ART REVIEW : When Japanese Warlords Turned to Gentler Pursuits

The recent death of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito sets one musing on the healing quality of flowing time. People who remember World War II saw their impression of the Japanese potentate change from one of a grimacing caricature of barbarism to that of a frail and venerated lover of nature. He stood at the head of his state for more than 60 years, enough time for a dozen U.S. Presidents to come and go. There is a clue there about the awesome endurance of Asian civilizations.

Once that didn’t seem to matter much to the West--Asia was too exotic and far away to be of more than romantic interest. But nuclear bombs and fast jets have shriveled the world to a tennis ball swirling in the galaxies. Now, people on the West Coast of the Americas live on the lip of a little bowl they call the Pacific Rim. Its U.S. capital is Los Angeles and its Asian counterpart is Tokyo, a potent cultural and economic force that we must reckon with.

A pity therefore that a splendid Japanese historical exhibition currently at the National Gallery (to Monday) will not travel here. Titled “Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo Culture 1185-1868,” it is the visual chronicle of an important social class that glued Japanese culture together for centuries.

By now every American addicted to popular novels and TV miniseries knows that the historical rulers of Japan were the shoguns, and their incredibly disciplined soldiers were the samurai. What has somehow not been dramatized is the class that existed between the two--Japan’s feudal warlord barons--the daimyo.

Originally they were the provincial strong men who battled among themselves for hunks of neighboring turf. Tough and resourceful, they scorned the arts of civilization. One of them--Obusuro Samura--wrote: “The ability to strum the zither or blow a flute doesn’t count for much on the battlefield. Everybody in my household--women and children included--will learn to ride wild horses and train with the longbow.”

As time went by, however, the daimyo found themselves called on more and more to act as courtiers to the shogun. Perforce, they became both patrons and practitioners of the gentler arts. The astonishing results of this cultural flowering are displayed in about 450 objects, ranging from armor that looks like lobster shell to fabrics that would shame a butterfly. Everything from the utensils of the tea ritual to the samurai’s sword is imbued with a combination of flinty-eyed craftsmanship and poetic sensitivity that is at once subtle and dramatic.

There are, of course, precedents for this kind of aesthetic in the Occident past and present. Henry VIII wrote love ballads between wars and wives. Andre Malraux was soldier, novelist, art expert and bureaucrat. American industrialist Norton Simon amassed a fabulous art collection.

Yet, a fairly silly American notion of consistency still has a hard time grasping the image of a warrior lopping off somebody’s head, then galloping home to write a haiku about it in calligraphy (an art in itself), then dressing in court finery to watch a Noh drama for several hours.

How can anybody do so many contradictory things at once?

Maybe the answer to that lies somewhere in the single most persistent and striking quality of this art--its ability to calmly combine the obviously artificial with the thumpingly realistic. The exhibition includes countless variations of the formula embodied in a polychromed wood sculpture of a Zen Buddhist priest--Jigen Daishi. It’s symmetrical posture makes it look like an abstract emblem; its head is as realistic as a George Segal sculpture but the folds of the drapery as stylized as the arabesques of a playing card.

The combination seems to bespeak a culture that keeps its ducks in a row by accepting a series of clearly artificial formalities as the mechanism through which life is conducted. This might seem phony to an American as well as a severe curtailment of spontaneous expression but it also produces a situation in which the individual has the confidence of always knowing how to behave, whatever the circumstances. That makes it easy to move from one ritualized act to another apparently contradictory ritualized act.

Formality also contributes to producing a desired aesthetic result. Armor, for example, was designed not only to protect the body but to awe and frighten the enemy out of his wits. Examples on view here are as scary as Darth Vader’s helmet--implacable and ruthless. But as you stand getting goose bumps in front of a row of these hollow costumes, each bodies forth a separate personality--qualities of individual expression.

By contrast, the fabric and cut of a courtesan’s kimono should not frighten but seduce, and the examples on view make you feel that loving the woman they were wrapped around must have been like floating disembodied in a summer garden.

If Japanese art ever appears soulless it is because we are not in touch with its language. It’s not so hard to communicate if we remember that poetry in any language gets to the essence of life by combining artificial form with real feeling. Asian art adds a dimension by being written in calligraphy that is eloquent even when we can’t read a word of it.