Page 35 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

circumstance, status, and class. Often only partly successful attempts were made to keep the traditions
43
secret by controlling their transmission in various ways. This development was sufficiently wide-
spread to qualify it as a cultural pattern. Equally interesting is the way form and content are related in
these cultural practices.
Manner often overwhelmed matter; content lost substance and disappeared, as it were,
leaving room only for form. Form had to be a perfect embodiment of norm — indeed, a host of norms
pertaining to detailed prescriptions and expectations regarding proper time, specific place, appropriate
status, and, underneath it all, wealth— and increasingly so for higher social and status groups. Thus,
for the elite consumers of Shijó cuisine, the generic "carp" ceased to exist, as they were presented only

34 with poetically transformed "flower-viewing carp," "congratulatory carp," "dragon gate carp," "snowy
44
morning carp," and "carp in a boat," each appropriate for one particular occasion (fig. 4). Ideally, one
never just ate plain carp. One above all degustated culture, and ingested the status politics — in a
sense, the whole system — which one thereby became. Just as social space was infinitely differentiated
according to status, social time became segmented in incommensurable moments. This was achieved
through an extraordinary emphasis on form. Proper form was all that counted.

Norm, form, and formality are close neighbors, and together they may sometimes seem to take
up too much cultural space. One can argue that this was the case in Tokugawa Japan. Tokugawa moral-
ists understood the intimate connection between form and norm. For them, form was destiny. "Heaven
and nature have their form...that is to say, all things have their own destiny,"Yamaga Sokó wrote. Ogyu
Sorai denied any regulatory power to inborn moral dictates or cosmic, natural principles: "The mind-
heart has no form. Therefore it cannot be regulated Principle has no form. Therefore it cannot pro-
45
vide a standard [to follow]." For him, socially correct forms were all important for an orderly society.
Yet he also criticized the excessive adherence to form. fig-4
"Congratulatory carp" and
The performance of alternate attendance in Edo became an empty shell, but a costly one since it "snowy morning carp," in
Digest of Secret Transmissions on
drained large amounts from the daimyo's revenue. Retinues were reduced; servants and hired hands Correct Food Preparation and
came to constitute the bulk of the processions. In 1827, out of a total of 1,969 people in Maeda's scaled- Cutting (1642-1659).
Illustration from Yoshii Motoko,
down procession, only 185, or nine percent, were actual retainers; the rest were servants employed éd., Edo jidai ryori-hon shusei
46
by the retainers or by the domain, or were porters from the way stations. The historian Watanabe (Kyoto, 1978)
Hiroshi, reflecting on the relatively quick manner in which the Tokugawa system gave way, suggests
that the end must have come as a sudden awakening from a dream, as if the royal coach at the stroke
of midnight collapsed into a pumpkin. He writes that during the Meiji period (1868 -1912), a former
shogunal elite retainer described the "face-to-face audiences" with the shogun, a hallmark of the
superior status of the bannerman retainers to which he belonged. After being rushed into an audience

room, he recalled, one bowed with one's forehead on the tatami as a voice said "hushhh" until a
second "hushhh" signaled that the audience was over, without the retainers ever knowing whether
the shogun had indeed passed through the room or not. 47
This was a description of the late Tokugawa preoccupation with form, but even in the early
eighteenth century Sorai had already complained about a similar formalist state of affairs. Samurai
"had the most comfortable upbringing imaginable," he wrote, and they had "come, gradually, to have
the most delicate dispositions: they worry about trivialities and excessively upbraid their subordinates
for their mistakes. Those who force their subordinates to be perfect are described today as good
officials. This is why they worry about making mistakes People do not become very involved with