Tsurezuregusa and Yokohama

I recently finished writing an essay about the Tsurezuregusa (徒然草) or Essays in Idleness (which I quoted here), and to take a break before writing my next essay I read a volume of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (ヨコハマ買い出し紀行) or, somewhat awkward in translation, “A Record of Going Shopping in Yokohama.” I was struck by how similar the two works are.

Certainly they have their differences. Tsurezuregusa was written in the fourteenth century by a reclusive Buddhist monk, and contains his reflections on many things: the proper way for a gentleman to behave; precedent and the correct form of court ritual; anecdotes and stories he heard and terse pieces of advice. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, on the other hand, is a twentieth/twenty-first century fictional manga that focuses on a very human-like robot named Alpha who runs a coffee shop (she occasionally goes to Yokohama to buy coffee beans, hence the name).

Tsurezuregusa is renowned for its description of a certain widespread (although not universal) Japanese aesthetic. Yoshida Kenkō, the author, describes the aesthetic value of things that are asymmetrical, incomplete and worn out. In one oft-quoted line he writes that “It is only after the silk wrapper has frayed at top and bottom, and the mother-of-pearl has fallen from the roller that a scroll looks beautiful.” (page 70 of Donald Keene's excellent translation), and again: “Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring – these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration.” (p. 115)

This aesthetic appreciation for the worn out or faded, often called sabi, is brilliantly portrayed in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. Alpha's coffee shop is located out in the lonely Japanese countryside in a world where the oceans have risen. She travels across highways that were great arteries in the past, but are now cracked and split, with sand blowing across them. In one of the more sublime scenes Alpha visits a former coastal town that is now submerged underwater. However, through (presumably) some oversight at the power company the streetlights are still hooked up. When night falls the lamps come on, and the pools of light reveal glimpses of the once great city that glitter up through the black water, turning the whole bay into an extraordinary, beautiful light show.

However it is not only the environment that expresses the aesthetic beauty of the worn out. In the series humanity itself seems older and more worn down. Yokohama still seems to be a bustling city, but outside of it there is none of the magnificent energy of human commerce. The roads are in disrepair and there are no trains hauling materials and products from place to place. Occasionally we see the remains of what seems to be an office building or hotel covered with weeds. Politically as well, the world seems but a dim reflection of its former greatness. The nation of Japan seems to no longer exist, at least as we know it, as small areas are referred to as countries and called by their old feudal names.

Other than the robots, human technological innovation seems to have halted. One volume introduces an old racing boat built by one of the characters, now an old woman, in her youth. Although it seems to have been a great accomplishment when she built it, now it is derelict and rusting, and as we are not shown any newer models, it seems that this reflects the general state of technological progress. Also Alpha is amazed when she sees a small, single engine airplane in flight, a far cry from the people of our day who barely notice great jets thundering above them.

But rather than depicting this human decline as some sort of apocalyptic dystopia (a theme that is a bit tired by now), the series basks in the aesthetic attractiveness of a world that offers but a glimpse of former human greatness. Alpha leads a very attractive life attending to her infrequent customers, taking pictures of old buildings, wondering what they were used for, and sipping coffee with her friends, watching the swaying pampas grass in the twilight of the human endeavor.

The two works are similar in other ways as well. Both posit themselves in a degenerate age that is but a pale reflection of the past. For Kenkō that past was the Heian era, the height of aristocratic refinement, which had been corrupted into the age of warrior power in which he lived. Tsurezuregusa is also a representative work of zuihitsu literature. Zuihitsu (随筆) literally means “following the brush,” and refers to a style of simply writing whatever comes to mind without restriction. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is not a zuihitsu work, since it is a work of fiction and must develop characters and events. However it is structured as a set of discrete episodes that, while they move forward in time, are often unrelated and do not build up dramatic tension within a structured plot, very similar to the zuihitsu style.

Kenkō was a Buddhist monk, and accordingly one of the themes of Tsurezuregusa is the Buddhist idea of mujō (無常), or impermanence; the idea that all phenomena are conditional and impermanent, and therefore attachment to them is the source of human suffering. Alpha is no Buddhist monk, and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is not didactic Buddhist literature. Nonetheless the work definitely conveys the idea of impermanence. Alpha is an unaging robot, and eventually all the people she has grown attached to go away. The children she plays with grow up and move away or move on, and she is conscious of the limited time left to the kindly old man who runs the nearby gas station. Everything she forms an attachment to will eventually leave her, including her original attachment; her distant, absent owner.

I think Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou brilliantly captures the themes and aesthetic sensibilities of Tsurezuregusa in an ambitious, futuristic, scifi-ish setting. I believe it belongs on the short list of manga deserving serious literary consideration.

Cao and Mao

I've been reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms recently, the translation by Moss Roberts. It is in need of some copyediting (it was published in Beijing), but Roberts has footnoteded the classic extremely well. He includes many comments from Mao Zonggang, the Qing dynasty editor of the story.

The below comment from Mao is about Cao Cao, the villain of most of the story, after he accidentally kills the entire family of his host for the night, purposely kills his host to prevent him from coming after him later, and utters the famous line “Better to wrong the world than have it wrong me!”:

No reader reaching this episode fails to revile [Cao Cao]... They fail to recognize that Cao excels here too [in saying “Better to wrong the world than have it wrong me”]. Who has not felt this way? Who dares give such feelings voice? The good Confucian gentlemen speak hypocritically when they say, “Better to be wronged than wrong another.” Not that it doesn't sound good, but when you examine their conduct every step they take is in secret imitation of Cao Cao's statement. Cao Cao is simply an ambitious and amoral man who said what was in his heart. Such frankness is most refreshing compared to the deceits spoken by the other type. In this sense Cao Cao excels. (p. 552)

I love Mao's admission (and universalization) of a secret desire to stick it to smarmy, hypocritical moralizers and look out for one's own best interests. That resonates strongly even today. Plus, he asserts that Cao and moral Confucian gentlemen essentially act the same, the only difference being Cao's frank admission of his motivations and the gentlemen's obfuscation of them. The implication is that morality is merely a facade that governs social presentation rather than actual action, although perhaps Mao would contrast the hypocritical gentlemen with an actual moral Confucian. Fascinating stuff.

Macross as allegory

Matthew Alt has a fascinating article up on Néojaponisme that analyzes the classic Anime Macross as an allegory for Japan's WWII experience, arguing that its "creators... re-cast the narrative of Japan’s role in World War II within the context of their own comfortable modern consumer lifestyles." It posits the Macross as "a lone space-fortress, an island if you will, drift[ing] alone in the sea of space. Its inhabitants are outnumbered thousands to one by enemies from a completely alien culture." In the end, the Macross is saved by consumer culture, as Minmei's pop songs paralyze the enemy ships and accounts of consumerism brought back by spies seed dissent among their fleet. "Modern consumerism is venerated as the savior of all civilization, much as home electronics 'saved' Japan in the postwar era."

It's a very interesting argument, but I think I'd favor interpreting Macross as an allegory for the Cold War. Remember, the creator, Shōji Kawamori, wasn't born until 1960. WWII might have been something related by his parents, but the Cold War he knew personally. The series starts with a calamity and destruction, after which civilians must rebuild, just like the beginning of Japan's postwar period. Shortly after reconstructing, however, they are beset on all sides by a fearsome, expansionist alien race that is most notable for its total lack of culture. They have a strictly structured society that obviates any civilian culture or love (or indeed, contact with the opposite sex), and channels all energy into more war production, war-waging and expansion.

The day is saved, however, by capitalist consumerism. Away from the strict ideological indoctrination of their society, the Zentradi spies aboard the Macross quickly become enchanted with the many amazing things capitalism has to offer (as well as inter-gender relations), and bring stories and artifacts back to their fleet, eventually causing a wave of defection. We learn that this "protoculture," as the Zentradi call it, was something they used to have long ago, but lost in a series of utilitarian social changes.

The article argues that "The Zentradi aliens are... a mish-mash of old-school authority figures. Their obsession with war and willingness — even desire — to die in combat is stereotypically medieval or Imperial-era Japanese, while their utter cluelessness as to the 'protoculture' aboard the Macross is akin to that of American Occupation soldiers dropped in the midst of a society they only vaguely understood." However, I think a better parallel for America is the unreasonable, overbearing, stodgy Earth government, which refuses to let the Macross crew return home once they make it back to Earth, or even admit the ship's survival to the public. This reflects the sentiment that Japan, although it had come into its own in the postwar era and was ready to reemerge as an equal in the community of nations, was being held back by America for political reasons.

Incidentally, the Néojaponisme article criticizes Macross for positing a thriving pop culture in the middle of a warship plagued by weekly crisis. However I've always found that to be not only unproblematic (after all, what are a large number of civilians going to do for a year except create a civilian society?), but actually refreshing compared to other scifi works (I'm looking at you, Star Trek) that fiat a societal ideal, but then never actually portray that society because they can't figure out how it would work.

(The great image above is from an artist named Jason Park, apparently drawn on his DS!)

Mushanokoji: An excerpt

Mushanokōji Saneatsu was a Japanese writer, painter and philosopher active during the Taishō and Shōwa periods. He was a believer in humanism and individualism, and he was one of Tolstoy's biggest fans. He also wrote a pro-war book during WWII, and was consequently exiled from government during the occupation period.

In the book "Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Author's Autobiography" there is this fascinating passage:

Regarding the book that was the cause of my being exiled after the war, I didn't write it after Japan had begun to fare poorly, but when things still seemed good. I thought that presenting my own thoughts in a book would be a way to cooperate with the national polity more befitting a literary man than going around to give addresses, being made to imitate reporters or being made into a war correspondent. I wrote it on nobody's request or recommendation, and I spoke to the publisher myself in order to get it published. Therefore I'm the one who bears sole responsibility for that book, but at the time there wasn't any problem with what I wrote, and among my books that's not one that didn't sell.　I thought one shouldn't do work one is not suited to. After the war when everyone's views were different and only that book was left behind to get noticed, it was only natural that what hadn't stood out before should have begun to stand out.

But it's not as if I changed my views; while the war was going on I didn't stop my work at Atarashiki Mura [a commune he founded in 1918] for even a moment, and I continued giving speeches at monthly meetings. Never for a moment did I stop wishing for a world in which all people could live out their lives and realize their individuality. It's just that as a Japanese I didn't want to lose. Accordingly, the fact is that I didn't want to lower the Japanese fighting spirit.

Part confession, part defense, part reaffirmation of ideals, I think it really captures the deep confliction of Japan's wartime intellectuals.

What is a cultureist?

What is a cultureist anyway? Well, first and foremost it's a clumsy concatenation of "culutre" and the suffix "ist." Briefly, it describes a person who studies culture. Just like economists study the economy and ecologists study ecology, cultureists study culture.

Much like the economy, culture is an abstracted entity. Everyone agrees that it exists, but no one can say exactly where it is or what it looks like. "The economy" isn't merely the aggregate assets minus the aggregate liabilities of a given region, but a meta entity made up of the countless economic transactions that take place each second, and changes shape with each new transaction, defying attempts to pin it down for study. At the macro level, however, we can observe its organic behavior; expanding or shrinking, growing into new sectors while other sectors die out.

Similarly, culture is not merely the sum of all of the books in all of the libraries, but an abstract entity constructed by the countless cultural transactions that we continuously engage in. Cultural objects are produced, purchased, ignored, consumed, loved, hated, reviewed, commented on and parodied, all of which becomes part of the cultural landscape and is implicitly absorbed by other cultural objects. All of these individual transactions aggregate into a mysterious entity we call "culture." It behaves metabolically; consuming, growing and spreading in irregular and unpredictable ways.

People who study culture are often characterized as academics in an ivory tower, working in the unhelpfully named "humanities" field, writing papers about phallic symbols in Shakespeare's works. I have supplied the term "cultureist" here to reinvent that image. Cultureists are actively engaged in an attempt to understand the mysterious, dynamic entity that is loosely defined but universally recognized as "culture." It both reflects and impels our minds and imaginations. It can bind nations together or split them apart. It affects us all in profound ways, and cultureists struggle to illuminate glimpses of its inscrutable, organic movement. When they are successful they provide insights about its creators, humans, both as a group and as individuals.