Japan’s Nero? The shogun who dabbled in art while Kyoto burned

Art and war seem poles apart. War is violent, murderous, ugly, an orgy of blood and death, humanity gone mad. Art is lofty, spiritual, beautiful, a rapturous celebration of life and the human spirit.

Japan’s earliest arts were arts of peace. Japan was a nation of peace, at peace. Its civilization was born in peace, circa 500 A.D., and nurtured in peace for 700 years thereafter. Its loveliest artifacts are Buddhist statues of the eighth, ninth and 10th centuries — wood, clay and bronze figures, bodhisattvas for the most part, their faces and poses reflecting a serenity that seems scarcely of this world and yet there is nothing remote about it. Its sublimity pierces the heart — even the modern heart, keyed to turmoil. What if war had never broken out? Maybe we’d all be bodhisattvas now.

Idle fancy. Was war inevitable? It came, inevitably or not, and from the late 12th century to the early 17th, Japan was almost perpetually at war. It was civil war mostly. Apart from two Mongol invasions — both repelled, the first in 1274 and the second seven years later — the outside world paid Japan little heed, leaving its warriors free to slaughter each other, which they did with unwearying gusto for the better part of half a millennium. How art of any kind could have survived and even flourished in the seemingly endless carnage is one of the enduring mysteries. Other civilizations — ancient Greek, medieval European — had their Dark Ages, near-total eclipses of everything that makes life gracious. Japan’s darkest age was an age of light.

The central figure in the enigma seems at first glance scarcely worthy to be the central figure in anything. Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436-90, in power 1449-73) is that rarest of historical figures, a reluctant ruler. Donald Keene, in “Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan,” portrays him as a hopeless, helpless, feckless weakling, putty in the hands of his wife and mother, set at naught by warlords who fought on over his pleas for peace, his apparently genuine compassion for the suffering poor mocked by his own irresistible craving for luxury and display.

He hated war and loved beauty; hated power and loved art. History miscast him. He was born in the wrong age to the wrong family. The age was one of famine, pestilence and war. The family was the Ashikaga — hereditary shoguns since 1338, mere figureheads by Yoshimasa’s time, still more so in his wake. He’d been meant for the priesthood. His father, Shogun Ashikaga Yoshinori (1394-1441, in power 1429-41) was murdered. An able ruler but compulsively cruel, he’d earned many enemies, who conspired and struck. His successor was a child, Yoshimasa’s older brother, who died within a year. Yoshimasa’s fate was sealed. Power was his, whether he liked it or not. He didn’t. He was 13.

“At least when he was young,” Keene writes, “Yoshimasa felt concern for the welfare of his subjects. His mildness and gentleness may have inspired his many gifts to relieve the suffering caused by the terrible famine of 1459.” It was no use. “Two-thirds of the people died of starvation,” wrote a contemporary diarist quoted by Keene, “and skeletons filled the street.” Was Yoshimasa as callous as his extravagance suggests? While his subjects starved, he built palaces. “Every day he employed people to create (gardens with) mountains, water, plants and trees,” wrote the same diarist. “Showing no pity for those who suffered from hunger, he made plans to build still another new palace.”

It is hard to penetrate the soul of a man so distant in time from us. Could it be that, “showing no pity,” he was in fact overwhelmed by pity, and by his own helplessness in the face of events that were simply beyond human control? The famine dragged on for three years. The people starved and died; the warlords fought — off and on at first, constantly from 1467 to 1600. With hindsight we see a process unfolding, the birth of a nation. Japan in Yoshimasa’s time hardly qualified as a nation; it was a chaotic welter of independent feudal baronies. Central authority had collapsed.

Might a stronger personality than Yoshimasa have shored it up? His successors fared little better. Warlord allied with warlord fought warlord allied with warlord, each absolute master in his own little domain, each obsessed with territorial expansion at his neighbors’ expense. In Yoshimasa’s time there were some 260 of these fiefs; by 1600 only a dozen or so remained; three years later the country was one under the House of Tokugawa and war, at last, ceased.

The year 1467 — Year 1 of the Onin Era — marks the start of the Onin War. If we of our time need a lesson in the utter stupidity, futility, savagery and barbarity of war at its worst, this is one to study. It arose over nothing, dragged on for 10 years, and settled nothing, its ending a mere prelude to what has become known as the Sengoku Period, the Age of the Country at War. It may be that the Tokugawas’ ultimate triumph in 1603 was due as much to national exhaustion as anything else.

The Onin War left Kyoto a ruin. “Accounts written by people who remembered the appearance of Kyoto at the height of its glory,” writes Keene, “described their shock when returning after the war they saw how terribly the city had been ravaged.”

What was Yoshimasa up to all this time? Nothing. He “continued to reside in his palace,” writes Keene, “even though it was situated no more than a few hundred yards from the worst of the fighting. He seems to have spent most of his time admiring his garden and his collection of Chinese paintings.”

He was in retreat, in withdrawal, perhaps in shock. Not in despair, however, as we know from a poem he wrote: Forlorn though the hope, / still I believe that somehow / peace will be restored. / Although it is so confused, / I don’t despair of the world.

Of himself, though, perhaps he did despair. Certainly he did of power. He abdicated with relief in 1473.

The “palace he continued to reside in” is the famous Ginkakuji (Temple of the Silver Pavilion), situated in the Higashiyama hills at the eastern edge of the city, built at enormous cost regardless of, it almost seems in mockery of, the appalling suffering around him. A ruler like him is a blot on any nation’s history. And there the story would end — but doesn’t, because Shogun Yoshimasa did have one redeeming feature.

He was an art lover, an art critic, a vigorous art sponsor, even something of an artist in his own right. And the Zen-infused Higashiyama culture he spawned in his Ginkakuji retreat — noh drama, tea ceremony, flower arranging, landscape gardening, ink wash painting, linked verse — is the “soul of Japan” Keene credits him with creating. It’s not to everyone’s taste — George Sansom, in “Japan: A Short Cultural History,” responds to its beauty but fears it’s “a trifle undervitalized” — but it is startlingly original and unmistakably Japanese.

Supposing Yoshimasa had been a normal ruler; supposing even an exceptionally able one. It would have added one more name to an already long list of able, powerful, almost without exception ruthless warriors and statesmen. Who, in the long run, advances civilization further — the warrior-statesman-ruler or the culture-creating artist-ruler? Our story closes leaving the question open.

This is the second of two pieces on art's role in Japanese history. Michael Hoffman’s latest book is “Arimasen.”