How little they knew of the world! How acutely they felt their lack of knowledge, and yearned to know more!
It was impossible. The pursuit of knowledge — unless Confucius had taught it, or was said to have by his official Japanese interpreters — was criminal. It implied criticism of the government — a crime punishable by death.
This is the bizarre state of things in early- and mid-19th-century Japan. Fearing Christian imperialism, the nation two centuries earlier had locked itself in. “Closed country” is the dominant theme of the Edo Period (1603-1868). No foreigners in, no Japanese out, on pain of death.
It spawned a vibrant culture — pop culture. Merchants got rich; the lordly samurai sank into poverty. For the first time in its life Japan was having fun. Kabuki plays, cheap novels, rollicking street entertainment, licensed pleasure quarters that elevated commercial sex to an art form — such are the jolly rewards of peace, wealth and the security of isolation. Who cared that the ruling Tokugawa shogunate was a dictatorship that brooked no dissent and punished even hints of it with death? Very few — at first.
For 200 years, no one bothered Japan. The only Europeans in the country were a handful of Dutch traders confined to a claustrophobic little island off Nagasaki. The outside world vanished from consciousness. Out of sight, out of mind.
It was there, though, and busy. Britain colonized India and brought China to its knees. Coal and iron forged an Industrial Revolution. American whalers penetrated Asian waters. Russia expanded eastward. Japan scarcely noticed — at first.
A turning point of sorts was the year 1808. How many Japanese would have heard of Napoleon and the global war he sparked? At its height, in 1808, the British frigate HMS Phaeton sailed into Nagasaki harbor. Holland having been annexed by Napoleonic France, Dutch shipping was fair game. It’s what the Phaeton was after. In Nagasaki it showed its guns and demanded food, water and fuel. The initial response of the highest Japanese local official was to order that the intruder be fired upon. This was scarcely realistic. Japanese guns were ancient. Samurai swords and the vaunted Yamato-damashii (Japanese spirit) were no match for modern, technological military might. The Phaeton, its demand for supplies met, departed, leaving Japan to its reflections.
They were slow to crystallize — to the despair of a handful of men, no more than 100 or so, who were engaged, more or less secretly, in rangaku (Dutch studies), so called because the Dutch in Nagasaki, and the Dutch language which some of the rangaku scholars managed to learn, were Japan’s only access to Western science, which alone, they were convinced, could save Japan from India’s and China’s fate.
Their very existence was subversive. National defense was official, not scholarly business. Let scholars study Confucius — or risk imprisonment if not death.
It’s a backdrop worthy of absurdist theater. Watanabe Kazan — samurai, Confucianist, artist, rangaku scholar — deserved better of fate than to be born into it.
He is a tragic hero — a tragic hero in an absurdist drama. He was born in 1793 in Edo (today’s Tokyo), where most of his life unfolded, but the domain to which he belonged, Tahara (in today’s Aichi Prefecture), was poor, and so was he, despite his high samurai rank. From earliest childhood he was the sole supporter of numerous brothers and sisters and the mother he revered — as Confucian filial piety required. Early on he discovered in himself a talent for drawing and became a hack artist, painting on demand for pennies. It kept starvation at bay.
Did he sense genius in himself? It was there, germinating — slowly. As a scholar too, he was gifted, steeped in the Confucian teachings that were the heart of samurai education. He remained a staunch Confucianist all his life.
But other currents flowed in him. What first drew him to rangaku? Perhaps Western art — he became the first Japanese to paint Western-style portraits, using light and shadow, depicting individuals, not types. Perhaps Western medicine. A stomach complaint led him to consult a Japanese doctor who pioneered in Western medicine, with results that belied Confucianist dismissal of foreigners as “barbarians.”
Or perhaps it was just something in the air, a pervasive, contagious restlessness. Ten years before Kazan’s birth, in 1783, a rangaku scholar named Otsuki Gentaki had written, “Hidebound Confucianists ... have no conception of the immensity of the world.” Forty years later Kazan himself wrote of Confucian scholars, “They have shallow aspirations and choose the small, not the great. ... Since that is the way things are, I wonder how long we shall go on waiting with folded arms for the arrival of the invader?”
He was appalled by his own daring. This was going too far. Confucius and “the immensity of the world” warred within him. Confucius won. He didn’t publish. It didn’t matter. There were spies everywhere. Word got out. He was arrested. The year was 1837. He had four years left to live.
Kazan’s portrait art is stunning. (It can be sampled in Donald Keene’s 2006 biography, “Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841.”) Never before in Japanese art had subjects been so sharply individualized. The Confucian scholar, eyes turned inward, seems lost in Confucian thought. The various samurai are human first, samurai second. One is over seven feet tall; his expression suggests someone searching in vain for a place to hide. Another is ill, posing stiffly and feebly as though against death itself. A third — wonder of wonders — is smiling: “not quietly smiling like Mona Lisa but baring his teeth in a grin,” comments Keene, surprised himself at this unexpected levity in defiance of the grim conventions of samurai deportment.
In 1821 Kazan, aged 28, accompanied his domain lord on a journey that included a stop at Kamakura, from where the party crossed to the small island of Enoshima. Kazan gazed across the sea. “How wonderful! How marvelous!” he exclaimed. “From here to the southeast is what the Westerners call the Pacific Ocean and the American states! They must be very close!”
They were closer than he knew, though he would not live to see their incursion and the end of the Japan he knew, loved and, almost against his will, rebelled against.
This is the first of three parts on Yamato-damashii. Michael Hoffman’s latest book is “Cipangu, Golden Cipangu: Essays in Japanese History.”
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