Lorraine thought that I should blog about Japanese arts, so here are some general thoughts. It should be noted first that the title to my blog is a riff on the translation of ankoku butoh ("dance in utter darkness"), a Japanese avant-garde movement in choreography, also known as butoh.

Also, if you are fluent in French, my former roommate Antonin Bechler used to blog quite frequently about Japanese literature, pop culture and cinema. His blog also includes a link to his master's thesis on Murakami Haruki and alterity. I owe much of my knowledge about Japan to Antonin.

It should also be noted that my interest in Japanese culture was ultimately a repudiation of my Chinese-ness. Not having a Chinese community surrounding me, I never considered myself Chinese and thus lost whatever I knew of Cantonese at the age of 7. Hence, my only exposition to an Asian culture (beyond my father try to have me speak Cantonese and my summer visits to my paternal grandparents in Houston) was Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai and anime (when I was 6). All of this quickly led to my being rather well-read in things Japanese by the time I entered high school: Mishima Yukio, Kawabata Yasunari, Chikamatsu, Hokusai, Hiroshige, manga. As a matter of fact, I chose to enter Lycée Jean Monnet because it was the only school in the region to offer Japanese classes, despite my acceptance into more prestigious schools, Lycées Kléber and Pontonniers. And Monnet had a more interesting European program than Kléber and Pontonniers anyway. Antonin entered Monnet for the same reason.

Now, I am not quite sure where to start. My interest in Japan was quite wide, encompassing Japanese rock (one of my dreams as a teenager was to bring a Japanese band to wherever I lived for a concert, which I actually did last year), line art (Hiroshige, Hokusai, gekiga and manga), poetry quite obviously (the Arechi movement, Tanikawa Shuntaro, Inuo Taguchi), fiction and cinema (Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Kitano Takeshi).

My interest in Japan waned over the years, as my resistance to nostalgia grew and as I shifted my focus to the rest of the world (well, mostly the German Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s and 1930s, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America). I am of course not the only one. Murakami Haruki and Inuo Taguchi are said not to write in a "Japanese style." When you read Mishima, Kawabata or Oe Kenzaburo, you still have a sense of ephemera, this sense of a floating world, despite their hard realism. The same thing could be said of the Japanese movement of Arechi (Tamura Ryuichi) when you compare him to Tanikawa Shuntaro or Inuo Taguchi (more on that in a later post). But Tamura, Tanikawa and Inuo both cull influences from Surrealism and butoh is inspired by Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud.

It is often said, quite derisively, that Japan imports technologies and tekne only to improve on it. We know that this assertion is ridiculous. Certainly, the Japanese used Chinese ideograms to derive their writing system (a mixture of kanji, katakana, hiragana and now, romaji - roman characters), but the same could be said of the Roman alphabet (from the Greek and then Phoenician). And the Koreans did it too. What we should be talking about is the constant flux of influence.

The painter Amano Yoshitaka (who will be coming to Houston in October for Oni-Con) is said to mix in his paintings the influence of traditional ukiyo-e (woodprints of the floating world) and art nouveau, especially Alphons Mucha and Gustav Klimt. Of course, we know that Art Nouveau, as well as French Impressionism and Expressionism, were themselves "mixed" arts, continuing and breaking away from the representational tradition of Western painting, and taking inspiration from the ukiyo-e of Hiroshige and Hokusai, among certain names. Knowing how Cubism, Neue Sachlichkeit and Surrealism themselves reacted to Impressionism and Expressionism, we can trace a certain lineage to the Japanese graphic arts. As such, maybe the influence of Surrealism on Arechi and butoh is a coming to full circle, if there is such a thing.

One question I'd like to raise is why Japan exerted such an influence. Why such a mystique? In a sense, in the 19th century, Japan was the ultimate Other (see Edward Said's Orientalism). As we may remember, Japan was closed to the foreign world from the early years of the Tokugawa era to the Meiji era (basically, from 1635 to 1868). There was thus a scarcity of Japanese goods. (Not to mention that the exportation of Japanese objects was a crime)

Another thing I'd like to explore is Japanese art as being non-representational. We start finding this in the Kojiki (768 AD), where Chinese ideograms are used in a strictly phonetic manner (ultimately leading to the creation of hiragana and katakana), where basically the character 加 is used to say "ka" instead of "to increase." But this is also found in the visual arts, where a picture is not mimetic. One of the conservative tropes in Western arts is that the arts should relate to something real (which is why crap like Thomas Kinkaide sells so well). But not so much in, for example, ukiyo-e, which certainly are the pictures of things, but not of things-as-things. Which is why the Japanese have very little interest in photorealistic art.

Okay, now, tell me what I should talk about.