Mountain Wizards, City Scholars, and the Art of Having Beliefs

When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane’s
Ethnography of the Other World
by Wilburn Hansen
University of Hawaii Press, 2008

Religious reformation and nation-building are frequent bedfellows. Culturally speaking, few things are more useful to a rising nation than the resurrection of some lost age of traditional spiritual purity, whether it ever existed or not. On the eve of the Meiji Restoration, Hirata Atsutane came to prominence as a proponent of Japanese cultural uniqueness and superiority, based on the singular spirituality of the island nation as the land of the Kami. He wanted to distinguish the sources of Japan’s traditional spiritual purity from invasive foreign (mainly Buddhist) contamination, with the goal of reviving the true religion of ancient times. But where was he to find the true religion of ancient times in anything like a living form?

Atsutane believed deeply, and complexly, in ancient mountain spirits and forest wizards who wielded the power of the Kami. So when word came that a human disciple of these magical beings was actually living in his neighborhood, he pulled every string he knew to capture the tengu’s disciple, a slum lad named Torakichi, and add him to his household as a new didactic weapon in the seminars and soirees where he fought his intellectual war for religious reform.

Wilburn Hansen takes up this story in When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane’s Ethnography of the Other World. The core question of When Tengu Talk is how a brilliant scholar like Atsutane could believe Torakichi was not a fraud, and how a street con like Torakichi could successfully convince Atsutane and quite a few others that he was a disciple in the kingdom of the Gods. Hansen treats this mystery with the seriousness it deserves. Neither Atsutane nor Torakichi was naïve. The elder needed the younger as a witness from the Other World but understood that the younger man needed leading questions to cue him what to say. Torakichi’s goal was more closely related to escaping from beggary but his methods, by a fantastic stroke of luck, were useful to one of the leading thinkers in Japan.

Atsutane, though on a different level, was no stranger to the kind of intellectual jugglery Torakichi practiced and he did not despise it. He could not resurrect a “pure” Japanese religion without falling back on the concepts that were in play around him. Atsutane was compromised by the Buddhist social religion of his day even as he fought against it. Torakichi was compromised by poverty. Both responded with a degree of cunning. In a way, Atsutane and Torakichi were simultaneously mentor and disciple to each other.

When Tengu Talk is of interest for students of Japanese religion and the emergence of Japanese modernity. It is also a fine anthropological case study and a fascinating pair of psychological portraits. I would add that anyone who loves irony for its own sake could hardly help being charmed. To the irony of the sage who inadvertently hosts a con man, we must add the larger irony that Shinto revivalism in the Meiji Restoration soon required the suppression of local mountain cults and belief in rural demons, in the name of state religion (described by Gerald Figal in Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan). Religious revivalism often has unintended consequences like that. Best of all is the happy detail that Atsutane and Torakichi went on to other things, Atsutane one of the great scholars of his age, Torakichi either a Buddhist monk or the operator of a public bath called the “Tengu Hot Springs.” I prefer to believe the latter.

Gary Mawyer

Taisho Chic

My big read of the last month has been a Honolulu Academy of Arts book called Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia and Deco, by Kendall H. Brown and Sharon A. Minichiello, which I carefully rationed out to a minimum of four but not more than six pages at a time. I finished it last night and look forward to reading it again in a few months. I can only call this a “thundering good read” rich with the sweet pain of having to put it down repeatedly even though you know you must. I am no fan of art criticism; art criticism often appears to be practiced as a vice. But the text of Taisho Chic was written in a gloriously conversational mode by someone with the eyes of an axe, and with no hawk to grind—text as sweet and subtle as the art on the facing page. Taisho is technically the imperial reign that followed the Meiji, but Taisho Chic is here defined to include the 1930s, up to the wartime austerity measures and reinforcement of nationalistic retro-traditionalism, what Miriam Silverberg called “the end of modernity.” This art is closely related to ukiyo-e bijin ga, featuring style and mood above all else, in particular through portrayals of beautiful women. It all puts the reader or viewer in mind of Lafcadio Hearn’s remark that of all the traditional fine arts of Japan, the women themselves were the highest achievement.

Gary Mawyer

In Godzilla’s Footsteps

I am enjoying In Godzilla’s Footsteps, Tsutsui & Ito eds., 2006, despite about half the essays being a bit academic. In essay #6, “Mothra’s Giant Egg: Consuming the South Pacific in 1960s Japan,” author Yoshikuni Igarashi quotes the once-famous Nagayama Yasuo’s “Kaijo no michi” (“Passage on the Sea”). In 1992, he was asking, “Why do monsters always come from the South Pacific in Toho monster films?”

Igarashi moves on to a more focused 2006-type question: “Why do monsters always come from the South Pacific in 1960s Toho monster films?” In particular he is interested in Mothra and commercialization, versus the Gozilla/war/nuclear-testing theme that belonged originally to the 1950s.

In this context he discusses the return of tropical fruit to Japanese markets, the arrival of Barbie about the same time as the tiny women in Mothra and Mothra versus Godzilla, and the inception of Japanese-Hawaiian tourism and its related themes.

I happened to be reading all this as a spin-off from some  allusions in the Mechademia issues. For one thing, I realized that I have never actually seen the original Godzilla—and learned that there was no way I could have, because it was not screened in the U.S. until 2002, and then only in a limited number of art houses. It was released on DVD the same year, in a two-pack along with a remastered re-release of the American (Raymond Burr) edition, also for the first time. I have a copy en route to me, and I am really looking forward to seeing the original, which apparently contains a lot of material edited out in the U.S. release.

In Godzilla’s Footsteps included two other essays I thought were piquant: “Gojira as Japan’s First Postwar Media Event,” by Barak Kushner, which portrays this movie as Japan’s first return to the international stage (several years before the Tokyo Olympics)—and a very appropriate return, if somewhat unexpected in this form; and Eric C. Rath’s “Godzilla Meets Super Kyogen, or How a Dinosaur Saved the World,” which traces Gojira’s ancestry to guys in monster suits (such as a fire-breathing giant toad) in kyogen and kabuki.

There is other neat stuff in In Godzilla’s Footsteps, but this appears to be the cream of the crop.

Gary Mawyer

Mechademia

Image from STEAMBOY

I have now finished Mechademia, and there are two good essays in it. One is a brief and somewhat fragmentary commentary by Ueno Toshiya (one of only two Japanese academics represented in the journal) that questions whether the linear “storyboard” or series of successive images (in film or animation) does or does not match the way people view their surroundings when they are not watching a film. That’s a neat question. Obviously it doesn’t have a single answer. The other good essay is actually a great essay, “The Multiplanar Image,” by someone from McGill named Thomas Lamarre, who takes the backdrop technique used in Steamboy as his starting point and then moves on to a host of issues: Disney, the invention of the multiplanar camera, Miyazaki, Murakami and the “Superflat” esthetic, and ultimately the history of the use of perspective in visual art and the link between Murakami and the ukiyoe “floating world” school of Edo art. There’s actually more than that; it is a tour de force essay with the best description of “superflat” I have ever read—much better than Murakami’s own explanation and also key to seeing in a flash that much of traditional Japanese painting and art was superflat by esthetic choice.

Here is Lamarre’s definition of superflat:

First we need to ask how something apparently uniplanar (flat) becomes superplanar (superflat). Superflat implies that something is not simply flat but very, very flat—complexly flat. To make something look superflat, you have to begin with layers that introduce the possibility of depth and then crush it. … You achieve superflatness only by having complex layers and making them all appear equally on the surface, and equally important visually. In other words, backgrounds or intermediate layers don’t fade away, allowing themselves to be overlooked. On the contrary, they push to the fore. Oddly enough, very flat backgrounds—say, a background of a single color or one composed of speed lines—often appear as important as the figure that they highlight. Depth comes right to the surface even as it serves to direct attention to the character. Foreground and background become equally striking.

This is the basic idea of superflat: no element within the image is more important than any other element. The result is a visual field without any hierarchy among elements. You could also call this a distributive visual field, since elements are distributed rather than hierarchized. … When everything comes equally to the surface, you still make connections, you will still orientate yourself, but those connections and orientations will not be guided by depth cues… you are orienting yourself in a densely packed distributive field—a sort of information field. Rather than simple flatness, you have complex superflatness.

It’s funny in a way that Murakami has always promoted Superflat as an art revolution when, in addition to some traditional art, ordinary maps are superflat by definition.

Gary Mawyer