Japan’s Okina-mai: The old man’s dance

THERE MUST BE SOMETHING IN THE WATER in Nara. Dancing isn’t usually an old man’s pastime, unless it’s a sedate fox trot at a senior citizen’s home or on board a cruise ship. But the performance of the Okina-mai—literally, the Old Man’s Dance—is almost as old as the hills in that city and is still performed today. It dates from the Nara period in the early 8th century.

As the name of the era suggests, Nara was where the action was in Japan in those days. Could the period have been so vibrant that even the old guys were inspired to trip the light fantastic?

It might have been, but it would be difficult to tell from watching the Okina-mai itself. The dance is thought to be the origin of Noh, the performance of which is rather stately and formalized. Now an important intangible folk and cultural treasure of the nation, the Okina-mai is performed annually every fall at the Narazuhiko Shinto shrine.

The story goes that the song-and-dance was first presented to cheer up the convalescing Kasuga’o, the son of the Imperial prince Shiki-no-miko, who himself was either the seventh or the third son of the Tenji tenno (emperor), depending on whose story you believe.

As you can see from the photo, the dancers wear masks, but that development didn’t occur until about 500 years later on during the Muromachi period. The Japanese have never been shy about playing around with their traditions–even ones that are 500 years old.

Today the Okina-mai is performed outdoors at night on the shrine grounds, with the site illuminated by small bonfires. That might well be another relatively recent development; if the story of the origin is true, it doesn’t seem likely that a convalescent would have been carried outdoors to watch an 8th century musical in the chilly autumn weather.

Then again, Okayama Zen’ichiro of Tenri University published an article in 2004 titled “On (the) Okina-mai Dance of Narazuhiko Jinja Shrine and Dongdong Koryo”. Unfortunately, the text of the article is not on line, but the latter seems to have been a Korean court dance. Is Prof. Okayama suggesting there are similarities? It might not be out of the question—there was a significant migration from the Korean Peninsula to the Nara area in the 8th century.

Be that as it may, you’ll find a brief explanation of the masks used in the dance with a photo here. (“Gigaku” in the text refers to an ancient mask show that was brought to Japan from China by a Korean musician, and let that be a lesson to you about East Asia!) And here’s a YouTube video showing the Okina-mai performed at a different location. (Note: It’s nine minutes long and the narration is in Japanese.)

Kasuga’o eventually recovered, but his brother was the one who went on to make a name for himself—he became the Konin tenno. And their father Prince Shiki made another contribution to Japanese history by composing six of the poems collected in the Manyoshu, the oldest existing anthology of Japanese poetry. (The most recent datable poem was written in 759.)

Last year’s performance of the Okina-mai attracted about 600 people. That’s a pretty good turnout to watch a 1,300-year-old-dance for old men!

Cultural commissars

THE JAPANESE SHOULD THANK their lucky stars they’ve kept their festival traditions alive over the centuries—and that no megalomaniac dictators decided to eliminate them in the name of progress. Otherwise, like the Chinese, they might be regretting what they’ve lost, as this article in the Asia Times points out.

Here’s what happened:

China’s late leader Mao Zedong had tried to erase many traditional Chinese celebrations by ordering the destruction of religious sites and outlawing folk customs. Everything “old” - from marriages to funerals, from folk medicine to folk music - was targeted.
But as communist ideology gradually lost its influence in contemporary society, Chinese leaders after Mao have tried to fill the void with nationalistic appeals for people to take pride in the country’s 5,000-year-old history and culture.

It’s not so easy to recreate the connection once the ties to the past have been severed, however. Many Chinese find the efforts to reclaim those festivals contrived and hollow:

“Any resemblance to the elaborate imperial sacrifices to heaven and Earth of the past was lost in these caricature performances of poorly trained traveling troupes from the provinces,” columnist Zhang Min wrote of his experiences at the capital’s Temple of Earth in the Beijing News. The exquisite works of artisans that once adorned Beijing temple fair stalls - Peking Opera masks, figurines made of painted dough and modeled on legendary figures, intricate kites and embroidered clothes - have now been replaced with “ubiquitous and cheap mass-produced trinkets”, Zhang complained.

The Chinese also faced an unexpected development. Other countries are claiming Chinese festivals and customs as their own for UNESCO registration:

The country saw one of its most treasured events, the Dragon Boat Festival celebrated in June, nominated and later successfully listed as an intangible part of the cultural heritage of neighboring South Korea. The listing angered Chinese scholars and officials who accused South Korea of brazenly encroaching on China’s cultural heritage.
Since the 2005 UNESCO listing of the Dragon Boat festival, South Korea has applied to have its ritualized Confucius memorial ceremony listed as another unique cultural heritage and is reported ready with an application for the listing of “Chinese traditional medicine” as “Korean traditional medicine”.

This touched off a different kind of culture war. Countries can get just as huffy about their rituals and ceremonies as they can about their territory:

“It is not enough to talk just about territorial integrity - China needs to safeguard its cultural sovereignty too,” argues literary scholar Bai Gengsheng. “Unlike material culture which is traceable, intangible cultural heritage can be very contentious and we must design strategies to preserve China’s heritage from being lost to other countries.”

This debate is fascinating because it highlights both the historical movement of culture in the region at large and some of the tensions that currently exist within it. Regardless of UNESCO bureaucratic fiats, no one can deny that the Chinese are the progenitors of much of East Asian culture that later became localized in other areas. The Japanese, to cite one of many examples, freely acknowledge the Chinese (and Korean) origins for gagaku, or Imperial Court music.

Chinese Overreaction?

But even some Chinese realize that when cultural traditions are replanted elsewhere, they adapt to the new soil and become transformed in the process. As this China Daily article points out:

Some Koreans working in China believe that the Chinese who are upset may be overreacting. A teacher surnamed Kim pointed out that the festival has been celebrated in Korea for more than 1,000 years, since it was introduced from China. It has been integrated with Korean culture over the centuries, so that celebrations now bear little resemblance to China’s.

The same article suggests that the Chinese who object may misunderstand the UNESCO process:

For all the pride the Chinese take in such traditions, however, they do not necessarily hold any proprietary rights over them.
“Unlike natural heritage sites, which are fixed and unique, the ‘masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity’ can be shared,” said Wu. “If UNESCO approves something as an intangible cultural property of one country, other countries may still apply. For example, mukamu is a typical music of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwest China, but still UNESCO has approved Iraq mukamu and Azerbaijan mukamu as those nations’ intangible cultural properties.”

Choseon Chicanery

Be that as it may, the Koreans are not entirely blameless in this affair, as this brief article points out:

The Chinese domain name for the (festival) website (duanwujie.cn), however, was first registered by a South Korean company in October last year when the two countries had already competed against each other fiercely in a struggle that aimed to include the Dragon Boat Festival as a world cultural heritage of their own country.

It cost the Chinese $30,000 to buy back the domain name.

The Koreans have been known to do this before. They were the first to register the rights for the Japanese name of the alcoholic beverage shochu in the United States, for example, and used it to sell their own version of the drink, which they call soju. The Japanese had to buy those rights back, too.

Everyone recognizes that some cultural practices which originated elsewhere have long been a part of Korean life and have taken on a Korean identity. It’s another matter, however, to register the Chinese and Japanese names with the intent of scamming some cash. And everyone also recognizes that it’s pointless to expect people on the Korean Peninsula to chastise the grifters who scavenge off of the Chinese or Japanese while poking a finger into their eyes. They’re likely to be applauded instead.

The Source of the Problem

But some questions inevitably arise after reading these accounts: Why is anyone bothering to register their cultural properties, tangible or intangible, with UNESCO? Why should anyone think any organization has the standing to render judgments on a country’s cultural heritage?

And who is this all for, anyway? Neither the Chinese nor the Koreans need UNESCO’s “approval” for cultural validation, particularly for a festival that dates back a millennium in Korea and 2,500 years in China. The Koreans haven’t needed it to keep their festival alive, and the Chinese still have their cultural memory despite the social devastation Mao wrought.

A look at the UNESCO website for the project provides some hints.

Other than country-specific lists with brief explanations, the site is short on reports of what it has achieved with actual, on-the-ground projects. Yet it is packed with organizational trivia, rules of procedure, and vapid platitudes. Just the sort of thing to keep people busy without doing any real work. Here are some statements from their convention, which presents the reasons and objectives for their activities:

Considering the importance of the intangible cultural heritage as a mainspring of cultural diversity and a guarantee of sustainable development…

When did intangible cultural heritage become a guarantee of sustainable development? It’s a toss-up which is worse: cutting and pasting political banalities to create a pleasant-sounding but meaningless mush of linguistic oatmeal, or inserting that phrase as self-justification into their convention as if it were an absolute scriptural truth.

An intangible cultural heritage guarantees nothing, least of all sustainable development.

And it’s no surprise that UNESCO should be so concerned about protecting—or enforcing—yet another mushy platitude: cultural diversity. It’s as if UNESCO were encouraging people to have sex. Cultural diversity is what happens when people are left to their own devices to interact naturally. Especially when the NGOs aren’t looking.

Recognizing that the processes of globalization and social transformation, alongside the conditions they create for renewed dialogue among communities, also give rise, as does the phenomenon of intolerance, to grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction of the intangible cultural heritage, in particular owing to a lack of resources for safeguarding such heritage…

We have a winner in the contest for non-native English speakers to see who can write the longest sentence with as many clichés as possible.

The proposition that globalization threatens diversity is untenable. Globalization enhances cultural diversity, and examples abound. To cite one: trends in popular music over the last century on every continent except Antarctica.

“Deterioration, disappearance, and destruction” result from isolation and the rejection of outside influences. Nature loves a wide gene pool. So does culture.

Considering the invaluable role of the intangible cultural heritage as a factor in bringing human beings closer together and ensuring exchange and understanding among them…

If this is referring to specific local areas, they’ve got it backwards. A cultural heritage results from the pre-existing exchange and common understanding between people. And while multinational cultural exchange sometimes does result in bringing people together, it doesn’t ensure it. Exhibit A: the Dragon Festival registration story.

UNESCO also attempts to define what they’re talking about. Here’s one definition:

(d) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe;

Perhaps the Chinese should register feng shui before the Koreans beat them to it!

Give UNESCO credit for trying to cover every conceivable base, however:

Close to half of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world are doomed or likely to disappear in the foreseeable future. The disappearance of any language is an irreparable loss for the heritage of all humankind.

The disappearance of any language is no more an irreparable loss for our heritage than was that of the pterodactyl. It just means that the language no longer has a practical use. If there were any benefits to be gained from its use, a language wouldn’t have to be protected.

After looking over this website, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the enterprise seems less about recognizing and preserving culture than it is about providing the transnational NGO jet set with a marvelous opportunity for self-congratulation and a chance to dress up and meet people from around the world on someone else’s tab.

If the plug were pulled on UNESCO tomorrow, Koreans would still celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival, Nigerians would still play juju music, the Balinese would still dance, and the Japanese living cultural treasures would still make ceramics and perform kabuki—not to mention holding more traditional festivals than the public sector can count.

Bam Goes Bamian

Yet when a cultural heritage really was threatened, UNESCO turned out to have been all bumper sticker and no horsepower. When the Taliban used the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamian for bazooka practice, as the third photo shows, the largest Buddhist statues in the world–a UNESCO World Heritage site–were turned into rubble.

Here’s what former Afghanistan leader Mullah Mohammad Omar allegedly said to a Pakistani reporter:

“I did not want to destroy the Bamian Buddha. In fact, some foreigners came to me and said they would like to conduct the repair work of the Bamian Buddha that had been slightly damaged due to rains. This shocked me. I thought, these callous people have no regard for thousands of living human beings — the Afghans who are dying of hunger, but they are so concerned about non-living objects like the Buddha. This was extremely deplorable. That is why I ordered its destruction. Had they come for humanitarian work, I would have never ordered the Buddhas’ destruction.”

The Mullah is obviously a lunatic, but there is a point lurking in that nonsense. If multinational organizations think it’s important to save threatened cultural heritages, a good place to start would be to help the culture save itself. Their money would be a lot better spent ensuring that people had safe drinking water than by creating an artificial cocoon for a language or dance form that long ago lost its meaning for living people.

But laying water pipe has very little cachet. At a catered multinational cocktail party, it’s a lot more impressive to be able to boast that one helped save indigenous weaving and dying techniques, and doesn’t that blanket look lovely on the wall of the apartment?

The problem here is not the end, but the means. The ostensible aims of this scheme may be admirable, and I’d elbow my way to the front of the line to see some of the registered activities, but UNESCO is just as likely to get in the way of people devising their own cultural preferences instead of helping them. Like the pterodactyl, cultural practices become extinct for a reason.

The best solution lies where it always has—at the local level. Even the Marxist government of Cuba has kept its local musical culture alive while allowing it to evolve by incorporating outside influences. Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs has a robust program for preserving and utilizing cultural properties, as you can see here. Even Japanese villagers need little encouragement to continue holding festivals that are hundreds of years old and that only a handful of people see.

And they don’t touch off arguments about who has dibs on what is supposed to be the shared heritage of humanity.

Postscript: Here is the UNESCO page for registered Japanese cultural properties. The Japanese seem to be paying a lot of the bills for other countries, while noh, kabuki, and joruri don’t need UNESCO registration to survive. The Japanese government is also playing a leading role in restoring the Buddhas of Bamian.

The apprentice geisha

IF YOU’VE NEVER SEEN an apprentice geisha perform, this is your chance.

KNB-TV in Toyama City, Toyama Prefecture (which has a 70% chance of snow tomorrow) broadcast a 59-second report on a maiko, an apprentice geisha in Kyoto, returning to her former nursery school in the city of Kurobe to perform for the children.

If you have RealPlayer, you can access the clip here.

Following is a quick translation of the newscaster’s report:

“A Kyoto maiko originally from Kurobe visited her former nursery school on the 21st and performed a graceful dance for the children.

“The visitor to the Ishida Nursery School in Kurobe was the Kyoto maiko Miharu (17), whose original name was Yurina Jodo.

“Miharu attended the Ishida Nursery School, and on the 21st she performed the dances Kyo no Shiki (The Four Seasons of the Capital [Kyoto]) and Gion Ko’uta (Gion Song) for the students and local residents.

“Miharu wanted to become a maiko in her primary school days. After being graduated from junior high school, she trained in Kyoto and debuted as a maiko in October 2005.

“The children were thrilled to see an authentic maiko, and they were captivated by her charming and graceful dances.”

Partway through the broadcast, there is a shot of three girls saying “kawaii” simultaneously. That’s the word for cute.

This should play if you have RealPlayer. If there are a lot of problems, let me know and I’ll see if I can figure something out.

Otojiro Kawakami: A tribute

IT’S INEVITABLE that the members of each new generation will behave as if they believe the world began on the day they were born. While it’s just a stage that people pass through as they mature, it can hinder the development of a balanced perspective on the nature of continuity in human affairs. Perhaps the only remedy is historical study of a sort that allows students to realize that new ideas are as old as the hills. Every generation has people who have been there and done that, as the saying goes.

An excellent subject for this historical study would be the life of Otojiro Kawakami, who was a pioneer in more ways than one. Kawakami was born in the Tsumashoji district of Fukuoka City in 1864, just at the end of the Shogunate. In 1878, at the age of 14, he boarded a ship in the Port of Hakata, sailed to Osaka, and then walked to Tokyo (a distance of 550 kilometers, or 342 miles). He continued his education in the capital, and among his teachers was Yukichi Fukuzawa, the founder of Keio University and one of the most influential people in Japan’s modernization during the Meiji Era. (Fukuzawa’s portrait is on the 10,000 yen note, worth $US 90.00 at present.)

He soon became involved as an activist in the Freedom and Peoples’ Rights Movement, a loose association of former samurai and commoners dedicated to the introduction of Western democratic principles in government. Kawakami left Tokyo after the government began cracking down on the movement in the 1880s.

The progressive philosopher Chomin Nakae suggested that he consider performing on stage, and Kawakami took up Nakae’s recommendation by combining Japanese-style vaudeville, called yose, with anti-government political activism. His performances became quite popular, and one of the songs he developed and performed, Oppekepe-bushi, took Japan by storm. The lyrics lampooned contemporary political conditions. One of the verses went:

“I’d like to give those who hate rights and happiness
A taste of jiyuto (a pun meaning both freedom tea/ Liberal Party).
Oppekepe, oppekepe, oppekepe, peppoppo.”

In performance, he wore a jimbaori (coat worn over armor), a headband, and a hakama (a divided formal skirt for men), and held a fan adorned with the rising sun.

Kawakami married the geisha Sadayakko in 1891, and together they established the Kawakami drama troupe. They barnstormed the country with plays ostensibly based on the kabuki tradition, but which were in fact in the avant-garde for Japan at the time. His wife thus became Japan’s first actress of the modern era.

After studying drama in Paris in 1893, he returned to Japan and switched to less controversial themes. Kawakami staged patriotic plays in support of the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95).

In 1899, his troupe sailed for the United States, where it presented the kabuki-based performances in New York, Washington D.C. (with President McKinley in attendance), and Boston. The following year, they were invited to perform at the Paris Exposition, where they were a huge success. The year after that, they toured 14 countries from Spain to Russia, performing before Czar Nicholas II, Emperor Franz Josef, and the Prince of Wales.

They created a sensation everywhere they appeared, partly due to their exoticism, but also due to their undeniable talent and enthusiasm. Sadayakko in particular captivated European audiences, who compared her to Sarah Bernhardt. Together, husband and wife made a recording of the Oppekepe-bushi, said to be the first phonograph record on which Japanese artists appeared.

Back home again, Kawakami became increasingly involved in theatrical production and became a pioneer in yet another field. He starred in his own presentations of Othello and Hamlet–the first professional Shakespearean productions in Japan.

A trouper to the end, Kawakami died during a performance on 11 November 1911. Today, on the anniversary of his death, a memorial service and other commemorative events were held at the Buddhist temple Joten-ji in Fukuoka City, the site where his remains are kept. (The temple is also famous as the point of origin for soba and udon in Japan, as well as the Gion Yamakata Festival.)

Another event commemorating Kawakami is being held in Tokyo–Osore wo Shiranu Kawakami Otojiro (The Fearless Otojiro Kawakami) is being performed as the first production at the new Theatre Creation in Tokyo’s Hibiya district from November 10 to December 30.

Otojiro Kawakami was a political activist, protest singer, Japan’s first recording star, theatrical idol, cultural ambassador to the West, and a show business entrepreneur. He was the man who brought Shakespeare to Japan on the stage, and, through his wife, created an opportunity for women to play a greater role in Japanese society. These achievements are all the more impressive because Kamawami accomplished them in a relatively short period of time—he died at the age of 47.

I don’t know if the Japanese educational system covers him in their curriculum, but he certainly wouldn’t be out of place there, or in the curriculum of any other country, for that matter. A younger generation would learn that other people already have been there, and done that—and that they could do it too.

Time for the US to become Japanized?

A CULTURAL WAR HAS RAGED in the United States for decades, with no sign of either a negotiated settlement or an unconditional surrender by any of the combatants. Rather than human life, the real victim of this battle has been social cohesiveness.

Similar conflicts occur in Japan, but despite the growing trend toward individual expression in this country—which has paralleled the American cultural war—a long tradition of cooperation and group harmony seems to be a factor in resolving these conflicts before they cause serious harm to the society, become ridiculous, or both.

A case in point are the concerns over the promotional materials used for the recently released film, Sukiyaki Western: Django, directed by Takashi Miike. The Japanese work is based on the movie Django, a Spaghetti Western directed by Sergio Corbucci. Miike used that film as a device for retelling the story of the late 12th-century Taira-Minamoto war as recounted in the Tale of the Heike. In other words, it’s a samurai drama remade as a Western, with an all-Japanese cast speaking in English. (Here’s a previous Ampontan post about the film.)

Problems arose because one scene of the movie shows a man lynched Western-style hanging from the crossbars of a torii, the distinctive gateway to Shinto shrines. This image was used in the film’s publicity posters, television commercials, and trailers. (You can see both the poster and the trailer at the other post.)

Not everyone in Japan thought this was cutting edge and cool. The priests at four Shinto shrines e-mailed objections to the picture’s distributor, Sony Pictures Entertainment. (The company is also a member of the film’s production committee, the vehicle for financing most Japanese films.) The complaints said the use of the image was an “inappropriate (form of) expression” and “a desecration of the holy torii”.

The Association of Shinto Shrines, which has a nationwide membership of about 80,000 institutions, also made their objections known to Sony. But it is worth examining the way they expressed their objection in the original Japanese:

誰もが安心して気持ちよくご覧になれる映画の方がよろしいのではないか

It isn’t possible to express all the nuances of this in comfortable English, but to get literal about it, one might translate the sentence as, “Wouldn’t it be better to have a movie that anyone could watch in an enjoyable way, with peace of mind?” Even in that short sentence, there are several instances of honorific and polite language that cannot be adequately conveyed in English. Indeed, the association chose the form of the sentence itself as a way to soften the impact, yet still communicate its message.

An association spokesman told a reporter for the Asahi Shimbun:

表現の自由も大事だが、関係者がどう受け取るかも考える必要があるのではないか

“Freedom of expression is important, but isn’t it the case that the people involved have to consider how (the scene) might be taken?”

What was the result of their objections? The production committee apologized:

不快感を与えたことは申し訳ない

“We have no excuse for causing a sense of discomfort.”

Sony also modified the posters, commercials, and flyers by deleting the scene. Yet they did not remove the scene from the movie itself. They said:

作品に興味を持った人が見るもので、作品全体を見れば、神社を冒涜するものではないと理解いただける

“People interested in the film will watch it, and if they see the whole film, they will (do us the honor of) understand(ing) that it is not a desecration of Shinto shrines.”

And with that the situation seems to have been resolved. In any event, the issue did not turn into a pitched battle, nor did the media go out of its way to be emotionally inflammatory.

One can well imagine what might have happened in a similar situation in the United States. One side in the dispute would have warned that the moral fabric of Western Civilization was fraying at the seams. Columnists and talk radio would have begun baying at the moon, which could have lasted as long as a whole week. There might well have been demonstrations outside of movie theaters.

The other side in the dispute would behave no less obnoxiously. They would assume a holier-than-thou posture and don the mantle of free speech and free expression to cloak the studio’s desire to make a buck and the director’s desire to throw cinematic spitballs. They would make the hilariously inapt observation that great art has always seemed offensive to some at first. (Ignoring that most of the material people find offensive seldom rises to the level of mediocre art, much less greatness.) They would dismiss the people making the objections as philistines and fascists, and in general act as if the film were the artistic equivalent of Martin Luther whaling away on the door of the Wittenburg church.

In Japan, the problem was resolved painlessly and politely. Both sides showed some respect for the other, and both came away with what they wanted.

In the United States, however, a similar issue would have provided the would-be saints and sages on both sides of the aisle an opportunity to pound the pulpit and to receive a thrill from indulging their emotions–further widening the gulf separating the two sides.

Some Japanese complain that their country has become too Americanized. I’ll leave it to the Japanese to determine whether that’s true or not—while regretting that most Americans will never know the benefits to be obtained by becoming Japanized.

No business like noh business

IT SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING Mel Brooks might come up with if he were Japanese. The English version of the Daily Mainichi　passes along this report from the Sunday Mainichi of a special performance of Isseki Sennin (One Stone, 1000 Hermits), a modern Noh play based on the life and times of Albert Einstein, with a special focus on the Theory of Relativity.

Then again, maybe the combination is not such a mismatch after all. Both Noh and Einstein are so famous that everyone has heard about them, but when people actually see a Noh play or read an explanation of the Theory of Relativity, they have a hard time staying awake.

University of Tokyo Professor Tomio Tada wrote the play, and he talks about his inspiration:

I wrote a Noh play about Einstein because his theories cast an enormous shadow over humanity. The nuclear issue proving a serious threat to the world at this moment is something he discovered and is also guided by his theory that energy is equal to the square of mass. The fervent peace campaigner Einstein will speak out about the power of the atom in this Noh play, too.

See? You’re starting to nod off already, aren’t you!

Director Ken’ichi Kasai chimed in,

“We’ll be able to pass on the message. We’ll certainly make it a hell of a lot easier to understand (Einstein’s Theory of Relativity) than any mathematical formula.

Well, that won’t be hard to do. Most of us aren’t physicists, so it’s unlikely we’d understand the mathematics behind Einstein’s theory. Then again, I think Kasai is being optimistic when he talks about making a Noh play easy to understand. Even the Japanese find the plots difficult to follow, unless they already know the story in advance. One attends a Noh play for the atmosphere, not to see what happens in the end.

Come to think of it, there’s another reason Einstein might be well-suited to Noh—based on photographs of the man, he resembled a Western Noh mask come to life.

After reading the article, I became curious about other instances of modern Noh plays. Most of the repertoire dates from the 14th and 15th centuries, but one popular drama in the canon dates from the 19th century. It turns out that Yukio Mishima, the influential—but really weird—novelist who so loved Japanese tradition that he dressed up in an old fashioned military uniform and committed hara-kiri one day, wrote a few modern Noh plays in the 50s. Here is a site with some photos from the productions, including a few of Mishima himself. There is one taken on his wedding day, with his poor bride wearing an expression that makes one wonder if she knew even then she would have to share him with his male lovers.

This site features a plot synopsis of Dojoji, one Mishima’s Noh plays. It takes place in a secondhand furniture shop. And here’s the site for the Theater of Yugen, which sometimes performs other modern Noh plays. One of them, Down the Dark Well, was written in 1996 by the same Dr. Tada who wrote the play about Einstein.

A little research unearthed the information that Irish playwright and poet William Butler Yeats also wrote Noh plays (well, sort of) after Ezra Pound introduced him to the form. This website tells you everything you’ll want to know about Yeats’s experiments with Noh in his Four Plays for Dancers. It quotes from “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” in which he wrote: “With the help of Japanese plays translated by Ernest Fenollosa and edited by Ezra Pound, I have invented a new form of drama, distinguished, indirect, and symbolic.”

It goes on to explain:

Yeats adapted the raw material presented by the Noh for his own artistic purposes, in much the same way that he altered the details of the Irish myths, the symbols of the Kabbalah, the Tarot and other ‘image banks’ from which he borrowed.

I think I’d better close with that before I get a nosebleed from all the artistic excitement.

Funky folk art from Japan

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED what future generations will consider the best of today’s popular culture? Edo period pop art and illustrations in Japan might provide a few hints. Some of this work from the 17th and 18th centuries comes close to being manga, but the originals are now hanging in such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Try Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Utamaro. You may not know their names off the top of your head, but you definitely know their pictures, as a quick click on the links will reveal.

For sheer funkiness, however, a lesser-known class of pictures called otsu-e (Otsu pictures) can’t be beat. The pictures are named for the city of Otsu, just east of Kyoto, which was located on the Tokaido road. This was the primary road between Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto during the Edo period. Shops in Otsu sold souvenirs, among them these prints that were produced rapidly and in quantity at the shop. They were usually done as hanging scrolls or simply on sheets of paper. They were so cheap anyone could afford them.

The subjects combined Buddhist themes, auspicious symbols, and a sense of humor with bold colors. They became so popular that the subject matter expanded over the centuries to include non-religious subjects. In fact, by the 18th century, the artists frequently incorporated pictures of such irreligious rascals as goblins, such as in the work shown here, called “Goblin Playing the Shamisen”. The little devil’s drunk and whaling away on his musical instrument, showing that the more things change, the more things don’t change at all.

The Japanese themselves tend to consider them caricatures. Other titles include “The Goblin Nembutsu” (Buddhist Prayer) or “Trying to Hold Down a Catfish with a Gourd.”

For more information, try this page at the Mingeikan (Japanese Folk Art Museum) in Tokyo describing their exhibit of a couple of years ago. (The link to the museum’s home page is on the right sidebar.) It also contains an article on the exhibit that appeared in the Japan Times.

Once you get started, you might not be able to stop. Here’s another page at the Cleveland Museum of Art, this is a self-portrait of the artist Kuniyoshi making otsu-e, and here’s a New York Times review of a 1994 New York exhibit, with an explanation of the sociopolitical aspects of the work’s original popularity.

And if you’re in Japan and want to buy some otsu-e or take lessons, here’s the Otsu-e Shop in the city that gave the art its name.

“You cannot study Japanese art without becoming more cheerful and happy.”- Vincent van Gogh

Noh by firelight

WHAT DO THE PEOPLE IN JAPAN associate with summer? The intense, otherworldly sound of cicadas, wind chimes, sweat, snow cones, watermelons, sweat, grade school kids exercising in an open lot while listening to the Rajio Taiso (Radio Exercise) program broadcast on NHK at 6:30 in the morning, a mountain of homework, and more sweat.

Less frequently mentioned, but just as much a part of the summer landscape, are the performances of takigi Noh, or bonfire Noh. For those unfamiliar with the form, Noh dramas are the oldest remaining professional theater in the world. Most of the repertoire dates from the 14th and 15th centuries, though one popular drama in the canon dates from the 19th century. It is extremely stylized; the actors wear masks, the lines of text are delivered in a distinctive chant (as intense and otherworldly in its own way as the cicadas), and the stage movements are rather deliberate and strictly defined.

For a good explanation of Noh, I recommend this excellent overview by Paul Binnie. He seems to sincerely love the form and does a good job of explaining its appeal. (For an in-depth look, try the Noh and Kyogen website on the right sidebar.)

Noh is usually performed indoors, often in a theater built specifically for that purpose. Come summer, however, Noh performances are staged outdoors at night with small bonfires for illumination. There have been dozens of performances throughout the country in recent weeks.

One, held at the Izumi Shinto Shrine in Kumamoto City, demonstrates that this is a living tradition; those outdoor performances began in 1960.

They are not a Japanese version of summer stock theater, either. The renowned Kuroemon Katayama IX, a national living treasure, appeared in four different dramas, including a kyogen performance, at the annual Shinshu Azumino Bonfire Noh in a local park in Azumino, Nagano Prefecture, with about 800 people in attendance.

Meanwhile, 700 people came to see Noh by firelight at Nikkozan Rinno-ji, a Buddhist temple in Nikko, Tochigi Prefecture. Many also made the trek to the countryside in Asahi-mura, Niigata Prefecture to see performances that are an intangible cultural treasure of the prefecture. Noh dramas have been presented in Asahi-mura annually for 150 years, though the outdoor Noh performances date back only 20 years.

One word that the media invariably use to describe bonfire Noh is yugen. That’s one of those inscrutable Japanese words with no direct equivalent in English. The late Alan Watts explained it this way:

The Japanese have a word yugen, which has no English equivalent whatsoever. Yugen is in a way digging change. It’s described poetically, you have the feeling of yugen when you see out in the distant water some ships hidden behind a far-off island. You have the feeling of yugen when you watch wild geese suddenly seen and then lost in the clouds. You have the feeling of yugen when you look across Mt Tamalpais, and you’ve never been to the other side, and you see the sky beyond. You don’t go over there to look and see what’s on the other side, that wouldn’t be yugen. You let the other side be the other side, and it invokes something in your imagination, but you don’t attempt to define it to pin it down

That’s the Zen hipster definition; the one in a standard Japanese dictionary is more mundane. There it’s identified as “something with a profound and unfathomable aspect”. Actually, unfathomable is a good word to describe the whole business. Because most Noh plays are several hundred years old, the language of the texts is no longer the language in common use today. The unusual chant used to deliver the lines renders them even more difficult to pick up.

I’ve been to two Noh performances, one in a theater and one outside with firelight, and I quickly gave up trying to understand what was going on. It’s best just to sit there and enjoy the spectacle.

It’s not much easier for Japanese to understand, either. At the theater performance, the audience consisted mostly of women who brought books containing the text of the plays and followed along with the performance.

It was next to impossible for me to dig the change of yugen at the outdoor Noh, however, because the entire experience was downright uncomfortable. First, Japanese summers are oppressively hot. Sitting outside on a sweltering night has all the negatives of a sauna with none of the positives, especially when you lack the foresight to bring along some refreshing beverages. Second, while the bonfires may help create the ineffable yugen experience, they certainly don’t make the area around the stage any cooler.

Yet, I could have managed all that but for one additional element that made my visit to a takigi Noh nearly unbearable:

The mosquitoes!

Sukiyaki Western Django: For teenagers from 13 to 30

LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY, some young Brits had such a yen for American musicians and their music they decided to imitate it for their countrymen’s entertainment. To everyone’s surprise–especially their own—the sensation they created caused other young people throughout the world to imitate them, even the Americans. How’s that for irony? Young Americans were playing music to mimic the young Englishmen they thought were cool, while the English were mimicking the Americans, whom they thought were the cool ones.

Rather than being isolated phenomena, artistic reverberations such as these are part of the creative process everywhere. At the same time as the British Invasion, modern African popular music was being fashioned by Africans imitating Cuban and other Caribbean music, which itself was a hybrid of traditional African music and that of several European countries.

Those precedents came to mind when I read this article about a new film from Japanese director Takashi Miike called Sukiyaki Western: Django. It’s loosely based on the movie Django, a so-called Spaghetti Western directed by Sergio Corbucci. Miike’s twist is to use that film as a vehicle for retelling the story of the late 12th-century Taira-Minamoto war as recounted in the Tale of the Heike.

At first glance, the idea seems to have the potential to stimulate some serious miscegenation and give birth to an entertaining flick. The similarities in the way Japanese mythologized their feudal past in cinema and television and the way Americans mythologized their 19th century frontier past have been discussed for years. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa was influenced by American director Frank Capra, and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was turned into The Magnificent Seven, making the Western an American remake of a samurai film by a Japanese director inspired by an American.

The Magnificent Seven also left some other cultural progeny in its wake. The main theme from Elmer Bernstein’s score was cut and pasted straight into television commercials for Marlboro cigarettes. In those days, the company was still reworking its former brand image as a ladies’ cigarette by using a rugged Western motif for TV ads and changing the spelling from Marlborough into something more butch. Listen carefully and you’ll also recognize Bernstein’s theme as part of the horn riff in Arthur Conley’s top 40 hit, Sweet Soul Music–the title of which also became the title of a book about 60s Southern soul by Peter Guralnick.

The Spaghetti Western rode into town a few years later when the Italians, most of whom wouldn’t know a stirrup from scaloppini, got hooked on the image and started making Westerns of their own, often with the theme music of Ennio Morricone. Those films turned out to be the career break for a down-on-his luck actor named Clint Eastwood, who had gone abroad to look for work. They were so successful Hollywood made its own Spaghetti Western starring Eastwood–The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Americans imitating Italians imitating Americans.

Meanwhile, the Japanese were quick to spot the similarities between the Spaghetti Westerns and their own samurai movies, and incorporated aspects of those films into their own movie and television work, particularly the theme and incidental music. Some directors even incorporated Western motifs into movies about other subjects, such as Juzo Itami’s Tampopo, which was very loosely about a woman running a ramen shop.

Adding even more flavor to this international stew was Eastwood’s apparent incorporation of some licks from Japanese movies into his own films. I watched the fourth and last Dirty Harry movie in Japan with some Japanese friends, and when a backlit Eastwood appeared for the climactic scene at a closed amusement park at night, they all yelled “Yojimbo!” in unison. (And that was a Kurosawa movie inspired by Dashiell Hammett and remade by Sergio Leone.)

That’s the tradition Sukiyaki Western: Django, slated to premiere in September, could have updated. Peeling back the top layer, however, suggests a work that’s all surface with no underlying resonance–a project that seems be sinking under the weight of post-adolescent irony rather than soaring on the wings of post-modern meta-hipness.

One could also compare it to a Japanese pizza: By replacing the pepperoni with potato salad, they missed the point.

The American sense of fashionable irony is one aspect of the country’s culture that doesn’t translate very well in Japan. Many Japanese just don’t get it when Americans come across that way, and not that many like it when they do get it. (More power to the Japanese.) So it’s not surprising that Miike’s attempt to cop a feeling seems both off-key and heavy-handed:

Miike’s film, to put it mildly, does not worry about anachronisms. Set “a few hundred years” after the Gempei War’s decisive 1185 Battle of Dannoura, the movie features men with punkish hairdos who blow to bits bottles of liquor at a saloon. The film…is set during a gold rush in the dusty, barren village of “Utah” — which, in Japanese, means “field of hot water.”

Yes, a “field of hot water” is such a common expression in Japanese, not to mention English. How clever.

A gunman, played by Japanese star Hideaki Ito, arrives under the torii gate to delve into gangland score-settling.

And when Ito rides into town, a man has already been lynched and is hanging from the torii with a rope around his neck.

Miike…shot the film entirely in English, forcing some of the Japanese cast members to head for a crash course. “I couldn’t speak English, so it was difficult,” Ito said of being presented with the script. Kaori Momoi, one of the film’s female leads who also appeared in Hollywood’s Memoirs of a Geisha, said she finds it more difficult to ad lib in English.
“If the way Japanese actors speak English comes to be accepted, then it will add to Japanese actors’ range,” she said.

She means it will add to their range of available employment without them having to do any work to earn it.

Miike said he told the actors to speak English as best they could. “For this movie, we used Japanese English, not the English perfectly spoken in the United States or in the UK,” he said. “If this is accepted, then Japanese English will come to be known as something very cool.”

Sure, podnuh, in the same way the Japanese English on t-shirts is already known worldwide as something very cool.

All your unbranded cattle are belong to us.

The cherry on top of this tongue-in-pierced-cheek sundae is a cameo appearance by director Quentin Tarentino playing a character called Ringo.

Sorry, I’m all out of appropriate icons.

Tarentino’s appearance in Sukiyaki Western: Django is a perfect fit because his own films have become so increasingly ironic and packed with obscure references that the last one (the two Kill Bills) is unwatchable for anyone other than really cool people into movies so bad they’re really cool.

I have no idea what Tarentino does in the movie, but if Miike wanted to carve some notches on his six-shooter, he’d have cast him as a masterless samurai in Utah, complete with topknot and speaking phonetic Japanese written out in the Roman alphabet.

“To be such a cool character, doing fast draws, wearing a cool costume, it just doesn’t get any better than that,” the Pulp Fiction director said. “There’s a childlike innocence to it. We could all be eight years old and doing this in our backyards and just having a whale of a time.”

I think Tarentino is selling the project short when he says it was like being eight years old. From what we know so far, I’d raise the age a bit–it seems much more in the vein of a high school renegade intellectual who spends too much time alone in his room or a collegiate spitball artist.

For example, take a look at the trailer at YouTube. Give Miike credit for his visual sense, but the swordplay on the saloon staircase, the guy with the pearl in his pierced lip, the body hanging in a noose from the torii, and the machine gun suggest this is little more than a sardonic snickerfest for international otaku who grew up on video games and manga.

That would explain the English dialogue. The enjoyment of a video game doesn’t depend on good acting from the animated characters. Humans aren’t even necessary–a machine-generated voice will do.

The manga connection is a real one, by the way. The first of 10 installments of the serialized version of the movie came out earlier this month in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Superior.

But one has to wonder if Miike’s lariat fell short of roping a few strays. If he’s going to go this far, why not go all the way? We know from his stated intention of making Japanese English cool that fluent dialogue is not a priority. If a Spaghetti Western is the objective, why not have the actors deliver their lines in Italian and dub it into English, just like the originals? It’s going to have to be subtitled or dubbed in Japan anyway. (My money’s on the former. It’s more cool and ironic that way, and besides, the trailers are subtitled.)

If he really wanted to play hipper-than-thou, he’d have released it domestically in Japanese English as is, suggesting to his audience that they’d still understand it, and if they couldn’t follow the dialogue, it wouldn’t make any difference. Then he could demonstrate that he does reside in a dimension of irony far beyond the rest of us.

And surely he could have come up with a better title. Telling people up front that it’s a Sukiyaki Western is like having to explain to someone that you were joking. If the joke were funny, no explanation would be needed.

That’s not to say that whatever Sukiyaki Western: Django turns out to be will be without merit. Some will enjoy it as entertainment, and entertainment is usually harmless. For millennia, people everywhere have been wearing silly costumes and makeup while playing pretend on stage, so it’s not going to herald the end of the world as we know it. It’ll just be the end of the Sukiyaki Western.

But that doesn’t mean we have to pretend it is what it isn’t: entertainment for adults. This simply isn’t grown up enough to be placed in the same company as Kurosawa, not to mention The Magnificent Seven, Sergio Leone, or even The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at its best.

And if Miike were to try to convince us otherwise, then the irony would be on him–even if he recouped the investment because enough geeks rented the DVD some Friday night when they didn’t have anything else to do

On the folding edge of origami

MOST JAPANESE–AND WOMEN IN PARTICULAR–can quickly flick together without much thought an origami crane or some other object, using whatever paper that’s handy. That’s the result of Japanese kindergartens having taught the art of paper folding for more than a century.

But the modern world of origami has gone far beyond making birds out of scrap paper—today artists square off in Bug Wars to produce paper insects requiring more than 100 folds, give their creations opus numbers, and use lasers to score the paper before folding.

The New Yorker recently gave its full-scale treatment to modern origami, focusing on scientist-turned-origami artist Robert Lang:

For centuries, origami patterns had at most thirty steps; now they could have hundreds. And as origami became more complex it also became more practical. Scientists began applying these folding techniques to anything—medical, electrical, optical, or nanotechnical devices, and even to strands of DNA—that had a fixed size and shape but needed to be packed tightly and in an orderly way. By the end of the Bug Wars, origami had completely changed, and so had Robert Lang. In 2001, he left his job—he was then at the fibre-optics company JDS Uniphase, in San Jose—to fold paper full time.

The artists are choosing subjects that transcend animal art:

(John Montroll) also made origami models of complex polyhedra that no one had thought possible. “John has done models in origami of all the Archimedean solids! All the Platonic solids! All the Johnson solids!” Lang said excitedly. “He did all the polyhedra!”

The time it takes to read the article (it’s five screens long) will be more than repaid–it’s excellent. The only slip-up I can spot is a reference to the old TV show Naruhodo Za Warudo as a Japanese “What’s My Line”. (That wasn’t the show’s format during most of the time it was broadcast.)

And while you’re you’re in the mood, you might stop by Joseph Wu’s Origami Page, with an extensive photo gallery that includes pictures of Lang and his creations. This page has photos of the works of Akira Yoshizawa, and this is the English site of the Origami Detectives, which I’ve added to the links at right.