Page 264 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

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of his disrespect. This incident, occurring roughly seven hundred years before Bashô's visit, reveals the
manner in which the Japanese landscape perpetuates the past through memory.
10
Landscape has been described as a "cultural process." The complexity of Japanese landscape
depiction derives from the evolving combination, over a thousand years, of numerous strains —
literary, religious, pictorial — that follow their own trajectories, interact, go dormant, and recombine in

endlessly fertile Edo imagination.

C I T Y S C A P E S In addition to providing lively subject matter, the urban environment was essential in making possible
art's social and economic underpinnings. Works of art are simultaneously aesthetic objects, social doc- 263
uments, and economic commodities. The florescence of the urban environment during the Edo period
led to the production and appreciation of the objects discussed here.
In just one century — the years between the late 15005 and the late i6oos —Japan went from
being a country with a single major city, Kyoto, to one of the most urbanized nations in the world. 11
This process was precipitated thanks to the policy, begun by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598) and vigor-
ously pursued by the Tokugawa, of uprooting the warrior class from their land base in the country and
relocating them in castle towns where they could be kept under centralized supervision. It is estimated
that some fifteen percent of the population during the Edo period — including farmers and villagers —
eventually gravitated toward the castle towns, turning them into real cities, despite repeated (and
futile) prohibitions against leaving the land.
Cities are composite mental fictions as well as fabricated physical environments. The ancient
capital of Kyoto offered a deeply internalized model of the ideal city. Thickly coded images of Kyoto had

appeared in the sixteenth century in pairs of monumental screens called Scenes In and Around Kyoto
(rafeuchu-rakugaizu).The screens follow prescribed formulas: the compositions progress from left to
right, beginning with spring in the northeast on the right screen and moving rightward into summer in
the southeast. The seasonal-directional progression is picked up on the left screen (fig. i), which starts
at the left with autumn and curves rightward around the western suburbs, merging with winter in the
northwest. Activities are calibrated by season and direction (New Year's ceremonies of early spring take
place at the imperial palace in the northeastern quarter). The mandalalike images conflated cosmic
order with an unblemished earthly order that expunged from the visual record the very palpable social
chaos and widespread destruction that blighted sixteenth-century Kyoto.
These Kyoto cityscapes consist of accretions of famous places (meishoe) interspersed with scenes
from everyday life. The imperial palace, mansions of leading pedigreed families, and ancient temples
like Kiyomizudera (founded in the ninth century) stood cheek by jowl with the shops of fishmongers
and bow sellers. Some of the famous places had apotropaic functions: Mount Hiei in the northeast,
and its great temple, Enryakuji, presided over the unlucky "demon gate" direction. The protective deity
of Mount Atago was supposed to guard the city from fire. This was the urban paradigm made visible.
The dilemma that faced Tokugawa leyasu (1542 -1616) as he designed his new headquarters
in Edo was identical to the predicament encountered by the Yongle emperor when the Ming-dynasty
monarch decided to transfer the Chinese capital from Nanjing to Beijing in 1421: how to invest an upstart
place that possessed little historical or cultural cachet with the rich symbolic character befitting the
seat of a ruler. And the solution hit upon by both men was similar: along with the physical construction