely because it is so fragile. Between dreams of metamorphosis or transmutation and the minimal positivity represented by the fragmentation of the being, or by impregnation through contact, Kurosawa very clearly favors the latter. Traces are not used at only the thematic level. On two occasions, for example, Watanabe’s portrait is shown in a close-up that cuts out the frame and therefore the distance that the frame provides. For the few moments 134

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FIGURE 20 Watanabe’s hat. Kurosawa Akira, Ikiru, 1952. (Tōhō Studios, Tokyo)

in which time is thus suspended, the film reveals its photographic nature, normally hidden by the hasty succession of images. In other words, the film reveals its petrifying character, especially since the portrait is of a departed person. Kurosawa thus claims film as a photographic art that acts, by photochemical impregnation, as a repository of life’s smallest details. The change of narrative mode shows this as well. Whereas the beginning of the film is dominated by expressionist and dreamlike registers, the staging of the second half privileges a realist perspective. The wake, for example, recalls the legal drama genre, with its prominent reference point (the portrait of the hero to whom justice is owed, which takes the place of the judge) and a succession of tight shots of the various main characters, framed in such a way as to bring out each one’s subjectivity and puncture the theatrical aspect. In contrast, the flashback scenes that track the hero’s efforts to reach his goal are replete with wide-angle, static shots that increase the impression of objectivity. By the end of the second half, the data provided through the two modes converge to bring out the truth about the credit that Watanabe deserves. 135

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In fact, however, Ikiru is two-thirds constructed around explorations of potential Elsewheres. The metonymic devices are not sufficient in themselves but make sense only in the context of a specific rhetorical framework—in this case, in opposition to the lure of metaphor. Ikiru is built around a complex plan that contrasts expressionism-metaphorillusion with realism-metonymy-truth. The first set is the film’s practical topos, which exists in the diegetic realm: the modern hero de facto spends the majority of his time looking for a metaphorical vehicle. The second is the ontological topos: traces punctuate the film like the narrowest possible horizon of the real, but we can discover their actual value only at the end, during the transition from life to death, like Watanabe in his park. This idea can be expanded. Like Kishida Ryūsei, who, in the face of the avant-garde’s vanity, relaunched himself by exploring the possibilities of representation, Kurosawa Akira’s film unfolds within the Romantic paradigm, and it is only after the failure of metamorphosis—the creation of the self in others—has been established that endowing signs of contact with a positivity they did not have to begin with emerges as a possibility. Both the painter and the director use the same process, the same tripartite progression that begins with the attempt to open the world through a projection of the ego, followed by the recognition of failure, and ending with reinvestment in “reality” as a way of coping with the sublime. What emerges from an exploration of the works themselves is a unique creative scheme that enriches what was revealed through critical analysis of the theoretical dimension.

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9

Araki Nobuyoshi’s Sentimental Journey—Winter, or, Eternal Bones

Sentimental Journey—Winter is an album that brings together two important and opposite moments in the life of photographer Araki Nobuyoshi: his honeymoon with Yōko in the early 1970s and her death in 1990.1 One of the shots is particularly striking. Yōko has just died; her body has been cremated. In the photograph, three objects stand out from a black background: the funeral portrait (a picture taken by Araki in the 1980s); the vertical tablet inscribed with Yōko’s Buddhist name (the name conferred on a deceased person); and, at the center, standing separate like a small statue, the most significant of all the bones remaining from the cremation, the hyoid bone, which adjoins the Adam’s apple—in Japanese nodobotoke (literally, the “Buddha of the throat”) (figure 21).2 In the middle, then, the Buddha bone, a hard and absolute image, a vibrant stasis, a concentration of sympathetic energy; next to it, like the consorts of a deity, the photographic image and the written trace. An imprint of the inside flesh, the bone recalls the visible whole. Its ontological nature, its consubstantiality with the signified, its physical characteristics, and the rarity of its appearance make the modern bone the zero-degree image par excellence,3 the model for all things associated with the living or that come to life through contact with it. Normally, human remains, whether corpses or bones, tend to stay hidden. They are objects that don’t often get pictured, that resist being portrayed, and indeed that resist being termed “objects.” Still, we feel the

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FIGURE 21 Portrait, bone, and tablet. Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey—Winter, 1991. Gelatin silver print. (© Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo)

need to install monuments where they are buried, which serve the double function of hiding them and signaling their existence. Bones possess a complex relationship with the visible, and Araki’s work provides an interesting angle on how to analyze it. Araki is particularly famous for his erotic images. About thirty of them figure in the first Sentimental Journey,4 which dates from 1971, and a few make a reappearance at the beginning of Winter. Araki is also known for the obsessive way he approaches photography, which has made him one of its more prolific practitioners. He has what one might call a priapic gaze, a fascination with female genitalia that is the most visible sign of an ungraspable and viscous world characterized by that which lures but eludes. “From now on,” he wrote in the 1970s, “we are entering a period where we will become ‘fairground showmen’ and charge an entrance fee to sniff one’s wife’s menstruation.”5 This dimension is not developed in Winter, but the images that he created around the theme of death must be considered in light of this other key aspect of his work.

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Repetition as System The number of photographs taken by Araki between the mid-1960s and the present day probably amounts to hundreds of thousands. This colossal output has been circulated mainly in albums; Araki has published about four hundred, the number of individual canvases that some painters might hope to produce in their lifetime. The album is where his work took shape and really comes into its own.6 In addition, these albums often have captions, notes, and text fragments written by Araki, which help to link the images and allow the emergence of a narrative. This key feature is seldom acknowledged in the West, however, since the big publishing houses, like Taschen and Phaidon, have not attempted to “translate” Araki’s albums.7 Instead, they favor merely compiling shocking images, thereby eliminating the highly literary dimension of the photographer’s work. Araki has the reputation of spending every minute of his life taking pictures, whether in the professional context of doing a shoot for a fashion magazine, in the semiprofessional setting of an event or a dinner party, or in his private life. In the words of Alain Jouffroy, “It is by tumbling around in the real that Araki photographs absolutely everything that comes near, but also everything that recedes, until just before it disappears from sight. Nothing seems to escape him.”8 The camera is for him a kind of natural extension, “a part of his body.”9 And even when he is not using it, he nonetheless remains in the world of photography by giving frequent interviews and writing extensively on his visual obsession. In 1999, the compilation of all his interviews, articles, notes, and essays made up eight 350-page volumes. “This sounds a little bombastic,” he wrote in 1996, “but taking pictures gives me the same feeling as living. I cannot not have a camera on me. Nothing stays in the memory if you do not have a camera to see things through.”10 Shattā wo kiru: literally, “cutting the shutter,” or, more idiomatically, “pressing the shutter button.” Araki uses this phrase often, thereby indirectly associating photography with the slice, the mechanical gesture. The recurrence of this phrase is one of the many ways to approach the repetitive aspect of his work. No matter what fascination a subject holds for him, or how important the layout and technical settings are, the last action is always exactly the same—a movement of pressing down with one’s finger

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on a high-technology mechanism designed by unknown engineers. But what is true of all photographers is amplified in his case by the constant use he makes of his camera. Araki seems able to take photographs under absolutely any circumstance. When he is working under commission, he takes professional photographs; he can shoot for fun; he can shoot in the happy moments of his life and also in the saddest. His relationship with taking photographs has something of the obsessive about it. Modernization led Japanese artists and intellectuals to value genius: those rare moments of solitary creation, the encounter of the individual mind with that of the people. But it also prompted opposite reactions: appeals to tradition, to putting egos aside, to rejection of the quest for beauty. This dialectic continued throughout the twentieth century; it is a known and theorized phenomenon, and Araki is perfectly familiar with it. In an interview he gave in 2009, he describes Nojima Yasuzō as the archetypal photographer of yesteryear who “wanted to make art” and created “icons” with a “sense of history” (it may be worth noting that Nojima was a close acquaintance of Kishida Ryūsei’s).11 Araki, however, likes to present himself as an artisan and painter of popular pictures, rejecting the label of “artist.” In Tokyo’s strippers, he seeks the heirs of Yoshiwara’s geishas and compares himself with Sharaku and Hokusai.12 Ishida Hidetaka writes that he “is without a doubt an artist who attests to the survival of Edo erotic culture and maintains contact with the universe of the ‘floating world’ that Japanese prints depicted,” which shows that Araki’s premodern identity has not passed unobserved.13 Yanagi Sōetsu, founder of the Japanese folk-craft movement (mingei), was the epitome of the modern intellectual who took issue with modernism. Whereas in the early years of the twentieth century he professed— initially in reference to himself—that will creates talent and advocated the free expression of individual genius, he changed views in the 1920s in favor of the anonymous artisan who neglects aesthetic pursuit in the dayto-day accomplishment of repeated gestures.14 Taking inspiration from Pure Land Buddhism, which exalts faith and encourages believers to yield to the power of sacred texts, he developed an aesthetic of repetition and resignation. In a passage about Song-dynasty artisans, he wrote, Easy handling of the brush and the boldness of composition resulted from the fact that all children had to draw the same thing a hundred 140

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times a day. This repetition conferred an extraordinary dexterity and a hand speed that must have been amazing to witness. There was no room for hesitation, anxiety, or ambition. Unconcerned with such things, the children worked in total detachment. The monotony of repetition, which today we would look on with horror, and the tedious labor that these young men were constrained to accept as their unavoidable destiny, were, however, a source of the work’s beauty. Having to repeat the same drawing a hundred times a day makes the artist forget what he is drawing; he is thus liberated from the dualist tension between dexterity and clumsiness and no longer has to spend time distinguishing the beautiful from the ugly; he just needs to move his brush quickly and without hesitation, having no awareness of what he’s painting.15

Araki’s work has nothing to do with popular art as Yanagi understood it—that is, involving a return to rural life and values. There are, however, some threads that connect the two men, such as the rejection of grandiose art, respect for the techniques of execution, and an interest in the ordinary and day-to-day. Araki also expresses an affinity for Pure Land Buddhism. “A photographer must never forget that he depends on the Strength of the Other [tariki hongan]. A photograph is not a work of creation. It is to melt behind the scenes. It is to flatten oneself; one has to disappear completely,” he wrote in 1983.16 Araki thus picked up some of Yanagi’s notions and applied them to his own universe—that of the metropolis and its suburbs, of love and sex. He was probably not consciously aware of it. But the point of highlighting this genealogy is to situate Araki in the long history of reactions to modernity and at the same time to put paid to hasty comparisons with popular painters of the Edo period. Araki is a modern artist, and his modernity is to be found precisely in the prickly nature of his relationship to modernity: it is his head-on opposition to certain forms of modernity that makes him modern. In the mid-1960s, Araki—who wanted to take his creativity beyond the limitations of advertising—began developing original output, and some of the themes of his future work can be found in these endeavors. At a general level, the 1960s were characterized by the rediscovery of various cultural forms, both past and present, that questioned or undermined the ideal of the creative artist. Participants in this trend included the painter Okamoto Tarō, who developed a passion for Okinawa and 141

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Jōmon culture; the choreographer Hijikata Tatsumi, who took an interest in Tōhoku’s shamanic dances; and the designer Yokoo Tadanori, who reclaimed the ukiyo-e tradition. All the detours via folk art gave center stage to relinquishing consciousness and acting on spontaneity, instinct, and the natural fluidity of movements. These attempts merged in spirit with the various performances on offer at the time by Gutai or High Red Center artists, for whom improvisation played an important part. Seen in context, Araki’s attraction to premodern culture thus belongs to a general trend and resembles a generational phenomenon. In Japan, as in the West, artists made numerous experiments aimed at “bringing art closer to real life.” References to the floating world were just one way among many. One of the major influences on Araki was the photographer Moriyama Daidō. A signature trait of Moriyama’s work is the uncontrolled proliferation of shots; Moriyama is preoccupied with surrendering his gaze and his consciousness, as he describes in the following passage: The whistle of the Hankyū train, carried by the wind, comes all the way to me. I can also smell a wood fire. I then realize that I am once again completely lost in the midst of a disconcerting space-time continuum. Coming back to my senses, I press the shutter button facing the landscape that is before me. It doesn’t matter what I take. Why do I shoot photographs like this, moving my target from one spot of light to another? I was suddenly overcome with a feeling of powerlessness.17

What this describes is a kind of surrender to the machine that brings with it a repetitive gesture. Araki never describes any such mystical moments, but the depth of the desire and empathy he feels toward the people he shoots allows him to let go of his own willpower, like the imagined artisan of days gone by. A modern return to the premodern, a rejection of the intention of making art, and the use of copy or repetition all form a part of this generational movement, whose Japaneseness emerges through its references to Buddhism, Edo-period art, and forms of culture that are supposedly uncontaminated by Western influence and exist on the country’s margins—a movement that thus aspires to be non-Western, nonartistic, and nontranscendent. To this system of values we must add everydayness (nichijōsei). In Araki’s work, keeping diary-like notes is one of the many signs of his 142

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desire to anchor his art in a brief, pulsating time frame. It is interesting to note in this regard that keeping a diary or daily notes, a very common practice until the end of the 1920s among avant-garde artists, later got somewhat lost. Araki’s generation would rediscover it and play with the possibilities it offers. In addition to Araki, practitioners include Yokoo Tadanori, Akasegawa Genpei, and Ikeda Masuo, all of whom not only kept diaries or wrote up their observations but also made them public.18 In Winter, the concern with everydayness is revealed primarily by the choice of subjects: the cat lying on the photographer’s lap, the cat getting out of the bath, Yōko eating in the hospital cafeteria, the apartment’s balcony in winter, children tobogganing in the park, the city seen through the window of a car, the cat hidden in various corners of the apartment, piles of melting snow along roadsides. The extraordinary— Yōko’s death—is not sectioned off in isolation but, on the contrary, is made to fit as much as possible in the normal flow of life; the day-to-day is photographed and shown as much as the moments of crisis. Drama therefore contaminates banality and banality contaminates drama, making the onlooker’s heart oscillate between sentimentality and fatalism. “I see something in order that makes ordinary days chase one another,” Araki wrote, somewhat enigmatically, in 1971.19 Meanwhile, the concern with the day-to-day also manifests itself at the formal level. His compositions are always slightly imbalanced. The horizontal lines—for example, the railings and walls of the balcony, which feature about twenty times in the album—are never exactly parallel with the edge of the image. They are always oblique, if only by a few degrees. And whenever there is a perpendicular element—for example, the door of the incinerator—there is a significant parallax effect that distorts the geometry of the object. Araki’s habit of always imposing a slight imbalance on his compositions has the effect, among others, of removing the impression of professionalism, of neat and carefully perfected work, and evoking instead something of the charm and spontaneity of amateur photography. His use of a Polaroid speaks to the same intention. A photograph creates a milestone. Its way of capturing a moment invites the mind to label it with spatial and temporal information. Where and when, says the caption. This aspect of photography is crucial for Araki, who dates most of his shots directly on the film. In the second part of Winter, the disappearance of his wife is presented like a photo 143

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story in chronological order. There are ninety-one images, all dated and sometimes captioned, taken between May 17, 1989, and February 1, 1990. The first shows Araki and his wife dancing cheek to cheek; a marginal note specifies that this picture was the last one taken of the couple and that it dates from Yōko’s birthday. The last image depicts Chiro, the couple’s cat, leaping through the snow six days after Yōko’s death (January 27) and four days after her cremation. The dating of each image serves as a reminder of the primacy of mechanical time, which is relentlessly consistent and independent of events. The regular succession of days is a fundamental and irrefutable structure, but nothing better illustrates the systematic and planned nature of Araki’s work than the presence of these dates. Because it is not, in his case, done out of a love of either classification (for which dating the back of the photograph would have sufficed) or technique (in the sense of people who feel the need to experiment with every one of their camera’s functions). The use he makes of dates belongs in the framework of a vast artistic project that he began with his first version of Sentimental Journey, published in 1971. As has often been noted, this looks more like the series Date Paintings by Kawara On—which is among the classics of conceptual art and with which Araki was familiar— than like amateur photography. The presence of dates on the photographs shows a sense of duration, an anticipation of the future. Indeed, Araki contrasts the “longevity” of the dated shots with the “eternity” of those that exist outside any time reference.20 This is because he knew that tomorrow he would again write dates on his photographs, and that he had dated the ones taken today—in other words, because he thought in terms of a series and wanted each image to find a posteriori its place relative to the others in an ensemble under construction. In choosing to date his photographs and sticking to this resolution day after day, Araki clearly shows that he is not playing on a purely emotive or sentimental attitude to time, as he might be inclined to claim, but that his work is governed by a projective and intellectual approach. The fact that these dates could be false only serves to emphasize the deliberate nature of this aspect of his work. Like Kawara, Araki thus pursues a project in which time is a central element. It is in this sense that we can say that his work is conceptual. When, in 1971, he decided to photograph his honeymoon and thereby blast the barrier between public and private time—a barrier that is perhaps hard to 144

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imagine for today’s constant and prolific photographers—he established the principle of every moment’s covalence and defined the direction he would articulate in his work from that point forward. It was a thoughtful and considered decision implemented with courage, determination, and impressive consistency. His work has a fundamentally systematic dimension; it is not uniquely in retrospect that Araki’s work achieves coherence. There is, moreover, no naïveté in his work. Although he refuses the status of artist in the nineteenth-century sense, his vision of creation—an exercise of the individual will embodied in the realization of the aesthetic project—allows us to situate him in the mainstream of international contemporary art. In other words, the way he calls himself a “genius” (tensai) is predominantly parodic and burlesque but nevertheless reveals complex feelings toward the question of the artist’s position. From the first version of Sentimental Journey, which for Itō Toshiharu marks Araki’s “real beginning,”21 the photographer bets that life will prove him right: this album, he says in the preface, is his “pledge as a photographer.”22 We must therefore be quite cynical of all interpretations of Araki that confine him to the stereotype, which he himself helped to create, of the photographer who “thinks with his finger”23 and gives no thought to art.24 His references to death are another clear sign that Araki conceived his work while thinking about the future. We may take as examples the picture of Yōko lying asleep in a boat as if “she were crossing the river of death” and the one of the stone bench that strongly recalls a sarcophagus (figure 22).25 Or we can point to the images of wrinkled sheets, which, because they show the evidence of a presence, hold a nostalgic dimension and thus a whiff of death, in the same way that travel often does in the Japanese literary tradition. Araki presumably did not know that his wife would predecease him, but he had understood that, whatever fate had in store, a work depicting today’s day-to-day to a future of certain death could not, in the long term, fail and that tomorrow’s day-to-day would eventually be a powerful echo of yesterday’s. In this regard, it is significant that this first work was signed by both spouses; it was designed to be effective regardless of which outlived the other. The ensemble of Araki’s work can be seen as unique, a lifelong project in which each snapshot has a reason to exist only in retrospect and in anticipation of the author’s dissolution. Fundamentally conceived in the expectation of death, then, this work considers the succession of days within the scope of a fixed term. 145

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FIGURE 22 Stone bench. Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey—Winter, 1991. Gelatin silver print. (© Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo)

This is why there is never any frivolity in Araki’s day-to-day. Indeed, he writes, “I have always had the feeling that there is an old man in me who looks in amusement at what the child or little boy that I am is doing.”26 There is no better way to put it. In the empathy and repetition of gestures, a worried intelligence plays, looks, and controls. Philippe Forest has managed to capture this ambivalence. He notes that all Araki’s work proceeds from an “inaugural decision” and that Sentimental Journey is “the first volume in a series that constitutes a coherent self and proceeds as an autobiographical novel.”27 However, he is also keenly aware of the living and unstable nature of the work and above all appreciates that it appears like a “memorial continually started afresh.” This is why he suggests not “putting too much emphasis” on analyzing the systematic and conceptual aspects of the Japanese photographer’s work. He even finds it “surprising” to discover such an approach in Araki, preferring to remind us that in the final instance Araki is “less the author [of his work] than its actor or witness.”28 Forest is honest in that he says what he sees. In this case, he recognizes the conceptual nature of Araki’s work but does not know what to do with this observation, which disturbs 146

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his image of a Japan where time is just a succession of moments; no doubt, he also feels the danger in pushing a Eurocentric perspective onto Japanese reality. On the one side we thus have Araki, who cerebrally developed an artistic life project but always tries to hide the intellectual aspect so that he neither appears too idealistic and Western nor loses the freshness of his contact with the lived moment and, on the other, a French writer who, although noting the systematic character of this Japanese work, fears its contradictions and does not want to renounce the relief from selfconfrontation that exoticism provides. This dynamic is typical of one aspect of current Japan–Western relations in the cultural domain. However, the study of Araki’s beginnings reveals his constant desire to find new protocols, which in turn indicates his fundamentally conceptual view of art. For example, in 1965 he began a series of pictures of women in the subway but stopped when he discovered that Walker Evans had already done something similar—proof that Araki valued the originality of his approach more than the impulse of his desires.29 He tried using a photocopier to make his first albums, an explicit reference to Andy Warhol and Pop Art. He sent one of his first albums to strangers chosen at random from the telephone book, an undertaking that recalls Fluxus. As for the series Sur-sentimentalist Manifest No. 2, showing women with spread legs, it is impossible not to see a link with Marcel Duchamp, who had been rediscovered only a short time before. The thoughtful nature of Araki’s artistic process becomes an undeniable premise. The chronology even shows that such intentionality is present in his work from the start. The project he defined, however, carries within it the means of its own concealment, since he asserts the primacy of both sentimental attachment to things and repetition of gesture, which with time leads to a kind of forgetting of the initial intention. Araki’s work is structurally based on a demand for creativity, novelty, and assertion of individual originality but nevertheless gets produced in the day-to-day as an essentially mimetic regime. This mechanism is fairly common among modern Japanese writers and artists. I mentioned previously the already long-standing case of Yanagi Sōetsu, who, before taking an interest in folk arts and extolling the virtues of a creative process free from the desire to make art, was one of the spearheads of the avant-garde, contributing to the knowledge of Van Gogh and Rodin.30 But one can also compare Araki with contemporaries 147

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like Suga Kishio and Akasegawa Genpei. Suga—and, more broadly, all the artists of the Mono-ha movement—developed a stance rejecting “creation” in favor of extracting objects from their usual environment and establishing relationships between objects. Behind the minimal installations of plaques, stones, ropes, and bits of wood, the artist organizes the disappearance of his own individuality in order to better identify the uniqueness of relationships as they exist in situ and fluctuating with the world. He contrasts the object (understood as a category of the mind) that can be imitated and reproduced—that is, a consumer product—with the thing (mono) that exists only in context, infinitely variable and by its essence not reproducible.31 The same goes for Akasegawa, like Araki a quite prolific artist. Of particular interest among his many projects is Tomason, begun in the 1970s. The word tomason is coined from the surname of the American baseball player Gary Thomasson, who was bought for a very high price by a Japanese team but whose performance proved disastrous. In a humorous and acerbic vein (the use of a Western name is in itself not neutral), Akasegawa uses tomason to designate objects of doubtful utilitarian value—a staircase that leads to a wall, a large stone embedded in the middle of a sidewalk, a blocked-off window, miniature utility poles—especially when it appears that these objects have been deliberately preserved and maintained, which adds to their quirky and absurd character.32 After a lengthy quest, in which he got help from colleagues and students, Akasegawa collected photographs, sketches, and descriptions of about a hundred tomasons in a book published in 1985. These objects are not works but just accidents and lucky finds—“superart,” as Akasegawa calls it: “Art is what the artist makes according to his intention, but superart is created unconsciously by a superartist who does not know he is making superart. This is why, in superart, although there may be assistants, there is no creator, only the people who discover it.”33 Araki fully belongs to a generation of artists who, in the aftermath of the student protests of 1968 and 1969, use conceptual and systematic procedures to subvert the view of art as heroic, Romantic, monumental, and eternal, disavowed again and again as Western—a generation that privileges nonintervention over the real in the creation of works, the repetition of a gesture over the production or reproduction of objects, and the absorption of individuality into environment over the assertion of subjectivity. 148

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In Araki’s summary, “Photography and art are encounters. This is why it is about ‘moving oneself’ rather than ‘doing.’ ”34 It is in this historic and aesthetic context that we must understand the unfurling of Araki’s work, whose fundamental concerns coincide with the work of contemporary artists using media other than photograph albums.

Images of Bones Having examined what makes Sentimental Journey a key element in a wider artistic project, we have to look at what the work consists of and, to begin with, return to the theme of the bone outlined at the beginning of this chapter: the sight of the bone, the photography of bone, the possibility of turning bones into images. I will subsequently explore the opposite proposition, the image as bone or, as Georges Didi-Huberman might say, the bone-image. Winter includes a series of pictures around the theme of cremation— two shots of a hearse seen from behind; the coffin on a trolley in the crematorium; the door of the incinerator; smoke escaping from the chimney of the crematorium; the bleached bones on the trolley following the cremation (figure 23); the hyoid bone placed in front of the funeral portrait of Yōko (see figure 21); two views of Araki carrying the burial urn. The primary—and not inconsiderable—interest of this ensemble is ethnographic, given how very seldom the subject is depicted. Since the nineteenth century, burial practices in Japan have changed to a remarkable extent. We know that prior to the Meiji period, cremations represented less than 20 percent of such practices and that burial was by far the most widespread funerary custom.35 But during the twentieth century, cremation slowly became more popular. From approximately 20 percent in 1900, it reached 54 percent in 1950, 86 percent in 1976, and 99.8 percent in 2005, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, or 1,112,178 cremations against 1,989 burials. In big cities like Tokyo and Osaka, the proportion of cremations is virtually 100 percent. This trend is global, but Japan tops the list in terms of prevalence. To put this in perspective, the figure in Great Britain, which is number two, is 70 percent, while it is only 50 percent in South Korea. From a numerical perspective, then, in just over a century there has been a radical transformation in the physical relationship to human remains, since cremation is 149

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FIGURE 23 At the crematorium. Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey—Winter, 1991. Gelatin silver print. (© Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo)

followed by the collection of the bones, which involves seeing and handling them. Today, cremation is a relatively standardized process in Japan, with just a few local variations. What is certain, however, is that most of the practices described in the guides distributed by caretakers and municipalities are recent adaptations of practices that used to be only regional or limited to a small segment of the population. It is also clear that this transformation in practices has been accompanied by an evolution in the perception of bones: today, cremation serves less to ease the deceased’s passage to the beyond as to supply relics that help families in their grieving process. Cremation takes place in three stages: the family’s farewell to the body, the process of actual cremation, and the deposit of the bones in an urn. It is this third part that differs the most from anything seen in the West. It is a very powerful moment in family life and, more broadly, in social and individual life; the moment of visual and physical contact with bones is one of particular intensity, especially since it immediately follows the cre-

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mation of the body. It is a crucial moment, not only at the symbolic and religious levels but also at the level of the economy of the gaze—of what can be seen and how. Unlike in the United States and Europe, the bones are not reduced to ash; on the contrary, it is important that some of them remain identifiable, “since,” as Ikezawa Natsuki writes in one of his short stories, “the whole art of working at a crematorium consists precisely in leaving bones in their basic shape” (which is indeed always written prominently in funeral homes’ advertising brochures).36 Two kinds of cremation have emerged since World War II. The first, called “on trolley,” exposes the body to relatively gradual combustion. The bones fall down through the consumed wood and end up on the trolley surface in a roughly anatomical layout. This is what Araki chose for his wife and the method documented in Winter. In the other, more economical method known as “on rack,” burners are placed all around the coffin such that the body is quickly consumed by flames; when only the bones remain, they tumble through a rack into a pan.37 In both cases, but more distinctly in the first than in the second, the bones draw, by simple translation, a shape—that of the body that has just disappeared. Hence the following description from a short story by Sasaki Toshirō published in 1931: “The oven was covered with white ashes over an area of several square meters. A thin wisp of smoke was still being produced. The old man’s white bones, looking a bit like a slightly hunched back, were laid out like an old withered tree exposed to the rain.”38 The product of a cremation is a mixture of ash and bone, not a skeleton, but the pattern of a skeleton—almost a pictogram. As with Yōko, on January 29, 1990. Following the cremation itself, which these days lasts about an hour, there is the removal of the bones, a rite with Buddhist origins (but which Shinto has also now adopted for its funerals). It is run by a crematorium employee or a priest who shows the attendees what to do, though some will just watch.39 The two people present who are most distantly related to the deceased approach first. Together, they use long chopsticks to grasp one of the bones from the ashes. Other pairs follow and repeat the gesture until the urn is full.40 The bones are thus chosen one by one, but also identified and often named. Custom dictates that the bones are picked up in a certain order, usually beginning with the feet and progressing

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upward. The first are thus the bones of the feet, then the arms, then the pelvis, the spine, the ribs, the skull, and finally the hyoid bone. The layering of the bones in the urn thus approximately follows the skeletal pattern of a person standing up and is therefore an exercise in mimetic transposition of the body. The process may even involve something like placing a pair of eyeglasses on top of the bones. In other words, just when fire has violently destroyed the individual’s physical appearance, a high-tech system sets out to capture the real beneath the real, to re-create an appearance—that of the bones chosen one by one. It is therefore a rite based on the figural asserting its fundamental nature: the impossibility of being destroyed. Destroying a figure always leads to finding another. There is no return to dust; when being is gone, one cannot just wait passively for the new infusion of breath, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition. What is shown in this ritual is that however brutal events may be—brutality symbolized here by fire—the being cannot escape a transformation or mutation that makes it inevitably pass from one form to another. This reflects an awareness of the world’s plasticity that finds its best expression in Buddhism. The last bone placed in the urn—or sometimes in a separate urn or fabric purse to be kept at home—is generally, then, the hyoid bone: the “Buddha of the throat.” This bone, which, as indicated, forms part of the Adam’s apple, is all the more important at the symbolic level because its resemblance to a Buddha cannot be seen by looking at a living person. In “Gathering Ashes” (Kotsuhiroi [literally, “gathering bones”]), Kawabata Yasunari humorously describes the crucial moment of the nodobotoke’s discovery: “A small cinder attracted everyone’s attention. It was about an inch in diameter and lay resting on a white sheet in the old woman’s hand. . . . I understood that the cinder was his Adam’s apple. With some effort, I could even imagine it as a human shape.”41 In other words, everyone possesses within themselves a little statue of the Buddha to which they are reduced after death. A nice and neat Adam’s apple, like Yōko’s, is seen as a sign of a good life and the promise of a positive rebirth. The identification of this bone, and the attention it is given at this unique emotional moment, instills the idea that each being has a core and that it is possible to survive death and transience via things and images. Bone is an organic substance that is white, without color; a substance that is dry and hard and degrades slowly. However, bone as it is seen in 152

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Japanese crematoria is an artifact, a man-made object, slightly more brittle than other bones. It has been heated enough for the flesh around it to have fallen away as ashes, but not so much that it disintegrates and mixes with the other remnants. Needless to say, the technique required to keep the bones intact was designed specifically to fulfill a desire to see the bones in this state. Their appearance is important; in fact, nowadays the process ensures that the bones end up as white as possible, whereas when cremations were performed over a pyre, the bones came out blackened (which is still the case, for example, in Indonesia). The “modern bone” strives for purity; it is by its nature historical and the product of a technique designed to fulfill an aesthetic. Although bones are hidden most of the time, how they look is essential. In the crucial moment when they are removed, their appearance embodies loss (of the other) and his or her deterioration but also symbolizes what remains (of oneself)—that is, a resistance to deterioration. It highlights the existence of a teleology—the Heideggerian “being-towarddeath”—but also emphasizes the existence of allochronic flows within the living. The modern bone, tidy, clean, and compact, is at once the ultimate survival of the human figure and the figure of survival itself. Although bones can, under certain circumstances, be seen; although their production involves something spectacular; and although their core nature gives them a special place in the visual economy—signaling to all living beings both their dissolution and their preservation—their display is highly fraught. Bones can easily be depicted and shown as long as they have a scientific dimension, especially medical or archaeological, but much less if they conjure mass tragedies like wars and virtually never if they belong to people we know. The issue is one of etiquette. The removal of bones, in particular, can be described, but holding them up to the view is quite another matter. At the end of July 2014, there was not a single example of this process on Flickr and only two on YouTube, which involved not a person but a pet. In film, examples are also few and far between. The most famous occurs in Fukasaku Kinji’s Graveyard of Honor (1975), which has one scene where the hero collects the remains of his wife, a second where he takes a bone and bites it to show his determination to die, and a third where we see the contents of an urn roll onto the ground during a fight. The display of bones represents the height of the moral transgression expressed in the title. 153

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Araki’s interest in the image of the bone preceded the death of his wife. As early as 1974, when his mother died, he had felt a photographic attraction to bones. “Seeing my mother come out of the burning breath of air as a residue of small bones, I once again regretted not having my camera. I really should have taken pictures. When, with my wife, I was putting the larger pieces of this residue into the urn, I realized just how much I wanted to take pictures of the bones,” he wrote at the time.42 His fascination did not wane, however, with the fulfillment of this desire and the publication of Winter, so it is not based on an attraction to transgression. As recently as 2010, in the album about the death of his cat, Chiro, there is a two-page spread (the only one in the album) of the animal’s whitened remains. His interest in bones manifests itself right across his work—each time he confronts a particularly intimate and painful encounter with death. It is one of the main themes around which his entire oeuvre unfolds. Despite his penchant for provocation, Araki did not, however, go so far as to publish images of the bones being picked up—the moment when the mourners looked at the remains with fascination and awe and then felt their texture and weight by holding them with chopsticks. He chose to follow convention and not break that taboo. He must have looked at the whitened bones and perhaps even taken pictures of them, but he left no public trace of them, as if he had reached the limit of his artistic project and recognized the vanity of photography in the face of the spectacle that is bone. This series in Winter is perhaps more important, as much on the documentary as aesthetic level, for what it does not manage to show than for what it does.

The Bone-Image Twentieth-century Japanese art is fed by two great traditions, Western oil painting and Chinese ink painting, and bone plays an important part in both. In Western painting, one of the major precepts since the Renaissance has been to not forget that there is a skeleton under the visible flesh of the body. This idea was known in Japan from the time of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795),43 which is how Japanese painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were led to their version of physical anthropology and why some strove to produce anatomical works. In Chinese painting, 154

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the bone has an even more important role. Bone is invoked either to talk about the overall composition, the structure or “skeleton” (kokkaku) of a work, or to identify what gives clarity to a brushstroke or strong lines to a calligraphic inscription, landscape, or portrait.44 It is a metaphor commonly used for a well-structured painting or photograph, where clear and strong lines dominate. The presence of a skeletal dimension, understood as both a structure and a concentration of energy, is perceived as an important element of artistic representation. Just as bone helps us to consider images from an organic and symbolic perspective, it is also an iconic model, which is to say that it allows us to identify the essence of certain types of images, not least photography. There is a striking parallel between the prevalence of cremation and the spread of funeral portraits. These practices, both stemming from Buddhism and for a long time the exclusive province of the elite, were simultaneously reinvented at the end of the nineteenth century thanks to technical innovations (the appearance of crematoria and photography) that led them, between 1930 and 1960, to become the norm. But this chronological confluence is not the work of chance. Thanks to photography, the funeral portrait acquired a likeness to the deceased that it had not previously had (funeral portraits in the Edo period were not always realist).45 It thus took on a dimension that we might call skeletal. The portrait was not only a symbol of what had disappeared but also, by virtue of its photochemical relation to the model, “a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead,” as Roland Barthes notes, whereas the bones were its purified reduction.46 There is in photography some of the synechdochal monstrosity of the “modern bone” removed from representation or perspective. It is therefore unsurprising that the use of these two forms of representation of death would converge and develop in tandem, so much so that today the use of funeral portraits is as common as cremation. As Yamada Shinya observes, It is entirely natural to have recourse to a funeral photograph when someone dies, and especially during the funeral, where it stands in the middle of the altar. When funerals are secular, it is considered the most important representation of the deceased since there is no funerary tablet [inscribed with the deceased’s Buddhist name]. In recent years, one 155

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has even started seeing triptychs composed of pictures from different periods of the deceased’s life replacing the single shot; at any rate, the funeral portrait has become an indispensable part of the funeral.47

One might add that the poses are generally quite stiff; if they were not used in funerals, it would be appropriate to say in Japanese that they “have bone” (hone ga aru). Araki’s work is hard to understand in depth outside this historical context. Itō Toshiharu records that Araki’s desire to launch into photography came to him in 1967, on the occasion of his father’s death, and specifically on the day when he selected a photograph of his father for the funeral.48 Araki’s first artistic endeavor thus centered on a funeral portrait. The emotion felt at the death of parents or friends and the need this engenders to preserve something of them constitutes for him the essence of photographic work. “In fact,” he asserts, “a photographer will be better if he has faced the death of loved ones several times.”49 It is on this basis that he risked scandal by taking and showing pictures of his mother’s and wife’s corpses.50 Expressed another way, seeing the corpse and bones of his loved ones revealed to him the very nature of photography, and fixing them on film even more so. But this openness to death not only was a seminal moment at the psychological level but also had to find its way into the images. “A photograph,” says Araki, “must make you really feel ‘death,’ ” adding that “a photograph is silent, doesn’t speak. In fact, it resembles a corpse.”51 Death permeates all his work. Nothing, whether representations of women, flowers, the sky, or the city, escapes its grip. As Itō writes, “In his hands, Tokyo, transforming as if it were bathed in radiation, becomes the ‘white death.’ The playgrounds and buildings seem to presage the sanatorium, hotels and office blocks adjoin cemeteries, Tokyo transforms into a ‘fossil museum,’ a ‘circus of death,’ or an ‘underground ossuary.’ ”52 Whereas in the West Araki tends to be seen as a frivolous photographer, in Japan critics invariably highlight the darkness of his work. We can now return to the shot in which Araki juxtaposes the picture of Yōko, her funerary name tablet, and her “Buddha of the throat” (see figure 21). This ensemble clearly shows the semiotic relationship between the bone and photography in Japan, where these three objects make up the basis of the material for private memorial. Their coherence is reinforced by the way their names echo one another: ihai (tablet), iei (photograph), 156

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and ikotsu (bones). They form a trilogy—the tablet is the rule, the law; the photograph shows external appearance; and the bone is the essential and irreducible part of matter. Araki likes playing on the relationship and tension that exist between the appearance and the essence of things. The “modern bone,” obtained after cremation performed in increasingly sophisticated ovens, is a kind of photograph, but shot from the inside; the photograph is a kind of bone, a stabilized reduction of the person. Both are connected to the original and present a face of resistance to the world’s mutability, but because they resist, and their resistance, as we know, is vain, they awaken and stimulate an awareness of what they are opposing. This dialectic back-and-forth causes the sentimental outpouring that they prompt. This juxtaposition of photography and bone is not unique to Araki. There are a number of examples of it in contemporary culture—for instance, in “Grave of the Fireflies,” Nosaka Akiyuki’s story on which Takahata Isao’s famous anime is based.53 To survive, the young hero has to relinquish, one by one, all his possessions and the souvenirs of his parents. He manages, however, to keep two: the few bones of his mother that he stores in a little box, and a picture of his father: “Along the way, he had looked at the picture of his father, the picture he always carried with him, and that was now all tattered, ‘Daddy! Daddy is dead! Daddy is also dead!’—a far more acute sense of reality than he had felt at the loss of his mother.” This scene occurs toward the end of the story. But the image of his father, whose death he suddenly comes to understand from the disintegration of the paper—another form of skeleton—cannot save him or give him new hope; on the contrary, since it “rids him once and for all of his steadfast determination to stay alive.”54 The photographic record is just another version of the bone-image. It carries with it no promise of survival. It refers to the living, but in a desiccated form. Moreover, in “Grave of the Fireflies,” it quickly gives way to the return of the bones, after which the story ends abruptly a few pages later. All photographs carry in them such hard and white things that are both an origin and vanishing point. The way in which Araki understands photography strongly recalls Barthes’s in Camera Lucida. In Barthes’s case, it is the discovery of a photograph of his recently deceased mother (that is, a form of funeral portrait) that prompts him to undertake his famous analysis. His relationship 157

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to photography had changed the day he saw in the mechanized image the living face of death. Barthes maintains that the essence of photography resides in its connection to the real, and that it is this characteristic that distinguishes it from other forms of visual expression. “Photography’s inimitable feature (its noeme) is that someone has seen the referent (even if it is a matter of objects) in flesh and blood [en chair et en os],” he writes.55 Because it proves that what it shows was there, in front of the lens, it can modify the viewer’s perception of time and, as it were, resuscitate what it shows. It then generates an emotion that it alone can engender and that Barthes compares to madness. The respect for photography’s morbid dimension, the recognition of its fundamentally sentimental and pathetic nature, and its reference to bone are all elements that unite the two men. This comparison calls for two observations. The first concerns the way in which Barthes’s knowledge of Japan affects his thinking. Barthes went to Japan three times between 1966 and 1968, trips that gave rise to Empire of Signs (1970). In 1978—the year following his mother’s death—he helped organize the exhibition MA: Space-Time in Japan at the Musée des Arts décoratifs and wrote some captions for the exhibition on various concepts in Japanese aesthetics, like michiyuki, yami, and sabi.56 Since he wrote Camera Lucida in the spring of 1979, these ideas were presumably still lingering in his mind as well, more generally, as Buddhism. He thus opens his essay with a reference to thusness, a very important concept in Japanese thought that he renders using the Sanskrit term tathatā.57 He also mentions on two occasions the topic of satori (Buddhist awakening) and compares photography to haiku.58 The similarity between Barthes’s view and Araki’s, which is contemporary with the French philosopher’s or slightly earlier, suggests a decisive influence of the modern Japanese aesthetic on Barthes. The second observation, which is an extension of the first, revolves around the question of perspective. In the West, insisting on the fossil and morbid dimension of photography is a way of evading metaphysics. What interests Barthes about photography is that it is not “connotative” but rather “denotative”: the photograph signals diachrony, simultaneously showing life and death, but does not possess any hidden message that would explain the change from one state to the other. Its essence makes it less explicit than discourse; the photograph refers to only the “tireless repetition of contingency.”59 Barthes thus has the same kind of experience 158

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in front of the photographic image as he had had a few years earlier during his trip to Japan, one of “a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void, without the object’s ever ceasing to be significant, desirable.”60 At a general level, there are many intersections between Empire of Signs and Camera Lucida. In Japan, Barthes sees open connections, channels between people. Individuality, he says, is pure of all hysteria, does not aim at making the individual into an original body, distinguished from other bodies, inflamed by that promotional fever which infects the West. Here individuality is not closure, theater, outstripping, victory; it is simply difference, refracted, without privilege, from body to body. That is why beauty is not defined here, in the Western manner, by an inaccessible singularity: it is resumed here and there, it runs from difference to difference, arranged in the great syntagm of bodies.61

But this relationship he perceives between people within society and in Japan’s aesthetic is similar to the one he experiences in an intense way in front of his mother’s image, that of a “harmony” that goes as far as to blur the order of the line of descent between himself and Henriette.62 Photography allows him to escape his being and to feel the link that unites him to others. It is interesting to note the similarity between the comment he makes about the pictures of General Nogi and his wife—“they are going to die, they know it, and [yet] it is not seen [that is, apparent]”63—and his perception of photography in general: “The photograph tells me death in the future.”64 Likewise, his analysis of Japanese arts in which he dismisses depth,65 a passage that echoes the idea that there is “no depth” in the noeme of the photograph.66 In Barthes’s universe, photographs and Japanese signs share the same polarity: they are a means of relinquishment and, more specifically, relinquishment of the feeling of death. In his mind, therefore, photography is in many ways Japanese—or, more precisely, exotically Japanese, Japanese in that it allows him to escape a universe fixated on individual salvation and historical transcendence. Seen from this angle, Barthes’s perception of photography is just one of the many manifestations of the orientalism (that can also center on China or India) that has fed Western culture since the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, 159

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Barthes did not let himself get drawn into the mystique of immanence. His experience of Japan, just like that of the relic-photograph, opens no hope, not even in the present. Japan remains a country where “there is nothing to grasp,” as he says in conclusion;67 as to photography, it leaves him hanging in the face of “intractable reality”—nothing to grasp from that angle either.68 The parallel between the two books extends right to the end. All that remains is a form of ecstasy before the “skeletal,” banal, and silent image of death in life. Araki does not approach things from the same angle. His work is the result of a modern Japanese culture that never completely broke with the heritage of classical China, and Chinese culture is first and foremost sensitive to change. It tends to conceive of reality as a moving apparatus that is governed by no external force. It looks for equilibrium points in a situation and not for a reflection of the absolute. As François Jullien explains, Conceiving everything real as a device, the Chinese are not driven to go through the necessarily infinite list of possible causes; aware of the ineluctable nature of propensity, they are also not inclined to speculate on ends that are only probable. They have no interest in cosmogonic stories or teleological assumptions. Nor are they invested in recalling the beginning or dreaming of the end. There exists, and only ever has existed, interactions at work, and the real is never anything but their never-ending process. It is thus not the question of “being” that the Chinese ponder, as per the Greek concept, opposed to both the becoming and the tangible, but that of the ability to function.69

Even if, as we have seen, Araki’s work is the unfolding of an art project and possesses an obviously teleological dimension that clearly distinguishes it from classical Chinese conceptions of art, it also shows an acute sensitivity to everything that moves and pulsates. It does not evoke the despair—expected and perhaps even sought—that Barthes feels when photography makes him experience the impossibility of bestowing meaning on death. Araki does not attempt to grasp either the meaning or the nonmeaning of disappearance (which come to the same thing). Since he does not begin from the assumption of a possible victory over nature, his encounter with the signs of connection between life and death—the bones and funeral portraits—engenders in him a desire to look and make 160

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visible (and not to hide or explain like Barthes). This metaphysical speculation is like a game played in recognition of its effective and productive nature. What we see here is one of the main themes of modern Japanese thought, which remains a system of effectiveness in line with Chinese tradition but which, precisely for this reason, puts the metaphysical option on the table because its effectiveness has been proven in the West. In Winter, Araki constantly keeps these two levels in play. The construction of the work follows a dramatic logic. The juxtaposition of the title and the first pages immediately announces a crisis. The honeymoon—the springtime of life—has become a winter journey; death is on the horizon. The chronological progression only reinforces this impression, since the passage of time is accompanied by a sense of unstoppable decline (Yōko at home, Yōko standing in her hospital room, Yōko in a coma, Yōko in the coffin). It is also a crescendo, with more and more pictures as we get closer to her death and funeral. The passage from life to death is the climax of this photo novel. We therefore expect a moral, a truth that will accompany the denouement of the drama—the more so since several of the shots are quite extraordinary; not only are the situations they refer to unique in a person’s life, but their depiction is very rare: the last handshake (figure 24), the last convulsions of the dying, the body in the coffin, the bones coming out of the incinerator. If all we can do is recognize the artist’s tour de force in the way he stages his narrative, the recognition is nonetheless accompanied by a question: Why? The focus on key moments in the fall toward death suggests that they constitute something special, a message, a truth. A recollection of the memento mori and a waft of metaphysics float over the depiction of Yōko’s death, corpse, and bones. Photographs of the “watching cat” are of the same order. Whether it is staring or looking on from a distance, there is in its eyes a questioning look that relates to absence. This is what Araki is looking for. “Where is Yōko?” This nagging question awaits a response. It cannot be dispatched with evidence that things have changed. Before or after the death, the solitary cat’s look keeps questioning the meaning of the disappearance. Finally, the images are almost all silent, to the point where looking at this album creates a feeling of deafness. The fact that each picture includes just one theme, the tension of the framing, and the richness of the grays despite the enhancement of the contrast all contribute to this effect, which invites contemplation and makes it easier to hear the little voice asking, “But where is Yōko?” Winter 161

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FIGURE 24 Araki with his wife. Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey—Winter, 1991. Gelatin silver print. (© Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo)

is a work that cannot help wanting an answer to the question of being, to the point of delving into the signs of death. And yet Araki’s compulsion to seek the bone-image, the zero-degree image that shows the junction between life and death and between the worldly and the absolute, does not lead to the narcissistic ecstasy that Barthes, fascinated by his own experience of the “awakening,” is incapable of recovering from or transcending. Araki’s quest never finds a fixed point. It manages only balance in movement; no shot is ever isolated, but all are connected with others within albums to form more or less structured stories. On the one hand, therefore, the quest always seems to be taken a little further (incidentally, how does the photographer envisage his own death?); on the other, it never manages to detach itself completely from the world of phenomena, which is mutable and uncertain. It is for this reason that Barthes’s “pathetic” is not conveyed, remaining in the end the author’s own problem, whereas Araki’s “sentimentalism” has a viscosity that makes it cleave to the gaze. Araki’s photographs very often have a monstrous, ghostly side. They show one thing and at the same time another, working through seman162

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tic superimposition. Often, in fact, they are just visual puns; his visual work has the same kind of wit as his written pieces and interviews, where constant wordplay allows him to sidestep concepts. In Winter, a number of the photographs can be described quite effectively using simple word associations. Thus, for example, in the order in which they appear: the tree–pulmonary system (90.1.5), the slide–drop (90.1.6), the tree– specter (90.1.6), the Ferris wheel–dead tree (90.1.27), piles of snow–bones (90.1.28 and 90.1.29), Araki–Christ on the cross (90.1.28), the shirt–ghost (90.1.29), the cloud–human ash (90.1.29), the bone–statuette (90.1.29), and all the pictures of the cat–white mourning. Some in particular refer to the figures of the fantastical bestiary. The tree–specter (a willow in front of a setting sun) evokes a yamanba, a demon with long unruly hair (figure 25). The slide–drop (children on a white slide) suggests a small yōkai with a menacing mouth and eyes. Death is never put on hold. It infects the living, without a doubt, but also fails to extract itself from phenomena, and its signs are never hypostasized. Even the image of the bone is swept along by this movement. So when Araki chooses to reproduce Yōko’s whitish remains lying at the opening of the crematory oven, he finds a way to insert this image into a mimetic system by placing nearby two piles of melted snow forming a repulsive and oblong heap (figure 26). The proximity of signs of death not only confers on the muddied snow a miserable glare and implacable cold but also gives it a biological aspect, as if it were a kind of stunted freak or a corpse covered in a shroud. In contrast, the presence of snow draws the bones toward the idea of the cycle of seasons or water. Bone becomes just a transient state, and its capacity to stun anyone that comes across it suddenly loses its strength. A wave of emotions—the thaw—takes over. Transpositions and mimetic movements disarm tragic ecstasy and recycle the signs of death into signs of impermanence. Similarly, when Araki photographs a bone at close range, he does not choose a nondescript and self-referential bone that would block the gaze and the understanding. He chooses instead the “Buddha of the throat,” a cultural bone that looks not like a bone but like a Buddhist statuette—that is, an object that promises that death is not an end and the antithesis of life but a journey to a Pure Land or toward a rebirth. By maintaining the signs of death in the system of similarities and comparisons, he undermines the feeling of fright and prevents tragic petrification. In Araki’s world, the image tends toward death, but it always 163

FIGURE 25 (top) Willow in the sun. Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey—Winter, 1991. Gelatin silver print. (© Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo) FIGURE 26 (bottom) Melting snow. Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey—Winter, 1991. Gelatin silver print. (© Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo)

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remains talkative. The bone-image is a fetish that is used not out of belief but out of a taste for effectiveness and sentimentalism.

Liquidation in Situ To complete our analysis, let us look at a few specific images. In the order in which they appear, they are a series depicting a doll with a cat, a funeral banquet scene, and Araki holding to his breast the portrait of Yōko on the day of her funeral. The purpose of examining these shots is to begin answering the following questions: How does Araki’s willingness to see a corpse in each photograph and his refusal to hypostasize the image get articulated? If, for example, a funeral portrait is not a Turin Shroud–type image, what, then, is it? How, specifically, is the image brought to life?

A Doll in the Street Winter includes an ensemble of five shots framed around a large figurine representing a young girl with blond curly hair, holding a black cat in her arms. At her feet, there is a bucket marked “Private Gift.” This doll—as I will call her for convenience—who stands on a pedestal, is photographed in the street and on the sidewalk. Each time, except for the last (figure 27), there is also a white metal clothes rack on which clothes sometimes hang. These images, dated between December 27, 1989, and January 26, 1990, refer to Yōko’s last days, in which Araki was going back and forth between home and the hospital. But interpreting them is rendered particularly challenging because Araki left no comments about them. Placed in the street, the decorative doll and clothes rack (as well as a laundry basket) initially appear as projections into the public space of objects from the couple’s daily, personal life. They evoke a wife who does the washing, puts everything away, takes care of her husband’s things, and sweetly keeps her house clean and pretty. In other words, the ideal feminine housewife from a male-dominant perspective. “Thank you for everything you do for me. It is difficult for me to express how much your kindness fills my heart,” wrote Araki in the margin of a photograph dated January 1, 1990, where the shadow of a drying rack is visible on the family home’s balcony wall. This little message tossed at the viewer is equivalent to the laundry items placed out on the street. Similarly, written opposite 165

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FIGURE 27 Doll. Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey—Winter, 1991. Gelatin silver print. (© Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo)

another image featuring the drying rack (90.1.4), it says, “It’s strange, isn’t it, with what’s going on, that I am rediscovering just how amazing you are.”70 In this picture, there is a panel showing the silhouette of a man and young woman holding hands, a clear reference to domestic happiness. The images of the doll are part of an ensemble of sentimental and nostalgic evocations of the wife as goddess of the hearth. Although the goddess is of an inferior rank, she still has a magical dimension. There is no doubt that the doll is used instead of Yōko. It is a double, a substitute, a genie that has left the domestic, personal space to incarnate the young woman in the public space of the city. She pulls the wool over our eyes, saying, “Wait! I will be back.” She makes us wait, and, even though she is only a ghost, she allows the sentimental journey to continue. And yet this is not the real Yōko, and no one is fooled. The doll is just an artifice, which highlights the strangeness of its presence in such a setting. And it seems that it knows this itself, shown by its big, doleful eyes. More broadly, it recalls countless manga and anime that depict ectoplasms struggling in a hostile environment to save their physical bodies.

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The spectral dimension of this female figure leads us to consider its role and significance in Araki’s visual economy. He explained on numerous occasions and in several ways that his interest in women was first and foremost visual: “With me, the desire to photograph is greater than any sexual desire.”71 This is why his works very often feature a play on the act of taking pictures, as in the famous self-portrait where we see him looking straight at the camera through a woman’s legs, a device that transforms her open vulva into a kind of camera. In this case, the doll can be seen as Yōko’s negative in the photographic sense. By way of comparison, let us consider one of the first images in Winter where we see Yōko at home before her illness is known (89.7.8). Yōko, who has black hair, is wearing an equally black dress; in her arms, she is holding a white cat with noticeably jet-black eyes. The doll, however, has a light dress and hair, and the cat is black and has white eyes. It is hard to believe that Araki, who was working during this period on silver film, failed to notice this chromatic reversal and did not in his mind associate the doll with a negative, especially since the last picture in which the doll figures (90.1.26) is placed opposite a shot where Araki’s shadow falls on a concrete staircase—in other words, a kind of negative (figure 28). Seen from this angle, the two images work perfectly together: the black silhouette of the photographer corresponds with Yōko’s white and reversed image, like a last tribute to their common work. Moreover, they announce the subsequent shot, where on either side of two hands holding each other we see the contrast of the white of a hospital bed and the black of a man’s suit (see figure 24). The doll is Yōko’s negative, the harbinger of her death but also of her survival. To return to this notion one last time, the doll is Yōko’s frame or skeleton. And yet this discovery does not detract from the other meanings of this motif. Around the doll there is a whole array of meanings, from the reference to the housewife who is missed by her distraught husband, to an allusion to the pact binding the couple that enabled the creation of a radical work of which Araki was the agent and Yōko the muse. To broaden the point, Araki’s photographs, though often incorporating a morbid dimension, are never completely absorbed in the contemplation of tragedy. On the contrary, they evoke a sense of play, intelligence, and determination, but also very human smells of laundry and hair.

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FIGURE 28 Photographer’s shadow. Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey—Winter, 1991. Gelatin silver print. (© Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo)

The Funeral Banquet Deaths in Japan are followed by a wake, during which the mourners come together and share a meal. It is a moment that is often depicted in art and literature to signify someone’s departure (we have already seen an example in Kurosawa Akira’s Ikiru). The photograph of the funeral banquet is dated the day after Yōko’s death (figure 29). It was taken in a banquet room in Jōkanji, a Buddhist temple of the Pure Land sect located in Minowa, an area of Tokyo’s shitamachi north of Asakusa. Jōkanji is the Araki family temple, but it is especially famous for having been the temple of the prostitutes of Yoshiwara, the pleasure area immediately adjoining. At the back of the banquet hall, we can see the silhouette of a small statue of Amitābha (J: Amida), the revered principal Buddha of the Pure Land sect, the practice of which, historically prevalent among the lower classes, is based on the litanic repetition of the Buddha’s name. About thirty people feature in this photograph, which is centered on a man standing with his arm raised. In front of this man on the right, we see Araki on his knees in an ecstatic pose, his arms wide open and his face radiant. It is therefore a kind of self-portrait in a group and was probably 168

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taken by an assistant. This image, by far the most animated and cheerful of the album, contrasts with the one that is on the right-hand page, where we see the photographer looking sad and closed off as he responds to a journalist in front of the funeral altar, in the middle of which is Yōko’s portrait. This game of side by side is reinforced by the fact that the two pictures were taken in the same room. On the right, grief and sadness under Yōko’s watchful eye; on the left, the celebration and ecstasy under that of the Buddha. Araki’s pose in the latter image has a Christ-like feel. Even the way his hands are open adds to this impression. This moment of ecstasy is not, however, an invitation to silence and contemplation. Although the pose is the image’s main motif, its setting fluidifies it, beginning with the slight misalignment of the composition that allows the introduction of movement. “I often try to take perfect photographs, but I also deliberately add a kind of imperfection. . . . Movement is synonymous with life. Stopping because you have reached perfection is the equivalent of dying,” noted Araki.72 The pictures taken by assistants also conform to this rule. Beyond such techniques, it is the whole cultural context that helps place the

FIGURE 29 Funeral banquet. Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey—Winter, 1991. Gelatin silver print. (© Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo)

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ecstatic motif within a dynamic. The scene is immediately understandable to Japanese viewers, who are helped by a marginal note of Araki’s that reads, “Sakata Akira played us ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is,’ Yoshimasu Gozō read us ‘The Ship of Death,’ and Nakagami Kenji sang Miyako Harumi’s ‘The Man I Love.’ ”73 Sakata is a saxophone player; Yoshimasu, a poet; and Nakagami, a novelist. Looking at the picture, we can recognize in the standing man’s broad face the traits of Nakagami Kenji, one of the most important writers of the 1970s and 1980s, with whom Araki made a book about Seoul in 1984.74 A novelist known for his dreamlike and widely loved universe, he is represented in the process of singing a song from the late 1960s, of which many people still know the first few lines by heart, “Sayōnara, sayōnara, genki de ite ne” (Good-bye, good-bye, please take care of yourself).75 This song, which describes the separation of people who love each other, is often played during funeral banquets. It is an enka (folk song), a kind of sentimental ballad that mixes words sung in a traditional style and a Western-style symphonic orchestration. The combination of the figure of Nakagami, novelist of the poor and outcast, and this sad song full of warm benevolence saturates the image with pathos. There is also a touch of roughness in this picture, of oozing sordidness, of people losing themselves in alcohol to the instinct for life. The darkness of the image and Araki’s ecstatic pose come into tension with this moving and soothing referential universe (the promises of Buddhism, friends, melancholic songs), and, as always in such cases (or at least in Araki’s work), it is the emotion of change that predominates. Signs of death, beginning with those that are inherent to the taking of pictures, are there to be knocked down and to stimulate by this overthrow a sense of belonging to the flow of life.

Yōko’s Funeral Portrait Araki explains the origins of Yōko’s portrait as follows: I decided to take her funeral portrait from Love Journey.76 It was a happy summer, we were going to see the Balthus exhibition in Kyoto.77 The picture I chose had been taken the day before at the Portopia Hotel in Kobe, where we spent the night. Every time I walk into a hotel room, I feel like making love. I push her onto the bed, I remove only her bottom clothing, 170

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and I take her roughly and forcefully. We took a shower together, and then Yōko got dressed to go out for dinner. I then took a picture in the light of the window. It is the photograph of that moment.78

Araki reprinted the shot in such a way that Yōko’s face appears slightly bigger than normal and then framed the picture with a white border. The day after her death, on January 28, 1990, the portrait appeared for the first time in the middle of the altar prepared for the wake—in other words, where it had to be for the ritual. Araki later used it several times in compositions, notably for the famous couples portrait—a color self-portrait of Araki holding at face level the black-and-white picture of his late wife. The photograph we are focusing on here was taken on the day after the wake, when the body was taken to the crematorium. In the foreground, an old man is reading a note. In the background, one can see bouquets, as well as family members standing close to one another. Between the two, in the middle, Araki is standing with the portrait of Yōko in his arms, while an old woman, probably Yōko’s mother, looks at the picture in great pain (figure 30). Even though this kind of scene is common at Japanese

FIGURE 30 Yōko’s funeral. Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey—Winter, 1991. Gelatin silver print. (© Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo)

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funerals, this picture has something strange about it. In the margin, Araki notes, “I will probably never be able to surpass that portrait.”79 There are a number of interesting details. In the first place, Araki’s presence rouses our curiosity. Who took the photograph, given that it would probably have been difficult to use a timer? An assistant? Probably. But what also catches the eye is the presence of three little panels on the top left of the picture that show the names of the people who gave the bouquets. The three names are cut off, but one can work out that they are, from right to left, Shinoyama Kishin, Asai Shinpei, and Tatsuki Toshihiro. In other words, three famous photographers, especially Shinoyama, with whom Araki often collaborated. Even though it is unsurprising that there would be photographers paying tribute to Yōko, it is difficult to think that their names are in the photograph merely by chance when we know Araki’s taste for visual tricks and puns. What is the significance of these signatures for the image? Is he highlighting his own social standing? Is it a celebration of the relationship between death and photography? Or is it a play on the question of who took the photograph? Even though the picture was taken at the emotional moment when the body of a loved one was carried away to the crematorium, a moment during which the body should, one would think, be the focus of everyone’s attention, we feel that another look is at work and probes the image to its roots. As often with Araki, this scene exudes a sense of contrivance. Another example is the bouquet placed on the left of the image, bearing the inscription “The editors of Travel magazine.” The bouquet given by the Japan Travel Bureau has thus been placed to echo the “sentimental journey” in which the photographer has recorded his whole artistic adventure with Yōko. A whole section of the photograph seems to have been staged, as if funerals were just a fiction. We notice, too, the way in which Araki is holding his wife’s portrait—at a slight angle. This offset is not without significance. Araki positions the frame at an angle similar to the one he uses during shoots, which lends the images a sense of imbalance. He probably did not do this deliberately, but this detail and the overall composition apparently appealed to him when he was choosing shots and compiling the album. Without actually pressing the shutter button himself, Araki still manages to apply his trademark to the final product, the rhythm that allows his photographs to be instantly recognizable. Although he is in the midst 172

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of a personal tragedy, his artistic work continues to tread the line between controlling effects and leaving interpretation to the eye of the viewer. Even the choice of photographs of his wife suddenly seems suspect. There is in the portrait a melancholia that lends itself almost too well to a funeral scene. It lacks any of the stuffy seriousness or simple kindness that usually governs the choice of such pictures. Here, Yōko seems to be in mourning for herself. Araki seems to have chosen this portrait not so much to resuscitate his wife for the duration of the mourning period but for the sake of his work—to give the image in which he has placed himself an effect of tautological depth: photography (the portrait) foreshadows death, Yōko knew it, it was her destiny, it will be ours, photography (of funerals) tells us so. In Araki, contrivance seeps even into funeral scenes and portraits and, with it, a movement, a game, a fiction that forestalls a sense of tragedy. Even if photography captures death in the living, there is always something that introduces a degree of instability, something that flows and cannot be stopped. Like the finger that wipes the nose of the old man reading a text to Yōko’s memory. A number of Japanese photographers in the 1990s and following decade explored the themes of death, the aging body, and memorabilia, including, for example, Fukase Masahisa, with whom Araki collaborated in the 1970s and who, a few weeks after Winter, published an album titled Memories of My Father in which there is a shot of his father’s emaciated corpse.80 Other notable examples are Matsumoto Eiichi, who, in 1999, published Houses Waiting for Death, a small album of pictures of the dead and dying taken in India,81 and Ishiuchi Miyako and Onodera Yuki, two prominent artists known for their work on skin, scars, and old clothes.82 With hindsight, we can see that Araki Nobuyoshi was one of the precursors of this trend. Adapting the conventions of the first-person novel, which had been one of the major currents of Japanese literature since the early twentieth century, to the sphere of visual artists, he helped reformulate the relationship between intimate, day-to-day events as well as everything over which the individual has little control and can only see and record, notably death, and that which belongs to social representations, Elsewheres that orient and motivate societies. There is no separation between these two spheres but rather interpenetration: social man’s need for values and his desire to create and perpetuate himself cannot escape from the here, the as is, and 173

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the finite. Conversely, the real comes to life, moves, becomes electrified as soon as it becomes part of a project. This capacity to put contraries in tension evokes one of modern Japanese culture’s most important traits: not to be focused on the definition and realization of grandiose ideals but rather to be extremely sensitive to the strength derived from the definition of an ideal and to exploit it in a remarkable way.

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Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away, or, the Adventure of the Obliques

“Why do people, who generally pay no attention to the world they live in or their surroundings, take a real interest only in fiction? Chihiro is not like that. The only thing that is important to her is the reality taking place before her eyes,” explained Miyazaki Hayao in an interview in 2001, following the release of Spirited Away.1 Spirited Away received more than thirty national and international awards, including the Golden Bear at the Fifty-Second Berlin International Film Festival in 2002 and the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2003.2 Produced by Studio Ghibli, it follows Princess Mononoke (1997) in Miyazaki’s filmography. Taken together, these two films with intersecting themes not only constitute one of the high points in the history of animated film but also mark the apogee of Japanese culture’s global influence, an influence that began in the 1950s and now seems to be slightly on the wane, though its scope is still considerable. Spirited Away is a work whose formal innovations and wondrous character has attracted millions of viewers worldwide. But the deeper purpose of the film, according to the director, is to emphasize the need to pay more attention to the real. The film follows ten-year-old Chihiro as she strives to reverse the curse imposed on her parents that has transformed them into pigs—a plot that echoes the Circe episode in Homer’s Odyssey—by infiltrating the gods’ sumptuous Bathhouse, frequented by the offending witch. A slightly sullen child to begin with, Chihiro discovers love, self-sacrifice, and a certain kind of maturity through the experience of being separated 175

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from her parents. The topics that arise during the course of her adventure are generally presented in quite starkly dichotomous terms; on one side, money, power, luxury, and pollution, portrayed as negative values that spawn conflict, and on the other, love, selflessness, and impulses from the heart, which tend to resolve them. Although relatively recent, Spirited Away has already given rise to a number of critical articles.3 If we put aside general and introductory-level studies, we can divide these into three broad categories: 1. Filmic analyses that examine the film from a formal and technical perspective;4 although important, there are relatively few of these. 2. Psychosocial studies focused on the question of children; these are the most common, particularly in the Japanese literature. 3. “Intercultural” analyses that look at the various ways in which the film has been presented and received across the world; these tend to emphasize the differences between translations and, by extension, depending on the author’s perspective, on the cultural differences or power games between the (Japanese) producers and (foreign) distributors. Historicizing accounts, however, have been rare (in both the specific field of history of animated film and the broader framework of cultural history), and there have been only a few aesthetic analyses, even though the film has frequently been mentioned in studies taking a philosophical perspective. It would be difficult to grasp the full scope of this film’s interest if we limited ourselves to the kinds of analyses that have been prevalent to date; Spirited Away is first and foremost an allegory built around the notion of space that tends to reverse the hierarchy between the vertical and horizontal. This is an aesthetic issue that corroborates the creation– imitation opposition and finds its ethical equivalent in the culture–nature dichotomy, and at the ontological level, in the contrast between being distressed about death and being fully immersed in life. Spirited Away was designed to be appreciated by a very wide audience and to have general appeal, but it is at the same time esoteric and encrypted with Japanese references. It is both open and closed, understandable by all and reserved to a limited few who are familiar with Japanese

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writing, especially kanji, and who make the effort to look beyond the surface of the story. The film’s universality is due to the simplicity of the main narrative thread, the strong delineation of the characters, and the clarity of the spaces within the images. But the fantastical bestiary echoes stories that are little known outside Japan; the play on words of the main characters’ names is lost in translation; and the kanji scattered throughout the film cannot be understood by anyone unfamiliar with them, especially since they are virtually impossible to see at normal speed. Like Kurosawa Akira’s Ikiru, this work’s universality is rooted in the local. Various elements of Spirited Away borrow from the folk, literary, and iconographic traditions. The Bathhouse, for example, takes its inspiration from a Shinto festival called Shimotsuki matsuri, common in certain mountain regions in central Japan, that consists of inviting gods to a bath. Chihiro’s name, which can be used for either a boy or a girl, suggests Chisato, the young hero of Izumi Kyōka’s story “Of a Dragon in the Deep” (Ryūtandan, 1896), which was one of Miyazaki’s sources.5 The pair who run the baths, the old witch Yubāba and her son Bō, recall the legend of yamanba, the witch of the mountains, and her son the monstrous Kintarō, well known to all Japanese children; the arrival of the various monsters at the castle at the beginning of the film calls to mind The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (Hyakki yagyō emaki), a kind of illustrated scroll that was relatively common in the Edo period; the white monster with heavy jowls who follows Chihiro into the elevator evokes a split-bulb daikon (in Japanese, a futamata daikon [literally, a daikon with two thighs]), a common erotic symbol in folklore.6 But the allusions are not exclusively Japanese. The transformation of Chihiro’s friend Haku into a dragon adds to the long history of Chinese influence on Japan, and the twin witches, Yubāba and Zenība, have many features in common with the witch from “Hansel and Gretel.” Miyazaki rejects the idea that he was inspired by a specific work, asserting that he tapped into the world of “popular medieval legends,” without specifying his sources.7 Spirited Away is thus a work of a composite nature in which we see the different influences on contemporary Japanese culture. This composite nature is reflected in the design of the monsters (yōkai). Even though we can see the lineage linking Bō and Kintarō, it is not

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explicit. In general, Miyazaki was careful not to adapt any motif as is, except for the paper mask that covers the face of some of the fantastical creatures, which is copied from a mask preserved in the Kasuga Shrine in Nara.8 In keeping with Shinto thought, Miyazaki maintained that native deities originally had no shape and yōkai are just a clumsy attempt to give them visibility.9 The film includes two conspicuous clues and one hidden one. The first conspicuous clue is the motif of the eye, the importance of which is emphasized by its presence in the credits and in the English poster for the film. Many signs on the shopping street include the character 目, 眼, or め, three different ways of representing “eye” (the first designates the generic meaning, the second refers to the look or gaze, and the third is the Japanese kana representing the phonetic value of both kanji). Next to these signs, we notice a picture of an eye, which we can interpret as a fourth ideogram directed at those who cannot read Japanese. At first, the theme of the eye might be construed as a call, a call to open one’s own eyes and profit from everything one sees, but also, knowing that the shopping street is located in an amusement park, to be vigilant and not be taken in by illusions. In the same scene, however, we also see a sign written 生あります(figure 31). This comprises two words: the first is a Chinese character pronounced nama that means “life” or “raw”; the second, a word that reads arimasu, meaning “there is” or “there are.” But since the action takes place in an alley filled with shops and businesses, we are spontaneously inclined to translate the sign, which is not grammatically correct, to mean “draft beer sold here,” since “draft beer” in Japanese is referred to as 生ビール (nama bīru [literally, “raw beer”]) or simply 生 (nama). Obviously, it is just a lure. Later, in the train scene, we see identical or near-identical characters, notably the word nama spelled out in hiragana that confirms that it is not meant in the general sense of “life” but rather in the sense of “lively” or “vivacious.” And finally, in one of the static shots of the credits, we see an eye as well as the characters 目 and 眼, which are drawn as graffiti on a wooden wall. This final apparition echoes the warning at the beginning: “Have you looked properly? Have you paid attention? Have you not been fooled by what you have seen?” they seem to ask the viewer, like a call to accounts. This shows the importance of peripheral elements in the film that are, however, accessible only to readers of Japanese. Underpinning this device, we see an enactment of 178

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FIGURE 31 Chihiro’s father arriving at the amusement park. Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away, 2001. (Studio Ghibli, Tokyo)

the idea that the most profound messages are always rooted in the local, a recurring approach in Miyazaki’s work. If you pay very close attention—at normal speed, it is extremely hard to catch—you will see that 生あります becomes 生眼あります in the credits. Suddenly, the meaning has changed, even though as a sentence it is still rather obscure because of the absence of a particle required for grammatical coherence. But to the idea of “life” or “raw” has been added a character for “eye” or, more exactly, “look” or “gaze.” This sentence could therefore mean something like “There is an active eye.” The compound 生眼 is in fact rarely used. There is an Ikime jinja (生目神社), a shrine whose name is written using the near-identical compound 生目 and that is located in . . . Miyazaki, a town in southern Japan in the prefecture of the same name, and that is visited predominantly by people hoping to be cured of eye diseases. Miyazaki Hayao is not from Miyazaki, but the echo is likely to be deliberate, especially since he likes the idea of anchoring individuals in their natural environment. Seen in this (still hypothetical) light, the eye is no longer a warning but the announcement of a healing program aimed at restoring the purity and vitality of the look or gaze, especially that of children, a group Miyazaki constantly refers to. Having uncovered this trail of clues around the themes of life and vision, let us look at another. Even in a translated version of the film, it 179

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is clear that the characters’ names are of paramount importance. We are explicitly told that the old witch keeps people in her service by depriving them of their names and, by extension, their identity: not knowing who they are, they are obliged to remain prisoners in the Bathhouse. This is why the heroine loses three of the four characters that make up her name. Ogino Chihiro, written 荻野千尋, thus becomes Sen, the alternative reading of the third character, 千. Her surname, Ogino, is completely eliminated. Similarly, Haku does not understand who he is and does not gain his freedom until he works out his name, thanks to Chihiro, at the end of the narrative: Nigihayami Kohakugawa, the spirit of a small river buried under concrete. In this case, too, his surname has been taken from him and his given name has been abridged. Although a certain number of these clues are intelligible to the nonJapanophone, only a viewer seeing the film in its original version, armed with a mastery of the language, will have complete access to the intellectual, emotional, and playful journey that the film offers. The significance of names is, for its part, declared in the Japanese title: 千と千尋の神隠し (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi [literally, “Sen and Chihiro abducted by the gods”]). By their similarity, the two names conjure a sense of mystery and prompt the viewer to pay attention to onomastic issues. Three main characters and vocables call out for analysis: 千 (chi or sen), 尋 (in this context, hiro), and ハク (haku), all of which are present in the names of the two heroes. The character 千 represents “thousand” and reads chi in the Japanese reading and sen in the Sino-Japanese reading. Used alone in a proper name, it would be Sen. This would usually be a surname, one that denotes families of monks or scholars—as, for example, the founder of the tea ceremony in Japan, Sen no Rikyū. There is a given name that also reads “Sen,” but it is usually written with a different character and these days is normally a boy’s name. Being given this unusual, scholarly sounding name of Sen, the young heroine takes on a somewhat abstract persona, sexually indistinct and outside normal society. At the calligraphic level, it is a simple character, composed, in the order in which it is written, of an oblique line, a horizontal line, and finally a vertical, and recalls the paper figures who attack Haku in dragon form. It signals both humanity reduced to its minimum form and a distillation of the film’s formal dynamics, as I will discuss.

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The character 尋 (jin in the Sino-Japanese reading; hiro or tazu[neru] in the Japanese reading) can mean “to seek or inquire,” but etymologically it signifies an armful, in the sense of the space between outstretched arms and, by extension, a unit of measure: before the introduction of the metric system, it was specifically used to measure depth. Chihiro thus signifies “very deep” or “unfathomable,” as in the phrase chihiro no tani (a deep valley). When Chihiro becomes Sen, she thus loses her depth and her mystery—an essential part of herself—becoming just the sign of an abstract space devoid of complexity, where depth becomes mere verticality or a “line” (in Japanese, the word “line” is also pronounced sen). She is just a cross that can be multiplied a thousand times, like the paper figures. Thanks to Haku, however, the young girl never completely forgets her identity. Within the world of the narrative, this is what allows her to pass the tests that confront her. Chihiro’s heroic nature resides precisely in the nonforgetting of the true space of her being. Haku, the young hero’s name, has also been truncated. In the film it is written ハク, in the dry and angular katakana syllabary and not with Chinese characters replete with multiple meanings. Names transcribed in katakana (a syllabary used not dissimilarly to Western italics, including for foreign words) are not usually of Sino-Japanese origin but rather Western or Arabic. But Haku is very much a boy’s given name in Japanese, generally written with the character 博. In the Sino-Japanese reading, this character is pronounced Hiro or Hiroshi and means “width.” It is thus an equivalent of the hiro character (尋) in Chihiro but is somewhat different in that it connotes a stretch or an expanse. It unquestionably refers to space, therefore, but more at the level of horizontality than depth. Alas, young Haku does not know this, because his name is both shortened and written in katakana. Not only has his true identity been taken away from him, but he has no way of knowing the real meaning of his relationship with space and knowledge. This interpretation of the significance of the name Haku is confirmed by an image that can be perceived only subliminally. In the very beautiful train scene, one of the first shots shows neon signs rolling past on both sides of the carriage. At very slow speed, on the second sign that comes into view on the right, we suddenly see the character 博 (figure 32). No explanation could justify the presence of this kanji other than a concealed

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FIGURE 32 Chihiro and Kaonashi on the train; the character for Haku is above right. Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away, 2001. (Studio Ghibli, Tokyo)

reference to the missing character of the hero’s name. This is a key moment of the story. The young boy turned into a dragon has just been saved by Chihiro, who decides to go to Zenība’s to give her back the seal that has been stolen from her. For the first time, Chihiro leaves the world of the Bathhouse: a huge flooded plain and new horizons appear from the windows of the train that is taking her to the place where she will get advice and, especially, a braided bracelet that will allow her to free her loved ones. The presence of this kanji formalizes within the fabric of the film, and subconsciously transmits, the idea that reconquering individual identity is inseparable from reconquering space and, more specifically, expanse. In other words, horizontality, rather than verticality, is the actual place of true depth, a fact that has ontological, ethical, and aesthetic implications. Following this cryptographic analysis, we can now see that there are two types of monster, in the broadest sense, in Spirited Away. There are monsters who live in or visit the Bathhouse, who clearly belong to the diegetic plane, and there are ghosts who are understood as agency-bearing traces or echoes; the character haku, imperceptible at normal speed, is the most important example. These are images that haunt the film. Although there are not many of them, they influence the story’s overarching meaning. Indeed, they often occur at particularly significant moments of transition. Although Miyazaki has never revealed the key to the film’s allegorical 182

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code, he is open about his taste for this kind of device. “In great films,” he says in reference to Kurosawa’s Ikiru, “we find, among the string of images, some shots that are like the work’s face. These images are far from appearing at only the most dramatic moments. They can be casually strewn in the closing credits or in a transition sequence. These shots get imprinted at the deepest level of the mind and develop within the memory like symbols of the whole work.”10 The first set of ghosts is visible to everyone, and their very visibility makes them in a manner harmless, but the second are hidden, surreptitiously infiltrating vision. Their existence seems to be one of the ways in which the work can preserve its true strangeness, without which it would lose much of its power.

The World of Verticality The world of the Bathhouse, populated by witches, monsters, and deities, explicitly parallels that of humanity. Indeed, Miyazaki is very clear on this point: this world is not a fiction, “it is Japan itself.”11 It is therefore understandable that one of the tendencies of the critical literature is to try to determine to whom the characters correspond in real life. The way that this type of mitate (transposition) usually works, however, is to be, as it were, explicit about the sin but vague about the sinner. In other words, it relies on similarities in circumstance and general shape, suggesting without asserting—hence its frequent use in polemical pamphlets and satire. The Bathhouse is a self-contained universe. There are certainly small bridges to other universes, but they cannot be crossed by everyone (the shopping street turns men into pigs as soon as they make any kind of purchase, the bridge that leads to the Bathhouse is closely guarded, and the railway line can be used only with very improbable tickets). This universe is founded on a physical verticality that takes the form of multiple channels: interior and exterior staircases, several elevators, an outside ladder, and even a duct directly linking the Bathhouse’s topmost point with its cellar. This verticality is also, however, symbolic. This becomes apparent if we just list the locations represented (from bottom to top): a well full of black larvae into which Haku almost falls when he is near death; the world of labor and industry, where a multitude of small, indistinct figures are busy transporting coal; the world of domestic helpers: rooms teaming with servants; the baths and dining rooms for the use of clients, which 183

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become more and more luxurious the higher they are; and, at the top, the rooms of the old woman who runs the Bathhouse, which are extravagantly magnificent. This old woman controls identities and amasses great wealth. But despite her wealth and magical powers, she is old and wrinkled, a sign of death’s proximity that is underlined by the presence on her desk of a skull-shaped telephone. The vertical universe is not only cut off from other worlds but also blocked by death at both ends: a physical death at the bottom, a spiritual and moral death at the top. Indeed, the two poles are connected. In fact, there is an interchangeability to the opposites; the pursuit of power and money and the fact of rising in society only ever get you closer to death, as is signaled in an extremely brutal way  by a mysterious inscription on the front of one of the restaurants, 上天中殺, which can be understood as “Killed while going up to heaven.”12 The absurd, tautological nature of this society is underlined by another interchangeability, that which unites the pigs and Bō, the witch’s son. The pigs are humans caught overconsuming at an amusement park. They represent the general public, particularly members of the middle classes like Chihiro’s parents, and serve to feed the deities, another class of beings who espouse exactly the same values—leisure and commercialism—since they pay for the care they receive in the Bathhouse.13 Bō lives at the top of the tower in luxury and comfort. But his existence is not really all that different from that of Chihiro’s parents. He is grotesquely fat, pale, and lethargic. The world of verticality turns men into pigs and makes them food for other pigs, but the beneficiaries of the system, those who run it and give it its values, are incapable of changing their lives and turn everything they approach, including those they love, into a kind of pig. Whether one is at the top or the bottom of the hierarchy, individuals (often difficult to distinguish from one another—even the old witch has a twin!) not only share the same dreams but also do everything to press others into the service of their “strange desires,” as Miyazaki calls them.14 Everyone wants to stand out by virtue of his possessions (the servants throwing themselves on the money) or consumption (monsters who pay the most are treated with the most respect), but since standing out is what everyone hopes to do, in the end truly standing out is not possible. The world of verticality is thus also that of imprisonment in mimetic desire. However, although the main motor of verticality is desire, the film emphasizes that it is desire itself that is vertical. Individuals who desire are always shown in postures 184

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FIGURE 33 Kaonashi dispensing his gold. Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away, 2001. (Studio Ghibli, Tokyo)

directed upward, with necks extended like begging dogs, as in the comic scene in which the Bathhouse’s foreman begs a dried lizard from young Rin, or in all the scenes showing Kaonashi (literally, Faceless) distributing his gold to eager, pressing crowds (figure 33). The Bathhouse is a closed world, like so many of the metropolises of which it is a transposed version. The image of an urban, violent, and vertical world is recurrent in Miyazaki’s work. It conspicuously occurs in his first feature film, The Castle of Cagliostro (Kariosutoro no shiro, 1979), but in his mind is particularly associated with Paul Grimault’s The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep (La bergère et le ramoneur, 1953), which he saw when he was young—he notes his debt to it on numerous occasions—and which marked him deeply.15 The French film does indeed incorporate the same system of levels, with the top of the Bathhouse occupied by the king’s apartments and the basement by the exploited workers, as well as placing heavy emphasis on vertical channels, including elevators, trapdoors, ladders, and of course stairs. More generally, the universe created by Miyazaki adds to the category of fantasy films with a sociopolitical focus, which range from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and which achieved substantial success in Japan in the form of anime, with, for example, Kishiro Yukito’s Ganmu (Gunnm, 1990– 1995) and Tezuka Osamu’s adaptation of Metropolis (2001). 185

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The world of verticality is severed from nature, just as the “urban planet” tends to be in works of science fiction. The formal manifestation of this is the chasm that separates it from the farm on which the pigs are kept and where several fantasy scenes are set (Haku and Chihiro in the flowers, for example). On one side vast, beautiful, and bountiful nature; on the other, the Bathhouse, where everything is artificial, epitomized by the overdone decoration in the old woman’s apartments. This artificiality is not only in the decoration, however. It also affects human relationships, which are based on duplicity (expressed, for instance, in the two faces— sometimes friendly, sometimes authoritarian—that Haku and Rin show Chihiro). The meaningful links that naturally unite individuals within a community are perverted by the pursuit of power and money. Nevertheless, although the way the Bathhouse is staged recalls a megalopolis, Miyazaki did not choose to show it from a futuristic angle, in contrast to Tezuka Osamu. The references are more nineteenth and early twentieth century: the forge, the apothecary’s cabinets, the tatami room, the tasuki sashes, the old-fashioned elevators, the curtains and wall hangings in the old woman’s apartments, as well as her hairstyle, and so on. It is the world of bourgeois order, not that of modernism, and, specifically, that of the Western bourgeois order. The old woman’s face, her Victorian bun, and the way her rooms are decorated all suggest it—at the very top of this closed and vertical universe lives an Anglo-Saxon–looking evil witch. However, neither the Japanese people nor Japanese culture (starting with the public-bath tradition) are entirely remote from this world. In fact, they are completely taken with it and are confirmed stakeholders in it; one of the more obvious reminders of this is that the outside of the Bathhouse clearly brings Sino-Japanese architecture to mind. But it is not an ancient architecture recalling a specific style. It is a hybrid building, almost a pastiche; it is made not of wood but of concrete painted and decorated in the 1930s style known as Imperial Crown, like the Tokyo National Museum. Miyazaki thus evokes the Rokumeikan palace, built in 1883 by the Japanese government to welcome Westerners, and the salons of Gajoen and Meguro, popular spots for bourgeois weddings.16 The visual emphasis on the flaking paint of the amusement park’s entrance gate indicates that Miyazaki wanted to convey this. In addition, just on the left of the building there is a tall industrial chimney bearing the sign 油 (yu),

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FIGURE 34 Bathhouse. Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away, 2001. (Studio Ghibli, Tokyo)

meaning “oil” (playing on the homonym yu 湯 [hot water], a character seen at the entrance of public baths), which reminds us that the Bathhouse is first and foremost a model based on contemporary society and its economy (figure 34). The Bathhouse is thus a universe with Western origins, riddled with bourgeois values and based on verticality, that exploits nature, exalts production and creation, and whose poles are inhabited by signs showing a frightening connection with death. Even though allusions to the West are the most pronounced, it is interesting to note that there are also references to Buddhism, a religion that in Japan is consistently described as a foreign creed. There are at least three allusions to Buddhism, each of which could plausibly be accidental but collectively leave no room for doubt of their working together. The first is in the name borne by the witch’s son, Bō, a word often used in Japanese to mean just “boy” or “kid” but that primarily means “monk.” The second occurs in a quick scene that takes place on the banquet level, where we see a small sign that says “Pure Land” (Jōdo). And finally, the big mole on the witch’s face is placed where one might usually find the “third eye” in Buddhist iconography. Buddhism is thus clearly associated with the upper spheres of society, with power and money. Beyond sociohistorical criticism, however, the allusion to Buddhism indicates that the vertical world is first and foremost one of eschatological promises. This

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is, in fact, one of the ways of understanding the title in Japanese: Sen and Chihiro Abducted by the Gods; faith in transcendent gods led mankind to lose its original sense of line (sen) and its true depth (chihiro).

Reconquering the Horizontal Spirited Away is, in terms of the story, the transposal of a fable about human society into a world of deities and spirits. The transposal is, as we have seen, one of the key modes of reproduction in Japan. It can be accompanied by a physical action, like writing a kanji on a sheet of paper based on a model or replicating a Chinese temple in Japan, or it can simply follow from an idea, like naming a mountain after someone for religious or historical reasons. Regardless, transposal is essentially lateral. It does not seek to conceal the model or to take its place, as a forgery would, but acknowledges both its distance (formal or geographic; for example, the same temple but smaller or built with slightly different materials) and its resemblance. At the literary level, the fable and parable function in the same way: a story based on observation of human society is displaced to another kind of society, often animal, using a logic of similarity (the lion for the king, the snake for the evil counselor, and so on). Spirited Away is organized in exactly this way. On both sides of the entrance tunnel, which is an explicit marker of transition, the sky is still the sky, likewise the grass—and, of course, Chihiro—but the topos is no longer the same. Contrasting with the verticality of the Bathhouse is the expansive horizontality of the world around. The importance of the sense of expanse is made apparent at the initial entry to the amusement park, which begins with a lateral sweep (whereas previously we had only risen). It is the promise of a new horizon for Chihiro, whose day-to-day has been limited to a childlike relationship with her parents. But this phase quickly draws to a close with her entry into the magic and haunted space ruled by the witch. On several occasions, the hectic sequence of events inside the Bathhouse is broken by poetic scenes centered on the sky, the clouds, and stretches of water that give rise to a powerful feeling of aesthetic fulfillment. They are, however, only brief openings, soothing pauses that contrast with the catastrophic comings and goings of the Bathhouse. Venturing off into the distance is not possible, so the vast stretch of sky and water only gives the individual a feeling of remoteness and solitude. However, 188

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FIGURE 35 On the train. Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away, 2001. (Studio Ghibli, Tokyo)

after a series of incidents, Chihiro does manage to leave, and the scenes that ensue after the heroine has made it into the washtub with Rin offer a different spatiality: no more sudden dives or vertical journeys but rather horizontal and often simply lateral moves (figure 35). If we also take the backdrop into account, the cool tones (gentle blues or blues softened by touches of warm colors) and the gentle clarity of the lines concur to create a soothing effect. These are also mostly outdoor scenes set in nature, with space not generally limited to the grid of linear perspective (or, if it is, only very subtly). The possibility of reaching the world of horizontality is granted to Chihiro thanks to her resistance to the laws of verticality—she never espouses the system of mimetic desire. Not only does she refuse the gold that Kaonashi offers her, but she refuses to give in to her new friends’ desire for wealth. Her attachment to people, beginning with her parents, is sincere and unwavering. She does not, however, have just one thing in mind (restoring her parents to human form, for example), which would amount to a form of fantasy. She handles situations in real time, based on circumstances, and solves problems as and when they occur. This is why she gives the antidote that could have saved her parents to Haku and Kaonashi, who need it immediately. She also avoids being reduced to the object of other people’s desire while still remaining sympathetic and compassionate, as we see from her relationship with Kaonashi. In short, Chihiro is driven by 189

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the power of her heart, which also dictates her moral sense. She is quite willing to imitate the way people look or act (she has no problem dressing like a servant and does her best to wash the floor like a practiced hand), but she does not adopt their aspirations. She can therefore have genuine relationships with people. She forges strong and lasting bonds, as symbolized by the tasuki—the white sleeve ties that she wears in the film’s poster. Miyazaki thus contrasts the fake depth of the Bathhouse, which is of Western origin (but into which modern Japanese culture has been completely absorbed) and which keeps individuals in a state of severe and ridiculous anxiety vis-à-vis death, with the real expanse, the real depth, which is an awareness of the bonds that link people to one another under any set of circumstances and in real time, and that link mankind to nature. However, although the film endorses the horizontal over the vertical, this is only at the narrative and formal levels. Placed end to end, the scenes based on the horizontal plane—from the moment Chihiro leaves the Bathhouse to her return—add up to just 18 minutes, or one-seventh of the film’s 124 minutes. Virtually all the rest, except for the end (the beginning, however, is no exception), takes place in the vertical world. Those sections, the parts that take place in and around the Bathhouse, could work as a self-contained film. In other words, it is the vertical world that enables the film to unfold and that provides the initial space for its creation. Miyazaki would have liked the train sequence to have been longer, but, he confessed, after discussing it with his team and for reasons of “overall composition,” he chose not to extend it.17 The horizontal remains, to play on the word, a horizon; it is the space toward which we are drawn in the hope of finding ourselves or getting closer to others. It is the space in which love and consciousness exist. But it is not a sufficient space for the film’s making. The horizontal has no, or only very little, autonomy. It exists only in opposition to the vertical, which is the only dimension in which the film can actually be made and see the light of day. It is not acknowledged on its own terms or seen in its own right, from within, but only relative to the vertical plane in which the story is anchored. In other words, on the narrative level it constitutes a vanishing point. Miyazaki denounces the vertical, but his film, which, in a certain sense, promotes nondesire, is only ever the product of this vertical world, which is of course particularly true at the financial level. The horizontal staged by Miyazaki can assert itself only in the context of a dialectic, a device that 190

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FIGURE 36 Train scene. Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away, 2001. (Studio Ghibli, Tokyo)

underlines at the formal level the very stark contrast between, on the one hand, the orgiastic scenes that mark the culmination of the vertical world (the feast of the parents transformed into pigs, Kaonashi’s banquet) and, on the other, the simplicity of the train journey (figure 36). Contrasting the artificial verticality of Western bourgeois modernity and a natural and regenerative horizontality is not new; in fact, it participates in a trope of modern Japanese thought. Since writers like Watsuji Tetsurō, Japanese culture has often represented itself as being essentially a culture of connection and social interdependence and one respectful of, as Augustin Berque would say, “the earthly expanse”—as opposed to the idealism (an inability to operate in the here and now) and materialism (the love of money and possessions) of Western origin.18 Miyazaki’s goal is to contribute to this tradition. The Japan in the throes of this verticality is not the real Japan but rather a false version (like a derelict amusement park). There is another Japan, which is home to universal values able to reconcile different aspects of the world—in this case, the values of horizontality and real situations and, by extension, human relationships, as opposed to solidarity or fraternity, which are abstract ideals. The 1990s witnessed a revival of these theories in the realm of art. Certain butō dancers, like Yurabe Masami in Kyoto, did everything they could to avoid becoming artists and contemporary dancers. Rather, they 191

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sought to incorporate their practice into a social reality by privileging teaching and therapeutic experience. Likewise, the painter Murakami Takashi helped to reinvigorate these ideas in the visual arts. Rejecting the notion of a generic artistic genius, he endorsed the workshop concept, a stance we see in no uncertain terms in Studio Ghibli. In his canvases, he refuses to create the illusion of depth, and the colors are used quite flatly. Everything is imagined, he has explained, to reproduce the frontality that he feels was the signature of Japanese art until the Meiji period and from which he sources most of his references. Art historian Tsuji Nobuo was not, however, taken in, as indeed he told the painter with a smile during a debate, “Horizontal, horizontal, horizontal, and nothing else! One could say the same of Sesshū’s Plum Tree: even though there are no diagonals, the space, contrary to what I believed for a long time, is remarkable. And that is your stock in trade!”19 Miyazaki’s film is part of a postmodern movement, a movement that is a reaction to Western-style modernity and that looks to “premodern” aesthetics and values for both the sources of its development and a way of concealing the recent past.

Synthesis Through the Oblique Erwin Panofsky has shown in a remarkable manner how, at each stage of the development of linear perspective in Western art, two opposing dynamics have interacted—one empirical and subjective, aimed at conceiving the space of the visual field with a view to making it seem real, and the other scientific and objective, allowing the mind to project into the visual field any kind of space.20 The second kind ultimately prevailed, thereby constituting a decisive step on the path leading to “modern ‘anthropocracy’ ” as opposed to “antique theocracy.”21 Perspective is consequently deeply related to modernity. From the Japanese point of view, however, its Western dimension is at least as powerful as its modern one. This is why it is not surprising that a movement like Superflat, of which Murakami Takashi is the standard-bearer and whose imaginary is openly nationalist, speaks of the necessity of breaking free from perspective. The story line of escape from the Bathhouse and the unfolding of the world of horizontality in Spirited Away are a nod toward this mode of thinking. However, the conquest of the expanse, evoked by the hidden clues I discussed earlier, is not limited to a conquest of the horizontal. As is often the case when 192

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encountering encrypted messages, a phenomenon of “double bind” is at play, rendering the visible suspect as well as the hidden. As I noted previously, the kanji for hiro in Chihiro (which the witch confiscated but the young girl still manages to hold on to) is primarily a measure of depth. Linear perspective is both a tool of and a model for the rationalization of reality. It can describe all objects, specify the relationship between them, and explain points of view. It uses grids (either visible, as in Dürer’s Window, or not) on which are traced diagonals and other oblique lines. There are countless shots in Spirited Away that play on obliques and even more on the oblique grid (for example, the wall of drawers in Kamajī’s room, the shoji [sliding paper-paneled doors] in the bathing room [figure  37], and the decorative grating near the bridge), particularly in the scenes inside the Bathhouse, where each shot shows in both a detailed and a dynamic way the framework within which the characters develop. The action seems to unfurl inside a box that is observed from every angle, especially from above and below. The diagonals serve to provide a vanishing point. They mark out the frame of representation, as opposed to the frame of the image. The world of verticality is thus also the world of perspective. Both make a claim to depth, but neither really achieves it. Perspective expresses verticality in a mapping of desire.

FIGURE 37 In the Bathhouse; the characters for Jōdo (Pure Land) are on the wood panel above. Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away, 2001. (Studio Ghibli, Tokyo)

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Miyazaki and his team master the effects of perspective extremely well. In the accuracy of the spatial positioning one can sense the effectiveness of the software that enables actions. Indeed, perspective not only is a universally applicable technique, allowing the representation of anything according to standard geometrical principles, but also can be handled these days entirely with software. In other words, it is no longer necessary to understand the laws of perspective to put objects in perspective—technology can do it for you. The world of verticality that Miyazaki critiques is thus also a world where rationalization, by virtue of being repeatedly systematized, eventually renders individual efforts of rationalization unnecessary. Even though this world, as I noted earlier, is the base from which Miyazaki expresses himself, he has always sought ways of resisting it—for example, by having his teams experience the reality that supports the fiction, as when he made the animators of Princess Mononoke camp in a forest for three weeks so that they could grasp the feel of the location. More generally, resistance to the dispossession of experience by the machine is expressed in his work by the decision to design each shot by hand before feeding it into the computer. In this way, the machine remains a development of individual human faculties. In Spirited Away, there is a conflicting desire both to show the perspective grid and to resist it, notably through the use of what we might call counterobliques that animate the characters. There are thus obliques to the frame of representation and obliques that signal interactions between characters. The two are treated differently. The first are essentially lines, black and soulless. The second are usually colored solids and motifs. This difference in visual treatment between the background and the subject of the action is one of Miyazaki’s basic techniques; examples include Kamajī’s long arms, the old dragon flying off into the sky, and Kaonashi in his bulimic phase. More generally, the diagonal, as Henri Joly writes, is a “symbol of irrationality.”22 It does not have the stability or authority of verticals, but neither does it have the calm and balance of horizontals. It is unstable, mutable, dynamic. Indeed, ghosts and spirits are almost always depicted moving along obliques, and those that populate the Bathhouse are no exception. Modern science has, however, allowed us to tame the oblique. Miyazaki thus contrasts the rationalized oblique with an unconstrained oblique that remains free of perspective. He creates a tension between the organized space of the diagonals forming boxes—the rational frame, the world of verticality—and a much more supple, spontaneous, and intuitive 194

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FIGURE 38 Kamajī spreading a blanket over Chihiro. Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away, 2001. (Studio Ghibli, Tokyo)

space. The scene in which Kamajī, spreading his long arms, lays a blanket over the sleeping Chihiro is perhaps the most effective example (figure 38). The lines traced by the old man’s limbs not only possess considerable graphic elegance but also shake up the strict order of the gridded wall from which they stand out. They are, in terms of drawing, the equivalent of Chihiro: they are a little fantastical and do not all have the same orientation but are nonetheless frank and determined. They therefore represent, at the aesthetic level, what Chihiro represents at the narrative level—that it is possible to resist the world of verticality’s grasp from within it. The presence of obliques is not, however, limited to the world of verticality. The train sequence, built around the theme of horizontality, also includes a number of shots containing obliques. And it ends with a scene— where the dragon Haku carries away Chihiro on his back—that is a kind of ode to the oblique. This therefore allows the visual unification of the work. Not only does horizontality not furnish the conditions for a viable autonomous work, but neither does it suffice for itself for even a few minutes. Oblique shots serve as connections between horizontal shots and lateral movements, giving them an energy that would otherwise be lacking. But the film’s creators go even further in giving them a thematic value— that of the link, or exchange, or sharing, all positive values that are embodied in the character of Chihiro. The most explicitly positive oblique shot 195

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occurs in the scene where the young girl visits the good witch, Zenība. The old lady explains that nothing comes of the magic used by her sister— in other words, of the expedients (money, religion) that transform men into what they are not: pigs or gods. She advocates instead the weaving process that the small team, especially Kaonashi, is dedicated to, having shed his haunting desires. A communal project, then, where everyone is working toward the same goal, a horizontal activity; threadwork that, very symbolically, restores social ties. The idea of the “link” (en) is very important in Japanese culture. The word is commonly used in many compounds and expressions to speak of love, friendship, and everything that unites people to one another or to spiritual forces. One example is the children’s word en-ga-cho (said after doing something that could bring bad luck and, accompanied by a cutting gesture, means roughly “evil be gone!”), which Chihiro and Kamajī say in unison to break the curse hanging over Haku. However, although the movement chosen to render this scene is essentially horizontal, the shot used at the crucial moment where the old woman offers Chihiro the braided bracelet (which she must use to find within herself the necessary resources to rescue those she loves) is oblique. A diagonal running across the movement of her hands strongly emphasizes this (figure 39). A similar arrangement occurs at several other junctures, when, for example, Chihiro and Haku hold hands in

FIGURE 39 Zenība offering the braided bracelet to Chihiro. Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away, 2001. (Studio Ghibli, Tokyo))

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FIGURE 40 Haku and Chihiro holding hands. Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away, 2001. (Studio Ghibli, Tokyo))

the sky and when the two children part at the end of the film (figure 40). At several key moments, the oblique is associated with an affection for fellow creatures. Horizontality does not suffice to express it; a movement toward the other (from the horizontal to the vertical) is also necessary. The oblique can thus be a tool used to regain autonomy within the world of perspective and verticality, but it also carries the idea of meeting and is introduced as soon as there is a movement toward the other. It thus effects, in a perfect dialectical movement, a synthesis between the two other forces. Miyazaki’s synthesis is not, however, the modern and Romantic synthesis that places God and nature under man’s control. On the contrary, Romantic synthesis, expressed in space as perspective, is pointedly criticized. Miyazaki’s synthesis wants to surpass the “Western” one and be a synthesis of the synthesis, another level, a fourth dimension. In the field of philosophy, this mechanism is not new; in the 1960s and 1970s, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard notably laid the conceptual basis for questioning the subjective and rationalist model, which led to postmodernism, a movement that appealed to a number of Japanese intellectuals and artists, including Miyazaki. However, postmodernism’s success in Japan is primarily the consequence of a mirror effect. It was the answer to a burgeoning question and validated and developed positions that were already germinating there. 197

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From the 1930s to the 1950s, but especially during World War II, there was already a debate in Japan about “surpassing modernity.” Even though people came at this from a variety of perspectives, one of the main ideas of this movement was to get out of the system founded on the primacy of the subject (whether individual or collective), the corollary of which being the existence of an essentially vertical relationship of domination between subject and object. This is how the political dynamics of the time were supported at the philosophical and aesthetic levels, especially the one known as the Imperial Way. In domestic politics, the Imperial Way was the idea that people are equal and in solidarity by virtue of the link that each possesses with the emperor. In foreign policy, it dictated that all the countries of Asia must unite under the moral aegis of the emperor to create the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, summarized by the paternalistic slogan hakkō ichiu, “Eight corners [of the world united under] one roof.” If it were rendered graphically, it would be a cone, with on one end a horizontal base that united all the individual entities, and lines rising to a projection point that is the figure of the emperor—a verticality, for sure, but one that is oblique and has meaning only because it defines the horizontal plane. I am not for a moment suggesting that Miyazaki pined for the empire, only that he offered a reminder that the impulse to escape “Western” verticality and reintroduce horizontality (all while maintaining a certain verticality that requires recourse to a slant) is one of the recurring propositions in twentieth-century Japanese critical writing. Indeed, the intellectuals who participated in the debate on surpassing modernity, from Kobayashi Hideo to Nishitani Keiji, were not even remotely ostracized after the war; rather, they became major reference points of contemporary thought. In terms of intellectual mechanism, Miyazaki’s film participates in this current—but with the fundamental difference that he does not incorporate a unifying figure like an emperor or the concept of a nation. He promotes the beauty and the necessity of horizontality, but he does not attempt to freeze it, like the graphic designers of the 1940s, under the majesty of a rising sun that would unify the expanse of the earth under its watchful eye. The obliques he introduces are movable, free, and dynamic. They highlight the link between two people, a link that is genuine and unique, and not a systematic link between several abstract entities. Such a perception of the oblique—the oblique outside a fixed framework and one that reflects the poetry of real encounters—can be found 198

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in the work of renowned ethnologist Orikuchi Shinobu. Orikuchi commented extensively on and defended the notion of kabuki, a word that now designates a well-known form of theater but was originally just the noun derived from the verb kabuku, today pronounced katamuku (to lean or incline), and that, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (that is, toward the end of the civil wars) took on the meaning of “to act in an eccentric way.” “This word,” wrote Orikuchi in 1927, “that was reserved for the group [of young samurai], spread in an atmosphere of freedom to designate conduct or behavior that was new, unusual, exciting, erotic, or modern.”23 In the seventeenth century, therefore, the term kabukimono (literally, “leaning people”) was used to describe a set of people who in some respects anticipated the extravagant types of England’s Restoration or France’s postrevolutionary Directoire period. In the subtext of his comments, Orikuchi is saying that Western modernity is not the only kind and that Japanese modernity has an indigenous dimension. Miyazaki, who regularly takes inspiration from Orikuchi, is very familiar with the theory that lends the inclined line, the oblique, a strategic importance. From that viewpoint, the oblique is not only the third term of the synthesis—the one that creates perspective—but also, at the same time, the symbol of a break from order and a return to the self. Let us go back to the idea of the two-stage dialectic revolution mentioned earlier. The first revolution corresponds to a modern revolution in the nineteenth-century sense, the one that saw Japan transform itself little by little into the Bathhouse, the one where the subject asserts its preeminence and then, having glanced back at the expanse of the world, undertakes to transform it. It is a historical world, operating in perspective, that is also the world of mimetic desire and stereotyped behavior. Since the early twentieth century, many Japanese intellectuals and artists have had difficulty adjusting to this first phase of modernity. Some, in the early years, managed to avoid acknowledging it, taking refuge, for example, in Chinese culture, like the painter Tomioka Tessai; others tried to mask it under “traditional” forms, resuscitating ancient wisdom along the way; still others attempted to improve it by conferring on it a “Japanese spirit.” Miyazaki is part of a generation that is beyond this stage. As Murakami Takashi says regarding the idea of contemporary art, and thus of the influence of Western modernity, “one cannot avoid it, one can only attempt to avoid it.”24 Miyazaki duly takes note of modernity—of what we are calling 199

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here, using Spirited Away as a guide, the world of verticality. But this does not suffice for him, and he launches a second dialectic movement in which the world of verticality is the thesis and the world of horizontality its antithesis. The rediscovery of the oblique, a new oblique that portends freedom, happiness, and love, constitutes the third and final phase. As we have seen, one of the covert agendas of Spirited Away is to make the eye properly alive or, rather, alert (nama me or iki me). This does not mean extracting oneself from perspective but occasionally, in times of crisis, distancing oneself from it. This involves knowing how to manipulate it, how to find one’s way in a world where verticality is posited as the yardstick of reality, and how to play with the “boxes” of modernity, but not to rest content with them since they enclose man and his gaze. We have paid close attention during the course of this semiotic analysis to the lines that structure the drawing, but one could reach similar conclusions by looking at the film’s editorial choices. Japanese animated film owes its success to the adoption of a model known as limited animation, in which, between one shot and the next, only one part of the image is changed, as opposed to the “full animation” used by Disney, where all the elements of the image might be redrawn. Limited animation, which has the advantage of being more economical, was systematized by Tezuka Osamu and for a long time remained the trademark of Japanese animated film. Studio Ghibli is known for having challenged this principle and freed itself from the divide between limited and full animation. Some scenes use full animation, others partial. There is no one-size-fits-all solution but many different ones, with each one being customized according to the needs of the story and the overall balance of the film. Such is the nama me, the alert eye: take your time, if necessary; do not just jump from key point to key point but look for the meaning enabled by careful handwork; and pay attention to specifics and to things in their context in a flexible and dynamic way. Spirited Away advocates fusion, a universal empathy that shapes the world; but fusion always occurs as a reaction, presenting itself as marginal, different, and unique. Restoring the world to one of imitation and nondifferentiation—the “world of Jōmon,” as Miyazaki Hayao would have it, a world “without government, without states, where there is no war or religion tainted with magic”25—is not possible, however, by means of a mere exercise of the will. It can be achieved only by taking into account what already exists. 200

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In an essay published in 1979, as a postface to a new edition of Moroccan author Abdelkebir Khatibi’s novel La mémoire tatouée, Roland Barthes summarizes his position on non-Western cultures: Some people seek to define difference using the absolute Other—namely, the East (Zen, Daoism, Buddhism). But what we need to learn is not how to copy a model—the language barrier makes this impossible—but how to create our own “heterological” language made up of a “whole mess” [ramassis] of differences, the amalgamation of which will somewhat rattle the Western ego’s imposing—because historically very ancient—solidity. That is why we try to be “mixers,” borrowing “outside” fragments here and there (a bit of Zen, a bit of Daoism, etc.) and thereby blurring this Western identity that often weighs so heavily on us.1

The idea of the East as opposite of the West, as “absolute Other,” boasts an age-old history but has been particularly prominent since the end of the eighteenth century and the advent of Romanticism. It is during this period, in which the superiority of the European “we” was taking root across the world, that the wholesale dismissal of the Other—from the Ottoman Empire to Japan—as radically different begins to emerge. In the twentieth century, this notion finds expression in Heidegger, among others, who, contrasting Western language (Rede) with that of the Far East, denies the possibility of a meaningful mediation between them; if 201

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language is the “house of Being,” a dialogue “from house to house,” as he puts it, will remain elusive.2 As has often been pointed out, Barthes’s interest in the East has an exoticist component in that it constitutes a desire based on the masculine, bourgeois, and cultured “we” acting on an elsewhere on which one can draw at will but with which it is impossible to merge; one does not add oneself to the mix but rather mixes something into oneself. Barthes thus is not endorsing a melting-pot mentality that fuses different elements in equal measure but instead is thinking in terms of internal reinvention using elements borrowed from the outside. His relationship with the East is therefore not fundamentally different from the waves of orientalism and japonisme that have succeeded one another since the nineteenth century. In some of his comments, there is as much nonsense and blinkeredness as there was among the travelers who used to discuss the immutable character of Asian civilizations. By the same token, Barthes rejects the idea that the Other could serve as a model. Nothing in the East can be adopted as is: neither its traditions nor its way of thinking. It is as much as he can do to find a “lesson on independence” in Khatibi’s novel.3 For, as he explicitly says, it is important to remain creative in one’s interaction with the foreign; he aligns himself not with those who adopt practices—Zen, Daoism, Buddhism—without fully understanding them but with those who generate practices themselves. So while Barthes asserts a desire to break the fetters of the Western ego and logos, his essay’s subtext subscribes to the Romantic mind-set that endorses creativity, rejects imitation, and cleaves the world into an active “us” and passive “them.” We have, in other words, an “us” that forcefully affirms its identity but nonetheless seeks ways to remain a part of history—hence the recurrence of verbs describing a change of state: to borrow, rattle, blur, mix—an “us” that presents itself as an indisputable fact but needs to constantly reestablish a distance to itself, in keeping with the current of thought running from Hegel to Gilles Deleuze. Yet there is also an indistinct, disembodied Elsewhere that is a composite, to be sure, but one without a history, a “whole mess” of notions from which you can freely help yourself to fragments, as from a beached shipwreck. The East remains a fundamentally foreign place, a world with which no possibility of meaningful communi-

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cation exists, which you can take from but not share with. It is a toolbox, a collective whole held at a distance, and not an alter ego. But while it is now easy to criticize Barthes, whose works have been scrutinized to an extent that few texts could survive, it is much harder to escape the paradoxes that analysis of his work brings to light. The first problem is of a systemic order. As I have pointed out, the combination of holding the other at a distance, dubbing oneself a creator, and rejecting imitation is no longer (and indeed never was) a purely Western phenomenon. It has long existed not only in Japan but also in Korea, China, and elsewhere. So rejecting this mind-set, particularly in the technologically interconnected world we now inhabit, does not automatically mean that we overcome it. Not asserting one’s creativity and dynamism in effect means yielding the privilege to someone else, as we can clearly see in the industrial realm, where countries that have failed to innovate not only struggle to export their goods but also quickly start needing to import foreign ones. This feature of economic reality plays a central role in the fields of publishing, cinema, and museums and therefore matters to art and philosophy. When all is said and done, what Barthes expresses is just a metaphysical version of this observation. The second problem is epistemological. The birth of modern science is concomitant not only with an assertion of creation as a central value to humanity but also with its immediate corollary. Modern science is based on the idea that human creativity has a transcendent value and is an end that justifies all means. Literary criticism can no more escape this attitude than can the human or social sciences. Our present concern, art history and East Asian studies, pivots on the development of a dynamic “we,” which, in many cases, gets formed dialectically when placing the other in a position of static difference, like a butterfly pinned in a box. Clearly, times have changed; we are no longer in a world where the Western historian sees in Japanese art a mere reservoir of forms to be adopted or, conversely, as an inert foil. The outlook in play is no longer strictly national and the attitude less predatory (even if there remains a long way to go in this regard). Nonetheless, today’s researcher has to discover, which, in the case of the humanities and social sciences, means putting forward new ideas and concepts. The assessment of creativity has been reduced to a smaller scale, that of

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the individual or research group, yet collectivity is still the operative standard, as we see from the importance conferred on international university rankings. Merely highlighting the violence and contradictions of this system is thus not sufficient to overcome it. No participant in publishing or current academic life can completely shelter themselves from this mode of thought. The key is to work out an acceptable compromise—though it will always remain a relative, imperfect, and interim solution. Throughout the twentieth century, artists tried to escape and subvert the Romantic mind-set that polarizes creation and imitation. They did not just deny, conceal, or sublimate their debt to careful observation of the world but also fundamentally questioned the dichotomy and had recourse to radical forms of imitation (“readymade,” installation, and reappropriation of objects, repetitive practices, and so on). By making works that were unsellable or self-destructing, they jostled the economic underpinnings of art and the standard hierarchy of values. Generally speaking, art history has taken a great interest in twentiethcentury artists but rarely integrated what it learned from them into its practice. On the contrary, it has merely cast a glance over works of art whenever they could contribute to its discourse and often even perverted them—for example, eternalizing pieces conceived as ephemeral or conferring preciousness on things that were never destined for such glory. And yet art history is fully able to adopt a more plastic approach. What I call a plastic approach is not fundamentally less complex or less theoretical than a so-called conceptual one, but it avoids doing its theorizing at the outset, since to theorize at the outset is to postulate a difference between the here-me-“-us” that drives a positive transformation of the world and a passive otherness. A plastic approach, then, does not contrast the concept and the object, the “us” and “them,” the here and elsewhere. For as the dictionary reminds us, the Greek word plastikè denotes the art of reproducing or creating; it is at once to imitate and to imagine.4 The approach can therefore not be undertaken in a rush; it requires patient observation, possibly learning a foreign language, and understanding numerous references before a work can be expected to start opening itself to view. It is thus radically different from the prevailing method, where the process increas-

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ingly comes down to little more than justifying something announced at the outset. For the historical reasons I described in the first part of this book, Japanese artists explored the possibilities of plasticity in even more depth than their Western counterparts, as the earthen quality of Kishida Ryūsei’s work shows. The use of viscous oils allowed the powerful experience of both transforming a material and being transformed by it, with the artist’s creativity adapting to its texture, warmth, and even color. It also enabled an awareness that creation, and the will that activates it, are first and foremost reactions. In my monograph L’art du Japon au vingtième siècle, which draws attention to the importance of the mud motif, I wrote that “the propensity of Japanese modern art to make use of processes, which, at different levels, signal the overarching presence of the real, reveals not just an agenda but also and predominantly the reiterated expression of the collective consciousness.”5 This assertion needs to be clarified or, more precisely, amended, since the idea of a collective consciousness is not in fact at play. This study has allowed us to observe a typical sequence. The pursuit of creation (that is, of transformation, metamorphosis, and imagination) in modern and contemporary Japanese art occupies a temporally initial and spatially dominant role, with the use of mimeticism coming subsequently and proving fragile. This is particularly clear in Ikiru and Spirited Away, where this sequence determines the very structure of the narratives. It is not the first stage, however, that earns a work attention or secures its place in history. The pursuit of originality—which is associated with the West, individual salvation, and modernity—always sees its preeminence overturned in the end. It is the force that drives the work’s development and for a long time remains a positive factor, but eventually it elicits discomfort and, ultimately, rejection. At the same time, harmony with reality, which had up to that point been dismissed or belittled, emerges as the solution, the means of finding oneself both at the ontological level and in terms of social identity. In modern Japanese art, imitation has a fundamentally postoperative function. This is one of its main characteristics. As such, it is necessarily deliberate—but not awkward or uneasy for all that. On the contrary, it has a calming effect, like the expression on Watanabe’s face as he swings in the

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snow. There is something in this approach that recalls Buddhist thought, where it is only after having experienced the violence of the world of passions (the world of desire, pride, and the ephemeral) that man is able, through a set of codified practices, to liberate himself from his ego, reconnect with the world, and attain enlightenment. The use of imitation in modern Japanese art does not, however, reflect an ahistorical world. Every artist and generation develops its own critical tools. The goal is always to mold fiction, but the means of doing so changes. The real is always being sought, including in itself, but its thusness is not fixed. It therefore remains unique. One last point. The importance of creativity in the modern value system is inextricably linked to the dream of overcoming death through technology or inscription in history; this dream is one of humanity’s wellsprings and should not be quashed. But nor is it sufficient. In a disillusioned world in which even the relationship to the spiritual often has a utilitarian bent, we need to give more consideration to the relative nature of life and the individual, to promote the poetic understood as the justice of the moment, and to look for solutions in death. The major works of twentiethcentury Japanese art open the way to progress along this path. Paying attention to the ghostly nature of objects and people, as Kishida Ryūsei does in the portraits of Reiko; ensuring that you leave evidence of your work without seeking any kind of salvation, like Watanabe in Kurosawa Akira’s Ikiru; building a complex and emotional relationship with time, between surrender and reaction, as Araki Nobuyoshi does in Sentimental Journey—Winter; and going beyond dialectical oppositions by a genuine openness to others, like Chihiro in Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away, are processes that can be put forward for all to imitate.

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Introduction 1. Kitano Takeshi, Akiresu to kame (Tokyo: Office Kitano, 2008), color, 35 mm, 119 mins. 2. Marcel Jousse, L’anthropologie du geste (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 63. 3. D. Eleanor Westney, Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 18–32; Sheridan Tatsuno, Created in Japan: From Imitators to WorldClass Innovators (New York: Harper & Row, 1990); Alain Peyrefitte, Du “miracle” en économie: Leçons au Collège de France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995), 278–86. 4. Bert Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodiment: Yōga, the Western Painting of Japan, 1912–1955 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012). 5. Michael Lucken, “Yoshihara Jirō: L’envers de l’épopée,” in Gutai, ed. Françoise Bonnefoy (Paris: Jeu de Paume / Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999), 17–24. 6. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction? (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 82–118. 7. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 46 (emphasis in original). 8. Kurosawa considered making a film about the artist, according to Kishida Natsuko, Ryūsei’s granddaughter, in “Reiko to Reiko zō no aida” [Between Reiko and the portraits of Reiko] (paper presented at conference, Kenchikuka Kaikan, Tokyo, November 5, 2003). On Miyazaki’s admiration of Ikiru, see the director’s eloquent text in Miyazaki Hayao, Shuppatsuten, 1979–1996 [Starting point, 1979–1996] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2010), 189–92.

1. Copycat Japan 1. André Leroi-Gourhan, Pages oubliées sur le Japon (Grenoble: Millon, 2004), 191. 207

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2. Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation (Paris: Alcan, 1890), 96. 3. Michaël Ferrier, “La tentation du Japon chez les écrivains français,” in La tentation de la France, la tentation du Japon, ed. Michaël Ferrier (Arles: Picquier, 2003), 53. 4. Henry James Coleridge, The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, 2 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1874); Antoine Faivre, Lettres des missions du Japon (Lyon: Rusand, 1830); François Caron, Le puissant royaume du Japon, ed. and trans. Jacques Proust and Marianne Proust (Paris: Chandeigne, 2003). 5. Jean Crasset, Histoire de l’église du Japon, vol. 1 (Paris: Michallet, 1689). 6. Engelbert Kaempfer, Histoire naturelle, civile et ecclésiastique de l’empire du Japon, trans. Jean-Gaspar Scheuchzer, 2 vols. (The Hague: Gosse and Neaulme, 1729), 1:126. 7. Ibid., 212–13. 8. Ibid., 2:197. 9. Ibid., 135–44. 10. Ibid., 20. 11. Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire de l’établissement, des progrès et de la décadence du christianisme dans l’empire du Japon (Rouen: Le Boullenger, 1715), reprinted as Histoire du Japon (Paris: Bureau de la Bibliothèque catholique, 1828), 12. 12. Antoine François Prévost, Histoire générale des voyages, 80 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1749–1789), 40:123. 13. Abbé Migne, Dictionnaire d’ethnographie moderne (Paris: Migne, 1853), 979. 14. Antoine François Prévost, Histoire générale des voyages, 20 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1746–1789), 1:lx. 15. Le Clerc [Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc], Histoire physique, morale, civile et politique de la Russie ancienne (Paris: Froullé, 1783), 190–91. 16. An early-nineteenth-century work states, “From the very dawn of their independence, the Americans became an imitative people. Having no examples of native excellence to appeal to, they at once adopted the models of another nation, without reflecting that these, however excellent, might be ill adapted for imitation in a state of manners and society altogether different” (Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 2nd ed., 2 vols. [Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1833], 2:49). 17. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 69–94; Thomas MacFarland, Originality and Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 181–89. 18. Gosme de Torres to the Society of Jesus, September 29, 1551, in Faivre, Lettres, 8. 19. [Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne], Despotisme des ministres de France, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1789), 3:238. 20. Jules Michelet, Le peuple (Paris: Hachette, Paulin, 1846), 27. 21. Alfred de Moges, “Voyage en Chine et au Japon,” Le tour du monde: Nouveau journal des voyages 1 (1861): 167.

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22. Léon Renard, “Le Japon et les Européens,” Le correspondant, no. 61 (1864): 38. 23. Pierre Loti, L’exilée (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1906), 236–37. 24. Émile Hovelaque, Le Japon (Paris: Flammarion, 1921), 187. 25. Edmond Théry, Le péril jaune (Paris: Juven, 1901), 252–54. 26. André Bellessort, La société japonaise contemporaine (Paris: Perrin, 1904), viii; Henri Labroue, L’impérialisme japonais (Paris: Delagrave, 1911), 151. 27. Félix Martin, Le Japon vrai (Paris: Fasquelle, 1898), 33. In 1899, Japan signed the Bern Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. 28. On this topic, see, in particular, John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 118–46, 182–90 (for the illustrations). 29. See, in this case, Nicolas Trigault, Les triomphes chrétiens des martyrs du Japon (1624), in Tōzai: Humanisme et langues, special issue, no. 1 (2005). 30. “Title of piece or section,” in Permanences d’Olivier Messiaen: Dialogues et commentaires, ed. Claude Samuel (Arles: Actes sud, 1999), 146. 31. Elian-J. Finbert to Georges Duhamel, March 10, 1929, in Robert A. Jouanny, Espaces littéraires de France et d’Europe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), 255. In the same letter, Finbert writes, “Le Japon est pourri, pourri jusqu’au-delà de sa moelle. Il n’y a plus rien dans son âme qu’un américanisme simiesque, le goût du trafic, un impérialisme occidental; et le reste, je veux dire l’essentiel: néant ou presque” [Japan is rotten, rotten to its core. Nothing remains in its soul save simian Americanism, a taste for peddling, and Western imperialism; and the rest of it, by which I mean the essential part, is a void or near void]. 32. Annie Besant, Theosophical Lectures: Chicago 1907 (1907; repr., Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2003), 65. 33. Conversely, the idea of Japan as an imitator has regained currency in mainland China, which is unsurprising given the country’s new aspirations on the regional and international stages. 34. Toshiaki Kozakai, Les Japonais sont-ils des Occidentaux? Sociologie d’une acculturation volontaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991), 132. 35. Jean-François Delassus, Le Japon: Monstre ou modèle? (Paris: Hachette, 1970), 33. 36. Alfred Smoular, Sont-ils des humains à part entière? L’intoxication antijaponaise (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1992), 139. 37. Alain-Marc Rieu, Savoir et pouvoir dans la modernisation du Japon (Paris: PUF, 2001), 128. 38. Sheridan Tatsuno, Created in Japan: From Imitators to World-Class Innovators (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 117. 39. Alain Peyrefitte, Valeurs et modernité: Autour d’Alain Peyrefitte, ed. Raymond Boudon and Pierre Chaunu (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996), 138, and Du “miracle” en économie: Leçons au Collège de France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995), 278–82. 40. Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese, 5th ed. (London: Murray, 1905), 8. 41. Robert Guillain, Le peuple japonais et la guerre (Paris: Julliard, 1947), 159.

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42. Emmanuel Lozerand, “Le Japon de Jacques Attali ou la philosophie de l’histoire d’un homme d’influence,” Écrire l’histoire 7 (2011): 43–52. 43. Bellessort, La société japonaise contemporaine, 386. 44. Michel Revon, Histoire de la civilisation japonaise (Paris: Colin, 1900), 129. 45. Dominique Château, L’héritage de l’art: Imitation, tradition et modernité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 194. 46. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 4.

2. The West and the Invention of Creation 1. Christophe Marquet, “Le rôle des livres de peinture (gafu) dans la transmission du savoir artistique au Japon à l’époque d’Edo,” in La question de l’art en Asie orientale, ed. Flora Blanchon (Paris: PUPS, 2008), 232. 2. Petrarch, Lettere di Francesco Petrarca, 5 vols. (Florence: Monnier, 1863– 1867), 3:241. 3. Edgar Zilsel, Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffes: Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926). 4. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), published in English as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970); Thomas McFarland, Originality and Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Originalité et expression de soi: Éléments pour une généalogie de la figure moderne de l’artiste,” in Art, création, fiction: Entre sociologie et philosophie, ed. Nathalie Heinich and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (Nîmes: Chambon, 2004), 71–104. 5. Schaeffer, “Originalité et expression de soi,” 86. 6. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.  H. Bernard, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1914), 203 (emphasis in original). 7. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:174. 8. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 203. 9. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, 1:43; Kant, Critique of Judgement, 100, 182. 10. Henri Matisse, Écrits et propos sur l’art (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 46, 47. 11. Philippe Brenot, Le génie et la folie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), 24. 12. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 190 (emphasis in original). 13. Ibid., 204. 14. Le tour du monde (1860–1914) was a monthly magazine launched by Édouard Charton (1807–1890), founder of Magasin pittoresque and cofounder of L’illustration. 15. Eugène Flandin, “Voyage en Mésopotamie,” Le tour du monde: Nouveau journal des voyages 2 (1861): 78. 16. John Denis MacDonald, “Voyage à la Grande Viti,” Le tour du monde: Nouveau journal des voyages 1 (1860): 203.

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17. Dominique Château, L’héritage de l’art: Imitation, tradition et modernité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 192. 18. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, 3 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1897), 1:82–83. 19. Ibid., 84. 20. Charles Menville de Ponsan, Histoire philosophique et médicale de la femme (Paris: Baillière, 1858), 347. 21. P. Belouino, La Femme: Physiologie, histoire, morale (Paris: Perisse, 1853), 259. 22. Charles Baudelaire, “Le public moderne et la photographie,” in Critique d’art, 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965), 2:305. The same opinion can be found in Théodore Jouffroy: “Those who understand the methods of art and have given it some thought can easily distinguish between imitation and the ideal, and they appreciate the ideal because it gives them pleasure, just as imitation brings pleasure to the common man. The enlightened man thus sees something more than the common man in a work of art” (Cours d’esthétique [Paris: Hachette, 1845], 239). 23. To be complete, one would have to add adult/child and human/animal. 24. Henri Michaux, for instance, speaks of style as “the unchanged distance” that the artist “maintains vis-à-vis his being and vis-à-vis things” (Poteaux d’angle [Paris: Gallimard, 1981], 33). 25. “ ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I,’ ” as G. W. F. Hegel wrote in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 110. 26. René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Hachette, 1961), 118–19. 27. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: 1872– 1877 (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1891), 198–99.

3. The Denial, Rejection, and Sublimation of Imitation 1. Léon de Rosny, Variétés orientales (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1869), 97. 2. Émile Bergerat, Les chefs-d’œuvre d’art à l’Exposition universelle (Paris: Baschet, 1878), 128. 3. Théodore Duret, Critique d’avant-garde (Paris: Charpentier, 1885), 4. 4. Ibid., 154. 5. Ibid., 243. 6. Ibid., 135. 7. Ibid., 139, 207, 217. 8. Ibid., 135. 9. Ibid., 67. 10. Ibid., 98 (emphasis added). 11. Michael Lucken, L’art du Japon au vingtième siècle: Pensée, formes, resistances (Paris: Hermann, 2001), 52–57. 12. Humbert’s Le Japon illustré was republished in 1870 by Hachette in two quarto volumes.

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13. Solange Vernois, “L’ambiguïté de l’image: Les illustrations du Tour du monde et du Journal des voyages,” Histoire de l’art 60 (2007): 69–80. 14. Gustave Le Bon, Les levers photographiques et la photographie en voyage (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1889), 3. 15. Siegfried Bing, “Programme,” Le Japon artistique 1 (1888): 4. 16. Ibid., 10. Charles Gillot (1853–1904), son of Firmin Gillot, was a French engraver and printer. Inventor of gillotage, an easy photoengraving process, he became known as an avid art lover. He was enamored of Japan and gathered a remarkable collection of inro, prints, and netsuke, which was partly bequeathed to the Louvre and later transferred to the Musée Guimet. 17. Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Minuit, 2008), 156–305. 18. Jackson Pollock, “My Painting,” in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 18–21.

4. No Poaching 1. Henry James Coleridge, The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, 2 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1874), 2:254. 2. Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, vols. 8–10 of Collection complette des œuvres de M. de Voltaire, 30 vols. (Geneva, 1768–1777), 9:496. The “Japan” article in the Encyclopédie adopts Voltaire’s commentary in the Essai. 3. Victor Hugo, Le Rhin: Lettres à un ami, 2 vols. (Brussels: Jamar, 1842), 1:282. 4. Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (1970; repr., Paris: Hachette, 1990), 139. 5. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Originalité et expression de soi: Éléments pour une généalogie de la figure moderne de l’artiste,” in Art, création, fiction: Entre sociologie et philosophie, ed. Nathalie Heinich and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (Nîmes: Chambon, 2004), 81. 6. Bulletin de l’Alliance française 1 (1884): 7. Regarding French linguistic imperialism and its connection with Japan, see Pascal Griolet, ed., Impérialismes linguistiques: Hier et aujourd’hui (Aix-en-Provence: Inalco/Edisud, 2005); and Henri Meschonnic, “Le rôle de la théorie du langage pour une poétique et une politique de la relation entre la France et le Japon,” in La modernité après le postmoderne, ed. Henri Meschonnic and Shigehiko Hasumi (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2002), 165–88. 7. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 239–40. 8. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 14. 9. Alfred Picard, Exposition universelle internationale de 1889 à Paris: Rapport général, 10 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1891–1892), 1:30. 10. On the genesis of this work, titled in Japanese Rōen, see Takamura Kōun, “Tochi no ki de rōen wo hotta hanashi” [Story of an old monkey carved from a

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horse-chestnut tree], in Bakumatsu ishin kaikodan [Memories of the bakumatsu and the restoration] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995), 385–99. 11. Fujita Tsuguharu is variously known as Fujita Tsuguji, Foujita Tsuguharu, and Léonard Foujita. 12. Marie-Madeleine Valet, “L’art japonais,” Bulletin de la Société francojaponaise de Paris 59–61 (1924): 58.

5. Seen from Japan 1. Masao Yamaguchi, “The Poetics of Exhibition in Japanese Culture,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 64, 66. 2. Brenda Jordan, “Copying from Beginning to End? Student Life,” in Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets: Talent and Training in Japanese Painting, ed. Brenda G. Jordan and Victoria Weston (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 32. 3. Ogyū Sorai, Bendō [Distinguishing the way], quoted in and translated into French by Olivier Ansart, L’empire du rite (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 180. 4. Ansart, L’empire du rite, 215. 5. Motoori Norinaga, Ashiwake obune [A small boat amid the reeds], in Ashiwake obune; Isonokami sasamegoto: Norinaga “Mono no aware” karon [A small boat amid the reeds; personal views on poetry: Norinaga’s poetical treatise on Mono no aware] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2003), 36–41. 6. Bernard Faure, L’imaginaire du Zen: L’univers mental d’un moine japonais (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2011), 202. 7. Ibid., 186. 8. Ibid., 188–89. 9. Ueda Akinari, “The Carp of My Dreams,” in Tales of Moonlight and Rain, trans. Anthony H. Chambers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 119. 10. Satake Shōzan, “Gahō kōryō” [Summary of the laws of painting] (1778), translation based on that of Vera Linhartová, Sur un fond blanc (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1996), 381. 11. Honda Toshiaki, “Saiiki monogatari” [Tales of the western countries] (1798), translation based on that of Linhartová, Sur un fond blanc, 389. 12. Shiba Kōkan, “Seiyō gadan” [Discussion of Western painting] (1799), translation based on that of Linhartová, Sur un fond blanc, 392. 13. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Gakumon no susume, in Fukuzawa Yukichi senshū [The collected works of Fukuzawa Yukichi], 14 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1980– 1981), 3:163 (available at www.aozora.gr.jp). 14. Emmanuel Lozerand, Littérature et génie national (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2005), 180–87. 15. Iida Ō, Mohō tetsugaku: Ichimei Nihon mohō no seishitsu [The philosophy of imitation: Individuals, Japan, and the nature of imitation] (Tokyo: Taikandō, 1888), 6.

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16. Katsurō Hara, Histoire du Japon, des origines à nos jours (Paris: Payot, 1926), 111. 17. Tsuda Sōkichi, Bungaku ni arawaretaru waga kokumin shisō no kenkyū: Heimin bungaku no jidai (chū) [The national mind as revealed in our literature: The age of commoner literature], vol. 5 of Tsuda Sōkichi zenshū [The complete works of Tsuda Sōkichi] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989), 362. 18. Ibid., 363. 19. Natsume Sōseki, “Mohō to dokuritsu” [Imitation and independence] (speech delivered to the students of Ikkō, the “premier school” attended by the capital’s elite, December 12, 1913), in Natsume Sōseki zenshū [The complete works of Natsume Sōseki], 34 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1956−1957), 33:125. 20. “Kyūshū bunka kyōkai hōkoku” [Report of the Kyushu Cultural Association] (1941), in Sōryokusen to bunka: Shiryōshū [Total war and culture: Documents], ed. Kitagawa Kenzō (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 2000), 396. 21. Terada Torahiko, “Kamera wo sagete” [A camera around the neck], Ōsaka mainichi shinbun, November 1931, in Terada Torahiko zuihitsu-shū [Terada Torahiko: Selected essays], 5 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1947−1948), 3:48. 22. Sōseki, “Mohō to dokuritsu,” 33:125. 23. Kishida Kunio, “Haiyū kyōiku ni tsuite” [On the education of actors], Engeki shinchō 1 (1926), in Kishida Kunio zenshū [The complete works of Kishida Kunio], 28 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989–1992), 20:95. 24. Michael Lucken, Grenades et amertume: Les peintres japonais à l’épreuve de la guerre, 1935–1952 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2005), 175–87. 25. Kawatsura Ryūzō, “Beiei tōmetsu no kokumin undō to bunka dōin” [People’s movement for Anglo-Saxons’ extermination and cultural mobilization], Shodō 13, no. 3 (1942): 11–12. 26. Kuwabara Jitsuzō, “Shinajin no bunjaku to hoshu” [The weakness and conservatism of the Chinese], in Tōyō-shi zeien (Tokyo: Kōbundō shobō, 1927), in Kuwabara Jitsuzō zenshū [The complete works of Kuwabara Jitsuzō], 5 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1968), 1:487. 27. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 321–22. 28. Kuwabara, “Shinajin no bunjaku to hoshu,” 477. 29. Hartmut O. Rotermund, “Occidentaux, Japonais et la révision des traités inégaux,” in Regards et discours européens sur le Japon et l’Inde au XIX e siècle, ed.  Bernadette Lemoine (Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2000), 100. 30. Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, 59. 31. Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Gakumon no dokuritsu” [The independence of learning], in Fukuzawa Yukichi senshū, 3:199–224 (available at www.aozora.gr.jp). 32. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Hekiken” [Distorted views], Josei kaizō 3, no.  3 (1924), in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū [The complete works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke], 28 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995–1998), 11:192. 33. Sakaguchi Ango, Nihon bunka shikan [Personal views on Japanese culture] (Tokyo: Buntaisha, 1943; repr., Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1978), 38. 34. Karatani Kōjin, “Buddhism, Marxism and Fascism in Japanese Intellectual Discourse in the 1930’s and 1940’s,” in Approches critiques de la pensée japonaise 214

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du XX ème siècle, ed. Livia Monnet (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2001), 209–14. 35. Umesao Tadao and Tada Michitarō, eds., Nihon bunka no kōzō [Structure of Japanese culture] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1972). 36. See, for example, Ina Nobuo, “Mohō kara dappi shite sōzō no shinnen wo” [Let’s believe in a creation freed from imitation], Asahi kamera, January 1966, in Ina Nobuo shashinron-shū: Shashin ni kaere [Return to photography! Selected texts on photography by Ina Nobuo] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005), 347. 37. Sheridan Tatsuno, Created in Japan: From Imitators to World-Class Innovators (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). 38. Yamada Shōji, Nihon bunka no mohō to sōzō: Orijinariti to wa nani ka [Imitation and creation in Japanese culture: What is originality?] (Tokyo: Kadokawa shuppan, 2002), 115–51. 39. Ibid., 174. 40. Ibid., 14. 41. Yoshida Masazumi divides the reception of Nakai’s work into three main phases: the period spanning the end of the 1950s to the end of the 1960s, during which time Nakai’s name is put forward (notably by Hani Gorō and Tsurumi Shunsuke) as the face of ideological opposition to fascism and his contribution to the study of media and applied arts at the beginning of the 1930s is rediscovered; the period between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, during which, on the one hand, his political resistance is relativized and, on the other, we begin to see real critical appraisal of his work on aesthetics; and the period beginning in the mid-1990s, when his role as a member of the resistance is clarified and contextualized and the importance of his postwar activity—first in Hiroshima and then as the head of the new National Diet Library—is reexplored. See Yoshida Masazumi, “Seikatsu ni tai suru yūki: Zenhen” [The courage to face life: Part I], Kyōto daigaku shōgai kyōiku-gaku toshokan jōhō-gaku kenkyū 2 (2003): 8–10, 31–33 (bibliography entries for 1952 to 2001). In English, see Leslie Pincus, “A Salon for the Soul: Nakai Masakazu and the Hiroshima Culture Movement,” Positions: Asia Critique 10, no. 1 (2002): 173–94; and Aaron S. Moore, “Para-existential Forces of Invention: Nakai Masakazu’s Theory of Technology and Critique of Capitalism,” Positions: Asia Critique 17, no. 1 (2009): 127–57. 42. Quoted in Kindai Nihon no hihyō [Criticism in modern Japan], ed. Karatani Kōjin (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997), 1:256 (emphasis in original).

6. The Logic of Reflection in Nakai Masakazu 1. A reference to the burning-house parable in the Lotus Sutra. 2. Nakai Masakazu, “Utsusu” [To transpose], Kōga 4 (1932): 69, in Nakai Masakazu zenshū [The complete works of Nakai Masakazu (hereafter NMZ)], 4 vols. (Tokyo: Bijutsu shuppansha, 1981), 3:299–300. 3. Kitamura Tōkoku, “Kokumin to shisō” [People and thought], Hyōron 8 (1893), in Gendai Nihon bungaku taikei [Collection of contemporary Japanese literature], 97 vols. (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1968−1973), 6:155. 215

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4. Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (New York: Dutton, 1904; repr., Tokyo: ICG Muse, 2000), 166. 5. The first edition of the complete works of Fukada Kōsan (Fukada Yoshikazu) was published in four volumes in 1930 and 1931 by Iwanami under Nakai’s direction. 6. Fukada Kōsan, “Mohō toshite no geijutsu,” Shisō, November 1921, 1–14, in Fukada Kōsan zenshū [The complete works of Fukada Kōsan], 3 vols. (Machida: Tamagawa daigaku shuppanbu, 1972–1973), 1:333–44. 7. Ibid., 333. 8. Ibid., 335. 9. It is interesting to note that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche figured among the principal inspirations of Japanese artists in the early twentieth century. For Fukada, there is thus a local and urgent dimension to his fight against Romanticism. 10. Fukada, “Mohō toshite no geijutsu,” 336. 11. Ibid., 337. 12. Ibid., 342–44. The Greek is included in the text. 13. The first complete translation of the Poetics was published in 1924 by Iwanami under the title Shigaku. It was the work of Matsuura Kaichi (1891–1967), a specialist in English literature. 14. Nakai Masakazu, “Kikaibi no kōzō,” Shisō 93 (1930): 59–70, in NMZ, 3:239– 55. In the same issue appeared the second part of Kuki Shūzō’s renowned text “Iki no kōzō” [The structure of iki]. 15. Nakai, “Kikaibi no kōzō,” 239–41. 16. Ibid., 250–51. 17. Ibid., 253. 18. Nakai Masakazu, “Iinkai no ronri” [The logic of committees], Sekai bunka 13–15 (1936), in NMZ, 1:108. 19. Nakai Masakazu, “Kaiga no fuan” [The anxiety of painting], Bi, 1930, in NMZ, 2:175. 20. Ina Nobuo, “Shashin ni kaere” [Return to photography!], Kōga 1 (1932), in Shashin: Shōwa gojūnen-shi [Photography: The fifty years of the Shōwa period] (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1978), 219–26. 21. Nihon kokugo daijiten [Dictionary of the Japanese language], 20 vols. (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1972–1976), 2:679–80. 22. Nakai, “Utsusu,” 300. 23. Ibid., 301 (emphasis in original). 24. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. W. C. Swabey and M. C. Swabey (New York: Dover, 1953). In Japanese, Erunusuto Kasshirā: Jittai gainen to kankei gainen, trans. Baba Kazumitsu (Tokyo: Ōmura shoten, 1926). Nakai does not use the translation kankei gainen (concept of relationship) for the German Funktionsbegriff proposed by Baba, preferring kinō gainen (concept of function [in the mechanical sense]). The most recent translation of Cassirer’s work (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1979) opts for kansū gainen (concept of function [in the mathematical sense]). 25. Nakai, “Utsusu,” 303. 26. Ibid.

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27. Nakai Masakazu, “Kinō gainen no bigaku e no kiyo” [Contribution to an aesthetics of function], Bi / hihyō, September 1930, in NMZ, 1:190. 28. Nakai Masakazu, “Kabe” [The wall], Kōga 2 (1932), in NMZ, 3:295, 297. 29. Nakai, “Utsusu,” 300. 30. Ibid., 303–4. 31. Nakai Masakazu, Bigaku nyūmon [An introduction to aesthetics] (Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1951), 12–13, in NMZ, 3:8–9. 32. Nakai Masakazu, “Rizumu no kōzō” [Structure of rhythm], Bi / hihyō, September 1932, in NMZ, 2:32. Nakai was probably the first specialist of aesthetics in Japan to elaborate on the concept of ma. See Michael Lucken, “Les limites du ma: Retour à l’émergence d’un concept ‘japonais,’ ” Nouvelle revue d’esthétique 13 (2014): 45–67. 33. Kinoshita Nagahiro, interview with author, January 26, 2010, Yokohama. See also Kinoshita Nagahiro, Nakai Shōichi: Atarashii bigaku no kokoromi (zōho) [Nakai Shōichi: Experiments for a new aesthetics, augmented edition] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2002), 91–121. 34. Nakai, “Kaiga no fuan,” 170–71. 35. On the Japanese Romantic movement (Nihon roman-ha), see, for example, Kevin Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 36. Kuno Osamu, “Henja no kotoba” [The words of the editor], in Doyōbi (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1974), 292. See also Satō Shin’ya, Nakai Masakazu: Toshokan no ronrigaku [Nakai Masakazu: The logic of libraries] (Tokyo: Kindai bungeisha, 1992), 10. 37. Nakai, “Iinkai no ronri,” 47–56. 38. Karl Marx, “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, sup. vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), 585–86. On Nakai’s relationship to Marxism, see Michael Lucken, “Reaction! Nakai Masakazu and the Origins of ‘Contemporary Thought,’” Positions: Asia Critique (forthcoming). 39. Nakai published little during the war, but some articles are clearly imbued with a patriotic tone and defend the Japanese way of thinking, notably its aesthetics of emptiness, a concept widely used by propaganda designed to encourage the spirit of sacrifice. See Banba Toshiaki, Nakai Masakazu densetsu: Nijūichi no shōzō ni yoru yūwaku [The legend of Nakai Masakazu: An appeal in twenty-one portraits] (Tokyo: Potto shuppan, 2009), 216–25. 40. In November 1946, Nakai was elected president of the Hiroshima Prefecture Workers Culture Association (Hiroshima-ken rōdō bunka kyōkai). The following year, he was chosen by various groups and unions united as the Workers Front (Rōdō sensen) to represent the Left in the election for governor (chiji) of Hiroshima prefecture. With very little money to run the campaign, Nakai lost to Kusunose Tsunei (1899–1988) from the right-wing Nihon jiyū-tō party. He nonetheless received nearly 40 percent of the vote. In March of the same year, he joined the new Japanese Socialist Party (Nihon shakai-tō). In July 1947, Nakai was contacted by the writer and historian Hani Gorō (1901–1983), who suggested

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that he apply to be president of the future National Diet Library. After numerous secret negotiations and with the support of the American Civil Information and Education Section, which was looking to fill this position with someone who was neither a Communist nor a nationalist, Nakai was appointed to the role of vice president of the new institution. A few months later, in 1949, he was appointed to the position of manager of the country’s library association. In this dual capacity, he actively participated in the expansion of the Library Law of April 1950, which turned Japanese public libraries into a remarkable asset for culture and education. See Banba, Nakai Masakazu densetsu, 261–379. 41. Leslie Pincus, “A Salon for the Soul: Nakai Masakazu and the Hiroshima Culture Movement,” Positions: Asia Critique 10, no. 1 (2002): 178. 42. Nakai, Bigaku nyūmon, 42. 43. Yoshida Kijū, Henbō no rinri [The ethics of transfiguration] (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2006), 257–97, 382–87.

7. Kishida Ryūsei’s Portraits of Reiko 1. Félix Régamey, Japon (Paris: Paclot, 1905), 44–46. 2. Ibid., 303. 3. Murakami Kumi, quoted in Enomoto Nahoko et al., “Kishida Ryūsei: Kenkyū nōto” [Kishida Ryūsei: Research notes], Nagoya zōkei geijutsu daigaku tanki daigaku-bu kiyō 13 (2007): 84. 4. Murakami Takashi, Sūpāfuratto [Superflat] (Tokyo: Madora shuppan, 2000), 126. 5. Sonobe Yūsaku, Kishida Ryūsei to gendai [Kishida Ryūsei today]  (Tokyo: Rokka-sha, 2003), 14. 6. Tsuji Nobuo, “Shōhaku irai no yōkai gaka” [The greatest yōkai painter since Shōhaku], Geijutsu shinchō 42, no. 6 (1991): 36–37. 7. Kishida made approximately seventy portraits of Reiko, among which are twenty-four oils and twenty-two watercolors. 8. “Title of Work,” in Kishida Ryūsei zenshū (hereafter KRZ), 10 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1979–1980), 5:142. 9. There used to be no year zero in Japan, which made for the following titles in the Western system: Reiko, Four Years Old, Seven Years Old, Fifteen Years Old, and so on. 10. See, for instance, Kishida Ryūsei, “Nikki” (Diary), in KRZ, 5:163. 11. Hijikata Teiichi, Kishida Ryūsei (Tokyo: Nichidō shuppan, 1971), 187. 12. The Ōtani sect is a branch of the Pure Land school (Jōdo shinshū). 13. On this point, see Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 52–53. 14. Its members included philosopher Miyake Yūjirō, writer Tsubouchi Shōyō, and anthropologist Tsuboi Shōgorō. See Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 44.

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15. Inoue Enryō, “Shinkai-ron” [On true mystery], in Inoue Enryō senshū [The collected essays of Inoue Enryō], 25 vols.  (Tokyo: Tōyō daigaku Inoue Enryō kinen gakujutsu sentā, 1987–2004), 21:147, 289. 16. Inoue Enryō, “Yūrei no shashin” [Picture of a ghost], in Inoue Enryō senshū, 19:292. 17. Inoue Enryō, Yōkaigaku kōgi [Lectures on monsterology], in Inoue Enryō senshū, vols. 16–18. 18. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (London: Macmillan, 1935), 194–206. 19. Inoue Enryō, Tetsugaku uranai [Philosophy and divination]  (Tokyo: Tetsugakukan, 1901), 5. 20. Figal, Civilization and Monsters, 41, 84. 21. Inoue Enryō, Shitsunenjutsu kōgi [Lecture on the art of oblivion]  (Tokyo: Tetsugakukan, 1896). See also Stefan Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 71. 22. Inoue, Tetsugaku uranai, 5. 23. Inoue Enryō, “Yōkaigaku to bijutsu to no kankei wo ron zu” [A discussion on the relation between monsterology and the arts], in Inoue Enryō senshū, 21:289. 24. Ibid. 25. Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Kachikachi yama to hanasaka jijī [Kachikachi mountain and the man of the flowers]  (Tokyo: Oranda shobō, 1917); Kishida Ryūsei, “Mukashi no dōwa: Kobutori jijī shinsaku ebanashi” [Old tales: The old man’s lump removed, new illustrated text], Josei kaizō, June–July 1923, in KRZ, 3:317–30, and “Mukashi no dōwa: Shinban ebanashi sarukani gassen” [Old tales: A new illustrated edition of the crab and the monkey], Kaizō, August 1924, in KRZ, 3:444–49. 26. The word yōkai is not always used this way. It often carries a more general meaning, something like, as mentioned, “supernatural creatures,” in which case it includes specters. 27. Kishida Ryūsei, “Bakemono banashi” [Ghost stories], Kaizō, September 1924, in KRZ, 3:467. 28. Ibid., 473–74. 29. See, especially, Yanagi Sōetsu, “Atarashiki kagaku” [The new science], Shirakaba 1, no. 7 (1910): 16–18. On this period of Yanagi’s work, see Michael Lucken, “The Endless Pursuit of Inner Desires: Yanagi Sōetsu Before Mingei,” Cipango English Selection 1 (2012) (available at http://cjs.revues.org/75). 30. Kishida, “Bakemono banashi,” 461–65. 31. Kitazawa Noriaki, Kishida Ryūsei to Taishō avangyarudo [Kishida Ryūsei and the avant-garde in the Taishō period] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993), 10–12. 32. Kishida Ryūsei was in fact born on June 23, 1891, almost a year after Van Gogh’s death, on July 29, 1890. See Kishida Ryūsei, “Kaiin shōsoku” [Recent member news], ca. May 1920, in KRZ, 2:287. 33. Kishida Ryūsei, “Van Gohho no e” [The paintings of Van Gogh], Yomiuri shinbun, August 1913, in KRZ, 1:244.

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34. Kimura Shōhachi, Kinsei bijutsu [Recent art] (Tokyo: Rakuyō-dō, 1915), 426. 35. Yanagi Sōetsu, Wiriamu Burēku [William Blake] (Tokyo: Rakuyō-dō, 1914), in Yanagi Sōetsu zenshū [The complete works of Yanagi Sōetsu], 22 vols. (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1981–1992), 4:9 (emphasis in original). 36. Kimura, Kinsei bijutsu, 435. 37. André Malraux, Les voix du silence (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 493. 38. Ibid., 439, 445, 489. 39. The photoengraver who worked for Shirakaba was Tanaka Matsutarō (1863–1949), the adopted son of a Tokyo photographer. Sent to Europe from 1897 to 1904, notably to Vienna and Prague, he learned the most cutting-edge methods of photogravure. On his return to Japan, he worked in the family studio and, in March 1915, founded the Hanshichi Shashin Seihan Insatsujo company, which still exists and which initially revolutionized the small world of art publishing in Japan by offering high-quality colored plates at reasonable prices. 40. Kimura Shōhachi nikki [The diary of Kimura Shōhachi], ed. Tōkyō Bunkazai Kenkyūjo (Nikkō: Kosugi Hōan kinen Nikkō bijutsukan, 2003), 190. 41. Ibid., 68. 42. Ibid., 175. 43. Walter Benjamin, “Brief History of Photography,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 187. 44. Asakura Fumio, “Shashin dōhan de o me ni kakatta kyoshō Rodan” [The great Rodin seen through copper plates], Shirakaba 1, no. 8 (1910): 113. 45. Kinoshita Mokutarō, “Shashinban no Rodin to sono rensō” [Some reflections after seeing the pictorial album Rodin], Shirakaba 1, no. 8 (1910): 61–62. 46. Mitsuda Yuri, “Nojima Yasuzō no rafuzō ni megutte” [Concerning Nojima Yasuzō’s nudes], in Nojima Yasuzō to sono shūhen [Nojima Yasuzō and his companions], ed. Shōtō Bijutsukan  (Kyoto: Kyōto kokuritsu kindai bijutsukan, 1991), 23, 150. 47. Kishida Ryūsei, Ryūsei gashū oyobi geijutsukan [Ryūsei’s paintings and views on art] (Tokyo: Shūeikaku, 1920), in KRZ, 2:377 (emphasis in original). 48. Kishida, “Nikki,” in KRZ, 5:149. 49. Kishida, “Nikki,” in KRZ, 8:339; 9:189, and the entry for January 29, 1924. 50. Kishida Ryūsei, “Omoide oyobi kondo no tenrankai ni sai shite” [Memories: On the occasion of my coming exhibition], Shirakaba, April 1920, in KRZ, 2:235. 51. The writer Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976) was a member of the Shirakaba group and a close friend of Kishida’s. 52. Kishida, “Nikki,” in KRZ, 5:149. 53. Tsuchida Maki, “Yanagi Sōetsu to ‘kindai bijutsushi’: ‘Miru’ to iu jissen” [Yanagi Sōetsu and modern art history: The gaze in action], in Taishō-ki bijutsu tenrankai no kenkyū [Research on the art exhibitions of the Taishō period], ed. Tōkyō Bunkazai Kenkyūjo Bijutsubu (Tokyo: Tōkyō bunkazai kenkyūjo, 2005), 565. 54. Ibid., 567 (emphasis in original).

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55. It is worth noting that Kishida was one of the first painters to try to systematically distribute his work in the form of reproductions. The Society for the Color Printing of the Works of Kishida Ryūsei was an organization he ran from 1917 to 1920. Its aim was both financial and to create publicity. Its members, with whom he communicated through the magazine Shirakaba, periodically received a high-quality color plate or “two simple photographic prints” accompanied by a short explanatory text. See Kishida Ryūsei, “Kishida Ryūsei sakuhin irozuri kai ni tsuite no kōkoku” [Announcement concerning the Society for the Color Printing of the Works of Kishida Ryūsei], Shirakaba, September 1917, in KRZ, 2:172, and “Irozuri kai ni tsuite” [Concerning the Society for the Color Printing of the Works of Kishida Ryūsei], Shirakaba, January 1918, in KRZ, 2:186. 56. Kishida, “Nikki,” in KRZ, 9:4, 16, 17, 43. 57. Photographer Nojima Yasuzō (1889–1964), son of a wealthy banker, played a major role as a patron and gallerist between around 1918 and 1930 and organized a solo exhibition for Kishida from May 15 to 29, 1922. See Nojima Yasuzō to sono shūhen, 11, 85–86. See also Kishida, “Nikki,” in KRZ, 7:184–91. 58. Kishida Ryūsei, “Shajitsu-ron” [On realism], in Ryūsei gashū oyobi geijutsukan, 50–62, in KRZ, 2:415–33; “Shajitsu no ketsujo no kōsatsu” [Thoughts on realism’s inadequacy], Kaizō, May 1922, in KRZ, 3:121–38; and Shoki nikuhitsu ukiyo-e [The beginning of ukiyo-e–style painting] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1926), in KRZ, 4:99–278. The preface to the richly illustrated book was written by the great dramaturge and critic Tsubouchi Shōyō. 59. Kishida, Shoki nikuhitsu ukiyo-e, 117–18. 60. Kishida, Ryūsei gashū oyobi geijutsukan, 386–88. 61. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1914), 182. 62. Kishida, Shoki nikuhitsu ukiyo-e, 136–41. 63. Ibid., 141. 64. Ibid., 120–21 (emphasis in original). 65. Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation (Paris: Alcan, 1890), 425; translated into Japanese as Mohō no hōsoku, trans. Kazahaya Yasoji (1899–1989) (Tokyo: Jiryūsha, 1924). 66. Kishida, Shoki nikuhitsu ukiyo-e, 124. 67. Jacques Rancière, Le destin des images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), 17. 68. Kishida, Shoki nikuhitsu ukiyo-e, 124. 69. Sonobe, Kishida Ryūsei to gendai, 65. 70. The first occurrence of this word can be found in Kishida Ryūsei, “Kyōto Minami-za rokugatsu kyōgen shokan” [An overview of June kyōgen plays at the Kyoto Minami-za theater], Shin-engei, July 1924, in Engeki biron [On the beauty of theater] (Tokyo: Tōkō shoin, 1930) and KRZ, 4:610–11. 71. Kishida’s view of Edo-period art and culture was diametrically opposed to that expressed in Kuki Shūzō, “Iki” no kōzō [The structure of iki] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1930). In fact, the term iki, which Kuki takes to mean “urbane,” “well formed,” and “elegant,” is, for Kishida, entirely pejorative. See Kuki Shūzō, Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki, trans. John Clark (Sydney:

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Power, 1997), 41; and Kishida Ryūsei, “Kongo no bijutsu ni tsuite” [The art to come], Shirakaba, June 1918, in KRZ, 2:208. 72. Junko Miura, Les premières peintures d’ukiyo-e à travers le regard d’un peintre du 20ème siècle: Kishida Ryūsei et le “Shoki nikuhitsu ukiyo-e” (Paris: Inalco, 2000), 74. 73. Ibid., 75. 74. Kishida, introduction to Shoki nikuhitsu ukiyo-e. 75. Kishida, “Bakemono banashi,” 476. 76. Kishida, “Nikki,” in KRZ, 5:119. 77. A (partial) translation of this text was published by Nishikida Yoshitomi as Beruguson no tetsugaku [Bergson’s philosophy] (Tokyo: Keisei-sha, 1913). 78. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 147. 79. Giorgio Agamben, Enfance et histoire (Paris: Payot, 2002), 152–54. 80. Kishida, Shoki nikuhitsu ukiyo-e, 102 (emphasis in original). 81. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La tache aveugle (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 205–6. 82. Yolaine Escande, Montagnes et eaux: La culture du shanshui (Paris: Hermann, 2005), 150–51.

8. Kurosawa Akira’s Ikiru 1. Kurosawa Akira [1910–1998], Ikiru (Tokyo: Tōhō, 1952), black and white, 143 mins. 2. See, for example, “Kodomo no rakuen” [Children’s paradise], Asahi shinbun, April 20, 1947, 2. 3. In the Mainichi Film Concours, Ikiru received prizes for Best [Japanese] Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Sound Recording. Outside Japan, it received the Golden Wolf at the Bucharest Film Festival in 1953 and the Special Prize of the Senate of Berlin at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1954. It was thus one of the first Japanese films to win a prize at a major international film festival, after another Kurosawa film, Rashōmon, which won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1951. See Kurosawa Akira, “Seisaku memoranda” [Production notes], in Zenshū: Kurosawa Akira [Kurosawa Akira: The complete works], 6 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1987–2002), 3:371. 4. Stuart Galbraith IV, The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa (New York: Faber & Faber, 2001), 159. 5. In 2005, Time included Ikiru in its list of the one hundred greatest films in the history of cinema and elected it as the best film of the 1950s. See Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel, “Nine Great Movies from Nine Decades,” Time, May 30, 2005, 77. There are also references to Ikiru in recent films, such as Aoyama Shinji’s Eureka (2000) and François Ozon’s Le temps qui reste (2005). 6. Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 93. 7. Kurosawa, Ikiru, in Zenshū, 3:183.

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8. Gordon Gray, Cinema: A Visual Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 22. See also Roland Schneider, Cinéma et spiritualité de l’Orient extrême: Japon et Corée (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 17. 9. See, for example, the commentary by renowned Germanist Tezuka Tomio (1903–1983), based on Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 1–54 . 10. André Bazin, Le cinéma de la cruauté (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 222. 11. Tadao Satō, Le cinéma japonais, 2 vols. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1997), 2:58. Satō (b. 1930), a prolific and important film critic, is the author of Kurosawa Akira no sekai [The world of Kurosawa Akira] (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1969), the first monograph about the filmmaker. 12. Satō, Cinéma japonais, 2:58. 13. Richie, Films of Akira Kurosawa, 94. 14. Ibid., 95. 15. Kurosawa Akira, “Kataru hodo ni tanoshisa wa fuyashite” [Pleasure comes with talking], Eiga fan, January 1953, in Taikei Kurosawa Akira [Kurosawa Akira: The essential collection (hereafter TKA)], 4 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2009), 2:85. 16. Kurosawa Akira, “ ‘Ikiru’: Puresu shīto” [Ikiru: Press release] (October 1952), in Kurosawa, Zenshū, 3:290, and TKA, 2:73. 17. Kurosawa Akira, interview by Ralph Rugoff, Cut, November 1990, in TKA, 3:370. 18. Kurosawa Akira, Gama no abura: Jiden no yō na mono (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984), published in English as Something Like an Autobiography, trans. Audie E. Bock (New York: Vintage, 1983); TKA, 4:70–72. 19. Kurosawa, Gama no abura, 41–42, 104. 20. Ibid., 100–103. 21. Ibid., 154. 22. Alain Bonfand, Le cinéma d’Akira Kurosawa (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 84–85. 23. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 88. 24. Kurosawa commissioned the film’s poster from Inokuma Gen’ichirō (1902– 1991), who was one of the army’s main painters during the war. See Michael Lucken, Grenades et amertume: Les peintres japonais à l’épreuve de la guerre, 1935– 1952 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2005), 53–55. 25. The expression “national people’s cinema” (kokumin eiga) is typical of the period 1941 to 1945, when it designated cinematic propaganda supported by the Cabinet Information Bureau (Naikaku jōhōkyoku). 26. Kurosawa Akira, “Shinmai enshutsuka no nikki kara” [From the diary of an inexperienced director], Eiga hyōron, March 1943, in TKA, 1:115. 27. Three Hundred Miles Through Enemy Lines (Tekichū ōdan sanbyaku ri) is a screenplay by Kurosawa based on a 1930 novel by Yamanaka Minetarō (1885–1966) in which the action takes place during the Russo-Japanese War. The film was made in 1957 by Mori Kazuo (1911–1989) under the title Nichiro sensō shōri no hishi: Tekichū ōdan sanbyaku ri [The secret history of the victory during the Russo-

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Japanese War: Three hundred miles through enemy lines], though the film is known by its subtitle. See Kurosawa, Gama no abura, 137–38. 28. Kurosawa Akira, “Tekigaishin kōyō ni tsuite” [On boosting the spirit of animosity], Shin eiga, November 1944, in TKA, 1:178. 29. Kurosawa, Gama no abura, 154. 30. Shiina Rinzō, “Jinsei e no sanka: ‘Ikiru’ wo mite” [Ikiru: An elegy of life], Eiga hyōron, December 1952, in Shiina Rinzō zenshū, 23 vols. (Tokyo: Tōjusha, 1970–1978), 14:175. 31. The word for “great cause” in Japanese is taigi, which has a dual meaning: it can denote a great cause in a general sense, or, in the context of the period, it can mean “the great cause”—that is, the Japanese empire. 32. “Shin eiga shōsetsu: Sugata Sanshirō” [Detailed review of new films: Sugata Sanshirō], Eiga no tomo, February 1943, in TKA, 1:127. 33. Kurosawa, “Shinmai enshutsuka no nikki kara,” 113. 34. Kurosawa Akira, “Eiga ni ‘ikiru,’ ” [“To live” in a film], Geijutsu shinchō, October 1952, in TKA, 2:74. 35. Galbraith, Emperor and the Wolf, 136. 36. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, trans. Jay Rubin (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 3–9, 10–19. 37. Kurosawa Akira, “ ‘Rashōmon’ wo amari sawagi sugiru: ‘Ikiru’ wo seisaku chū no Kurosawa Akira to ichimon ittō” [Too much noise around Rashōmon: Questions to Kurosawa Akira during the shooting of Ikiru], Tōkyō shinbun, April 28, 1952, in TKA, 2:79. 38. Hashimoto Shinobu, Fukugan no eizō: Watashi to Kurosawa Akira [The binocular image: Kurosawa Akira and I] (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2010), 103–17. 39. Stanley Kauffmann, A World on Film: Criticism and Comment (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 374. 40. Ronald T. Simone, “The Mythos of the Sickness unto Death: Kurosawa’s ‘Ikiru’ and Tolstoy’s the ‘Death of Ivan Ilych,’ ” Literature / Film Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1975): 2–12. 41. From the end of the nineteenth century Tolstoy was greatly admired in Japan, notably among the writers of the naturalist movement and then among those of the Shirakaba movement. The Death of Ivan Ilyich was translated into Japanese for the first time toward the end of the Taishō period (1912–1926), first from an English translation and then directly from the Russian in 1928 by Yonekawa Masao (1891–1965): respectively, “Iwan Iritchi no shi,” trans. Miyajima Shinzaburō, in Torusutoi zenshū, ed. Toō Zenshū Kankōkai, vol. 8 (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1926); and Iwan Iritchi no shi, trans. Yonekawa Masao (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1928). 42. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories (London: Wordsworth, 2004), 124. 43. Ibid., 123, 124. 44. “Beikoku de no ‘Ikiru’ ” [Ikiru in the United States], Kinema junpō 271 (1960): 148. 45. Kurosawa Akira dokyumento [Documents: Kurosawa Akira] (Tokyo: Kinema junpō sha, May 1974), 110–14. 224

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46. Barbara Carr, “Goethe and Kurosawa: Faust and the Totality of Human Experience—West and East,” Literature / Film Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1996): 274–80. 47. Hyangsoon Yi, “Kurosawa and Gogol: Looking Through the Lens of Metonymy,” Literature / Film Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1999): 210–17. 48. Kurosawa Akira, “ ‘Ran’: Sai-sutāto ni atatte” [Ran: On the verge of a new start], Kinema junpō, January 1984, in TKA, 3:277. 49. Both Drunken Angel and Ikiru were produced by Tōhō. The intervening films, however, were produced either by Shōchiku (Scandal [Shūbun], 1950) or Daei (Rashōmon, 1950). 50. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge, 2003), 634. 51. Roland Barthes, “Éléments de sémiologie,” Communications 4 (1964): 115–16. 52. Roman Jakobson, On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 130–31. 53. Kurosawa, Ikiru, 165–66. 54. Yoshimoto, Kurosawa, 203. 55. Marc Bonhomme, Le discours métonymique (Bern: Lang, 2006), 28. 56. Richie, Films of Akira Kurosawa, 27.

9. Araki Nobuyoshi’s Sentimental Journey—Winter 1. Araki Nobuyoshi, Senchimentaru na tabi—Fuyu no tabi [Sentimental journey—Winter] (Tokyo: Shinchō-sha, 1991). Araki was born in 1940 in the Minowa neighborhood of Tokyo. 2. Araki writes in the margin, “I took the picture with the hyoid bone, but when I had developed and printed it, the bone began to look like the face of [our cat] Chiro” (Fuyu no tabi). 3. Thierry Gontier, “L’image blanche,” in Roland Barthes et la photo: Le pire des signes, ed. Gilles Mora, Les cahiers de la photographie 25 (Paris: Contrejour, 1990), 23–29. 4. Araki Nobuyoshi, Senchimentaru na tabi (Tokyo: Araki Nobuyoshi, 1971). 5. Araki Nobuyoshi, “Title of Work,” in Araki Nobuyoshi bungaku zenshū [Araki Nobuyoshi’s complete writings (hereafter ANBZ)], 8 vols. (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1998–1999), 6:126. 6. Iizawa Kōtarō, ed., Arakibon! 1965–2005 [Araki Books! 1965–2005] (Tokyo: Bijutsu shuppansha, 2006). In 2005, Iizawa counted 357 works published by Araki (17). 7. Araki (Cologne: Taschen, 2001); Araki Nobuyoshi, Araki: Moi, la vie, la mort, ed. Akiko Miki, Yoshiko Isshiki, and Tomoko Sato (Paris: Phaidon, 2007). 8. Alain Jouffroy, “L’interminable roman vécu d’Araki,” in Araki (Arles: Actes sud, 2006). 9. Araki Nobuyoshi, “A meigon shū” [Famous quotes by A.], in ANBZ, 6:86. 10. Ibid., 46. 11. “Nobuyoshi Araki Discusses Yasuzo Nojima,” GOLIGA (available at http:// vimeo.com/6846348, 6:10 and 8:35). 225

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12. Araki Nobuyoshi, “Fuyajō!? Aoi ukiyoe oiran shō no kiiroi kajitsu Mari-chan” [Sleepless town!? Mari-chan, a yellow fruit at the Aoi ukiyo-e oiran show], in ANBZ, 1:95–107; “A meigon shū,” 61; and “Yakushae” [Actor prints], in ANBZ, 6:267–70. 13. Ishida Hidetaka, “La mémoire photographique,” in Le temps des œuvres: Mémoire et préfiguration, ed. Jacques Nefs (Saint-Denis: PUV, 2001), 119. See also Iizawa Kōtarō, Araki! (Tokyo: Hakushuisha, 1994), 70–74. 14. On this aspect of Yanagi’s work, see Michael Lucken, “The Endless Pursuit of Inner Desires: Yanagi Sōetsu Before Mingei,” Cipango English Selection 1 (2012) (available at http://cjs.revues.org/75). 15. Yanagi Sōetsu, Artisan et inconnu, trans. Mathilde Bellaigue (Paris: L’Asiathèque, 1992), 55–56. 16. Araki, “A meigon shū,” 81. 17. Moriyama Daidō, Inu no kioku [Memories of a dog] (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 2001), 18. 18. Akasegawa Genpei, Jirojiro nikki [Unflinching diary] (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 1990); Yokoo Tadanori, Iwayuru gaka sengen: Yokoo Tadanori no gaka no nikki, ’80–’83 [Manifesto of a so-called painter: Painter Yokoo Tadanori’s diary, 1980–1983] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1991); Ikeda Masuo, Hizuke no aru jigazō [Portraits with dates] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1977). 19. Araki Nobuyoshi, “A jobun batsubun shū” [Collection of introductions and postscripts by A.], in ANBZ, 6:9 (emphasis in original). 20. Araki, “A meigon shū,” 51. 21. Itō Toshiharu, Araki Nobuyoshi: Sei to shi no iota [Araki Nobuyoshi: An iota between life and death] (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1998), 185. 22. Araki, “A jobun batsubun shū,” 9 (emphasis added) (the Japanese word I translate as “pledge” is kesshin). 23. Humorously, Araki often replaces the first character in the word shisō 思想 (thought) with a homophonous character meaning “finger” 指想, a neologism that could be translated as “thought of the finger.” 24. Jouffroy, “L’interminable roman.” 25. Itō, Araki Nobuyoshi, 196. 26. Araki, “A meigon shū,” 54. 27. Philippe Forest, Araki enfin: L’homme qui ne vécut que pour aimer (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 62–63. 28. Ibid. 29. Araki Nobuyoshi, “Tsuma no iei” [The funeral portrait of my wife], in Araki Nobuyoshi: Senchimentaru shashin jinsei [Araki Nobuyoshi: A lifetime of sentimental photography] (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1999), 18. 30. Lucken, “Endless Pursuit of Inner Desires.” 31. Suga Kishio, “Mumeisei no kanata no mumei” [Anonymous beyond anonymity], Bijutsu techō 355 (1972): 304–6. 32. Akasegawa Genpei, Chōgeijutsu tomason [Hyperart: Thomasson]  (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1987), 26. 33. Ibid., 25. 34. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Conversation avec Araki,” in Araki, Araki: Moi, la vie, la mort, 250. 226

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35. Terazawa Norihisa, “Sōhō no busshitsu kagaku” [The scientific reality of corpse disposal], in Shi no gihō [The techniques of death], ed. Kondō Noriyuki and Komatsu Kazuhiko (Kyoto: Mineruva shobō, 2008), 152. 36. Ikezawa Natsuki, Hone wa sango, me wa shinju [Bones of coral, eyes of pearl] (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1995), 168, translation based on Véronique Brindeau, Des os de corail, des yeux de perle (Arles: Picquier, 1997), 15 (emphasis added). 37. Terazawa, “Sōhō no busshitsu kagaku,” 153. 38. Sasaki Toshirō, “Aru eiji goroshi no dōki” [The motives of an infanticide], Bungaku jidai, January 1931, 171 (available at aozora.gr.jp). 39. Andrew Bernstein, Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Changes in Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 170. 40. Terazawa, “Sōhō no busshitsu kagaku,” 154. 41. Kawabata Yasunari, “Kotsuhiroi,” Bungei ōrai, October 1949, in Kawabata Yasunari zenshū [The complete works of Kawabata Yasunari], 35 vols.  (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1999), 1:12; Yasunari Kawabata, The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories, trans. Martin J. Homan (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1997), 89–90 (emphasis added). 42. Araki Nobuyoshi, “Haha no shi,” Workshop, 1974, in Araki, Araki: Moi, la vie, la mort, 560. 43. Josef Kyburz, “La réponse de Maruyama Ōkyo au Titien,” Cipango 12 (2006): 49–50. 44. Yolaine Escande, L’art en Chine (Paris: Hermann, 2001), 86–90. 45. Yamada Shinya worked on the funeral portraits of a guardian temple (bodaiji) in the Tōno area. The oldest funeral paintings (kuyō egaku) are done on wood panels and depict the deceased in a stylized way participating in various rituals. As much by their colors as their composition, these works related to the Kanō style are very far removed from photographic realism. The last example of this type, which fell into steady decline around 1890, dates from 1922. The first as it were “real” funeral portraits date from around 1889 and are of young soldiers killed on duty. They are painted from photographs on silk or paper using a technique known as shashinga, developed by, among others, the Goseda workshops in Yokohama. This technique, which isolates and freezes the deceased in all his or her solemnity, was the most common until about 1950, after which it declined sharply but without disappearing completely. The first photographic portrait dates from 1904. From around 1910 to 1920, this technique gradually spread and is now virtually the only method used. See Yamada Shinya, “Kindai ni okeru iei no seiritsu to shisha hyōshō” [The emergence of the portraits of the deceased in the modern era and representations of the dead], Kokuritsu rekishi minzoku hakubutsukan kenkyū hōkoku [Bulletin of the National Museum of Japanese History] 132 (2006): 290–98. Bernstein points out that the use of photographs on funeral altars goes back to the 1920s, in Modern Passings, 213n.110. 46. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), 32. 47. Yamada, “Kindai ni okeru iei,” 288. 48. Itō, Araki Nobuyoshi, 17. 49. Araki, “A meigon shū,” 76. 227

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50. In a family context, photographing corpses is extremely unusual in Japan. The publication of the picture showing Yōko’s corpse therefore had a scandalous dimension, and it prompted very angry responses. See the discussion between Araki and Shinoyama Kishin in Araki Nobuyoshi, “Uso to makoto, umaheta—vs. Shinoyama Kishin” [Lies and truth, good and bad—vs. Shinoyama Kishin], in ANBZ, 6:188–94. 51. Araki, “A meigon shū,” 47. 52. Itō, Araki Nobuyoshi, 37–38. 53. Takahata Isao’s film, adopting the same title as the story (Hotaru no haka, 1967), was produced by Studio Ghibli in 1988. 54. Nosaka Akiyuki, “Hotaru no haka,” Ōru yomimono, October 1967. This novella has been translated into French by Patrick De Vos as La tombe des lucioles (Arles: Picquier, 1988) and into Spanish by Lourdes Porta and Jun’ichi Matsuura as La tumba de las luciernagas y Las algas americanas (Barcelona: El Acantilado, 2007). 55. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 79 (emphasis in original). 56. Roland Barthes, Ma: Espace-temps du Japon (Paris: Festival d’automne à Paris, 1978), in Œuvres complètes, 5 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 5:479–80. See also Roland Barthes, “L’intervalle,” Le nouvel observateur, October 23, 1978, in Œuvres complètes, 5:475–77. 57. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 4–5. 58. Ibid., 49, 109. 59. Ibid., 5. 60. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 4. 61. Ibid., 97–98. 62. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 67–72. 63. Barthes, Empire of Signs, 92–93. 64. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. 65. Barthes, Empire of Signs, 46–47. 66. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 115. 67. Barthes, Empire of Signs, 110. 68. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 119. 69. François Jullien, La propension des choses (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 263. 70. Araki, Fuyu no tabi. 71. Araki, “A meigon shū,” 58. 72. Araki Nobuyoshi, “Aspirer à la perfection imparfaite,” in Araki, Araki: Moi, la vie, la mort, 144. 73. Araki, Fuyu no tabi. 74. Nakagami Kenji and Araki Nobuyoshi, Monogatari Sōru [Seoul, the story] (Tokyo: Parco shuppan, 1984). 75. “Suki ni natta hito” [The man I love (1968)], by Ichikawa Shōsuke (music) and Shiratori Chōei (lyrics), sung by Miyako Harumi (b. 1948), who was often on television until the early 1990s. 76. Araki Nobuyoshi, Aijō ryokō [Love journey]  (Tokyo: Magajin hausu, 1989). 228

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77. This Balthus exhibition was held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, from June 17 to July 22, 1984 (available at http://www.momak.go.jp/ Japanese/exhibitionArchive/1984/). 78. Araki, Fuyu no tabi. 79. Ibid. 80. Fukase Masahisa, Chichi no kioku (Tokyo: IPC, 1991). 81. Matsumoto Eiichi, Shi wo matsu ie (Tokyo: Media fakutorī, 1999). 82. Ishiuchi Miyako, 1906 to the Skin (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1994).

10. Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away 1. Miyazaki Hayao, Orikaeshi ten, 1997–2008 [Turning point, 1997–2008] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2008), 262. 2. Miyazaki Hayao was born in Tokyo in 1941. The film’s original title was Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi [Sen and Chihiro abducted by the gods] (Tokyo: Studio Ghibli, 2001), 124 mins. 3. The CiNii search engine turns up 126 articles in Japanese about this film as of July 2014. There are also many in English, Korean, and French. 4. See, particularly, Kubota Keiji, “Eiga no naka no mei serifu, mei shīn: Miyazaki Hayao shinario ‘Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi’ ” [Famous dialogues and scenes from films: Spirited Away, a screenplay by Miyazaki Hayao], Shinario 66, no. 3 (2010): 87–96, no. 4 (2010): 84–94. 5. Mino Toshiko, “Sutajio Jiburi to kindai bungaku: Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi to Izumi Kyōka no ‘Ryūtandan’ ” [Studio Ghibli and modern literature: Spirited Away and Izumi Kyōka’s “Of a Dragon in the Deep”], Kenkyū kiyō 48 (2010): 1–17. 6. Miyazaki, Orikaeshi ten, 259. 7. Ibid., 270. 8. Ibid., 258. 9. Ibid., 259. 10. Miyazaki Hayao, Shuppatsuten, 1979–1996 [Departure point, 1979–1996] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2010), 190. 11. Miyazaki, Orikaeshi ten, 258. 12. There is a pun in this word in Japanese. The first two characters can be read as jōten and mean “heaven” or “ascent to heaven.” However, the last three characters are usually read as tenchūsatsu, a word from the Chinese sexagenary cycle referring to moments during which heaven cannot help. 13. “We did not choose to make [the men] pigs out of irony. They really became pigs,” explained Miyazaki in 2001. See Miyazaki, Orikaeshi ten, 258. 14. Ibid., 296. 15. An exhibition titled “Grimault, Takahata, Miyazaki” was held in 2008 at Fontevraud Abbey in the Loire Valley. 16. Miyazaki, Orikaeshi ten, 258. 17. Ibid., 251. 18. Augustin Berque, Être humain sur la terre (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 77. 229

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19. Tsuji Nobuo, “Taidan: Tsuji Nobuo” [Discussion: Tsuji Nobuo], Tokushū: Murakami Takashi, in “Murakami Takashi,” special issue, Bijutsu techō  812 (2001): 46. 20. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 21. Ibid., 72. 22. Henri Joly, Le renversement platonicien (Paris: Vrin, 1974), 206. 23. Orikuchi Shinobu, “Kokubungaku no hassei: 4” [The birth of national literature: 4], in Orikuchi Shinobu zenshū [The complete works of Orikuchi Shinobu], 31 vols. (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1995–1999), 1:193 (available at www.aozora .gr.jp). 24. Tsuji, “Taidan,” 48. 25. Miyazaki, Shuppatsuten, 261.

Conclusion 1. Roland Barthes, “Ce que je dois à Khatibi,” in Abdelkebir Khatibi, La mémoire tatouée (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1979), in Barthes, Œuvres complètes, 5 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 5:667. 2. Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 5. 3. Barthes, “Ce que je dois à Khatibi,” 667. 4. Trésor de la langue française informatisé (available at http://atilf.atilf.fr). 5. Michael Lucken, L’art du Japon au vingtième siècle: Pensée, formes, resistances (Paris: Hermann, 2001), 245.

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236

Index

Numbers in italics refer to pages on which illustrations appear. Abrégé de l’histoire générale des voyages (Concise general history of travel; La Harpe), 10–11 Abstract Expressionism, 1, 23 Académie Julian (Paris), 42 Académie royale de peinture, 20 acculturation, 16, 55 Achilles and the Tortoise (film, Kitano), 1 aesthetics, 4, 55, 59, 65, 88–89, 215n.41; aesthetic pleasure, 98, 99; Barthes and Japanese, 158, 159; Buddhist, 45, 46, 66, 140; consumer society and, 42; feudal order in Japan and, 44; of Hegel, 22, 62; of Hind, 88–89; of Japan in 1920s, 63; of Kishida, 88, 94, 96, 97, 99–103; metonymy in Buddhist, 45, 46; “modern bone” and, 153; of the monstrous, 101; of the mundane, 64; of Nakai, 66, 67, 68, 70–71, 217n.32, 217n.39; politics and, 21, 198; “premodern,” 192; of repetition and resignation, 140–41; of Sakaguchi, 56; shadows in Japanese, 4, 168; traces in Japanese, 4, 125, 133–36, 135 Agamben, Giorgio, 104 Akasegawa Genpei, 143, 148 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 55–56, 122 Alechinsky, Pierre, 33 All About Ghosts No. 8 (Kishida), 86, 87

Americanization, 112 “ancients versus moderns” debate, 21 anime, 3, 16, 157, 166, 185, 200 anthropology, physical, 24, 154 Anthropométries (Klein), 36 Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy, 91 apprenticeship, imitation as, 33, 45, 50 appropriation, 5, 14, 58 Araki Nobuyoshi, 3, 4, 59, 137, 206, 225n.1; affinity of, for Pure Land Buddhism, 141; diary-like notes in work of, 142–43; erotic images of, 138; modern return to the premodern and, 141–42; Sur-sentimentalist Manifest No. 2, 147; treatment of death in work of, 156, 160–61, 173, 228n.50. See also Sentimental Journey—Winter architecture, Sino-Japanese, 186, 187 Aristotle, 50, 64, 68–69 “Art as Imitation” (Fukada), 63 Art du Japon au vingtième siècle, L ’ (Lucken), 3, 205 art history, 28, 34, 204 artisans, 17, 29, 140, 142 Aryan race, theory of, 24, 34 Asai Shinpei, 172 Asakura Fumio, 93 Ashikaga period (1336–1573), 62 Assyrian art, 24

237

Index

Attali, Jacques, 17 Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (Pollock), 58 avant-gardes, 31, 50, 56, 76, 136, 147; creative impulse exalted by, 59; imitation and, 33; rapid turnover of movements of, 4; Western/European, 90, 106 Barthes, Roland, 5, 19, 155, 157–60, 161, 162, 203; Camera Lucida, 157–58, 159; Empire of Signs, 158, 159; on non-Western cultures as Other, 201, 202 Bashō, 45 Baudelaire, Charles, 26, 28, 35 Baudrillard, Jean, 44 Baumeister, Willi, 33 Bazin, André, 108, 111 Beginning of Ukiyo-e-Style Painting, The (Kishida), 96, 221n.58 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 127–28 Bellessort, André, 17 Benjamin, Walter, 39, 69, 93 Bentham, Jeremy, 50 Bergerat, Émile, 30 Bergson, Henri, 84, 101–2 Bern Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1899), 209n.27 Berque, Augustin, 191 Besant, Annie, 15 Bhaba, Homi, 5 Bing, Siegfried, 35 Black Paintings (Goya), 58 Blake, William, 63, 91 body art, 1 Bonald, Louis de, 48 bone-image, 154–63, 165 Bonhomme, Marc, 133 Brazil (film, Gilliam), 185 Buddhism, 10, 32, 49, 128, 142, 206; aspects of, adopted by Westerners, 201, 202; “Buddhist Kantianism,” 84; commemorative stelae and idea of transference, 45–46; Japanese government’s rejection of, 81; metaphor of mirror as enlightenment in, 66–67; Nakai on, 61–62; organic vision of creation in, 56; reality appearing as “reflection” in, 65; satori

238

(awakening) in, 158, 162; sculpture in, 31, 32; in Spirited Away, 187. See also Pure Land Buddhism burial and funeral practices of, 151–52, 155; banquets as, 168–70, 169; “Buddha of the throat” (hyoid bone) and, 137, 138, 149, 152, 156, 163, 225n.2; function of traces of, at funerals, 134, 135; portraits as, 108, 110, 134, 138, 155–56, 227n.45; tablet with Buddhist name as, 134, 137, 138, 155, 156 bushidō (Japanese spirit), 54 Bust of Smiling Girl in Western-Style Clothes (Kisihida), 81 butō (dance theater), 191 Cabinet Information Bureau (Naikaku jōhōkyoku), 115, 223n.25 calligraphy, Sino-Japanese, 30, 85, 106, 133 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 157–58, 159 Campbell’s Soup Cans (Warhol), 36 Carné, Marcel, 111 Caron, François, 9 Cassirer, Ernst, 62, 66, 216n.24 Castle of Cagliostro, The (Kariosutoro no shiro; anime, Miyazaki), 185 Cernuschi, Henri, 31 César (César Baldaccini), 36 Cézanne, Paul, 77, 92, 93 Challaye, Félicien, 13 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 17 Charlevoix, Pierre de, 10, 11 Charton, Édouard, 210n.14 Château, Dominique, 24 China, 2, 10, 12, 30, 159, 203; divination methods in, 84; emergence of, on global economic scene, 15, 209n.33; Japanese imitation of, 12, 47, 52; modern Japanese culture and influence of, 160, 177; rebellions in, against colonialism, 13; viewed as imitator nation by Japan, 54 Chinese studies, in Japan, 49 Christianity, 21, 84; colonization and, 37; Japanese converts to, 14; Kishida and, 89, 91, 99; Western view of Asia and, 38 cinema, 70–71 classicism, 28, 33, 62, 71

Index

colonialism, 2, 14, 28; of France, 14, 38; of Japan, 13, 209n.31; Japan under threat from Western, 55; national liberation movements against, 15 Communism, 69, 70, 119, 218n.40 Compressions (César), 36 computer programmers, as artisans, 29 Confucianism, 10, 47 “Contribution to an Aesthetics of Function” (Nakai), 67 Cook, James, 11 copy, 1, 98; dichotomy of, and original, 36; model and, 39, 45; modernization paired with, 18 copyright law, 57 counterfeit, 18 craftsmanship, 29 Crasset, Jean, 9–10 creation, 15, 53, 148; archaeology of, 21; Buddhist organic vision of, 56; European invention of, 20; ex nihilo, 1, 29; genius paired with, 63; hegemonic promotion of, 23; as highest ideal, 1–2; imperialist nation-state and, 57; power dynamics and, 29; reflection and, 67; Romantic, 28 Creation of Heaven and Earth, The (Kishida, 1914), 99–100 Creative Mind, The (Bergson), 101 creativity, 3, 23, 41, 147; avant-garde as guarantor of, 33; denial or belittling of that of others, 30; dream of overcoming death and, 206; Romantic mind-set and, 202; science and, 203; as scientific discovery of the world, 88 Cubism, 1 Daguerre, Louis, 26 Darwin, Charles, 98 Date Paintings (Kawara), 144 death, 104, 116, 123, 173; anxiety about, 190; dream of overcoming, 206; fear of, 88; in Ikiru, 108, 114, 117, 127, 131, 134, 136; imitation identified with, 12; photography and, 156, 157–58, 170, 172, 173; in Sentimental Journey—Winter, 138, 143–45, 146, 154–63, 162; in Spirited Away, 176, 183, 184, 187; as yōkai, 84. See

also Buddhism: burial and funeral practices of Death of Ivan Ilyich, The (Tolstoy), 122–23, 125, 224n.41 decolonization, 15 Degottex, Jean, 33 Delacroix, Eugène, 34, 91 Deleuze, Gilles, 202 derori aesthetic, 100–102, 104 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 197 Descartes, René, 21 diachrony, 24, 158 Dictionnaire d’ethnographie moderne (Dictionary of modern ethnography; Abbé Migne), 11 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 36, 149 difference, 5, 30, 59, 68, 176; absolute Other and, 201; assertion of inherent, of Japan, 57; domesticated by technique, 34; “we”–“them” distinction and, 25, 26 Dodesukaden (film, Kurosawa), 120 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 111, 122, 125 Dreams (film, Kurosawa), 120 Drunken Angel (film, Kurosawa), 113–14, 126, 225n.49 Duchamp, Marcel, 36, 147 Dürer, Albrecht, 62, 89, 91, 94, 193 Duret, Théodore, 31–32 Edo period (1603–1867), 20, 43, 55, 58, 141; funeral portraits in, 155; three types of imitation and creation in, 44–47; yūrei (specters) in art and theater of, 86 ego, Western, 23, 26, 201, 202, 206 El Greco, 91 Eliseev, Sergei, 13 Ema Tsutomu, 85, 86 Empire of Signs (Barthes), 158, 159 en (link), in Japanese culture, 196, 196–97, 197 Encouragement of Learning, A (Gakumon no susume; Fukuzawa), 49, 55 Encyclopedists, 38 Enlightenment, 21 ethos, 64 European art. See Western/European art Evans, Walker, 147 Exilée, L’ (Loti), 12 existentialism, 128

239

Index

exoticism, 24, 111 Expressionism, 23, 36, 42, 63, 91 fascism, 59, 64 Faure, Bernard, 46 Faust (Goethe), 123 Fauvism, 4, 42 Federation for the Great Way of Venerating the Emperor and Repaying the Buddha (Sonnō hōbutsu daidōdan), 81–82 Fenollosa, Ernest, 49 Ferrier, Michaël, 9 Figal, Gerald, 84 Finbert, Elian-J., 14, 209n.31 Flag series (Johns), 36 Fluxus, 147 folklore/folk arts, 50, 59, 140, 147, 177 Ford, John, 111, 113 Foreign Settlement at Tsukiji (Kishida), 89, 90 Forest, Philippe, 146–47 Foucault, Michel, 21 Fra Angelico, 94 France, 13, 26, 51; as authority on value of artworks, 40; Bourbon Restoration in, 48; civil unrest of May 1968 in, 23; colonialism of, 14, 38; and Japan, 37–42; Japanese studying in, 50; Longwy pottery of, as imitation of Chinese ceramics, 30 Frankfurt school, 69 French language, imperialism and, 39 French Revolution, 11, 21 Fujita Tsuguharu, 41, 213n.11 Fukada Kōsan, 63–64, 216n.5 Fukasaku Kinji, 153 Fukase Masahisa, 173 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 49, 55 functionalism/functionality, 62, 64, 65 Futurism, 64 Galbraith, Stuart, IV, 108 Ganmu (Gunnm; anime, Kishiro), 185 “Gathering Ashes” (Kotsuhiroi; Kawabata), 152 Gauguin, Paul, 91, 93 genius, 21, 23, 30; as affirmation of difference, 33; creation paired with, 63; as imitated model, 27; machine as

240

extension of artist’s hand and, 35; modernization and, 140 geography, 24, 30, 32 Germany, 50 Ghost Stories (Kishida), 85–86, 88 Gilliam, Terry, 185 Gillot, Charles, 35, 212n.16 Girard, René, 28 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 123 Golden, Arthur, 16 Goncourt, Edmond de, 28 Goya, Francisco, 58, 91, 93 Grapes of Wrath, The (film, Ford), 113 “Grave of the Fireflies” (anime, Nosaka and Takahata), 157, 228n.53 Graveyard of Honor (film, Fukasaku), 153 Great Kantō Earthquake (1923), 85, 114 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 198 Griffis, William E., 13 Grimault, Paul, 185 Guernica (Picasso), 58 Guillain, Robert, 17 Guimet, Émile, 75 Gulick, Sidney, 13 Gutai group, 142 Hani Gorō, 215n.41, 217n.40 “Hansel and Gretel” (Brothers Grimm), 177 Hanshichi Shashin Seihan Insatsujo, 220n.39 Hara Katsurō, 51 Hashimoto Shinobu, 122 Hasumi Shigehiko, 59 Hegel, G. W. F., 21–22, 96, 202, 211n.24 Heidegger, Martin, 68, 201–2 High Red Center, 142 Hijikata Tatsumi, 142 Hind, C. Lewis, 88–89, 90 Hiroshige, 32 Histoire de l’église du Japon (History of the Japanese church; Crasset), 9–10 Histoire de l’établissement, des progrès et de la décadence du christianisme dans l’empire du Japon (History of the establishment, progress, and decadence of Christianity in the Japanese empire; Kaempfer), 10 Histoire générale des voyages (General history of travel; Charlevoix), 10

Index

Histoire naturelle, civile et ecclésiastique de l’empire du Japon (Natural, civil, and ecclesiastical history of the Japanese empire; Kaempfer), 10 history, 19, 24, 25, 30; Romantic view of, 64; salvation through inscription in, 28, 40; willed exit from, 48 History of Japan’s Fantastic Creatures, A (Ema), 85 Hokusai, 32, 46, 77, 140 Holbein, Hans, 89, 91 Homer, 175 Honda Toshiaki, 48 Horkheimer, Max, 69 Hototogisu (The cuckoo; journal), 92 Houses Waiting for Death (Matsumoto), 173 Hovelaque, Émile, 13 Hugo, Victor, 38 humanism, 38, 50, 114 Humbert, Aimé, 33, 34, 211n.12 I Live in Fear (film, Kurosawa), 114 Ideals of the East, The (Okakura), 62 Idiot, The (Hakuchi; film, Kurosawa), 122 Ikeda Masuo, 143 Ikezawa Natsuki, 151 Ikiru (film, Kurosawa), 3, 168, 177, 183, 205, 206, 225n.49; as adaptation of other works, 122–25; collective endeavor in, 120–21; critical acclaim for, 108, 222n.5; emotional effect of, 107–8; failures of metamorphosis in, 128–33, 130, 132; hero’s role in, 111–13; holes and finitude as themes in, 109, 125–28; metaphor and metonymy in, 128–29, 133, 134, 136; prizes won at film festivals by, 222n.3; traces in, 4, 133–36, 135; transition point in, 108, 109, 110, 111; World War II reflected in, 107, 113–19, 115, 127 imagination, 23, 75, 84, 205 imitation, 96–99, 204; ancient/distant civilizations associated with, 24; Aristotelian concept of, 64; Christian, 21; colonialism and, 14; denigration of, 12; external and synchronic, 18; genius opposed to, 23; internal and diachronic, 18; lack of natural origin

and, 22; mass of common people associated with, 26, 28, 211n.22; in music, 36; negative connotation of, 1–2, 16, 18–19; paradoxically disallowed by Romantic model, 42; Platonic concept of, 21, 63; power dynamics and, 29; preliminary function of, in classicism, 33; race theory and, 24–25; radical rejection of, 22; restitution of, 65, 71; understanding and, 56; in Western art, 36. See also Japanese-as-imitators stereotype Imitation and Creation in Japanese Culture (Yamada), 57–58 imitation–creation dichotomy/polarization, 4, 28, 36, 63; “creative imitation,” 16–17; culture–nature dichotomy and, 176; Japanese reluctance to accept, 2; Romantic mind-set and, 204 immutability, 17, 18 Imperial Crown (architectural style), 186 Imperial Way, 198 Impressionism, 31, 32, 42, 91 “In a Thicket” (Akutagawa), 122 independence (dokuritsu), 55 India, 15, 61, 62, 159, 173 individualism, 111, 112, 119 individuality, 38, 57, 148 individuation, 3 Indo-European language, 24, 34 ink painting, Chinese (Sino-Japanese), 40, 50, 76, 100, 104, 154–55 innovation, 3 Inokuma Gen’inchirō, 223n.24 Inoue Enryō, 81, 84–85, 102 intellectual property laws, 2 internal mediation, 28 invention, 1, 21, 49 Ishida Hidetaka, 140 Ishiuchi Miyako, 173 Itō Toshiharu, 145, 156 Izumi Kyōka, 177 Jakobson, Roman, 128, 129 Japan, 30, 34; American Occupation of, 113–14, 119; assertion of uniqueness by, 57; assimilation of Western modernity in, 2; “between tradition and modernity,” 17; as colonial power, 13, 209n.31; cremation as

241

Index

Japan (continued) burial practice in, 149–54; cultural debt of, to China, 10; Dutch studies in, 48; and France, 37–42; historiography of, 51; as home of universal values, 191–92; imitation of Chinese models in, 47; industrial and colonial expansion of, 85; modern aesthetic history of, 6; as nation of imitators, 1, 9; as only nonWestern culture with global reach, 1; postmodernism in, 197; Romantic concepts assimilated by, 51, 52, 55; as second-biggest economy, 16; selfawareness of, as imitative nation, 43, 50–60; Westernization of, 102 Japan Romantic school, 68 Japanese-as-imitators stereotype, 2, 15; as caricature, 13; in China, 209n.33; diplomatic missions and, 12; disappearance of, 16; in European literature, 9–11; Romanticism and, 11–12; as threat, 13–14 Japanese exceptionalism (Nihonjin-ron), 57 “Japanese mind,” 54–55 Japanese studies/Japanology, 16–17 Japon illustré, Le (Humbert), 33–34, 211n.12 japonisme, 31, 32, 202 Jesuits, 39 Johns, Jasper, 36 Joly, Henri, 194 Jōmon culture, 142, 200 Jordan, Brenda, 44 Jouffroy, Alain, 139 Jouffroy, Théodore, 211n.22 Jousse, Marcel, 1 Judeo-Christian tradition, 1, 152 Jullien, François, 160 Kabuki theater, 118, 199 Kaempfer, Engelbert, 10 Kagemusha (film, Kurosawa), 114 kanka (inspiration), 124 Kanō Jigorō, 118 Kanō school, 20, 227n.45 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 50, 70, 86; on genius, 21; on imitation of nightingale’s song, 22, 96–97 Karatani Kōjin, 56

242

kata (set form, pattern, mold), 44, 47, 65 Kauffman, Stanley, 122, 123 Kawabata Yasunari, 152 Kawara On, 144 Kawatsura Ryūzō, 53 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 201, 202 Kimura Shōhachi, 90, 91, 92–93 King Lear (Shakespeare), 125 Kinoshita Mokutarō, 93 Kinoshita Nagahiro, 68 Kishida Kunio, 52 Kishida Natsuko, 207n.8 Kishida Ryūsei, 3, 4, 59, 136, 140, 207n.8, 219n.32; as avant-garde pioneer, 76; photography and, 92–96, 99; plasticity and, 205; on principle of imitation, 96–99; realism and, 89–92, 96–98, 100, 103; Society for the Color Printing of the Works of Kishida Ryūsei, 221n.55 works of: All About Ghosts No. 8, 86, 87; The Beginning of Ukiyo-eStyle Painting, 96, 221n.58; The Creation of Heaven and Earth, 99–100; Foreign Settlement at Tsukiji, 89, 90; Ghost Stories, 85–86, 88; Nude: Study, 78, 79; On Her Fifth Birthday (Reiko), 95, 95; On Her Twelfth Birthday (Reiko): At Home at Nanzenji-Kusagawachō, Kyoto, 95, 95; “On Realism,” 96; “Thoughts on Realism’s Inadequacy,” 96. See also Reiko portrait series Kishiro Yukito, 185 Kitamura Tōkoku, 62 Kitano Takeshi, 1 Klein, Yves, 32, 36 Kline, Franz, 30 Klinger, Max, 63 Kobayashi Hideo, 198 Kōga (photography journal), 65 kokugaku (national studies), 47 Korea, 54, 203 Kristeva, Julia, 5 Kuki Shūzō, 221n.71 Kuno Osamu, 68 Kurosawa Akira, 3, 4, 59, 207n.8; collective aspect of filmmaking and, 119–21, 122; holes as theme in films

Index

of, 126; violent events experienced by generation of, 114; wartime films of, 114, 115–17; as Westernizing artist, 111, 119 films of: Dodesukaden, 120; Dreams, 120; Drunken Angel, 113–14, 126, 225n.49; The Idiot, 122; I Live in Fear, 114; Kagemusha, 114; The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, 115, 118; The Most Beautiful, 115, 121, 133; Ran, 114, 125; Rashōmon, 111, 121, 122, 222n.3, 225n.49; Rhapsody in August, 114; Scandal, 225n.49; Seven Samurai, 114; Stray Dog, 111; Sugata Sanshirō I, 115, 118, 125; Sugata Sanshirō II, 115, 118, 125; Throne of Blood, 114. See also Ikiru Kuwabara Jitsuzō, 54 La Harpe, J.-F., 10–11 Lang, Fritz, 185 Le Bon, Gustave, 34 Le Corbusier, 64 Lenin, Vladimir, 68 Leonardo da Vinci, 91 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 9 linguistics, 24 Lissitzky, El, 112 literature, 20, 92, 173, 176; of Edo period, 43, 46, 51; first-person novel, 173; funeral banquet in, 168; imitation in, 36; Russian, 122 Little Girl (Reiko Standing Up) (Kishida), 81, 82 living dolls (iki ningyō), 46 “Logic of Committees, The” (Iinkai no ronri; Nakai), 68–69 Lois de l’imitation, Les (The laws of imitation; Tarde), 9, 99 Loti, Pierre, 12 Lyotard, Jean-François, 197 MA: Space-Time in Japan (museum exhibition), 158 Magritte, René, 36 Maistre, Joseph de, 48 Malevich, Kazimir, 112 Malraux, André, 91 manga, 16, 166 Marcuse, Herbert, 69 Marquet, Christophe, 20

Maruyama Ōkyo, 154 Marx, Karl, 68, 69 Masaccio, 94 masterpiece, notion of, 3, 39 Matabei (Iwasa Matabei), 94, 100 Matisse, Henri, 22, 91, 93 Matsumoto Eiichi, 173 Maximum Embodiment (Winther-Tamaki), 2 McFarland, Thomas, 21 mediation, 67 Meier-Graefe, Julius, 88 Meiji period (1868–1912), 49, 50, 55, 86, 105, 149 Mémoire tatouée, La (Khatibi), 201, 202 Memories of My Father (Fukase), 173 Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, The (film, Kurosawa), 115, 118 Messiaen, Olivier, 14 metamorphosis, 205 metaphor, 9, 46, 155; in Ikiru, 128–29, 133, 136; mirror as enlightened mind in Buddhism, 66; as mitate, 43 metonymy: in Buddhist aesthetics, 45, 46; in Ikiru, 128, 133, 134, 136 Metropolis (film, Lang; adaptation, Tezuka), 185 Michaux, Henri, 211n.24 Michelangelo, 91 Michelet, Jules, 11–12, 51 Mifune Toshirō, 120 Migne, Abbé, 11 mimesis/mimeticism, 1, 11, 33, 55, 106; aesthetic pleasure and, 98; Aristotelian version of, 64; creation and mimetic economy, 28–29; domestication of, by reason, 34; in Edo period, 44–45; hierarchy of manifestations of, 63; principle of imitation and, 99; rejection of, 34; verticality and mimetic desire, 184, 189; “we”– “them” distinction and, 25 mitate (metaphor, parodic allusion), 43–44, 46, 47, 118, 183 Mitsuda Yuri, 93 Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, 114 Miyake Yūjirō, 218n.14 Miyako Harumi, 170, 228n.75 Miyazaki Hayao, 3, 4, 59, 200; The Castle of Cagliostro, 185; folkloric sources tapped by, 177–78;

243

Index

Miyazaki Hayao (continued) postmodernism and, 197; Princess Mononoke, 175, 194. See also Spirited Away models, 39, 40; in Edo period, 44–45; transient nature of, 42, 45 modernism, 140, 186 modernity, 1, 4, 17, 18, 57, 124; Christian tradition and, 38; ghosts and, 81–82, 84–86, 87, 88; indigenous dimension of Japanese, 106, 199; of Meiji period, 49; philosophical and historical perspectives on, 58–59; postmodern reaction to Westernstyle of, 192; rebalancing of, 64; rejection of Western type of, 58; Romanticism and, 62; surpassing of, 198; verticality of Western bourgeois, 191 Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci), 39 Monet, Claude, 31 Mono-ha (movement), 148 Monsterology (Study of Yōkai) (Inoue), 84 Montesquieu, Baron de, 5 Mori Kazuo, 223n.27 Moriyama Daidō, 142 Moronobu (Hishikawa Moronobu), 100 Most Beautiful, The (film, Kurosawa), 115, 121, 133 Motoori Norinaga, 45, 47–48 Murakami Takashi, 76, 192, 199 Mushanokōji (Musha) Saneatsu, 94, 220n.51 music, imitation in, 36 Mystery Research Society (Fushigi kenkyūkai), 84 Nakadai Tatsuya, 120 Nakagami Kenji, 170 Nakai Masakazu (Nakai Shōichi), 59–60, 121, 216n.5; on cinema, 70–71; imprisonment of, 69–70; as opponent of fascism, 59, 215n.41; photography in aesthetics of, 66–68; postwar activities of, 70, 217n.40; Romanticism rejected by, 62–64, 68–69; wartime writings of, 217n.39 Nara Yoshimoto, 106 national spirit, 2, 54, 88 nationalism, 69

244

Natsume Sōseki, 52, 55 nature, 21, 22, 26, 66, 99, 189; control over, 197; copying of, 42; dichotomy of, and culture, 176; exploitation of, 187; historicized notion of, 88; in imitation of art, 63; passive and objectified, 28; tangible objects (mono) and, 96; victory over, 160 Naval Battles Offshore of Hawaii and Malay (film, Yamamoto), 116 Neuville, Alphonse de, 34 Newman, Barnett, 32 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 63, 64, 216n.9 Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, The (Hyakki yagyō emaki; Edoperiod scroll), 177 Nishida Kitarō, 67 Nishitani Keiji, 198 Noh theater, 46 Nojima Yasuzō, 95–96, 106, 140, 221n.57 Nosaka Akiyuki, 157 nostalgia, 64, 115, 119, 145, 166 “Nostratic” language, 24 Nothomb, Amélie, 16 Nude: Study (Kishida), 78, 79 Oda Sakunosuke, 131 Odyssey (Homer), 175 “Of a Dragon in the Deep” (Ryūtandan; Izumi), 177 Oguni Hideo, 122, 123 Ogyū Sorai, 45 oil painting, Western, 33, 41, 48, 50, 154 Okakura Kakuzō, 62, 63 Okamoto Tarō, 141–42 Okinawa, 141 Okunoin Cemetery, on Mount Kōya, 45 Old Monkey (Takamura), 40 On Her Fifth Birthday (Reiko) (Kishida), 95, 95 On Her Twelfth Birthday (Reiko): At Home at Nanzenji-Kusagawachō, Kyoto (Kishida), 95, 95 “On Realism” (Kishida), 96 Onodera Yuki, 173 orientalism, 11, 24, 28, 159, 202 originality, 1, 18, 122, 124, 147, 205; avant-garde as guarantor of, 33; of classical masterpieces, 20; genius and, 21 Orikuchi Shinobu, 199

Index

Other/otherness, 5, 24, 28, 37, 59, 201; contradictions in “we”–“them” distinction, 26–27; nonviolent appropriation of Other’s culture, 58 Ōtsuka Museum (Shikoku), 43, 58 Ottoman Empire, 201 Pacific War, 53 Panofsky, Erwin, 192 Parody of Sanbasō (Hokusai), 46 pathos, 64 “Perception of Change, The” (Bergson), 101–2, 222n.77 Perry, Matthew, 49 Persia, 30 Petrarch, 20 Peuple, Le (The people; newspaper), 11–12, 51 Peyrefitte, Alain, 2, 16 photography, 26, 35, 52, 70; Araki and, 138, 139, 140, 143–45, 149, 156–57, 167; Buddhist metaphor of mirror as enlightenment and, 66–67; collective gaze and, 68; death and, 156, 157–58, 170, 172, 173; film as art of, 135; funeral portraits and, 155–56, 157–58, 227n.45; Kishida and, 92–96, 99; modernist view of, 65; pictorialism in, 65, 95 Physics (Aristotle), 68–69 Picasso, Pablo, 27, 58, 90, 93 Pincus, Leslie, 70 plasticity, 2, 152, 205 Platonic idealism, 63, 64, 102 Plum Tree (Sesshū), 192 Pointillism, 42 Pollock, Jackson, 32, 36, 58 Pop Art, 147 Portrait of Reiko (Kishida), 100 Portrait of Reiko, a Shawl on Her Shoulders (Kishida), 76, 77 postcolonialism/postcolonial studies, 5, 16 post-Impressionism, 41, 76 postmodernism, 16, 44, 192, 197 praxis, 64 Pre-Raphaelites, 91 Princess Mononoke (anime, Miyazaki), 175, 194 Principles of Sociology (Spencer), 24–25 progress, 40, 91

prototype, 39 Pure Land Buddhism, 61, 67, 141, 163; emphasis on power of sacred texts in, 140; Jōkanji temple of, 168; Ōtani sect of, 81, 218n.12. See also Buddhism Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 94 racialism, evolutionary, 14 racism, 69 Ran (film, Kurosawa), 114, 125 Rancière, Jacques, 99 Raphael, 62 “Rashōmon” (Akutagawa), 122 Rashōmon (film, Kurosawa), 111, 121, 122, 222n.3, 225n.49 readymades, 36, 204 realism, 4, 40, 67; of German Renaissance painting, 76; in Kishida’s art, 89–92, 93, 96–98, 100, 103; proletarian, 59–60, 112; in Western art, 32 reason/rationality, 10, 85, 91; domestication of mimesis through, 34; France as model of, 38 re-creation, 58 Régamey, Félix, 75 rei (ryō [soul, spirit, ghost]), 46, 47 Reiko portrait series (Kishida, 1914– 1929), 3, 4, 76, 85, 206, 207n.8, 218n.7; Bust of Smiling Girl in Western-Style Clothes, 81; Kishida’s break with European avant-gardes and, 106; Kishida’s explorations in realism and, 89; Little Girl (Reiko Standing Up), 81, 82; as metamorphosis, 103–4; Portrait of Reiko, 100; Portrait of Reiko, a Shawl on Her Shoulders, 76, 77; realism and, 98; Reiko, an Apple in Her Hand, 78, 80; Reiko, Five Years Old, 81, 100; Reiko, Hanshan-Style, 81, 83; Reiko, Portrait at Sixteen, 79, 80; Reiko Sitting, 100; strangeness and impermanence in, 76–79; temporalities in, 79–81 Rembrandt van Rijn, 77, 91 Renaissance painting, European, 4, 90, 106, 154; realism of, 76; Romanticism and, 23; “scientific” foundations of, 34

245

Index

Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 31, 92 repetition, 9, 45; Araki and repetition as system, 139–49; of contingency, 158; of gesture, 59, 147, 148; rejection of mimesis and, 34; traditional art and logic of, 41; value of, in Japanese education system, 44 representation, 33, 136 reproduction, 29, 34–35, 95, 221n.55 resemblance, 67 Ressemblance par contact, La (DidiHuberman), 36 Revon, Michel, 18 Rhapsody in August (film, Kurosawa), 114 Richie, Donald, 108, 112, 113, 123, 133 Rieu, Alain-Marc, 16 Rodin, Auguste, 36, 63, 91, 92, 94, 147 Rokumeikan palace, 186 Romanticism, 11, 21, 31, 37, 71; fascism associated with, 64; Hegelian form of, 62–63; introduction of, to Japan, 62; Japanese intellectuals and, 43; occult phenomena explored by, 86; paradigm of decoupling imitation and creation, 51; rhetoric of Western enlightenment and foreign darkness, 38; synthesis of, with the modern, 197; Volksgeist (national spirit) notion and, 54, 88; “we” and “I” of, 23, 24, 27, 28, 42, 201–2, 211n.25; Western dismissal of the Other and, 201–2 Rosny, Léon de, 30 Rossellini, Roberto, 125 Rotermund, Hartmund, 55 Rubens, Peter Paul, 91 Russian Revolution, 63 Sakaguchi Ango, 56 Sakata Akira, 170 Sanbasō (Noh play), 46 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 127–28 Sasaki Toshirō, 151 Satake Shōzan, 48 Satō Tadao, 111, 223n.11 Scandal (Shūbun; film, Kurosawa), 225n.49 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 21 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 63, 216n.9

246

science, 3, 59, 65, 69, 133, 194; China and Japan as innovators in, 10; creativity and, 23, 203; doctor in Ikiru as representative of, 128, 129; Renaissance representations and, 34 Sekai bunka (journal), 69 Sen no Rikyū, 180 Sentimental Journey—Winter (Araki), 3, 4, 137–38, 138, 206; as autobiographical novel, 146; everydayness in, 143, 146, 165; funeral banquet in, 168–70, 169; image of doll in, 165–67, 166; images of bones in, 138, 149–54, 150, 156; references to death in, 145, 146, 161–63, 162; spatio-temporality in, 143–45; visual puns and word association in, 163, 164, 172; Yōko’s funeral portrait in, 137, 138, 170–73, 171 Sesshū, 192 Seven Samurai (film, Kurosawa), 114 shadows, in Japanese aesthetics, 4, 168 Shakespeare, William, 111, 125 Sharaku, 140 Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep, The (La bergère et le ramoneur; film, Grimault), 185 Shiba Kōkan, 48 Shiina Rinzō, 117 Shimura Takashi, 120, 133 Shinoyama Kishin, 172 Shinto, 81, 134, 151, 177, 178 Shirakaba (White birch; journal and group), 93, 220n.39, 220n.51, 221n.55; photogravures used by, 92; Tolstoy admired by, 224n.41; view of reproductions and originals in, 94 Shisō (Thought; journal), 63, 64, 96 Simone, Ronald, 122 simulacrum, 44 Smoular, Alfred, 16 Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale, 39–40 Society for Psychical Research, 84 Spencer, Herbert, 23–24, 50 Spirited Away (anime, Miyazaki), 3, 4–5, 175–83, 205, 206; allegory in, 176, 182–83; composite influences in, 177–78; critical articles about,

Index

175, 229n.3; horizontality in, 181, 182, 188–92, 189, 191, 195; international film festival awards for, 175; kanji and kana in, 177, 178–82, 179, 182, 184, 186–87, 187, 193, 229n.12; obliques and counterobliques in, 192–200, 194, 195, 196, 197; verticality in, 181, 182, 183–88, 185, 194–95, 200 spirituality, 33 stereotypes, 9, 12 Stray Dog (film, Kurosawa), 111 “Structure of the Machine’s Beauty” (Nakai), 64 Studio Ghibli, 175, 192, 200, 228n.53 Subaru (The Pleiades; journal), 92 subjectivity, 23, 38, 64, 70; generation of 1960s and, 148; in Kurosawa films, 111, 112, 135 sublime, 33 Subscription List, The (Kabuki play), 118 Substance and Function (Cassirer), 66, 216n.24 Suga Kishio, 148 Sugata Sanshirō I (film, Kurosawa), 115, 118, 125 Sugata Sanshirō II (film, Kurosawa), 115, 118, 125 “superart,” 148 Superflat (movement), 192 Sur-sentimentalist Manifest No. 2 (Araki), 147 Symbolism, 91 synchrony, imitation and, 48 Taishō period (1912–1926), 88, 224n.41 Takahata Isao, 157, 228n.53 Takamura Kōun, 40 Takeuchi Seihō, 40 Tanaka Matsutarō, 220n.39 Tarde, Gabriel, 9, 99 “Taste in Ukiyo-e” (Kishida), 96 Tatsuki Toshihiro, 171, 172 Tatsuno, Sheridan, 2, 16, 57 tea ceremony, 85, 180 technique, 33, 34, 53, 98 technology, 64–65 temporality/time, 28, 45, 206; in Reiko portrait series, 79–81; in Sentimental Journey—Winter, 143–45, 147 Terada Torahiko, 52

Tezuka Osamu, 185, 186, 200 Thomasson, Gary, 148 “Thoughts on Realism’s Inadequacy” (Kishida), 96 Three Hundred Miles Through Enemy Lines (screenplay, Kurosawa), 116, 223n.27 Throne of Blood (film, Kurosawa), 114 Tobey, Mark, 33 Tōhō (film studio), 115, 119, 225n.49 Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867), 51 Tolstoy, Leo, 111, 122–23, 224n.41 Tomioka Tessai, 199 Tomita Tsuneo, 125 Topics (Aristotle), 69 Tour du monde, Le (magazine), 24, 33–34, 210n.14 traces, in Japanese aesthetics, 4, 125, 133–36, 135 tradition, 3, 17, 18, 20, 57 transcendence, 23, 27 Tsuboi Shōgorō, 218n.14 Tsubouchi Shōyō, 218n.14, 221n.58 Tsuchida Maki, 94–95 Tsuda Sōkichi, 51 Tsuji Nobuo, 78, 192 Tsurumi Shunsuke, 215n.41 Two Sources of Morality and Religion, The (Bergson), 84 Ueda Shōji, 106 ukiyo-e painting, 31–32, 96, 100, 104, 142 Umesao Tadao, 57 United States, 13, 106; Americans criticized as imitators, 11, 208n.16; bombing of Tokyo in World War II by, 107; cremation process in, 151; investment in education in, 39; Japanese studying in, 50; propaganda of, against Japan in World War II, 13; reception of Ikiru in, 123–24; rejection of imitation in, 2 Uphill Road, The (La route montante; Cézanne), 92 “Utsutsu” (Nakai), 65, 66 Van Dyck, Anthony, 91 Van Eyck, Jan, 94

247

Index

Van Gogh, Vincent, 63, 89, 91, 93, 147, 219n.32 Velázquez, Diego, 91 Voltaire, 38 Warhol, Andy, 36, 147 Watsuji Tetsurō, 191 “we” and “them” distinction, 23–24, 25, 26, 37 Weber, Max, 20 West, 3, 27, 55, 205; blind spot in selfexamination of, 19; creation of idea of, 24; European discourse on imitation, 2; influence of, on Japanese artists, 32–33; Japan as apprentice of, 50; Japan’s conscious adoption of aspects of, 47; self-image of, 37; view of photography in, in relation to death, 158 Western/European art, 20, 48, 58; abstract orientation of, 91; classical (Greco-Roman), 23; forms of, as models for non-Western artists, 41–42; imitation of Far Eastern ceramics in, 30; Kishida and, 90; oil painting, 33, 41, 48, 50, 76, 154; realism in, 32; techniques of, borrowed from Asian art, 33. See also Renaissance painting, European Westernization, 49, 53–54, 102, 111 Westney, D. Eleanor, 2 White Horse Society (Hakubakai), 42 Whitman, Walt, 56 Wilde, Oscar, 63 Window (Dürer), 193 Winther-Tamaki, Bert, 2

248

women, seen as imitators, 25–26 World War I, 50 World War II, 13, 53, 85, 107; Japan’s defeat in, 127; propaganda and censorship in Japanese cinema, 115–17; surpassing of modernity and, 198 Xavier, Francis, 9, 11, 37 Yamada Shinya, 155–56, 227n.45 Yamada Shōji, 57–58 Yamaguchi Masao, 43–44 Yamamoto Kajirō, 116 Yamanaka Minetarō, 223n.27 yamanba (mountain witch), 163, 177 Yanagi Sōetsu, 86, 91, 92, 93, 147; modernism opposed by, 140; on repetition, 140–41 Yasuda Yojūrō, 68 “yellow peril,” 13 yōkai (supernatural creatures/phenomena), 84, 86, 88, 163, 219n.26; derori aesthetic and, 101; image of child as metamorphosis and, 104; in Spirited Away, 177–78 yōkai-gaku (study of supernatural creatures), 82 Yokoo Tadanori, 142, 143 Yoshida Kijū, 71 Yoshida Masazumi, 215n.41 Yoshimasu Gozō, 170 Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, 114, 131 Yurabe Masami, 191 Zilsel, Edgar, 21