Why I Get Annoyed With So Many Books

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I feel a bit guilty about this, as there are plenty of books about Japanese arts that I love, but I've read a lot by now, and lots of them are very poor - I've read plenty on Western arts too, and almost none of them are as bad as about a third of those I've read on Japanese forms. I am not talking here about the odd incompetent disaster like Taschen's unspeakably awful Manga book, but of faults that seem to be fairly widespread.

One of the problems I have is that what I am trying to do here, slowly and gradually, is to take a wider view, make connections that the books I have found don't make. A central problem here is that these books are written by experts in their fields, professors or museum specialists. You don't get to be those things by being a dilettante like me, dipping in all over the place. I am sure every author of a book on Japanese painting knows more than I do about their subject (though there are moments that make me doubt that), and I'm sure the same is true of every author of books on manga (one is an old pal of mine, and it's certainly true in his case). But what I want is someone who knows more than I do about painting and manga - and, come to that, gardens and lacquer and movies and so on - and can make the connections across these forms. They do exist, and there are attempts at this, but they are from experts in one area who know a little about the other, so they never go very far.

I realise this is as true of books on Western arts, which are also written by specialists. The problem is that we in the West have a shared base of knowledge about our forms, so can casually make references to Van Gogh or the Beatles or I Love Lucy or Superman or Dickens; books on Japanese arts published in English can't make any such assumptions, so rather than offer long explanations for the sake of a minor comparison, they are omitted; and the depth of expertise that would be needed for a more serious point about connections requires knowledge that, in all probability, is lacked by the writer too. This doesn't make these books bad, but it does too often make them not at all close to what I want, what interests me.

Political biases

There are more serious flaws, though. Part of it comes from the West's hideous racist past (regarding Japan, this continued in very virulent form beyond WWII, for instance) and a liberal arts culture where writers are perhaps overly careful not to say anything that may smack of that, that may give offence - plus, I guess, the fact that the writers' expertise often grows from a deep love of the country, and they want to push its merits. This can lead to omitting any negative criticism of a lot of things. I'm not suggesting other books should repeat my highly disrespectful attitude to Zen and the other religions there, but a tone of reverence does work against any serious questioning of its ideas and methods. This extends to treading on eggshells when discussing the different place that morality and ethics holds in Japanese arts and culture. This isn't the place for me to get into this area, as there is an essay coming on that at some time, but there is a very important difference, in comparison to traditionally Christian cultures, and this is hugely interesting, and it feeds into all kinds of areas of the arts.

There are other political dimensions to a lot of books too. This is particularly extreme in the case of books relating to both Korea and Japan. The legacy of 35 years of Japanese occupation of Korea in the 20th Century is a deep hatred between the two countries. Western writers often gloss over this as much as they can. Japanese writers often tie themselves in absurd knots to minimise the Korean influence on early Japan; Korean writers swing the other way, and try to discount the huge influence of China, and claim that everything in ancient and classical Japan derived from Korea. Sadly, many Western writers feel the need to pick sides too, so it's not at all safe to assume a balanced, unbiased perspective from them either.

Obviously there are additional problems in older books, a kind of parallel of the Great White Males tendencies in older Western histories, art or otherwise. Japanese art books were inclined to not be at all bothered about the exclusion of women from the great narratives; about the misogyny of many stories and periods of Japanese history; about the brutality and treachery that was there behind the noble bushido front of many samurai. They coyly skip over the gigantic role of prostitutes in Edo Japan, and the prevalence of gay male relationships among medieval samurai, and so on.

Women are particularly poorly served by many older art histories. Of course they will mention that the world's first novels were by women in Heian times, but they tend to minimise the huge importance of women's arts even in that classical period. To an extent this is inevitable, after a thousand years of the Japanese doing the same, but the books should at least acknowledge this issue, rather than colluding with it. For instance hiragana, the calligraphy most prized from that period, was known as 'feminine hand', and it would be very easy to think, from most of the books, that women had nothing to do with it, that it was entirely produced by men. You can also read lots about Japan's most admired pottery style, Raku tea ceramics, without learning that it was almost certainly started by a woman, the mother of the celebrated Chojiro. I am very frustrated that, having read countless accounts of how cultured the classier courtesans were, how they were expected to be skilled at painting, calligraphy and so on, I have so far been able to find exactly zero examples of their art or calligraphy.

(Post-)Modern Ideas

We expect and usually get better today, but even now it's very rare to read anything about Japanese art that has any awareness of modern critical ideas. Foucault's analysis of, for instance, changing constructions of insanity over the centuries, should be in any art historian's mind when writing, and in particular when surveying the existing literature, but I can only think of a couple of books on Japanese art where you'd guess that the writer is probably at least familiar with such ideas. I guess there is a drawback in addressing the undeniable fact that our metanarratives change over time in an art history: it is to draw attention to the possibility that your account is equally culturally conditioned by the time and place and so on of the author. I don't suppose many authors want to deliberately make their readers think they aren't being objective, universal, authoritative, definitive. Personally, I am certain that none of us can avoid being of our time and culture, and this isn't a problem, a bad thing. I don't want anyone to see this site as in any way authoritative or anything like that - this is just some thoughts by a middle-aged English guy with no formal arts education, looking at Japanese arts from a distance. I tend to write with the assumption that any readers I have are in similar positions, though possibly with more proper education in artistic areas, so this seems a very useful perspective. I think whatever value my writings have would be diminished rather than enhanced by any pretence at objective authority, at making definitive statements.

So I believe we are all limited in how we look at things, penned in by particular frameworks, paradigms. I get exasperated by writers who seem not to want to face this, but it gets worse when they don't face a bunch of other obvious limitations too. A good example here might be writing about the tea ceremony, and particularly Sen no Rikyu. Rikyu is presented as the definer of the way of tea as it has been practiced in the last four centuries, and as promoted by the tea schools - which are hugely powerful institutions. The largest schools were founded by his descendants, and they all want to be seen as the school that represents the pure, uncorrupted Rikyu way. It's hard for any researcher to get access to most of the historical source materials except through these schools, and they guard this history closely, policing who writes about their history, and how. Some books acknowledge this difficulty, this biasing factor in most of the writings, but a lot prefer to pretend to an objective and definitive approach that is all but impossible to achieve.

Art/Craft

I untend to write a whole essay at some point about art and craft, but I'd note here that you can find some strange claims about this area in a lot of books. The Japanese division is much less clear than it has generally been in Western art history, and their mental model of the hierarchy of the arts is very different from our traditional one - but to say that the Japanese made no distinction between arts and crafts, as some writers claim, is blatant nonsense. The gap in respect, in the way the makers were regarded, between calligraphy or painting and furniture or textiles, is very obvious. Even when the greatest artists painted a design on a kimono, they would never sign it the way they would their paintings; ceramics had been treasured for centuries before any market for ceramics by named artists developed. There are many other examples, but they can wait for the moment - my point is simply that seeing less of a distinction, a shallower hierarchy, fools some writers into making statements that are clearly untrue.

Edo prints

There is also still that old high culture/low culture divide prevalent in many arts circles. This means that if you want to talk about Edo prints, Japan's most successful art in the West (arguably overtaken recently by animation, but that's another matter), you might be less than keen to face how these prints were consumed. You might easily feel that attempts to describe them as great art, art to rank alongside not just Japan's best painters but also those in the West, would be undermined by facing how these prints were actually consumed, seen and used. I discuss this at length in the printmaking section in painting, but there can be no doubt that many of these prints were bought less as fine art than as something directly analogous to fashion mags, porn, postcards, fan magazines and so on. I think the scary prints by Yoshitoshi can as meaningfully be compared to Hammer horror movies or EC horror comics, as with Bosch or Goya; and samurai prints (and indeed samurai kabuki plays) seem to be most worth comparing to American war comics such as Sgt Rock, on many levels. I can see no reason why these ideas in any way diminishes the worth of the prints as great art (a famous Utamaro image on my page on sexual prints is, for me, undoubtedly a world class masterpiece, for instance), any more than evidence of purchasers masturbating over great Western nudes by Titian, Ingres, Manet or whoever would make them any less wonderful. Nonetheless, you can read a whole bunch of books on this popular area without seeing anything about this kind of thing at all. My belief is that the way these prints were read enriches our view of them, rather than corrupts or debases it. I guess the other huge factor here is that the (fairly modern) paradigm of the artist as someone producing what they want, from some inner necessity, some artistic drive not to be constrained by commercial considerations, is a prevalent and very powerful one, but it can't sanely be applied to all that much of art history anywhere in the world.

Contests

One more point, not unrelated to that inner necessity notion, is the way that the prevalence of competition in the history of Japanese arts is ignored or skimmed over. I suppose the fact of many centuries of contests for painting, poetry, calligraphy, flower arranging, dancing and countless other arts doesn't really fit with the inner necessity ideal, nor does it suit writers who want to foreground Zen ideas, and that's a lot of writers. These contests played a huge part from at least Heian days, and are still around today. This is a good example of a difference in Japanese arts that is a lot to do with my interest in the country, but it's largely or completely ignored by the books. (If anyone can point me at any decent books on this subject, I'd be extremely grateful.)