Japanese pattern is drawn from nature. The paddy fields assume their shape because mountains are observed and valleys followed, because this is the country where the house was once made to fit into the curve of the landscape and where the farmer used to cut a hole in the roof rather than cut down the tree.
The natural was once seen as the beautiful, and even today, lip service is given to this thought. However, both then and now, the merely natural was never beautiful enough. That nature is grand only when it is natural—Byron’s thought—would never have occurred to a Japanese. No, this ideal is closer to the ordered landscape of Byron’s grandfather: forests become parks, trees are espaliered, flowers are arranged. One does not go against nature, but one does take advantage of it: we smooth, we embellish. Nature is only the potential—man gives it its shape and its meaning.
Since it is the natural forms that are traditionally most admired—the single rock, the spray of bamboo—it is these that are seen more frequently in Japanese art, delivered from the chaotic context of nature and given meaning through their isolation. There are canons, but they derive from nature. Purple and red do not clash as they might in the West because, since they occur often enough in nature, no law of color can suggest that their proximity is unsatisfactory.
A single branch set at one side of the niche-like tokonoma and balanced by nothing is not ill composed because there is a rule that insists that formal balance is not necessarily good. The Japanese garden is not the French: symmetry is something imposed upon nature, not drawn from it; asymmetry is a fine compromise between a complete regularity and an utter chaos.
To think of Japan is to think of form, because these patterns are repeated often and faithfully. Wherever the eye rests they occur. They give the look of a land its consistency, as though a set of rules has been rigorously followed. It is these patterns, these shapes, these forms, these designs endlessly occurring, that mark the country. Chaos is vanquished; pattern prevails. They make the view more consistent than would otherwise be possible. They create what often identifies art: style.
A pattern exists for everything: for temples, kimono, carpenters’ saws, and the new is often in the shape of the old. There is only one way to build a shrine, to sew an obi. This traditional rigidity is in the outline, the profile, and is based upon a geometry of stress and repose. In the decoration is individual variation: endless, myriad, protean invention. The shape of a temple bell remains, but the patterned surface varies. Dressed stone, planed wood, decorated cloth or pottery, now the gleaming facets of glass, chrome, plastic—the surface is made visible by its own texture. The profile, austere and timeless, is metamorphosed into the unique, the individual.
Japanese design surprises, both in its extent and in its rightness. It is found in the castle and in the kitchen, and the combination of a nearly unvarying outline and a completely varied surface—a decoration that is all form—creates the kind of sign that is weakly called “good.”
Not, however, until recently by the Japanese themselves. Traditional design was never noticed. We, the curious foreigners, are in a better position. On the other hand, if we curious foreigners had never seen and did not know the use of some of our own more lovely objects—the light bulb, the spoon, the toilet bowl—we would possibly find them beautiful. But habit blinds and practical knowledge dims. Japan is still distant enough from us that essence is perceived. Disassociated from function, the object becomes formal rather than practical; it becomes an entity—its visual character is all there is.
Design is a matter of economics, and an unchanging economy creates an unchanging design. Usually this design is the conjunction of the nature of the material and the least possible effort. Japanese design is inseparable from art in that it rarely takes the least effort, but rather, the most. Consequently, Japanese craftsmen are paid almost as much as artists would be.
In pre-modern Japan the economy not only produced the audience for craft, it also maintained it, as well as the standards of craftsmanship itself. So long as the economy remained undisturbed there could be no question of fashion. For two and a half centuries Japan was closed, and even before that there was (except, of course, for the massive cultural importations from China and Korea) little of that great fashion maker, Western influence.
From the age of Shakespeare to the time of Tennyson, through all the French Louises and all the British Georges, Japan isolated itself. Until Meiji, the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japan had no arches, cornerstones, fireplaces, armchairs, or farthingales.
Thus Japan had never had to contend with the old fashioned. It had never seen an entire style wane and then wax again. Since old things continued to be used, except for the minor surface variations (a new way for courtesans to do their hair, a fashionable striped kimono material for Kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers, a popular shade of cinnamon brown we might compare to puce) there was little concept of the structurally old. There were no antique stores, only secondhand stores and pawnshops. Precious old objects existed but always in the context of the present.
These old things showed the same “perfect” shape. They accommodated themselves both to their desired use and also to the natural laws of stress and response. Design followed the Confucian standard in all things: uniformity and authority. It followed that Japan is thus the home of the module unit, the first of the prefab lands. At the same time, however, though the profile is standard, individuality is allowed, even insisted upon in the surface itself. One might say of Japanese design what Aldous Huxley said of the Mayan: “It is florid but invariably austere, a more chaste luxuriance was never imagined.”
Although the distinction between outline profile and surface decoration is as artificial and as arbitrary as that between form and content, it is possible to say Japanese design not only permits but insists upon archetypal patterns and that all such patterns show a like division, a like propensity.
This natural affinity everywhere remains. Lewis Mumford has observed that the airplane is called beautiful because it looks like a seagull. In Japan, this affinity is more acknowledged, more displayed, than elsewhere. Thus, one of the reasons for the beauty of Japanese design—its rightness, its fitness—and one of the reasons for the proliferation of Japanese forms, their economy, their enormous presence, is that the Japanese man and woman, artists or not, are among the last to remember the earliest lesson that nature teaches all makers.
—1962
Japanese Rhythms
Cultures have their own rhythms: how they divide the day and the nights, when to go fast and when to go slow. Some of the differences are familiar. A well-known temporal gulf exists between the global north and south. The latter has, for example, its famous siesta—night again in the middle of the day. The northern visitor is always surprised at this diurnal difference and is often irritated as well.
Another familiar gulf exists between the East and the West, the Orient and the Occident. We speak of the slower pace, calling it leisurely if we like it, indolent if we don’t. These temporal differences are well known. Not so familiar, however, are those cultures that blend the differences and bridge the chasms. Among these, the most spectacular is Japan. Here the rhythms of the West have been rigorously applied and yet, under these, the pulse of old Asia is still felt.
Seen from the outside, the way that the Japanese structure time seems much closer to New York than, say, Kandy or Mandalay. Indeed, most of the Western temporal virtues—efficiency, promptness, get-up-and-go—are being flung in our faces by this seemingly industrious nation.
Yet, viewed from the inside, the older, more purely Asian rhythms persist. There is the new way of arranging the day, and then there is the old. And these two, as with so much else in Japan, coexist—strata in time.
Early to bed, early to rise has been the recipe for business success in the Western world,
