aestheticization and its pitfalls, again

Image source: http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/view.pl?id=114346

The Japanese fashion everything: They twist chopsticks; they wrap the trunks of trees and rocks; they redesign the shape of ponds and waterfalls to make them look realer than real. They hold a long and carefully rippled mirror up to nature.

It is no wonder that the world has been astounded by anime, manga and all varieties of Japanese presentational design. All Japanese culture is fantasy. A fantasy that is as real as it gets.

--Roger Pulvers, 'Fantasy really is reality in many aspects of Japanese life and culture', in The Japan Times, 24 April 2011.

*       *       *

Many, way too many Western scholars seem to find endless pleasure in extolling and popularising the qualities of Japanese aesthetics while neglecting or altogether omitting its underside (which would no doubt alienate their audiences, at least in Japan). As far as the appreciation of nature is concerned, I wonder if these scholars would be as enthusiastic and light-hearted if they really realised some of the disturbing implications of the attitudes they so readily praise.

Pulvers overstates his case when he says that the Japanese 'fashion everything' in nature. They do fashion certain things you can put on a list - say, a limited number of scenic sites (the Nihon sankei e.g.), cherry blossom viewing in the spring, moon viewing in autumn, and so on and so on. However, the general ugliness of Japan's cities and towns, with their flat sterile surfaces and exposed power lines, their wasteful, chaotic proliferation of vending machines, convenience stores and neon signs, as well as the pitiful sight of mountains, rivers and seashores increasingly choked with concrete, belie the famed Japanese love of and 'oneness' with nature. 

What all these things show instead is an appalling aesthetic and ecological insensitivity to those parts of nature which have not been popularised in the collective consciousness and thereby subject to strict rules of seeing and experiencing that generally rule out the unpredictable. While the Japanese delight in viewing the cherry blossoms in spring and know exactly how to behave and what to say under these highly structured circumstances, seldom does such admiration extend to a broader, spontaneous appreciation of and concern for the natural world outside certain collectively favoured features. They only seem to be comfortable when touching 'nature' from a safe distance, by freezing and putting walls around things.

These risk-averse attitudes certainly stem from the harshness of living in an overcrowded land at the mercy of nature's unpredictability and prone to earthquakes, typhoons, floods, mudslides. Yet they can also be seen as an integral part of the ingrained Japanese tendency to focus on the instant or small detail, as epitomised in a haiku poem. While this ability to 'narrow the focus' has a praiseworthy dimension in its elegance and perfectionism, it also has a dark underside. As Alex Kerr, citing the architect Sei Takeyama, puts it in his Dogs and Demons, this leads the Japanese people to ignore and become desensitised to the ugliness in their environment:

You can admire a mountainside and not see the gigantic power lines marching over it, or take pleasure in a rice paddy without being disturbed by the aluminum-clad factory looming over it. 

[...]

Photographers and moviemakers in Japan must carefully calculate how to frame each shot to preserve the illusion of natural beauty. The Japanese are surrounded by books and posters that feature precisely trimmed shots of nature - mostly close-ups of such details as the walkway into an old temple grounds or a leaf swirling in a mountain pool - with accompanying slogans praising the Japanese love of nature, the seasons and so forth.

[...]

It is impossible to get through a single day in Japan without seeing some reference - in paper, plastic, chrome, celluloid, or neon - to autumn foliage, spring blossoms, flowing rivers, and seaside pines. Yet it is very possible to go for months or even years without seeing the real thing in its unspoiled form. Camouflaged by propaganda and symbols, supported by a complacent public, and directed by a bureaucracy on autopilot, the line of tanks moves on: laying concrete over rivers and seashores, reforesting the hills, and dumping industrial waste. (pp. 74-76)

  

And thus are some of the disquieting aesthetic and ecological implications of favouring 'fantasy' - and... er... 'narrow focus', I'd add - over the truth. Then there is also, of course, the ethical dimension of it all, but that's another long story, about which I've already written more than enough.

Perplexities, in a word.