By Haga Tōru (Japan Library, 2021) Transl. Juliet Winters Carpenter
Review by Cody Poulton
Lightning—
girdled by waves
the islands of Japan
This haiku by Yosa Buson (1716-1784) captures a snapshot of Japan in the Tokugawa era: isolated, peaceful, self-contained.
The Tokugawa era (aka Edo period), which stretched from 1603 until its fall in 1868, has generally been considered a dark, feudal age run by a draconian police state. To be sure, the samurai could come down hard on dissidents and were inveterate party poopers, but this period also witnessed the flourishing of practically every gentle art that Japan has become famous for: tea, horticulture and landscape gardens, kimono textile design, woodblock prints, haiku and its satirical cousin senryū, kabuki and the puppet theatre, and a few forms like kyōka (“mad poems”) and gesaku pop literature that would be less known to the layperson. In his book, Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853, Haga Tōru covers all these, as well as the advances made chiefly in medicine and natural history by Japanese philosophers and scientists. This collection of Haga’s essays is elegantly translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, capturing the voice of this engaging writer.
Haga enjoyed a long and brilliant career before his death in 2020. He held positions in comparative literature at Tokyo University and at the International Research Institute of Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto before becoming President of Kyoto University of the Arts, and later, Director of Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art.
Haga had no patience with Marxist or modernization theory, both of which hold that there is there is one single road to modernity and civilization. As his son Haga Mitsuru writes in his preface to this book, Tokugawa Japan was “an object lesson in relativity.” The great cultural relativists like anthropologist Franz Boas (who mentored Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict) have impressed on us that, however strange and conflicting other human cultures may seem at first glance, each one is a remarkably sophisticated device for making sense of the world and must be understood on its own terms. Haga’s book examines a number of key figures—poets, artists, doctors, natural scientists, writers and philosophers, and sometimes many of these occupations at once—whose reflections are a remarkable window into the world they lived in. Because Haga was also a comparatist par excellence, fluent in both English and French, he was also able to contextualize the achievements of these Tokugawa intellectuals for the world stage.
From the early 17th century—when Japan booted out Christians and most other Europeans except a few Dutch merchants—until Commodore Matthew C. Perry steamed into Edo Bay in 1853 (forcing the country to open to foreign trade), Japan had been a closed country, sakoku in Japanese.
Haga writes that:
“Sakoku has long been discussed as a lackluster state of lockdown unique to Tokugawa Japan, and served as the dreadful cause of delay and distortion in Japan’s modernization. But taking a broader view, Japan’s policy of isolation seems little different from similar policies in contemporary China and Korea, and its severity is questionable compared to continuing political, economic, cultural and communication policies of isolation in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Albania, North Korea, and Burma [Myanmar], especially amidst the far more tightly woven web of international interdependence in the latter half of the twentieth century to the present day. National seclusion, in other words, is a universal phenomenon seen frequently in the course of world history, including our own time (pps. 107-18).”
Sakoku enabled the Tokugawa regime to not only maintain its control over a relatively weak federation of semi-independent fiefdoms, each with its own language and customs, but to regulate the extent to which foreign powers could engage in trade and diplomacy with Japan. And isolation didn’t mean ignorance. Haga’s book examines a number of remarkably talented intellectuals such as Arai Hakuseki, Kaibara Ekiken, Sugita Gempaku, Hiraga Gennai, and Watanabe Kazan, who readily engaged with European advances in science, technology, and art. Some of the most fascinating passages in this book deal with encounters between Japanese officials and Europeans, like German Engelbert Kaempfer, who spent two years in Japan with the Dutch East India Trading Company and amassed a vast trove of information and artifacts which he took back to Europe. Kaempfer’s botanical discoveries in Japan influenced Carl Linnaeus’ classification of flora.
One singular encounter was Arai Hakuseki’s interrogation of the Jesuit priest Giovanni Batista Sidotti, who had snuck into Japan a little less than a century after Catholics had been banned. Hakuseki’s remarkably sympathetic account describes a meeting between equals, each curious of the other’s ways. He expresses great respect for Sidotti’s wisdom and tact, but remarks, “When Sidotti talked about religion, not one word seemed to approach the true way. It was as if wisdom had given way to folly and I were listening to the words of a completely different man. I realized that while the learning of the West may be superior in regard to concrete matters and objects with firm outlines, such learning can only be applied to the physical realm and has nothing to do with the metaphysical.” (p. 141)
Hakuseki would later publish Seiyō Kibun (Tidings of the West) in 1715, one of the signal works of so-called rangaku (Dutch Studies). Sugita Gempaku (whose expertise in a wide range of scientific and cultural pursuits Haga compares to Goethe’s) published Kaitai Shinsho (A New Text on Anatomy) in 1774 and Rangaku Kotohajime (The Dawn of Western Science in Japan) in 1815. Haga writes that Japan was gripped by a natural science craze in the eighteenth century, during which a remarkably comprehensive and objective classification was made by numerous keen observers of flora and fauna. The illustrations by these authors of plants, flowers, insects, fish, and birds are astounding. See Kaibara Ekiken’s Yamato Honzō (A Japanese Herbal) published in 1708 and the extraordinary sketches jotted down by Watanabe Kazan of insects and other small things at hand during his house arrest shortly before he took his own life in 1841.
The Japanese eye for naturalistic detail can be seen in the woodblock prints of Hokusai or Hiroshige, but also in the illustrations that Kawahara Keigo drew for Franz von Siebold’s meticulous collections of flora and fauna during the early nineteenth century. It is clear that Japanese natural scientists were at least on equal terms with their European colleagues during this period; their illustrations surpass anything made by Audubon or others in the West. They were as rationalist and empiricist as any of their contemporaries in the European Enlightenment. The scientific eye is an artistic eye. We see the same eye and mind at work in the remarkable writings of the polymath botanist, ecologist, and ethnologist Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941), who owed a deep debt to his Tokugawa forebears.
Some of this will be familiar to those who have read books like Sir George Sansom’s The Western World and Japan (Knopf, 1958) or Donald Keene’s books The Japanese Discovery of Europe (Stanford Univ. Press, 1969) and World Within Walls (Henry Holt & Co., 1976), to name just a few classic studies of this period in English.
Where Haga excels is in his attention to the art and literature of this period. His collection is also sumptuously illustrated, many with colour plates of masterpieces of this era. Pax Tokugawana begins with a study of two painted screens depicting Kyoto. The first, called the Uesugi version, was commissioned by warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1574 and depicts a vibrant city at peace, crammed with people (2,485 figures in all) enjoying daily pastimes like the theatre, after nearly a century of civil war. The second screen, the Funaki version, was painted around 1616 and contains even more people. Haga describes how our point of view hovers over the city in both screens, as if we were gazing down on it from a helicopter. Zeroing in on the little details, he provides a delightful commentary, for example, on a scene in the Funaki screen of what is likely a portrait of English merchant Richard Cocks with his hound, panting in the summer heat. Aerial metaphors abound also in his portrait of Tawaraya Sōtatsu’s portrait of the wind and thunder gods in Kenninji, Kyoto, which have, Haga writes, “the flight accuracy of a pair of jets.”
Artists like Sōtatsu and Hon’ami Kōetsu (who often worked together) produced works of astounding beauty and were in large part responsible for the seventeenth-century revival and popularization of classical Heian culture. A portrait by Kusumi Morikage, of a peasant family enjoying a summer evening under a trellis of evening glories, graces the cover. Haga writes that “anyone who views this work with admiration or relief should be allowed into the country, visa or no visa, no questions asked” (p. 184). Alas, not likely under the current pandemic, when most countries (not just Japan) have gone sakoku on us.
Another chapter is devoted to a contemporary of Shakespeare: the founder of kabuki. Izumo no Okuni, created a dance fever in Kyoto of a style called fūryū (“drifting in the wind”). Kabuki, now written with the Chinese characters for “song, dance, skill,” originally meant someone “bent” or “deviant.” Kabukimono (or kabuki people) were the cross-dressing punks of their age, a tradition maintained with the onnagata, male actors playing women’s roles. (Tokugawa authorities had banned women from the stage in 1629 on the charge that their performances encouraged prostitution). An exemplar of her age, Okuni was a symbol of the new freedom, sensuality, and experimentation that was suddenly made available to the masses under the Tokugawa peace. Kyoto remained one of the largest cities in the world throughout much of the seventeenth century until its population was superseded by Edo around 1700.
Such a “lockdown” allowed Japanese culture to ferment and flower as it were in a hothouse, creating numerous prodigies. Haga is especially fond of Yosa Buson, whom he calls the “cloistered poet,” one who “slides into a deeply isolated ‘small world’ resembling the fin de siècle ennui of poetry and one-act pantomimes of nineteenth-century Europe” (p. 244).
And yet there is a serenity to Buson’s works that is rarely found in Western art. Buson’s superlative portrait of Mt. Fuji, of which Haga gives brilliant account, is one such case. He was as great an artist as he was a poet. Not everyone was content with the longuer monotone of the Pax Tokugawana, however. It was a trap for some. A genre of popular literature of this period, called gesaku (“playful works”) was the response of many, often writing under pseudonyms, who kicked against the pricks of official restrictions on free expression. Gesaku raised “ennui itself into an art” Haga writes. Two of its masters were Hiraga Gennai and Ōta Nanpo, who both came to a bad end, as did Watanabe Kazan, whose criticism of Tokugawa foreign policy led to his untimely demise little more than a decade before Perry made his unwelcome visit to Japan. Gennai’s essay “Hōhiron” (On Farting) published in 1774, and its sequel in 1777 describes the amazing flatulent talents of a sideshow artist, a fartist if you will. But then he concludes: “I have merely appropriated the sound of flatulence in order to awaken from their torpor those who are in despair or lacking in industry; but perhaps my argument smells suspicious. Tell me my ideas aren’t worth a fart if you like; I don’t give a shit.” (p. 221-2). You can find his essay in Haruo Shirane’s Early Modern Literature: An Anthology 1600-1900 (Columbia Univ. Press, 2003) called “The Theory of Farting.”
Like so many multi-talented men of this age Gennai was also a scientist; he was the inventor of an early electrical generator. Clearly, like many, he felt his talents were wasted on the Tokugawa regime. Nevertheless, Haga notes, when the Meiji era dawned (1869-1912) it was “a change, and not necessarily for the better.” This is a conclusion with which novelist Natsume Sōseki, whose life straddled the Tokugawa and Meiji eras, would readily have concurred. Japan’s race to catch up with Western civilization wrought enormous spiritual and cultural trauma, and precipitated the horrors of the Sino-Japanese and Pacific wars. That’s as good enough a reason as any for staying unplugged in ages of empire or globalization.
From farts to Fuji, in Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853, Haga ranges widely over the variegated landscape of Tokugawa Japan. Usually his insights are enlightening, but there is a good deal of repetition in this collection of essays, which had first appeared in a variety of different publications over the course of his long career. The book is sadly in need of an editor (not the translator’s job; Carpenter’s note on page 32 hints at her preference for, but also her exasperation over, certain essays and passages). The same cast of characters pops up in different guises from chapter to chapter and if readers are looking for a carefully reasoned argument, this is not the book for them. In that sense, Haga’s style is typically Japanese, the essay as zuihitsu (following the brush), and one has to go with the detours and digressions. As much culturally French as he was Japanese though, Haga would have likely called these jeux d’esprit.
Another drawback to this book is that his cast is, with the exception of Okuni, all men. Women appear only as subjects for male contemplation of their beauty. For insight into the real lives of women during the long Tokugawa peace, we need to read elsewhere. I’d start with Edwin McLellan’s delightful Woman in the Crested Kimono: The life of Shibue Io and her family (Yale Univ. Press, 1985), based on Mori Ōgai’s biography of Io’s husband, the early nineteenth-century doctor Shibue Chūsai, and, more recently published, Amy Stanley’s Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese woman and her world (2020).