A Lateral View. Donald Richie
to the patterns of a country. Cultivated Japan is all paddies winding in free-form serpentine between the mountains, a quilt of checks and triangles on the lowlands—very different from the neat squares of Germany, or that vast and regular checkerboard of the United States. The Japanese pattern is drawn from nature. The paddy fields assume their shape because mountains are observed and valleys followed, because this is the country where the house was once made to fit into the curve of the landscape and where the farmer used to cut a hole in the roof rather than cut down the tree.
The natural was once seen as the beautiful, and even now lip service is still given this thought. However, both then and now, the merely natural was never beautiful enough. That nature is grand only when it is natural—Byron’s thought—would never have occurred to a Japanese. No, this ideal is closer to the ordered landscape of Byron’s grandfather: forests become parks, trees are dwarfed, flowers are arranged. One does not go against nature but one takes advantage of it: one smooths, one embellishes. Nature is only the potential—man gives it its shape and meaning.
Since it is the natural forms that are traditionally most admired—the single rock, the spray of bamboo—it is these which are seen more frequently in Japanese art, delivered from the chaotic context of nature and given meaning through their isolation. There are canons but they derive from nature. Purple and red do not clash because, since they occur often enough in nature, no law of color can suggest that their proximity is unsatisfying. A single branch set at one side of the niche-like tokonoma and balanced by nothing is not ill-composed because there is a rule that insists that formal balance is not necessarily good. The Japanese garden is not the French: symmetry is something imposed upon nature, not drawn from it; asymmetry is a fine compromise between a complete regularity and an utter chaos.
To think of Japan is to think of form, because these patterns are repeated often and faithfully. Wherever the eye rests they occur. They give the look of the land a consistency, as though a set of rules had been rigorously followed.
It is these patterns, these shapes, these forms, these designs endlessly occurring, which mark the country. Chaos is vanquished; pattern prevails. They make the view more consistent than would otherwise have been possible—they create what often identifies art: style.
A pattern exists for everything: for temples, kimono, carpehters’ saws, and the new is often in the shape of the old. There is only one way to build a shrine, to sew an obi. This traditional rigidity is in the outlines, the profile, and is based upon a geometry of stress and repose. In the decoration is individual variation: endless, myriad, protean invention. The shape of a temple bell remains but the patterned surface varies. Dressed stone, planed wood, decorated cloth or pottery, now the gleaming facets of plastic, chrome, glass—the surface is made visible by its own texture. The profile, austere and timeless, is metamorphosed into the unique, the individual.
Japanese design surprises, both in its extent and in its rightness. It is found in the castle and in the kitchen, and the combination of a nearly unvarying outline and a completely varying surface—a decoration which is all form—creates the kind of design that is weakly called “good.”
Not, however, until recently by the Japanese themselves. Traditional design was never noticed. We, the curious foreigners, are in a better position. On the other hand, if we had never seen and did not know the use of some of our own more lovely objects—the light bulb, the toilet bowl, the spoon—we would possibly find them beautiful. But habit blinds and practical knowledge usually deprives of vision. Japan is still distant enough from us that essence is perceived. Disassociated from function, the object becomes formal rather than practical; it becomes a complete entity, and its visual character is all there is.
Design is a matter of economics, and an unchanging economy creates an unchanging design. Usually this design is the conjunction of the nature of the material plus the least possible effort. Japanese design is inseparable from art in that it is rarely the least effort but the most. Consequently, Japanese craftsman are paid almost as much as artists would be, as anyone now wishing to construct a real Japanese-style house soon discovers. In Tokugawa Japan, as in eighteenth-century England, one is continually surprised that the gentry spent its money so well.
This economy not only produced the audience for craft, it also maintained it, and the standards of the craftsmanship itself. So long as the economy remained undisturbed there could be no question of fashion. For two and a half centuries Japan was closed and even before that there was—except, of course, for the massive cultural importations from China and Korea—little foreign (Western) influence, that great fashion-maker. From the age of Shakespeare to the time of Tennyson, through all tht: French Louis and all the British Georges, Japan isolated itself. Until Meiji, the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japan had no arches, cornerstones, fireplaces, armchairs or farthingales. Thus, Japan had never had to contend with the old-fashioned. It had never seen an entire style wane and then wax again. Since old things continued to be used, except for the minor surface variations there was no concept of the structurally old. There were no antique stores, only second-hand stores. Precious, old objects existed but always in the context of the present.
These old things showed the same “perfect” shape. They accommodated themselves both to their desired use and also to the natural laws of stress and response. Design followed the Confucian standard in all things: uniformity and authority. It followed that Japan is thus the home of the module unit, the first of the prefab lands. At the same time, though the profile is standard, individuality is allowed, insisted upon, on the surface itself. One might say of Japanese art as Aldous Huxley said of the Mayan: “. . . it is florid but invariably austere, a more chaste luxuriance was never imagined.”
Although the distinction between outline profile and surface decoration is as artificial and as arbitrary as that between form and content, it is possible to say that Japanese design not only permits but insists upon archetypal patterns and that all such patterns show a like division, a like propensity.
This natural affinity everywhere remains. Lewis Mumford has observed that the airplane is called beautiful because it looks like a seagull. In Japan this affinity is more acknowledged, more displayed, than elsewhere. Thus, one of the reasons for the beauty of Japanese design, its rightness, its fitness, and one of the reasons for the proliferation of Japanese forms, their economy, their enormous presence, is that the Japanese man and woman, artist or not, are among the last to remember the earliest lesson which nature teaches all makers.
—1962
Japanese Rhythms
CULTURES HAVE their own rhythms: how they divide the days and the nights, when to go fast and when to go slow, in what manner to fragment time.
Some of the differences are familiar. A well-known temporal gulf exists between the global north and south. The latter have, for example, their famous siesta-night again in the middle of the day. The northern visitor is always surprised at this diurnal difference, and often irritated as well. What? The post office isn’t open? Don’t these people know it is two in the afternoon?
Another familiar gulf, this time a chasm, exists also between East and West, the Orient and the Occident. We speak of the slower pace, calling it leisurely if we like it, indolent if we do not. Our travel brochures advise us to go and, specifically, relax in exotic such-and-such.
These various temporal diffenmces are well known. Not so familiar are those cultures which blend the differences and bridge the gulfs. Among these, the most spectacular is Japan. Here the rhythms of the West have been rigorously applied and yet, under these, the old pulse of Asia is still strongly felt.
Seen from the outside, the way in which the Japanese structure time seems much closer to New York than, say, Kandyor Mandalay. Indeed, most of the Western temporal virtues—efficiency, promptness, get-up-and-go—are being flung in our faces by this seemingly industrious nation.
Yet, the view from the inside indicates that older, more purely Asian rhythms persist. There is the new way of arranging the day and then there is the old. And these two, as with so much else in Japan, coexist—strata in time.
Early to bed, early to rise, etc., has been the recipe for business success in the WASP world and this is the