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Plate 1-35 Iizuka Tōyō (active ca. 1760–1780), Tiered stationery box (ryoshi bako), ca. 1775. Makie lacquer over wood core, gold and silver inlays, and colored lacquer, 21.6 x 34.9 x 21 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: David T. Beales III Fund, F78-23. Photo: E. G. Schempf. This boldly decorated box expresses the elegant karei taste of the upper echelons of the samurai class. Its varied minute designs, including family crests, cranes, and sailboats, as well as patchwork areas of pure abstraction, were created using a multitude of lacquer techniques that required many months of patient effort on the part of the artist to complete.
KABUKU AND BASARA
OUTLANDISH ELEGANCE
After the Tokugawa warriors took control of the country in the early seventeenth century, urban commoner culture flourished as never before. Participants in this new culture included warriors forced to become masterless samurai (rōnin), who fought on the losing side of the recent civil wars, and commoners displaced by the conflicts. These individuals became subsumed into the ranks of the newly emerging urban commoner classes who participated en masse in popular Shinto shrine festivals, attended Kabuki theater performances, and partook of other leisure activities, many of which took place in new red light districts of Japan’s burgeoning urban centers, where banquet halls like the Sumiya, were constructed. Their reckless attitude became identified with a new type of extravagant fūryū elegance known as kabuku, literally “twisted, out of kilter, or outlandish.”38 This word implied “rebellion against conventional social and artistic attitudes, with a strong suggestion of a clash with norms of sexual behavior comparable to that carried today by words such as ‘gay’ or ‘queer.’”39
The distinguished Japanese art historian Tsuji Nobuo (b. 1932) was the first scholar to recognize a broad range of arts and artists whose works seem to have been inspired by a sense of heterodoxy and playfulness implicit in the word kabuku. He traced this aesthetic from the dawn of Japanese history to the present day, and noted that it reached its apogee during the Edo period in the work of artists he has famously described as eccentrics.40
Influenced by Tsuji’s writings, recently another older expression for this bold aesthetic, basara, has been revived by the neo-Nihonga (modern Japanese painting) artist Tenmyouya Hisashi (b. 1966). He claims to have made this aesthetic the basis of his art because it expresses the current climate of social upheaval in Japan. Tenmyouya organized an exhibition titled Basara for the Spiral Garden Gallery in Tokyo in 2010. In addition to showcasing his own work, the exhibition featured pre-modern Japanese art that inspired him. In the catalogue, he described basara as:
the family of beauty that stands on the opposite end of the spectrum from wabi sabi and zen…. The term basara originally referred to social trends that were popular during the Nanbokucho Period (1336 to 1392), and people with an aesthetic awareness that wore ornate and innovative wardrobes and favored luxurious lifestyles. The term comes from the name of the 12 Heavenly Generals [Buddhist guardians] and originally means “diamond” in Sanskrit. Just as diamonds are hard and can break anything, the term was taken to mean people that rebel against authority in an attempt to destroy existing concepts and order. At the same time, they were persons with a superior aesthetic sense that favored chic and flamboyant lifestyles in addition to elegant attire.... BASARA art has continually flowed through the channels of Japanese street culture—from the furyu of the Heian period … being delivered to modern times.41
Plate 1-36 Elegant Amusements at a Mansion, second half 17th century. Pair of six-panel screens, ink, colors, and gold leaf on paper, each screen 106.7 x 260.35 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 32-83/14,15. Photo: Tiffany Matson. This imaginary view of a mansion portrays the wide variety of kabuku spirit leisure activities, some refined and others boisterous, enjoyed by affluent warriors and merchants in the privacy of their walled-off residences or in the houses of entertainment and assignation that they frequented.
Plate 1-37 Mino ware, Oribe-type set of five serving dishes with persimmon design, 1600–1620s. Stoneware with underglaze iron oxide design and copper green glaze, each 9.8 x 5.7 x 6.4 cm. Collection of John C. Weber, New York. Photo: John Bigelow Taylor. Tea ceremony aesthetics also succumbed to the influence of the new kabuku aesthetic, as seen here in newly popular Oribe wares, whose style is characterized by the application of bright green, spontaneous looking glazes and quirky, playful asymmetrical designs.
Plate 1-38 Suit of Armor (marudō tōsei gusoku type), made for daimyō Abe Masayoshi (1700–1769). Suit ca. 1730–1740; helmet bowl by Neo-Masanobu, early 18th century. Lacquer, silver, gold, whale baleen, silver gilded washi (paper), silk, rasha (textile), bear fur, leather, iron, copper alloy, gilt copper, silks, shakudō (alloy of copper and gold patinated to a rich black), wood, crystal, doe skin, gilded metal, ink stone. Crow Collection of Asian Art, 2013.1. The best craftsmen of the day created this armor for a samurai of refined taste, who wore it during formal processions. It typifies the outlandish warrior (kabuku or basara) taste. Intricate floral scroll patterns and family crest designs cover the surface. A red lacquered wood dragon perches between gilded wood hoe-shaped decorations atop the helmet (kabuto). The face mask projects a fierce expression, while in contrast, the breast plate features delicate maple leaves. The forearm sleeves hide hinged compartments for medicines and writing implements.
Plate 1-39 Tenmyouya Hisashi (b. 1966), Archery, 2008. Acrylic on wood, 90 x 70 cm. Photo © Tenmyouya Hisashi, courtesy of Mizuma Art Gallery. In this painting, Tenmyouya has created a personification of the basara aesthetic by combining the fierce stance of the warrior with the tattooed body of a gangster, juxtaposed with a vibrantly-colored bird and snake.
Plate 1-40 Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800), New Year’s Sun, late 18th century. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 101 x 39.7 cm. Gift from the Clark Center for Japanese Arts & Culture to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2013.29.9. Jakuchū’s art, the epitome of eccentricity, is exemplified in this painting by the artist’s bold, dramatic brushwork, asymmetrical composition, and truncated view of his subject.
Plate 1-41 Kano Kazunobu (1815–1863), Five Rakan Saving Sinners from Hell, 1862–1863, scroll number 23 from a set of One Hundred Scrolls of the Five Hundred Rakan, Zōjōji, Tokyo. Hanging scroll, ink, gold, and colors on silk, 172.3 x 85.3 cm. This graphic, gruesome scene of sinners trapped in an ice-filled pool is one Tenmyouya included in his basara exhibition. It exemplifies the penchant for violence during the mid-19th century.
MA
AN INTERVAL IN TIME AND SPACE
The term ma has become a popular buzzword for defining a whole cluster of Japanese aesthetics in the post-war period among Japanese architects and cultural critics. Literally translated as “an interval in time and/or space,” ma describes the partiality in Japanese design for empty spaces, vagueness, abstraction, asymmetrical balance, and irregularity.
The earliest reference to ma in Japanese occurs in the eighth century Manyōshū anthology. There, poets used it to express the misty spaces between mountains and as a marker of the passage of time. By the eleventh century, the word defined
