example, the traditional landscape gardener moved this rock over a couple of feet, shifted that bamboo grove back a yard or two, and swiped the view of the mountain in the process. The result was the natural garden, a product of change. Ikebana, classical flower arrangement, changes venue and placement, and only then calls itself “living flowers” though they are of course no longer quite that, being cut.
The difference that I thought I had noticed in Japan’s attitude toward nature was then but one of degree. When the daimyo built himself a landscape garden his need was aesthetic because such labor-intensive work as this would otherwise not have been so ostentatiously indicative of his social standing. When it is money itself, rather than aesthetics and art appreciation, that satisfies the demands of social standing, however, then forests are cut down for golf courses and ancestral tombs are trashed for hotels. But the difference is only in degree—now, famously, money must make more money. The demand is no longer aesthetic—it is economic. Yet the mechanism is the same. Everything changes. Though there may be amber-like blocks of permanence within this moving magma they remain only because they are for the time being useful. Like now, for example.
The irresistible force has met what has seemed an immovable object. We have in Japan the System, the way things are done, the bloated bureaucracy, the Bank of Japan, the Ministry of Finance, those organizations concerned only with their own propagation. Yet they are now structurally irrelevant. As the pressure for change grows, they will slowly give way. They have already—lifetime employment, the effortless escalator to the top, the golden parachute jump into cushy retirement—all of this is now of the past. And more, much more, will change.
What is important, and what is eventually defining, I decided, is this genius for the harnessing of change. Having decided this I looked at my new, small, metaphor of the country—it lies here in my palm, a whirling gyroscope.
This dynamo might become a model elsewhere, I thought. Not as a slogan (“Japan as Number One” had misled practically everyone)—but as a paradigm. As a system of thought that welcomes and celebrates that very change that so transforms us and our world, that accepts death and taxes as well. If there is no mortality there is no life, let alone aesthetics.
And over the hum of my gyroscope I heard the words of the priest Kenko who now nearly seven hundred years ago wrote: “What if man lingered on . . . how things would then fail to move us. The finest thing in life is its uncertainty.”
—1994
The Nourishing Void
In Tokyo for the first time, Roland Barthes looked toward the empty Imperial plaza, the invisible palace, and the woodlands beyond, and wrote in The Empire of Signs that while Tokyo does possess a center, this center is empty.
This was stated with an air of surprise. Where he came from, centers were never empty. But he could see why Tokyo’s was, and he could understand its consequent function. This empty center was an evaporated nation, subsisting here not in order to radiate power, but to give to the entire urban movement the support of its central emptiness.
The idea of emptiness supporting something is not commonly encountered in the West. But it has long been familiar in Asia. Once remarked upon, it is seen everywhere—both in old scroll paintings and in the modern advertisement. What is all that empty space doing there? Why isn’t it filled in?
It is not filled in because it is already filled in with itself. It is a structural support. The emptiness of the scroll defines the tiny person crossing the miniscule bridge. In the advertisement it defines that important small print running across the bottom of the page. In both cases, emptiness plays a positive role. It has its own weight, its own specific gravity, its own presence.
To see the full in the empty can be defined, I think, as a creative act. From nothing, something is created. And Japan has traditionally been elevated by the invention of the fullness that invests the empty. Examples spin out from this central idea. Lots of mud and no money? Then create, like the Chinese and the Koreans, superb pottery. Lots of room and no furniture? Then make an aesthetic of space itself and invent the concept of ma to account for it. Lots of time for unemployed samurai? Then elevate manners into a ritual and create a space where temporal routine is so heightened that it becomes transparent—invent the tea ceremony where guests with time on their hands sit and savor the emptiness.
From the tea ceremony came an entire celebration of the empty as reflected in the carefully shabby, the ostentatiously poor, the expensively maigre. Wabi, sabi—things made of very little, of a striking simplicity: the cracked pot holding the field flower.
Such invention, no matter its resultant chic, is created from want. From nothing something is created because it is necessary. The Japanese woodworker creates in his otherwise empty box an artful disclosing of the very grain of his materials. The Japanese gardener, with only stones and trees at hand, hones out of this emptiness something ideal, which he necessarily calls nature but which is nonetheless his aesthetic.
Emptiness can be a virtue in other ways as well. What else is the Zen koan but a riddle constructed to be empty? It is up to you to fill it. As Barthes himself notes: Zen wages a war against the prevarication of meaning.
It does so because meaning fixes fully and for all time just one single meaning. All those overtones that so resounded before this naming are now still. Meaning closes. Emptiness, on the other hand, leaves open, all options still hanging. Meaning, wanting to fill this fruitful emptiness, prevaricates because it opts for the single rather than for the burgeoning multiple.
Emptiness can also be celebrated. Look at the films of Ozu. His world is created of very little: the frames of domestic architecture; a single camera position, low; one form of punctuation only, the straight cut; no plot, simply layered scenes of single, haiku-like cause and effect. Often his scenes are empty. People have not yet entered, or have already left. The camera gazes, in a sleeping, half-dark room, at a common vase holding nothing. And we fill this vessel with the emotions we have been holding, emotions generated by the film itself. We fill the empty scene with meanings just as we fill the empty koan with insight.
Meanings flow and disappear as the film fades, as the guests bow at the end of the tea ceremony and go home. Here is the temporal equivalent of a nutritious emptiness—an immortal perishability, an eternal transience. Examples abound: the carefully mended tea bowl, the cherished tarnish of the silver caddy, the haiku that freezes forever a single moment. These are the things created from the stuff of time itself.
Even now, much is made of the cherry blossom—not in full bloom but when the petals begin to flutter down. The transient moment thus symbolized is seized upon and visible perishability is openly prized. Thus transience is traditionally celebrated, just as emptiness is traditionally commemorated. Finding nourishment in the void is truly creative, but you have to have the void before you can find the nourishment. And what if this fruitful void fills up?
Something like this is occurring in modern Japan. As I write, emptiness is draining away. A civilization traditionally predicated upon the virtues of being empty is becoming full. The ideals of poverty have been superseded by the ideals of wealth. Since the end of World War II, this traditionally poverty-stricken country has become progressively more wealthy—that is, the government, not the people themselves. But the people have been easy to lead away from the void of poverty when shown the mountain of things for them to buy.
The empty room is no longer filled with the riches of emptiness. Instead, it now contains the television set, the tape/DVD player, the cassette deck, the deep-freeze, the home computer, the microwave, the answering machine, and much, much more.
There is a glut of time, too—a democratic distribution for everyone. Stretches of time are no longer creative voids to be
