Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival by David Pilling Page A

he said, did not distinguish between art and craft. Their best artist-craftsmen – potters, swordsmiths, papermakers, lacquer workers and calligraphers – were afforded enormous respect, designated ‘National Living Treasures’. Like many observers of Japan, he found art everywhere, in the exquisite arrangement of flowers, food laid out on lacquerware or ceramic, even in the movements, passed down the generations, with which people sliced fish or swept a stone garden. ‘For the Japanese, in Keats’s words, truth is beauty, beauty truth.’
    The haiku, a poem of just seventeen syllables that includes an obligatory allusion to the season, supports the idea that little in Japan makes sense without reference to something else. The best-known haiku by the poet Basho is:
    furu ike ya
    kawazu tobikomu
    mizu no oto
    Hearn rendered it:
    old pond
    frogs jumped in
    sound of water
    In English, it sounds like doggerel. The beauty in Japanese comes from its reference to things outside; the season (spring is mating time for frogs), the setting, the sound of water conveyed by the onomatopoeic word
oto
. A master of wine who is also an expert in sake once told me that the most elegant Japanese rice wines are defined by the absence of taste, the reverse of what one looks for in a claret or a Chardonnay. ‘Sake is about what’s not there. With wine it’s about what’s here. It’s like in speech. The pauses and the silences, the things that aren’t there give a hint of the meaning. The most elegant sakes are barely there at all.’
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    The idea of thinking about Japan as different from anywhere else is seductive. Yet there are many reasons to reject the notion. Those feelings that Japan moves to rhythms incomprehensible to most outsiders have reinforced an almost morbid sense of separateness. The Australian academic Gavan McCormack sees Ruth Benedict’s
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
as ‘one of the great propaganda coups of the century’. 15 In stoking Japanese fantasies about their own separate identity, he says, the book helped sever Japan’s psychological ties with its Asian neighbours in the years after the war, making it more dependent on the US.
    If we look closer, much of Japan’s supposed ‘essence’ turns out to be a relatively modern distillation. Nineteenth-century nationalist leaders found it useful to create emperor-centred myths around which a new, post-feudal nation could rally. They elevated Shinto, an animist set of folkloric beliefs, to the status of national religion. The various strands of Shintoism were united under the banner of the emperor. Amataresu, the sun goddess from which the imperial line supposedlysprang, was placed at its centre. From the 1880s, history textbooks in school began not with Stone Age man but with the birth of the Sun Goddess and the start of the imperial line. Much of Japanese uniqueness, in other words, is propaganda. Blending nativist animism with the cult of emperor worship was a political artifice. The emperor became so powerful an expression of the Japanese state that even the occupying Americans preserved the institution, exonerating him from any responsibility for the war fought in his name. ‘All of this left him as the supreme icon of genetic separateness and blood nationalism, the embodiment of an imagined timeless essence that set the Japanese apart from – and superior to – other peoples and cultures.’ 16
    It is all too easy to attach cultural explanations to what were, in fact, exercises in the consolidation of political power. It turns out, for example, that the practice of recording dates according to imperial reign is not – as some would have it – an expression of Japan’s uniquely cyclical view of time. Rather, it dates back merely to the mid-nineteenth century when the imperial cult was being created. Of today’s nationalists pining for a supposed Japanese essence, McCormack writes: ‘What they believed to be ancient