or archaic imperfection, apparent simplicity or effortlessness in execution, and richness in historical associations.”22 Yanagi Sōetsu (see page 138), champion of Japan’s folk art aesthetics, also wrote about wabi and sabi, describing them as a hidden “irregular,” and imperfect beauty, and also linked them to shibui.23
Influenced by Yanagi, Elizabeth Gordon helped to popularize the concepts through her inclusion of a short article about them in her House Beautiful magazine Shibui issue, where she explained wabi and sabi as underlying principles of shibui.24 Gordon noted the presence of sabi in gardens that possess a “tranquil and serene atmosphere,” and wabi as a design concept in which “nothing is over-emphasized or extravagant or exaggerated.” She further noted that “the humility in wabi, the hint of sadness in the recognition of perfection in any human achievement, springs from the knowledge that with the bloom of time comes the first embrace of oblivion.”25
The words wabi and sabi are perhaps the most familiar, and also overused, Japanese aesthetic terms in the present day. Leonard Koren (b. 1948), a consultant and prolific writer specializing in design and aesthetics, helped to popularize these words in his 1994 book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, which contrasted Japanese and Western ideals of beauty.26 They “became a talking point for a wasteful culture intent on penitence and a touchstone for designers of all stripes, including some makers of luxury goods.”27 More recently, these words have been applied to a wide variety of crafts, fine arts, commercial products, architectural designs, and even interpersonal relationships.28 Clearly, usage of these terms has strayed far from their original meanings. Nowadays, it has become popular to associate wabi-sabi with virtually anything having abbreviated and suggestive qualities, and products created from rustic and tactile, seemingly old, natural materials.
Plate 1-22 Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?–1806), Folding Fan Seller, Round Fan Seller, Barley Pounder (Ogi Uri, Uchiwa Uri, Mugi Tsuki), from the series Female Geisha Section of the Yoshiwara Niwaka Festival (Seiro niwaka onna geisha no bu). Polychrome woodblock print, ink and color on paper with mica ground, 37.5 x 24.8 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 32-143/139. Photo: Mel McLean. In this print, a genre known as mitate (humorous visual allusions to classical themes in ukiyoe prints), a group of geisha entertain attendees at a festival by parodying various types of merchants.
IKI
STYLISH, SOPHISTICATED ELEGANCE
The aesthetic of iki, first noted in writings of the second half of the eighteenth century, described the taste preferences of the most sophisticated men and women participants (clients, geisha, and Kabuki actors) of the thriving entertainment quarters, called the Ukiyo or “Floating World,” of Japan’s urban centers, particularly Edo (Tokyo), Osaka, and Kyoto (see also Plate 3-6). It celebrated the dynamic sense of coquetry that defined their amorous but strained interrelationships, and captured the boldness and joie de vivre attitude with which they lived under the specter of a politically repressive military regime. This sensibility was manifested visually in their tasteful, finely made clothing, refined accoutrements, and the elegantly appointed banquet halls and tea rooms they frequented,
Iki was one of the aesthetic words briefly mentioned by Elizabeth Gordon in her shibui issue of House Beautiful, which she described as “stylish, à la mode, smart…, [the Japanese] equivalent of France’s chic.”30 It has more recently been translated as “urbane, plucky stylishness.”31
Although Gordon regarded shibui as the highest category of refined beauty, not all critics agree. Widespread Japanese intellectual interest in promoting iki as an aesthetic that represented the essential spirit of the Japanese people had arisen in the early twentieth century, initially through the writings of philosopher Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941), whose father, Kuki Ryūichi, a high-ranking Meiji government official in charge of cultural institutions, had served as mentor to Okakura Kakuzō (see page 136). Kuki Shūzō’s mother, a former geisha who eventually divorced his father, had carried on a romantic relationship with Okakura, and this enabled her son to develop a close spiritual bond with him that influenced the trajectory of his philosophical inquiries. Kuki Shūzō wrote his seminal work, The Structure of Iki (Iki no kōzō), while living in Paris in 1926 and published it in Japan in 1930. It is no coincidence that the European intellectual climate in which he immersed himself in Paris influenced his choice of emphasis and the manner in which he discussed this aesthetic, as did his exposure there to ukiyoe prints, which celebrated the Edo period pleasure quarter sophisticates who were his mother’s social forebears. Kuki Shūzō especially admired the prints of Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?–1806), which he described as embodying a “high-class feminine taste that revealed a ‘heroic affinity’ with modernity.”33 As Westernized modernization was quickly and drastically altering daily life and cultural attitudes in Japan, Kuki sought to define an identifiably Japanese aesthetic that highlighted both his own culture’s past and its unique sense of the modern. In the beginning of the book, he introduced other words used in the Japanese language to describe taste, to tease out their subtle differences.34 Because of his scholarly prestige, interpreting the meaning of iki through the lens of Kuki has remained a topic of much discussion among writers of Japanese aesthetics to the present day, both in Japan and abroad.
Plate 1-23 Katsukawa Shunshō (1726–1792), The Kabuki Actor Ichikawa Danjūro V in the Role of Gokuin Senuemon, 1782, from a set of five prints showing actors in roles from the play Karigane Gonin (Karigane Five Men). Polychrome woodblock print, ink and color on paper, 30.8 x 14.8 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 32-143/71 A. Photo: Tiffany Matson. Kuki Shūzō commented that purely geometric designs, especially those featuring parallel lines which created patterns of vertical stripes, as seen in the kimono design of this actor, express the essence of iki.32
Plate 1-24 Tsuke shoin (writing desk alcove) adjacent to the tokonoma of the Matsu no Ma (Pine Viewing Room) at the Sumiya banquet hall, Shimabara licensed district, Kyoto, 18th century. Kuki Shūzō observed that iki in architecture features a “dualistic opposition” in subtle juxtapositions of textures and colors, for example, in pairing wood and bamboo structural components, and in suffusing space with subdued, indirect lighting.35 The interplay of the textures and colors of the walls, windows, and post-and-beam architecture, and the subdued lighting infuse this room with an elegant tension characteristic of the aesthetic of iki.
Plate 1-25 Shibata Zeshin (1807–1891), Inrō with design of prunus blossoming outside a latticed window. Bamboo, lacquer, porcelain, agate. The Walters Art Museum, 61.203. This elegant object, a tour de force of virtuosity, embodies the essence of iki.
MIYABI AND FŪRYŪ
OPULENT AND STYLISH ELEGANCE
The flip side of the understated and restrained beauty of shibui, wabi, sabi, and iki, is a more opulent elegance associated with Japan’s élites and intellectuals. Formal aristocratic culture of the Heian period (794–1185) gave rise to the first flowering of this aesthetic in Japan, then described as miyabi, “courtly elegance,” a word that expressed the pinnacle of refinement and beauty wistfully contemplated in the expression mono no aware.
Closely related to miyabi is fūryū (“blowing with the wind”), a word that was also first clearly articulated in the Heian period. Originally a Chinese term (fengliu), it entered the Japanese vocabulary in the
