The Art of All They Do

By ROBERT HUGHES

A world of infinite desires in finite time and space

For a thousand years, the Japanese have been working on a problem that Americans are only now beginning to see: How can you make a culture of congestion work, and turn constriction to advantage? The main cultural myth of America centers on infinite space, limitless resources, and the energies they foster. Without these, such diverse cultural emblems as Moby Dick, '50s tail fins, westerns and the paintings of Jackson Pollock would not exist. Neither would those words in the Declaration of Independence, so bizarre to the Japanese, about pursuing happiness. When they find their space is finite, their resources limited and their social energy grossly deformed by the friction of overcrowding, Americans get confused and resentful; they see the world in terms of rights, whose scope is truncated by congestion.

The Japanese, who see their world in terms of duties and obligations, have learned to do so because they have always had to live with constraint. If you live on an island (to paraphrase an English poet who did) you cannot be one. The Japanese have evolved a whole system of forms, etiquette and images, a culture that makes the compression of numbers tolerable. It strikes an endlessly interesting balance between artifice and nature. The three legs of this system are adaptation, consensus and miniaturization.

It is a common fantasy of Westerners that there was once an Old Japan (samurais, geishas, moon watching from the tatami) that was destroyed after 1945 by the trauma of Westernization, so that the New Japan ceased in some basic way to be Japanese. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the Japanese do, and always have done, is much more subtle. They adapt what they need from other cultures. They seem always to be submitting--sometimes masochistically--to cultural colonizations, of which the American is only the most recent. But what they make of the acquired form is invariably Japanese.

This has been going on since the 6th century, with the result that few of the accumulated images that spell "typical Japan" to a foreigner were invented by the Japanese themselves. Zen Buddhism was an import, and pagodas and brush calligraphy and bonsai trees (originally known to the Chinese as penjing). Likewise the microchip and the small, inexpensive car. Tempura, the name of one of the Japanese dishes most popular among foreigners, is a mangled Latin word that refers to the Portuguese Catholic propensity to eat fish on Fridays as penance, as distinct from the Japanese practice of eating it every day for pleasure. Even Kobe beef, on which every Japanese dotes when he can afford to, is a Western import. The first cow butchered in Japan died for the table of an American consul in Shimoda in the 1850s, and a monument has since been raised to it by the butchers' association of Japan. Before that, cattle were not eaten. The idea of eating beef was as strange as that of were not eaten. The idea of eating beef was as strange as that of eating roast tractor parts.

A culture of adaptation saves time and energy. It promotes service and flexibility. It enables its members to concentrate on refinements, rather than lose themselves in Promethean false starts. They can treat the whole world as their unpaid research lab. Japan made cars and trucks before World War II, but the prototype that launched the world triumphs of the Japanese auto industry was the American Jeep, a tough, open, naive and compact vehicle that became a common sight in the country after 1945. It was a Volkswagen without a Volk. It showed, as no Buick staff car could, that four wheels and a motor could mean democracy and access. It became a prime motif in the envy of the vanquished for the victors.

So did the imagery of the visitors' PX: the white gleam of refrigerators and stove enamel, the iconography of GE and Hoover, so utterly different from the traditional dimness of the Japanese house and the mandatory drabness of wartime, with its austerity colors and nocturnal blackout. On a popular level, the war had caused an immense disenchantment with traditional Japanese architecture, wood and paper: "weak" materials, which burned. Concrete and steel were the substances of a victor culture, and the huge termitary cities of Japan were rebuilt with them.

The Japanese thus embraced the Bauhaus. Before the war, that small school in Germany had seemed distant and unimportant to most Japanese architects; now it, and the homogeneous systems of environmental design it stood for, became an obsession with younger architects at Tokyo University. In 1954 Walter Gropius came to Japan to give a series of lectures, only to discover that an extraordinary loop of adaptation had taken place. What Gropius liked in Japan was its traditional architecture, epitomized by the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. The kind of modernism he stood for was heavily indebted to Japanese sources, transmitted to Germany nearly 50 years before by Frank Lloyd Wright, not just in details or quotations of carpentry, but in fundamentals, such as the open plan and the design of furniture. Thus a German brought Japan back to the Japanese, and the prestige of traditional vernacular among Japanese architects zoomed: a fact that might give pause to those who think that the mission of the Bauhaus was to standardize buildings everywhere. In effect, it enabled the Japanese to adapt to themselves. Perhaps this could have happened only to people accustomed, time out of mind, to living with two or three cultures simultaneously, like a farmer addressing one Shinto god after another until he gets the result he needs.

Japanese food, the most refined if not the most varied in Japanese food, the most refined if not the most varied in the world, is wholly a product of instinctive modular thinking. The intrepid traveler may find himself at 5 a.m., at the end or the beginning of his day, in a sushi restaurant near the prodigious fish market at Tsukiji in Tokyo, where nearly all the protein for 11 million people arrives fresh before dawn and is gone by 9 a.m. He will breakfast on fatty raw tuna belly, live tiger shrimp, abalone rectums and, if he is lucky, the sperm of red snapper. Such things are not grotesque but delicious; the neophyte must approach them in a spirit of hedonistic calm, interspersing them with commoner raw morsels such as lean tuna or squid.

French cuisine, in its classic forms, is mostly verbs and modifiers: the mixing, processing and transforming of raw material. High Japanese cooking, whose root is the austere kaiseki style associated with the tea ceremony, is by contrast all nouns. It is devoted to the thing-as-such, presented in small units with the precision of the razor knives that cut it and the picky exactitude of the little chopsticks that bring it to the mouth. Its decor is astringent, not sweet. Japanese cuisine's simplicity is a very high fiction, requiring too much skilled labor for it to be replicated in New York or London.

One cook to every ten guests is a rule of thumb. The restaurant run by perhaps the greatest cook in Kyoto, Moto Nagata, seats ten people, and no tip will get you in; the Japanese rarely accept tips. Such cooking flourishes because few Japanese entertain at home. Phrases like "home cooking" do not translate into Japanese with their overtones intact. They suggest strain and bumbling, not warmth and sincerity.

In essence, Japanese food is modular food, miniaturized, and the ideal gastronomic experience is a line of small, distinct events rather than a symphony (or cacophony) of spreading transformations. As with food, so with design and technology.

To Kenji Ekuan, 52, a former Buddhist priest who founded GK Industrial Design Associates, Japan's largest and most innovative design firm, the matter is partly a philosophical one. "We Japanese," he says, "are the most avaricious people. Infinite desires but infinite time and space." To Ekuan the traditional bento-bako -- the stacked lunch box packed with its careful array of distinct morsels -- is the true ancestor of that emblem of modern Japan, the box full of microchips. Both represent a culture of linear flow: the processing of information, sensuous or electronic, through standardized components that can modulate content rapidly and to an infinite degree by rearrangement. The bento-bako is the archetype of modular coordination; food culture and high tech are, in spirit, the same. In short, the TV dinner begat the TV set, so to speak.

The preference for modules over mixtures pervades the culture, and always has. Japanese color tends not to be harmonic or atmospheric: it is distinct, a sequence of clear notes struck on the retina. To a greater degree than in Western art, each color comes equipped with its own symbolic associations, which remain more or less constant through its use in architecture, print, neon, fabric design, packaging, food or painting. Red, for instance, pertains to magic and sorcery, vitality, fire and the conquest of evil spirits. Japanese color is grounded in nature: every indigo or cobalt dye runs, as it were, back to the sea. But the circuit between nature and abstraction is far shorter than in the West. Color has the peremptory quality of calligraphy: a gesture, an unmediated act.

The colored substance that had the most influence on the structure of Japanese taste is a green powder called matcha, or ceremonial tea. Whisked with hot water to a bitter jade froth and served in coarse-looking, irregular bowls, it is the basis of chanoyu, the tea ceremony. The aesthetic of tea has permeated all visual culture in Japan, from architecture to the appreciation of nature.

Tea was a Chinese import like Buddhism, and the histories of both are twined inextricably: together they afford the prime example of how the Japanese throughout their history have taken foreign forms and metabolized them into wholly Japataken foreign forms and metabolized them into wholly Japanese practices. In time, tea came to define the difference between the Chinese and Japanese ideals of exalted beauty: the former based on symmetry and minute gradations of fixed etiquette, the latter on irregularity and "natural" grace. Sen No Rikyu (1521-91), greatest of the tea masters, established chanoyu as a kind of psychic enclave in which warlord, samurai, priest and scholar could shed the burdens of rank and power by refreshing themselves at the well of nature. A developed Japanese form of Rousseau's "natural man," living in harmony with a world he has not made, is to be found in the teahouse and the culture it epitomizes: neutral colors, simple gestures, the uncarved block, the silent garden, sober dress--and check your swords at the door.

Tea culture revolves around two key ideas, sabi and wabi.

Sabi suggests patina or decomposition: the retreat of bright new substance into a world of obscurity and hints. It is what a cypress doorframe acquires after three centuries of sliding the shoji back and forth. It is what Japanese collectors got when they left their silverware to tarnish, instead of polishing it to a bright Tiffany glitter. Wabi is an older and wider concept. It conveys not the dryness and stillness of sabi, but an aristocratic use of "poor," rustic materials. Tea is the origin of much of Japanese design since the 15th century; in fact, the nearest thing to the Western concept of "design"--at least before the 1950s and the Western flood--was the word isho, used in explication of tea culture.

Form has a way of decaying into formalism, especially when the original form was antiformalist. Nowadays Japanese department stores carry rows of cases displaying tea bowls and caddies; new ones--never mind the old, which may cost more than a suburban house--bear price tags of $15,000. If one suggests that this is steep for a new teacup, however dense with sabi and wabi it may be, one is told that such objects are signed on the box by a noted living tea master. This imprimatur, a fabulously profitable extension of Marcel Duchamp's solitary act of declaring a urinal a work of art, gives the bowl its pedigree and value. Thus the tea implements are snapped up by the rich and fashion-tyrannized; and the tea masters make fortunes, what with certifying tea ware by the truckload, writing syndicated columns, running tea-school franchises and in general milking matcha for all it is worth.

The commercialization of chanoyu illustrates a wider fact about Japan: namely that it is the best country in the world in which to study the impact of mass audiences on elite cultural forms. When something like tea becomes so popular, is it democratized? Not necessarily. It may become more snobbish, taking on a coercive preciousness to sustain its mystique when the old mechanisms of aristocratic patronage in small groups have corroded. Japanese snobbery, Japanese cultural insecurity, are hog heaven for merchandisers: once they get into a cultural feeding frenzy, the Japanese can make Rodeo Drive look modest.

They revere nature, but they have been running out of it for the past 300 years. Thus their appreciation of it is miniaturized, subdivided and typified: the modular scheme again. Unlike Americans, the Japanese know they have no more space. Hence their habits of tourism: in their homeland (as out of it) the Japanese tend to concentrate on exemplary sights and ignore whatever lies in between them. These sights, like the tea bowls, have been "signed" by usage, ratified by the national passion for consensus.

For this reason, they are permanently jammed, for the Japanese also like to contemplate nature in groups. They do not fancy themselves as Americans do, as solitaries contemplating the infinite in deep valleys. Mr. Matsuda has nothing against the infinite, but he likes the same bits of it that his friends like. The bitterness felt by the Winnebago driver on finding that he must share a view in the Rockies with a dozen other motorized campers is not felt in Japan. The purest effusion of tourist nostalgia in Japan is a verse, attributed by legend to the 17th century poet Matsuo Basho, concerning an archipelago in north Japan:

Ah, Matsushima!

Ah, Matsushima, ah!

Matsushima, ah!

Whatever this may lose in translation, those four sighs are clearly addressed to a group. Everyone else has been to Matsushima too, so there is no need to describe it.

There is an equation behind this: Famous View divided by Mass Audience equals Acute Miniaturization. Nature becomes "nature," a metaphor of itself. At the highest cultural level, this is expressed by the classical Zen gardens. Saihoji, the Moss Temple in Kyoto, has 4.5 acres carpeted with some 120 kinds of moss, an inexpressibly sensuous green skin. It conflates the near and the far; as you gaze down at a patch of hinoki moss, with its tiny cypress-like spears thrusting an inch above the green, you imagine yourself hovering high over a rolling landscape of mountain and forest.

Events in the Moss Temple epitomized what happens to Japanese nature under the stress of mass enthusiasm. By 1972 up to 10,000 people a day were streaming through its turnstiles. Then the exhaust gases from tour buses began to kill the moss. Brown patches appeared, then bald ones. The abbot, a sturdy and composed monk named Kaiko Fujita, realized that the garden had earned enough cash from mass tourism. He then sharply restricted public access to it. There was an outcry in the press about the elitism of this gesture. But as the abbot insists, elitism with moss is better than democracy with none. The moss is now in perfect shape. Thus Abbot Fujita becomes a hero of conservation, but on the scale of the bento-bako or the microchip, not the wilderness. Meanwhile, one can always go and consort with Miki Mausu in Tokyo Disneyland to escape the terrible crush in the other Zen gardens like Ryoanji.

The love of consensus and accommodation has had deep effects on the visual culture of modern Japan, making that culture seem both familiar and strange to Western eyes, as though the rug had been snatched out from under the pattern. It partly explains, for instance, why the prestige of most contemporary painting and sculpture is low in Japan, while designers and architects enjoy an almost unparalleled celebrity and cultural leverage.

In all their borrowings from the West, the Japanese never acquired the cult of the artist as Agonistic Hero. There is no

Japanese Michelangelo or Van Gogh (or perhaps one should say that the Japanese Van Gogh is Van Gogh). The very idea of the avantgarde, that ruling myth in terms of which a century of artists from Manet to Joseph Beuys is conventionally discussed, is purely Western and has never had more than a surface appeal to the Japanese. The idea of cultural norms based on confrontation and "radical" displays of ego strikes them as embarrassing. The scheme whose parody is now being played to exhaustion among the graffitists and plate breakers of Soho--culture as a series of self-conscious grabs and Oedipal rebellions, cloning one short-lived artist-hero after another--is not the model of current Japanese art.

Does this produce a harmonious and vivid fine art culture?

Not at all. It only means that Japanese collectors (not that there are many) ignore the work of contemporary Japanese painters and sculptors, which is why there are some 1,500 emigre artists from Japan working in New York City today. Those who make a solid reputation on the American art scene, like the painter Shusaku Arakawa--a highly intellectual artist whose half-conceptual, half-painterly work is, as one American critic put it, "haggard with self-consciousness"are much envied in Tokyo. But the most admired living artists are all Western, with Jasper Johns at the top, closely followed by Christo, whose island-fringing project in Miami's Biscayne Bay--as Japanese as a Monet, blooms of pink on the still water--caused great excitement on the other side of the Pacific. It is possible to find current work of real merit, like the exquisite objects of washi (handmade paper) with tones and twigs embedded in them, by the Kyoto artist Shoichi Ida. Yet the resignation with which artists accept their secondary role is almost as troubling as its opposite, the gross commercial ambitions of the American art world.

National museums are crippled by the bureaucratic conservatism of their staff when it comes to making decisions about any art since 1930. A man like Toshio Hara, 48, who runs a private museum in Tokyo with a steady policy of showing living Japanese artists in an intelligent and flexible context, is so exceptional as to be almost a cultural anomaly. And nobody gets tax deductions for giving art away. Consequently, the real museum action has moved to the corporate sphere, where overhead can be written off as promotional expenses. In America, corporations underwrite exhibitions. In Japan, they own museums.

The most ambitious and curatorially sustained exhibitions of Western modern art in Tokyo over the past few years have been presented, not by state or city or private galleries, but by a department store named Seibu in northwestern Tokyo, owned by Seiji Tsutsumi, 56. Tsutsumi's intention is "to ignore the limitations inherent in categories of genre from the art world" and "to continually create a place of expression." The Seibu museum and its offshoots in Nagano and Funabashi have mounted shows on subjects as diverse as Marcel Duchamp and Edvard Munch, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Jasper Johns, Paul Klee and Egon Schiele. Today Seibu is the most influential source of direct contact with Western art in Japan, quite apart from the immense influence it has on popular attitudes toward design.

But the ruling arts are those that provide tangible social services and are grounded in consensus: namely, design and architecture. It was quite normal for a corporation like the Mitsubishi Bank, in commissioning its new Tokyo headquarters, to spend millions in "prestige" money for the building and the corporate design image without bothering to acquire a single noteworthy painting. The contrast with, say, Chase Manhattan or Philip Morris in New York could not be more marked.

It was Kenzo Tange, now 69, who broke the ice in the 1950s and became the first Japanese architect to win a wide institutional clientele by combining a Corbusian idiom with traditional Japanese quotations, done in reinforced concrete. Since then a generation of architects--some of them Tange's former students at Tokyo University--has proved less interested in formal revivalism than in a more conceptual relationship to their heritage. Outstanding among these (but still, one among several) is Arata Isozaki, 52, whose as yet unbuilt design for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles may turn out to be the most remarkable building conceived by a Japanese architect in the West. Isozaki's relation to the Japanese past is denned by what he calls "basic continuities--ideas about the flow of space, intervals in space and time" rather than by the quotation of detail.

The prestige Isozaki and his colleagues have in Japan mirrors (and was certainly increased by) the rise of American architects such as Richard Meier and Michael Graves as stars. On the other hand, no American clothes designer has--or deserves--the kind of cultural importance in the U.S. that Issey Miyake, 45, has achieved in Japan. Miyake possesses a remarkable gift for condensing a long craft tradition relating to textiles, ceremony and theater into fresh but amenable images of the body, without the condescension and puppeteering that so often accompanies high fashion in the West.

A similar process goes on in the mass-media arts. Comic books, for instance, are not a peripheral affair in Japan as they are in America. Known as manga, they are a gigantic publishing industry and, sociologically, a fascinating one. Seventeen different comic magazines and 30 volumes of manga collections are issued monthly by Tokyo's main publisher, Kodansha. The comic book is as important a dream mechanism in Japan

as rock music is in the West. The

top artists, with, at the very top,

Osamu Tezuka, known as Manga No Kamisama (God of Manga), are treated by their adoring public of all ages with an enthusiasm unknown to Stan Lee or Garry Trudeau; they are stars in the way that Mick Jagger or Norman Mailer are stars, and are credited with some of the properties of both.

Nowhere else in today's world, a visitor feels after the first anarchic impact of Tokyo has settled, is there a more intelligent consciousness of design than in Japan. It is not that the environment has been designed into a paradise; the surface chaos is too great for that, and the modern Japanese streetscape seems unspeakably chaotic because, in essence, the street is only the backside of internal space, a visual dump. The "good" building in Tokyo sticks out much more than its New York or Chicago counterpart, another reason for the premium now placed on prestige architecture and the building-as-logo. The point is, however, that Japanese designers at all levels, from architecture to illustration, have a ravenously vivacious quality to their dreaming. They are expert administrators of fantasy; and where real space is cramped, dream life and fantasy space expand. No wonder that it is they, not the painters, who are riding high. --By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.