DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Examining Japanese Peace and Beauty
Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Origins of Japanese Culture
Eiko Ikegami, 2005
I am rereading Eiko Ikegami's Bonds of Civility, a book I read soon after its publication in 2005, but which made little impression on first reading. I had different interests twenty years ago, and did not understand the book's originality, or its importance as an historical and anthropological study of beauty, creativity and identity. Bonds of Civility begins with a discussion of Japanese ideas about beauty and the arts during the Medieval period to lay the groundwork for a focus on aesthetic ideas and practices during the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1847), a 249-year period of peace, stability and prosperity that followed devastating civil wars. The novel, Shogun, by James Clavell, is about the period that led to the dominance of the Tokugawa shoguns.
One lesson of Bonds of Civility is that the Japanese have had an exquisite sense of beauty for well over a thousand years (and perhaps much longer) and that cultivation of the arts was not limited to the upper class, i.e., samurai, but included commoners and marginal persons who lacked a secure place in Japanese society. Ikegami asserts: "Beauty and power have always been closely related in Japanese history. ... the realm of the beautiful was a distinctive source of power in the ancient Japanese imperial system" because it tapped "cosmic ritual power" and "was deeply rooted in the ontology of human erotic forces and animistic views of nature." And "To the Japanese of centuries past, the performing arts and poetry were magical technologies to move or influence nature and to connect the present world with the unseen world beyond." During the Heian era (794-1192), "all courtiers, men and women alike, were poets and performing artists (including musicians) of some sort; without these skills they could hardly have functioned as courtiers." Court society in Japan was aesthetically cultivated which "led to an intense concern for aesthetic quality and authority" in all social classes.
During Medieval times, the Japanese aesthetic realm was enmeshed with religiosity. According to Ikegami: "The true vitality of medieval Japanese people's religiosity ... was expressed in their ardent longing to touch and feel the presence of a world that they could not see. During an artistic performance, the audience felt that they shared the performance space with the sacred, ... artistic performance was a holy act." However, Ikegami believes, "The high level of development of the Japanese performing arts and their evolution into alternative forms of socialization might not have taken place of aesthetic values and standards had subserved purely religious ends."
During medieval times and in later centuries, "performing artists were considered marginal people," (but) "they were also thought to have a special ability as go-betweens, joining this world and the world to come." And: "The notion of identity transformation in the act of performing and the function of connecting different worlds" became an ideal of aesthetic socialization during the Tokugawa shogunate when social identity and social expectations related to caste and class were rigid to an extreme degree. The performing arts was a realm where both performers and audience were briefly freed from this social straight jacket and could taste the freedom of taking on a new identity. Japanese of all social classes wanted to participate in this realm of freedom, not just witness it. The involvement of marginal people, i.e., outcasts, was an important factor in creating a unique social space of lightness and freedom, Ikegami believes.
As Ikegami tells the story, this history created the cultural framework for the development of linked poetry (renga) which became so important during the Tokugawa shogunate. In linked poetry, groups of participants including poets, samurai, commoners and (sometimes) the audience, engaged in the improvisational creation of lengthy poems by successively creating stanzas which were a creative response to the stanza that preceded it, not to the whole poem. "The genuine pleasure participants derived from renga sessions was an excitement born of unexpected encounters with other poets' contributions," Ikegami states. "Each participant entered an explored an unmapped territory of cognitive associations through exchanges with others in the session. As the chain of linked verse was built up line by line, the session participants would be caught up in a mood of rapturous enchantment." A linked poetry session was "relatively open, egalitarian and temporary," playful, "common to all."
Linked poetry sessions often involved several groups of about ten persons who developed poems of up to one hundred stanzas as each participant contributed a line that built on the preceding line according to fixed rules. However, it was not enough to create a stanza that fit the rule; each participant was expected to bring something fresh and original to the poem in a way that built on the previous line. Ikegami states: "When an unexpectedly interesting succeeding stanza was presented, the perceptive participants would be captivated by feelings of surprised exhilaration." Renga participants sought the direct experience of creativity that could only have been achieved by being in sync with others engaged in the same activity.
It also created a social space of "lightness and freedom" that set aside the hierarchical status system that held interaction between persons of different classes in a net of strong social gravity. Renga poets and participants were equals; even samurai gave up their status prerogatives, including their names while taking part in renga poetry contests. Ikegama writes: " ... participants had to leave behind their worldly identities when joining za art projects. Renga participants would often wear hats that identified lower social classes during the session. "By wearing an item of clothing associated with marginal persons, the participants in linked - verse sessions could temporarily transform themselves into persons outside the feudal order."
Bonds of Civility has an important lesson for Americans. It is possible to create artistic activities that take participants outside their individualistic identities and create an experience of shared creativity. Currently, team games and sports is the primary way most Americans temporarily escape the limitations of an extreme individualism that has a gravitational lock on American society in the way Japanese in Tokugawa Japan found a temporary way out of a rigid rule bound hierarchal culture. It's possible to do something different that offers the experience of creativity an engaging group activity, with or without a competitive element.
-- Dee Wilson