Page 56 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

languages and categories were glossed in a lecture given in 1914 by Taki Seiichi at Tokyo Imperial
University. Responding to Ernest Fenollosa, a Harvard-trained scholar who taught aesthetics in Japan
during the Meiji period, Taki related:

When I met Fenollosa in Tokyo near the end of his life, he told me that Japanese art was abstract and decorative,
and should be most highly appreciated as applied arts. However we Japanese think that this view is not correct.
The special character of Japanese art is spirituality; therefore it is abstract. Even the famous Kórin folding
screen painting of Irises is indeed an object of abstract beauty and must be recognized as possessing a surprising
strength that is more than mere decoration. 8

cat. 29 Fenollosa and his student Okakura Kakuzô played an important role in reshaping Japanese art history 55
Ogata Kórin,
Kosode with autumn /lowers (and both became curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Certainly Fenollosa came to Japan
and grasses, with later nineteenth-century ideas about beauty and realism representing truth and therefore being
early eighteenth century,
hand-painted ink and morally superior. Taki countered this claim by asserting the spirituality underlying Japanese art as the
color on silk twill, source of its abstraction.
147.2 x 130.2 (58 x 5iV4),
Tokyo National Museum, The fundamental problem lies in the term "decorative" and in the culturally perceived func-
Important Cultural Property
tion of art. To Fenollosa the abstract nature of Japanese art perhaps signified a deficiency, whereas
Taki, invoking Kórin's irises (see fig. 4 in Melinda Takeuchi's essay), discerned it as spiritual. Kórin's
work is indeed instructive. The irises and the plank bridge depicted on the screens refer to a chapter
in the tenth-century Tales o/Ise in which the hero of the narrative, Ariwara no Narihira, writes a
poem about emotions inspired by a visit to a beautiful place. In this sense the painting falls under
the category of depictions of famous places (meishoe). Kórin paints only irises and planks, however.
The viewer would have to be familiar with the Tales o/ise to understand the scene and appreciate its
meaning, spiritual or otherwise. Thus certain traditional Japanese art forms are part of a common-
ality of shared knowledge. The images can be viewed as symbolic, but not decorative in the classic
English sense.

The term kazari first appeared in the Man'yóshü, a late eighth-century poetry compilation.
Several poems, or more correctly songs (uta), refer to the act of ornamentation (here the active form
kazashi), particularly to ornamenting the hair with flowers. One poem describes a man and a woman
placing plum and wisteria blossoms in each other's hair. Another (number 1429) tells of cherry
blossoms tied in the hair of girls and boys. Yet another (820) mentions plum blossoms that look as if
they are blooming on someone's head. In Poems on the Flowers and Birds of the Twelve Months, composed
by the aristocratic poet Fujiwara no Teika in 1214, kazari still has the same meaning: "Even the sleeves
of travelers who broke off cherry blossoms to decorate their hair have caught the scent that fills this
9
spring sky." Kazari is thus an act that interweaves man and nature in a "temporary re-creation"
(tSLifeurimono). It transforms an ordinary object into something extraordinary. And it is the process of
transformation, according to Tsuji, that is a spiritual operation, releasing one from the pressures of
ordinary existence.
Kazari has been manifested in many ways throughout Japanese history, using fanciful and
temporary re-creations such as the seasonal festivals that punctuate the Japanese calendar even today
(see cat. 135). Kazari can also be experienced in an "extravagant act" (/üryü), recorded since the eighth
century and evident during the Edo period in spontaneous circle dances, parades, and processions as
well as in kabuki theater. And it can be expressed through "illusory re-creations" or parody (mitate) and