Back in the early nineteen-sixties, anything English was chic: "Carnaby Street" and "Penny Lane." During the mid-Sixties, anything Indian was fashionable, including trekking off to India to sit with a guru who purported to offer enlightenment. And nowadays, anything Japanese is the rage. If you know any adolescents of a certain character or intelligence, you will find that they are consumed with Japanese comics, video games, fashions, movies, cartoons, costumes, and food. Some of these young Japanfans even want to learn Japanese, and their sketchbooks are full of copies of Japanese adventure comic or movie characters. For those who are not familiar with the whole phenomenon, the animated cartoons and movies are called anime' and Japanese comics are called manga. These two can take over someone's whole life if they are not careful.

I'm not much of a manga or anime fan, and yet I am touched by the whole Japan thing: I drive a Honda (made in the good old USA) and eat plenty of sushi (made by Korean or Thai food workers). I constantly encounter the current fascination with Japan among my co-workers or science fiction fans or many younger people I meet. There is a young man who works at my workplace who is so involved with anime that he is learning Japanese so he can read manga in the untranslated original. He even wants to go to Japan and make a career for himself as some sort of business liaison or interpreter. I've heard that the Japanese language is exceedingly hard to learn and that Japanese customs are almost impossible for a Westerner to fathom, so I wish him good luck. Meanwhile, I enjoy the fantasy TV series "Heroes," which features a Japanese main character and samurai subplot complete with improbable powers and martial arts.

This is not the first time that Western Europeans and Americans have become fascinated with Japanese culture. Back in the middle and late nineteenth century, the artistic elite found inspiration in Japanese prints and screens and ceramics, many of which turned up almost accidentally in the West. Impressionist composers such as Debussy and Ravel used Japanese pentatonic modes in their music. This Eastward-looking fashion was nicknamed Japonisme, or "Japan-ism." The craze for anime, manga, samurai, and Japanese entertainment nowadays is another wave of Japonisme. What is important to remember, though, is that anything Japanese we encounter or imitate in the West is no longer "authentically" Japanese. We can only fabricate our version of Japan, never participating in the real thing. Hence the word "Japonisme," denoting an artificial Japan interpreted through Western culture.

Most of the material coming out of Japan matches the frenetic and quick-cutting pace of our own American culture, especially things aimed at children and teenagers. You get lots of explosions, martial arts action, slashing swords, laser beams, giant robots, flame-throwing, teary romance, steamy erotica, and soap opera often with supernatural and fantastic elements. Whatever goes on is relentlessly exciting.

But there is another sector of Japanese culture which is not as popular, or visible, in Western Japonisme. This is the Japan of Zen gardens and empty rooms and haiku poetry, the culture that can make a statement with a single flower in a vase. This is the opposite, at least to Western eyes, of the frantic slashing of movies and comics. It is a cultivation of serenity and wonder, mixed with a kind of melancholy at the transitoriness of the world. The Japanese name for this is wabi-sabi, which in its untranslateableness means something like "beauty in incompleteness and transitoriness." I am much more attracted to this aesthetic than the "anime" aesthetic. Maybe this is because I am old, but I remember being enthralled by the Western version of this many years ago in Italy, when I was of an age that should have been more involved in hot action.

It means quiet courtyards with trickling fountains, or empty hallways with sunlight slanting through them, or shaded pools in mossy gardens. It looks at old broken rocks and green shoots growing up through cracks in pavement. It loves long minutes or even hours of silence with nothing but nature noises to listen to. In a world that is crammed with one shrieking stimulus after another, this is what I long for.

I have heard that there are some Japanese comic books which follow this aesthetic; no word balloons, just one evocative panel following on another in graphic silence. But I have never found any of these publications; maybe they aren't imported to the USA. Musically, though, there is such a refuge. It is not in Western or modern classical or pop music, but in the electronic and acoustic ambient that I have spent so much time here talking about. Ambient composers do not create "music" in the sense of Mozart or Beethoven or pop songs. They craft sonic environments which promote that Japanese feeling without ever being Japanese, a sound garden of white noise wind, synthesized bamboo, and electronic tea.

Posted at 3:59 am | link