Collecting Japanese Antiques - Alistair Seton

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from some 2 inches (5 cm) to 3 feet (1 m). The container is often oval for deciduous trees and rectangular for evergreens, but it also depends on the style. Glazed pots work well with flowering trees, while unglazed pots give a look of age. Styles like upright, slanting, cascading, twisting trunk, weeping cascade, twin trunk, clumped or forest, and clinging are self-explanatory. In all cases, asymmetry is de rigueur (never planted in the middle, and leaning from the outside to the inside if it leans), as is a good balance between the pot and the tree's size and height.

      A natural look, achieved with no evidence of human tampering, matters too. Usually one side is the front or viewing side. Traditionally, a tree is wider at the base and then slimmer, but bunjin (literati scholars) liked to joke and do it the other way round. People talk of a tri-relationship between life (or deity), the bonsai grower, and the tree, while the form of the tree often turns out to be triangular, to please the eye. The grower's nature matters too; he must have all the virtues of patience.

      Bonsai shows are common all over Japan and buying is possible. Many of the best growers will appear unwilling to sell at first, though acquaintance may change that. There has been a recent explosion in the number of gardening centers. In general, Japanese bonsai fans are no longer young and find it soothing to putter around in the garden. Before you get carried away, you might want to check the applicable pla nt quarantine rules if you will be moving country. With increasing interest in gardening (and urbanization's smaller spaces), bonsai may well become more popular.

      Gardens

      Unlike France's regimented, geometrical gardens, or Britain with both regimented and natural ones, Japan's gardens have always aimed at creating "a natural landscape with aesthetic value," as Ishikawa Takeshi puts it in his Traditions: A Thousand Years of Japanese Beauty. He adds that the first recorded garden was made at the Asuka mansion of Soga Umako in AD 620, with several islands (rocks) in a pond. The word for gardens then was shima (island), so a marine setting must have been basic. The aristocrats living inland at Nara probably pined for the sea they only saw on official trips and so chose this name to distinguish it from farming.

      The parts of a garden were symbols for a whole: weathered rocks formed islands and a tree a wood on the shore. In later centuries rock and carefully raked gravel gardens (kare-sansui) bounded by walls inspired Zen adepts to meditate and seek satori (enlightenment). Pure Land (Jōdo) gardens, such as the Phoenix Hall at Uji, tried to show paradise through a treasure pond with bridges that could lead the believer into heaven. Later, the concept became less religious and more of a cultural pursuit, such as Kokedera at Kyoto with its various mosses carpeting trees, or Kinkakuji and Ginkakuji with their ponds and strolling walks giving views of reflected-in-the-water pavilions. Lawns, flower beds, topiaries with monumentally cut shrubs and trees, and continuous carpets of flowers are too artificial for Japanese, nor do they go for wide open spaces. Even daimyō were comfortable with a restricted space, fully used, and perhaps borrowing views of hills beyond (shakkei) to lend depth. These values permeate screens and scrolls.

      Nō Theater

      Nō or Noh (the "h" is silent, just lengthening the vowel) is a form of theater that grew independently in the late fourteenth century from various dance-drama forms such as sarugaku, kagura, kyōgen, dengaku, and gigaku, due largely to Kan'ami and his son Zeami. The shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu saw Kan'ami and Zeami act at the Imagumano Shrine in Kyoto in 1374 and was excited enough by them to become the first-ever leader to patronize an acting troupe, the Kanze, which remains the best-known school of Nō theater.

      Based on previous temple acting techniques, Kan'ami built up a corpus of theater from old plays which he made significant and more plausible to contemporaries by adding new plays based on current events. He is said to have excelled at realistic portrayal of character, achieving rapport with audiences and melding song, dance, and mime by building up a subtle, mysterious beauty (yūgen) and introducing a strong rhythmic accompaniment. His father died in 1384 when Zeami was 21 years old. Taking over leadership of the troupe, he wrote dozens of plays that reflect the age when Zen was part of the air, so restraint, brevity, and suggestion rather than statement were valued. From 1400 to 1436, he wrote down the theory of Nō, which still stands.

      Fig. 8 Bonsai, Japanese black pine, ca. 200 years old, ht 361 /2 in (93 cm). Photo courtesy Sotheby's.

      Fig. 9 "Interior of Kabuki Theater Playing Chushingura," hanging scroll, att ributed to Tori'i Kiyotada, ca. 1749, color on paper, 23 x 35 in (58 x 89 cm). Photo courtesy Kobe City Museum.

      After his death, Nō was less officially patronized but the dispersal of shelter-seeking actors to the provinces during the Ōnin War of 1467-77 spread Nō knowledge round the country. The Tokugawa shōguns made this form of theater their own and, typically for the nation, laid down conservative rules, slowed its action down, allowed only actors' children to be trained in it, and tried to prevent ordinary people from learning the scripts or songs.

      Nō is important for collectors, but the masks and costumes are valued and hard to come by, and selling is resisted.

      Kabuki Theater

      All kinds of drama were in the air when an Izumo Shrine maiden called Okuni came to Kyoto early in the seventeenth century and with a number of other women put on a series of plays with sensuous dances on the bed of the Kamigamo River. A lovely screen in Kyoto Museum of such a scene shows that the dance-dramas were very popular. Soon, however, the government felt that they were more a front for prostitution, and prohibited women from acting. Young men took over but got up to similar tricks. In 1652, the government changed the rules so that plays had to be based on the formal acting style of the traditional farce and only men could act, with their forelocks cut to show they were of age. Some men started specializing in acting women's parts (on'nagata) and brought an extraordinary form of acting to prominence. In a way, it is the essence of theatrical make-believe-willing suspense of disbelief. While knowing they are men, even women find something attractive about the way they train their bodies, voices, and gestures to present an image that still has something feminine about it.

      A number of on'nagata appear in woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), though the majority of prints are of male roles. It is hard to imagine the whole body of ukiyo-e without the kabuki background so this form of theater is basic to Japan's art heritage, even if the average reader might now get bored by the stylized plays themselves, despite the great colorful spectacles (and theatrical tricks), music, gorgeous clothes, and acting. Needless to say, sumōwrestlers (also common in ukiyo-e) were all men (Fig. 9).

      Artistic Experiments

      The main thrust of Japanese painting prior to the mid-eighteenth century had not been realistic, but Hiraga Gen'nai went to Nagasaki to study Western art from the Dutch and imparted his knowledge to Shiba Kōkan (1738-1818) who made many pictures in the Western style (Fig. 10). When young, Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-95) was exposed to European perspective, but preferred to follow the traditional Kanō style of art while portraying the townspeople of Kyoto where he grew up, not the aristocrats whom he despised.

      Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-99), Itō Jakuchu (1716-1800), and Soga Shōhaku (1730-81) knew the Kanō and Maruyama traditions but tried to develop styles sometimes dubbed eccentric; some designs appeal to Westerners' desire for something different.

      Another artistic current was the literati or bunjinga school, an awkward word for those Chinese government officials who had painted in a reduced way for centuries. In the seventeenth century, some Chinese fled their country after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, took sanctuary in Nagasaki, and brought techniques and instruction manuals with them. The Japanese were ready to de-emphasize training for war, after a century of peace, and were also encouraged by rising prosperity. The idea that it was desirable to study literature and express yourself in painting had wide appeal.

      The names of famous literati painters over the next century include Sakaki Hyakusen, Ike Taiga, Yosa Buson (also known in the West as a great haiku poet), Yamamoto Baitsu, Tani Bunchō, Okada Beisanjin, Uragami Gyokudō, and Watanabe Kazan. Typically, Westerners find their landscapes and kachō (flower-and-bird)

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