The argument of this prodigiously detailed study is that Japan as we now know it did not exist until the late 18th century. It was then created, piece by piece, in response to a series of perceived threats. In answer to dissolution within and menace without, it was invented, formalized and identified as "Japan," and canopied by a presence that was defined as "Japanese culture."
The way in which this materialized is the theme of the work. "Sealing off the outside gave a unity to what lay within," observes the author, and he adds that the motivation for this reification of a "Japanese culture" was the establishment of a real entity "to counter a belligerent Other. It was fear-led."
The new "Japanese" entity was in many ways the creation of Matsudaira Sadanobu, the shogun's chief counselor. It was he who insisted upon what the author calls a "discourse of disaster," and through this organized dread assembled all of those talents who contributed to the self-conscious creation of a culture.
Not only were barbarians increasingly at the ports, but the shogunal system itself was falling apart. Without some kind of restabilization, the regime would collapse (as indeed it did a century later). "The means of averting this was to fabricate gloriously a shared bond that would hold space culturally together."
The author calls this creation "the shogun's painted culture." His provocatively attractive thesis draws widely and deeply, wading through the most arcane sources and producing living, breathing examples. While one could not here duplicate his convoluted and convincing conclusions, there are a number of detachable examples.
One is the parting of the ways still visible when "official" culture went off, leaving "popular" culture to fend for itself. The latter, notably the demimonde, the "ukiyo" -- without an official thought in its pretty head -- went its own way and still occasionally surfaces. Sadanobu called the ukiyo-e "debased" and pushed for a unified pictorial culture that included the whole Kano School, a self-conscious academy that called its leader a "director" and took its other titles from the defunct bureaucracy of the Japanese court.
Through the manipulation of agreed-upon images, certified techniques, official tags and political jockeying, the Kano School created approved images that served as paradigms for the official culture. It did this in the teeth of popular opinion. Ueda Akinari, the Osaka writer, thought "the Kano posse was disastrous." But such opinion was beside the point. The point was that here was monumental Japaneseness, and this is what Sadanobu needed.
Another way in which the material world was codified and rigorously reduced to "Japan" was seen in Sadanobu's treatment of gardens. There had long been a tradition of including famous sites, both local and abroad, but only now were these seen as enclosing and defining.
Many were the methods. Vistas from abroad were captured and incorporated, local scenes were domesticated. Some official gardens were even designed to be "dangerous." That is, "women and those educated into excessive timorousness were recommended not to go into some parts, since the scenery surpassed leisurely amusement." These were thought dangerous because they were foreign -- that is, outside the prescribed perimeters. While not dangerous at all, by being so labeled they strengthened the belief that safety lay only within the confines of a culture in which one might in an approved fashion wander.
Sadanobu's garden building was part of the larger project of a complete spatial reconstruction. His parks were "distillations of, not escapes from, the wider realm." He was, in his way, the first Disney, but his intentions were not culture as amusement, but culture as control. When Kyoto was destroyed by fire in 1788, Sadanobu -- though by now retired -- was instrumental in constructing an entire capital in the image of a presumed cultural authority.
The extent of this control was immense, and much of it is still with us in various "Nihonjinron" forms. A look at the traditional culture of the country reveals the remains -- the forms of "kata," those governing combat and cooking alike; the rules defining haiku and ikebana, as well as much else; the need for prior example; the power retained by the cliche -- the list continues on and on. It becomes a diagram of the country itself, like Jorge Luis Borges' map that on a one-to-one scale, completely covered and took the place of the country it was to depict.
Realism in any form becomes a lie when it cannot conform to political demands. Those realistic simulacra that are then created and which do conform are treated as real. The author traces this political control through its varied convolutions -- ambling along this attractive path, then that one, but somehow always returning us to the main road.
As in his admirable "Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan 1700-1820" (reviewed here Feb. 8), Screech lavishes learning and scholarly precision, but remains colloquial in thought and eminently readable.
His thesis -- that what we regard as official Japan (all those 18th-century constructs: tea ceremony, Bushido, the tour garden, and much more) are coldblooded fabrications -- is not in itself surprising, since all governments work this way. Look at Versailles. What is startling is the openness and panache with which "Japan" was culturally constructed. It is that which this book illuminates.
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