Realism

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The first point to make here is that I am very much talking about stylistic realism. Arguably, realism of subject matter is at least as common in the history of Japanese art as in the West - plenty of images of ordinary people, of suffering, of town scenes, of nature, as well as demons and Buddhist deities and sages.

Hillier, in his book Japanese Colour Prints, talks about "a tradition of painting that had never adopted mere representationalism as one of its tenets." It's hard for a lot of people to really grasp the importance of this point. Clearly verisimilitude, a semblance of life, was something some artists strived for some of the time, but it never claimed the significance that it did in the West, never became a central plank of any critical paradigm. Why this was is hard to know, but art seems to have had a magical role early on, a schematic mandala role, sometimes more diagramatic than representational, and maybe this and the Buddhist ideas about the nature of reality, that it is illusory and not to be taken as real, go some way to explain it. There are some wonderful quotes from Zen artists in the 20th Century, faced with patrons who have absorbed these foreign ideas about art imitating reality, sharp and dismissive as if faced with barbaric philistines. Zen always maintained that it was painting the soul that should be aspired to, not painting the appearance.

Sesshu is a good example here of Japan's ideas of what a great artist makes. There is a lovely myth about him being tied to a post as punishment, then drawing rats in the dust with his toes, and those rats coming to life and gnawing through his bonds. This isn't to suggest that he ever painted anything that genuinely resembled reality - his monochrome outline work does not come close to capturing real appearances - but that his work was infused with the real spirit of its subjects.

This is not anti-realism

We shouldn't fall into the trap of seeing lack of realism in older Japanese art as a conscious anti-realism, some sort of parallel to a Modernist/PostModernist rejection of an outmoded metanarrative - it isn't that at all, it's that it seems never to have occurred to Japanese artists that there was any reason why realism should be central, why art should try to look just like reality.

We also shouldn't construct this as making Japanese art better than Western art, in overreaction against the many who assume that a lack of realism makes it inferior. I find it interesting to try to understand this tendency because it's different, because it puts the emphases on other things. One of the key reasons that made me start this site was to examine the way that the different assumptions and foundations of Japanese art made me question and rethink many things about Western culture, and this is a good example of what it was that most interested me along such lines.

Landscapes

Landscapes make another interesting case study. For centuries, they rarely depicted real places in Japan. Artists would paint mythical landscapes, idealised scenes, Chinese places (more based on other art and the imagination than really seeing them). This became less common in Edo prints, when they were often consumed like souvenir postcards or travelogues, but even then printmakers often took considerable artistic licence.

On a couple of technical points, don't assume that because chiarascuro and linear perspective rarely show up in Japanese painting, they were unknown. Masanobu, for example, played with linear perspective several times, but it seems to have been generally perceived as a cute gimmick rather than an essential part of how to draw, until the Meiji Restoration, after which Western styles and ideas were widely adopted. Maruyama Okyo (18th Century) and his followers absorbed a lot of styles for shading and perspective from Western art, and I think they successfully integrated it with more traditional Japanese styles.

Sculpture

I should also note that many of Japan's ancient sculptures show the two ends of the realism spectrum. The earliest figures of humans look bizarre and alien; the Unkei school gave us superb technical skill in the service of accurate anatomy and lifelike movements, and sometimes serious and frank subject matter too (Unkei's son Tankei in particular - was there a greater realist sculptor than these two anywhere in the world so long ago?); and the only major sculptor, for me, between Tankei in the 13th Century and the late 19th Century, Enku, was perhaps the most highly stylised sculptor before the 20th Century, anywhere in the world.

How stories are interpreted

But this attitude to realism in art goes much deeper than a lack of interest in making paintings look like reality. There is every reason to believe that stories in general are interpreted and reacted to differently, whether in prose or images or on film/TV. The excellent Ian Buruma says notions of family in Japan are more to do with social groupings than relatives, by blood or marriage, and that compassion is felt for one's own, but hardly at all for others, certainly rarely stretching to other nations or races. This particularly means that such compassion is not extended to fictional characters, so they are not related to as friends/family, as people you care about. This may be why the Japanese seem to prefer stories where the protagonist struggles, suffers and dies, generally, and not necessarily victoriously. This does resemble a kind of modern Western style of 'realism': tragic antiheroes rather than shining knights emerging triumphant; but that is emphatically not what is behind this taste at all. The Japanese don't see characters in a film as people to care about, but as artistic creations, and this may explain why their stories have so much cruelty - it becomes a catharsis, a release, rather than a depiction of genuine suffering that anyone empathises with.

The Japanese theatre has never been at all realistic. Its history includes formal dance styles, puppet theatre and the high stylisation of Noh's minimalism and kabuki's coarser bombast, plus of course a long tradition of masks and extreme make-up, and audiences happily accepting 75 year old men playing pretty boys and men playing women. Cinema started in a similar way, and retained much of the interest in presentation, rather than representation.

We see a fascinating attitude to realism in the work of Japan's greatest comic creator, Osamu Tezuka. A good example is in the 600-page 'Civil War' story in his masterwork, Phoenix. This tale is set at the end of the 12th Century, when the Heian aristocracy was being supplanted by the first samurai rule. A few pages in we are introduced to a revered Buddhist monk. Tezuka tells and shows us that he was a great scholar, a political power, a great poet and a gifted artist ("he even drew cartoons" - there is reference herein to the classic Choju Giga funny animal scrolls). Then he stretches it way beyond anything that fits into the story, telling us he was a great singer - showing him with a microphone - and that "he even made guest appearances on quiz shows" and we see him grinning on TV. These are deeply serious and ambitious stories addressing important themes, but Tezuka is positively keen to stop us immersing ourselves in some kind of apparent depiction of reality - he deliberately undercuts serious tones and moments regularly. This example can be seen as a mere gag (though I think that misunderstands it), but later in the same story a major plot development hinges on a long distance telephone call. This is a complex and fascinating anti-realist strategy.

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