Essays On Japan Between Aesthetics and Literature PDF

Essays on Japan
Brill’s Japanese
Studies Library
Edited by
Joshua Mostow (Managing Editor)
Caroline Rose
Kate Wildman Nakai
VOLUME 35
Essays on Japan
Between Aesthetics and Literature
by
Michael F. Marra
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2010
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marra, Michael F.
Essays on Japan : between aesthetics and literature / by Michael F. Marra.
p. cm. — (Brill’s Japanese studies library, ISSN 0925-6512 ; v. 35)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-18977-5 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Japanese literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Aesthetics, Japanese.
3. Hermeneutics. I. Title.
PL708.M37 2010
895.6’09—dc22
2010031856
ISSN: 0925-6512
ISBN: 978 90 04 18977 5
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To Gianni Vattimo
and Sergio Mamino (1956–2003)—
The devil is in the details,
the fun is somewhere else…

CONTENTS
List of Original Publications ............................................................ ix

Preface .................................................................................................. xiii
AESTHETICS
1. Japanese Aesthetics in the World ............................................. 3

2. The Creation of the Vocabulary of Aesthetics in
Meiji Japan ................................................................................... 23
3. Aesthetics: An Overview ........................................................... 49
4. Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning .............. 57
5. Japan’s Missing Alternative: “Weak Thought” and the
Hermeneutics of Slimness ......................................................... 81
6. Coincidentia Oppositorium: The Greek Genealogies of
Japan ............................................................................................. 113
7. Conrad Fiedler and the Aesthetics of the Kyōto School ...... 131
8. On Japanese Things and Words: An Answer to Heidegger’s
Question ....................................................................................... 149
9. A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an
Inquirer: Kuki Shūzō’s Version ................................................. 167
10. Frameworks of Meaning: Old Aesthetic Categories and the
Present .......................................................................................... 187
11. Paradoxes of Reclusion: Between Aesthetics and
Anti-Aesthetics ............................................................................ 203
12. The Dissolution of Meaning: Towards an Aesthetics of
Non-Sense .................................................................................... 227
13. Hermeneutics of Emplacement: On Places, Cuts, and
Promises ....................................................................................... 249
LITERATURE
14. The Hermeneutical Challenge .................................................. 277

15. Place of Poetry, Place in Poetry: On Rulers, Poets,
and Gods ...................................................................................... 295
viii contents
16. Playing with Japanese Songs: Politics or Pleasure? ............... 307

17. Continuity in Discontinuity: Thinking The Tale of Genji
with Japanese Thinkers .............................................................. 327
18. The Aesthetics of Tradition: Making the Past Present ......... 349
19. Nativist Hermeneutics: The Interpretative Strategies of
Motoori Norinaga and Fujitani Mitsue ................................... 365
20. An Interview with Michael F. Marra
by Robert D. Wilson .................................................................. 417
21. Fields of Contention: Philology (Bunkengaku) and the
Philosophy of Literature (Bungeigaku) .................................... 423
22. The Poetry of Aizu Yaichi ......................................................... 451
23. Poetry and Poetics in Tension: Kuki Shūzō’s French and
German Connections ................................................................. 471
24. History and Comparability ....................................................... 491
Bibliography of Michael F. Marra’s Works ..................................... 497

Index .................................................................................................... 501
LIST OF ORIGINAL PUBLICATIONS
1. ‘Japanese Aesthetics in the World,’ in Shinohara Motoaki, ed., Iwa-

nami Kōza: Tetsugaku, Vol. 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2008), pp.
179–202.
2. ‘The Creation of the Vocabulary of Aesthetics in Meiji Japan,’ in
J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Japanese Art of the Modern Age (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, forthcoming).
3. ‘Aesthetics: An Overview,’ in James Heisig, Thomas Kasulis, and John
Maraldo, eds., Sources in Japanese Philosophy (Honolulu: University
of Hawai’i Press, forthcoming).
4. ‘Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning,’ in Philosophy
East and West 45:3 (July 1995), pp. 367–386, http://www.jstor.org/
stable/pdfplus/1399394.pdf.
5. ‘Japan’s Missing Alternative: Weak Thought and the Hermeneutics
of Slimness,’ in Versus, 83/84 (May 1999), pp. 215–241.
6. ‘Coincidentia Oppositorum: The Greek Genealogies of Japan,’ in
Michael F. Marra, ed. Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on
Aesthetics and Interpretation (Honolulu: The University of Hawai’i
Press, 2002), pp. 142–152.
7. ‘Conrad Fiedler and the Aesthetics of the Kyōto School.’ Paper pre-
sented at the Third International Congress for Aesthetics, Taipei,
Taiwan (August 26, 2004).
8. ‘On Japanese Things and Words: An Answer to Heidegger’s
Question,’ in Philosophy East and West 54:4 (October, 2004), pp.
555–568, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_east_and_west/
v054/54.4marra.pdf.
9. ‘A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer:
Kuki Shūzō’s Version,’ in Victor Sōgen Hori and Melissa Anne-
Marie Curley, eds., Neglected Themes and Hidden Variations,
Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy 2 (Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for
Religion and Culture, 2008), pp. 56–77, http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/
SHUBUNKEN/publications/EJPhilosophy/PDF/EJP2–Marra.pdf.
10. ‘Frameworks of Meaning: Old Aesthetic Categories and the Present,’
in Atsuko Ueda and Richard Okada, eds., Literature and Literary
Theory, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies
(PAJLS), Vol. 9 (2008), pp. 153–163.
x list of original publications
11. ‘Paradoxes of Reclusion: Between Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics.’

Paper delivered at the Second International Symposium “Elegant
City Planning: from Kireisabi to Mabusabi,” Kyoto University, Japan
(October 26, 2009).
12. ‘The Dissolution of Meaning: Towards an Aesthetics of Non-Sense,’
in The Asian Journal of Aesthetics & Art Sciences 1:1 (2008), pp.
15–27.
13. ‘Hermeneutics of Emplacement: On Places, Cuts, and Promises.’
Paper prepared for the International Symposium “Questioning Ori-
ental Aesthetics and Thinking: Conflicting Visions of ‘Asia’ under
the Colonial Empires,” International Research Center for Japanese
Studies, Kyōto, Japan (November 8, 2010).
14. ‘The Hermeneutical Challenge,’ in Michael F. Marra, ed., Herme-
neutical Strategies: Methods of Interpretation in the Study of Japanese
Literature, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary
Studies (PAJLS), Vol. 5 (Summer 2004), pp. 1–16.
15. ‘Place of Poetry, Place in Poetry: On Rulers, Poets, and Gods,’ in
Eiji Sekine, ed., Travel in Japanese Representational Culture: Its Past,
Present, and Future, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese
Literary Studies (PAJLS), Vol. 8 (Summer 2007), pp. 35–46.
16. ‘Playing withy Japanese Songs: Politics or Pleasure?,’ in Michael F.
Marra, Seasons and Landscapes in Japanese Poetry: An Introduction
to Haiku and Waka (Lewinston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008),
pp. 1–24.
17. ‘Continuity in Discontinuity: Thinking The Tale of Genji with Japa-
nese Thinkers,’ in Genji: Genji Monogatari no Hon’yaku to Hensō
(Kyoto: Dōshisha Daigaku Daigakuin Bungaku Kenkyūka, 2008),
pp. 55–80.
18. ‘The Aesthetics of Tradition: Making the Past Present,’ in Ken’ichi
Sasaki, ed., Aesthetics of Asia (Singapore and Kyoto: NUS Press and
Kyoto University Press, 2010), pp. 41–55.
19. ‘Nativist Hermeneutics: The Interpretative Strategies of Motoori
Norinaga and Fujitani Mitsue,’ in Japan Review: Bulletin of the Inter-
national Research Center for Japanese Studies, Number 10 (October
1998), pp. 17–52, http://shinku.nichibun.ac.jp/jpub/pdf/jr/IJ1002
.pdf.
20. ‘An Interview with Michael F. Marra by Robert D. Wilson: On
Motoori Norinaga,’ in Simply Haiku—A Quarterly Journal of Japa-
nese Short Form Poetry 5:3 (Autumn 2007), http://www.simplyhaiku
.com/SHv5n3/features/Marra.html.
list of original publications xi
21. ‘Fields of Contention: Philology (Bunkengaku) and the Philosophy

of Literature (Bungeigaku),’ in Joshua A. Fogel and James C. Bax-
ter, eds., Historiography and Japanese Consciousness of Values and
Norms (International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2002),
pp. 197–221.
22. ‘The Poetry of Aizu Yaichi,’ in Michael F. Marra, A Poetic Guide to
an Ancient Capital: Aizu Yaichi and the City of Nara (Baltimore,
Maryland: Modern English Tanka Press, 2009), pp. 7–27.
23. ‘Poetry and Poetics in Tension: Kuki Shūzō’s French and German
Connections,’ in Eiji Sekine, ed., Japanese Poeticity and Narrativ-
ity Revisited, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary
Studies (PAJLS), Vol. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 79–97.
24. ‘History and Comparability,’ in “Global Confrontations: Japanese
Arts”—JAG Workshop, UCSB (2008), http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/
projects/jag/marra.html.
PREFACE
A sudden and unexpected turn of events in the life of this book’s author
has convinced him of the need to publish some of the articles, essays,
interviews, and papers that he wrote and delivered in the past ten years.
The confrontation with mortality as a result of an illness that specialists,
for lack of a better cure, concur in deeming “terminal,” has prompted
him to publish a few thoughts that were meant as sketches in view of
a more final and definitive project which may well remain unwritten.
It takes a while to connect the dots that one devises with great efforts
in mid career. In the humanities, the whole youth is spent on detail—
long textual and linguistic journeys through ancient and modern lands.
Readers of these essays will find much detail, many dots, and a few
connections, although the author fears that the important ones still
need to be thought.
The author profoundly enjoyed bringing different disciplines
together—a practice that his students know too well to their chagrin,
and his colleagues have often tolerated with great forbearance. He found
comfortable niches in the cracks between things, neither literature nor
philosophy, neither history nor mythology. Unable to name them, he
confides in the readers’ forgiveness.
I wish to thank Dr. Albert Hoffstädt and Dr. Inge Klompmakers of Brill
for allowing me to come full circle with my publications that began in
Turin thirty years ago and ended in Leiden after long and rewarding
journeys through U.S. and Japanese presses. The book is dedicated to
two exceptional friends with whom I shared ideas, good laughter, and
gourmet food in Turin, Condove, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Yorba Linda,
Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, Monument Valley, and Osaka—and Toshie
was there the whole time.
AESTHETICS
CHAPTER ONE
JAPANESE AESTHETICS IN THE WORLD
Although this section is titled, “Japanese aesthetics in the world,” my

survey of the field of Japanese aesthetics will be limited to the West,
mainly the United States and Europe. In the West, the study of Japa-
nese aesthetics was not initiated by departments of philosophy or art,
as one might think should be the case, considering that, at least from
Hegel’s time, aesthetics has come to be seen as a philosophical disci-
pline studying the realm of the beautiful in art. Instead, it is scholars
of Japanese literature who should be credited with the introduction
of aesthetic terms and ideas with which they were confronted while
translating into English and other European languages the “classics”
of Japanese literature. A generation of gifted translators took upon
itself the difficult task of introducing to Western readers texts which
these readers were bound to perceive as unorthodox. The curiosity
for the exotic that had fascinated European and American consum-
ers of Japanese artifacts in the late nineteenth and first decades of the
twentieth centuries was not strong enough to make them appreciate
a literal translation of a “novel” which had no beginning nor ending,
or of a “poem” that was as hazy as the mist described in it, or of a
“tragedy” devoid of any movement or action. The translators felt a
strong responsibility to make the original Japanese texts acceptable
and pleasurable to Western readers.1 This was not an easy task consid-
ering the fact that mere content plays such an irrelevant role in literary
texts. If a Westerner could easily appreciate the beauty of a Japanese
screen with a beautiful landscape painted on it, surrounded by a poem
in unintelligible Chinese characters, things were much more compli-
cated once the poem was translated into English and sounded so little
poetic and even more unintelligible. The first kind of unintelligibility
1
This marketing strategy for appealing to a Western audience, paired with a pas-
sion on the part of a generation of Japan scholars who are genuinely in love with the
field of their expertise, has continued until recent times. See, for example, Donald
Keene, The Pleasures of Japanese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press,
1988), the first chapter of which is titled “Japanese Aesthetics.”
4 chapter one
was considered exotic and, therefore, beautiful; the second was felt
to be plainly uninteresting. In order for the text to make sense, the
translator had to bring the reader into the cultural milieu that had
produced the unintelligible text, hoping to provide explanations that
would make entirely unfamiliar literary conventions acceptable.
This explains why the late Ivan Morris, one of the pioneering transla-
tors of the Japanese classics, decided to produce the English translation
of Sei Shōnagon’s Makura no Sōshi in two volumes, one of translation
and one of footnotes, with the volume on footnotes longer than the
original translation.2 If one reads the 1161 footnotes of volume two,
one could get a very good glimpse of Japan’s eleventh century world of
taste and “art”—bits and pieces that could easily be put together into a
sustained theory of art in pre-modern Japan. As a matter of fact, Ivan
Morris attempted to do this in a separate volume that was very influ-
ential in English speaking countries in the 1960s and 70s, The World
of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (1964). This book
is a good example of pioneer translators’ engagement with the field of
aesthetics. It also unveils some problems that were bound to arise as
a result of unreasonable demands that were put on translators. Too
much was required of them: They had to be philologists, historians,
and aestheticians at the same time. The cultural study of Japan that
was mainly centered on fictional works inevitably led to the aestheti-
cization of historical periods in which the major epochs of Japanese
culture were identified with particular aesthetic constructs. Thanks to
masterful translations by Arthur Waley, Ivan Morris, Donald Keene,
Edward Seidensticker, Howard Hibbett, Helen Craig McCullough, and
others, the Heian period came to be known as the refined age of a
cult of beauty (miyabi) and of feminine sensibility, an emotional age
characterized by the “ahness” (aware) of things;3 the Kamakura and
2
Ivan Morris, Trans., The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Volume I and II (New York
Columbia University Press, 1967).
3
Arthur Waley, trans., The Tale of Genji (Boston and New York: Houghton Mif-
flin Company, 1925–1933); Donald Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature from the
Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1955); Edward
Seidensticker, trans., Kagerō Nikki: Journal of a 10th Century Noblewoman (The Trans-
actions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 3d ser., v. 4, 1955); Helen Craig McCullough,
trans., Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1968).The expression “cult of beauty” comes from Ivan Morris, The
World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1965), p. 170. The expression “feminine sensibility” comes from Donald Keene, “Fem-
inine Sensibility in the Heian Era,” in his Appreciation of Japanese Culture (Tokyo:
japanese aesthetics in the world 5
Muromachi periods were interpreted as a time of perishability, irregu-

larity, simplicity, and impermanence;4 the Edo period came to be seen
as the pleasurable moment of the floating world, a period “obsessed
with entertainment.”5 In a sense, these translators completed the pro-
cess that had begun in Japan during the Meiji period when, under
the mounting pressure for proving to the West the greatness of their
culture, the Japanese intelligentsia packaged their country as an aes-
thetic product, “the museum of Asiatic civilization,” to use a famous
expression by Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913).6 There was more than
ukiyo-e, screens, lacquer, and ceramics to the beauty of Japan. There
were also literary gems that Western scholars attempted to make part
of the cultural treasury of any learned Westerner.7
Furthermore, in an attempt to reduce the particularity of histori-
cal reality to the universality of general concepts in the representa-
tion of every cultural epoch, each period came to be characterized
by specific aesthetic categories. The literary, artistic, religious, and
social movements of discreet temporal segments were all subsumed
under categories which found their systematization in the West in
the English translation of a fragment of the massive history of literary
interpretation by the Japanese literary historian Hisamatsu Sen’ichi
Kōdansha, 1971). The expression “ahness of things” comes from Wm. Theodore de
Bary, ed., “The Vocabulary of Japanese Aesthetics, I, II, III,” from Ryusaku Tsunoda,
Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol-
ume I (New York Columbia University Press, 1958). The resilience of this approach
to the field of Japanese aesthetics can be elicited from the fact that the last two articles
were reprinted in Nancy G. Hume, ed., Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
4
Donald Keene, trans., Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1967). From Kenkō’s text Keene extrapolates the four cat-
egories of suggestion, irregularity, simplicity, and perishability to describe the aesthet-
ics of the Japanese Middle Ages. Donald Keene, “Japanese Aesthetics,’ in Nancy G.
Hume, Japanese Aesthetics and Culture, pp. 27–41.
5
Howard Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1959).
6
Okakura Tenshin, The Ideal of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan
(London: John Murray, 1903), p. 5.
7
The most successful results of this attempt can be seen in the popularization of
haiku among Westerners, and the widely known plot of the alleged masterpiece of
Japanese literature, The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari). Two complete English trans-
lations followed Arthur Waley’s famous rendering: Edward Seidensticker, trans., The
Tale of Genji (New York: Knopf, 1976), and Royall Tyler, trans., The Tale of Genji
(New York: Viking, 2001). It goes without saying that popular culture has been having
a much deeper impact on the dissemination of Japanese artifacts, including literary
works—the examples of manga and anime are the most apparent.
6 chapter one
(1894–1976). In Hisamatsu’s The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aes-

thetics (1963), Japanese antiquity was interpreted as the age of makoto
(sincerity), further divided into the three elements of brightness,
purity, and uprightness. Although the translation mentions the source
for this subdivision—the eighteenth-century scholar Fujitani Mitsue
(1768–1823)—no reference is made to a possibly fruitful comparison
between Fujitani’s reduction of brightness to reason (what Hisamatsu
calls rational beauty), will (uprightness, or beauty of the will), and
emotion (purity, or emotional beauty) to Kant’s three critiques of pure
reason, practical reason, and judgment. At this point, we must remem-
ber that literary historians were still the ones in charge of introducing
the field of Japanese aesthetics to Western readers. Hisamatsu makes
a reference to “one scholar” who attempted to find Japanese coun-
terparts to the Western categories of elegance, sublimity, and humor
(graceful, tragic, and comic): aware, yūgen, and sabi. The scholar, how-
ever, goes unnamed, being not a literary historian but a philosopher,
Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959), whose lifelong research on Japanese
aesthetic categories (biteki hanchū) provided Hisamatsu with the gen-
eral framework for his literary typologies.8 Hisamatsu saw the elegance
of middle antiquity in the ideas of “aware” (sensitivity) and “mono no
aware” (sensitivity to things). He caught the sublimity of the medieval
period in the notion of “yūgen” (profound), and its elegance in “ushin”
(discriminating), the opposite of which, mushin (imprudent, witty, or
jesting), constituted the humorous side of the times. “Iki” (chic) was
the elegance of the recent past, while “sabi” (loneliness in the midst of
brilliant beauty) marked its sublimity and “kokkei” (comic) its humor.9
Since the 1960s, aesthetic categories have provided a reliable strong-
hold for literary historians in their discussions of major literary works.
It would take them a few decades before they would acknowledge their
indebtedness to the work of Japanese colleagues from the departments
of philosophy and aesthetics, and only a few, actually, did.10
8
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics (Tokyo: Cen-
tre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1963), p. 8. Ōnishi had published Yūgen to Aware
(Yūgen and Aware) in 1939, Fūga Ron: Sabi no Kenkyū (On Refinement: A study
on Sabi) in 1940, and Man’yōshū no Shizen Kanjō (Feelings Toward Nature in the
Man’yōshū) in 1943.
9
The complete scheme appears in Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, The Vocabulary of Japanese
Literary Aesthetics, p. 9.
10
A good case in point is the work of the literary historian Makoto Ueda, who in
1967 authored a pioneering work on Japanese theories on art, Literary and Art Theo-
We must wait until the 1980s before witnessing the beginning of a

serious engagement with issues of aesthetics and philosophy in Japa-
nese studies. One of the first examples came from the work of Toshi-
hiko Izutsu, a Japanese Islamist who had turned his attention to the
aesthetics and poetics of pre-modern Japan. The publication in 1981
of his landmark study, The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthet-
ics of Japan, was more welcomed by scholars of philosophy and reli-
gion than by literary historians.11 The latter felt some discomfort with
the philosophical idiom in the Izutsu’s discussion of waka and haiku.
Steven Heine, a specialist of Dōgen’s (1200–1253) philosophy and a
philosopher in his own right, welcomed the new, phenomenological
direction taken by the Izutsus, praising them for making “significant
inroads both methodologically and conceptually in formulating a phi-
losophy of the Japanese sense of beauty.”12 He, also, highlighted the
fact that this approach was “rather novel in English-language stud-
ies.” With Toshihiko Izutsu the category of ushin ceases to be simply
“a deeply felt poetic emotion,” as Hisamatsu had noted in The Vocabu-
lary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics. Referring to the second volume of
Ōnishi Yoshinori’s Bigaku (Aesthetics, 1969), Izutsu disengages from
the methodology that literary historians had used for several decades—
ries in Japan (Cleveland, Ohio: The Press of Western Reserve University). In the book,
we find a chapter in which Nō theater and its major writer, Zeami, are discussed in
terms of yūgen and sublimity (“Zeami on the Art of the Nō drama: Imitation, Yūgen,
and Sublimity”). It will take Ueda almost twenty-five years before he would recognize
the role played by Ōnishi Yoshinori in the formation of aesthetic categories commonly
used by literary historians. See Makoto Ueda, “Yūgen and Erhabene: Ōnishi Yoshi-
nori’s Attempt to Synthesize Japanese and Western Aesthetics,” in J. Thomas Rimer,
ed., Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 282–299. “Sabi” is the keyword in Ueda’s article
on “Bashō on the Art of the Haiku: Impersonality in Poetry,” which is included in
Nancy G. Hume, Japanese Aesthetics and Culture, although, again, no reference is
made to the genealogy of the concept. Makoto Ueda also contributed the entry on
“aesthetics” (bigaku) to the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1983).
This encyclopedia introduces Japanese aesthetics according to basic aesthetic catego-
ries, such as fūryū (elegant, tasteful, artistic), mono no aware (empathetic appreciation
of ephemeral beauty), okashi (delightful, charming), yojō (overtones), yūgen (mystery,
darkness, depth, elegance, ambiguity, calm, transience, and sadness), wabi (simple,
austere type of beauty with a serene, transcendental frame of mind), sabi (old age,
loneliness, resignation, and tranquility), and iki and sui (urbane, chic, bourgeois type
of beauty with undertones of sensuality).
11
Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu, The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of
Japan (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981).
12
Heine’s book review appeared in Philosophy East and West 34:2 (April 1984), pp.
227–228.
8 chapter one
i.e., to look at the mode of ushin as an external form of linguistic

expression. Instead, he interpreted it as “the inner configuration of
poetic expression.”13 Izutsu problematizes the encounter between the
subjectivity of the poet and the natural objects of the poet’s descrip-
tions, focusing on the totality of associations that come to fill the
semantic field of the poetic act—what Ōnishi Yoshinori had called
an invisible aesthetic “resonator” hidden under even a tiny piece of
Nature. In other words, Izutsu pulls away from a “syntactic” reading
of Japanese literary texts—readings that had created major problems
for the gifted translators of the 1960s and 1970s, forcing them to make
excuses by defending the alleged “poverty” of linguistic expression and
the alleged lack of organizational structure of the Japanese classics.14
Instead, he focuses on a “semantic” field which works very similarly to
the notion of “place” (basho) developed by the Japanese philosopher
Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945): a place where subject and object, man
and nature come together, a field of non-temporal associations which
explains the alleged minimalism of Japanese expression as the result of
the over-determination of a language that words cannot easily contain.
The question is not whether a poet fails to express reality in a “logical”
way. The problem is that the Japanese language contains much more
than what is syntactically articulated in a poem. As Heine has pointed
out, Izutsu’s project highlights the fact that “the multiplicity of mean-
ings of the semantic field cannot be contained by the syntactic gram-
mar, and therefore require a suggestive and deliberately ambiguous
expression which opens up rather than obstructs their philosophical
ground.”15
Izutsu’s basho is actually a “threefold field,” which he defines
“semantic-cognitive-contemplative.” He calls “Nature-field” the field
in which the subjective moments of perception, vision, cognition and
the objective presence of the being of nature act in unison in the pro-
13
Japan, p. 17.
14
See, for example, the following assessment of Kenkō’s Tsuresuregusa by its trans-
lator: “Kenkō’s views on aesthetics or on gentlemanly behavior make up a coherent
argument, but on other matters we find contradictions . . . Some contradictions may be
the result of the casual manner of composition, random thoughts jotted down over a
period of time, but in any case, Kenkō is a suggestive rather than a systematic thinker.
Essays in Idleness, despite such inconsistencies and despite a number of uninterest-
ing sections on forgotten ceremonials and usages, is an attractive and moving work.”
Donald Keene, Essays in Idleness, pp. xxi–xxii.
15
Steven Heine, Philosophy East and West 34:2 (April 1984), p. 228.
duction of a poem. Man (the poet) and nature (the alleged object of
representation) belong to the same field. The presence of nature is not
denied by the imposition of the poet’s conceptual scheme over a real-
ity that only exists in the mind of human beings. At the same time,
nature produces and informs the conceptual schemes that the poet
employs while talking about nature. This is not simply a matter of a
thinking “mind” (kokoro) and “words” (kotoba) expressing an alleged
external reality. There is no exteriority to the act of the Japanese poet.
Kokoro and kotoba, the primary ingredients of Japanese poetics, are
parts and parcel of Izutsu’s basho, the associative, non-linear, non-
sequential place of waka. What is perceived by Western readers as
the ambiguity of poetic language is nothing but the articulation of the
awareness of (or logic behind) “the insubstantiality and delimitation
of the human existential field.”16 Such awareness is not the result of
a logic based on the false assumption that the mind can locate itself
outside the field of cognition, so as to enable itself to know and possess
an external object. The awareness can only come from the inside of the
fragility of human existence of which good poetry is the most eloquent
voice. Man cannot step over the boundaries of the field in which he
exists, although he knows that the limitations of his existence hide the
unarticulated reality that lies beyond him. Paradoxically, man is aware
of what he does not know (negative form of awareness) or, at least,
he has a sense of the unarticulated—what Izutsu, following Nishida,
calls Nothingness. The perception of what is not comes to what is (the
being of man) from art and the beauty that successful art is able to
convey. Izutsu sees in the “nine stages” of a Nō actor as defined by the
playwright Zeami (1363?–1443?) a guide to an articulation of a seman-
tic field that syntactic world of words and grammar fail to articulate.
Seen from this perspective, “aesthetic categories” cease to be matters
of style and begin to work as existential categories with ethical as well
as aesthetic implications. The aesthetics of the way of tea (wabi), then,
point to “the destitution, deprivation, dispossession, forlornness, deso-
lation, distress, languishment” of human life.17 That is to say, while
being “an ideal in tea ceremony” to use Hisamatsu Sen’ichi’s words,
wabi has also the potential of being developed into an ethics of old
16
Japan, p. 28.
17
Japan, p. 48.
10 chapter one
age and death, “the ephemeral coagulation of phenomenal things and

their dissolution.”18 This brings us back to Nothingness, the non-phe-
nomenal, non-articulated whole, the blank space of the non-expressed
totality of nature and human affairs that only the minimalist linguistic
structure of a haiku can articulate—“a magical dot by which a mere
space transforms itself into a ‘blank space.’ ”19
Toshihiko Izutsu’s insights might not have been so striking for
Western scholars such as David A. Dilworth and Valdo H. Viglielmo,
who in the 1960s and 1970s were pioneering the study of Japanese
philosophy in general and of Nishida Kitarō in particular.20 However,
to the majority of Japan specialists trained in Japan’s literary classics,
the application of Nishidean philosophy to the reading of waka was
definitely novel and not necessarily welcomed, as the lack of reviews
in journals on Japanese studies attests. The early 1980s witnessed the
publication of another book on the Japanese literary arts that brought
matters of philosophy and aesthetics to bear on discussions of Nō the-
ater and waka, William R. LaFleur’s The Karma of Words: Buddhism
and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan (1983). LaFleur, who special-
izes in Japanese religions and ethics, traced the Buddhist genealogies
of aesthetic categories such as yūgen, following the lead of Hisamatsu
Sen’ichi’s The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics: “Yūgen as
an aesthetics quality was esteemed throughout the medieval period.
In the subtle overtones of its symbolic statements, one discerns the
influence of Buddhist philosophy . . .”21 LaFleur examines this aesthetic
18
Ibidem, p. 58.
19
Ibidem, p. 74. The magical dot of the blank space is the one analyzed by Vĕra Lin-
hartová, a scholar of Japanese art from the Czechoslovak Republic who works at the
Guimet Museum in Paris. Her monumental translation volume of theoretical state-
ments on Japanese art from the ninth to the nineteenth century is titled Sur un Fond
Blanc (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
20
Valdo H. Viglielmo’s English translation of Nishida’s Zen no Kenkyū (A Study
of Good) appeared in 1960 from the presses of the Japanese Government Printing
Bureau. In 1973, together with David A. Dilworth, he translated Nishida’s Geijutsu to
Dōtoku (Art and Morality) for the University Press of Hawaii. David A. Dilworth’s
translation of Nishida’s “The Forms of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and
West Seen from the Metaphysical Perspective” appeared in 1969 in the Eastern Bud-
dhist. In 1970, Dilworth translated Nishida’s Fundamental Problems of Philosophy:
The World of Action and the Dialectical World, which appeared in two volumes from
Sophia University Press.
21
The quotation appears in William R. LaFleur, The Karma of Words: Buddhism
and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983), p. 82. The original text appears in Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, The Vocabulary of Japa-
nese Literary Aesthetics, p. 5.
category in light of Buddhist scriptures such as the Lotus Sutra and

the Mo-ho chih-kuan (Jpn. Makashikan, Great Concentration and
Insight)—foundational scriptures for the Tendai school.22 He points
out the “harmonizing” nature of the Lotus Sutra and its power to bring
contradictions into unity. On the same lines, the Mo-ho chih-kuan
“involves a rejection and refutation of ontological dualism” as a result
of the philosophical/meditational act of standstill contemplation.23 The
collapsing of the duality between the subject and the object of contem-
plation that LaFleur finds spelled out in the philosophy which under-
lines the practice of meditation is also at work in the acts of poetic
creation and consumption. Emphasis on the dialectics of non-discrim-
ination and the high usage on the part of poets of negative particles
in their compositions inform the attitude that is expected from the
readers of the poem: a merging of their subjectivities into the images
presented by the poet, to the point that one’s subjectivity is eventually
erased in the moment of aesthetic experience. The practice of medita-
tion on the part of a monk becomes the paradigm for the apprecia-
tion of a medieval Japanese poem. Ōnishi Yoshinori provides LaFleur
with the bridge from religious practice to the attitude needed for an
appreciation of Japanese art. A quotation from Yūgen to Aware (Yūgen
and Aware, 1939) allows LaFleur to argue that yūgen is an aesthetic
experience that “participates in the structure of shikan thought and
meditation” inasmuch as it implies a “collapse of the distance between
object and subject:”
. . . when all of one’s “ego” has been transformed into the datum of nature
and when one has penetrated into the arena of shikan (standstill)—that
is, into the locus of absorption into the vision of pure tranquility—then
nature and mind or object and subject will have become one and the
same. At this point we should say that all aspects of existence (German:
Sein) seem to be directly and simultaneously present in a split second of
time, and the individual’s existence is the same as the totality’s, and the
22
In the 1970s Richard B. Pilgrim, a scholar of Japanese religions, had pioneered
the study of yūgen and sabi as “religio-aesthetic” categories. See his article, “The Artis-
tic Way and the Religio-Aesthetic Tradition in Japan,” Philosophy East and West 27:3
(July 1977), pp. 285–305. See, also, Richard B. Pilgrim, “Intervals (Ma) in Space and
Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan,” in Charles Wei-hsun
Fu and Steven Heine, eds., Japan: Its Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 55–80.
23
William R. LaFleur, The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in
Medieval Japan, p. 88.
12 chapter one
microcosm is amplified in the macrocosm. This is the unique aspect of

this aesthetic experience.24
However, LaFleur hastens to add that a poem does not bring about
a fusion into an undifferentiated entity between the observer and the
observed, but that it discloses “the fundamental interdependence of the
two.”25 This insight comes to him from the Buddhist notion of code-
pendent origination, i.e., an understanding in which we see the way
everything is interconnected—that there is nothing separate, nothing
standing alone. In other words, the way Buddhists reacted “with a
sense of awe (myō ᅱ)”26 to the dimension of depth in the universe
was similar to the way a poet like Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204)
approached the world, as one can see from his poems. And, it is also
the same as the attitude that is expected of the readers of Shunzei’s
poems, who must understand the aesthetics of yūgen in order to fully
appreciate Shunzei’s work. It is interesting to notice that in the late
1870s Nishi Amane (1829–1897) incorporated this “awe” (myō) into
his understanding of the word “aesthetics,” which he translated with
the Japanese word “bimyōgaku” ⟤ᅱቇ (lit., the science of beauty and
awe).27
The idea of a “Japanese contemplative aesthetics” was also champi-
oned by Steven Heine who, in an article which appeared in the East-
ern Buddhist in 1990 noticed the importance of the notion of “yūgen”
in the explanation of the famous “A Dialogue on Language between
a Japanese and an Inquirer” by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).28
I believe that discussions of this dialogue are the starting point of a
second wave in the study of Japanese aesthetics—a wave that began in
the last decade of the twentieth century and that has continued to this
day. This second wave is much more informed in matters of philoso-
24
Medieval Japan, pp. 102–103. Ōnishi’s original text appears in Ōnishi Yoshinori,
Yūgen to Aware (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939), p. 100.
25
Medieval Japan, p. 105.
26
Ibidem, p. 106.
27
Nishi Amane used the word bimyōgaku in his treatise Bimyō Gakusetsu (A The-
ory on Beauty and Awe, 1878). See Michael F. Marra, “The Creation of the Vocabulary
of Aesthetics in Meiji Japan,” in J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Japanese Art of the Modern Age
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, forthcoming).
28
The English translation of Heidegger’s “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache”
appears in Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 1–54.
phy and aesthetics that the one that I have described earlier, mainly for
two reasons: on the one hand, an opening on the part of a few literary
scholars to works of their colleagues in philosophy departments, and,
on the other, an increased engagement with Japan on the part of phi-
losophers and aestheticians. Heidegger’s “Dialogue” is an extremely
fruitful departing point for a serious discussion of Japanese aesthetics
since it brings into conversation philosophers (the Inquirer, or Martin
Heidegger, who talks about the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shūzō) and
a literary historian (the Japanese, or Tezuka Tomio, a professor of Ger-
man literature at the University of Tōkyō), who engage topics such as
language, poetry and aesthetics. The “Dialogue”—a fictional exchange,
which Heidegger wrote in 1959 based on a real encounter between
Heidegger and Tezuka Tomio (1903–1983) in 1954—centers on the
aesthetic category of “iki” as developed by Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941) in
his bestseller Iki no Kōzō (The Structure of ‘Iki,’ 1930). Heine makes the
point that the choice of “iki” as the aesthetic category under discussion
might well be the cause for the failure of the dialogue—a failure that
Heidegger himself looked for in an attempt to demonstrate the impos-
sibility of communication between different houses of Being, i.e., dif-
ferent languages. In other words, for Heidegger, the dialogue must
fail. Heine finds this conclusion drastic and misleading, and feels that
Buddhist-influenced yūgen poetics may be a more appropriate start-
ing point for the conversation with Heidegger than “ ‘floating world’
stylishness.”29 For Heine, language (kotoba) is not “inexhaustible to
our thinking,” as Heidegger argues in the “Dialogue,” if one thinks
that in Japanese contemplative aesthetics—“that is, literature and lit-
erary criticism based on some form of Buddhist mediation, includ-
ing shikan, zazen and nembutsu in Shunzei, Teika, Dōgen, Chōmei,
Kenkō, Zeami and others”—language is connected to mind (kokoro) as
“authenticated spiritual intentionality.”30 This inseparability between
kotoba and kokoro—a spiritual realization resulting from meditation
that is at the basis of Japanese poetic discourse—actually hides the
answer to Heidegger’s question of how to articulate things as they are
or, to say it with the poet Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) dear to Heide-
gger, to articulate the fact that “the rose does have no why; it blossoms
29
Steven Heine, “The Flower Blossoms ‘Without Why’: Beyond the Heidegger-
Kuki Dialogue on Contemplative Language,” in The Eastern Buddhist, Autumn 1990,
pp. 64–65.
30
Ibidem, p. 64.
14 chapter one
without reason,/forgetful of itself, oblivious to our vision.”31 For Heine,

yūgen would have been an answer to Heidegger’s question inasmuch
as it brings “into unconcealment by preserving concealment.”32 The
poet composing in the style of yūgen discloses the nature of reality by
immersing it in the deepest haziness. Heidegger’s original Saying is a
matter related to the disclosure of “nearness” (Nahheit) rather than to
explanation or critique—a nearness that the associative procedure of
poetry in the yūgen mode successfully captures.33
In addition to Heine’s insight on the aesthetic category of yūgen
which might have been more congenial to a development of Heideg-
ger’s “Dialogue,” recent studies on “iki” and Kuki Shūzō have invig-
orated discussions on Japanese aesthetics, beginning with a recent
English translation of Kuki’s Structure of Iki.34 Works on Kuki by
philosophers Stephen Light, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, and Graham
Mayeda have dealt with the impact of existential phenomenology on
Kuki’s creation of the category of “iki.”35 Studies on Kuki’s poetics and
the politics of Kuki’s hermeneutics have furthered enhanced knowl-
edge of Kuki among Western readers, who are provided with a wealth
of information on the hermeneutical process undergone by a Japanese
aesthetic category built with the aid of French and German philoso-
31
Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. Maria Shrady (New York: Pau-
list Press, 1986), p. 54.
32
Steven Heine, “The Flower Blossoms ‘Without Why’: Beyond the Heidegger-
Kuki Dialogue on Contemplative Language,” p. 76.
33
For different responses to Heidegger’s Dialogue see Michael F. Marra, “On
Japanese Things and Words: An Answer to Heidegger’s Question,” Philosophy East
and West 54:4 (October 2004), pp. 555–568; and Michael F. Marra, “A Dialogue on
Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer: Kuki Shūzō’s Answers to Heidegger’s
Questions,” in Victor Hori, ed., The Kyōto School: Neglected Themes and Hidden Vari-
ations (Nagoya: Nanzan Institute of Religion and Culture, 2008), pp. 56–77.
34
Hiroshi Nara, trans., The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki
Shūzō, with a Translation of Iki no Kōzō (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
2004). An earlier English translation of Iki no Kōzō appeared in 1997: John Clark,
trans., Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki (Sydney: Power Publications,
1997).
35
Stephen Light, Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre: Influence and Counter-Influ-
ence in The Early History of Existential Phenomenology (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1987); Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, “Iki, Style, Trace: Kuki Shūzō and
the Spirit of Hermeneutics,” and “Contingency and the ‘Time of the Dream’: Kuki
Shūzō and French Prewar Philosophy,” in his Place and Dream: Japan and the Virtual
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004); Graham Mayeda, Time, Space and Ethics in the Philoso-
phy of Watsuji Tetsurō, Kuki Shūzō, and Martin Heidegger (New York and London:
Routledge, 2006).
phies.36 Kuki’s work has also had an impact on the aesthetics of the
Japanese philosopher Ōhashi Ryōsuke, whose Kire no Kōzō: Nihonbi
to Gendai Sekai (The Structure of Cuts: Japanese Beauty and the Con-
temporary World, 1986) is translated into German.37
In the mid 1990s I discussed the aesthetic category of “yūgen” in
light of the “weak ontology” that readers of Heidegger such as the
Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo had highlighted in their study of
the German philosopher.38 Inspired by a training in classical Japanese
literature, my analysis of medieval poetry was done in light of herme-
neutical practices developed in the eighteenth century by Japanese phi-
lologists such as Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) and Fujitani Mitsue.39
At the same time, I analyzed Norinaga’s doctrine of mono no aware
(moving power of things) in relationship to the experience of what
Ōnishi Yoshinori had called the “excitement” (kandō; German, vereh-
ren) of the aesthetic adventure. In other words, I traced the adven-
ture of the pliant content of what makes traditional Japanese aesthetic
categories: weak subjectivity (mushin), impermanence (mujō), the
logic of negation (hitei no ronri), brittleness (wabi and sabi), haziness
(yūgen), and so on. I wondered how such “weak” elements that could
be easily incorporated into Heidegger’s “exercise in mortality,”40 and
made into the pillars of a postmodern philosophy of a weak ontology
(as executed by Vattimo in his philosophical project known as “weak
thought” or pensiero debole), would find themselves placed within the
boundaries of strong structures leading to the formation of very strong
subjects: Norinaga’s hermeneutics of disclosure of a native truth, or
Ōnishi’s construction of aesthetic categories that reduce the difference
of particularity to the unifying power of a general concept. That is to
36
Michael F. Marra, Kuki Shūzō: A Philosopher’s Poetry and Poetics (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004); Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial
Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1996).
37
Ōhashi Ryōsuke, Das “Schöne” in Japan: philosophisch-ästhetische Relfexionen zu
Geschichte und Moderne (Köln: DuMont, 1994). See also Ōhashi’s German translation
of excerpts from philosophers of the Kyōto School, Die Philosophie der Kyōto-Schule:
Texte und Einführung (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1990).
38
Michele Marra, “Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning,” Philosophy
East and West 45:3 (July 1995), pp. 367–386.
39
I discussed Motoori Norinaga’s aesthetics and hermeneutical practices in The
Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2007).
40
This expression is by Gianni Vattimo, La Societá Trasparente (Milan: Garzanti,
1898), p. 78.
16 chapter one
say, I analyzed the formation of aesthetic categories within the context

of Japanese modernity and in light of the formation of alternative phi-
losophies that could be easily developed in postmodern times.41
While working in the late 1980s, early 1990s, on the political impli-
cations of Japanese medieval literary texts I noticed a linguistic insuffi-
ciency in the articulation of aesthetic discourses in pre-modern times.
As the title of my book The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclu-
sion in Medieval Japanese Literature attests, my research focused on
the ideological underpinnings of discourses on language, writing, and
poetry from the ninth to the fourteenth century. It was a contestation
of the alleged autonomy of aesthetic practices based on a reversal of
Norinaga’s depoliticizing acts (mono no aware) and of Kant’s theory
of “purposiveness without a purpose.”42 In a sense, the book was the
record of a personal discontent towards the first wave in the study of
Japanese aesthetics. At the same time, the book was also very much
indebted to the painstaking research of literary historians who, like
me, could not benefit from a clear view of the development of Japa-
nese aesthetic discourses from pre-modern to modern times. In other
words, independently from whether the literary historian was Japa-
nese or Western, everybody seemed to share a common language that
modernity had made available to anyone who was engaged in doing
so-called “critical” work. Consciously or unconsciously, the past tended
to be seen from the lenses of aesthetics, a product of modernity—
to be more precise, a product of Western modernity. The writing
subject was rarely problematized in “explanations” of Japan, as if the
method itself guaranteed objectivity to the portrayal of a reality that,
41
I further developed these thoughts in the article “Japan’s Missing Alternative:
‘Weak Thought’ and the Hermeneutics of Slimness,” Versus 83/84 (May–December
1999), pp. 215–241.
42
“By following the aesthetic approach, it becomes immediately clear that the lit-
erary act can only be conceived in an a-historical, a-political setting that justifies the
difference between a historical record, a political statement, and a ‘literary’ text. The
line separating political and metaphorical language is sharp and clear. Two different
bodies of epistemological assumptions fill the rubric of politics and literature, exclud-
ing through the differences involved all possibilities of contamination between the two
fields. Literature becomes the ‘pure’ realm of fantastic gratification, superreal creation,
and imaginative endeavor. The development of modern aesthetics has thus brought
about the tendency of de-contextualizing, de-pragmaticizing, and de-politicizing the
literary text.” Michele Marra, The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in
Medieval Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), p. 1.
as a matter of fact, profoundly resisted any attempt of explanation.43

I personally felt that the notion of aesthetics needed to be subjected
to genealogical scrutiny, and that the cooptation of aesthetics in the
production of hermeneutical strategies that were directly related to the
formation of subject and state needed to be spelled out. At the same
time, the issue of hermeneutical hegemony that justified the confi-
dence of scholars in their appropriations of foreign objects had to be
confronted. These basic questions led to the publication in 1999 of
a Reader in modern Japanese aesthetics—a preliminary anthology of
English translations of works from Japanese scholars who should be
credited with introducing the discipline of aesthetics to Japan (Nishi
Amane, Tsubouchi Shōyō, Okakura Tenshin, Ōnishi Hajime, and
Takayama Chogyū), from aestheticians who had developed the notion
of “aesthetic category” (Ōnishi Yoshinori and Kusanagi Masao), from
philosophers of the Kyōto and Tōkyō Schools (Nishitani Keiji and
Imamichi Tomonobu), and from contemporary philosophers and lit-
erary critics (Sakabe Megumi and Karatani Kōjin).44 The Reader was
followed two years later by a companion volume which included Eng-
lish translations of articles authored by Japanese aestheticians on the
aesthetic systems of the thinkers mentioned in the Reader, with a few
additions (Ernest F. Fenollosa, Mori Ōgai, Shimamura Hōgetsu, Aizu
Yaichi, Ōtsuka Yasuji, Watsuji Tetsurō, Abe Jirō, Nakagawa Shigeaki,
Fukada Yasukazu, Nishida Kitarō, Ueda Juzō, and Kuki Shūzō).45
These two projects benefited from a conference held at the Uni-
versity of California, Los Angeles, in 1998, in which major Japanese
aestheticians (Amagasaki Akira, Hamashita Masahiro, Kambayashi
Tsunemichi, Ōhashi Ryōsuke, Otabe Tanehisa, and Sasaki Ken’ichi),
Japanese art historians (Inaga Shigemi and Ōta Takao), Japanese liter-
ary historians (Haga Tōru and Suzuki Sadami), and a Japanese histo-
rian working in the West (Naoki Sakai) met with Western philosophers
43
This was one of the major insights that a literary historian, H. Richard Okada,
developed in a masterful study of pre-modern Japanese literary texts, Figures of Resis-
tance: Language, Poetry, and Narrating in The Tale of Genji and Other Mid-Heian
Texts (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991). For a discussion of hege-
monic practices in the reading of a major Japanese classic, Genji Monogatari, see his
article, “Domesticating The Tale of Genji,” Journal of the American Oriental Society
110:1 (January–March 1990), pp. 60–70.
44
Michele Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1999).
45
Michael F. Marra, ed., and trans., A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001).
18 chapter one
(Paolo Fabbri, John Maraldo, Mark Meli, Graham Parkes, and Gianni
Vattimo), Western literary historians (Thomas LaMarre, J. Thomas
Rimer, Haruo Shirane, and Meera Viswanathan), and a Japanese
American historian (Stefan Tanaka). This project was very ambitious
inasmuch as it was meant to tear down the thick walls separating dis-
ciplines (aesthetics, art, literature, philosophy, history) in an effort to
inquire about the aesthetic assumption that every scholar makes when
dealing with his or her object of study. At the same time, the panel-
ists addressed the issue of interpretative models in pre-modern times
which could be presented as alternatives to current models informed
by aesthetics—the beginning of a history of Japanese hermeneutics
that is yet to be written.46
I embarked on all these projects in an effort to prepare the ground
for a third wave of researchers who come with a formidable knowledge
of philosophy. These younger thinkers will need to pay attention to the
details of their discipline while not neglecting the historical develop-
ment of the field of Japanese aesthetics. On an institutional level, the
third wave was made possible by the creation in Japan of the first Chair
of Japanese philosophy in 1995 at the University of Kyōto under the
headship of Fujita Masakatsu. This addition to the Faculty of Letters at
Kyōto University is currently enabling several young scholars trained
in Western philosophy in the West to pursue their study of Japanese
philosophy in Japan. Up to 1995, Japan scholars from the West were
forced to pursue their field work in departments of religion, history,
or literature—departments which are notoriously impervious to philo-
sophical jargon. The training of philosophically minded scholars in
the newly established department at Kyōdai has begun to produce a
wealth of research, particularly on the Kyōto School. Graduates from
this department are expected to take the lead in the study of Japanese
aesthetics in the West.47
46
The conference papers are collected in Michael F. Marra, ed., Japanese Herme-
neutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2002). For an examination of the hermeneutical challenge in approach-
ing Japanese literary texts, see my introduction to Michael F. Marra, ed., PAJLS—
Hermeneutical Strategies: Methods of Interpretation in the Study of Japanese Literature,
Vol. 5, Summer 2004, pp. 1–16.
47
See, for example, Matteo Cestari, “The Problem of Aesthetics in Nishida Kitarō,”
in Michael F. Marra, ed., PAJLS—Hermeneutical Strategies: Methods of Interpretation
in the Study of Japanese Literature, pp. 175–191.
To this day, there are not many studies of Japan in English from
a genuinely aesthetic perspective by scholars trained in philosophy.
Among the few we find the work of Yuriko Saito, a philosopher who
specializes in environmental aesthetics.48 She reminds us that in Japa-
nese cultural tradition aesthetic considerations go well beyond the tea
ceremony, flower arrangement, Nō theater, and calligraphy. Aesthet-
ics permeates every aspect of life, including cooking, swordsmanship,
letter writing, etiquette, and “even the execution of ritual suicide.”49
Packaging, “the positive aesthetic experience of concealment and
obscurity,” is a topic that has drawn her attention in recent years.50 She
has also looked at Japanese gardens and the arrangements of rocks, an
art of apparent effortlessness and artlessness.51 And yet, Saito’s work
is still very much under the spell of the cultural history promoted by
the first wave of scholars—a reliance on an unspecified “Zen founda-
tion” for an aesthetics of imperfection and insufficiency, as well as
an emphasis on the same Zen tradition that is praised for allegedly
introducing “a positive celebration of transience, as perhaps most elo-
quently expressed by Kenkō.”52
One finds similar reservations with regard to the only English
publication that is completely dedicated to a comparative analysis of
Japanese aesthetics by an analytical philosopher, Steve Odin’s Artistic
Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative
Aesthetics (2001). The book opens with a superb survey of Western
theories of artistic detachment. However, once the author turns his
attention to Japan, and particularly to yūgen, he immediately falls into
the trap of taking for granted the existence of an alleged “classical
48
Yuriko Saito, “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 56:2 (Spring 1998), pp. 101–111.
49
Yuriko Saito, “Japanese Aesthetics of Packaging,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 57:2 (Spring 1999), p. 257.
50
Ibidem, p. 259.
51
Yuriko Saito, “Representing the Essence of Objects: Art in the Japanese Aesthetic
Tradition,” in Stephen Davies and Ananta Ch. Sukla, eds., Arts and Essence (Westport,
Connecticut: Praeger, 2003), pp. 125–141. Graham Parkes, a philosopher working at
the University of Hawai‘i, has authored an outstanding philosophical essay on “The
Role of Rock in the Japanese Dry Landscape Garden,” in which he analyzes rela-
tionships between religious and aesthetic contemplations. The essay follows Parkes’
translation of François Berthier’s Le Jardin du Ryōanji: Lire le Zen dans les Pierres.
See François Berthier, The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden: Reading Zen in the Rocks
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), pp. 85–145.
52
Yuriko Saito, “The Japanese Aesthetics of Imperfection and Insufficiency,” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55:4 (Autumn 1997), p. 382.
20 chapter one
aesthetics of Japan,” without ever considering the possibility of a mod-

ernist genealogy for the construction of such classical aesthetics.53 At
the same time, he resents ideology critiques of aesthetic detachment
and rejects the political implications of alleged aesthetic attitudes in
medieval Japan that I described in The Aesthetics of Discontent on
the ground that this methodology leads to a “complete reductionism
of poetry into ideology, of aesthetics into politics, of literary art into
power relations.”54 In other words, the philosopher Steve Odin would
like to bring us back to an eighteenth century Kantian world in which
one should “take pleasure in the detached contemplation of beauty for
its own sake.” I would like to encourage philosophers to strongly avoid
providing in the twenty-first century a philosophical justification to
the innocent and pleasurable readings of the Japanese classics pro-
moted by the first waves of scholars. As a matter of fact, this is what
Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West actually accomplishes.55
Things would have been different if the basic question was asked
whether such a thing as “aesthetics” actually existed in medieval Japan.
If indeed it existed, then, how was it formulated? After all, the list of
concepts which today we call “aesthetic categories” of which yūgen was
just one, were nothing but poetic styles aimed at reaching specific rhe-
torical effects on the part of poets. In this sense, Odin’s work, despite
its erudition of Western philosophy, does not move beyond the con-
fines of Nancy G. Hume’s Japanese Aesthetics and Culture, which was
mainly authored by literary historians born in the 1920s and 1930s.
It seems to me that one of the most thought provoking publications
on Japanese aesthetics in the West still remains the issue on Japan that
Akira Tamba and Gilbert Lascault prepared for the Revue Ésthetique
53
“Traditional aesthetic ideals in the Japanese canon of taste—such as aware
(melancholy beauty), miyabi (gracefulness), yūgen (profound mystery), ma (negative
space), wabi (rustic beauty), sabi (simplicity), fūryū (windblown elegance), iki (chic),
and shibumi (elegant restraint)—all contain an element of detached resignation.”
Steve Odin, Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Compara-
tive Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), p. 19. “Those who have
discussed the aesthetic attitude have confined their observations to a specific artist or
thinker. They have failed to recognize it as a recurrent motif running throughout the
Japanese tradition.” (p. 103). “First, I consider explicit theories of artistic detachment
that have been articulated in the classical aesthetics of Japan . . .” (p. 104).
54
Steve Odin, Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Com-
parative Aesthetics, p. 119.
55
For a critique of Odin’s hermeneutics of “disinterestedness,” see the review by
Gregory Golley in The Journal of Religion 83:2 (April 2003), pp. 330–332.
almost twenty years ago.56 It might well be the most complete account
of what has been accomplished in the West with regard to the field
of Japanese aesthetics aside from the study of literary texts. The issue
begins with an article by Imamichi Tomonobu on the cosmological
basis of Japanese aesthetics, examining what he calls “aesthetica folii”
(aesthetics of leaves), “aesthetica floris” (aesthetics of flowers), “aesthet-
ica frugis” (aesthetics of fruits, or yūgen), “aesthetica venti” (aesthetics
of wind), and “aesthetica arboris” (aesthetics of trees). This might well
be a starting point for a study of environmental aesthetics which is
overdue.57 Sakabe Megumi deals with the affective foundation of ethics
and aesthetics in pre-modern Japan. Other articles deal with Japanese
gardens (Tatsui Takenosuke), negative particles in the Japanese sen-
tence (Irène Tamba-Mecz), space and the notion of “ma” (Hashimoto
Noriko), the Japanese milieu and issues of geography (Augustin Ber-
que), emptiness (Anne-Marie Christin), poetry, literature, and religion
(Tsujimura Kōichi, René Sieffert, Yves-Marie Allioux, Ninomiya Mas-
ayuki, Kobayashi Yasuo, and Julie Brock), painting (Érika Peschard-
Erlih), images of Japan in Europe (Françoise Féty), film (Dominique
Noguez and Monique Sabbah), theatre (Kawatake Toshio and George
Banu), yūgen in relation to kimonos (Ōhara Reiko), swords (Alain
Briot), and music (Daniel Charles). Although these articles are no
more than sketches waiting to be further developed, they are good
indicators of topics which could be easily included in future discussion
of Japanese aesthetics.58
However, future studies will need to take into consideration the
massive challenge that post-war Japanese art has posed to the ratio-
nality of meaning. In this sense art historians seem to be ahead of the
aestheticians. Reiko Tomii, co-founder of PoNJA-Gen-Kon (a post-
1945 Japanese art discussion group), has described the development
of Japanese art after 1945 as a debate between non-art (hi-geijutsu)
56
Revue Éthetique 18:90, Japon (Paris: Jean-Michele Place, 1990).
57
For a beginning in this direction, see Toshio Kuwako, “The Philosophy of Envi-
ronmental Correlation in Chu Hsi,” in Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Berthrong, eds.,
Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Hearth, and Humans (Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions,
1998), pp. 151–168.
58
Another important hint could come from the work on the ethnical implications
of aesthetics by Sasaki Ken’ichi, who has published in English Aesthetics on Non-
Western Principles—Version 0.5 (Maastricht: Department of Theory, Jan van Eyck
Akademie, 1998).
22 chapter one
and anti-art (han-geijutsu).59 The former, exemplified by Gutai (Con-

crete Art Association), moved to dismantle the institution of art; the
latter, represented by Monoha (School of Things), was a descent into
the everyday in its critique of the making of art. Discussions of the
aesthetic underpinning and consequences of such movements are still
to be written in the West.60 It is doubtful whether Japanese aesthetics
in the twenty-first century should be reduced exclusively to the idea of
“Superflat” recently advanced by the artist Murakami Takashi. How-
ever, this original idea has found fertile territory in the U.S. thanks to
Murakami’s Superflat trilogy which has reached a large public thanks
to publications and exhibitions.61 The richly illustrated and persua-
sively argued catalogue Little Boy, which accompanied the exhibition
of Tokyo Pop at the Japan Society in New York in 2005, cannot escape
the attention of a younger audience well versed in the booming indus-
try of manga and anime. It remains to be seen whether the massive
attacks on meaning advanced by Japan’s avant-gardes in the thirty
years following the end of World War Two will result in the total
dissolution of meaning and the construction of a two-dimensional
society in which withdrawal has replaced engagement, as in the case
of the otaku generation, and the difference between virtual and real
has disappeared. Or, whether groups more sensitive to issues related
to the violence, exploitation, pollution of post-capitalistic, global soci-
eties—in other words, more marginal groups—will emerge from the
ruins of post-avant-garde Japan.62 This is a history that still needs to
be made in order to be recorded.
59
“Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar
Japan, 1950–1970)” is the title of an exhibition held at the Getty Research Institute in
Los Angeles from March 6 to June 3, 2007. The symposium “Rajikaru: Experimenta-
tions in Japanese Art, 1950–1975” took place at the Getty Center on April 27–28.
Reiko Tomii was one of the organizers, as well as a featured speaker.
60
Thomas R. H. Havens provides a historical account of Japan’s avant-garde move-
ments in his Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-Garde
Rejection of Modernism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006). However, this
publication does not contain sustained discussions of aesthetic debates.
61
This was a six-year project which began in 2000 with the publication of the book
Super Flat, continued with the exhibition Coloriage in 2002, and ended with the Little
Boy exhibition of 2005. See Takashi Murakami, ed., Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s
Exploding Subculture (Yale: Yale University Press, 2005).
62
An example could be an aesthetics derived from the work of artists such as Shi-
mada Yoshiko, who has confronted the issue of involuntary prostitution of Asian
women (the so-called “comfort women”) and the violence behind the aestheticization
of Japan’s past.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CREATION OF THE VOCABULARY OF

AESTHETICS IN MEIJI JAPAN
The formation in Japan of the notion of the “fine arts” (bijutsu; lit.,
“acts pertaining to beauty”) in the Western sense of the word took
place during the early Meiji period (1868–1912), at the same time that
the idea of “beauty” underwent a massive redefinition. If we accept
the statement by the literary critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983) that
until the Meiji period in Japan there were beautiful cherry blossoms
but no idea of beauty, we might even argue that “beauty” in the aes-
thetic sense of the word was discovered in Japan in the second half of
the nineteenth century.1 In other words, only the introduction to Japan
of the science of aesthetics allowed a redefinition of the particularity of
beautiful objects in terms of the universality of the concept of beauty.
Japan’s encounter with the idea of beauty is linked with the creation
of the first dictionaries, when a need was felt to find adequate words
to translate the Dutch noun “shoonheid,” and the Dutch adjective
“schoon.” The scholar of Dutch studies Inamura Sanpaku (1758–1811)
used the word “birei” ⟤㤀 to translate both in his Dutch-Japanese
dictionary Haruma Wage (A Japanese Rendition of Halma’s Diction-
ary, 1796). The characters “bi” and “rei” were historically associated
with something worthy of praise for its being good, appealing, and
attractive.
When we look at the history in Japan of the character “bi” we see
it making an appearance at the very beginning of the first poem from
the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, 759), as a means
to embellish the words “basket” (ko) and “trowel” ( fukushi): “With a
basket,/a pretty basket (miko),/and a trowel,/a pretty trowel (mibuku-
shi) in hand.”2 In the tenth century Ki no Yoshimochi (d. 919) used
1
Kobayashi made this point in his 1942 book, Taima.
2
Man’yōshū 1:1, by Emperor Yūryaku (r. 456–479). English translation by Edwin
A. Cranston, A Waka Anthology. Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 163. The original text appears in Kojima Noriyuki,
et al., eds., Man’yōshū, 1, NKBZ 2 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1971), p. 63.
24 chapter two
the character “bi” in his Chinese Preface to the Kokinshū (Collec-

tion of Ancient and Modern Poems, 905), with reference to “beauti-
ful landscapes” (bikei ⟤᥊), as we read in the following statement:
“Whenever there were good seasons or beautiful scenes (bikei), the
earlier Emperors commanded their banquet guests to compose Japa-
nese poems (waka).3” The character “bi” came to be used to write the
adjective “utsukushi,” which included the meanings of “darling, cute,
beautiful, and splendid.” During the late Heian period, “utsuskushi”
lost its restrictive meanings of “darling” and “cute” (the beauty of what
is small),4 when it came to be associated with beautiful natural objects,
as we can see from the following passage in the Ōkagami (The Great
Mirror, ca. 1119): “After walking all over the capital, I located a beauti-
ful (utsukushiki) specimen [i.e. tree], covered with deep red blossoms,
at the house in the western sector.”5
One we turn to the Japanese history of the character “rei,” we see
it appearing in the compound “karei” ૫㤀 in a footnote to a poem
by Empress Iwanohime (4th or 5th century?), the consort of Emperor
Nintoku. “Rei,” which in antiquity was read “uruwashi,” had a variety
of meanings, including “beautiful, proper, earnest, intimate, and cor-
rect.” The compound “karei” means “handsome,” as we see from the
footnote to Iwanohime’s poem: “In the Twenty-Third year of Emperor
Ingyō’s reign (434), Prince Kinashi no Karu was made Crown Prince.
3
English translation by Helen C. McCullough, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial
Anthology of Japanese Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 257. The
original text appears in Okumura Tsuneya, ed., Kokin Wakashū, SNKS 19 (Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, 1978), p. 385.
4
See, for example, the list of “beautiful things” (utsukushiki mono) in Sei Shōnagon’s
(?966–?1017) Makura no Sōshi (The Pillow Book): “The face of a child drawn on a
melon. A baby sparrow that comes hopping up when one imitates the squeak of a
mouse . . . A baby of two or so who is crawling rapidly along the ground. With his
sharp eyes he catches sight of a tiny object and, picking it up with his pretty little
fingers, takes it to show to a grown-up person . . . A young Palace page, who, still quite
small, walks by in ceremonial costume . . . One picks up a tiny lotus leaf that is floating
on a pond and examines it. Not only lotus leaves, but little hollyhock flowers, and
indeed all small things, are most adorable . . .” English translation, with slight modi-
fications, by Ivan Morris, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Volume I (New York:
Columbia University, 1967), pp. 156–157. The original text appears in Matsuo Satoshi
and Nagai Kazuko, eds., Makura no Sōshi, NKBZ 11 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1974),
pp. 298–299.
5
English translation by Helen C. McCullough, Ōkagami: The Great Mirror: Fuji-
wara Michinaga (966–1027) and His Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1980), p. 222. The original text appears in Tachibana Kenji, ed., Ōkagami, NKBZ 20
(Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1974), p. 387.
the vocabulary of aesthetics’ creation in meiji japan 25
His features were handsome ( yōshi karei), and those who looked on
him found themselves in love with him.”6 Ki no Yoshimochi (d. 919)
used the character “rei” in his Chinese Preface, in which we find the
compound “karei” ⪇㤀 with the meaning of “showy, flowery.” Com-
menting on the poetic skills of Kisen (fl. ca 810–824), Yoshimochi
argues that “the language of the Ujiyama monk Kisen is dazzling
(sono kotoba karei), but his poems do not flow smoothly.”7 Sugawara
no Funtoki (899–981) also made use of the character “rei” in a Chi-
nese poem included in the Wakan Rōei Shū (Songs in Chinese and
Japanese, 1012), in which the Chinese character is read “uruwashi”
in Japanese pronunciation: “Secretary Wang’s ‘Orchid Bureau’ was
lovely (rei, uruwashi)/as far as loveliness goes (rei, uruwashikereba),/
but alas! He had only red-cheeked guests;/Hsi Chung-san’s Bamboo
Grove was secluded/as far as seclusion goes,/but we must regret that
his guests were not scholars/of truly noble discourse.”8 Like the ad-
jective “utuskushi,” “uruwashi” also meant “dear” in ancient times.
In this case the word was recorded with a different character (ᗲ),
as we see from the expression “my dear husband” (uruwashizuma)
in the Man’yōshū.9 When written phonetically in Man’yōgana script,
“uruwashi” ቝᵹᵄਯ also referred to the beautiful appearance of
a person, as Ōtomo no Tabito (665–731) indicates in his poem, “Is
it because/my thoughts fly constantly to her,/my handsome darling
(uruwashi to),/that each step I take ahead/should be so desperately
6
Man’yōshu 2:90. English translation by Ian Hideo Levy, Man’yōshu: A Transla-
tion of Japan’s Premier Anthology of Classical Poetry, Volume One (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1981), p. 83. The original text appears in Kojima Noriyuki,
Man’yōshu, 1, p. 117.
7
English translation by Helen C. McCullough, Kokin Wakashū, 1985), p. 257. The
original text appears in Okumura Tsuneya, Kokin Wakashū, p. 386.
8
Wakan Rōei Shū, 557. English translation by J. Thomas Rimer and Jonathan
Chaves, Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing: The Wakan Rōei Shū (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1997), p. 168. The original text appears in Ōsone Shōsuke and
Horiuchi Hideaki, eds., Wakan Rōeishū, SNKS 61 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1983), p. 212.
Funtoki was inspired by a poem from the Wen Hsüan (Literary Selections, 6th c.),
“What is lovely is lovely;/ however, loveliness cannot be exhausted.” Quoted in Ōsone
and Horiuchi, Wakan Rōei Shũ, p. 211, headnote 557.
9
Man’yōshū 4:543, by Kasa Kanamura: “My beloved husband/has gone with the
many retainers/following our Sovereign/in his procession.” English translation by Ian
Hideo Levy, Man’yōshū, pp. 265–266; Kojima Noriyuki, Man’yōshū, 1, p. 321. Some
scholars argue that the character “аi” ᗲ was read “airаshi” in ancient times, and that
the reading “uruwashi” began only in the seventeenth century.
26 chapter two
hard?”10 The nuances of gracefulness and exterior beauty increased in

the literature of the Heian period, as the Genji Monogatari (The Tale
of Genji, ca, 1000) attests: “A superb artist had done the paintings
of Yōkihi, but the brush can convey only so much, and her picture
lacked the breath of life. The face, so like the lotuses in the Taieki Lake
or the willows by the Miō Palace, was no doubt strikingly beautiful
(uruwashiu) in its Chinese way.”11 Here the word “uruwashi” seems
to come to encompass a fascination with a gaudy and showy type of
beauty, an idea that will begin to be more common at the end of the
Middle Ages.
As a translation of “schoon,” Sanpaku also chose the term “yoshi”
ᅢࠪ (good), pointing at something which is likable because of either
its ethical goodness or physical appeal. Already in the Man’yōshū
“yoshi” referred to the fair looks of a person, as in the following poem:
“Despite my efforts/to tie my rope around/Tago Peak, /it is of no avail,/
since her looks are so stunning (sono kao yoki ni).12 “Yoshi,” however,
is a very ambiguous term with a variety of meanings: good (as opposed
to evil), skilled, healthy, intelligent, effective, noble, prosperous, pleas-
ant, friendly, profitable, valuable, auspicious, happy, etc. A famous
tongue-twister from the Man’yōshū plays on a variety of meanings of
the adjective “yoshi,” conjugated in a variety of ways. It is a homage to
the beautiful landscape of the Yoshino mountains, whose name—“the
Fair Field”—incorporates the adjective “good, fair, beautiful, attrac-
tive” ( yoshi): “Good men from the past/took a good look saying what
a good place it was./Take a good look at Yoshino, the good field/which
they declared to be good!/The good men of nowadays should take a
good look.”13
10
Man’yōshū 15:3729, by Nakatomi no Yakamori. English translation by Edwin
A. Cranston, A Waka Anthology, p. 516; Kojima Noriyuki, et al., eds., Man’yōshū, 4,
NKBZ 5 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1975), p. 86.
11
“Kiritsubo” (The Paulownia Pavilion) Chapter. English translation by Royall
Tyler, The Tale of Genji, 1 (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 11. The original text appears
in Ishida Jōji and Shimizu Yoshiko, eds., Genji Monogatari, 1, SNKS 1 (Tokyo:
12
Man’yōshū 14:3411. Kojima Noriyuki, et als., eds., Man’yōshū, 3, NKBZ 4 (Tokyo:
Shōgakukan, 1973), p. 464.
13
Man’yōshū 1:27, by Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–686), who composed this poem on
the Fifth Day of the Fifth Month 679 during an excursion to Yoshino. The original
text, “Yoki hito no/yoshi to yoku mite/yoshi to iishi/Yoshino yoku miyo/yoki hito yoku
mitsu,” appears in Kojima Noriyuki, Man’yōshū, 1, p. 79.
In Sango Benran (Handbook of Three Languages, 1857) the scholar

of French studies Murakami Hidetoshi (1811–1890) translated the
word “beauté” with the character “bi” ⟤ (beauty) accompanied by
the reading “utsukushisa,” the nominal form of the adjective “utsu-
kushi” (beautiful). This appears to have been the first example in
Japan of the use of the character “bi” to indicate beauty. Murakami
reserved the word “birei” for the translation of the French term “gen-
til” (graceful, delicate), indicating that these two characters should be
read “kirei ni naru” (to be graceful). The first Japanese philosophical
dictionary, Tetsugaku Jii (Philosophical Dictionary, 1883) edited by
Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944) and Ariga Nagao (1860–1921), records
two compound words as translations of “beautiful,” kabi ⪇⟤ (lit.,
flowery beauty) and furei ን㤀 (lit., rich beauty).14 The first part of
the Meiji period was characterized by fluidity in the use of a variety of
characters devised to signify the word “beauty,” including “kirei naru
koto” ᄸ㤀࠽࡞੐ (lit., to be mysteriously lovely), “kōtaku” శᴛ (lit.,
brilliance), “bimyō” ⟤ᅱ (lit., charming and wondrous), “shūrei” ⑲㤀
(lit., excellent beauty), and “karei” ૫㤀 (lit., good beauty). “Birei” ⟤㤀
was the most widely used term in the first years of the Meiji era. It was
eventually replaced by the simplified form “bi” ⟤, which thus became
the standard translation for “beauty,” following the example of the
writer Tsubouchi Shōyō (1858–1935), who in 1886 wrote a series of
articles titled “Βi to wa nan zo ya” (“What is Beauty?”, 1886).15
We should not look at the lively debates taking place in Japan during
the last thirty years of the nineteenth century as idle exercises in find-
ing right words. The word “beauty” coming from the West together
with an arsenal of concepts belonging to the field of aesthetics forced
the Japanese intelligentsia to rethink their cultural heritage in terms of
Western ideas. It rerouted intellectual activities that had developed in
Japan over a span of more than a thousand years into new frameworks
of knowledge that used Western sciences as yardsticks for the discus-
sion and evaluation of local cultural products. Questions of compari-
son arose, forcing the notion of commensurability over a native reality
that was, then, rethought in terms of measures coming from the out-
side. Once thinkers agreed on the right translation of “beauty,” and
14
Inoue Tetsujirō and Ariga Nagao, eds., Tetsugaku Jii (Tokyo: Tōyōkan, 1883),
p. 14.
15
For a complete English translation see Michael F. Marra, Modern Japanese Aes-
thetics: A Reader (Honolulu: The University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), pp. 65–86.
28 chapter two
once they had settled on its definition, they had to ask whether beauty
existed in Japan and where it could be found. Were there local versions
of beauty and, if so, how could they be explained? Answers were found
in classical works which were re-canonized in what came to be known
as “literature,” “religion,” “philosophy,” and “history,” at the very same
time that thinkers were pondering over the correct Chinese characters
to be chosen for signifying “beauty.” If the word “beauty” did not exist
in Japan prior to 1796, how did the Japanese refer to their artistic
accomplishments in the past? The question was already the result of
the application of Western intellectual norms to local “ways” (michi)
of transmitting knowledge, since it forced thinkers to find in the local
heritage concepts which could be deemed commensurable with West-
ern notions of beauty. Yanabu Akira, a leading Japanese scholar of
translation theory, mentions six key concepts taken from the Japa-
nese world of poetry which scholars have repeatedly singled out since
the Meiji period up to the present day to be commensurable with the
idea of “beauty:” “Hana” ⧎ (flower) and “yūgen” ᐝ₵ (grace), devel-
oped by the playwright Zeami (?1363–?1443); “wabi” ଌ (simplicity),
characterizing the art of the tea-master Rikyū (1522–1591); “fūga”
㘑㓷 (elegance) and “sabi” ኎ (artlessness), sustaining the poetics of
the haiku-master Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694); and “mono no aware”
‛ߩຟࠇ (the pathos of things), devised by the scholar of National
Learning Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801).16
When we look at the actual texts in which all the concepts above
appear, we cannot but wonder whether these ancient literati were con-
cerned with producing works of artistic beauty, or, more convincingly,
whether they were interested in giving practical advice on how to excel
in the arts of which they became undisputed masters. Zeami’s discus-
sions take place in manuals that he wrote for the training of young
Nō actors—a set of maxims to be jealously guarded less they fall into
the hands of rival groups. Bashō was concerned with the survival of
poetic styles (and the creation of new ones)—styles which were deeply
grounded in rhetorical norms secretly transmitted through the ages
from master to disciple. These norms were more related to issues of
practical skills (the need to be a good actor and a successful poet) than
to matters of beauty or aesthetic contemplation. Originally, “hana,”
“yūgen,” “fūga,” etc., were levels of accomplishments that poets and
16
Yanabu Akira, Hon’yakugo Seiritsu Jijō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), p. 69.
actors had to struggle their whole life to achieve. The expression

“yūgen” appears repeatedly in the words of judges at poetic matches
as they awarded victory to outstanding poems: “However, the way of
poetry requires the achievement of the realm of grace ( yūgen), which
is so difficult to reach, as the poem of the left so skillfully achieves
in the verse, ‘the moon expanding/night after night over Yoshino.’ ”17
Zeami’s warning to actors was stern when it came to the achievement
of acting skills:
For example, stage characters such as Ladies-in-Waiting, or women of
pleasure, beautiful women, or handsome men, all show alike in their
form, like the various flowers in the natural world, the quality of Grace
(yūgen). On the other hand, roles such as those of warrior, brave men,
or demons and gods show in their form the quality of strength, like
pines and cedars in the natural world. If an actor does his best to create
truly such varied characters, then a role that involves Grace will produce
an atmosphere of Grace, and a role demanding strength will of itself
appear strong. If such distinctions are not observed, however, and an
actor merely decides to attempt to create a sense of Grace directly, the
performance will be crude and cannot realize its object.18
The importation to Japan of the field of aesthetics forced a re-interpre-
tation of concepts belonging to rhetoric, poetics, and theater in light
of aesthetic categories, thus transforming these concepts into Japanese
counterparts of Western beauty. Without the introduction of aesthetics
Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959) would have been unable to rethink the
notion of “yūgen” from the perspectives of intuition (chokkan ⋥ⷰ)
and affection (kandō ᗵേ), thus seeing it as a sub-branch of the sub-
lime (sūkō ፏ㜞).19 Likewise, he would not have analyzed the concept
of “aware” as an example of “world pain” (Weltschmertz) keeping the
Heian court within the boundaries of the Melancholic.20 Such acts of
hermeneutical colonization were direct results of the reconfiguration
17
Sengohyakuban Uta-awase (The Poetry Match in Fifteen Hundred Rounds,
1201), 4:541. The original text appears in Hagitani Boku and Taniyama Shigeru, eds.,
Uta-awase Shū, NKBT 74 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965), pp. 486–487.
18
Zeami made this statement in his first treatise on Nō, Fūshikaden (Style and
the Flower). The English translation is by J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu,
On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), p. 47. The original text appears in Tanaka Yutaka, ed., Zeami
Geijutsu Ronshū, SNKS 4 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1976), p. 75.
19
Ōnishi Yoshinori, Yūgen to Aware (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939), p. 4 and p. 101.
20
For an English translation of the chapter on “Aware” from Ōnishi’s Bigaku (Aes-
thetics), see Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader, pp. 122–140.
30 chapter two
of knowledge that took place in Japan during the Meiji period.21 The
path to an understanding of what aesthetics was about was not an easy
one, as the convoluted history of the Japanese name demonstrates.
Nishi Amane (1829–1897), who was responsible for introducing the
“science of beauty” directly from Holland where he studied Western
sciences, created five different words to translate “aesthetics,” which
are indicative of the transformations that the concept underwent in
Nishi’s mind.
In a draft version of a lecture of 1867 Nishi called aesthetics “zen-
bigaku” ༀ⟤ቇ (the science of goodness and beauty), a term which
he used again in 1874, in his Hyakuichi Shinron (New Theory of One
Hundred and One). This word points at the strong ethical underpin-
nings of Nishi’s Confucian education which he tried to reconcile with
Western theories learned at the University of Leiden under the guid-
ance of the philosopher C.W. Opzoomer (1812–1892). Like most of
his contemporaries, Nishi believed in the ethical consequences of the
artistic act—an idea popularized by Neo-Confucian scholars for whom
writing was geared to “the promotion of good and the chastisement
of evil” (kanzen chōaku). No art could be good unless it promoted
good behavior. This tenet conflicted with one of the basic rules of aes-
thetics: the autonomy of the artistic realm from any other sphere of
knowledge, including religion and ethics. Nishi found a way out of this
dilemma by using the expression “zenbigaku,” which combines the
Confucian “theory of goodness, beauty, capability, and refinement”
(shan mei liang ueng) and the Greek “theory of goodness and beauty”
(kalosk’agathos). In this initial stage Nishi was able to remain loyal to
his native upbringing while, at the same time, introducing an “enlight-
ened” theory from the West, although this was over two thousand
years old. With his choice of the word “zenbigaku” Nishi implied that
while beauty was the material cause of morality, moral goodness was
morality’s formal cause. Morality, however, pertained to the human
sciences and was independent from the law and other hard sciences.
On this point Nishi challenged his Confucian mentors, inasmuch as he
rejected the idea that a well-ordered nation could be founded upon the
21
On this topic see my article “Coincidentia Oppositorum: Ōnishi Yoshinori’s Greek
Genealogies of Japan,” in Michael F. Marra, Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates
on Aesthetics and Interpretation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp.
142–152. See also, Otabe Tanehisa, “Representations of ‘Japaneseness’ in Modern
Japanese Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Critique of Comparative Reason,” in the
same volume, pp. 153–162.
ruler’s moral behavior. Confucian, Platonic, and utilitarian concerns

are at work in this first definition of aesthetics.22
In 1870 Nishi referred to aesthetics by using three different words:
1) “shigakuga” ⹞ᭉ↹ (the science of poetry, music, and painting) in
the section on literature of his Hyakugaku Renkan (Encyclopedia);23
2) “gaku no takubi” ቇࡁථ⟤ (science of supreme beauty) in the sec-
tion on philosophy of the same volume;24 3) “kashuron” ૫⿰⺰ (the
discipline of good taste) in the same section on philosophy.25 In the
Encyclopedia Nishi linked truth, goodness, and beauty respectively
to the activities of the intellect, the will, and sensibility, which were
the ground of the sciences of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Here we
clearly see a demarcation between disciplines which are increasingly
asserting their autonomy from each other, not only with regard to
the major distinction between human sciences (which in Hyakuichi
Shinron Nishi had called “psychology”) and the hard sciences (which
he had called “physics”), but also among disciplines belonging to the
same group. As a branch of philosophy, Nishi considered aesthetics to
belong to what in Hyakugaku Renkan he called “the intellectual sci-
ence” (theology, philosophy, politics, political economy, and statistics),
distinguished from the “physical science” (physics, astronomy, chem-
istry, and natural history). At this point Nishi considered beauty to
be the object of feelings on which the intellectual power of sensibility
was based. In order to discern such an object, a judgment of taste had
to be formulated. This explains his terminological shift to “kashuron”
(the discipline of good taste)—a term which emphasizes the process
of aesthetic appreciation. This choice highlights Nishi’s reliance on an
aesthetics based on the intuitive power of the observer, the realization
that “the perception and enjoyment of the beauty are subjective, rela-
tive, dependent,” even if beauty is not.26 This statement was made by
Joseph Haven (1816–1874), whose Mental Philosophy: Including the
Intellect, Sensibilities, and Will of 1857 Nishi translated with the sim-
plified title Shinrigaku (Psychology) in 1870–1871.
22
Ōkubo Toshiaki, ed., Nishi Amane Zenshū, 1 (Tokyo: Munetaka Shobō 1966),
pp. 232–289.
23
Ōkubo Toshiaki, ed., Nishi Amane Zenshū, 4 (Tokyo: Munetaka Shobō, 1981),
p. 99.
24
Ibid., p. 168.
25
Ibid., p. 146.
26
Joseph Haven, Mental Philosophy: Including the Intellect, Sensibilities, and Will
(Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1857), p. 274.
32 chapter two
Turning to the Japanese history of the word “kashu” ૫⿰ (good

taste), we find it in a headnote to a poem from the Shūishū (Collection
of Gleanings, 1005–1007), in which the most powerful politician of the
Heian period, Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), sings the elegance
of the nature surrounding his new villa. Michinaga used the image of
the pine tree for its customary meaning of longevity in order to wish
prosperity to his house and its inhabitants: “The Minister of the Right
invited several literati and poets to compose poetry during his first
visit to his newly rebuilt house; he wrote the following song on the
topic of ‘elegant (kashu) waters and trees:’ One can see the future/of
this place/where I begin to live—a place as clear as the clear waters—
/because of the reflection/of the pine tree’s shadow by the waterside.”27
According to Michinaga’s diary, the Midō Kanpaku Ki (Record of
the Buddha-Hall Regent, 995–1021), this gathering took place on the
Sixth Day of the Fifth Month 999 in the East side of the Higashi Sanjō
mansion. He had invited several famous poets such as Fujiwara no
Takaie (979–1044), Fujiwara no Kintō (966–1041), and Fujiwara no
Tadanobu, “in order to compose poems in Chinese.”28 The reference
to the “good taste” of the elegant settings is reminiscent of a verse
by Chang Chiu-ling (678–740): “Enjoying it in good taste (kashu),/it
makes my heart swing.”29
Eventually, Nishi settled on the term “bimyōgaku” ⟤ᅱቇ (the sci-
ence of the delicately and wondrously beautiful ) in his major treatise on
aesthetics, Bimyō Gakusetsu (A Theory on Wondrous Beauty, 1878).30
In this work Nishi clearly differentiated aesthetics from ethics and law.
He argues that while feelings of morality and justice sustain ethics (the
distinction of good from evil) and law (the distinction of justice from
27
Shūishū 18:1175. The original text appears in Masuda Shigeo, ed., Shūi Wakashū,
WBT 32 (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 2003), p. 222. The reference to Michinaga as “Minister
of the Right” is puzzling since, in fact, he was the powerful Minister of the Left.
28
Francine Hérail, trans., Notes Journalières de Fujiwara no Michinaga Ministre à
la Cour de Heian, 1 (Genève: Librarie Droz, 1987), p. 216.
29
“Quoted in Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, 4 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1973), p. 552.
30
There is a discrepancy in the date of this work. Aso Yoshiteru argues that it
was written in 1871; Ōkubo Toshiaki gives the date 1876; Mori Agata argues that
Nishi delivered this work in 1878, not in front of Emperor Meiji, as it was usually
believed, but in front of members of the imperial family. See Hamashita Masahiro,
“Nishi Amane on Aesthetics: A Japanese Version of Utilitarian Aesthetics,” in Marra,
Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, p. 90. The
original text of this lecture appears in Aoki Shigeru and Sakai Tadayasu, eds., Bijutsu,
NKST 17 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989), pp. 3–14.
injustice), aesthetic feelings allow man to distinguish beauty from

ugliness. Nishi’s stress on feelings reminds readers of the etymological
sense of the word aesthetics, which derives from the Greek “aisthe-
sis,” meaning affects, sensations. The emphasis that earlier debates on
aesthetics had put on the notion of beauty, especially artistic beauty
alongside the Hegelian example, had distracted Japanese thinkers from
discussing the feelings at the basis of aesthetic experience.31 Nishi recu-
perates the original meaning of aesthetics by using a Japanese word,
“bimyō,” which refers to an ancient poetics of “delicate, mysterious,
wondrous” (myō or tae ᅱ) feelings. In the Japanese vocabulary there
is a word, “bimyō,” ᓸᅱ whose first character “bi” means “minute,
subtle, and hidden”—a synonymous of the first character of “yūgen”
ᐝ₵. The second character, myō, means “supple, hidden, small, won-
drous, mysterious, and beautiful.” We find the expression “bimyō”
(wondrously beautiful) written with the characters mentioned above
in a verse from a Buddhist scripture, the Amida Sutra, which Senshi
Naishinnō (964–1035) used as an introduction to one of her poems
from the Hosshin Wakashū (A Collection of Poems for the Awaken-
ing of Faith). The Amida Sutra says, “The lotuses in those lakes are as
big as carriage wheels./There are lotuses of blue color and blue light,
/ lotuses of yellow color and red light,/lotuses of white color and white
light,/and their perfume is wondrously (bimyō) strong.” This quotation
inspired the Kamo priestess to compose the following poem: “Does my
heart/appear to be as pure/as those pure waters/that shine with all the
colors/of the lotuses?”32
The word “myō” ᅱ is well entrenched in the Japanese rhetori-
cal vocabulary of ancient times. Read as “tae,” it appears in several
poems of the Man’yōshū, including the following long verse (chōka)
by Mushimaro on the legend of Urashima Tarō: “They reached the
realm of Everworld./There in the palace/of the god of the great deep/
they made their way/together, hand in hand,/into the chamber/of the
31
The emphasis on art in Hegelian aesthetics is present from the very beginning
of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) lectures on aesthetics: “The present
course of lectures deals with ‘Aesthetic.’ Their subject is the wide realm of the beauti-
ful, and, more particularly, their province is Art—we may restrict it, indeed, to Fine
Art.” Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 3.
32
Hosshin Wakashū 18. English translation by Edward Kamens, The Buddhist
Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess: Daisaiin Senshi and Hosshin Wakashū (Ann Arbor:
Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1990), p. 92. The original text
appears in Shinpen Kokka Taikan, Ver. 2, CD-ROM, 2003.
34 chapter two
inmost mystery (tae naru tono ni).”33 In the Japanese Preface to the
Kokinshū Ki no Tsurayuki (868–945) used the word “tae” to judge the
Man’yōshū poet Yamabe no Akahito (fl. 724–737), whom Tsurayuki
called “a poet extraordinary to the point of wonder” (uta ni ayashiku
tae narikeri).34 According to Zeami, “myō” is also the highest of the
nine levels achieved by a skillful actor—“the level of the flower of peer-
less charm” (myōkafū ᅱ⧎㘑). In his Kyūi (Notes on the Nine Levels)
Zeami defines “myō” as follows:
The meaning of the phrase Peerless Charm (myō) surpasses any expla-
nation in words and lies beyond the workings of consciousness. It can
surely be said that the phrase “in the dead of the night, the sun” exists in
a realm beyond logical explanation. Indeed, concerning the Grace (yūfū
ᐝ㘑) of the greatest performers in our art, there are no words with
which to praise it, [as that Grace gives rise to] the moment of Feeling
that Transcends Cognition (mushin no kan ήᔃߩᗵ), and to an art
that lies beyond any level that the artist may have consciously attained.
Such surely represents the level of the Flower of Peerless Charm.35
The close link between the word “myō” and explanations of the articu-
lation of feelings in pre-modern times was undoubtedly a major rea-
son for Nishi’s choice of the term “bimyōgaku” to translate aesthetics.
In Bimyō Gakusetsu Nishi highlights a difference between what he
calls “aesthetic feelings,” which are disinterested, and “moral feelings,”
which are inserted within a chain of causality and are, thus, related to
the consequences deriving from them. Aesthetic feelings are described
by adjectives such as “interesting” (omoshiroshi) and “funny” (okashi);
on the other hand, ethical feelings are best represented by adjec-
tives such as “good” (yoshi), “evil” (ashi), “cute” (kawayushi), “hate-
ful” (nikushi), “happy” (ureshi), “pleasurable” (tanoshi), and “joyful”
(yorokobashi). We hear behind this distinction an echo of Immanuel
Kant’s (1724–1804) definition of aesthetics as “purposiveness without
a purpose” or “finality without an end” (Zwechmässigkeit ohne Zweck).
Nishi is very eloquent on this point:
33
Man’yōshū 9:1740. English translation by Edwin A. Cranston, A Waka Anthol-
ogy, p. 324. The original text appears in Kojima Noriyuki, et als., eds., Man’yōshū, 2,
34
Okumura Tsuneya, Kokin Wakashū, p. 19.
35
English translation by J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu, On the Art of
the Nō Drama, p. 120. The original text appears in Tanaka Yutaka, Zeami Geijutsu
Ronshū, p. 165.
Unlike the seven passions of joy, anger, sadness, pleasure, love, evil, and
greed, “interesting” and “funny” do not occur in correlation with one’s
personal interests. Feelings of joy, for example, arise in human beings
when they obtain what they want and what benefits them. And feel-
ings of anger arise when they sense something that they hate, abhor,
and might harm them. This is all part of the ordinary course of nature.
But in regard to feeling that something is interesting or funny, personal
interest is not a consideration. Simply the sight of a particular thing is
interesting or funny. Only when a person goes so far as wanting to pos-
sess this interesting thing does he start positing the aim of judging good
and bad, thus making his feelings the work of the will. It goes the same
way for the feeling of amusement. When you simply think that some-
thing is funny, there should not arise any sense of moral judgment. But
once it falls into the will’s hands and a person goes so far as to laugh at
people or ridicule them, that immediately indicates the purposiveness of
moral judgment.36
Despite this distinction, in Nishi’s mind the beautiful never set itself
free from the true and the good. As a translator into Japanese of John
Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) Utilitarianism, Nishi aimed at making aes-
thetics good for his country and true to the promotion of civilization
in Japan.37 Unless he declared that “a good person is naturally moved
to justice and his external appearance cannot be deprived of beauty,”
and, likewise, “an evil person is naturally unjust and his appearance
ugly,” he could not convince the authorities of the Meiji government
that aesthetics was a science worthy of imperial support. After all, as
he argued at the end of his lecture, “the true purpose of aesthetics
does not conflict with the comparable purposes of morality, law, and
economics.”38
The need for utilitarian theories that could be directly applied to the
“enlightenment” of a modernizing country took thinkers away from
debates on human feelings and passions—the core of native aesthetics
which was debated by Neo-Confucian scholars and their opponents
during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868). Anything reminiscent of
the ancient regime had to be overcome in favor of new thoughts cen-
tered on the rights of individuals. Aesthetics was no exception. The
native moment of Nishi’s definition of aesthetics—the wondrous nature
of human feelings contained in the character “myō”—disappeared
36
English translation by Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader, p. 35. For a
complete English translation of Nishi’s Bimyō Gakusetsu, see ibid., pp. 26–37.
37
Nishi translated Mill’s work as Rigaku ೑ቇ, publishing it in 1877.
38
Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader, p. 28 and p. 37.
36 chapter two
from the word that came to be used as the standard Japanese term
for aesthetics: “bigaku” ⟤ቇ, or the science of beauty. The journal-
ist and political scientist Nakae Tokusuke (1847–1901), also known
as Chōmin, devised this term in his translation of Eugène Véron’s
(1825–1889) L’Esthétique (Aesthetics, 1878), which Chōmin translated
as Ishi Bigaku (The Aesthetics of Mr. V., 1883–1884). A formidable
opponent of idealism and a severe critic of Plato’s metaphysics, Véron
stressed the individual and concrete aspects of artistic creation, thus
emphasizing the preeminence of the artist’s genius in the creation of
works of art. For Véron, aesthetics was “the science of beauty,” or,
more precisely, “the science of beauty in art, whose object is the study
and elucidation of the manifestations of artistic genius.”39
Nothing could be the farther apart from concerns about the meta-
physical underpinnings of human feelings shrouded in the mist of
discourses on the “wonders and mystery” (myō and yūgen) of poetic
artistic perception than the aesthetics of the politically engaged Véron
in the translation of the socialist Nakae Chōmin. Having to choose a
word that would convey the meaning of “metaphysician” in Véron’s
pejorative sense—“no science more than aesthetics is prey to day-
dreams of metaphysicians”—Chōmin opted for the expression “rigaku
yūō setsu,” ℂቇᐝᅏ⺑ which literally means, “mysteriously profound
theories of philosophy.” The character “yū” ᐝ (mysterious) is the
same as the first character of “yūgen”, ᐝ₵, a key concept in the dis-
cussion of artistic pursuits in pre-modern times. The same character
appears again in the translation of Véron’s statement, “From Plato
up to the present time, art has been made into a mixture of quintes-
sential fantasies and transcendental mysteries which find their highest
expression in the absolute concept of ideal Beauty: unmovable and
divine prototypes of real things.” Chōmin conveys Véron’s vitriolic
attack on “quintessential fantasies and transcendental mysteries” with
the expression “kōsoku yūkai byūkō sakuzatsu” 㜞ㅦᐝ᥂❤Ꮑ㍲㔀,
which literally means “intricacies of fast, dark, and clever schemes.”
Against this “chimerical ontology” Véron posits “individual original-
ity” (jika koyū no jōsei ⥄ኅ࿕᦭ࡁᖱᕈ; lit., personal and individual
affective nature) as the main ingredient for the development of “artistic
39
English translation by W.H. Armstrong, in Eugène Véron, Aesthetics (Lon-
don: Chapman & Hall, 1879), p. 109. The original text appears in Eugène Véron,
L’Esthétique (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1878), p. 132.
eras” ( geijutsu no shi ⧓ⴚࡁ჻; lit., gentlemen of art), which are

always “eras of freedom” (jika no jōsei kishō o hoshiimama ni shite
⥄ኅࡁᖱᕈ᳇⽎ࡥ⡷࠾ࠪ࠹; lit., the fulfillment of the phenomenon
of affective nature).40
The presence of the West in Japan through the scholarly activities of
translators and lecturers—Japanese thinkers who had studied abroad
as well as foreign scholars invited by the Meiji government—was a con-
stant reminder of the importance of “individualism” and “individual
originality” in the formation of a modernized nation. When in 1878
the Japanese government invited the American Ernest F. Fenollosa
(1853–1908) to lecture on philosophy, aesthetics, art, and literature at
what would become Tokyo Imperial University, Japanese translators
had to create arrays of words and concepts that would convey the
arcane meanings of Fenollosa’s speeches. It was not simply a question
of words. Ideas such as “authorship” and “individual creation” were
quite alien to audiences trained in the art of communal participation
and shared responsibilities in the performance of artistic pursuits,
such as the “tea ceremony” (chanoyu), “linked poetry” (renga), and
the composition of “haiku sequences” (haikai). Even when requested
to compose an individual poem such a “short poem” (tanka), the Japa-
nese poet was mostly concerned with the creation of a variation on a
series of poems written in earlier times on fixed topics. It was a com-
mon practice for poets to use entire verses composed by famous poets,
and insert them in their own composition—a practice known as “allu-
sive variation” (honkadori). The situation was not very different for
painters who based their compositions on models, often Chinese, of
unarguable mastery painted using historically-repeated motifs.41 Noth-
ing was more alien to such audiences than the notion of the inspired
genius. A new vocabulary had to be created in order to convey words
that fit statements such as the following from one of Fenollosa’s lec-
tures at the Higher Normal School in Tokyo:
40
See Katō Shūichi and Maruyama Masao, eds., Hon’yaku no Shisō, NKST 15
(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), p. 209 and p. 215, with a selection of comparative
passages from Véron’s original text and Chōmin’s translation.
41
Concerns about authorship developed with the establishment of art markets in
which the presence of the artist’s seal determined the value of a painting by guarantee-
ing its authenticity.
38 chapter two
The author has a weighty responsibility, to which few are true. He must
not allow one shadow of influence to affect him from the outside. It will
strike a flaw through the crystal. Although educated out of the past, he
must forget the past, and breathe alone with himself. He must not let
his personality intrude, for then self-interest or prejudice will disturb the
free re-distribution of the affinities. He must not yield to fear, or hope
of gain, or thirst for fame; else, the glorious soul that is forming within
him will be strangled or poisoned in the womb. He must be the pure
individual, untainted by any formalism; then the infinity of the new will
bubble out of him like a spring. The individuality of the literary whole
will find itself only through that free fluidity of soul which his own indi-
viduality implies.42
One of Fenollosa’s translators was Ōmori Ichū (1844–1908), who
translated a lecture that Fenollosa gave to the Dragon Pond Society
(Ryūchikai) on May 14, 1882, in the presence of the Minister of Edu-
cation Fukuoka Kōtei (1834–1919). Ōmori entitled the translation
“Bijutsu Shinsetsu” ⟤ⴚ⌀⺑43—a name which matches the title of
what survives today as a fragmentary manuscript by Fenollosa, “The
True Meaning of ‘Fine Art.’ ”44 In this lecture Fenollosa introduced
what in the manuscript he calls an “art-idea,” which he defines as an
“absolute individual produced by the melting down of ever varying
ingredients into a new synthetic unit.” Since such a synthetic unity
cannot be twice alike, the art-idea guarantees “the absolute necessity of
originality in art.” The art-idea “is conceived in the solemn purity of a
momentary inspiration,” and cannot be reached by analytic steps, fol-
lowing a scientific process. Moreover, an art-idea cannot be found in
“the application of general rules, or formulae.” Otherwise, “the abso-
lute individuality of an art idea would be destroyed.” These insights
have a direct impact on the act of artistic judgment, and on the practi-
cal purpose of teaching art in school—a purpose that could not escape
the attention of the Minister of Education. Given the individuality of
any single artistic product, there cannot be standards for the judgment
42
Fenollosa delivered this lecture on January 25, 1898. The text appears in Akiko
Murakata, ed., The Ernest F. Fenollosa Papers: The Houghton Library, Harvard Univer-
sity, Japanese Edition, Vol. 3, Literature (Tokyo: Museum Press, 1987), p. 160.
43
Ōmori’s translation appears in Aoki Shigeru and Sakai Tadayasu, Bijutsu,
pp. 35–65. For a discussion of this lecture in English, see J. Thomas Rimer, “Hegel in
Tokyo: Ernest Fenollosa and his 1882 Lecture on the Truth of Art,” in Marra, Japanese
Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, pp. 97–108.
44
This manuscript, catalogued as bMS Am 1759.2 (92), is currently kept at the
Houghton Library of Harvard University. All the quotations below come from this
manuscript.
of art. Each work must be appreciated according to its individual laws,

which are dictated by the idea incorporated in it. People have to be
educated in the “spiritual qualities of things”—an education that will
allow them to make proper aesthetic judgments.
There is no standard for its [art’s] ultimate criticism, but the unique one
which it affords itself. Each great work of art prescribes its own law to
itself; hence it is the sole business of the art critic first to divine sympa-
thetically the idea intended, and then to comment on the purity of its
realization. Hence to train the pure art faculty to feel such individual
synthesis, is the primary object of all art education; and if all the profes-
sional art schools in America were abolished tomorrow it would be a
far less serious matter than the possibility of introducing into our public
schools a system of training which shall normally develop the art faculty
among the peoples.45
Fenollosa’s position is truly paradoxical inasmuch as, on the one hand,
he promoted the idea of the originality and non-repeatability of a dis-
creet work of art that lives in an autonomous space, the space of the
genius. On the other, the sympathetic divining of the idea meant a
re-inscription of what he called “art-totality” into a web of correla-
tions which Japanese artists had championed in the poetics of mys-
tery and “yūgen.” If a work of art must be judged according of its
idea and people must be educated to see “things, situations, ideas in
their larger and spiritual relations,” then one must explain the relation
between the idea, the artist, and the object of representation (nature).
The result is a mystic union which the theory of the genius had tried
desperately to escape. The end of Fenollosa’s manuscript could have
been a quotation from a Neo-Confucian text: “The arts swallow one
another successively as do the several art problems, and widest of all
is the art of life, where man and his surroundings should be melted
into one supreme social harmony.” This paradox was the result of the
encounter of abstract aesthetic theories with the realities of art mar-
kets that Fenollosa helped to establish. On the one hand, Fenollosa
justified the greatness of Japanese art according to a Western canon
of masters and masterpieces. This move would allow him to facilitate
the commerce of Buddhist statues and scrolls which were, thus, pro-
vided with an equal footing with the masterpieces of Western art. On
the other hand, he also needed to justify the decorative arts (ceramics
45
Ernest Fenollosa, “The True Meaning of ‘Fine Art,’” manuscript.
40 chapter two
and lacquer wares) which, by being made into works of art, economi-
cally benefited a popular sector of the Japanese market. This might
explain his statement in “The True Meaning of ‘Fine Art’ ” that, “per-
haps the deepest lesson taught at the present day by the example of
eastern European as well as of Asiatic art is that the practical divorce
between painting and decoration which Western art has allowed in
recent centuries, is as false as it is ruinous.” This distinction was par-
ticularly ruinous to Fenollosa in his efforts to promote Japanese art
and artifacts among wealthy Bostonian collectors. The explanation of
the gratuity of such a distinction was made on aesthetic grounds which
are more in tune with the ancient Tokugawa regime than with the
modernizing Meiji era:
Since nature means representation, decorative art stultifies herself in see-
ing how far away she can get from nature. On the other hand the Japa-
nese, who know such duality, to whom nature means art and beauty, is
equally strong on both sides of the scale, for in his representations he
never forgets to clothe it in soul-satisfying music and in his decoration
he never fails to embody everything he needs and loves of nature, into
his lines and colors.46
The implications of Fenollosa’s “art-idea” were quite far-reaching.47
His translator Ōmori Ichū must have been quite aware of the mys-
tical underpinnings of Fenollosa’s popular version of idealism when
he translated it as “bijutsu no myōsō” ⟤ⴚࡁᅱᗐ (lit., the mysteri-
ous, wondrous thought of the fine arts). Although Ōmori indicated
that the characters “myōsō” should be read “aijia” (idea), he chose
a compound which contained the character “myō/tae”—Mushimaro’s
“inmost mystery,” Tsurayuki’s “wondrous excellence,” and Zeami’s
“peerless charm.” Several debates ensued on the role played by “ideas”
in the process of artistic creations—debates that often suffered from a
semantic confusion between ambiguous terms such as “myōsō” ᅱᗐ
(idea; lit., wondrous thought), “risō” ℂᗐ (idea; lit., thought based on
principle),48 and “shisō” ᕁᗐ (thought; lit., discriminating thought).
46
Ernest Fenollosa, “The True Meaning of ‘Fine Art,’” manuscript.
47
See, Kaneda Tamio, “Fenollosa and Tsubouchi Shōyō,” in Michael F. Marra, A
History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001),
pp. 53–67.
48
Although we find the word “risō” used by the writer Mori Ōgai to signify “idea,”
Nishi Amane employed it in his translation of Mill’s Utilitarianism with the meaning
of “ideal.”
A genuinely thought-provoking clash between realism and idealism

ended as a pedantic dispute between the writers Mori Ōgai (1862–
1922) and Tsubouchi Shōyō (1858–1935)—a dispute which came to
be known as the debate on “submerged ideas” (botsurisō ᴚℂᗐ). As
the Japanese translator of the Hegelian Eduard von Hartmann (1841–
1906), Ōgai championed a notion of the Beautiful as representative of
the idea lying behind all reality.49 On the other hand, Shōyō argued
that art must be realist rather than idealist since artists must report
ideas rather than developing them—the latter being the task of the
philosopher. For Shōyō, imagination is what counts in an artist—the
ability to create situations in which readers and viewers can find their
own ideas reflected. In other words, we should value the artist’s work
“for its submerged ideas.” Ōgai reacted strongly, attacking Shōyō for
denying the need of “risō” (ideas) in the artistic process.50 The whole
debate was marred by the protagonists’ inability to agree on the mean-
ing of “risō,” due to the different backgrounds of the two writers. Ōgai
was trained in Germany as a medical doctor; Shōyō was a teacher of
English literature and the Japanese translator of Shakespeare. While
for Ōgai “risō” translated the Hegelian notion of “Idee”—“the combi-
nation of metaphysical universality with the determinateness of real
particularity”51—for Shōyō it simply meant “idea” in the English sense
of the word.
We find a similar misunderstanding in what the President of Tokyo
Imperial University and Minister of Education Toyama Masakazu
(1848–1900) called “shisōga” ᕁᗐ↹ (thought-paintings) in a lecture
delivered on April 27, 1890, at the second meeting of the Meiji Asso-
ciation of Fine Arts (Meiji Bijutsu-kai). In this lecture, titled “Nihon
Kaiga no Mirai” (The Future of Japanese Art), Toyama took Fenol-
losa’s concept of “Idee” (myōsō) to mean idea or thought. Therefore,
he interpreted Fenollosa’s invitation to artists to present in their work
“ideal” representations of reality as a suggestion to portray concrete
ideas and thoughts. In other words, Japanese painters should portray
49
Mori Rintarō and Ōmura Seigai, eds., Shinbi Kōryō: Jō, Ge (Tokyo: Shun’yōdō,
1899). Ōgai used the word “shinbi” ክ⟤ (lit., a discernment or beauty) to translate
Hartmann’s “Ästhetik.”
50
For an account of this debate in English, see Richard John Bowring, Mori Ōgai
and the Modernization of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), pp. 73–79. See, also, Bruno Lewin, “Mori Ōgai and German Aesthetics,” in
Marra, A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, pp. 68–92.
51
Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, pp. 25–26.
42 chapter two
“ideological paintings,” paintings based on “thoughts,” drawing

their subject matters from actual events and social problems.52 These
instances of misunderstandings are eloquent examples of the diffi-
culties involved in conveying alien idioms in native scripts—a task
that Meiji intellectuals undertook with a painstaking fervor. A need
for more precise communication led to the formation of new words
and the application of new meanings to old ones. With regard to the
word “idea” several expressions were used to differentiate the nuances
of the term. In 1877 Nishi Amane used the Buddhist word “kannen”
ⷰᔨ (meditative thought) to translate the English “idea” and French
“idée”—a translation that Inoue Tetsujirō accepted in his Tetsugaku
Jii of 1883. The German “Idee” came to be translated “risō” ℂᗐ by
Inoue Enryō (1858–1919) in his Tetsugaku Yōryō (The Basics of Phi-
losophy, 1886). In Tetsugaku-shi Yō (Basics of the History of Philoso-
phy, 1901) Hatano Seiichi (1877–1950) used the word “idē” ࠗ࠺࡯ in
katakana script to translate Kant’s Idee, and “risō” to translate Hegel’s
Idee. Eventually, the word “rinen” ℂᔨ (lit., the thought of principles)
came to be used as a general term for the German Idee.53
“Idea” was not the only part of Fenollosa’s expression “art-idea”
to have thrown into a frenzy the promoters of modernization. “Art”
was problematic as well. In pre-modern times the practice of artis-
tic composition was often defined in light of Buddhist terminology,
so that a poet in medieval Japan would see himself as part of what
was known as “the way of poetry” (uta no michi, or kadō ᱌㆏), in
the same way that a monk was practicing the “Buddhist way” (hotoke
no michi, or butsudō ੽㆏). The poet Shōtetsu (1381–1459) opened
his treatise Shōtetsu Monogatari (Conversations with Shōtetsu) with
the statement, “In the way of poetry (kono michi ni te), those who
speak ill of Teika should be denied the protection of the gods and
the Buddhas and condemned to the punishment of hell.”54 Although
English translators of Shōtetsu tend to render the first sentence as “In
52
The text appears in Aoki Shigeru and Sakai Tadayasu, Bijutsu, pp. 122–152. See,
especially, pp. 144–145.
53
Ishizuka Masahide and Shibata Takayuki, eds., Tetsugaku, Shisō Hon’yakugo Jiten
(Tokyo: Ronsōsha, 2003), pp. 50–51.
54
English translation by Robert H. Brower, Conversations with Shōtetsu (Shōtetsu
Monogatari) (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan,
1992), p. 61, with the first sentence modified. The translation says, “In this art of
poetry . . .” The original text appears in Hisamatsu Sen’ichi and Nishio Minoru, eds.,
Karon Shū, Nōgakuron Shū, NKBT 65 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1961), p. 166.
this art of poetry” in order to facilitate the reader’s understanding,

technically speaking, in medieval Japan poetry was “a practice” (waza
ᬺᛛ) to be discharged with religious fervor, rather than an art in the
aesthetic sense of the word. Far from being the outcome of romantic
inspiration, “artistic practices” such as painting, music making, poetry,
dance, and acting, were the result of “extenuating practices” (keikogoto
Ⓚฎ੐), to be performed with devotion and with utmost respect, lest
a deity might take offense and retaliate against the unpolished per-
former, thus bringing calamities (wazawai) upon him or her.
The expressions “way” (michi), “practice” (waza), and “rehearsals”
(keigo) used in Japan in pre-modern times perfectly fit the meaning
of “art” in its pre-eighteenth century sense of craft—a nuance car-
ried over from the Greek word “techne.” Such a meaning was still at
work in the expression “geijutsu” ⧓ⴚ, which, prior to 1872, signified
the technical skills (gijutsu ᛛⴚ) of master crafters. The word “gei-
jutsu” appears in the Shoku Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan, Continued,
797), in the entry for the Sixteenth Day of the Tenth Month 703, in
which we read, “The emperor (Monmu) made monk Ryūkan return
to secular life. His original family name was Kon, and his first name
was Takara. He was the son of the śramana Kōjin. He was a man
of superlative knowledge and great artistic skills (geijutsu). He was
also good in mathematics and astronomy.”55 An examination of the
Japanese history of the character “gei” ⧓ indicates that Ki no Yoshi-
mochi used it in the compound word “saigei” ᚽ⧓ (technical talent)
in his Chinese Preface to the Kokinshū. The compound is included
in the customary apologetic statement on the part of the anthology’s
compilers, begging their readers (and their patron, the Emperor) for
forgiveness for their alleged lack of technical ability in the poetic craft.
Yoshimochi says, “Need we say how we come forward fearing the ridi-
cule of the world, and retire ashamed of our lack of talent (saigei).”56
The poet and essayist Kenkō (ca. 1283–after 1352) used the word “gei”
to indicate the game of backgammon, which requires skills on the part
of the players, and “michi” to signify what we would call today art in
55
Ujitani Tsutomu, ed., Shoku Nihongi, Jō, KGB 1030 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1992),
p. 63.
56
English translation by Leonard Grzanka, in Laurel Rasplica Rodd, with Mary
Catherine Henkenius, Kokinshū: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 385. The original text appears in Okumura
Tsuneya, Kokin Wakashū, p. 387.
44 chapter two
the sense of profession. He makes the following statement in Tsurezu-

regusa (Essays in Idleness, ?1310–1331):
It is a grave misconception for a stupid man who has one skill, playing
go, when he meets an intelligent man with no talent for this game (gei),
to decide that the man is no match for himself in learning; or for an
expert in one of the many different arts (michi), seeing that others are
ignorant of this particular specialty, to conclude that he is more accom-
plished than they.57
Zeami used the word “gei” to indicate training in the skills of Nō per-
formance, as we see at the beginning of his treatise Fūshikaden (Style
and the Flower): “It may be said of our art (gei) that one may begin
at seven.”58
When we consider the Japanese history of the character “jutsu” ⴚ,
we see it standing for knowledge, discipline, method, and skills. In
the Man’yōshū it appears in a headnote in the form of a letter from
Yoshida Yoroshi with the simple meaning of “action:” “I entreat you,
Lord, to spread virtue like Lu Kung, who tamed the pheasant in the
morning, and to leave behind benevolent acts (jutsu, with the reading
of michi) like K’ung Yu, who freed the turtle in the evening—so that
your name may be spoken of a hundred generations hence.”59 “Jutsu”
also appears in combination with “koyomi” (calendar) in the com-
pound “rekijutsu” ᥲⴚ (the art of calendar making) in a headnote to
a poem by Kitabatake Chikafusa in the Shin’yō Wakashū (Collection
of New Leaves, 1381–1384).60 The expression “mujutsu” (unskilled) is
part of the vocabulary of poem evaluations in the judgments of poetic
matches (uta-awase)—“Right Team’s Comment on the Opposition:
The verse ‘to hurry through the storm’ (shigure o isogu) is unskillful
(mujutsu).”61
57
Tsurezuregusa 193. English translation by Donald Keens, Essays in Idleness: The
Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 165. The
original text appears in Kidō Saizō, ed., Tsurezuregusa, SNKS 10 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha,
1977), pp. 209–210.
58
English translation by J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu, On the Art
of the Nō Drama, p. 4. The original text appears in Tanaka Yutaka, Zeami Geijutsu
Ronshū, p. 15.
59
Man’yōshū 5:864. English translation by Ian Hideo Levy, Man’yōshū, p. 376. The
original text appears in Kojima Noriyuki, Man’yōshū, 2, p. 81.
60
Shin’yō Wakashū 16:1131. Kogi Takashi, ed., Shin’yō Wakashū: Honbun to
Kenkyū (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 1984), p. 214.
61
Rounds 479–480 of Roppyakuban Uta-awase (The Poetry Match in Six Hundred
Rounds, 1193). The text appears in Shinpen Kokka Taikan, Ver. 2, CD-ROM.
Traditional meanings of the word “geijutsu” are still present in the

Eiwa Taiyaku Shūchin Jisho (A Pocket Book English-Japanese Diction-
ary) of 1862, in which “geijutsu” is used to translate the English word
“ingenuity.” The practical underpinnings of the technical skills associ-
ated with the notion of “art” in Meiji Japan are also clear from the
fact that when the Japanese government invited the architect Giovanni
Vincenzo Cappelletti (d. 1887), the painter Antonio Fontanesi (1818–
1882), and the sculptor Vincenzo Ragusa (1841–1928) from Italy to
teach in Tokyo, the three artists were assigned to the Technological
Art School (Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō Ꮏㇱ⟤ⴚቇᩞ), which was origi-
nally founded in 1876 within Tokyo’s Engineering College (Kōbushō
Kōgaku-ryō Ꮏㇱ⋭Ꮏቇኰ). The government was less interested in
the Italians’ artistic preeminence than in their practical skills in print-
ing techniques as engravers and graphic designers. During most of
the eighteenth century the word “geijutsuka” ⧓ⴚኅ৻which today
means “artist”—referred to scientists, especially specialists of astron-
omy, geography, medicine, and mathematics. When in 1854 Sakuma
Shōzan (1811–1864) encouraged his countrymen to “follow Eastern
morality and Western technology” (tōyō dōtoku, seiyō geijutsu ᧲ᵗ㆏
ᓼ‫⷏ޔ‬ᵗ⧓ⴚ), he used the word “geijutsu”—which today we would
translate “art”—to indicate “technology.”62
In Japan, in the 1870s the meaning of the word “art” was still quite
ambiguous, as we can see from the variety of Japanese words used to
translate it: “jutsu” ⴚ (skill), “waza” ᚻ⧓ (action), “hataraki” ᛛ୔
(work), “keisaku” ⸘╷ (plan), “itsuwari” ⹊ன (fiction), “narihai”
⡯ᬺ (occupation), and “takumi” ᯏഞ (ability). The Tetsugaku Jii
translates art with the words “jutsu ⴚ, “gigei” ᛛ⧓ (skilful art), and
“hataraki” ᛛ୔.63 In his translation of Véron’s L’Eshétique, Nakae
Chōmin employed the terms “gijutsu” “geijutsu” “gigei,” and “kōgei”
Ꮏ⧓ (ingenious skills), as mutually interchangeable translations of
the French “l’art.” Once the word “beauty” (bi ⟤) had entered the
vocabulary of Meiji aesthetics, it was possible to unite the character
“bi” (beauty) with “jutsu” ⴚ (discipline), and create the word “bijutsu”
⟤ⴚ (the discipline of beauty) to indicate the fine arts. This word
made its first appearance in 1872, in the Japanese translation of the
German catalogue of the objects exhibited at the Vienna Exposition
62
Sakuma Shōzan, Seiken Roku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), p. 25.
63
Inoue Tetsujirō and Ariga Nagao, Tetsugaku Jii, p. 11.
46 chapter two
on the following year. This was the first international fair in which
Japan participated, and in which Japan stood out for its fine selections
of industrial art. Section twenty-two of the catalogue states, “The arts
(bijutsu)—in the West fine arts are music, painting, sculpture, poetry,
etc.—for which museums are built.”64 Nishi Amane used the word
“bijutsu” in Bimyō Gakusetsu, in a passage in which he includes cal-
ligraphy as an example of the fine arts:
Presently in the West art (bijutsu) includes painting, sculpture, engrav-
ing, and architecture. Yet it is appropriate to say that the principle of
aesthetics applies also to poetry, prose, and music, as well as to Chinese
calligraphy. Dance and drama should also be included in this list.65
However, Nishi Amane’s text was not made public until 1907. Undoubt-
edly, Fenollosa’s lecture “The True Meaning of ‘Fine Art’ ” (“Bijutsu
Shinsetsu”) in Ōmori’s translation played a larger role in redefining
the field of practical crafts (geijutsu) by making them into objects of
aesthetic appreciation (bijutsu). Seven years later, in 1889, the Tech-
nological Art School became an independent body of learning, and
was renamed the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō
᧲੩⟤ⴚቇᩞ). By this time, the basic vocabulary for a discussion
of art had been established, and Japan was ready to join the Western
academic world of the arts. The way was paved for the establishment
of the first Japanese university chair in aesthetics, which was assigned
in 1900 to Ōtsuka Yasuji (1868–1931) at Tokyo Imperial University.66
The vocabulary of aesthetics began to be standardized around the basic
notion of the “fine arts” (bijutsu), Ōtsuka contributed to the stabiliza-
tion of a field which in Japan had been in flux for over thirty years, by
reminding his readers that aesthetics could not be separated from the
empirical objects of its study: the actual works of art which the newly
established scholar known as the “aesthetician” was asked to discuss
in philosophical terms. Ōtsuka attacked Eduard von Hartmann’s
64
The text appears in Aoki Shigeru and Sakai Tadayasu, Bijutsu, p. 404.
65
Aoki Shigeru and Sakai Tadayasu, Bijutsu, p. 4. Modified English translation of
Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader, p. 28.
66
This chair was established nine years before the second Japanese chair of aesthet-
ics was approved at Kyoto Imperial University in 1909. Imamichi Tomonobu argues
that the chair at Tokyo Imperial University was the first university chair of aesthetics
in the world, since in Europe the first chair was created at the University of Paris in
1919 with the appointment of Victor-Guillaume Basch (1865–1944). See, Imamichi
Tomonobu, “Biographies of Aestheticians: Ōtsuka Yasuji,” in Marra, A History of
Modern Japanese Aesthetics, pp. 152–153.
idealistic aesthetics on which he had previously lectured at Waseda

University, opting for a combination of psychological aesthetics and
a sociological study of the arts—a combination which he called “bijut-
sugaku” ⟤ⴚቇ (the Japanese translation of “Kunstwissenschaft,” art
science). Following Ōtsuka’s lead, the discipline of aesthetics in Japan
increasingly distanced itself from philosophy departments, and was
eventually integrated into art departments, which to this day are called
“departments of aesthetics and art history” (bigaku bijutsushigaku
⟤ቇ⟤ⴚผቇ, or bigaku geijutsugaku ⟤ቇ⧓ⴚቇ). Aestheticians,
however, never stopped being concerned with what Ōtsuka singled
out as their primary task—the development of “bijutsu tetsugaku”
⟤ⴚືቇ, the philosophy of art.67
67
Ōtsuka argued these points in the article “Bigaku no Seishitsu Oyobi Sono
Kenkyū” (“The Nature of Aesthetics and Its Study,” 1900), which appeared in the
June issue of Tetsugaku Zasshi (Journal of Philosophy).
CHAPTER THREE
AESTHETICS: AN OVERVIEW
As Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) indicates at the

beginning of his treatise Aesthetica (Aesthetics, 1750), “Aesthetics
(theory of the liberal arts, doctrine of inferior knowledge, art of beau-
tiful thinking, art of the analogous of reason) is the science of sensible
knowledge.”1 This is the opening statement of a work that is consid-
ered to be the genealogical moment in the creation of aesthetics as
an autonomous philosophical field—a creation prompted by the need
to rescue the senses from the primacy of reason. The association of
feelings (aisthesis) with the fallacious world of experience has a long
history that goes back to Plato’s (428–384 B.C.) mistrust of the senses.
The latter gave access to a reality whose essences could only be found
in the reflection of transcendental forms, or ideas. The senses and their
cosmetic apparatuses (including the rhetorical world of poets) came
to be enslaved to a mind (or dialectical logos) that the philosopher
applied to the study of knowledge (the ultimate good). Baumgarten
was faced with the challenge of formulating a theory of sensibility in
which the body could stand shoulder to shoulder with the mind—a
“science of sensuous cognition” (scientia cognitionis sensitivae) invest-
ing the sensible world with the perfection of logic. No matter how
hard the philosopher tried to elevate the status of the senses, these
could not escape the destiny of remaining “an inferior form of knowl-
edge” (ratio inferior) grounded in the analogon rationis (conformity to
the principle of reason).
When Nishi Amane (1829–1897) introduced to Japan the field of
aesthetics in Bimyōgaku Setsu (The Theory of Aesthetics, 1877), and
applied it to the organization of what could be called “the arts” in
Japan, he was faced with the paradox of accepting the basic Descartian
These remarks were originally prepared for the Workshop on Sourcebook in Japanese
Philosophy, Techny Towers Conference and Retreat Center, Chicago (March 14–16,
2008). The author wishes to thank Professors James Heisig, Thomas Kasulis, and John
Maraldo for their kind invitation and comments.
1
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Estetica (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1993), p. 17.
50 chapter three
apriori that “I am because I think” (cogito, ergo sum).2 René Descartes’

(1596–1650) motto does not deny the importance that passions and
feelings have in the life of human beings, as his treatise Les Passions
de l’Ame (The Passions of the Soul, 1649) attests.3 It does indicate, how-
ever, that one cannot rely on the passions in order to understand them.
Instead, one must analyze them with the rationality of the geometer
whose tools of inquiry—mind and reason—need to be free and inde-
pendent from the object of their exploration. For Descartes, to think
is definitely not to feel, even if, as Pascal reminded him, “the heart has
its reasons, which reason cannot know.”4 Considering the fact that in
pre- and early modern Japan, most of what is currently considered
aesthetic speculation was made by poets and artisans, cogito, ergo sum
was not very well suited to begin a treatise on aesthetics, as its Japanese
translation—ware omou, yue ni ware ari—already demonstrates. The
verb “omou” ᕁ߰ does not correspond to the English “to think” or the
French “penser,” as it includes strong pathic elements. Etymologically,
omou has been related to the words “to hide” (ōu ⷒ߁) and “surface”
(omo 㕙).5 Therefore, omou originally meant keeping inside feelings
such as anxiety, hatred, hope, love, expectations, and so on, without
letting them come out to the surface (the face). The act of omou took
place in the “heart” (kokoro ᔃ) which was the driving force behind
the externalization of the feelings pent up in the process of “thinking.”
Therefore, kokoro originally appears to have referred to the disclosure
of one’s inner “thoughts/feelings” (omoi). In other words, the Japanese
translation of “I think, therefore I am” actually means that my exis-
tence can only be explained by my omou, i.e., yearning for something
or somebody, hoping that something will happen, being distressed and
feeling a secret anxiety, and realizing that something is taking place at
the bottom of one’s heart. The pathic aspect of the verb omou explains
the Japanese expression “kokoro ni omou” ᔃߦᕁ߰ which literally
means “to think inside the heart”—a contradiction in terms according
to the logic of thinking with the mind and feeling in the heart. This
expression appears in Ki no Tsurayuki’s (868?–945?) Preface to the
first imperial anthology of poetry in Yamato language, the Kokinshū
2
For a translation of Nishi’s work, see Michele Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics:
A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), pp. 26–37.
3
For an English translation, see Stephen H. Voss’s version of René Descartes, The
Passions of the Soul (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1989).
4
Quoted in René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, p. ix.
5
Ōno Susumu, et als., Iwanami Kogo Jiten (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974), p. 249.
aesthetics: an overview 51
(Ancient and Modern Songs, 905): “Since people fill this world with
many actions, they express with words what they think in their hearts
according to what they see and what they hear.”6 In other words, when
it comes to Japanese discussions of knowledge and perception it might
be more accurate to begin with the motto, sentio, ergo sum (I feel,
therefore I am).
It is only fitting that the present selection of writings on topics
related to aesthetics in Japan begins with the discussion of the con-
cept of “kokoro,” which, as readers learn from Toyo Izutsu, is vari-
ously translated as either “heart” or “mind.” In Tsurayuki’s version of
kokoro a variety of subjective events take place, such as the thinking
of thoughts and the feeling of emotions. However, these thoughts and
emotions do not find verbal articulation unless they are “entrusted to
what a person sees and what a person hears.” In other words, only
metaphors can provide the inner self with an exit into the world—
metaphors which in the Kokinshū are mainly drawn from nature (“the
voice of the warbler singing among the blossoms, and the voice of the
frog dwelling inside the water”). As readers of the Kokinshū imme-
diately realize, were it not for the scanty information we have about
the poems included in the collection (author’s names when available,
and kotobagaki, or short notes preceding the poems), it would be
impossible to trace the object of poetic expression back to any spe-
cific subjectivity. The poet’s calculated attempt to defer expression to a
background that is fore-grounded in natural images (scattering cherry
blossoms and falling maple leaves) has led Toyo Izutsu to deny that
Tsurayuki ever used the word “kokoro” to indicate any particular state
of subjectivity. She argues that only in the poetry of the Shinkokin
period (1205), and especially in Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241), kokoro
became genuine subjectivity transcending the transience of phenom-
enal experiences. This transformation in the notion of kokoro followed
the impact that the philosophy of Tendai Buddhism, especially the
6
The meaning of omou poses severe challenges to English translators. Helen Craig
McCullough gives the following rendition of this sentence: “[Japanese poetry] comes
into being when men use the seen and the heard to give voice to feelings aroused by
the innumerable events in their lives.” Helen Craig McCullough, Kokin Wakashū:
The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1985), p. 3. Laurel Rasplica Rodd translates this sentence as follows: “Many things
happen to the people of this world, and all that they think and feel is given expres-
sion in description of things they see and hear.” Laurel Rasplica Rodd, Kokinshū:
A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984), p. 35.
52 chapter three
concept of “experience of self-illumination” ( jishō taiken), had on the

construction of the subject in medieval Japan. Thus, kokoro became a
“state of mind.” By stressing the unindividualized state of mind which
he called “no-mind” (mushin ήᔃ), Teika argued that the products of
the kokoro (thoughts/feelings or omoi) originate spontaneously without
ever being controlled by any conscious endeavor. Consequently, Teika
considered a poetic masterpiece (shūitsu) to be the result of a process
of spontaneity in which the omoi spontaneously arises from the kokoro
and spontaneously flows into words (kotoba). Teika drew many of
these insights from his father Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204), whose
poetic treatise Korai Fūteishō (Poetic Styles Past and Present, 1197)
was deeply infused with ideas coming from the philosophy of Zhiyi’s
(538–597) Mohe-zhiguan (The Great Calm-and-Contemplation).
Debates on the conflict between reason and feelings became very
popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when members
of the School of National Learning (Kokugaku) confronted the ratio-
nalism of neo-Confucianism, whose adherence to social obligations
(giri) clashed with the reality of human passions (ninjō). Hori Keizan
(1688–1757), the author of Fujingen (Things That Cannot Be Fully
Expressed in Words, 1742), underscored that the pursuit of “human-
ness” as expounded in Confucius’ Analects could not be realized
without an understanding of human feelings. Keizan’s pupil, Motoori
Norinaga (1730–1801), attempted in his major treatise on poetry, Iso-
nokami no Sasamegoto (1763), to reconcile the act of knowing (shiru)
with the act of feeling (mono no aware) in an age that was becoming
increasingly suspicious of the irrationality of the unknown (guts and
unconscious). Western “enlightenment” was finding its way to Japan
through scientific publications and the presence of a few Western sci-
entists. In order to be viable to the present circumstances, the realm
of feelings had to find rational justifications or, at least, had to be
explained in light of “knowledge.” Accordingly, Motoori felt the need
to explain the paradox of “knowing mono no aware” (mono no aware
o shiru, or “to know the feelings of things”). He was deeply commit-
ted to this task because of the evidence that he felt could be found in
classical texts such as Ki no Tsurayuki’s Preface with reference to the
idea of “thinking inside the heart”—an expression that for Norinaga
meant thoughts deeply grounded in the co-rationality of feelings. The
reader will find an essay on transience of dichotomies such as reason
and feelings by one of Japan’s major twentieth-century literary critics,
Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), who dedicated the last part of his life
to an in-depth study of Norinaga, the two-volumes Motoori Norinaga
(1979–1980).
Kokoro (the heart/mind), which constitutes a major element in
discussions of pre-modern Japanese poetics, cannot be considered
aside from its expression in words (kotoba), as Tsurayuki stated in his
famous Preface: “The poetry in Yamato language (yamato uta߿߹ߣ
᱌) is the togetherness of numberless words (yorozu no koto no ha ࠃ
ࠈߕߩ⸒ߩ⪲) that take the human heart (hito no kokoroੱߩᔃ) as
their seed (tane⒳).”7 Discussions on language became of paramount
importance among scholars of the School of National Learning, as the
essay on kotodama (the spirit of words) by Fujitani Mitsue (1768–1823)
demonstrates. Belief in the performative action of language is reflected
in the fear and reverence that one felt for language for its alleged abil-
ity to transform a statement (koto ⸒) into an actual thing (koto ੐).
In modern times, the philosopher Ōmori Shōzō (1921–1997) has dis-
cussed this topic in a powerful essay titled “Kotodama Ron” (Essay
on the Spirit of Language, 1973). Without lending any credence to
the belief that words come with any specific power, Ōmori reminds
readers of the power that words have to move people, and, conse-
quently, to move them to take action in the world. He emphasizes the
bodily being of language that touches people, acting on them with its
“gestural” power. By inspiring actions that change the world, language
indeed has the power to transform environments.
With the introduction of aesthetics to Japan in the late eighteenth
century, the vocabulary that poets had used for centuries in their poetic
treatises (karon ᱌⺰) was put to the use of aesthetic discourses. If we
accept the statement by Kobayashi Hideo that until the Meiji period
in Japan there were beautiful cherry blossoms but no idea of beauty
(bi⟤), we might even argue that “beauty” in the aesthetic sense of the
word was discovered in Japan in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury.8 Yanabu Akira (b. 1928), a leading Japanese scholar of translation
theory, mentions six key concepts taken from the Japanese world of
poetry that scholars have repeatedly singled out since the Meiji period
7
Okumura Tuneya, ed., Kokin Waka Shū, SNKS 19 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978),
p. 11.
8
Kobayashi made this point in his 1942 book, Taima.
54 chapter three
to be commensurable with the idea of “beauty:” “Hana” ⧎ (flower)

and “yūgen” ᐝ₵ (grace), developed by the playwright Zeami (?1363–
1443?); “wabi” ଌ (simplicity), characterizing the art of the tea-master
Rikyū (1522–1591); “fūga” 㘑㓷 (elegance) and “sabi” ኎ (artlessness),
sustaining the poetics of the haiku-master Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694);
and “mono no aware” ‛ߩຟࠇ (the pathos of things), devised by the
scholar Motoori Norinaga.9
Yūgen, a key concept in Japanese poetics, found its locus classicus
in the definition given by the poet Kamo no Chōmei (1155?–1216) in
the chapter on “The Style of Uta” from his treatise Mumyōshō (The
Nameless Treatise, 1211–1216), in which Chōmei links the yūgen style
to the modern poetry of the Shinkokin Waka Shū (New Collection
of Ancient and Modern Times, 1205). He writes that yūgen is what
words cannot convey and poetic form cannot adequately catch; it is
the absence of color and sound, and yet it has the power to move
the human soul, as well as Gods and spirits; it is suffering in silence
rather than the exposure of one’s grief; it is a view hampered by mist.
The silence of dusk in autumn became the privileged site for yūgen.
One finds similar ideas in the section on “mystery and depth” from
Shōtetsu’s (1381–1459) poetic treatise Shōtetsu Monogatari (Conversa-
tions with Shōtetsu, 1450), in which the poet tries to revamp the poetic
style of Fujiwara Teika during the age of linked poetry (renga).
The court nobility of the Heian period (794–1185) was the model
for the “style of yūgen” (yūgen no fūtei) which the playwright Zeami
considered to be “the highest ideal of perfection in many arts.” Nō
actors were required to master this style in their performances, as
Zeami pointed out in his treatise Kakyō (Knowing the Flower, 1424).
The actor must look like a dignified nobleman whose yūgen assures
him proper respect; he must reproduce the grace of the nobleman’s
speech and action. Even when impersonating a fearsome demon, the
actor must strive to preserve a graceful appearance in order to be able
to manifest the “yūgen of a demon’s role” (oni no yūgen). The high-
est danger for an actor is to appear vulgar on stage—a vulgarity that
disappears once he has entered the realm of yūgen. In other words,
yūgen is the reproduction on stage of a world long gone, and of a
world that the poetics of yūgen had contributed creating. For a further
philosophical discussion of Nō theater the reader is invited to consider
9
Yanabu Akira, Hon’yakugo Seiritsu Jijō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), p. 69.
the essay on Nō and the body by Zeami’s son-in-law and legitimate

artistic heir, Komparu Zenchiku (1405–1468?).
When in the early twentieth century Japanese scholars confronted
the issue of the cultural aspect of nation formations—see the essay on
nationalism and aesthetics by Umehara Takeshi (b. 1925)—the yūgen
style became one of the most promising candidates for inclusion in
aesthetic explanations of Japan. With the philosopher Ōnishi Yoshi-
nori (1888–1959), yūgen became one of the leading aesthetic catego-
ries (biteki hanchū) that contemporary and later scholars of Japanese
thought and Japanese literature would use to explain the sensitiv-
ity and sensibility of the Japanese nation. Yūgen became part of an
“ethnic aesthetic consciousness” (minzokuteki bi ishiki) which Ōnishi
purported to uncover by analyzing waka poetry in terms of the rela-
tionship between intuition (chokkan; Ger., Anschaung) and affection
(kandō; Ger., Rührung).10
In the 1930s, when the use of aesthetic categories reached their peak
in Japan through the work of Ōnishi Yoshinori, the very notion of aes-
thetic category was already suspicious in Europe because of the reduc-
tion of particularity to the alleged universality of specific aesthetic
concepts. However, in the hands of the gifted philosopher Kuki Shūzō
(1888–1941), the use of the category of “iki” (cool) was quite bril-
liant, as demonstrated in Iki no Kōzō (The Structure of Iki, 1930). The
intricate relationships of grace and clumsiness (iki and yabo), distinc-
tion and vulgarity ( jōhin and gehin), the subdued and the showy ( jimi
and hade), the astringent and the sweet (shibumi and amami), which
he worked out with geometric precision in his well-known hexahe-
dron, bring to the fore a varieties of tensions between opposite sexes,
between I and you, between self and nature. Although Kuki could not
resolve the problem of apriorism that is inherent in the very nature of
an aesthetic category, and has inevitably tied iki to issues of ethnic-
ity, his intellectual tour-de-force is quite impressive. In more modern
times philosophers have pursued the analysis of aesthetic catego-
ries, devising their own versions, as in the case of Ōhashi Ryōsuke’s
(b. 1944) notion of “cuts” (kire) in his Kire no Kōzō (The Structure of
Cuts, 1986).
The present anthology also includes essays by major Japanese think-
ers on a variety of arts, such as the way of tea by the Zen Buddhist
10
Ōnishi Yoshinori, Yūgen to Aware (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939).
56 chapter three
scholar Hisamatsu Shin’ichi (1889–1990), who was a member of the

Kyōto School of philosophy initiated by Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945).
The essay on wabi by Toyo Izutsu contributes further insights into
the philosophical implications of the tea ceremony. Nishitani Keiji
(1900–1990), another prominent member of the Kyōto School who
held the principal chair of religion at the University of Kyōto, is rep-
resented with an essay on the art of flower arrangement (ikebana).
Finally, calligraphy is discussed in an excerpt from the work of Morita
Shiryū (1912–1998), a student of Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, and an active
participant in the dialogue between American abstract expressionist
and Japanese calligraphers.
CHAPTER FOUR
JAPANESE AESTHETICS: THE CONSTRUCTION

OF MEANING
Recently, much has been made in the West of poststructuralist modes

of interpretation that challenge the comforting stability of herme-
neutical practices grounded in metaphysical explanations of reality.
The great debate between the French and German inheritors of the
Enlightenment has polarized the European and American fields of
interpretation between a staunch opposition to the acceptance of defin-
able meanings and a stern resistance to the dismantling of the con-
cept of “presence” that for centuries has been at the core of Western
epistemology. The twentieth-century rhetorical attack on the alleged
rationality of the Platonic-Aristotelian-Cartesian-Hegelian scheme of
things has vehemently resurrected the powerful antirationalist bent of
the Sophist movement that, in the fifth century b.c., was reduced to a
silence that thereafter led to its neglect. Although to the contemporary
Western observer this mostly French renewal of nondialectical think-
ing might have come as a surprising phenomenon, it is my contention
that the Japanese response to the postmodern debate has been soft-
ened by an inscription of the same conflict within the boundaries of
its premodern culture. It is the purpose of this essay to show the role
played in medieval Japan1 by self-contradictory modes of interpreta-
tion that privilege both the fluidity of Becoming and the metaphysical
presence of Being.
This essay was written under the auspices of a Japan Foundation grant that allowed
me to do reseach in the Department of Aesthetics (Bigakka) of the University of
Osaka from May to August 1993. I wish to thank Professor Kanbayashi Tsunemichi
␹ᨋᕡ㆏ for his invaluable suggestions and for steering my research in the direction
taken in the present essay.
1
My use of the word “medieval” when applied to Japan follows the extended mean-
ing provided by William R. LaFleur in his Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary
Arts in Medieval Japan (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California
Press, 1983), where “medieval” includes the Tokugawa period (1600–1868). I have
discussed this topic in my Representations of Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval
Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), pp. 154–155.
58 chapter four
Void and Nothingness
When we observe the map of the contemporary process of capital

accumulation, we cannot fail to notice a concerted effort by unpreten-
tious structures of economic/political manipulation to draw a chart
of dispersal in which the consumer is led to believe in his/her own
personal empowerment. Individuals are needed as potential buyers
at a time when monarchs, states, and national boundaries obstruct
the free flow of exchange that make markets the undisputed lawmak-
ers of the late twentieth century. This rising to “power” of consumers
from different cultural backgrounds makes any concept of authority
that is not directly invested in the alleged “choice” of the individual
problematic. The truth is with the consumer, and there are as many
truths as there are consumers. In fact, truth seems to reside more with
the variety of constantly changing products that challenge consumers
by confronting their “bourgeois integrity” with an alleged freedom to
choose whatever they desire. Rather than being alienated, the subject
is fragmented, like the frenetic buyer in a mall whose main anxiety
derives from the puzzlement of selecting which brand from which
store on which occasion. The commodity’s disposable nature justifies
consumers’ lack of commitment and the unsteadiness of their convic-
tions, which, far from being a source of continuing concern that still
remains for the people of modernity, are the marks of updatedness,
sophistication, and “liberation.”2
In spite of the bleak potential for its writing a new page of false con-
sciousness, what we today call postmodernism cannot be denied the
merit of continuing the unfinished business of modernism: to reject
the transparency of a master history in which truth unfolds along the
lines of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, and which a Cartesian
subject constructs in binary opposition and Hegelian synthetic pro-
cesses. The demise of grand narratives challenges the unitarian view
of history that has made the masters of the written word the undispu-
table makers of human destiny. The pluralization of histories has made
societies less transparent and less willing to accept the notion of an
objective reality whose frame of reference is grounded in the unverifi-
2
For a critique of postmodernism see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cul-
tural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
japanese aesthetics: the construction of meaning 59
able fable of the metaphysical world.3 The Nietzschean Übermensch is

finally finding a concretization in the person of postmodernity, who,
by accepting the tragedy of the demise of “truth” and by resuming the
anti-Socratic philosophy of belittled Sophists, denies the existence of
permanent, stable, “metaphysical” truths and essences.
In spite of a multiplicity of interpretative strategies, the current
debate on the postmodern focuses on how to dismantle epistemologi-
cal categories that restrict the human mind within the closed boundar-
ies of a metalanguage that fails to explain itself, let alone the object of
its speculation. Nietzsche’s murder of the reassuring myth of stability
and meaning, as well as Heidegger’s concept of the human fluctuation
between belonging and loss, deprives humanity of a “scientific” appa-
ratus that might provide legitimation to the process of thinking. If the
main target of postmodernism is the dismantling of Western episte-
mology, non-Western cultures whose premodern world has developed
independent of Western influences should well be positioned to claim
their status of postmodernity ante-litteram. This is exactly what is cur-
rently occurring among Japanese intellectuals, for whom postmodern-
ism is as new as the beginning of their civilization.
For example, Karatani Kōjin ᨩ⼱ⴕੱ (b. 1941), a leading voice
in contemporary Japan, argues that in his country the postmodern
questioning of modernity was contemporaneous with the impor-
tation from the West of modernity in the second half of the nine-
teenth century. The invocation of traditional practices resisting the
country’s “blind” acceptance of modernism, modernity, and mod-
ernization can reasonably open the doors to postmodernity, pro-
vided that premodern conditions satisfy the postmodern requirement
of deliverance from metaphysics. Given the impact that Buddhism
had on medieval Japanese culture, Karatani is free to argue that the
rejection of the dualities of one and many, inner and outer, sub-
ject and object, and mind and body has been at the core of Japan’s
philosophical tradition since time immemorial. Quoting from the
distinguished writer Mori Ōgai ᫪㣁ᄖ (1862–1922), he points out the
post-modern nature of the Japanese subject, “a bundle of subjectivi-
ties” determined more by circumstances than by an appropriation of
3
In response to the Marxist critique of postmodernism, the Italian philosopher
Gianni Vattimo sees in the “chaos” of a fragmented subjectivity the seed of emanci-
pation from the simplistic view of reality grounded in Greek metaphysics. See his La
Società Trasparente (Milan: Garzanti, 1989).
60 chapter four
the Cartesian mind. Karatani argues that the lack of an original meta-
physical apparatus explains the preeminence in Japan of the process of
becoming (naru ᚑࠆ) over an absent presence of Being. The Japanese
cultural tradition, he continues, has unfolded “naturally” and free of
any metaphysical rationalism, from the time Buddhist thinkers devel-
oped the theory of impermanence (mujō ήᏱ) until the dismissal of
rational categories on the part of the eighteenth-century philosopher
Motoori Norinaga ᧄዬት㐳 (1730–1801).4
Although Karatani’s characterization of the Buddhist strategy of de-
centering, which reads a major stream of premodern Japanese thought
in a postmodern light, is undoubtedly accurate, the presence of Moto-
ori among the beacons of postmodernity is at best suspicious, given
his leaning toward the reinstatement in Japanese epistemology of a
metaphysical world that was part of a tradition no less prominent
than its more postmodern counterpart. The presence in the Japanese
philosophical tradition of what has been called “weak thought”5—the
relativism of a continuously decentered philosophy of absence—implies
rather than denies a “stronger” philosophy of Being that already made
its apparently contradictory appearance within the Buddhist decon-
structive stream. This metaphysics of presence reappeared during the
Tokugawa period (1600–1868), when Japanese scholars were faced
with a redefinition of representation as the linkage between ontology
and its metaphysical ground—what has come to be known as “the
spirit of representation” (kotodama ⸒㔤). Before dealing with the
hermeneutics of presence, however, let me examine a few features of
Japanese anti-rationalism.
“Weak Thought”: Poetic Representations. There is some sort of com-

mensurability between Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God
and the Zen patriarch’s exhortation to kill the Buddha.6 Both imply
that if the construction of external authority (myth) does not die of
natural causes, it is imperative for humankind to bring its life to a
quick end. In both Nietzsche’s nihilism and the East Asian monistic
4
Karatani Kōjin, Hihyō to posuto modan ᛕ⹏ߣࡐࠬ࠻̒ࡕ࠳ࡦ (Tokyo: Fuku-
take Shoten, 1985), pp. 9–49.
5
G. Vattimo and P.A. Rovatti, Il Pensiero Debole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983).
6
“You kill the Buddha if you meet him; you kill the ancient Masters if you meet
them” (Zenkei Shibayama, ed., Zen Comments on the Mumonkan [San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1974]), p. 29.
philosophy, ultimate values are superfluous inasmuch as they block

the march toward knowledge by introducing a comforting and gratu-
itous end to the potential of change. Reality is a fable whose “appear-
ance” is by no means any less real or unreal than the ontos on of what
we take to be “scientifically” true. Nietzsche spelled it out clearly in the
Twilight of the Idols: “The characteristics which have been assigned to
the ‘real being’ of things are the characteristics of non-being, of noth-
ingness—the ‘real world’ has been constructed out of the contradiction
to the actual world: an apparent world indeed, insofar as it is no more
than a moral-optical illusion.”7
As long as people insist upon reading the fabulistic experience of
reality as “truth,” they cannot be freed from the metaphysics of theol-
ogy/ teleology, whose ground Heidegger exhorted to discard in order
to be able to “jump into the abyss.” Once the foundation of Being has
been ungrounded, Being starts making sense as the constitutive pos-
sibility of not-being any longer. Heidegger, who strenuously searched
for a method to get rid of metaphysics—without, however, sacrificing
Being on the Nietzschean altar of the anti-Christ—argued that Being
cannot be thought of as presence, since the only organ that can actu-
alize it—thought—remembers Being as what has already disappeared
(an-den-ken), a void moment of absence. Being is a trace of past words,
a message transmitted (Überlieferung) from generation to generation
of mortal entities; it is contained in the process of becoming, and iden-
tifies with the fleeting rhythm of existence, nothingness.8
Gianni Vattimo calls this exit from the metaphysical dimension
“weak ontology,” an acceptance-convalescence-distortion in which
“the metaphysical concepts of subject and object, or more correctly
reality and truth-ground, lose their weight.” In this lightened version
of post-modernity, the split between truth and fiction/information/
image is in some way reconciled by a human swinging (schwingend)
in a lightened/enlightened reality.9
No one in the West has been more sensible to the distortions of
metalanguage than the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose
essays “Force and Signification” and “Structure, Sign, and Play” are
7
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (1889; London: Pen-
guin Books, 1990), p. 49.
8
See Gianni Vattimo, La Fine della Modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), pp. 27–38,
121–136.
9
Ibid., p. 189.
62 chapter four
devoted to showing the metaphoricity and circularity of all structural

discourses. The logic/rationalism of metaphysics that informs all pre-
determined interpretative practices introduces into metalanguage the
“truth” that one wants to find in a text already, before approaching the
object of interpretation. The use of metalanguage is, then, reduced to a
series of metaphorical and self-reflexive props without which the mind
loses its ability to conceptualize. The Derridean process of deconstruc-
tion challenges the interpreter to pause on the opacity of metalanguage
and meditate on the metaphorical/metaphysical plays characterizing
interpretative practices. Derrida is indebted to Nietzsche when he
moves from logic to rhetoric by subjecting to rhetorical analysis the
metaphorical movement from image to concept.10
The deconstructive practice that suspends the metaphysical corre-
spondence among mind, meaning, and the method allegedly unit-
ing them was not unknown to the Buddhist philosophical tradition,
which characterized truth as an insight into a nondifferentiating and
non-objectifying wisdom (prajñā) that frees the interpreter from the
danger of thinking of categories as absolutes. This nameless and form-
less reality stretching beyond the well-known boundaries of concep-
tualization has engaged the sharpest minds of Asia in the definition
of what language can hardly name and concepts can hardly describe:
Nāgārjuna (ca. a.d. 100–200) calls it śūnyatā (emptiness), Chuang
Tzu ⨿ሶ (between 399 and 295 b.c.) refers to it as wu ή (nonbeing),
and Lao Tzu ⠧ሶ (sixth century b.c.) calls it the tao ㆏ (way).
The American scholar Thomas Kasulis challenges this defiance of
conceptualization by using the image of the hollow interior of a bell.
Once the bell is struck, the observer expects a sound to come from it,
but, Kasulis inquires, does the sound come “from the metal casting
or from the emptiness inside”? He argues that no sound would be
possible without either the hollow interior or the casting, so that “for
the bell to resound, both the Being and the Nonbeing of the bell are
necessary.”11
10
Both articles mentioned above appear in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Dif-
ference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). See also Christopher Norris,
Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (1982; London and New York: Routledge, 1991),
pp. 78–83.
11
T.P. Kasulis, Zen Action Zen Person (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1981), pp. 34–35.
The grasping of the interrelatedness of opposites requires in Zen

meditational practices a particular training of the mind called mushin
ήᔃ, or no-mind, which introduces the practitioner to a mental stage
preceding the formation of meaning. The medieval Japanese philoso-
pher Dōgen ㆏ర (1200–1253) called this privileged access to enlight-
enment “without thinking” (hishiryō 㕖ᕁ㊂), which he distinguished
from both “thinking” (shiryō ᕁ㊂) and “not-thinking” (fushiryō
ਇᕁ㊂). The peculiarity of “without thinking” is its nonconceptual
and prereflective mode of consciousness, which makes the individ-
ual perceive reality as it is (genjōkōan ⃻ᚑ౏᩺), without letting
consciousness and the construction of categories intervene in the
modification and distortion of reality. Experience then precedes the
conceptual categorization of reality, which the mind scrutinizes as
the coming into consciousness of past conditions. Prereflective experi-
ence avoids the distortion operated by the reflection of reality on the
mirror of the mind.12 Reality is then perceived in its phenomenological
aspect of constant transformation (mujō ήᏱ), which resists reduc-
tion to the grammatical rules of logic and rejects the grammaticaliza-
tion of conceptual categories. Let me use another eloquent example
taken from Thomas Kasulis:
Even if thought A (a flower) occurs to you, as long as it is not followed
by thought B (is beautiful) no significance such as A is B (a flower is
beautiful) is formed. Neither is it something which could be taken in the
sense of A which is B (beautiful flower). Then, even if thought A does
occur in your head, as long as you don’t continue the thought, A stands
before the formation of meaning. It is meaningless, and in that condition
will disappear as consciousness flows on.13
The logical links of the chain of existence are broken and nothing
exists but experience before the stage of consciousness—the flower or
the sound of the bell uncontaminated by the presence of a viewer or
a listener. Language reconstructs experience by putting in grammati-
cal form the results of retrospective analysis. Therefore, by reducing
experience to conceptual categories, language fails to represent real-
ity, whose portrayal falls prey to distortion and error, since language
12
See also the analogous concept of “pure experience” developed by Nishida Kitarō
⷏↰ᐞᄥ㇢ (1870–1945) in the attempt to define the stage of nonreflective conscious-
ness (Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and Christopher
Ives [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990]).
13
Kasulis, Zen Action Zen Person, p. 45.
64 chapter four
cannot catch the immediacy of experience. This reminds us of Nietz-

sche’s theory of metaphorization, which results from the fact that
things cannot be known in themselves since “the chemical analysis
of the process of knowledge reveals that this is nothing but a series
of metaphors.”14 If language must freeze on the page the absence of a
fleeting and nonconceptualizable moment, error becomes the inevi-
table necessity in order for one to escape the burden of metaphysics
(i.e., “thinking/not thinking”).
East Asian philosophies have paid unusual attention to the problem
of naming and the arbitrariness of all signifiers. We may recall the
famous beginning of Lao Tzu’s ⠧ሶ Tao-te ching: ㆏ᓼ⚻ “the way is
not the way people think of; names are not what people take names
to be.”15 As a product of human consciousness, reality cannot ground
itself in the stability of meaning, which, on the contrary, is relative
and illusory. This perception of reality, which was shared by Taoists
and Buddhists alike, further discredits linguistic activity as a tempo-
rary means to represent what in reality fails to prove its own existence.
In Japan, philosophers of a major Buddhist school known as Tendai
ᄤบ called the arbitrary linkage between sign and object “temporary
specification” (kemyō ઒ฬ), the fabrication of an imaginary relation-
ship between the object and its naming as a tool for the organization of
knowledge. Buddhists argued that since there is no truth in represen-
tation, what we take as reality is nothing but the product of “a worldly
logic” (zokutai ଶ⺼), while Buddhist truth (shintai ⌀⺼) cannot
become an object of representation. This explains the resistance that
language encountered among many Buddhist practitioners—mainly
members of the Zen school—whose teachings were transmitted expe-
rientially from mind to mind (master to disciple) rather than entrusted
to the written page. The Buddhist justification of language occurred at
the metaphorical level, where a privileged kind of language—namely
poetic—came to be accepted as a “skillful device” (hōben ᣇଢ) to sup-
plement the contingent, illusory logic of ordinary language.
The medieval poet Fujiwara Shunzei ⮮ේବᚑ (1114–1204) stated
that reality was the product of poetry and textualization. The percep-
tion of external reality was not informed by the impression of nature
14
Vattimo, La Fine della Modernità, p. 175.
15
Abe Yoshio 㒙ㇱศ㓶, et al., eds., Rōshi, Sōshi ⠧ሶ ⨿ሶ, Shinshaku kanbun
taikei 7 (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1966), p. 11.
on the viewer’s mind; it was rather the result of poetic representa-

tion. According to Shunzei, colors and fragrances were not located in
nature, but in the poet’s words. As he stated in his poetic treatise, the
Korai Fūteishō ฎ᧪㘑わᛞ, “without poetry, although we might be
able to pay our respects to the cherry blossoms in spring and admire
the maples in autumn, no one would be able to distinguish [i.e., to
understand] their color and fragrance.”16
Far from considering the perception of external reality to be the
result of a passive reception of the natural world, Shunzei explained
it as the active product of the poet’s creative power, which becomes
an experiential form of knowledge at the time of textual reception.
The movement of the poet’s heart (kokoro ᔃ) corresponds to this
moment of authorial creation, which the Japanese aesthetician Ama-
gasaki Akira ዦࠤፒᓃ (b. 1947) calls “poetic subjectivity” (shiteki
shukan ⹞⊛ਥⷰ).17 According to Amagasaki, the reception of poetry
is a transfer to the reader of “poetic subjectivity,” whose reiteration
Shunzei calls “the way of poetry” (uta no michi ᱌ߩ㆏). It would be
a mistake, however, to visualize such a “way” as a material structure of
presence: we must, in fact, remember that the eye (or common subjec-
tivity) cannot see it, since Shunzei’s “way” is a process resulting from
overexposure to poetic subjectivity rather than a localizable activ-
ity. Borrowing from the language of a major scripture of the Tendai
school, the Mo-ho chi-kuan ៺⸹ᱛⷰ (Jpn. Makashikan, Great Con-
centration and Insight) by the Chinese philosopher Chih-i (538–597),
Shunzei described this process as a bracketing or stopping (shi ᱛ)
of the daily practice of conceptualization, expression, and language
(gengo dōdan ⸒⺆㆏ᢿ) in favor of envisioning (kan ⷰ) a reality
that nothing shares with the illusory, temporary, ordinary world as
perceived by the common subject.
Shunzei’s association of the “way of poetry” with the “Buddhist
way” (hotoke no michi ੽ߩ㆏) freed poetic activity from the presence
of a metaphysical ground, inscribing the production and reception of
poetry within a spiral of emptiness and void. The title of his major
theoretical work, Korai fūteishō (Excerpts from the Poetic Body from
the Past to the Present Time), refers to the role played by poetry as the
16
Hashimoto Fumio ᯅᧄਇ⟤↵ et al., eds., Karonshū ᱌⺰㓸, NKBZ 50 (Tokyo:
Shōgakukan, 1975), p. 273.
17
Amagasaki Akira ዦࠤፒᓃ, Kachō no tsukai: Uta no michi no shigaku ⧎㠽ߩ૶:
᱌ߩ㆏ߩ⹞ቇ, Gendai bigaku sōsho 7 (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1983), p. 81.
66 chapter four
textual reproduction of the three bodies of void, temporariness, and

the middle (kūkechū no santai ⓨ઒ਛߩਃ૕). Shunzei was quot-
ing from the Tendai theory of the “Three Truths” (santai ਃ⺼), also
known as the “Three Views” (sankan ਃⷰ).18
The first truth, known as the truth of void (kūtai ⓨ⺼), introduces
what today we would call a poststructural model of representation
inasmuch as everything is posited as a relative existence open to an
uninterrupted process of deconstruction, the product of an arbitrary
sign whose meaning results from a deferring movement of difference.
The fallacy of naming is a fiction that promotes aberrant forms of com-
munication that are discredited by the decentered truth that “every-
thing is void, matter is void, void is matter.” The simplistic or mimetic
view that takes the sign to be the represented object corresponds to
the second truth, or temporary truth (ketai ઒⺼), according to which
everything is posited as presence in spite of its simply temporary exis-
tence. The potential for the specification of reality precedes what we
take to be definitively specified on account of our faulty senses. The
third and median truth (chūtai ਛ⺼) mediates the rupture between
absence (kū ⓨ) and presence (ke ઒), ungrounding them both and
presenting them as the supreme moment of undecidability.
As in the process of Buddhist enlightenment, the poetic act entails
the potentiality for the ideation of a deconstructible reality that denies
the presence of what appears to be. Shunzei gives the example of uta-
makura ᱌ᨉ or “pillow-poems”—foundation verses that established
the language and imagery expected to be employed by poets while
representing famous scenic spots—as producers of a textual reality
much more powerful than the immediate result of the poet’s direct
experience. Poets were expected to have their experiences molded by
the poetic tradition and were strongly forbidden to inject into their
descriptions the details of the “real”—that is, temporary—view. Each
viewer became a poet when confronted by the “actual” scene, inasmuch
as his perception was immediately modified by textual knowledge. If
required to write another poem on his vision, he would have to avoid
the illusion of temporariness, concentrating instead on quoting from
the autonomous sphere of textuality that was sharply removed from
the world as commonly experienced. Similar to Buddhist experience,
18
See the informed discussion by William R. LaFleur in his Karma of Words,
pp. 80–106.
in this textual world, cherry blossoms do not scatter like snow, nor
does snow fall like cherry blossoms. Instead, the poet creates a reality
in which the reader is reminded that cherry blossoms are snow, and
vice versa.
The poem’s form (sugata ᆫ) produces, justifies, and treasures the
paradoxes of a decentered truth that refuses to accept the idea that
flowers cannot dissolve into snow, or that snow cannot solidify into
flowers. Rather than represent “beautiful flowers” as poets had done
in the past, Shunzei creates a reality in which “beautiful flowers” speak
the impossibility of representation. If we feel that, in spite of his claims
to the need of overcoming the structural and linguistic limits of poetry,
Shunzei was still tied to the conventions of poetic diction and rules of
composition, his son Teika ቯኅ (1162–1241) delivered the final blow
to the concept of poetic structure.
Teika’s erasure of linguistic rationality from the poetic act made him
a very controversial figure in the cultural world of medieval Japan. His
concept of poetry as an activity independent of the contextual reality
of court life put him in open conflict with Retired Emperor Go-Toba
ᓟ㠽⠀ (r. 1183–1198), for whom the poetic act was essentially a means
of political legitimation. The charge of intellectual arrogance that Go-
Toba moved against Teika in his Go-Toba in gokūden ᓟ㠽⠀㒮ᓮญ
વ (Ex-Emperor Go-Toba’s Secret Teachings) was mainly motivated
by Teika’s resistance to acknowledging the dependence of good poetry
on the poet’s social status. The emperor knew that high social cre-
dentials were paramount to the success of a poem, whose popularity
was bound to be guaranteed by the author’s political power. Teika’s
opposition to the concept of popular judgment resulted from his con-
viction that only a person versed in the “way of poetry” was qualified
to formulate a judgment, no matter what may have been his or her
social standing. As a matter of fact, Teika’s approach to poetry was no
less political than the one privileged by his imperial patron inasmuch
as Teika supported the idea that monopolistic rights must be detained
by private families whose major business was, as in the case of his own
Mikohidari ᓮሶᏀ house, the legitimation of poetic lineages.
Teika himself, however, challenged the idea of transmission by work-
ing on the creation of a poetic style known as the “Mysterious Style
of Depth” (yūgentai ᐝ₵૕), which Go-Toba warned young poets
to stay away from because of its being inimitable. While relying on
“ancient expressions” ( furuki kotoba ฎ߈ߎߣ߫), by which he meant
the words used in the first three imperial collections—the Kokinshū
68 chapter four
ฎ੹㓸 (905), the Gosenshū ᓟᠠ㓸 (956), and the Shūishū ᜪㆮ㓸
(1055)—Teika stressed the need “to search for a new heart” (atarashiki
kokoro ᣂߒ߈ߎߎࠈ)19 in order to create the écart (mezurashiki ⃟
ߒ߈, metomaru ⋡ߣ߹ࠆ) or surplus of meaning required of poetic
language. Teika achieved this “new heart” by breaking the logical order
of words and by creating ambiguity in the poem’s syntactical patterns
so as to interrupt the flow of signification. We can see this from the
following poem:
Samushiro ya The narrow mat, how cold!
Matsu yo no aki no The waiting night autumnal
Kaze fukete Wind wearing on/blowing
Tsuki o katashiku Spreading one fold of the moon
Uji no Hashihime The Bridge Princess of Uji.20
It would be hard to start detecting a preliminary meaning without first
referring to the source of Teika’s variation (honkadori ᧄ᱌ขࠅ), a
poem by Teika himself that says:
Samushiro ni On a narrow mat
Koromo katashiki One fold of her dress spread
Koyoi mo ya Tonight again:
Ware o matsuran Shell be waiting for me
Uji no Hashihime The Bridge Princess of Uji.21
By going back and forth between source and variation, several images
can be visualized, such as the night wearing on while the woman is
waiting for her lover, the setting moon, the cold wind blowing on the
Uji river, and the white moon shining on the robe of Hashihime—only
half of which she has spread, since she knows that her beloved will fail
again to appear. However, the peculiarity of the variation consists in
the dispersal of signification that Teika achieves either by taking full
advantage of the denotative richness of the Japanese language, or by
creating grammatical mistakes that deprive interpretation on a logical
grounding. In the first case the word samushiro ߐ߻ߒࠈ indicates
both the “cold season” and the “straw mat” without any need on the
19
See Teika’s treatise, Eiga taigai ⹗᱌ᄢ᭎, in Hashimoto et al., Karonshū,
pp. 493–494.
20
Shinkokinshū ᣂฎ੹㓸 420 (Kubota Jun ਭ଻↰ᷕ, ed., Shin kokin wakashū: Jō
ᣂฎ੹๺᱌㓸: ਄, SNKS 24 [Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1979], p. 150).
21
Matsushita Daisaburō ᧻ਅᄢਃ㇢, ed., Zoku kokka taikan: Kashū ⛯࿖᱌ᄢⷰ:
᱌㓸 (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1958), p. 540, N. 33,836. See also Amagasaki, Kachō
no tsukai, pp. 135–136.
poet’s part for linguistic specification. In the second, the expression

kaze fukete 㘑߰ߌߡ (wind wearing on) is grammatically incorrect
since kaze 㘑 (wind) usually accompanies fukite ็߈ߡ (to blow),
while fukete ᦝߌߡ (to wear on) rather indicates the night (yo fukete ᄛ
ᦝߌߡ), which is thus silently implied by Teika’s purposeful mistake.
Teika cuts his poems off from the process of interpretation by
insisting on the impossibility of hermeneutical practices that claim to
reconstruct an alleged original meaning. His poems are built to resist
interpretative closure, as Amagasaki Akira has demonstrated by focus-
ing on the following poem:
Aki sugite The fall is over
Nao urameshiki And here I am feeling bitter
Asaborake In the early morning light:
Sora yuku kumo mo Even the clouds streaming the sky
Uchishiguretsutsu Turn into the rain of wintery storms.
The hermeneutic task is made desperate by the proliferation of mean-
ing that defers all potential interpretations, and makes the poem unin-
telligible. On a first reading, the poem above could easily be interpreted
as a simple scenic description announcing the end of autumn and the
arrival of winter. The metaphoricity of the storm would then refer to
the tears of the narrator, who, for some unexplained reason, falls vic-
tim to bitterness. To stress the metaphorical aspect of the poem at the
expense of the literal would also determine a shift in interpretation
inasmuch as Teika’s poem could then be taken as a human response to
nature: the sudden disappearance of the lovely colors under the heavy
storms provokes the narrator’s depression at the sight of the intimidat-
ing clouds. The validity of these two superficial interpretations, how-
ever, is immediately called into question as the reader realizes that
the poem’s second and third verses are variations of a well-known
poem from the Goshūishū ᓟᜪㆮ㓸, an imperial collection completed
in 1086:
Akenureba Since the day has broken off
Kururu mono to wa It will become dark again,
Shirinagara I know it, and yet
Nao urameshiki This early morning light
Asaborake ka na That makes me feel so bitter!22
22
Goshūishū 672 (Fujimoto Kazue ⮮ᧄ৻ᕺ, ed., Goshūi Wakashū ᓟᜪㆮ๺᱌㓸
3, Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko 586 [Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1983], p. 98).
70 chapter four
In this poem the narrator expresses his bitterness at the early light of
morning that reminds him/her of the time when lovers must separate.
The interpretation of Teika’s poem, therefore, must be reviewed in the
light of this variation to mean that finally the morning—a sad time for
lovers—has come to remind the narrator that, no matter how tempo-
rary it might be, the present separation is the cause of her deep sadness.
Far from providing any consolation, the natural setting contributes
to an aggravation of the poet’s depression at the sight of the winter
storms, tears announcing the end of autumn. A further interpretative
displacement, however, follows the fact that the original poem from
the Goshūishū includes a reference to a legend made famous by the
Chinese poet Li Po ᧘⊕ (772–846). According to this legend, King
Hsiang saw himself in a dream exchanging amorous vows with the
goddess of Sorceress Mountain (Mount Wu Ꮔጊ). When the time
came to say farewell, the goddess confessed that she dwelled on a hill
south of the mountain, where she used to transmogrify into a cloud
each morning and into rain every evening. When the king woke up,
he realized that the woman had told him the truth, and, as a result, he
ordered that a shrine be built for the goddess.
This reference opens a further possibility in the hermeneutics of
Teika’s poem, since the allusion to the Chinese legend points at an un-
fulfillable love, a love that has ended forever. This would also explain
the first word in the poem, aki ޽߈; besides indicating “autumn,” ⑺
it can also be taken to mean “to get tired of someone 㘻߈,” with par-
ticular regard to romantic occasions. Then we could attempt the fol-
lowing provisional interpretation: “It is early morning, and although
I have just been abandoned by my lover, who has finally gotten tired
of me, I cannot forget the night spent with him. The clouds in the sky
keep reminding me of him, and bitter tears stream down my cheeks.”
However, this is bound to remain a temporary interpretation whose
displacement is guaranteed by the hermeneutical process itself, should
we decide to continue searching for further deferrals and ruptures.23
While Fujiwara Shunzei considered reality the textual product of
poetry, Teika denied the existence of any relationship between the
poetic act and external reality, whether the Buddhist realm of enlight-
ened absence or the presence of the historical world. His style was
strongly opposed by members of more conservative poetic schools,
23
See Amagasaki, Kachō no tsukai, pp. 136–138.
who labeled Teika’s poems “Zen-like mad verses” (darumashū) because

of their resistance to interpretation. The medieval poet and theorist
Kamo no Chōmei 㡞㐳᣿ (1153–1216) applauded Teika’s poetry as
an example of surplus of signification deriving from an outburst of
the poet’s heart (yojō ૛ᖱ), whose wordless articulation (kotoba ni
arawarenu yojō ⹖ߦ㗼ࠇߧ૛ᖱ) catches a form of reality that the
eye cannot see (sugata ni mienu keiki ߔ߇ߚߦ⷗߃ߧ᥊᳇).24 Accord-
ing to Chōmei, with Teika’s poetic performance, the silence of absence
is more powerful than the presence of rationally explicable concepts,
and leads the reader to an experience of yūgen ᐝ₵, the ability to be
moved by “the view of a late autumn sky where no color can be seen
and no voice can be heard.”25 This style Teika called “Body with Heart”
(ushintai ᦭ᔃ૕) in a poetic treatise, the Maigetsushō, in which Teika
strongly opposed the practice followed by poets in the past of privileg-
ing the arid logic of representation (kotowari).
The Disclosure of Being
“Strong Thought”: The Spirit of Representation (Kotodama ⸒㔤).

The Western epistemological tradition of legitimizing knowledge by
grounding it in transcendence has been strongly resisted by exponents
of “weak thought” through the centuries. Although it might be diffi-
cult for the postmodern person to imagine the shocking impact that
Gorgia’s argument—“that nothing exists, that even if anything does
exist it is inapprehensible by man, and even if it were apprehensible it
would be impossible to communicate”26—had on a culture that hardly
welcomed the appearance of a treatise titled On the Nonexistent, Or On
Nature, we are all too well aware of the not always benign reaction of
intellectuals, not to mention the “common” reader, to the antirational
challenge of a Jacques Derrida. We can easily define the Western
24
Yanase Kazuo ▽ἑ৻㓶, Mumyōsho zenkō ήฬᛞో⻠ (Tokyo: Katō Chūdōkan,
1980), p. 388. See also Hilda Katō, “The Mumyōshō of Kamo no Chōmei and Its Sig-
nificance in Japanese Literature” Monumenta Nipponica 23(3–4) (1968): 408.
25
Yanase, Mumyōshō zenkō, p. 388. See also Katō, “The Mumyōshō of Kamo no
Chōmei” p. 408.
26
George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition
from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
1980), pp. 30–31.
72 chapter four
philosophical tradition as a variation on the theme of reality and

other, visible and invisible, speakable and unspeakable, with the first
term firmly grounded in the second and a single, clear mirror divid-
ing the two.
We might think, for example, of Plotinus’ (a.d. 204/5–270) aesthetic
concept of beauty as the mirroring of the invisible that is revealed—
and not represented, as Plato had argued, with a patent reference to
the imperfection of all imitations—by the artist’s ability to capture
the original form. Plotinus’ theory implied the concept of emanation
(tolma) of reality from a transcendental being that is made of the One
(to hen) beyond all conception of knowledge, the mind (nous), the
divine knower who is one with the object of his knowledge (noeta),
and all-soul (psyche), the principle of life. Plotinus argued that since
reality attempts to recapture its primal source and, at the same time,
its emanation, beauty is the mirror reflecting the One onto reality. Art,
therefore, acquired a revelatory purpose.27
The empathy with nature of mystics such as St. Francis and St.
Bonaventure is another instance of the aesthetic relationship between
reality and transcendence. The specular philosophy of St. Bonaven-
ture likens the world to a mirror whose brightness derives from the
reflection of divine wisdom. The degree of brightness, however, dif-
fers according to the distance from its source of the reflected object.
The American aesthetician Monroe C. Beardsley describes these three
degrees as follows:
A “shadow” is a distant and confused representation of God, by means
of certain properties but without specifying the type of causal relation-
ship God has to it. A “vestige” is a distant but distinct representation of
God; the vestige is a property of the created being that is related to God
as its efficient, exemplary, or final cause. An “image” is a representation
that is both distant and close; it is a property that acknowledges God not
only as its cause but also as its object.28
Far from being unknown in Japan, the metaphysical explanation of
reality occupied the mind of many intellectuals during both the pre-
modern and postmodern eras. A good example is provided by the sev-
enteenth-century theoreticians who developed the concept of what is
27
Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short His-
tory (1966; University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1982), pp. 84–85.
28
Ibid., p. 113.
known today as “the spirit of things” (kotodama), an attempt to recap-

ture the primal power of language to unveil the source of signification.
A comparison between Japanese aesthetic theories developed before
and after this time reveals a deep transformation in the meaning of
one of the key concepts of the Japanese philosophy of art, the idea
of the “way” (michi ㆏). The beginning of the Tokugawa period wit-
nessed an erosion of multidimensionality that reshaped the “way” into
a unidimensional structure grounded in the human body, whose main
function was thought to be the disclosure of metaphysical truth.
Rather than being a source of epistemological strength as had been
the case in previous centuries, the slippage or écart between the sign
and the object of representation became a source of deep anxiety as a
result of the bifurcation between reality (what is) and ideal (what ought
to be), that is, between what Japanese philosophers in 1600 referred to
as the “way of daily life” and “the way of the heart.” We may think of
Motoori Norinaga ᧄዬት㐳, who diagnosed the cause of this illness
in the Japanese importation from India, China, and Europe of alien
epistemologies such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity. As
a treatment, Motoori recommended the recapturing of the transpar-
ency of the “way of the past” (inishie no michi ฎߩ㆏), the ideal time
of mythical coexistence when the sign, he argued, corresponded to the
object in a univocal and unquestionable relationship. Motoori’s thirty-
year struggle to decipher the most ancient Japanese written document,
the Kojiki ฎ੐⸥ (Record of Ancient Matters, a.d. 712), and to make
it readable again, aimed at disclosing a primordial language whose aes-
thetic dimension (adagoto ᓤ੐) left no room for any practical con-
notation ( jitsuyō ታ↪).
The experience of such linguistic revelation Motoori called “the
moving power of things” (mono no aware ‛ߩ޽ߪࠇ), the ability
inherent in language to be moved by the scriptive trace of a cherry
blossom, rather than to conceive of the cherry tree in its material
aspect of firewood. The latter, Motoori noted, was the result of the
representation of what he called “common words” (tada no kotoba
ߚߛߩ⹖), the signs conveying “reason” (kotowari ߎߣߪࠅ), and
“the meaning of things” (koto no i ੐ߩᗧ). Mono no aware, on the
other hand, was the domain of “pattern words” (aya ᢥ) that dressed
the elegance of poetic forms, leading to the disclosure of the “heart of
things.” The study of the classics, particularly the linguistic patterns of
the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari Ḯ᳁‛⺆), became with Motoori
a shortcut to the actual experience of mono no aware that, far from
74 chapter four
being limited to a textual event, was asked to disclose the truth of

external reality by restoring to humanity the transparency of nature.
Textual experience was simply a door to the realization of mono no
aware, mainly related to the awesome moment of “experiencing”
(kansuru tokoro ᗵߔࠆᚲ) what the philosopher Ōnishi Yoshinori
ᄢ⷏స␞ (1888–1959) called the “excitement” (kandō, G ᗵേ/vereh-
ren) of the aesthetic adventure.
However, in Motoori’s philosophy, experience requires the pres-
ence of the rational understanding (wakimaeshiru ࠊ߈߹߳ߒࠆ)
of external reality (mono no kokoro ‛ߩᔃ, koto no kokoro ‛ߩᔃ),
what Ōnishi has labeled “intuition” (chokkan ⋥ⷰ, G. schauen).29 The
aesthetic awesomeness of aware cannot take place without the physi-
ological intervention of the eye, whose vision makes the “excitement”
possible. It also requires the life of the external object, whose pres-
ence, Motoori reminds his readers, was erroneously discarded by the
aestheticians of the Kamakura (1192–1333) and Muromachi (1334–
1573) periods. He stressed the need to be deeply acquainted with
external reality, so as to become “experts” (tsūjin ㅢੱ) of the world,
the knowledge of which takes place through the physicality of the
human body. Motoori recorded in his Iso no Kami Sasamegoto ⍹਄
⑳ᶻ⸒ that, “unless you get in touch ( furezareba ⸅ࠇߑࠇ߫) with
all elements of external reality, you will not know the heart of things”30
The same thing he repeated in the Shibun yōryō ⚡ᢥⷐ㗔, where
he warned his readers “to get well-acquainted with the things of this
world (seken no koto o yoku shiri ਎㑆ߩ੐ࠍࠃߊ⍮ࠅ).”31
Although the body was essential to the experience of aware, there
was more than simple physicality to the knowledge of the “heart of
things.” A judgment of taste was required that screens the objects fit
for such an experience, a kind of culinary knowledge that is more than
conceptual inasmuch as it goes well beyond the horizon of epistemol-
ogy. This privileged knowledge, or aesthetic knowledge—the taste of
things—is accessed through the surplus of signification conveyed by
“pattern words” that Motoori believed would bring humanity back to
the Being of existence.
29
Ōnishi Yoshinori ᄢ⷏స␞, Yūgen to aware ᐝ₵ߣ޽ߪࠇ (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1939), pp. 125–134; see also Amagasaki, Kachō no tsukai, pp. 222–241.
30
Hino Tatsuoᣣ㊁㦖ᄦ, ed., Motoori Norinaga shū ᧄዬት㐳㓸, SNKS 60 (Tokyo:
31
Ibid., p. 87.
Despite his publicized aversion to Buddhist philosophy, Motoori’s

theory of language is profoundly indebted to the work of philoso-
phers belonging to a Buddhist school known as Shingon ⌀⸒(“True
Word”). Shingon philosophy constructs the universe as a symbolic
expression (monji ᢥሼ) and embodiment (samayashin) of the inde-
structible and timeless Absolute known in Buddhism as the “Dharma-
body” (dharmakāya) and represented by Dainichi Nyorai ᄢᣣᅤ᧪
(Skt. Mahāvairocana). A series of mental, verbal, and physical prac-
tices unites the cosmic level of Dainichi Nyorai to the microcosmic
level of reality. This linkage was provided by the mental envisioning of
reality (mandala), the verbal expression of sacred words (mantra), and
the enacting of sacred gestures (mudrā). Language, therefore, was the
phonetic link to the Absolute Buddha as a potential vehicle for con-
veying the “true words” of the Absolute. Sacred words were thought
to be pointers to the root of language, which was the root of reality as
emanated from the body of the Buddha.32
A similar hermeneutical path was followed by the thinker Fujitani
Mitsue ን჻⼱ᓮ᧟ (1768–1822), for whom also poetry was a means
to the disclosure of Being. Like Motoori he considered the human
patterns of individuation—self, will, desires, and passions—privileged
components of human beings that Fujitani argued were known in
ancient Japan as “the sacred” (kami ␹). Rather than associating the
senses with the potential production of evil, as Confucian thinkers had
consistently argued, Fujitani described them as spiritual elements, hid-
den in the innermost part of the body (yū ᐝ), that made up what he
called the “godly way” (shintō ␹㆏). Their power was confirmed by the
fact that, if overregulated, the senses could destroy the body by causing
illness, madness, or suicide. Fujitani distinguished the psychological
aspect of the self from its bodily and physical expression ( jindō ੱ㆏),
which was instead dominated by reason (kotowari ℂ). The “sacred”
was contrasted to the “bodily” (hito ੱ), which Fujitani conceived as
an external manifestation of the self (ken 㗼) regulated by social, ethi-
cal, and religious rules. The latter was responsible for the performance
of the good and evil that resulted from the body’s tendency either to
observe or to break social conventions.
32
See Thomas P. Kasulis, “The Origins of the Question: Four Traditional Japanese
Philosophies of Language,” in Eliot Deutsch, ed., Culture and Modernity: East-West
Philosophical Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), pp. 213–226.
76 chapter four
Communication between the external, physical components of

human beings occurred through daily language and daily actions
that, by being unable to convey spiritual experiences of the self, Fuji-
tani argued, ended up “killing god/the sacred” (koto to iu mono wa
kami o korosu ⸒ߣ޿߰‛ߪ␹ࠍߎࠈߔ). A privileged language was
required to disclose the inner self that he called “true words” (makoto
⌀⸒) and “true acts” (mawaza ⌀ὑ), and whose location was to be
found in the “way of poetry” (kadō ᱌㆏). This special language was
alleged to heal the fracture between internal and external elements of
human reality, and restore the “way of humanity” to the godliness
of the “way of gods/senses” Fujitani referred to this special feature
of poetic language as “reversed words” (tōgo or sakashimagoto ୟ⺆),
which he explained in his Essentials of the Way of Poetry (Kadō kyoyō
᱌㆏᜼ⷐ) (1817) in the following terms: “Reversed words are like
saying ‘I do not go’ when I actually go, and ‘I do not see’ when I actu-
ally see. Reversals are applicable to events as well as to feelings ( jō ᖱ).
You do not reveal your thoughts; instead you build with words what
you do not think. On purpose you invert the signification of words.”33
The power of poetic language, thus, resides in its ability to say some-
thing by not saying it, or to say it by pointing at something else, or
even by its indicating the opposite of what the poet intends to say. In
this respect Fujitani found two major rhetorical figures in metaphor
and metonymy. In the first case, the metaphorical use of the word
“flower” to indicate a person’s life was expected to make the reader
experience the transience of time that ordinary language could only
catch as rational connotation. Likewise, metonymy was expected to
highlight the “spiritual” side of experience, which would otherwise
be confined to a dry, denotative linguistic pattern. Fujitani gives the
example of the powerful eloquence of an expression like “I want to
visit your house” which conveys much more strongly the desire to
meet with someone than the more simple “I want to see you”34
According to Fujitani, reversed words are the “spirit of things” (koto-
dama ⸒㔤) hiding the presence of Being (kami ␹); they are “true
words” (makoto ⌀⸒, written with the same characters as shingon)
33
Miyake Kiyoshi ਃቛᷡ, ed., Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue zenshū ᣂ✬ን჻⼱ᓮ᧟
ో㓸, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Shibunkaku, 1986), p. 766.
34
Ibid., p. 768.
incorporating a spiritual presence (tama 㔤). Poetic language explodes

conventional vocabularies beyond the constrictive field of denotation,
informing the word with the formlessness of the noumenal/experien-
tial. Kotodama is a language without words ( fugen ਇ⸒) that only a
poet, a child, or a sage possesses. Poetry contains the hidden voice of
Being (kakurimi 㓝ࠅり) whose secrecy only the hermeneutical act
can disclose.35
Fujitani explained his method of hermeneutical recovery in what he
called the “surface/underside/border theory” (omote ura sakai ⴫ⵣႺ),
according to which each word is made up of three meanings: (1) the
apparent meaning that, in the case of the word for “pine tree,” for
example, distinguishes that plant from the oak; (2) the excluded mean-
ing of “oak” from which the pine tree is differentiated; and (3) the
intended, symbolic meaning that, in the case of a pine tree in the East
Asian tradition, would most certainly be the idea of “old age.” The
same scheme can easily be applied to sentences, in which case, accord-
ing to Fujitani, the command “close the door!” would mean: (1) An
order to close the door and not the window, (2) the fact that the door
is open, and (3) the fact that the person issuing the order might be
concerned with the cold or the noise coming from the outside. The
third meaning—the “border meaning”—is the most problematic since
it is the result of fallible conjecture.
Once applied to the interpretation of poetry, Fujitani’s theory
argues that a poem (waka ๺᱌) includes three interpretative levels,
culminating in the disclosure of Being. The first level is the expression
of the poet’s feelings at a particular time. The second indicates the
undisclosed “other” of the poem, or what has been excluded from it.
This is a key moment for the third and final disclosure of the internal
conflict between the poet’s innermost self and external reality. Fujitani
provides several examples in the Light on the One Poem by a Hun-
dred Poets (Hyakunin isshu tomoshibi ⊖ੱ৻㚂Ἦ), his reading of
Fujiwara Teika’s ⮮ේቯኅ Hyakunin isshu ⊖ੱ৻㚂. Following the
lead of Amagasaki Akira, I will concentrate on the following poem by
Sugawara no Michizane ⩲ේ㆏⌀ (845–903):
35
See the discussion on Fujitani by Isobe Tadamasa ⏷ㇱᔘᱜ, Mujō no kōzō: Kami
no sekai ήᏱߩ᭴ㅧ: ᐝߩ਎⇇, Kōdansha gendai shinsho 450 (Tokyo: Kōdansha,
1976), pp. 61–82.
78 chapter four
Kono tabi wa For this travel

Nusa mo toriaezu I could not offer the deity
Tamukeyama The purifying paper:
Momiji no nishiki Instead I will be presenting him
Kami no manimani With the brocade of maples.36
In addition to the literal meaning—the first level of interpretation—
Fujitani reminds the reader of the extraordinary circumstances in
which the poem was composed, as the reader can surmise from the
fact that, had the poet planned his travel, he would have had plenty of
time for the preparation of the customary offerings. The poet’s inner
desire to provide the deity with proper donations was thwarted by the
fact that the travel in question is Michizane’s trip into exile, and this
prevents him from discharging his duties—the second interpretative
level. The “border meaning” is the poet’s profound resentment against
the government at the thought that he has been deprived of his only
chance to assure himself with divine protection during the dangerous
trip to Dazaifu ᄥቿᐭ, on the island of Kyūshū.
According to Fujitani, the poet’s anxiety results from the subjuga-
tion of the guts—the aesthetic sacred dimension—to the political rules
of the body, or external reality. The poet penetrates and communi-
cates with the inner self (kami ␹) of the reader by dwelling within the
“spirit of words” (kotodama ⸒㔤), which awakens the reader to the
truth of his real, “uni-dimensional” Being.
Although they shared the common goal of engaging the Other and
articulating a discourse on the topic of the invisible, the interpreters
of yūgen and kotodama proceeded along different paths that are of
cogent actuality to the contemporary debaters of postmodernity. While
the theorists of the “deep and dark” (yūgen) undertook the challeng-
ing task of debunking metaphysics, the commentators of the “spirit
of things” (kotodama) followed a hermeneutic strategy that, in spite
of Heidegger’s acrobatics of denial, never completely succeeded in
silencing a resistant metaphysical ground. The struggle on the part of
contemporary Japanese philosophers to “harmonize” the inconsisten-
cies of the two systems into a native post-postmodern epistemology is
36
Miyake, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue zenshū, vol. 4, pp. 249–250; Amagasaki, Kachō
no tsukai, pp. 260–261.
far from complete.37 “Weak thought” and “strong thought,” however,

continue to coexist in the works of contemporary thinkers while the
possessing demon of metaphysical hermeneutics refuses to die in the
postmodern land of the groundless Buddha.
37
See, for example, the interesting work of Sakabe Megumi ဈㇱᕺ (1936–2009) on
language as a link between the transcendental and the inter-subjective in the definition
of a Japanese subject that is free of Cartesian dualities. Sakabe Megumi ဈㇱᕺ, Kamen
no kaishakugaku ઒㕙ߩ⸃㉼ቇ (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1976), and
Kagami no naka no Nihongo: sono shikō no shujusō ㏜ߩਛߩᣣᧄ⺆ ߘߩᕁ⠨ߩ⒳‫⋧ޘ‬,
Chikuma Library 22 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1989).
CHAPTER FIVE
JAPAN’S MISSING ALTERNATIVE: “WEAK THOUGHT” AND

THE HERMENEUTICS OF SLIMNESS
1. Metaphysics on a Diet
The harsh economic reality that has confronted the humanities in West-
ern universities during the past few decades is literally threatening the
survival of fields of knowledge whose immediate applicability to the
market is increasingly less apparent. We can say that such a trend is
to a certain degree the result of an inevitable historical process, which
is also echoed in the classroom whenever a student inquires about the
relevance of the past to his or her present situation. What is the value of
historical knowledge in our contemporary society, and to what use can
such knowledge be put today? These are not simple or innocent ques-
tions. As a matter of fact, in order to answer them we must confront
the problem of our own subjectivity. Whenever a subject confronts an
object, the subject does not represent the object: it creates an image
of the object. As to how the subject creates such an image, we might
say that the subject arbitrarily includes itself in the interpretation of
the object, thus arbitrarily creating an image of the other. The original
object cannot exist apart from its being penetrated by a subject. How-
ever, as soon as the object passes through a subject, the object loses its
subjectivity. Actually, nothing is lost in the process. If the object can-
not come to life apart from a subject, how could be possible for any
object to exist in an original form? In order for something to be repre-
sented, the process of representation must be premised on an original
manifestation. The problem is that the original manifestation is from
the very beginning nothing but the result of interpretation. Students
The central ideas of this essay were presented on April 15, 1997, at the 95th
Nichibunken Forum, Japan Foundation, Kyōto, Japan, and on October 24, 1997, at
the Conference of the Midwest Association for Japanese Literary Studies (MAJLS),
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. The author wishes to thank Pro-
fessors Suzuki Sadami and Esperanza-Ramirez-Christensen for their kind invitations
and comments.
82 chapter five
understand this mechanism quite well. They know that it is impossible

to represent the past, since no such objectifiable entity exists anywhere
in the world. What we call “the past” is only possible as the result of
an interpretative process. Now, since interpretation is deeply rooted
in subjectivity, the number of possible interpretations becomes unlim-
ited. Therefore, as a result of the fact that the past does not originally
exist as an objective reality, the number of possible pasts also becomes
infinite. As soon as the notion of objective reality vanishes, no one can
guarantee the correctness of interpretation. At the same time teaching
becomes an impossible endeavor, and the value of the humanities is
questioned by an increasing number of people whose mounting skep-
ticism is understandable and well justified.
It has been convincingly argued, however, that while the consola-
tion of certainties is dead in our present post-modern world, we are
actually provided with new chances. It might, in fact, become pos-
sible to dilute the metaphysical tradition that has been with us for two
thousand years. To repeat a well-known adagio, Western philosophy
grounds the relativity of reality in a place of transcendence, thus giv-
ing reality an absolute meaning. This place of transcendence is called
Being. Since the seer is fettered and he cannot move his head, his eyes
can only enjoy the glimpse of shadows. However, as soon as he is
released from the fetters, the prisoner in the cave can get closer to the
essence of reality. The process of seeing is complicated by the fact that
truth is different from the entities visible to the naked eye. Plato called
this different reality “ideas,” making Being and truth into stable, con-
stant essences. Without them, communication between people would
become impossible. Using the word “table” people can understand
what is talked about, regardless of different tables’ forms and colors,
thanks to the idea of a “table” shared equally by everybody. (Plato, The
Republic 7: 514–517)
The mythology of truth was broadly welcomed in so far as it pro-
vided the world with clarity, stability, and certainty. The history of its
development is long, and entirely aimed at reducing man’s anxiety. An
early example of this is Plato’s notion of an “idea” transcending space
and time, a non-material, eternal reality also known as true reality.
Plotinus called this reality, which informs all existences and without
which nothing can come into being, “the One.” Christian philoso-
phers gave new meaning to this transcendental existence by calling it
“God.” Hegel defined it as “the absolute Spirit,” which brings the con-
flict between subject and object, finitude and infinite, to a stand-still
weak thought and the hermeneutics of slimness 83
and a point of unity. All these thinkers shared a strong interpretative

model of reality, and a strong belief in truth rooted in the mythol-
ogy of Being. However, belief in this reality had to deal with a strong
antagonist, history, the world of accidental becoming in which we all
live. Since history cannot be known beforehand, it is hardly a source
of easiness and security. Conversely, history can well be defined as
the source of anxiety, and the cause of incessant change. Therefore, in
an attempt to put an end to this anxiety, thinkers made the process
of becoming absolute, grounding the real world in the sphere of an
unborn, unperishable, unchanging, and unmovable Being. Without
the ground of Being, no universally valid process of legitimation can
be realized. This, however, would make the ordering of the world a
difficult matter. At this point we are faced with the problem that, if
there are believers who belong to the religion of the Absolute, there
must also be a faith involving reverence, reliance, and worship towards
the planner(s) of such a process, who guarantees the maintenance of
a comfortable order in the world. What started out as a simple philo-
sophical problem acquires a profoundly political meaning, so that the
interpretative act brings about results of momentous consequences.
When we look back on history, we cannot ignore the tragic forms that
the metaphysical tradition took in ways that are difficult to fathom,
such as the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazi regime, or the victims
of nuclear conflicts at the hands of economic regimes.
In the Twilight of the Idols (1888) Nietzsche called the history of
metaphysics “an error.” He depicted this history as a process which
started from the notion of Platonic truth, passed through Christianity,
was carried on by Kant in his philosophy, provoked the skepticism of
the Positivists, went beyond the stage of nihilism, and was finally dis-
solved in the soft truth in which the world becomes a fable. Of course,
Nietzsche reserved the last stage for himself, as we can see from the
following passage—“How the ‘true world’ finally became a fable”—
which can be read as Nietzsche’s own history of metaphysics:
1. The true world—attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man;
he lives in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible,
simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, “I, Plato,
am the truth.”)
2. The true world—unattainable for now, but promised for the sage,
the pious, the virtuous man (“for the sinner who repents”). (Progress
of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible—it
becomes female, it becomes Christian.)
84 chapter five
3. The true world—unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the

very thought of it—a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (At
bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea
has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
4. The true world—unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being
unattained, also unknown. Consequendy, not consoling, redeeming,
or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? (Gray
morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
5. The “true” world—an idea which is no longer good for anything, not
even obligating—an idea which has become useless and superfluous—
consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast;
return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed bush; pan-
demonium of all free spirits.)
6. The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The
apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abol-
ished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of
the longest error; high point of humanity; Incipit Zarathustra.)1
Nietzsche pointed out the reading that metaphysicians gave of a

fabulistic reality which they had made into an absolute truth. His
accomplished nihilism points at a softer truth—the imperative need
for modern man to become used to living in a fictional and ground-
less reality, since all strong interpretations which are deeply rooted
in metaphysics have become impossible. Nietzsche’s ‘overman’ (Über-
mensch) is one who feels comfortable with the absence of consoling
truths and knows how to accept a world that has lost metaphysical
solidity, without falling prey to the neurosis of alienation. There is
no structure left to justify the judgement of right and wrong, good
and evil. As a matter of fact, such a structure has now become use-
less, having been replaced by different and more modern concerns,
such as the historicization of the interpretative process (hermeneutics)
and of the rules regulating the play of interpretation (metatheory). For
Nietzsche nihilism is the reduction of the highest values, the fabuliza-
tion of the world. There are no facts, only interpretations—a statement
which itself is not a description but an interpretation. After the death
of God, the source of all processes of legitimation, both God and truth
survive only as interpretations. The accomplished nihilist must under-
stand that although the realization of the relative nature of truth might
possibly open the door to man’s fall into despair, he should consider
1
Walter Kaufmann, transl., The Portable Nietzsche (London: Penguin Books, 1976):
485–486.
it a discovery that finally makes him rejoice. At last man is given the
chance to be liberated from the heaviness of metaphysics.2
If we still acknowledge the presence of the concept of truth in Nietz-
sche’s thought, such a truth is reduced to its rhetorical meaning. When
we search for the ingredients making up truth, we must address the
topic of language where tropes turn without pause. However, since the
same tropes were abused from years past, we should not depend too
strongly on the heaviness of tropes either. Following the fact that the
present reality is enslaved by language, man must make an effort to
live in a world free of emphasis. By pointing out the relativity of truth,
Nietzsche indicated how an obsession on the part of philosophers and
artists for strong beliefs actually paves the way to the realization of the
actual nature of truth, lightness.3
Seriousness, heaviness, importance, emphasis—all these concepts
died together with God. This complete farewell to old metaphysics aims
2
In The Gay Science Nietzsche discusses the meaning of this cheerfulness as fol-
lows: “Even we born guessers of riddles who are, as it were, waiting on the mountains,
posted between today and tomorrow, stretched in the contradiction between today
and tomorrow, we firstlings and premature births of the coming century, to whom the
shadows that must soon envelop Europe really should have appeared by now—why
is it that even we look forward to the approaching gloom without any real sense of
involvement and above all without any worry and fear for ourselves? Are we perhaps
still too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this event—and
these initial consequences, the consequences for ourselves, are quite the opposite of
what one might perhaps expect: They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a
new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encourage-
ment, dawn. Indeed, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news
that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with grati-
tude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to
us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again,
venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted
again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open
sea.’ ” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, transl. by Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Random House. 1974: 279–280).
3
See, for example, the following passage from The Gay Science: “Being serious about
truth. Being serious about truth: what very different ideas people associate with these
words! The very same views and types of proof and scrutiny that a thinker may con-
sider a frivolity in himself to which he has succumbed on this or that occasion to
his shame—these very same views may give an artist who encounters them and lives
with them for a while the feeling that he has now become deeply serious about truth
and that it is admirable how he, although an artist, has at the same time the most
serious desire for the opposite of mere appearance. Thus it can happen that a man’s
emphatic seriousness shows how superficial and modest his spirit has been all along
when playing with knowledge.—And does not everything that we take seriously betray
us? It always shows what has weight for us and what does not.” Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science, 2: 88.
86 chapter five
at reducing violence, at weakening the strong and assaulting principle

of self-identity, and at being opening to and accepting the other. Since
people living in the post-modern world can no longer depend on rules
coming from an outside, they are forced somehow to develop flexible
systems of thought in order to act successfully in a world of differ-
ence. Based on these premises, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo
(b. 1936) has developed a soft philosophy grounded in interpreta-
tions of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which he has called “weak thought”
(pensiero debole).4 This system describes the shift from modernism to
post-modernism as a move from a strong to a weaker sense of being.
Following in Nietzsche’s footsteps, Vattimo assumes a positive atti-
tude towards the death of metaphysical truth which he interprets as a
true chance for post-modern man. In order to establish the relevance
of Vattimo’s philosophy for contemporary society, we must address
the question of what happens to the violence of metaphysics in “weak
thought,” and what kinds of relationships can be drawn between past
and present. Is a dialogue with history still possible in the present age
that would not reproduce the violence of the past? If we follow the
deconstructive methodology of the French philosopher Jacques Der-
rida, we see that the object known as “the past” is completely dis-
solved. We can barely capture it in the interpreter’s engagement with
the past, so that the past itself is reduced to a kind of performance by
critics. On the other hand, “weak thought” maintains a notion of the
past as a sort of a message, an experience taking place on a herme-
neutical horizon where the past comes into being through messages
coming from the other—the other next to us, as well as other cultures
and other ages. Being does not exist; it happens as messages or, to
use Heidegger’s expression, as ‘trans-mission’ (Über-lieferung), a total
openness to all messages irrespective of their provenance. It could be a
poet, a classical text, the media, or an advertisement. This transmission
takes place in an interpretative space in which Being-there (Dasein) is
thrown into an inherited language and culture. Being, then, appears as
4
Gianni Vattimo, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Turin,
taught aesthetics for more than twenty-five years before succeeding his teacher, Luigi
Pareyson, to the most prestigious chair in the department of philosophy of his uni-
versity. The name “weak thought” derives from the title of a book which gathers sev-
eral articles discussing resistance to the “strong” images provided by metaphysics. See
Gianni Vattimo, and Pier Aldo Rovatti (eds.) 1983.
a multiplicity, temporality, or mortality, which the work of art helps

bringing into being.
The past can only be caught in the form of an interpretative distor-
tion or, to use another expression of Heidegger, as a ‘twist’ (Verwind-
ung), a recollection accepted as a destiny, as well as a convalescence, a
recovery after an illness. The hermeneutician’s confrontation with the
past with whose messages he is always in tune, is an acceptance of the
past, a coming to terms with it, as with an illness from which he has
recently recovered, as well as a resignation to his destiny (= death),
which precludes the hermeneutician from ‘overcoming’ it. This explains
why Heidegger privileged the more subtle expression Verwindung to
the word simply indicating ‘overcoming’ (Überwindung). If we simply
attempted to overcome the past, then we would still be standing in
the midst of a strong metaphysical tradition. We would still be living
under the illusion that there exists an objective truth which must be
overcome in order for man to improve his life in this world. We then
would be falling back into the trap of Hegelian dialectics. However,
by resurrecting this process, thus trying to overcome a metaphysical
ground, we would still be maintaining it in a synthesized form. We
would still be victims of the notions of progress, development, and
growth, since the dialectics of overcoming hide a belief in the truth
of steady development. How can we expect that by preserving this
dialectic, a modernity which has produced the atrocities of concentra-
tion camps such as Auschwitz, will develop into a post-modernity free
of violence? As long as the dialectical process legitimating the Holo-
caust remains the same, no matter what inflation of words is used to
announce the overcoming of a violent modernity, the same atrocities
are bound to repeat themselves. As soon as we ask ourselves what this
dialectical process is about, we realize that it is nothing but our long
metaphysical tradition, a deep faith in the possibility of ‘overcoming.’
Nietzsche had already pointed out that the dialectic of overcoming
could never be considered an exit from modernity, since such a proce-
dure would simply reproduce the historical pains of modernity.5
5
See on this point Vattimo’s informative discussion of Nietzsche: “In this work
[Human All Too Human], the problem of how to escape from the historical sickness
or, more accurately, the problem of modernity as decadence, is posed in a new way.
While in his 1874 text [‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ from
Untimely Meditations] Nietzsche proposes a recourse to suprahistorical and eternal-
izing forces, Human All Too Human brings into play a true dissolution of modernity
through a radicalization of its own constitutive tendencies. Modernity is defined as
88 chapter five
In the footsteps of Nietzsche, “weak thought” argues that post-mod-

ern thinkers must reject the notion of foundation, and of the possibil-
ity of ever recuperating or appropriating an original ground that is
located either in the past of origins or in the future of salvation. “Weak
thought” is very sensitive to the paradox following the belief that the
post-modern world is a new world which has overcome modernity.
It interprets the cult of the new as the fulfillment of an accomplished
the era of overcoming and of the new which rapidly grows old and is immediately
replaced by something still newer, in an unstoppable movement that discourages all
creativity even as it demands creativity and defines the latter as the sole possible form
of life. If this indeed is the case, as Nietzsche claims, then no way out of modernity
can possibly be found in terms of an overcoming it. His recourse to eternalizing forces
signals this need to find another way to resolve the problem. In his 1874 essay Nietz-
sche already very clearly sees that overcoming is a typically modern category, and
therefore will not enable us to use it as a way out of modernity. Modernity is not
only constituted by the category of temporal overcoming (the inevitable succession of
historical phenomena of which modern man becomes aware because of an excess of
historiography), but also by the category of critical overcoming. Nietzsche’s 1874 text
associates the kind of relativistic Historismus which envisions history in terms of pure
temporal succession with the Hegelian metaphysics of history, which understands the
historical process as a process of Aufklärung, that is, a progressive enlightenment of
consciousness and increasing absoluteness of the spirit. This is probably the reason
that Nietzsche, in ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, cannot imagine
a way out of modernity as the effect of critical overcoming, and must instead have
recourse to myth and to art. Human All Too Human remains faithful in principle to
this notion of modernity. It no longer, however, imagines that a way out of moder-
nity could be discovered through recourse to eternalizing forces, and instead seeks to
dissolve modernity through a radicalization of its own innate tendencies . . . Nietzsche
argues that this nihilistic conclusion [i.e. God ‘dies’, slain by religiosity and by the
will to truth which believers have always had, and which now leads them to recognize
God himself as an error which one can do without] offers us a way out of modernity.
Since the notion of truth no longer exists, and foundation no longer functions (inso-
far as there is no longer a foundation for the belief in foundation, that is, in the fact
that thought must ‘found’), there can be no way out of modernity through a critical
overcoming, for the latter is a part of modernity itself. It thus becomes clear that an
alternative means must be sought, and this is the moment that could be designated
as the moment of the birth of post-modernity in philosophy. Like the death of God
announced in The Gay Science (aphorism 125), this is an event whose meaning and
consequences we have not yet fully fathomed. In The Gay Science, where Nietzsche
speaks for the first time of the death of God, the idea of the eternal return of the Same
also first appears; this marks, among other things, the end of the era of overcoming,
namely that epoch of Being conceived under the sign of the novum. Whatever other
(and rather problematic) meanings it may have in a metaphysical perspective, the idea
of the eternal return surely can be said to have at least this ‘selective’ meaning (this is
Nietzsche’s own adjective) . . . Post-modernity is only at its beginning, and the identifi-
cation of Being with the novum—which Heidegger understands to be expressed in an
emblematic way, as we know, by Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power—continues to
cast its shadow over us, like the defunct God that the Gay Science discusses”. Gianni
Vattimo, “Nihilism and the Post-modern in Philosophy,” in Vattimo, 1988: 165–168.
process of secularization, in which the idea of progress takes the place

of transcendence as history’s ultimate and fundamental value. It alerts
us to the consequences of such a repetition of history for the future,
and asks how we can overcome our own mortality. On which ground
can we stand in order to explain our death when we know that we can
experience death only through the mediation of someone else’s demise?
We understand death as a message coming from the outside, as a dis-
tortion, a twist, a Verwindung. Therefore, “weak thought” argues that
the acceptance of destiny—the Heideggerian leap into the abyss (Ab-
grund)—is more liberating than its overcoming. Put in these terms,
the notion of truth does not disappear completely. One truth is left,
the truth of death, which forces the hermeneutician to confront the
basic experience of mortality or, as Gianni Vattimo calls it, “a funerary
monument built to bear the traces and the memory of someone across
time, but for others” (Vattimo, 1988: 73). In our dialogue with the past
we face a funerary mask, a reduction of fullness to a monument which
is seen not in its ‘monumentality’, but in the effects exercised on it by
time. A trace, a residue of a memory is left of the past, an ornament
rather than a monument, which takes attention away from itself, and
refuses to be constructed as a strong, prepotent foreground.6 The atti-
tude required in capturing messages from the past must, then, be com-
mensurable with the nature of this ‘diminished’ reality and avoid the
arrogance of judgements of certainty. In a dialogue with death—what
Vattimo calls “an exercise in mortality”7—piety (pietas) and respect
are due to what once existed. The subject that for such a long time has
taken pride in partaking of divine or scientific truth is now required
to “weaken” itself in the absence of consoling truths, and go on what
Vattimo calls “a crash diet.”8 Piety (pietas) is a word that immediately
recalls to mind a weaker truth which speaks of perishability, finitude,
and transiency. The latter is what Nietzsche posited as the transcen-
dence that makes possible all experiences in the world.9
6
For the impact that this thought has on Vattimo’s aesthetics see Vattimo, 1988:
79–89.
7
This expression appears in Vattimo, 1989: 78.
8
This expression appears in Vattimo, 1988: 47.
9
Vattimo summarizes the major points of his “weak thought” as follows: “If we
want to summarize what a weak ontology thinks of the notion of truth, we could start
from making the following points: a) what is true is not the object of a noetic grasping
such as evidence, but the result of a verification process which produces it by follow-
ing certain procedures which are always and every time already given (the project of
90 chapter five
2. Hermeneutics of Disclosure
“Weak thought” alerts us to the fact that all hermeneutical attempts

aiming at deciphering or unmasking a text are premised in a deeply
rooted belief that strong truths do indeed exist. Such a faith elicits an
obsession for the search of the hidden truth, a penetration of surfaces
in an attempt to recover what they conceal behind, so as to finally
arrive at the essence of truth. All hermeneutics of disclosure which
focus on the recovery of pristine truth are rooted in the metaphysical
notion of an absolute existence such as, for example, the existence of
God. With the death of God all methodologies related to the unveil-
ing of things become meaningless, since no truth is left to be uncov-
ered. By looking at Heidegger’s response to the confrontation with a
groundless reality, Gianni Vattimo describes the crisis of historicist
hermeneutics as follows:
The task of hermeneutics in regard to tradition is never a making-present
in any sense of the term. Above all, it cannot be understood in the his-
toricist sense of reconstructing the origins of a certain state of affairs or
things in order better to appropriate them, according to the traditional
notion of knowledge as knowledge of causes and principles. In entrust-
the world that constitutes us as being-there); in other words, what is true has not a
metaphysical or a logical nature, but a rhetorical one; b) verifications and stipulations
happen in a ruling horizon, the openness of which Vom Wesen der Wahrheit talks
about, which is the space of freedom of interpersonal relationships, of relationships
between cultures and generations; in this space no one ever moves from zero, but
always already from allegiances, belonging, bonds. The rhetorical horizon of truth
(or we could also call it, hermeneutical) comes into being in this free but ‘impure’
manner, analogously to that common sense mentioned by Kant in the Critique of
Judgement. The bonds, the acts of respecting and of belonging are the substance of
pietas: the latter outlines, together with a logic-rhetoric of the ‘weak’ truth, also the
foundations of a possible ethic, in which the highest values—those acting as goods
in themselves and not in view of something else—are the symbolic formations, the
monuments, the traces of the living (everything that gives itself and stimulates inter-
pretation; an ethic of ‘goods,’ rather than an ethic of ‘imperatives’); c) the truth is
the result of interpretation, not because through the interpretative process we reach
a direct grasping of what is true (for example, as in the case where interpretation is
perceived as a process of deciphering, unmasking, etc.), but because the truth consti-
tutes itself only in the interpretative process understood first of all with reference to
the Aristotelic sense of hermeneia, expression, formulation; d) in all this, namely in
the ‘rhetorical’ concept of truth, Being experiences the extremity of its decline (accord-
ing to the Heideggerian view of the West as the land of the setting of Being), thus
living its weakness to the end; as in Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology, Being now
simply becomes Über-lieferung, trans-mission, vanishing even in the procedures, in
‘rhetoric’ ”. Gianni Vattimo, “Dialettica, Differenza, Pensiero Debole,” in Vattimo and
Rovatti (eds.), 1983: 25–26.
ing oneself to tradition, what proves liberating is not cogent evidence

of principles or Gründe which, when we arrive at them, would finally
allow us to explain clearly what happens to us; instead what is liberating
is the leap into the abyss of mortality. As happens also in Heidegger’s
etymological reconstructions of the great words of the past, the relation-
ship with tradition does not supply us with a fixed point of support, but
rather pushes us on in a sort of return in infinitum to the past, a return
through which the historical horizons that we inhabit become more
fluid. The present order of entities—which in the objectifying thought of
metaphysics claims to be identified with Being itself—is instead unveiled
as a particular historical horizon. This is not, however, to be understood
in a purely relativistic sense. What Heidegger is seeking is still the mean-
ing of Being, and not the irreducible relativity of the different epochs.
The meaning of Being is precisely what is recalled through this re-ascent
in infinitum through the past and the fluidification of historical hori-
zons. This meaning of Being, which is given to us only through its link
to mortality and to the handing down of linguistic messages from one
generation to another, is the opposite of the metaphysical conception of
Being as stability, force, energheia. It is instead a weak Being, in decline,
which discloses itself through a weakening and fading: it is that Gering,
so unapparent and irrelevant, which Heidegger discusses in his lecture
‘The Thing’. (Vattimo, 1988: 120–121).
When we look at the history of Japanese hermeneutics, we see the
hermeneutics of recovery at work among members of the National
Learning movement (Kokugaku) in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, resulting from the belief in a direct relationship existing
between the native gods and the language of the Yamato land. Nativ-
ist hermeneutics are informed by a strong faith in the recoverability of
the original voice of the gods, which was thought to have been silenced
by the intrusion of external cultures, such as Confucianism and Bud-
dhism, onto the native land. Nativist hermeneuticians struggled to
recover the divine voice and reconnect with the deities, by restoring
to words their original meanings. They ‘polished’ from the literary text
the layered strata of interpretations under which, according to them,
the text had been lying hidden from sight for centuries. The working
premise behind this move was that the text could be brought back to
some kind of pristine purity, meaning, or truth whose clarity several
generations of commentators had allegedly managed to obfuscate. In
a sense, the late Tokugawa exegetes employed a method of “textual
restoration” analogous to the one later used by the Meiji reformers
in taking power away from the shogunal house and restoring it to what
they thought to be the pristine source of political/religious legitimation—
the imperial house (Meiji Restoration). A religious imperative became
92 chapter five
the duty of everyone who was engaged in the interpretation of texts.

The study of the past was tantamount to the resurrection of the gods,
a reading into the alleged transparency of ancient language whose
soul (kotodama) was a direct expression of the divine spirit. Accord-
ing to Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), a leading figure of the move-
ment, native poetry (waka) preserved the honesty and frankness of
the age of the gods since, as he asserted in a major treatise on poetry,
his Personal Views on Poetry (Isonokami no Sasamegoto, 1763), “both
the feeling and the diction of the poetic voice reflect exactly the feel-
ings felt during the spontaneously risen age of the gods of our august
land” (kokoro mo kotoba mo waga mikuni no onozukara no kamiyo no
kokorobahe no mama niteha arikeru).10 No matter whether the value
of native poetry might decline in a certain age, one truth remained
unchanged, the belief that “the feelings felt in the age of the gods are
faithfully transmitted” in waka (uta ha uta ni te otorohenagaramo
kamiyo no kokorobahe no mama niteha tsutaharerikeru) (Motoori, in
Hino, 1983: 416). Motoori’s strong interpretative model is grounded
in an absolute belief in transcendence to the complete exclusion of
any ‘other’ that might disconnect the present from the divine past. The
political and social dangers of such a model, which are immediately
apparent, informed Motoori’s discussion of non-native formations,
which he reduced to “the Chinese heart” (karagokoro). We can see
this by looking at the following remarks, for example:
As for later ages, although everything became increasingly more like
China, only poetry was not in the least hybridized with styles coming
from alien countries. Even today poetry alone maintains unaltered natu-
ral feelings and words as in the age of the gods of our august land. Isn’t
this cause for great rejoicing? The reason is that our poetry is not fit
to express the annoying and confusing conceits that we find in foreign
lands. If you use one single, isolated Chinese sound [in waka], the poem
will sound harsh and strange to the hear. There is no doubt that it will
sound filthy. This is an indication of the superior ingenuity, frankness
and grace that blessed the poetic language of our land from the begin-
ning. When we hear everybody extolling the superiority of China in all
matters, we realize that this can only be a fad of our times. Therefore, it
is only natural for the way of poetry to be recognized as the major way in
our land. It is the way of the gods (Shintō)—which we should be calling
our major way—which has actually made scholars of several generations
10
Motoori’s text appears in Hino Tatsuo (ed.), 1983: 414.
go astray in the labyrinth of Chinese writings,11 making them quibble

over mistaken views based on a prejudiced and groundless logic. Their
theories are no different from those of Confucianism. Since they have
soiled the bright light of our august deities, these scholars have lost the
feelings of this land of ours which belongs to the honest and graceful
deities. Isn’t this cause for deep regret? However, I am overpowered with
joy to think that this way of poetry alone has not lost the heart of the
divine age. (Motoori, in Hino, 1983: 416–417).
Motoori argues that the original meaning of words is as deep as the
way of the gods and, therefore, truly difficult to grasp. However, he
believes that it is possible to reach the root of signification through
the mediation of a hermeneutician whose duty is to penetrate the sur-
face and to recover the real meaning behind it. A major problem with
Motoori’s thought is that he takes the existence of the gods as an a
priori that determines from the beginning the result of his philologi-
cal search. No matter which text he analyzes, the text is constantly
reduced to an expression of truth grounded in a mythical past. As with
all hermeneutical enterprises which are rooted in a strong metaphysi-
cal ground, the hermeneutician knows the result of his search prior to
the beginning of his inquiry. However, a science that discloses a truth
which is actually the working premise upon which that same science
is grounded, is a meaningless enterprise, since the truth located in the
underside of things was already determined by a transcendent agent
from the beginning. In such a strong model of interpretation anything
finds its justification, including the most strongly prejudiced opinions,
as long as they are premised on the will of a concealed deity who
acts as the guarantor of the process of legitimation. At the same time
that truth is always already determined, what opposes the truth—the
rejected opinions of those who do not agree—is automatically erased
from the process as an error, a mistake. The hermeneutician plays the
role of the oracle by reading God’s mind and by giving expression
to his will. Motoori justified his hermeneutical practice by arguing
that we already find in the classical texts this hermeneutical reduc-
tion, which aims at uncovering an alleged hidden reality beneath the
surface of a text. Motoori was thinking of the text which he made the
most ‘classical’ of all, The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), as we see
11
Motoori is referring to the influence that Confucianism had on the writings of
Shintō scholars prior to the Nativist movement.
94 chapter five
in the following excerpt from Motoori’s The Essentials of the Tale of

Genji (Shibun Yōryō, 1763):
In her tale Murasaki Shikibu expressed straightforwardly the real pur-
pose (hoi) for writing The Tale of Genji in the chapter entitled ‘Fire-
flies’ (‘Hotaru’). Although she does not spell it out in any definite way,
she distinguishes herself from the authors of the usual, ancient stories
by showing her hidden purpose (shitagokoro) in the dialogue between
Genji and Tamakazura. Since in the ancient commentaries there are
many mistakes, and it is hard to single out the author’s purpose, not to
mention numerous misinterpretations, I will extract the entire passage
from the text, providing my commentary to each section. This shall
become a guide through the text that will uncover Murasaki’s hidden
purpose to write the story. (Motoori, in Hino, 1985: 47).
For Motoori the uncovering of the author’s original intention corre-
sponds to the understanding of the work’s real meaning (= the truth).
As is widely known, Motoori argued that Murasaki’s real purpose was
to write a story from the perspective of someone who was able to relate
to and to understand “the pathos of things” (mono no aware). This is
the working hypothesis which runs through most of Motoori’s criti-
cal work on The Tale of Genji, and which reduces the story to what
modern aesthetics would call the psychology of empathy (Einfühlung).
“Mono no aware” is posited as an a priori which is entrusted with
the search of the truth in monogatari, and which will find in mono
no aware itself the result of the search. Motoori’s hermeneutic circle
often caused him to lose control of his arguments, leading him to the
impasse of tautology, as we can glimpse from the following example:
Distinguishing two interpretative moments ( futashina) in The Tale of
Genji Murasaki states her purpose in writing the tale. Earlier on she
had indicated that the possible presence of truth in the genre shows the
pathos of things (aware). This purpose aims at moving the heart for no
explicable reason by having the scene somehow appealing to the reader’s
heart. As for how to achieve this goal, [the tale] must move the reader’s
heart and make him know the pathos of things. By knowing the pathos
of things, the heart moves and [the event] appeals to the heart. Therefore
we should realize that there is no didactic purpose whatsoever in the
writing of fiction, and that fiction is not an admonition against lewdness.
(Motoori, in Hino, 1983: 53–54).
The strong presence of the mono no aware a priori in Motoori’s judge-
ment led him to reject all other possibilities with regard to the expla-
nation of monogatari, on the ground that they were prejudices coming
from the outside (China), the groundless logic of alien epistemologies
such as Buddhism and Confucianism. Reality as the conflict of inter-

pretations is rejected in favor of a precise, determinate, and unmovable
truth. Indifference to the history of hermeneutics blinds Motoori to
his most patent methodological contradiction: the construction of an
internal space of pristine innocence with a series of interpretative tools,
or hermeneutical models, coming from the outside, such as the pattern
“frontside-underside” (omote/ura) which underlies Motoori’s discus-
sion of Murasaki’s alleged “hidden purpose.” While using a hermeneu-
tical model developed by Buddhist thinkers, Motoori denounced as a
violation from the outside a thought which was actually at the very
core of the native space. The myth of origins, which was central to the
development of a strong subjectivity, led Motoori to stress the alleged
purity and uniqueness of the genesis of the Yamato land, thus inter-
rupting the hermeneutical search at the local level (the presence of the
frontside-underside theory in The Tale of Genji), rather than pursu-
ing it to its genealogical extremes. As Motoori himself most probably
knew but decided to forget, his interpretative model was not of Mura-
saki’s making. It was quite alien in origin, as we find it at work in the
Mādhyamika school of Buddhism which was transplanted to Japan
as the Sanron or The Three-Treatise School. The notion of the “two-
truths” (Skr. satya-dvaya; Jpn. shin-zoku nitai) and of the “implicit/
explicit meanings” (nīta- and neya-artha) became very popular in
pre-modern Japan since it allowed to posit different levels of knowl-
edge according to the intellectual capabilities of the learners. Based
on Nāgārjuna’s Mādhyamika Śastra (Chūron), the argument goes that
the historical Buddha addressed his audience by means of a twofold
teaching: the worldly truth (samvriti-satya; Jpn. zokutai) contended
that the law of causation was at the source of creation; on the other
hand, a higher and transcendental truth (paramārtha-satya; Jpn. shin-
tai) pointed to the relativity of all beings as Void or Emptiness.12 This
notion of the double truth had a profound impact on the philosophy
of language, as it led to the following conclusion. Language was seen
as both a mere conventional, communicative, and relational device, as
well as a reliable indicator of transcendental truth. A tension came into
being between the notions of absolute and relative, silence and speech,
true knowledge (prajñā) and skillful means (upayā).13
12
See Junjirō Takakusu, 1947: 102–104.
13
See Louis O. Gómez, 1987: 450.
96 chapter five
This tension has been widely appropriated by interpreters of Japan

to this very day, making of the frontside-underside theory a privileged
topos in academic as well as more popular discussions about Japan
(Nihonjinron). On the academic front the application of the dichot-
omy of frontside (omote) and underside (ura) to the analysis of texts
is sustained by a belief in the mythology of concealment, according to
which meaning is carefully ‘hidden’ from the view of the inattentive or
untrained reader. This type of reading is difficult to resist since it gives
a precise purpose to the act of reading. At the same time, however,
it takes attention away from the interpretative nature of interpreta-
tion, by locking the reader in a privileged—but illusory—space which
is grounded in some sort of ‘strong’—but meaningless—truth. It is
not uncommon to find this slippage even among the most attentive
readers of The Tale of Genji, as the following statement from a recently
published book (which actually aimed at resisting strong, hegemonic
interpretations) clearly demonstrates. The passage in question refers to
“the rainy night critique of ranks” in The Tale of Genji:
Occupying a good three-fifths of the chapter, the narratings discuss how
women of different ranks qualify as objects of desire. The pretext is a rit-
ual pollution (monoimi) at the palace that requires abstinence and strict
seclusion. As often happens, overt ‘public’ circumstances provide an
opportunity for revealing the covert ‘private’ world beneath (or behind)
the scenes, for focusing on the question of ‘underside-frontside’ (ura-
omote) relations constitutive of all aspects of Japanese writing and the
‘life’ constructed therein, (Okada 1991: 220. The emphasis is mine).
Rather than positing the question of “underside-frontside relations”
in terms of an interpretative strategy which was used for centuries in
Japan in order to establish a canon of “local truths,” the same strategy
is used to present the Japanese past to a contemporary, non-Japanese
audience. The result is the disguise of what is simply an a priori at the
source of the searching process (a specific hermeneutical strategy) as
an objective reality, and the presentation of such an a priori as a reli-
able, truthful fact (Heian Japan). The same strategy which privileges
the recovery of meaning, rather than focusing on meaning as the result
of interpretation, is at work again in the following statement from the
same book with regard to The Tales of Ise:
In other words, the possibility arises that the Ise compilers, through the
opening gesture, wanted the reader-listener to recall both the Heijō site
and the reign of Heizei to suggest an underside (ura) to a Fujiwara power
structure based at the Heian capital. (Okada 1991: 141. The emphasis is
mine).
This methodology is also applied to sociological and anthropological

discourses on Japan to indicate the ineffability of a culture that alleg-
edly conceals the truth behind layers of disguising surfaces. The charge
of reverse Orientalism that such an approach immediately invites, has
been felicitously summarized as follows:
The literature manipulating the public-private binary opposition over
the whole range of Japanese culture and experience (in a pseudoanalytic,
‘amuletic’ fashion) is vast. The reiterative intensity of their use in the
nihonjinron suggests that ‘the discrepancy between the formal and the
actual, between the ideal and the normative functioning’ of institutional
and social life is profound. (Dale 1986: 105).
3. Aesthetic Categories
The history of the notion of mono no aware after Motoori enshrined it

in his hermeneutics of disclosure follows the path of a further hardening
of the concept in the hands of several aestheticians, philosophers, and
literary historians who shared a common interest in constructing for
their land a unified subjectivity that would provide Japan with a sense
of distinction among other strong, external subjectivities. It should not
be too hard to recognize that the history of Japanese hermeneutics
from the Edo period to the present has been characterized mainly by
a stiffening of interpretative models which I will be calling “strong
thought”, with reference to the reverse notion that Gianni Vattimo
has introduced as man’s last chance for escaping the nightmares of
modernity. As in the case of Motoori, who built his case of local purity
out of alien interpretative models, the scholars who dealt with the idea
of mono no aware after the Meiji restoration sharpened their critical
tools at the school of Western philosophy, mainly German Idealism.
The relationship between German Idealism and the entire Western
metaphysical tradition since at least Plato becomes apparent when we
consider that Idealism can well be described as a sort of secularized
Christianity, developed for the consumption of the skeptical post-
Enlightenment mind. God was replaced by the “absolute spirit”, whose
self-expression takes place as an epiphany in the Romantic work of art.
While faith in God was eroding, the Absolute was taking a different
form (the artifact) in front of a newly constituted assembly of believers
(the art critics and the appreciators of arts), who filled with aesthetics
the void left by theology. To use Hegel’s terminology, art as Beauty
is the Ideal, i.e., “the Idea as reality, shaped in accordance with the
98 chapter five
Concept of the Idea,” the expression of a total fit between “the Idea
and its configuration as a concrete reality”.14 Art mediates the human
journey from the internal earthly realm of the senses (nature) to the
external world of pure spirit, leading from the finitude and necessity of
nature to the infinity and freedom of the Absolute. The strong meta-
physical apparatus is at work in all its might in Hegel’s Introductory
Lectures on Aesthetics as we can see from the excerpt below:
This is an attribute which art shares with religion and philosophy, only
in this peculiar mode, that it represents even the highest ideas in sen-
suous forms, thereby bringing them nearer to the character of natural
phenomena, to the sense, and to feeling. The world, into whose depth
thought penetrates, is a supra-sensuous world, which is thus, to begin
with, erected as a beyond over against immediate consciousness and
present situation; the power which thus rescues itself from the here, that
consists in the actuality and finiteness of sense, is the freedom of thought
in cognition. But the mind is able to heal this schism which its advance
creates; it generates out of itself the works of fine art as the first middle
term of reconciliation between pure thought and what is external, sen-
suous, and transitory, between nature with its finite actuality and the
infinite freedom of the reason that comprehends.”15
The field of aesthetics played a major role in the formation of modern
nations, since it managed to bring to order the confusion of particular-
ity under the heading of universality. The aesthetic system developed
by Idealism was particularly welcomed inasmuch as it aimed at bring-
ing the variety and accidentality of becoming under the grip of the uni-
versality and necessity of Being.16 According to Hegel and those who
14
“With respect to the first part, we must begin by recalling to mind, in order to
make the sequel intelligible, that the Idea qua the beautiful in art is not the Idea as
such, in the mode in which a metaphysical logic apprehends it as the absolute, but
the Idea as developed into concrete form fit for reality, and as having entered into
immediate and adequate unity with this reality. For the Idea as such, although it is
the essentially and actually true, is yet the truth only in its generality which has not
yet taken objective shape; but the Idea as the beautiful in art is at once the Idea when
specially determined as in its essence individual reality, and also an individual shape of
reality essentially destined to embody and reveal the Idea. This amounts to enunciat-
ing the requirement that the Idea, and its plastic mould as concrete reality, are to be
made completely adequate to one another. When reduced to such form the Idea, as
a reality moulded in conformity with the conception of the Idea, is the Ideal.” Hegel,
Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, transl. by Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin
Books, 1993: 80).
15
Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics: 9–10.
16
Hegel was very explicit on this point: “The philosophic conception of the beauti-
ful, to indicate its true nature at least by anticipation, must contain, reconciled within
followed him in developing the system known as Idealism, the recon-

ciliation between the present world and the world of transcendence
takes place through the mediation of the ‘beautiful’, which is to say
that an aesthetic category is entrusted with the reduction of the chaos
engendered by particularity to the order of universality. The poten-
tial that aesthetic categories have to be coopted by political systems
which reduce ideological pluralism to the construct of the nation-state
is immediately apparent. A policy that succeeds in compelling people
to feel in the same manner with reference to external reality, would
essentially accomplish two major tasks. First, it successfully leads to
the construction of a “national subjectivity” that can be shown to the
world to constitute the distinguishing identity of a nation. Moreover,
it makes people believe that these “national feelings,” far from being
a construct pushed onto subjects by governments and other agen-
cies of power, are the outcome of a natural process grounded in the
immediacy of perception. Since aesthetic categories are rooted in
the realm of feelings, sensations—the word ‘aesthetics’ comes from the
Greek word for ‘sensations’ (aisthesis)—they are easily interiorized as
products of nature, rather than being seen as the result of a carefully
mastered intellectual process dealing with perceptions and sensations.
As a result, aesthetic categories are easily taken to be eternal and unde-
stroyable truths. Their value as a temporary a priori used to ground
an illusory hermeneutics is often forgotten, since they are perceived as
principles of nature. Once governments find access to the most private
of a person’s possessions, his affects, they can then boast total control
over him. In the modern state aesthetic categories play the role of the
ideal policeman, inasmuch as they succeed in controlling man’s last,
most valuable refuge, the freedom to feel. By having the subject polic-
ing his own tastes, the apparatus of control is further interiorized as
it, the two extremes which have been mentioned, by combining metaphysical uni-
versality with the determinateness of real particularity. Only thus it is apprehended
in its truth, in its real and explicit nature. It is then fertile out of its own resources,
in contrast to the barrenness of onesided reflection. For it has in accordance with its
own conception to develop into a totality of attributes, while the conception itself as
well as its detailed exposition contains the necessity of its particulars, as also of their
progress and transition one into another. On the other hand, again, these particulars,
to which the transition is made, carry in themselves the universality and essentiality of
the conception as the particulars of which they appear. The modes of consideration of
which we have so far being treating lack both these qualities, and for this reason it is
only the complete conception of which we have just spoken that can lead to substan-
tive, necessary, and self-complete determinations”. Ibidem: 25–26.
100 chapter five
one’s own choice, so that what used to be the coercive power of abso-
lutist governments is, in the modern state, an internalized repression,
the internalization of a moral imperative which is now felt as pleasant
repression. The field of aesthetics thus brings closure to the process of
hegemonic control by finally accomplishing it after what was still felt
as an external intrusion has been interiorized as a matter of personal
choice, no matter if this “private act” is actually the object of an exter-
nal will. The consequences for not conforming to judgements which
are determined by aesthetics are potentially self-destructive, inasmuch
as they entail neglect and possibly ostracism from communities bound
by common aesthetic feelings. Aesthetic categories are far from being
a harmless, innocent matter.
To take an example within the Japanese context, we might want
to think of the notion of mono no aware which Motoori determined
to be the hermeneutical drive in the interpretation of The Tale of
Genji. The same concept was transformed into an aesthetic category
(biteki hanchū) by twentieth century aestheticians in an attempt to
create a mythology that would take mono no aware to represent the
aesthetic feeling of the entire country. Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959),
who taught aesthetics at the University of Tōkyō from 1922 until his
retirement in 1949, began his study of mono no aware by addressing
the problem of particularity and universality. He asked the question
of how a concept “that had developed from the spirit of the court
during the Heian period, and that had grown to signify an extremely
peculiar, characteristic aesthetic content”, (Ōnishi 1939: 106), even-
tually became a category of universal dimension. Ōnishi’s Aesthetics
(Bigaku), which was published posthumously and includes a variety
of writings from several sources, precedes the chapter on aware with
the following remarks:
After analyzing ‘gracefulness’ (yūen) or “graceful beauty” (enbi) as “a spe-
cial type” deriving from ‘beauty’ (das Schöne) seen as a “basic aesthetic
category,” I will now turn from the same perspective of “basic category,”
to another new ‘form’ of beauty branching off in a different direction,
the notion of ‘aware.’ As most of my readers already know, this concept
has been variously used by scholars of Japanese literature to indicate the
content of the aesthetic consciousness of our people. However, I doubt
that it has ever been acknowledged as an “aesthetic category.” Even if
it has been acknowledged as such, I still wonder where can we find the
“aesthetic essence” of aware, and in which sense can we ascribe it to the
“basic aesthetic category” of ‘beauty’? Can we think of aware as a “special
type” deriving from das Schöne? (Ōnishi, 1959: 288–289).
This is a slightly revised version of the methodological remarks that

Ōnishi made in his 1939 book on the notions of yūgen and aware
(Yūgen to Aware), in which he was basically addressing two concerns.
First was the problem of how to locate a local concept within the
framework of a science, aesthetics, that was coming from the outside,
so as to identify patterns in Japanese culture that would ‘correspond’
to Western cultural structures. Needless to say, by forcing the local
language into alien modes of interpretation, Ōnishi was neutralizing
and domesticating his own heritage. Secondly, and very much related
to the first point, was Ōnishi’s concern for the construction of a ‘uni-
versal’ subjectivity that would stiffen local particularity into a single
block. While restructuring the local approach to the Japanese literary
arts, the aesthetician Ōnishi was a central force behind the creation of
a strong Japanese subjectivity. This should not diminish, however, the
genuineness of Ōnishi’s efforts to deal with the local heritage in a truly
uncharted manner, as well as to contribute new ideas to the field of
aesthetics by working on notions that were alien to Western aestheti-
cians, as we can see from the following remarks, which appear in the
preface to Yūgen and Aware:
My original scientific concern was to include afresh all Japanese notions
related to beauty in the logical network of discourses on aesthetic catego-
ries, as well as to further develop these debates from within the system
of aesthetics in general. (Ōnishi, 1939: 1).
The results of Ōnishi’s search might sound bewildering to a modern
reader, but they certainly bespeak the complexity of the enterprise that
he had set out to accomplish. At the end of his essay on aware, Ōnishi
summarizes the meaning of the word in five steps which the reader is
asked to see in a hierarchical order, from the less successful definition
given by Motoori Norinaga (step 1) to the one that Ōnishi considers
the highest and most complete description of aware as an aesthetic
category (step 5):
1. The “specifically psychological meaning” in which ‘sorrow’ is under-

stood as an emotion with a specific characteristic. For example, to
be moved by the view of Genji who plays koto alone during his
exile at Suma.
2. The “inclusive psychological meaning” which explains aware as
a general emotional experience going beyond the limitations of
the specificity of the first step. For example, the general lack of
102 chapter five
sensitivity, participation, or compassion on the part of the oarsman

who drinks alone on the boat in spite of the grief of the travellers
journeying back to the capital in the Tosa Diary (Tosa Nikki).
3. The “aesthetic meaning” in which an “aesthetic consciousness” is
born with the addition of the intellectual intervention of “intuition”
and “clear vision” in the understanding of the meaning of external
reality. The reader or viewer is faced with an awareness of ‘Beauty’
(das Schöne) which frees him from the purely emotional sense of
“sadness” that aware still had in the first and second steps.
4. The “specifically aesthetic meaning” in which the field of percep-
tion and clear vision overcome the immediacy of a specific object,
becoming instead a metaphysical and mystical vision (Einstellung)
of a general ‘world-weariness’ informing the nature of ‘existence’, of
‘Being’. For example, the reader’s view of Fujitsubo in The Tale of
Genji who, after taking the tonsure, spends her days thinking exclu-
sively of the after-life, thus underscoring the metaphysical nature of
an existence grounded on the absence of actual life. This is an over-
ture towards the cosmic meaning of life that the reader perceives
aesthetically, through an aesthetic experience. The observation of
the infinity of time and space in nature helps to bring about such
an experience. As an example of the “specifically aesthetic mean-
ing,” Ōnishi mentions the ‘cosmic’ (kosmisches Gefühl) poetry of
Saigyō.
5. Aware seen as the “aesthetic category” of “the Beautiful”, in which a
specific “aesthetic content” which is made of the union of all kinds
of ‘beauty’, originates the specifically aesthetic experience of aware.
In this step a symbolic and associative ‘empathy’ (Einfühlung) takes
place in which the essence of things is perceived intuitively through
mental associations. The examples provided by Ōnishi to explain
this last step are all taken from situations dealing with the topics of
death, demise, and disappearance, taken as symbolic of the mean-
ing of human life. (Ōnishi, 1939: 243–257).
In dealing with mono no aware Ōnishi transformed a private feeling

of sadness into a more generally perceived feeling describing a specific
community. He finally broadened that community to the entire world
by seeing in mono no aware an example of universal “world weari-
ness” (Weltschmerz). The heavy vocabulary of metaphysics employed
by philosophers of the Idealist school stands out conspicuously in
Ōnishi’s writings, as we can see, for example, in the following excerpt,

describing the fourth step mentioned above:
By being established in this new moment, here, for the first time, a
special “content of aesthetic meaning” is born from inside the concept
of aware. As a result, the essence of aware as the “aesthetic category”
that we are searching for, or the experience of mono no aware which
has overcome the ‘pathos’ in its narrow, experiential, and psychological
meaning, are absorbed into, and are permeated by, the aesthetic excite-
ment and by intuition of the very metaphysical bottom of “the general
thing,” and of the “general being.” From there it widens into something
like the meaning of a world-view, and it is universalized into a kind of
‘world-weariness’ (Weltschmerz). We may then think that aware exists
in something that tries to metamorphosize into a special passional expe-
rience of ‘sorrow.’ (Ōnishi, 1939: 149–1.50).
At the beginning of this article I mentioned the relationship between
metaphysics, a strong subjectivity, and violence. This relationship
becomes all the more clear when we look at works written by Japanese
aestheticians in the thirties and forties. “Strong thought,” which goes
hand in hand with the notion of a strong subjectivity, suffocates the
particularity of becoming, forcing difference under the yoke of a single
heading—a specific country, for example, or a specific people. It does
so by constructing a variety of mythologies related to those countries
and people. Since these mythologies are deeply rooted in the feelings
of people, they are easily interiorized as truth, so that “universal” aes-
thetic categories end up by determining and limiting one’s own sub-
ject. The subject is subjected to mythology. A product of modernity,
this mechanism is at work all over the world. Descriptions of Japan in
terms of “strong thought” and strong subjectivities are called “debates
on the Japanese” (Nihonjinron). They occur in varying degrees in the
popular press as well as in more academic discourses, a trend which
will most probably continue as long as the strong construct of ‘nation’
(kokka) survives. In a recent publication on this topic, Minami Hiroshi
has called attention to how writings on aesthetics and the Japanese
spirit informed Japan’s fascist literature in the thirties and forties. He
reserved for Ōnishi the following remarks:
An even more precise study of Japanese aesthetic consciousness is Yūgen
and Aware by the aesthetician Ōnishi Yoshinori. Ōnishi took ‘yūgen’ to
mean “not an opening the path through the grasses’ mist, not something
clear, but something that is somehow hidden”, “gloom, haziness, a twi-
light”. Moreover, he also used the expressions quietness, depth, fullness
104 chapter five
(the coagulation of infinity), mystery, and also super-naturalness. As for

‘aware’ he gives as its first meaning a specifically psychological sadness,
as second meaning a common psychological emotion, as third gentle-
ness, loveliness, gracefulness, charm as general aesthetic consciousness.
Similarly, in his Essay on Elegance (Fūga Ron, 1940), he takes the notion
of ‘sabi’, which treatises on haikai employ when they state that “elegance
is somehow sad”, not in its narrow sense of “secluded quietness”, but as
an aesthetic concept specific to haikai, Moreover, he describes ‘sabi’ as
the age of a perpetually self-recreating nature from which the essence of
things comes into being. He argues that the tea-room can be character-
ized as quietness, playfulness, freedom, and that ‘asymmetry’, its major
characteristic feature, is at the root of the aesthetic consciousness of a
people who is fond of irrationality. (Minami, 1994: 181)
Mono no aware was further enshrined in the temple of metaphysics
in a major work by the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), A
Study of the History of the Japanese Spirit (Nibon Seishin Shi Kenkyū,
1940). Watsuji took mono no aware to be an example of mysticism,
calling it a “yearning for the source of eternity” in which was rooted
the human response to the awesomeness of external reality—man’s
reverent exclamation (eitan) in front of the mystery of the universe.
Using the vocabulary of Idealism, Watsuji defined mono no aware “the
feeling of the infinite,” further commenting as follows:
By looking at the matter from this perspective, we can clearly under-
stand why “the pathos of things” (mono no aware) had to be interpreted
as a purified feeling. What we call mono no aware is the feeling of the
infinite, which has in itself a tendency toward an unlimited purity. That
is to say, mono no aware is inside ourselves, one of the mechanisms used
by origin itself to make us return to the origin. The literary arts express
it in a concrete form at a heightened level. Thanks to it, we come in con-
tact with the light of eternal things that do not pass away, while we pass
through things that pass away between things that pass away. (Watsuji,
1940: 242–243)
The return of the Absolute Spirit to the original light was a lesson
Hegel had taught one hundred and twenty years earlier, a lesson of
“strong thought” that Japanese aestheticians mastered perfectly. In
1941, one year after Watsuji’s statement, Okazaki Yoshie (1892–1982),
a major aesthetician and historian of the Japanese literary arts, made
the following remarks on aware:
Originally aware was an exclamatory particle. An exclamatory particle is
the whole consciousness that defies analysis. It indicates the most basic
form of expression. The way an expression such as aware works probably
exists everywhere at the beginning of all races (minzoku). However, in

Japan, even after culture had developed to a high level [aware] became,
in a uniquely polished shape, the ground of our culture and the founda-
tion for the adaptation of complicated foreign cultures. We can further
speculate that the homogeneity of the Japanese people is reflected in
aware. (Okazaki, 1941: 55).
The following comments that Minami Hiroshi made with regard to
Okazaki Yoshie, could easily be applied to the mythologies of Watsuji
Tetsurō:
In Forms of the Japanese Literary Arts (Nihon Bungei no Yōshiki) Oka-
zaki Yoshie, an advocate of the Japanese literary arts, argues that the sub-
stance of the Japanese literary arts privileges impression over thought,
life’s moods over conceptions of life, feelings over will. They are poor in
intensity, vehemency, depth, while being rich in magnanimity, elegance,
and refinement. Similar to the characteristics of our race, [the Japanese
literary arts] are youthful and feminine. For example, the notions of
‘sabi’ and ‘shiori’ possess a touch of antiquity, and yet after all they are
feminine. (Minami, 1994: 181–182)
The reduction of a particularity as we find it in reality to a unifying
principle, such as an aesthetic category, often causes the observer to
lose sight of the hermeneutical nature of categories themselves, which
are then taken as a prioris to be entrusted with the explanation of his-
torical becoming, and the creation of a consoling but illusory view of
reality. Like God in the metaphysical tradition, these categories act like
principles outside history that legitimate the historical process from
the loftiness of omniscience. This delusion is carried over in contem-
porary criticism in renewed efforts to provide readers with a strong
sense of self-identity, by calling their attention to the alleged continu-
ity that notions such as mono no aware carry over from the past. We
see it, for example, in a recent paper by a major literary critic of the
new generation, who entitled a lecture on the religious components of
eighteenth-century Japanese cities, “‘Mono no Aware’—The Identity
of the Japanese”, from which comes the following excerpt:
I have said at the outset that “mono no aware” was a sentiment of sad-
ness, but in fact it is a sadness that is constantly evolving toward gaiety.
I should be careful to note that this gaiety was nothing other than a sort
of salvation for the urban citizen of the early modern period for whom
a feeling of powerlessness was endemic. In this way, ‘mono no aware’
106 chapter five
becomes the basic principle of solidarity and of salvation in the godless

cities of early modern Japan.17
4. Devising Alternatives
The advocates of “weak thought” argue that a weakening of metaphysi-

cal structures might lead to a reduction of conflicts between strong
subjectivities. In order to control the violence of conflicts, a lighter
version of thought might be needed to accommodate the particularity
in which we all live. Independendy of the variety of positions that can
be taken on the subject, there is one thing we might be able to agree
on, namely a desperate need to confront the frenzy of violence in the
modern world. This is a challenge that no thinker can escape, not even
philosophers who might argue, as it is often the case in Japan, that
the relative peacefulness of their land does not present any need for
the problematization of violence. As we have seen when dealing with
aesthetic categories, violence can take many forms, displacing itself
into canons of taste and beauty, and robbing subjects of their freedom.
With regard to “weak thought”, Japan finds itself in a paradoxical situ-
ation. On the one hand, scholars could argue that all the ingredients
for devising an alternative model to the stiffness of metaphysics are
found in the Japanese classics: for example, the notion of a soft sub-
ject (no-mind or mushin), or the concept of soft time (impermanence
or mujō) devised by Buddhist thinkers who could be credited with
the creation of a “negative logic of denial” (hitei no ronri).18 This is
the stand taken by the contemporary literary critic Karatani Kōjin
(b. 1941), who argues that the actual absence of metaphysics in the
Japanese tradition positions Japan better than Western nations with
regard to adapting to and solving the problems of the post-modern
world.19 On the other hand, by using Western hermeneutical strategies
17
Momokawa, 1987: 11–12. For the Japanese version see, Momokawa Takahito,
“Kokugaku Ron no Kadai,” in Saigō Nobutsuna (ed.), Nihon Bungaku Kōza 1: Hōhō
to Shiten Tōkyō: Nihon Bungaku Kyōkai, 1987: 157.
18
For an overview of this idea see Ienaga, 1969: 17–112.
19
“Incidentally, while I am on the topic of ‘lightness’, let me say that lightness also
refers to ‘the present reality.’ The word realism, as the representation of reality, does
not exist. I believe that the direction taken by contemporary literature is towards a
complete denial of and contempt for any word which carries the burden of meaning
and reality, and towards the unmaking of those words, one after another. In the end,
they make words extremely light. They make them shallow. They get away from the
which are loaded with metaphysical connotations, these soft ingredi-

ents find themselves placed within the boundaries of strong structures,
eventually leading, as we have previously seen, to the formation of a
very strong subject. This second strategy blinds Japanese thinkers into
believing that they can shortcut the problems raised by more than two
thousand years of metaphysical thought by arguing that, in any event,
such a tradition is alien to Japan—an argument with a long genealogi-
cal history.20 We find this weakness in Karatani’s argument above, as
we also see it in the following remarks by the contemporary philoso-
pher Sakabe Megumi (b. 1936), who is probably the best example of
“soft thinker”21 that can be found nowadays in Japan:
Maybe in Japan, in order to remain faithful to traditional thought, there
is no need either “to reverse Platonism,” or “to examine the metaphysics
of presence, the onto-theo-teleological metaphysics . . .” (Sakabe, 1989:
49)
If we acknowledge that traditions are not objective truths but the result
of hermeneutical acts, then it becomes difficult to accept the notion of
a traditional thought which is taken as a given, without further con-
sidering the historicity of the process of tradition-formation. Motoori
Norinaga fell into this trap by ignoring the genealogy of his own
hermeneutical method when positing a local tradition grounded in the
divine age of the ancestral gods. Sakabe follows the same path when
neglecting the role played by Western hermeneutics in his construc-
tion of the so-called “Japanese tradition.” There is certainly a press-
ing need to confront the metaphysics of presence, since most of what
we call today “the Japanese tradition” is the product of hermeneuti-
cal practices which are deeply rooted in Western metaphysics. Unless
this confrontation takes place, and the realization that hermeneutical
practices, and not eternal a priori, are responsible for the creation of
“traditions,” the violence coming out of strong subjects will perpetuate
itself to the end of history.
heavy load of meaning. There are books on the situation of mass produced images
that argue from the perspective of the contemporary consumer society, but there is
no other region that has progressed to such an extreme as contemporary Japan with
regard to consumerism and information. The West will never become like that”. Kara-
tani Kōjin, “Edo no Chūshakugaku to Genzai,” in Karatani, 1989: 97.
20
For an example of a similar argument in the context of medieval debates on the
issue of Japan and the end of history see Marra, 1985: 119–141.
21
‘Soft’ (yawarakai) is actually the word recently used in Japan to introduce Sakabe’s
thought. See Hirata, 1990: 67–75.
108 chapter five
This does not mean that we should not examine the soft ingredients
that we find in the Japanese classics, but this should be done herme-
neutically, inquiring as to whether these softer elements of Japanese
thought can be inserted into softer models of interpretations that
would finally lead to a weakening of otherwise violently used categories
such as external and internal, frontside (omote/tatemae) and underside
(ura/honne), Japan (Nihon) and foreign (gaikoku). Sakabe himself has
taken a first, important step in that direction by acknowledging the
fact that, in terms of presence, there are only frontsides (omote), and
that we might have to accept this as our destiny. Looking at the mean-
ing of the Japanese word omote, which means both ‘face’ and ‘mask’,
Sakabe indicates the possibility that a softer subject has to survive in
the postmodern world if he realizes that the self is actually the product
of a structure that Sakabe calls ‘reciprocity’ (sōgosei) and ‘reversibility’
(kagyakusei). That is to say, the self is “something that is seen by oth-
ers, that sees itself, and that sees itself as other”. (Sakabe, 1989: 49).
Sakabe finds the model of a softer subjectivity in the nō actor who,
before entering the scene, performs a little ritual with his mask in a
room called the “Mirror Hall” (Kagami no Ma), as we can see from
the following remarks:
In the ‘Kagami no Ma,’ the actor puts on the mask; he sees in the mir-
ror his own face or his own mask; at the same time, he is seen by his
mask in the mirror and, finally, he sees himself transmogrified in some
deity or demon. Afterward, he walks onto the stage as an actor who has
changed into a deity or demon or, which is to say the same thing, as a
deity or demon who has taken the bodily form of this actor. To say it dif-
ferently, the actor enters the stage as a self transmogrified into an other,
or, as an other transmogrified into the self. Here we witness the typical
manifestation of the structure of ‘Omote’ as I described it a while ago.
What is important to notice now is the fact that the structure of ‘Omote’
is evidently the structure of the mask, as we have seen, but, at the same
time, it is also the structure of the face. The reason is that the face also
is what is seen by the other, what sees itself, and what sees itself as an
other. (Sakabe, 1989: 44–45).22
22
This quotation comes from an article by Sakabe which was originally published
in French as “Le Masque et l’Ombre dans la Culture Japonaise: Ontologie Implicite
de la Pensée Japonaise’, in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 87: 3 (July–September
1982): 335–343. The author himself translated it into Japanese as “Nihon Bunka ni
okeru Kamen to Kage: Nihon no Shikō no Senzaiteki Sonzairon,” and he included it
in Sakabe. 1989: 37–58.
A problem arises, however, if we try to find the roots of this structure in

an alleged ‘local’ tradition, as Sakabe does by invoking the name of the
medieval playwright Zeami (1364–1443) and his theory of “detached
view” (riken no ken), according to which “the true actor must always
see his own image from far away, even from behind, from his back,” so
as to be able “to see himself as the spectators do, grasp the logic of the
fact that the eyes cannot see themselves, and find the skill to grasp the
whole.” (Sakabe 1989: 47–48). There is no doubt that Zeami worked
with the Buddhist notion of a soft subject when he was warning the
actor that he was a link in a chain and not a separate character on
stage. However, to develop this insight into the strong structure of tra-
dition undermines Sakabe’s own efforts to build a softer philosophy,
and it ignores the fact that several Western thinkers could equally well
be invoked to create exactly the same ‘Japanese’ tradition—a paradox
that confirms the senselessness of searching for origins. Sakabe could
have invoked Heidegger, for example, whose work on the ontological
difference was summarized by a major Japanese philosopher, Nishitani
Keiji (1900–1990), as follows:
The self who actually is has been thrown into the world and is in rela-
tion to the various things in it. To take this kind of actual existence as the
clue to the human mode of being is to say that it is possible to question
Being from within a mode of existence where the seeing self and seen
self are truly one. In other words, it is to say that the ontological differ-
ence is understandable. This is the standpoint of Heidegger’s existential
philosophy. (Nishitani, 1990: 162)
Or, Sakabe could have invoked Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961),
whose influential article “Eye and Mind” (1961) is dominated by the
notion of ‘reversibility’ of subject and object. This, according to the
French philosopher, is best seen in the painter who, caught in
the midst of the visible, brings into vision a fundamental manifesta-
tion of Being in his paintings by showing that, in order to see, the
seer must in turn be capable of being seen. This inversion, which for
Merleau-Ponty is a doubling with difference and without fusion, is
characterized as follows:
Inevitably the roles between the painter and the visible switch. That
is why so many painters have said that things look at them. As André
Marchand says, after Klee: “In a forest, I have felt many times over that
it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were
looking at me, were speaking to me . . . I was there, listening . . . I think
that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to
110 chapter five
penetrate it . . . I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paint

to break out . . . Depth is the experience of the reversibility of dimensions,
of a global ‘locality’ in which everything is in the same place at the same
time, a locality from which height, width, and depth are abstracted, a
voluminosity we express in a word when we say that a thing is there. In
pursuing depth, what Cézanne is seeking is this deflagration of Being,
and it is all in the mode of space, and in form as well. Cézanne already
knew what cubism would restate: that the external form, the envelope,
is secondary and derived, that it is not what makes a thing to take form,
that that shell of space must be shattered—the fruit bowl must be bro-
ken. But then what should be painted instead?”23
Although Merleau-Ponty’s question is certainly a difficult one to
answer, by now we should at least know what should not be painted,
namely, the metaphysical trap. That is to say, the source of light com-
ing from high in the sky on which Sakabe still relies to make his
play of mirrors possible.24 On a more positive note, however, paint-
ers and philosophers might want to keep challenging the softer issues
of shadow, silhouette, reflection, phantom, sign, trace—resulting,
as Sakabe argues, from the play of light (kage) and shade (kage),25
always remembering Nietzsche’s insight that there are no facts, only
interpretations.
References
Dale, P.N.
1986 The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, London, Sydney, and Oxford: Croom
Helm and Nissan Institute for Japanese Studies.
Gómez, L.O.
1987 “Buddhist Views of Language,” in Mircea Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of
Religion, Volume 8, New York: MacMillan Publishing Company: 446–451.
Hegel, G.W.K
1993 Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, London: Penguin.
Hino, Tatsuo (ed.)
1983 Motoori Norinaga Shū, SNKS 60, Tōkyō: Shinchōsha.
Hirata, Toshihiro
1990 “Yawarakai Sakabe Tetsugaku” (“The Soft Sakabe Philosophy”), in Risō 646:
67–75.
Ienaga, Saburō
1969 Nihon Shisō ni Okeru Hitei no Ronri no Hattatsu, Tōkyō: Shinsensha.
23
The essay appears in Johnson (ed.) 1993: 129 and 140.
24
“Would it be possible for a play of mirrors to take place without a light coming
from high?” (Sakabe, 1989: 122).
25
Sakabe develops this argument in Sakabe, 1976: 24–49.
Johnson Galen, A. (ed.)

1993 The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Karatani, Kōjin
1989 Kotoba to Higeki, Tōkyō: Daisan Bunmeisha.
Marra, M.
1985 “The Conquest of Mappō: Jien and Kitabatake Chikafusa,” in Japanese Jour-
nal of Religious Studies 12: 4, December.
Minami, Hiroshi
1994 Nihonjin Ron: Meiji kara Kyō made, Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten.
Momokawa, Takahito
1987 “ ‘Mono no Aware’—The Identity of the Japanese,” in Kokubungaku Kenkyū
Shiryōkan Kiyō, 13.
Nishitani, Keiji
1990 The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, transl. by Graham Parkes with Setsuko
Aihara, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Okada, H.R.
1991 Figures of Resistance: Language, Poetry, and Narrating in The Tale of Genji
and Other Mid-Heian Texts, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Okazaki, Yoshie
1941 Geijutsu Ron no Tankyū, Tōkyō: Kōbundō.
Ōnishi, Yoshinori
1939 Yūgen to Aware, Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten
1959 Bigaku 2: Biteki Hanchū Ron, Tōkyō: Kōbundo.
Plato
1935 The Republic, English translation: Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Sakabe, Megumi
1976 Kamen no Kaishakugaku, UP Sensho, Tōkyō: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai.
1989 Kagami no Naka no Nihongo: Sono Shikō no Shujusō, CR 22, Tōkyō: Chi-
kuma Shobō.
Takakusu, Junjirō
1947 The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, Honolulu: University of Hawaii.
Vattimo G.
1988 The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Madern Culture,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
1989 La Societá Trasparente, Milano: Garzanti.
Vattimo G.-Rovatti P.A. (eds.)
1983 Il pensiero debole, Milano: Feltrinelli.
Watsuji, Tetsurō
1940 Nihon Seishin Shi Kenkyū, Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten.
CHAPTER SIX
COINCIDENTIA OPPOSITORIUM:
THE GREEK GENEALOGIES OF JAPAN
When we look at the history of Japanese aesthetics beginning from

the early writings of Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913), we are faced with
the presence of a hermeneutical technique that became a widespread
“leitmotif” among aestheticians building up a distinctive “Japanese”
subjectivity. We might call this technique “comparison and reduction”
because it implies a comparison of local realities with the West and a
consequent reduction of the “otherness” of such realities to a foreign
“Other.” The move is paradoxical inasmuch as it claims to establish
notions of “distinctness” by creating images of Japan that are actually
a miniaturized version of what Japan is supposed to be distinguished
from. The contemporary reader becomes immediately aware of the
basic flaw of such an argument—a flaw of which the authors them-
selves might well have been aware. What is less known, however, are
the reasons behind the use of such techniques, reasons we might want
to start searching for in the political arena.
We might want to begin by asking how a Third World country—as
it could be argued Japan was until recent times—could stand up eco-
nomically and culturally to the giants of the technologically advanced
world. Because this essay is concerned mainly with cultural questions,
I could answer by emphasizing the idea of eclecticism that allows the
incorporation of the advanced “Other” into the explanation of the
backward “self.” One method would be the use in Japan of Hegel’s syn-
thetic process, in which opposites are overcome for the sake of a third,
more “universal” alternative. Another method—the one with which I
am mainly concerned in this essay—is the erasure of substantive dif-
ferences between the two opposite terms by making them coincide in
the end, a technique known in philosophy as coincidentia oppositorum
(the sameness of opposites). Both the Hegelian dialectic and coinci-
dentia oppositorum aim at accommodating “difference” by somehow
harmonizing the conflicting elements of reality, either through a pro-
cess of ingestion and digestion, as in the Hegelian case, or through a
movement of negation and erasure, as in the second case.
114 chapter six
For a country in search of international recognition, “the same-

ness of opposites” was not simply an intellectual game. It implied
a concerted effort to demonstrate the cultural advances of Japan by
arguing that, after all, differences between opposites (Japan and the
West) could not only be reconciled but actually erased, thus leaving
the two adversaries on an absolutely equal footing. We find this kind
of argument at work in the images of ancient Japan formulated by
Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959), a professor of aesthetics at the Uni-
versity of Tokyo during the 1930s and 1940s. The present-day succes-
sor to Ōnishi’s post, Sasaki Ken’ichi (b. 1943), has recently explained
Ōnishi’s obsession with harmonizing conflicts and his arguments
about the merely apparent nature of contradictions by reminding us
of the fundamental role that the method of coincidentia oppositorum
played in the aesthetics of Romantic thinkers, especially G.W.F. Hegel
(1770–1831), F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854), and K.W.F. Solger (1780–
1819). Before the development of their systems, he argues, the split
between body and soul (the animal/human and the intellectual/divine
sides of a human being) was felt as a contradiction that could hardly
be healed without the intervention of a redemptive figure from the
outside, such as God. With the Romantic movement, however, art was
called on to mediate the conflict and to bring harmony to the conflict-
ual moments of human experience that the intervention of aesthetic
consciousness would prove to be only apparently contradictory.
While acknowledging that Ōnishi inherited from the metalanguage
of his field of expertise (aesthetics) a drive to bring opposites into an
orderly dialogue, Sasaki contends that Ōnishi’s motivations were, how-
ever, different from the Western desire to find in this method a means
to reconcile the animal side of man with his more spiritual, divine
aspects. Desire, in Ōnishi’s case, should rather be sought in what Sasaki
calls the “ethnic dimension” (esunikku no jigen)—that is, a need for
intellectual syncretism on the part of a thinker belonging to a “back-
ward” country who struggles to make/create/forge the subjectivity of
his own land into a form acceptable to a more powerful “Other” (the
West). According to Sasaki, this academic posture, which was intrin-
sic to the method of aesthetic research and which Ōnishi absorbed
from the West, actually allowed him to maintain some distance from
the West (Ōnishi’s “hermeneutics of distinction”) even while he was
enmeshed in a pervasively Western methodology.1
1
Sasaki Kenʾichi, Esunikku no Jigen: “Nihon Tetsugaku” Sōshi no Tame ni (Tokyo:
Keisō Shobō, 1998), pp. 59–67.
coincidentia oppositorum: japan’s greek genealogies 115
In this essay, I analyze Ōnishi’s application of the method of coin-

cidentia oppositorum to his reading of ancient Japan (kodai), which
Ōnishi identifies as the time of the compilation of ancient prayers
(norito) and poems appearing in the collection known as Ten Thou-
sand Leaves (Manʾyōshū)—approximately the seventh and eighth cen-
turies.2 I also point out the price that Ōnishi had to pay because of his
devotion to a method that, once applied to the explanation of Japan,
became fraught with paradoxes.
By embracing the field of aesthetics as his area of specialization,
Ōnishi was faced with a particular view of the West that was centered
around ancient Greece. The abstract discourse on the philosophy of art
developed in the West contemporaneously with a practical application
of the major principles of aesthetics to an appreciation/construction/
idealization of the Greek world, starting from Johann J. Winckel-
mann’s (1717–1768) work on Greek art. It was inevitable, therefore,
that Japanese scholars of aesthetics would bring to bear on Japanese
reality the “Grecization” of the world deriving from the inner develop-
ment of the field of their expertise, even though the construction of a
reality such as Japan was only minimally related to the land of Homer.
Ōnishi’s representations of ancient Japan are informed by the meta-
language of aesthetics despite his reticence to clarify to his readers the
aporias of a hermeneutical method that—willingly or unwillingly but
certainly without the author’s acknowledgment—transforms the time
and space of the Manʾyōshū (the Nara period) into sunny visions of
the Mediterranean world.
In apparently mutually contradictory interpretations of Greece,
Ōnishi found a key to a reconciliation of two mutually divergent views
on Japan that were still current in the 1940s. First is Tsuda Sōkichi’s
(1873–1961) view, according to which the Japanese past is character-
ized by optimism and an exclusive concern for worldly matters as a
result of the mildness of the climate, the relative abundance of food,
the limited population (and, consequently, the lack of struggles for
survival), the homogeneity of the people, and the insular nature of
the land, which sheltered it from foreign invasions. Tsuda explains the
alleged lack of a metaphysical world in ancient Japan as a result of the
people’s satisfaction with their present condition, which did not
prompt them to search for a better place to live beyond the boundaries
2
My reading of Ōnishi is based on his Manʾyōshū no Shizen Kanjō (Feelings for
Nature in the Manʾyōshū) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1943). This title is hereafter abbre-
viated as MSK.
116 chapter six
of the present world. He perceives the country as beautiful, sunny, and

ethically good. Second is the view sustained by scholars such as Higo
Kazuo (1889–1981), who points out that terror, rather than love, is at
the root of the relationship binding the ancient Japanese to their gods,
including the belief that illnesses and catastrophes were the result of
the deity’s curses (tatari).
Ōnishi denies the mutually contradictory nature of these views of
Japan on the ground that the difference is only apparent and that a
process of harmonization along the lines of Western hermeneutics
is possible for interpreting ancient Japan. It suffices to consider how
Westerners had reconciled the apparently contradictory views of
Greece as (1) the sunny land of harmony, order, and optimism and
(2) the tragic land of chaotic natural forces according to the inter-
pretations of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Jakob Burckhardt
(1818–1897). Nietzsche himself, Ōnishi points out, was responsible for
solving the apparent contradiction by positing the sunny Apollonian
and the tragic Dionysian as the two major principles of Greek civili-
zation.3
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) provided Ōnishi with key
concepts for developing the two basic categories that he uses to differ-
entiate Japan from the West: “naturism” and “olympianism.” He asso-
ciates Japanese mythology with naturism, describing it as a moment of
fusion between nature and man (spirit), as a lack of conflict between
good and evil, which had led to the development in ancient Japan of
“natural beauty” (shizenbi). This, according to Ōnishi, found expression
in “the spirit of words” (kotodama), to which he applies the definition
current in aesthetics of “intuition of poetic language.” Ōnishi elicits
from ancient prayers (norito) and a few poems from the Manʾyōshū
the definition of “naturism” as a sort of “Dionysian” attitude centered
around the spiritual force of nature.4
By “olympianism,” Ōnishi indicates the relationship between nature
and spirit in Greece. He explains it as a mixture of “idealism” and
“anthropomorphism” (words to which we will return) found in the
Greek creation of the Olympian gods whose model was Apollo. These
gods were the result of the artistic creation of the spirit, and they medi-
ated the space between spirit and nature, being the Greek response to
3
Ibid., pp. 49–51.
4
Ibid., pp. 42–45.
the human confrontation with the fearful power of nature. The “per-
sonification” or “humanization” of nature (expressions to which, again,
we will return) are actually an attempt at overcoming nature and the
mark of culture’s triumph. Such an attitude led to the development in
Greece of “artistic beauty” (geijutsu chūshin no biteki bunka), which,
Ōnishi continues, was the result of “fantastic intuition” (Phantasiean-
schauung), This intuition is related to Greece’s Apollonian principle,
which resulted in the ability to make things individual (principium
individuationis).5
To simplify Ōnishi’s complex argument, we can say that he grounds
the specificity of Japan on a Dionysian fusion of nature and spirit into
“oneness” (the naturism of natural beauty) while characterizing Greece
as the Apollonian land of “fantastic intuition” and “principium indi-
viduationis” (the olympianism of artistic beauty). Nietzsche had called
Apollo the father of the Olympian world—the god in charge of the art
realm of dreams, who reigned over the illusion of man’s inner world of
fantasy. Such a world called for the victory of Apollonian illusion over
the truth of death and suffering.6 Nietzsche singles out Homer as the
champion of aesthetic illusion, whose fantastic power let him create
an individuated world of heroes in the image of the gods, first among
them Apollo, the god of individuation and just boundaries. Homer’s
production of an aesthetic mirror in epic poetry had a redemptive
5
Ibid., pp. 68–71.
6
About Apollo, Nietzsche writes:
Apollo is at once the god of all plastic powers and the soothsaying god. He who
is etymologically the “lucent” one, the god of light, reigns also over the fair illu-
sion of our inner world of fantasy. The perfection of these conditions in contrast
to our imperfectly understood waking reality, as well as our profound aware-
ness of nature’s healing powers during the interval of sleep and dream, furnishes
a symbolic analogue to the soothsaying faculty and quite generally to the arts,
which make life possible and worth living. . . . In an eccentric way one might say
of Apollo what Schopenhauer says, in the first part of The World as Will and
Idea, of man caught in the veil of Maya: “Even as on an immense, raging sea,
assailed by huge wave crests, a man sits in a little rowboat trusting his frail craft,
so, amidst the furious torments of this world, the individual sits tranquilly, sup-
ported by the principium individuationis and relying on it.” One might say that
the unshakable confidence in that principle has received its most magnificent
expression in Apollo, and that Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvelous
divine image of the principium individuationis, whose looks and gestures radiate
the full delight, wisdom, and beauty of “illusion.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis
Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 21–22.
118 chapter six
function with regard to the tragic reality of human life.7 Sculpture is

another example of an art based on the principium individuationis.
Ōnishi refers to Mythologie figurée de la Grèce by Maxime Collignon
(1849–1917)8 to argue that Greek sculptures portraying deities were
patterned after views of ideal men and, therefore, that they were close
to what Nietzsche calls the “Apollonian.”9
Principium individuationis, “ideal types,” “anthropomorphization
of deities,” are all elements that Ōnishi finds present in Greek and
absent in Japanese mythology. This explains, in his opinion, why Japa-
nese mythology has been labeled “anti-aesthetic” and “anti-artistic.”10
Rather than presenting the human side of its deities, Japanese mythol-
ogy tends to portray human nature as a “natural presence” or “natural
Being” (shizenteki sonzai). This celebration of natural powers by Shinto
scriptures, Ōnishi reminds us, was underscored by Western scholars
of ancient Greece such as Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1920) and Rob-
ert Ernest Hume (1877–1948), who pointed out the lack of a specific
ethical characterization of the Japanese deities and their representa-
tion in biological terms. They are born, get married, bear children,
become sick, become jealous, kill, and eventually die and find burial.
7
On Homer, Nietzche writes:
It is this achievement which makes Homer so magnificent—Homer, who, as a
single individual, stood to Apollonian popular culture in the same relation as
the individual dream artist to the oneiric capacity of a race and of nature gener-
ally. The naïveté of Homer must be viewed as a complete victory of Apollonian
illusion. Nature often uses illusions of this sort in order to accomplish its secret
purposes. The true goal is covered over by a phantasm. We stretch out our hands
to the latter, while nature, aided by our deception, attains the former. In the case
of the Greeks it was the will wishing to behold itself in the work of art, in the
transcendence of genius; but in order so to behold itself its creatures had first to
view themselves as glorious, to transpose themselves to a higher sphere, with-
out having that sphere of pure contemplation either challenge them or upbraid
them with insufficiency. It was in that sphere of beauty that the Greeks saw the
Olympians as their mirror images; it was by means of that esthetic mirror that
the Greek will opposed suffering and the somber wisdom of suffering which
always accompanies artistic talent. As a monument to its victory stands Homer,
the naїve artist.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 31–32.
8
The book was published in 1883 in Paris by A. Quantin.
9
MSK, pp. 90–91.
10
This point might explain the reasons behind the efforts on the part of Japanese
artists at the beginning of the century to provide “human portraits” of deities por-
trayed in the Kojiki. See, for example, Takahashi Yuichi’s (1828–1894) painting of
Yamato Takeru (1891), Harada Naojirō’s (1863–1899) portrait of Susanowo slaying
the dragon (1895), or Aoki Shigeru’s (1882–1911) representation of Ōnamuchi-no-
Mikoto (1905).
This characterization of Japan’s religious world leads Ōnishi to argue

that Japanese deities are a product of “remembrance” (kioku) rather
than of ideals (risō), not just a “historical remembrance” attempting
to reach the primordial age of human history, but also a “mystical
remembrance” trying to recapture the movement from man as spiri-
tual entity back to nature.11
Not only did Western interpretations of ancient Greece provide
Ōnishi with representations of an “Other” to which Japan was com-
pared to underline differences and create images of alleged distinc-
tion, but such interpretations were paramount to the construction of
ancient Japan, as Ōnishi’s category of “naturism” clearly demonstrates.
The experience of the ancient Japanese during the Nara period, then,
became a concrete example of Nietzsche’s definition of the Diony-
siac—a shattering of the principium individuationis, the individual’s
complete forgetting of itself, and the triumph of a mystical oneness, a
complete oneness with the essence of the universe.12 The ancient songs
collected in the Manʾyōshū were considered to be examples of Diony-
sian music, dithyrambs tearing asunder the veil of Maya, so as to sink
back into the original oneness of nature.13 The ancient Japanese poet
was presented as a Dionysian artist whose abrogation of subjectivity
11
MSK, pp. 76–77.
12
Nietzsche writes:
If we add to this awe the glorious transport which arises in man, even from
the very depths of nature, at the shattering of the principium individuationis,
then we are in a position to apprehend the essence of Dionysiac rapture, whose
closest analogy is furnished by physical intoxication. Dionysian stirrings arise
either through the influence of those narcotic potions of which all primitive
races speak in their hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, which
penetrates with joy the whole frame of nature. So stirred, the individual forgets
himself completely. . . . Now that the gospel of universal harmony is sounded,
each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with
him—as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only
shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness. Man now expresses himself
through song and dance as the member of a higher community; he has forgotten
how to walk, how to speak, and is on the brink of taking wing as he dances.
13
“In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to strain his symbolic faculties to the
utmost; something quite unheard of is now clamoring to be heard: the desire to tear
asunder the veil of Maya, to sink back into the original oneness of nature; the desire
to express the very essence of nature symbolically.” Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
and the Genealogy of Morals, p. 27.
120 chapter six
led him to be one with the heart of the world.14 The alleged oneness
of man and nature in ancient Japan was nothing other than Dionysus’
breaking the spell of individuation and opening a path to the maternal
womb of being.15
In refining the meaning of “naturism” to portray ancient Japan,
Ōnishi incurs a series of debts to several Western scholars, beginning
with the German thinker Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub (1884–1963), who
in an article published in 1940 used the word naturistisch (naturis-
tic) to define the spiritual characteristics shared by all primitive arts.
Hartlaub had chosen this expression over the more common natu-
ralistisch (naturalistic, or, in Japanese, shizenshugiteki) because of its
intimate relation with “the reality of nature” (Naturgegebenheiten).
Playing on Max Dessoir’s (1867–1947) word “anthropomorphic”
(anthropomorph), Hartlaub had called naturism “cosmomorphic”
(kosmomorph)—an abstract formalization experienced in primitive
artistic expression that mixed the contingency of the embossed carving
of the uneven surface of stones with a “protogenic impressionism,” or
the reproduction of a visual act of remembrance. Such a formalization
included a network of symbolic relationships between man and the
cosmos in which the notion of “relationship” itself was grounded in
the conceptual “axis-system” (Axensystem) of the world. “Naturism”
was nothing but a kind of “nostalgia” (nagori), the “horror of empti-
14
Of the lyrical poet, Nietzsche writes:
He is, first and foremost, a Dionysian artist, become wholly identified with
the original Oneness, its pains and contradiction, and producing a replica of
that Oneness as music, if music may legitimately be seen as a repetition of the
world. . . . The artist had abrogated his subjectivity earlier, during the Dionysian
phase: the image which now reveals to him his oneness with the heart of the
world is a dream scene showing forth vividly, together with original pain, the
original delight of illusion . . . . Being the active center of that world he [the lyrical
poet] may boldly speak in the first person, only his “I” is not that of the actual
waking man, but the “I” dwelling, truly and eternally, in the ground of being. It
is through the reflections of that “I” that the lyric poet beholds the ground of
being.
15
Nietzsche writes:
In opposition to all who would derive the arts from a single vital principle, I wish
to keep before me those two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus.
They represent to me, most vividly and concretely, two radically dissimilar realms
of art. Apollo embodies the transcendent genius of the principium individuatio-
nis; through him alone is it possible to achieve redemption in illusion. The mysti-
cal jubilation of Dionysus, on the other hand, breaks the spell of individuation
and opens a path to the maternal womb of being.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, p. 97.
ness” (horror vacui) witnessed in primitive art. Hartlaub’s argument

was aimed at portraying Greek art as an overcoming of “naturism”
and “cosmomorphism” and as a transition from a primitive, archaic
age to the Greek discovery of “anthropomorphism,” in which man
became the measure of all things (homo mensura).16
Ōnishi’s dependence on Western representations for his self-repre-
sentation goes one step further when he tries to refine his definition
of ancient Japan by using expressions related to the alleged “cosmo-
morphism” of Japan’s past. He borrows one of these expressions,
“cosmocentric” (Kosmozentrisch)—which Ōnishi applies to the age
of the Manʾyōshū—from the German philosopher Rudolf Odebrecht
(1883–1952). Ōnishi relates the notion of “cosmocentrism” to the local
aesthetic experience of a mythical past that, he argues, was grounded
in the oneness of primordial life. Such oneness was dispersed all over
the universe, and it was the source of all natural phenomena, includ-
ing human consciousness and the deities’ transcendental nature. This
primordial aesthetic experience elicited what Ōnishi calls “interior or
internal contemplation,” the result of “the concretion of the spirit”
(Geistesverkörperung). The “cosmocentric” aesthetic experience stands
in opposition to the “anthropocentric” (Anthropozentrisch) experience
of ancient European cultures—foremost among them the Greek—
which make “personhood” the privileged aesthetic standard. All natu-
ral phenomena, including death and destiny, were given ideal human
features, thus eliciting an aesthetic contemplation of idealized forms. In
other words, in the West nature became animated (Naturbeseelung).17
Ōnishi further underlines the difference between cosmocentrism
and anthropocentrism by associating the first type of experience with
the notions of “mystic participations” (participations mystiques) and
of “entrance back into life” (Einleben) while reserving for the second
the concepts of “animation” (ujōka), “personification” (gijin sayō),
and “empathic transference” (kanjō inyū). By “mystic participations,”
Ōnishi means the original nonseparation of “spirit” and “nature,”
which, he argues, underlines the entire notion of “naturism.” The
expression came to him from the work of the French ethnologist
16
MSK, pp. 77–80.
17
Ibid., pp. 182–186.
122 chapter six
Lucien Lévi-Bruhl (1857–1939).18 Ōnishi argues that the spiritual

power of life was expressed in Japanese mythology by the word musubi
(literally, “tying”)—the combination of musu (to produce, to create)
and bi (spirit)—which meant “spiritual creative force.”19 He finds in
the poetry of the Manʾyōshū textual examples of the unity of “spirit”
and “nature,” or human life and natural phenomenon—a unity exem-
plified by the rhetorical texture of the poems. Ōnishi interprets poetic
rhetorical techniques such as “pillow words” (makura kotoba), “pref-
aces” ( jo), and “pivot words” (kakekotoba) as hyperlogical statements
compressing the expression of the poet’s feelings and the description
of the natural surroundings into a single, unitary image. The seventh-
century poet Hitomaro is presented as the champion of “naturism,”
unlike his Greek counterpart Homer, whose similes stand as examples
of the separateness of subject and object, interior and exterior, poet
and landscape, which the reader must re-compose in an act of aes-
thetic experience.20
The notion of mystic union also serves for Ōnishi to explain the
apparent contradiction between the argument for a pristine, immedi-
ate, and “sympathetic” perception of nature in ancient Japan and the
18
Lévy-Bruhl writes:
The attitude of the primitive’s mind is very different. The natural world he lives
in presents itself in quite another aspect to him. All its objects and all its entities
are involved in a system of mystic participations and exclusions; it is these which
constitute its cohesion and its order. They therefore will attract his attention first
of all, and they alone will retain it. If a phenomenon interests him, and he does
not confine himself to a merely passive perception of it without reaction of any
kind, he will immediately conjure up, as by a kind of mental reflex, an occult and
invisible power of which this phenomenon is a manifestation. . . . In the midst of
this confusion of mystic participations and exclusions, the impressions which
the individual has of himself whether living or dead, and of the group to which
he “belongs,” have only a far-off resemblance to ideas or concepts. They are felt
and lived, rather than thought. Neither their content nor their connections are
strictly submitted to the law of contradiction. Consequently neither the personal
ego, nor the social group, nor the surrounding world, both seen and unseen,
appears to be yet “definite” in the collective representations, as they seem to be as
soon as our conceptual thought tries to grasp them. In spite of the most careful
effort, our thought cannot assimilate them with what it knows, as its “ordinary”
objects. It therefore despoils them of what there is in them that is elementally
concrete, emotional and vital. This it is which renders so difficult, and so fre-
quently uncertain, the comprehension of institutions wherein is expressed the
mentality, mystic rather than logical, of primitive peoples.
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (New York: Macmillan, 1923; 1st French ed.,
1922), pp. 35–36, 446–447.
19
MSK, p. 11.
20
Ibid., pp. 140–141.
evidence that perceptions were ruled by conventions21 once they were

expressed in poetry—a contradiction solved in the West by relying on
the notion of aesthetic experience. Ōnishi points out that what was
called “beauty of nature” (shizenbi) did not refer to a specific natu-
ral phenomenon, such as a particular flower or a specific bird, but
to the experience deriving from the view of this phenomenon from
the perspective of “the totality of nature” (shizen no “zentaisei”). Such
a contemplation was predetermined by what conventions had made
into traditions. Rather than acting on the object of contemplation, the
viewer is acted on by the object, by the conventionalized moment of
“production” (Produktion), the colors of a painting, for instance, or
the words of a poem, and by the conventionalized reception (Rezep-
tion), how the object comes to be perceived within a specific ethnicity.
To use a paradoxical expression, Ōnishi argues, the beauty of nature
(shizenbi) is “a work of art prior to art” (geijutsu izen no geijutsuhin).
He states that while in the West man learned to appreciate nature by
relying on the conventions developed to admire art, Japan discovered
nature through poetic space. The conventions regulating the writing of
“poetry” (shibun)—the change of seasons and colors during the same
day, impermanence signified by trailing clouds, mist, or smoke—also
determined the act of contemplating nature. Because pictorial pre-
vailed over poetic conventions in the West, the Western experience
of nature was basically more “visual.” Ōnishi calls the experience of
nature the result of a “formative, productive activity” (keisei sayō, or
Formung) on the part of the human spirit. As a synonym of “conven-
tions,” he uses the expression “inner form” (naimenteki keishiki, or
innere Form), which is at the same time the product of aesthetic con-
sciousness and the producer of the perception of natural objects.22
21
Ōnishi argued that landscapes in the poetry of the Manʾyōshū were often presented
by what he called “convention,” “tradition” (dentō), and “pattern” (kata). He inter-
preted “conventions” as mainly the result of a particular climatic situation ( fūdoteki
shizen) and as the crystallization of form forcing poetic materials into regulated pat-
terns. However, Ōnishi was concerned mostly with “psychological” conventions that
predetermined the aesthetic experience of the observer. He saw in the natural phe-
nomenology of the seasons (temporal movement) a major source of “psychological
conventions,” which led to a formalization of the poet’s feelings vis-à-vis nature. Joy
and sadness, for example, began to be conventionally associated with specific natural
situations. Specific natural phenomena also became objects of conventional associa-
tions, such as, for example, “plum tree” and “nightingale” or “cherry blossoms” and
“spring rain.” Ibid., pp. 244–260.
22
Ibid., pp. 280–287.
124 chapter six
Returning to Ōnishi’s argument of “reversals,” the pristine harmony

of Japan’s ancient poetic lore was finally reached in the West as a result
of an aesthetic contemplation of nature mediated by art. While the
Western awakening to naturism during the Romantic era with poets
and writers such as Rousseau, Lamartine, Hugo, Byron, Shelley, and
Goethe was basically a product of modernism, Japan had made natur-
ism the ground of its artistic and cultural life since the most ancient
era. Ōnishi argues that in the West the experience of artistic beauty
(as described by members of the Romantic movement) brought about
what in Japan had been perceived in ancient times as an experience
of natural beauty. This leads Ōnishi to argue that Romantic poetry
achieves a sympathetic view of and feeling for nature as a result of
artistic intervention, the power of art.23
Ōnishi, however, is careful to avoid the direct consequences that
the notion of “aesthetic contemplation” (Kontemplation, Betrachtung)
implies. This idea, developed by the phenomenological aesthetician
Moritz Geiger (1880–1937), is premised on a spiritual distance between
the observing subject and the observed object. Accordingly, the denial
of the existence of such a distance in the spiritual life of the Japanese
people in ancient times deprived them of the ability to have aesthetic
experiences. Ōnishi’s entire project aims at demonstrating the oppo-
site, which is that aesthetic experience was the prerequisite for the
appreciation of nature in ancient Japan.24 He relates the Manʾyō poets’
privileging of naturism to Japan’s delay in developing natural land-
scapes (Naturschilderung, or “descriptions of nature”) because nature
had not yet become an object of pure observation. Although in ancient
Japan the focus of aesthetic experience was never on nature seen as
an object of pure vision, or “pure contemplation” (junsui kanshō), he
continues, a feeling for nature (shizen kanjō) was very much present
in ancient Japanese poetry.25
Ōnishi goes on the offensive, arguing that Western poetry is trapped
in a sort of “parallelism” (heikō kankei) in which the subject could
not resist the temptation to provide reflections on and explanations
of nature instead of presenting nature as an undifferentiated union
of subject and object. In his opinion, Western languages are respon-
23
Ibid., pp. 148–149.
24
Ibid., pp. 17–18.
25
Ibid., pp. 232–235.
sible for seeing things from an exclusively human perspective and

for anthropomorphizing everything, whereas the Japanese language
resists the temptation to differentiate between man and nature, the
organic and the inorganic. This last argument leads Ōnishi to stress
the “naturalness” (shizenteki ni), “frankness” (sotchoku ni), and “sim-
plicity” (soboku ni) of linguistic expressions appearing in the poetry
of the Manʾyōshū.26
In a sense Ōnishi was reviving an eighteenth-century argument
developed by members of the National Learning movement (Koku-
gaku) who saw in the poetry of the Manʾyōshū an ethical moment of
purity (magokoro, or “true heart,” and makoto, or “sincerity”) prior
to the contaminating influence of foreign ideologies (Buddhism and
Confucianism).27 Reinforcement of this local creed came to Ōnishi
from a famous essay by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), “On Naive and
Sentimental Poetry” (1795–1796), which Ōnishi quotes,28 apparently
without paying attention to the paradox of creating “distinctness” by
relying on the alleged “distinctions” of the “Other.” Schiller, in fact,
associates ancient Greece with simplicity, artfulness, and immediacy
(the “naive” of the essays title) while charging modern, Romantic
poetry with the crime of being technical, distant, and opaque (the
sentimental).29
26
Ibid., pp. 167–169.
27
See, for example, Kamo no Mabuchi’s (1697–1769) argument on the
Manʾyōshū.
28
MSK, pp. 88–89.
29
Schiller writes:
Recall the beauty of nature surrounding the ancient Greeks. Consider how con-
fidently this people was able, under its serendipitous sky, to live with nature
in the wild; consider how very much nearer to the simplicity of nature lay its
manner of thinking, its way of feeling, its mores, and what a faithful copy of this
is provided by the works of its poets. If one reflects upon these things, then the
observation must appear strange that one encounters there so few traces of the
sentimental interest we moderns attach to nature’s settings and characteristics. . . .
In the case of the ancient Greeks it was very much different. For them the culture
had not degenerated to such a degree that nature was left behind in the process.
The entire edifice of the social life was erected on feelings, not on some clumsy
work of art. Their theology itself was the inspiration of a naive feeling, born of
a joyful imagination and not of brooding reason as is the belief of the churches
of modern nations. Hence, since the Greek had not lost the nature in humanity,
he also could not be surprised by nature outside humanity, and for that reason
could have no pressing need for objects in which he rediscovered nature. One
with himself and content in the feeling of his humanity, the Greek had to stand
quietly by this humanity as his ultimate and to concern himself with bringing
everything else closer to it. We, on the other hand, neither one with ourselves
126 chapter six
The “naive” quality of the so-called naturism of ancient Japan

also implies an “instinctuality” (honnōteki) of feelings for nature
that, according to Ōnishi, goes a step beyond the “self-conscious”
( jikakuteki) appreciation of and “intellectual love” (chiteki no ai) for
nature, as is the case with the Romantic poets. Ōnishi further defines
“naturism” as an “entrance into life” (Einleben), a kind of “vitalism”
proceeding from nature and moving toward people as a result of what
he calls the three “vital forms” (seitkatsu yōshiki) of clothing, food,
and dwelling, which in the past were all directly and closely related
to nature.30 As a cosmocentric experience, naturism is based on an
unconscious perception of “seimei” (life) in which body and spirit are
in a relationship of primordial unity. Ōnishi points out that the spiri-
tual attitude of the Japanese people toward nature was in those times
a “thrownness” (tōnyū), a “projection” (tōsha) into nature, an entrance
of vision, affects, and will into nature.31 Such a mystic and vitalistic
experience was grounded in a “hyperspiritual” (chōseishinteki) and a
“hypersubjective” (chōshukanteki) nature. Once the human spirit was
in tune with and sympathized with hyperspiritual and hypersubjective
nature, Ōnishi concludes, a subjective aesthetic consciousness could
take place among the ancient Japanese.32
The vitalistic argument undoubtedly came to Ōnishi from Nietz-
sche’s The Birth of Tragedy.33 The enormous impact that this trend
nor happy in our experiences of humanity, have no more pressing interest than
to take flight from it and to remove from sight so miscarried a form. The feeling
spoken of here is thus not something that the ancients had. It is rather the same
as the sort of feeling we have for the ancients. They felt naturally, while we feel
the natural.
Friedrich Schiller, Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York:
Continuum, 1993), pp. 194–195.
30
MSK, p. 187.
31
Ibid., pp. 203–204.
32
Ibid., p. 206.
33
Nietzsche writes:
Dionysiac art, too, wishes to convince us of the eternal delight of existence, but
it insists that we look for this delight not in the phenomena but behind them.
It makes us realize that everything that is generated must be prepared to face
its final dissolution. It forces us to gaze into horror of individual existence, yet
without being turned to stone by the vision: a metaphysical solace momentarily
lifts us above the whirl of shifting phenomena. For a brief moment we become,
ourselves, the primal Being, and we experience its insatiable hunger for existence.
Now we see the struggle, the pain, the destruction of appearances, as necessary,
because of the constant proliferation of forms pushing into life, because of the
extravagant fecundity of the world will. We feel the furious prodding of this
travail in the very moment in which we become one with the immense lust for
of thought had on Japan in the first half of the twentieth century has
been thoroughly examined and documented.34 The notion of “entrance
into life,” however, was set up as an alternative to the Western anthro-
pocentric aesthetic experience, which centered around the spiritual
activity of empathic transference, animation, and personification.
Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) is the philosopher responsible for pro-
viding Ōnishi with the hermeneutical strategy of transference, which
he reverses. In Lipps’s case, Ōnishi argues, the theory of “empathetic
transference” (Einfühlen) is the thrownness/transference/objectifica-
tion of one’s affects onto the aesthetic object—what the French call
“objectivation du moi” (objectification of the self). In the process, the
aesthetic experience becomes objectified, thus allowing the self to
become conscious to itself. Because the process of “penetration” is
prior to and, therefore, separate from aesthetic consciousness, Ōnishi
continues, rather than talking about “feeling into” (Einfühlung), an
idea that also implies “feeling one with” (Einsfühlen), it would be more
correct to use the word “feeling out of” (Herausfühlen) with regard
to Lipps’s theory. When we turn to Japan, the cosmocentric aesthetic
experience of ancient times makes the human heart deeply “engrossed
in” (chinsen) the surrounding nature. In this case, Ōnishi argues, we
can truly speak of going from “an entering back to life” (Einleben) to
an authentic “feeling into” (Hineinfühlen). The moment of “thrown-
ness,” or “entrance into,” is not consciously spelled out. The self, the
spiritual subject, is converted back (kie suru) to nature unconditionally
(mujōken ni) in such a way that the self overcomes itself and forgets
itself in the wonders of nature. Although in “anthropocentric aesthetic
experience” we can still talk of “feeling one with” (Einsfühlen) as “cos-
mocentric aesthetic experience,” there is a difference. In the anthro-
pocentric attitude we witness the subjectivization of an object and the
subject experiencing itself in the object, while the cosmocentric posi-
tion implies the erasure of the self in nature and the final forgetting
life and are made aware of the eternity and indestructibility of that lust. Pity and
terror notwithstanding, we realize our great good fortune in having life—not
as individuals, but as part of the life force with whose procreative lust we have
become one.
34
See, for example, the detailed study of Suzuki Sadami, “Seimei” de Yomu Nihon
Kindai: Taishō Seimeishugi no Tanjō to Tenkai (Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai,
1996).
128 chapter six
of the self.35 Ōnishi calls this last process “intuition” (chokkan), which,
he explains, is the spiritual “thrownness into nature” that takes place
through “empathetic transference” (kanjō inyū), “a transference of the
will” (ishi inyū), and a “transference of direct vision” (chokkan inyū),
or “entrance into vision” (kanʾnyū, or Hineinschauen, Hineinsehen).36
In the end, Ōnishi supplements Lipps’s philosophy of empathy with
the work of Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), especially his Abstrac-
tion and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 1908), in which Wor-
ringer discusses the two basic principles of aesthetic consciousness:
“the impulse to abstract” (Abstraktionstrieb) and “the impulse to
empathize” (Einfühlungstrieb). Ōnishi evidently felt that abstraction
rather than empathy could further clarify the world of the Manʾyōshū.
However, he also felt that the application of Worringer’s notion of
abstraction to the naturism of Japan was fraught with a basic danger.
While empathy is premised on a benign relationship of mutual trust
between nature and man, abstraction implies that man was originally
afflicted by the chaos of nature. Therefore, in an attempt to escape
such a disordered reality, man aimed at spiritual tranquillity, which
he found in artistic forms: the formalism of abstraction that frees man
from the contingency of nature. Because Worringer had a sunny image
of ancient Greece, he privileged the empathetic relationship between
man and nature. Nietzsche, who supported the view of a tragic Greece,
considered its culture an abstraction resulting from the unreliability
of nature. If “empathy” is a problematical category for describing the
serene and undivided reality of ancient Japan, “abstraction” has to
undergo hermeneutical surgery before it can accommodate the world
of the Manʾyōshū. This Ōnishi achieves by calling to his aid the Swiss
psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961), who reconciles the apparent con-
tradiction between empathy and abstraction by arguing that empathy
presupposes an unconscious act of abstraction: an ordering of prime-
val chaos that allows confrontation and identification with nature, or
an empathizing with nature as a way to make sense of it and thus
tame it. Ōnishi succeeds in associating abstraction with primeval order
and in privileging it over empathy by making abstraction inclusive of
empathy. This hermeneutical tour de force eventually allows Ōnishi
to argue that, while empathy leads to the formation of “realistic” (sha-
35
MSK, pp. 204–211.
36
Ibid., p. 222.
jitsuteki), “naturalistic” (shizenshugiteki) forms of art characteristic

of the West, abstraction explains the “abstract” (chūshōteki) forms of
Oriental art.37
To be true to the method of coincidentia oppositorum, Ōnishi in the
end leaves his readers with a deep doubt as to the feasibility of main-
taining and justifying the distinction of categories that, as we have
seen, are always only apparently mutually contradictory. He teases
his readers by deconstructing his own argument after leading them to
believe that ancient Japan could be described as the land of oneness,
natural beauty, cosmomorphism, cosmocentricism, mystic participa-
tions, naturism, naturalness, frankness, simplicity, naïveté, vitalism,
“feeling out of,” and abstraction. After relating Worringer’s notion of
abstraction to Hartlaub’s concept of naturism and after pairing Lipps’s
theory of empathy with Nietzsche’s description of olympianism, he
challenges his readers by concluding that categories of uniqueness are
inadequate for analyzing people and that such schemes cannot explain
the experience of art. In conclusion, he takes a syncretic view of ancient
Greece, according to which Greek art is at the same time realistic and
ideal, natural and spiritual.38
Although we might agree with Sasaki’s argument that Ōnishi used
the method of coincidentia oppositorum in an effort to prove the cul-
tural value of Japan to a skeptical Other and to convince the Japanese
readership of the intrinsic greatness of Japanese culture, it would be
hard to deny the consequences of constructing as intrinsic to a cul-
ture what was actually intrinsic to a method. This example of “the
hermeneutical fallacy” results from the paradoxical attempt to negoti-
ate one’s own identity by relying on the identity of the Other, believ-
ing that one can maintain, by creating images of the self modeled on
a mythical Other, an autonomous position with regard to that Other.
If I am allowed to pose a question that still deals with facts rather
than with interpretations, once Japan is made into Greece, then what
remains of Japan?
37
Ibid., pp. 81–89.
38
Ibid., p. 90.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CONRAD FIEDLER AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE

KYŌTO SCHOOL
The name of Conrad Fiedler (1841–1895), the founder of Kunstwissen-

schaft (the science of art), continues to draw attention among Japanese
scholars of aesthetics and art history, although Fiedler did not have
any special ties with either Japan or the Japanese world of the plastic
arts.1 This renewed interest in a scholar who is essentially a forgotten
name in the West can only be explained on the grounds of a deep
affinity between his theoretical work and attempts made by Japanese
artists, philosophers, aestheticians, and art historians to overturn the
rigidity of Cartesian dualistic modes of knowledge in favor of monistic
views of the mind-body compound.2 Fiedler’s publication of Über den
Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit (On the Origin of Artistic Activ-
ity, 1887) did not escape the attention of Japan’s foremost philosopher,
Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), who found in Fiedler’s thought a sober-
ing exception to the simple aesthetic conceptualization of a work of art
in terms of an observing subject and an object of pure contemplation.
Fiedler’s theory of art was a fierce attack against the aesthetics and
the historical conscience dominating the nineteenth century. As the
title On the Origin of Artistic Activity indicates, the meaning of artistic
activity should not be sought in the effects (edification) that a work of
art has on the viewer’s spiritual life. Instead, the viewer should concen-
trate on the realization of the bodily-spiritual construction of reality
that such an activity brings about. This difference can only be caught
at the beginning of a process which later will come to be known as
artistic. The unfolding of this original moment is realized when all
This paper was originally presented on August 26, 2004, at the Third International
Congress for Aesthetics, Taipei, Taiwan. The author wishes to thank Professor Pan
Fan for his kind invitation and comments.
1
From the long list of essays on Fiedler published in Japan, especially in the Kan-
sai area, I will only mention one of the most recent which appeared in the journal of
the Department of Aesthetics and Art History at Osaka University: Ishihara Midori,
“Zōkeiteki na Me de Miru: Fīdorā no Geijutsuron no Kanōsei,” pp. 19–35.
2
This topic is thoroughly discussed in Yuasa Yasuo, The Body: Toward an Eastern
Mind-Body Theory.
132 chapter seven
the effects of the work of art are bracketed, so that the origin of artistic
activity can eventually be abstracted. Why is such a bracketing neces-
sary? Because we cannot posit an external reality which is separate
from the spiritual formations (perceptions, representations, or con-
cepts) which are actually defining what we call external reality. Para-
doxically, we could even argue that, since human beings cannot possess
the notion of any object apart from the spiritual forms in which such
objects are configured, it would not make any difference to us if no
object actually existed. Of course, objects need to exist in order to
be perceived. However, our possession of reality does not depend on
autonomous objects separated from the process of perception. From
the very beginning our possession of reality is a “bodily” possession.3
To concentrate on the effects of a work of art fails to go beyond
the notion that the observer already has of the essence and goals of
art. Then, the judgment becomes more a valuation of the spirit of the
observer than of the work itself. In other words, history has the upper
hand over the real meaning of art. Rather than being the beginning
of a historical structure, Fiedler’s “origin” is an eternal vortex, the
foundation of becoming and life. History is simply the space in which
expressive movements appear as vortex. Once historical issues are set
aside in the judgment of art—notions such as, for example, the role
played by minor artists so dear to Romantic historicism—it becomes
impossible to found a critique on any aesthetic principle. The space
of aesthetic judgment must instead be replaced by an understanding
of the activity of the artistic process based on the pedagogical goal of
making the observer of art into an artist. The eye must be sensitized
to the importance of the field of visibility. This becomes particularly
difficult in light of the fact that the scientifically oriented nineteenth
century privileged a mode of experience based on conceptual cogni-
tion rather than on perception. Everyone, especially the artist, must be
re-sensitized to the realm of visual imagination or ideas (Vorstellun-
gen) in which perception takes place. The preeminence that has been
given to concepts has made conceptual or abstract cognition superior
to the world of perception. Fiedler’s theory of art aims at challenging
this distortion and reversing the trend from “sensuous to the non-
3
Conrad Fiedler, Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit, section 1,
pp. 1–23.
conrad fiedler and the aesthetics of the kyōto school 133
sensuous, from visible to invisible, from perception to abstraction,

from that which is seen to that which is a concept of the seen.”4
Thought, therefore, must leave behind the dualism between the sen-
suous and the supra-sensuous in order for people to realize that there
is no difference between the perfection of being and the imperfection
of intuition and knowledge. This amounts to Fiedler’s appeal to what
he called “a coherent monism.”5 It would be a mistake to think that
appearance and being are separate from each other; the in-itself of
the thing that comes into view is the same as the way in which such
a thing appears. Reality is no pure phenomenon (subjective idealism),
nor is there behind the phenomenon’s appearance an absolute reality
that cannot appear in itself (transcendentalism).
And yet we continue to see a dualism where, as a matter of fact, only
a unity exists. Only recently and only halfway we have been treading
a path which from the hypothesis of a dualistic existence of spirit and
body leads to the opinion that a separation of these two hypothetical
elements of our nature (whose opposition, which has been affirmed for
such a long time, has always constituted the biggest of all existing anti-
theses) is something totally unrealizable.6
It is no wonder that Fiedler’s theories found fertile ground in Japan. In
his quest for the meaning of art Fiedler rejected all metaphysical oppo-
sitions between subject and object, form and content in the sphere of
artistic production. Rather than relying on the comforting presence of
a fixed, well-defined being Fiedler emphasized the constant becom-
ing of reality. As he argued in On the Origin of Artistic Activity, “our
representations cannot be considered as something already existing,
ready-made, something that enters our conscience and then disappears,
but as something in flux which rises and flows.”7 Prior to intuition
and thought nothing is fixed. Reality can only be known from within
a process of consciousness, and within such a given process reality
keeps changing. At every single moment human beings are faced with
nothing—the only thing they can call real existence. Evidently, Fiedler
rejected the idealism of the Romantic school. He argued that a theory
of art must be found within the forms in which the subject disciplines
his experience of the world. Fiedler accused the Romantics for having
4
Conrad Fiedler, On Judging Works of Visual Arts, p. 31.
5
Conrad Fiedler, Aforismi sull’Arte, p. 72.
6
Conrad Fiedler, Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit, p. 39.
7
Conrad Fiedler, Ibidem, p. 11.
134 chapter seven
devised theories of beauty (aesthetics) rather than theories of art, and

for having reduced beauty to a simple appearance, a transitory con-
tent to be dismissed in order to reach a higher truth. The Romantics
had developed notions of the sense of beauty which inevitably led to
the “death of art” for the sake of a higher truth: beauty. For Fiedler
art was a search for truth and knowledge, not beauty, since beauty
could not be deduced from concepts, whereas the value of art could.
Artistic judgment was based on knowledge, whereas aesthetic judg-
ment did not require any preliminary knowledge of the thing to be
judged. Rather than beauty, which for Fiedler was a simple prejudice
hindering the evaluation of the work of art, art elevates the sensitive
intuition to consciousness, so that the main effect of art is the charac-
teristic form of knowledge it provides. Art is simply a form of language
through which a few determinate objects are elevated to the level of
consciousness. “It is the effort to go from the uncertainty of percep-
tion to the limpid possession of spiritual cognition.”8 Simple taste will
never reach into the secrets of art since taste cannot guarantee that a
form of knowledge has been reached.9 For Fiedler the metaphysical
hypothesis of beauty as the content of art must be abandoned.
According to Fiedler there are only two ways to grasp reality—a
reality that he described as “a play (Spiel) in constant transformation”:
1) by either giving it a name through language, or 2) by entrusting
vision with the task of bringing reality into visibility. By naming real-
ity, however, a fissure opens between the form that language gives
to reality and reality’s infinite process of incessant becoming. Fielder
called this fissure a “veil” hiding the true essence of reality. On the
other hand, visibility finds a way around this veil that can be torn off
if the whole body becomes the eye and all other concepts and senses
are rendered ineffectual—a process which Fiedler called “a pure see-
ing” (reines Sehen).
Fiedler radicalized the liquidation of the theme of the “thing-in-
itself ” championed by neo-Kantianism at the end of the nineteenth
century. Artistic activity is a movement of conscience that, by becom-
ing concrete in the movement of the hand, succeeds in never objectify-
ing its representational space, thus escaping the deception of an alleged
8
9
See Fiedler’s “Theory of Art and Aesthetics,” in his Aphorismen (Aphorisms)
1–29.
separation between conscience and reality, subject and world. The sub-
ject becomes a “pure eye of the world” only when the conscience of
its identity does not stifle itself in objectifying forms, as Fiedler saw
happening in the knowledge of the natural sciences. The artistic activ-
ity is the realization of the fact that being and world belong together.
The process of seeing and expressing is one and the same, and not
the product of a causal relationship with one anticipating the other,
as in the case of someone copying with the hand what the eye sees.
Fiedler challenged the mimetic/representational tradition of Western
aesthetics.
Fiedler’s notion of the production of the artistic conscience had
nothing to do with the productivity of the romantic genius project-
ing the content of his conscience on a world conceived as totally
other from itself. In Fiedler, art and reality coincide not because of
an alleged common metaphysical essence, but because the unfolding
of reality cannot be disclosed without the cognitive process and, espe-
cially, without the artistic activity which is the intensification of such
a process. The impulse of artistic activity is specified by what Fiedler
called, “the expressive movement.” Expression, however, does not
refer to any implicit content, whether feeling or thought, to be trans-
lated into an exterior form. “Rather, in expressive movement we can
recognize only a degree of development of a psycho-physical process.”10
The hand continues the process of creating a changing reality that the
eye has begun. The hand gives a shape to a reality that ceases to be at
any moment. Expression assumes an “original” position in Fiedler’s
theory of art inasmuch as expression does not simply coincide with
intuition. The artist does not distinguish himself for any particular
intuitive power.
Although it sounds like a paradox, we must say that art begins only
when vision ceases. The artist des not distinguish himself for any special
visual disposition; or for being able to see more or more intensely than
others; or for possessing in his visual organs a special skill to choose, to
concentrate, to transform, to ennoble, to transfigure, so as to reveal in
his products the conquest of his visions. He distinguishes himself for
enabling the particular talent of his nature to go immediately from intui-
tive perception to intuitive expression. His relationship with nature is
not intuitive, but expressive.11
10
11
Conrad Fiedler, Ibidem, p. 98.
136 chapter seven
While the normal person engages his visual process by passively con-
templating nature, the artist mobilizes a visual activity which is tied to
processes of pure perception and visual representations—what Fiedler
called “intuitive expression.” Fiedler noted that “the only task of the
artistic act has to be searched in the pure expression of an object’s
visibility.”12 Visibility (Sichtbarkeit) is determined by a dialectic
between intuition and expression.13 Only in an active behavior such as
the artistic act can the visibility of an object be isolated and purified to
the point where its representation disappears, thus allowing visibility
itself to become an autonomous form of reality. The artist participates
actively in the visibility of things to the point that this visibility fully
discloses itself to him. From the perspective of visibility art ceases to
be a vehicle of contents that can be deciphered in any language aside
from the language that is proper to art itself. Thus, the artistic sphere
becomes independent from any history beyond such a sphere. “The
work of art does not contain an idea; it is itself an idea.”14 In the work
of art, form creates the subject in whose name the work exists. This
form, which is also content, must simply express itself. Whatever else
it expresses in its explanatory language lies beyond the borders of art.
Art’s historicity must be found in the immanence of the work of art.
Thus, art cannot be reduced to any cultural sphere, whether this is
dictated by feelings or, more generally, by aesthetics.
Art can be approached in no way other than through itself. . . . Art has
nothing to do with form, which existed before and apart from its activ-
ity. Rather, the beginning and the end of artistic activity reside in the
creation of forms which only thereby attain existence. What art creates
is no second world alongside the other world which has an existence
without art; what art creates is the world, made by and for the artistic
consciousness.15
Reality discloses itself to the eye of the artist (or the observer)—the
eye that only follows itself, neglecting all considerations that are neces-
sary to a discursive knowledge. The artist knows how to become free
from conceptual thought based on the law of causality. As Kant had
argued in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), the
12
Conrad Fielder, Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit, p. 126.
13
Fiedler had already developed this notion in 1876 in Über die Beurteilung von
Werken der bildenden Kunst (On Judging Works of Visual Art).
14
15
Conrad Fiedler, On Judging Works of Visual Art, p. 48.
intuitive consciousness of the poet puts him in touch with faculties

which are beyond conceptual knowledge, such as pictorial imagina-
tion, association, and affinity.16 According to Fiedler, the correct intu-
ition of the artist results in the correctness of concepts, and his wide
intuitions widen his conceptual knowledge.17 However, only visual
interest leads the artist’s hand. The artistic object is a product that
exists only thanks to its being as visibility. In the world of visibility
things are freed from the domain of competing senses and from the
interests of the act of thinking. What is left is an empowerment leading
the players in the field of visibility towards “a situation of an always
increasing clarity . . ., a clear knowledge of reality in which nothing else
lives but the immediate certitude of being.”18 For Fiedler the work of
art has an ontological truth that cannot be explained in terms of an
absolute intellectual, moral, or aesthetic perfection. With art human
knowledge has reached the highest possible degree of development.
Nishida Kitarō
Nishida Kitarō played a major role in bringing Fiedler’s scholarly

achievements to the attention of Japanese scholars. According to his
diary (entry 6/16/1912), Nishida became acquainted with Fiedler’s
work in 1912, the year following the publication of Nishida’s first
major work, Zen no Kenkyū (An Inquiry into the Good, 1911).19 We
find several quotations from Fiedler in Nishida’s discussion of aesthet-
ics and art in Geijutstu to Dōtoku (Art and Morality, 1923). For Nishida,
art, like morality, exists as a realm of volitional objects. The starting
point of Nishida’s quest in the realm of aesthetics is the notion of self-
awareness (jikaku). The knower and the known are one, since self-
awareness implies the awareness (subjective stand) of an object (the
aware self). This premise highlights the preeminence of the eye (or
ear) in the construction of aesthetic objects which would be unthink-
able aside from the perceptual apparatus: “When we see a color or
16
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, pp. 64–73.
17
See Fiedler’s “Theory of Knowledge,” in his Aphorisms, 82–145.
18
Conrad Fiedler, Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit, p. 170 and 174.
19
The entry states, “I read a work by Fiedler.” Fujita Masakatsu argues that the
“work” in question was probably Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit.
Fujita Masakatsu, Gendai Shisō to Shite no Nishida Kitarō, p. 164.
138 chapter seven
hear a sound, we say that the color or the sound is part of the exter-
nal world and that we are made conscious of them through visual or
aural activity. However, what is color or sound in the external world,
apart from the visual or aural activity?”20 At the source of aesthetic
experience there is a visual act, the a priori upon which the experi-
ence of colors is based. “The a priori of art is the a priori of pure
consciousness.”21 For Nishida the fundamental condition for the estab-
lishment of consciousness is feeling, since “knowledge exists within
feelings.” The observation of a work of art is for Nishida an act of
pure consciousness, since colors come to life in the intentionality of
pure visual perception. “The content of aesthetic beauty is not objec-
tive space, which is an intellectual object, but is a subjective space that
continues to function internally as the unifying force of perception
itself.”22
On the issue of consciousness and reality Nishida referred to Fie-
dler’s On the Origin of Artistic Activity in “The Essence of the Beauti-
ful,” which forms the first chapter of Art and Morality. Nishida praises
Fiedler’s idea that reality is the result of the images created by the
mind. However, reality is not deprived of its objective presence since
the mind must express it in order to create it. Such an expression
can only take place through the human body. Far from being mere
symbols of spiritual phenomena, expressive movements are the devel-
opment and completion of the spiritual realm. Thus, language “is not
a sign of thought but is an expressive movement of thought.” At the
same time, language and thought are not the only forms of expres-
sion. For the act of pure visual perception to develop into language
the body must move and be moved, thus developing into an expres-
sive movement—i.e., “the creative act of the artist (künstlerische Tätig-
keit).” For Nishida, Fiedler’s discovery consists in having realized that
in the artistic act, “the world of concepts suddenly breaks up, and the
prospect of a world of infinite visual perception opens up.”23 Nishida
transformed Fiedler’s theory of art slightly by interpreting his concept
of visibility as “pure visibility” (reine Sichtbarkeit)—an expression that
we do not find in Fiedler’s work.24 Evidently, Nishida wanted to find
20
Nishida Kitarō, Art and Morality, p. 9.
21
Nishida Kitarō, Ibidem, p. 14.
22
23
Nishida Kitarō, Ibidem, pp. 23–24.
24
I owe this insight to Professor Iwaki Ken’ichi who, in a personal communication
(9/10/2003), indicated to me that Nishida’s misreading of Fiedler has yet to be ques-
confirmation in Fiedler’s thought of the validity of his own notion of

“pure experience,” which he had developed in Zen no Kenkyū. From
the standpoint of the absolute will the distinction between body and
mind (i.e., the interior and the exterior of the mind) becomes mean-
ingless, since the only lived reality is the activity of mind and body.
In the independent, self-sufficient true reality prior to the separation of
subject and object, our knowledge, feeling, and volition are one. Con-
trary to popular belief, true reality is not the subject matter of dispas-
sionate knowledge; it is established through our feeling and willing. It
is not simply an existence but something with meaning. If we were to
remove our feelings and the will from this world of actuality, it would
no longer be a concrete fact—it would become an abstract concept. The
world described by the physicists, like a line without width and a plane
without thickness, is not something that actually exists. In this respect, it
is the artist, not the scholar, who arrives at the true nature of reality.25
The artistic work is “the development of muscular sensation,” which
is what Fiedler had called “expressive movement.” Nishida explains
the world of visual perception as a “painting that has been painted
by means of the power of the eye itself without the use of the hand.”
However, he immediately adds—referring to Fiedler—that a painting
merely painted by the eye is part of the ordinary visual world and,
therefore, it is incomplete. The visual act requires the hand of the art-
ist to assist “at those places where the eye is unable to function.” The
hand becomes one with the eye and the entire body becomes the eye.26
In other words, artistic creation is a productive seeing, the creation
of a true reality “entirely apart from the intentionality of conceptual
knowledge.” This does not mean that pure visual perception is irratio-
nal. Although it looks similar to an instinctive act, it is “the expres-
sion of a personal act that is dynamic in itself,” and the expression
of a rational will.27 Alongside Fiedler, Nishida argues that, “aesthetic
concept is not a conceptual reality, but it would be a mistake to view
it as something identical with fantasy and illusion. Aesthetic content
is transintellectual, but not anti-intellectual; rather, it can be said to
tioned in Japan. Interestingly, several European aestheticians have taken the theory of
“pure visibility” to be Fiedler’s original standpoint—an idea that, according to Pro-
fessor Iwaki, was probably introduced by Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), the Italian
philosopher for whom art was “pure intuition.” Croce’s thought was quite popular
among Japanese thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century.
25
Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good, p. 49.
26
Nishida Kitarō, Art and Morality, pp. 26–27.
27
140 chapter seven
include the intellectual. What is given as the content of judgment is first

given as this kind of intuition.”28 By intuition Nishida does not mean a
standpoint of quiet contemplation, but the horizon of a creative, free
self that transcends and includes consciousness. “The standpoint of
creative intuition is the horizon of the aesthetic, creative act.”29
Then, what is for Nishida the relationship between expression and
intuition—two key concepts in Fiedler’s dialectics? Following Fiedler,
Nishida takes intuitive understanding to be at the base of all kinds of
abstract understanding. Far from being acts which are mutually con-
tradictory and independent, instinct and intelligence are two sides of
one act. The intentionality of the expressive act points at the distinc-
tion between intuitive intentionality and conceptual understanding.
“The content of our feeling directly appears in expressive movements
without passing through the plane of reflection in conceptual thinking.
We immediately intuit the content of the feelings of another person,
for example, through such an expressive act.”30 As in Kant’s reflective
judgment, the expressive act shortcuts the objective world of reflection
(determinant judgment). The work of art does not present a world
that needs to be reflected upon. Instead, it constitutes an immedi-
ate unity of understanding (spiritual content). Thus, the work of art
allows us to do what mathematics, for example, would not permit us
to achieve: to get to the content of feeling that is inaccessible to rea-
son. We should remember, however, that Nishida’s stress on feelings
and emotions (kanjō) in Art and Morality, far from being in line with
Fiedler’s thought, was the result of his borrowing from the theory of
emotions that Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) developed in the essays
“The Imagination of the Poet and Madness” (1886) and “The Imagina-
tion of the Poet: Elements for a Poetics” (1887) which Nishida quotes
in his work.31 In “The Essence of the Beautiful” Nishida acknowledged
28
Nishida Kitarō, Ibidem, pp. 56–57.
29
30
31
For the English translation of the second essay see, Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and
Experience, pp. 29–173. In Dilthey the self represents itself outside of itself when the
will cannot contain the erupting emotions which are thus expressed in either artistic
or pathological form. Fiedler had strongly objected to the idea of associating the artist
and the madman under the rubric of inspiration, since for him art was a form of ratio-
nal knowledge. In On Judging Works of Visual Art (p. 35, 61, and 76), Fiedler states:
“If cognition attained by perceptual experience is different from cognition reached by
abstract thinking, it can nevertheless be a true and final cognition. . . . Artistic activity
requires the highest circumspection and leads to the clearest consciousness. . . . The
the superiority of Fiedler over Dilthey when it came to the idea of

artistic expression: “Dilthey’s explanation goes no further than the
subjective meaning of the creative act of the artist, but Fiedler clarifies
its objective meaning.”32 Without the help of the hand, the eye alone
cannot capture the flow of life. Knowledge alone (the eye conceptual-
ized intellectually) is unable to explain reality in flux—which can only
be caught in the movements of art.
Fiedler’s notion of “expressive action” brought Nishida to draw
consequences which are not always in line with Fiedler’s theory of
art. As a philosopher interested in the construction of a system of
his own by synthesizing a variety of Western theories, Nishida used
the notion of “expressive act” in a much broader sense than Fiedler,
who had reserved it for the arts in order to give them a privileged
position over other disciplines. Nishida applied the structure of Fie-
dler’s artistic intuition to the notion of “experience” in general, thus
infusing an experience structured by self-awareness with an enormous
degree of creativity. Eventually, Nishida applied Fiedler’s theory of art
to explain the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. With bold
strokes he indicated that morality is the expressive act of reason and
that “moral society is reason’s work of art.” Being the functioning of
the free self, morality and aesthetics are, thus, reduced to one essence.
In the movement of pure visibility, “life is the fusion of subject and
object, appearing when the self becomes thing and the thing becomes
self.”33 However, Nishida locates moral behavior over artistic produc-
tion on the ground that “the former is abstract and partial, whereas
the latter is concrete and unified.” Moral behavior is a creative act of
synthetic unity, an act of acts which brings together different forms
artistic impulse is an impulse of cognition; artistic activity, an operation of the power

of achieving cognition; the artistic result, a sequel of cognition. The artist does nothing
else than achieve in his own universe the work of logical, creative configuration; herein
lies the essence of every cognition.” In Art and Morality Nishida put the emotions at
the center of consciousness, endowing them with an especially strong cognitive power.
In this regard Nishida was particularly influenced by Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941)
Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience (An Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness, 1889). For Fiedler’s downplaying of emotions and feelings, see the
following statement from On Judging Works of Visual Art (pp. 29–30): “Because many
persons are all too quick to transform perceptual experience into feeling, their percep-
tual abilities consequently remain on a low level of development.”
32
Nishida Kitarō, Art and Morality, p. 24.
33
142 chapter seven
of spirits (for example, visual act/painting and aural act/music).34 In

Fiedler, on the other hand, the process of visibility takes center stage to
the very end, developing from within an incessant becoming, leading
from confusion to clarity and from the obscurity of an inner process
to the clarity of outer expression.
Fiedler’s and Nishida’s emphasis on the concept of “expression”
underlies their opposition to art theories based on the principles of
imitation and representation. The latter implies the transference of a
visible object to another visible media. Expression, on the other hand,
indicates the act of providing something formless with presence.
Fiedler was adamant on this difference:
The artist activity is often said to be a process of imitation. At the basis
of this notion lie errors which beget new errors. . . . Imitation which aims
merely at copying outward appearances implies that one starts from the
premise that there is in nature a substantial capital of minted and fixed
forms at the disposal of the artist and that the copying of these forms is a
purely mechanical activity. . . . Artistic activity is neither slavish imitation
nor arbitrary feeling; rather, it is free creative configuration. Anything
that is copied must first of all have existed. But how should that nature
which comes into being only through artistic representation have an
existence outside of this production and prior to it?35
Ueda Juzō
“Expression” (hyōgen) became a key word in the art theory of Ueda

Juzō (1886–1973), a younger colleague of Nishida Kitarō at the Uni-
versity of Kyoto where Ueda was in charge of courses in aesthetics
from 1912 until his retirement in 1946.36 A reading of works of art in
terms of their expressive movements challenged conventional read-
ings that insisted on taking apart the artistic object and analyzing its
allegedly discontinuous elements: essence, form, content, and spiri-
tual components. Capturing a work of art in the fluidity of its chang-
ing movements seriously undermined any attempt to describe art as
the production of a fixed object of representation on the part of an
34
35
Conrad Fiedler, On Judging Works of Visual Art, pp. 46–47.
36
For an introduction to Ueda’s philosophy of art, see Iwaki Ken’ichi, “The Logic of
Visual Perception: Ueda Juzō,” in Michael F. Marra, ed., A History of Modern Japanese
Aesthetics, pp. 285–317.
unchanging subjectivity—the author. Such a critical stance under-

mined any judgment of works of art based on a fixed “ethnic spiritu-
ality” (minzoku seishin)—a hermeneutical practice widespread in the
1930s and 1940s among Japanese critics of all arts. Iwaki Ken’ichi has
called Ueda’s resistance against trends to reduce artistic expression
to mere national feelings an example of “weak theory” ( yowai ronri)
in the sense formulated by the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo:
the realization of the provisional nature of the basic presuppositions
(or metaphysical ground) in which “strong theories” are inevitably
grounded.37 For Ueda a painting was simply the union of color (iro)
and form (katachi) caught by the artist in a flashing instant. To a paint-
ing there is neither before nor after. The “before and “after” are pro-
vided by the viewer who projects his narrative onto the painting. Such
a reading, however, has more to do with the prejudices of the viewer
than with the original painting. In other words, as Ueda argued in the
essay “Did Zen Influence Art?”, “in the world of paintings Zen does
not exist.”38 To discuss a painting in religious terms meant to force a
doctrinal discourse onto a field which was structured by pure visibility.
Zen, thus, becomes a metaphysical ground used by critics to explain an
art that is subjected to the distortions of a “strong thought.” According
to Ueda, the doctrine is of no concern to the artist who, thus, should
not be faulted for not showing signs of enlightenment in his paintings.
That is the business of religion, not art. Art is concerned with visibility,
i.e., the mechanism that eye and hand bring to the realization that we
live in a world. To see is to understand that we exist.
No matter how deeply enlightened one might be, he will not be able to
produce one single line or one single color with Zen enlightenment. Only
the logic of painting will enable him to do so. Painting does not exist
outside of itself. Here lies the freedom of painting. At the same time,
here also lies the privation of painting. In other words, this is painting’s
destiny. It is a mistake to think that Zen ever influenced painting.39
37
Iwaki Ken’ichi, “Kaisetsu,” in Ueda Juzō, Geijutsu Ron Senshū: Tōzai no Taiwa,
pp. 373–374. For a discussion of Vattimo’s “weak thought” (pensiero debole) in light
of Japanese hermeneutics, see my article “Yowai Shii: Kaishakugaku no Mirai o Mina-
gara,” pp. 1–38.
38
Ueda Juzō, “Zen Bijutsu ni Eikyō Shita ka,” in Ueda Juzō, Geijutsu Ron Senshū,
p. 350.
39
Ueda Juzō, Ibidem, pp. 365–366.
144 chapter seven
Ueda’s development of the concept of “visibility” (shikakusei) is

indebted to the hermeneutics of Fiedler and its later variations, espe-
cially Martin Heidegger’s dialectic of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit).
Human beings are thrown into a specific historical reality of time and
space in a purely contingent fashion. At the same time, however, they
have the power to change such a reality through actions and expres-
sive activities, thus transforming contingency into necessity—what
Heidegger called “Entwurf ” (fore-throw, project). Nishida Kitarō had
adopted the same dialectic when he used the words “determination”
( gentei) and “reversed determination” (gyaku gentei).40 Human beings
are determined by the environment in which they are born and edu-
cated (society and history). However, such an environment is renewed
by the power that human actions have to reverse the process of deter-
mination, thus bringing about real change in the world. According to
Ueda, in the field of visibility the viewer is already determined by the
world in which the object of vision comes into view, since the viewer
is thrown into such a world. Therefore, the way we see an object is
already determined; it cannot be a purely free act. The viewer is bound
by an environment or, to use Ueda’s vocabulary, by a “historical vis-
ibility” (rekishiteki shikaku). The field of visibility determines the way
a painter (or a critic) sees his painting. At the same time, however,
the artist changes the historical world by reversing with his own work
the direction of determination. In the chapter “Geijutsuteki Kankyō”
(The Artistic Environment) from Geijutsu Shi no Kadai (Issues in Art
History, 1935) Ueda argues that the Italian Renaissance artist painting
a Madonna brought to his painting a clearly religious notion of his
subject matter which preceded the creation of the work. At the same
time, the newly created Madonna contributed to determine a change
of that very religious notion that was part of the field of visibility from
which the painting came into being.41
Nishida’s further variations of Fiedler’s theory of art are easily
found in Ueda’s thought as well, given the large impact that Nishida’s
philosophy had on him. Ueda’s brand of aesthetics is known as “tran-
40
Iwaki Ken’ichi argues that Nishida learned of Heidegger’s hermeneutics from his
student Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945) who had studied with Heidegger in 1923–24. Miki
was also well acquainted with Fiedler’s art theories. Iwaki Ken’ichi, “Miki Kiyoshi
Bungei Ron: Kyōto Gakuha no Tetsugaku, Sono Tokushoku to Mondai Ten,” in Iwaki
Ken’ichi, ed., Geijutsu/ Kattō no Genba, pp. 276–295.
41
Ueda Juzō, Geijutsu Ron Senshū, pp. 30–31.
scendental aesthetics” because of the fact that he always searched for

a ground that is always already formed before any perception of real-
ity takes place. In the “background” (haigo) of things always lurks a
field of possibilities that enables something to happen. An anticipatory
mechanism is constantly required for things to develop. For example,
with regard to Ueda’s key concept of “visibility,” what comes into view
anticipates the reality of what does not come into view, of what is not
the object of our vision. The infinity of things (the external world of
nature) must be anticipated. Yet, at the same time, something allows
the viewer to distinguish among the infinity of visions the colors and
forms that catch his eyes. Ueda called this further anticipation, “vis-
ibility” (shikaku/shikakusei)—“the origin stipulating everything by
color and form,” as he argued in Shikaku Kōzō (The Structure of Vis-
ibility, 1941).42 The field of visibility is transcendental because it can-
not see itself, being the presupposition of the act of seeing, and not
the object of such a seeing. The eye is visibility’s place of work based
on the fact that the eye is by necessity the place of visual experience.
Ueda called the universality of visual experience, “the original reality”
(kongenteki jijitsu). This reality allows the eye to see specific contours
and surfaces delimited by shape and colors which differentiate “one
thing” (hitotsu no mono) from “other things” (ta no mono). “Here ‘the
world of visibility’ (shikaku no sekai) takes place.”43 The field of vis-
ibility transcends individual human beings. Alongside Fielder’s lines
Ueda argued that to see is not the result of the action of an outside
reality, but the result of the coming into being of a field of visibility.
An “I” seeing a flower simply does not exist since an eye separated
from the mechanism of visibility does not exist. At the bottom of the
field of visibility there is an unlimited will to see.
Fielder would have undoubtedly taken issue with the notion of an
anticipatory ground which is always already present in the “back-
ground” of things—a transcendental idea central to both Nishida’s
and Ueda’s philosophies. For Fiedler the conscience of reality was tied
to a becoming that took place “not outside of us, but within us, and
through us.”44 If any ground ever existed, it could only be found in the
encounter between intuition and expression. Moreover, it is doubtful
42
Ueda Juzō, Shikaku Kōzō, p. 10.
43
Ueda Juzō, Bi no Hihan, p. 3.
44
146 chapter seven
that Fiedler would have subscribed to Nishida and Ueda’s concept of

will when talking about pure visibility, since will still overemphasizes
the mental over the bodily component of the individual. However, it
would be difficult to deny the affinities that Nishida and Ueda found
in Fiedler’s thought in bringing mind and body (eye and hand) to act
upon the field of visibility, making it into a creative act—whether this
be the act of the artist (Fielder and Ueda), or the act of the philosopher
searching after the world of pure experience (Nishida).
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Mallgrave, Harry Francis, and Eleftherios Ikonomou, trans. Empathy, Form, and
Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893. Santa Monica: Getty Center for
the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994.
Marra, Michael F. “Yowai Shii: Kaishakugaku no Mirai o Minagara (Weak Thought:
A Look at the Future of Hermeneutics),” in Nichibunken Forum 95, 1997.
Nishida, Kitarō. Art and Morality. Trans. By David A. Dilworth and Valdo H.
Viglielmo. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1973.
——. An Inquiry into the Good. Trans. by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Ueda, Juzō. Bi no Hihan (A Critique of Beauty). Tokyo: Kōbundō Shobō, 1948.
——. Geijutsu Ron Senshū: Tōzai no Taiwa (A Selection of Essays on Art: An East-
West Dialogue). Edited by Iwaki Ken’ichi. Kyoto: Tōeisha, 2001
——. Shikaku Kōzō (The Structure of Visibility). Tokyo: Kōbundō Shobō, 1941.
Yuasa,Yasuo. The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory. Trans. by Nagatomo
Shigenori and T. P. Kasulis. Albany: SUNY, 1987.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ON JAPANESE THINGS AND WORDS:

AN ANSWER TO HEIDEGGER’S QUESTION
It has been over thirty years since my high school teacher of philoso-
phy, Professor Dino Dezzani, recommended a book from which to
begin my study of philosophy: Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) Unter-
wegs zur Sprache (On the way to language [1959]). Evidently he was
aware of my interest in literature and thought that Heidegger’s dis-
cussion of words, things, and poetic language would give some sort
of direction to my naïve and youthful questions of what literature is
about and what I should hope to find in it.
The impact that Heidegger’s book had on this young student was
much greater than my professor could ever have imagined. I would
hardly have committed myself to the study of Japan were it not for
my reading of “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an
Inquirer,” which appears in On the Way to Language. The dialogue is
a fictional reconstruction of an actual meeting that Heidegger had with
Tezuka Tomio (1903–1983), a Japanese scholar of German literature
who visited the German philosopher in Freiburg at the end of March
1954.1 In the dialogue the Inquirer (Heidegger) formulates a central
question that, in my opinion, should be of fundamental interest to
anyone seriously concerned with the study of Japan. The question is
deceptively simple, at least compared with the difficulty of coming up
with the answer—an answer that, as a matter of fact, the reader will
not find fully formulated in the dialogue. The question is: “What is
the Japanese word for ‘language’”? The Japanese visitor (Tezuka in
Heidegger’s recollection) appears to have been caught off guard, as we
can see from Heidegger’s parenthetical remark: “after further hesita-
tion.” Had Heidegger posed the same question to a Frenchman or an
Italian, the answer would have been immediate: “langue” or “lingua.”
In memory of Dino Dezzani

1
Tezuka’s account of the encounter, “An Hour with Heidegger,” appears in Reinhard
May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work, trans. Graham
Parkes (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 59–65.
150 chapter eight
The challenge for Tezuka was definitely higher since he had a variety
of words from which to choose. He could have used, for example,
the expression gengo ⸒⺆, a combination of two Chinese characters
indicating “the speech of words.” Instead, he used an ancient Japanese
word derived from the native Yamato vocabulary: kotoba ⸒⪲, which
literally means “the foliage of speech.”2
There should be little doubt that Tezuka’s choice was prompted
by his desire to please Heidegger by playing the philosopher’s own
game—something that Tezuka totally succeeded in doing, as Heideg-
ger’s dialogue attests. Tezuka introduced a term that lent itself to
etymological play—an enterprise very close to the heart of Heidegger,
2
The relevant portion of the dialogue goes as follows:
I: What is the Japanese word for “language”?
J: (After further hesitation) It is “Koto-ba.”
I: And what does that say?
J: Ba means leaves, including and especially the leaves of a blossom—petals.
Think of cherry blossoms or plum blossoms.
I: And what does Koto say?
J: This is the question most difficult to answer. But it is easier now to attempt an
answer because we have ventured to explain Iki: the pure delight of the beckon-
ing stillness. The breath of stillness that makes this beckoning delight come into
its own in the reign under which that delight is made to come. But Koto always
also names that which in the event gives delight, itself, that which uniquely in
each unrepeatable moment comes to radiance in the fullness of its grace. (Mar-
tin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz [San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1971], p. 45)
Tezuka’s version of the event is as follows:
He (Heidegger) then asked me: “In Japanese there is presumably a word for lan-
guage so-called: what is the original meaning of this word?”
I replied: “The word you are asking about is kotoba. Since I am not a specialist
in this area, I cannot offer a precise account, but I think that the koto is connected
with koto [meaning ‘matter] of kotogara [meaning ‘event’ or ‘affair’ (Sache)]. The
ba is a sound-transformation of ha and has connotations of ‘many’ or ‘dense,’ as
with leaves (ha) on a tree. If this is right, then the koto of ‘language’ and the koto
of ‘matter’ are two sides of the same coin: things happen and become language
(kotoba). The word ‘kotoba’ may have its roots in ideas of this kind.”
This explanation seemed to fit well with Heidegger’s idea. Taking notes on a
piece of paper that was to hand, he said: “Very interesting! In that case, Herr
Tezuka, the Japanese word for ‘language,’ kotoba, can mean Ding [thing].”
There was perhaps an element here of forcing the word into a preconceived
idea, but I was not in a position to contradict this interpretation. “Perhaps one
can say that,” I replied. In my opinion it could mean thing [Ding] as well as affair
[Sache].” “Isn’t that so? Have you read my essay ‘The Thing’? I wrote something
there that bears upon this issue. If you read it, please let me hear your impres-
sions.” (Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, p. 61)
on japanese things and words: an answer to heidegger 151
and one that was also very popular among Japanese thinkers.3 In fact,
the expression kotoba incorporates the word koto, which means both
“thing” ੐ and “word” ⸒ and which is found in the basic concepts
of Japanese ontology: Mikoto ᓮ੐ (God, or “the honorable thing”),
makoto ⌀⸒ (truth, or “the true word”), koto-dama ⸒㔤㧔soul, or
“the spirit of words”), and kotowari ℂ (reason, or “the splitting of
things”). The association of “words” and “things” in the Japanese word
for “language” must have been of particular interest to Heidegger, who,
four years before his meeting with Tezuka, had written “Das Ding”
(The thing), a major lecture on the notion of things interpreted in
light of the fourfold earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. In the dialogue
Heidegger refers to this essay, in which “things” are presented in their
objectified presence—the disparaged things that modernity and tech-
nology have dispossessed of their Being (Sein). Heidegger points out
that never has the distance between things and Sein been as great as in
modernity, when all distances in space and time have shrunk.4 Given
the unflattering position that Heidegger had taken on the notion of
“things,” Tezuka was forced to come to the rescue of the Japanese
word kotoba by endowing koto with the meaning of two Heideggerian
keywords: “event” (kotogara) and “affair” (Sache). The thingly com-
ponent of kotoba was not simply an objectifiable presence that can be
counted, analyzed, and disposed of, but rather a poietic “act” that has
the power to create a reality by transforming the named thing (koto
⸒) into a real thing (koto ੐).
In “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer,”
Heidegger’s engagement of Tezuka is very similar to his engagement of
other Japanese students and colleagues who had visited the philosopher
in great numbers during the 1920s and 1930s. Heidegger challenged
them to a discussion of possible responses to basic philosophical issues
such as things, being, and language. What could a Japanese philoso-
pher contribute to such a discussion, and what impact would Japanese
culture have on a revision of the philosophical vocabulary? What could
Japanese philosophy contribute to Heidegger’s project of dismantling
3
The practice of analyzing the etymological meaning of key words of the Yam-
ato language was quite common among scholars of the School of National Learning
(Kokugaku) such as Keichū (1640–1701) and Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), and
is still popular among contemporary Japanese philosophers such as Sakabe Megumi
(1936–2009).
4
For the English version of the essay, see Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 182.
152 chapter eight
Western metaphysics, and what new elements could Heidegger’s phi-

losophy bring to a deeper understanding of Japanese thought?
In this essay I will elicit from the voices of a few Japanese philoso-
phers answers to Heidegger’s question that Tezuka did not explore
and that were most probably unknown to Heidegger himself—answers
that might have encouraged Heidegger to write the dialogue differ-
ently without, however, changing the main thrust of his argument.
Let’s accept Tezuka’s preliminary answer that the Japanese word for
language is “kotoba,” and that this word is related not just to “saying”
but also to “things.” As Tezuka himself had suggested by indicating
that a “thing” was “an affair” (Sache), language is at the same time two
different things: the “saying of things” as well as a “thing” in itself—the
very “action of saying.” Here we are faced with two different reali-
ties: the objectifiable reality of things out there that can be counted,
narrated, and judged, on the one hand, and, on the other, a complex
action in which a series of relationships between subjects, objects, and
environments results in an expressive act. If the German language
allowed Heidegger to posit clearly a difference between Sein and das
Seiende—a difference that tends to disappear in the English transla-
tion, “being”—the Japanese language has two words indicating what
is commonly translated as “thing” in English or “Ding” in German:
mono ‛ and koto ੐. I personally believe that this difference is crucial
in the study of Japanese thought, inasmuch as the difference between
Sein and Seiende is of paramount importance for an understanding of
what Heidegger calls “the ontological difference.”
For Heidegger, Being (Sein) is the difference it makes that there is
something rather than nothing; Being is that which determines entities
as entities, that on the basis of which entities are already understood;
Being is the difference that entities make to us and is what allows us
to encounter every entity; Being is an ability to be (Seinkönnen or
potentiality-for-Being); Being is the difference that entities make to
human beings (dasein or being-there).5 On the other hand, beings (das
Seiende) are that which is—a celebration of the fact that things are, or,
in a word, a celebration of entities. As a being (Seiende), a mountain
is out there, an object given to us to be objectified and exploited. At
5
These definitions of Being are scattered in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927). For
an English translation, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein
und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
the same time, however, the Being (Sein) of the mountain points to
the fact that the mountain shelters the truth of Being that allows us to
experience the “thereness” of the mountain more fully, thus reminding
us of how the mountain makes a difference in our world: for example,
as a sky resort, the miner’s workplace, or the home of a God. The dif-
ference that Being makes is of utmost importance for human beings
since it elicits from them a sense of care (Sorge) and respect that oth-
erwise they would not feel for simple objects (Seiende). As Heidegger
argues in Contributions to Philosophy, “true godlessness is not the
absence of gods, but a state in which their presence or absence makes
no difference to us.”6
Can we carry over Heidegger’s explanation of the ontological differ-
ence to the difference between mono and koto (which, for the sake of
differentiation, I will translate, respectively, as thing/things and Thing/
Things in this essay)? The Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsturō
(1889–1960), who read Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit while in Berlin in
the summer of 1927,7 addressed the notion of koto in the 1929 essay
“Nihongo to tetsugaku no mondai” (Japanese and the question of
philosophy), which he later included in revised form in Zoku Nihon
seishinshi kenkyū (A study of Japanese intellectual history, continued
[1935]). In this article Watsuji points out the need to examine the
philosophical possibilities of the Japanese language. Since for centu-
ries learning had been imported into Japan from abroad—from either
India, China, or the West—the Chinese language served the purpose
of transmitting theoretical knowledge to Japan up to the Meiji period,
when, once again, compounds made of Chinese characters were cre-
ated to translate the scientific terminology of the West. For over a
thousand years, while Chinese in its local variants (kanbun) was used
as the official language for the study of scientific matters, including
philosophy (Buddhist and Confucian thought), the local language was
used to convey the richness of daily experiences, as attested by the
country’s long literary (poetic) tradition.
6
Quoted in Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1999), p. 152.
7
“It was in the early summer of 1927 when I was reading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit
in Berlin that I first came to reflect on the problem of climate” (Watsuji Tetsurō, Cli-
mate and Culture: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas [New York: Green-
wood Press, 1961], p. v).
154 chapter eight
In a sense, the Japanese language was finding itself in the same posi-
tion as the German language had found itself at the time of Goethe
and Hegel. A historical language had to be molded into a philosophical
idiom in order to convey ideas usually restricted to the Latin language.
In other words, the Japanese language was about one and a half cen-
turies behind its European counterparts. Watsuji clarifies that it is not
his intention to argue that Japanese is not a philosophical language, as
too many intellectuals were stating at the time.8 On the contrary, Wat-
suji indicates that it is the responsibility of Japanese thinkers to look
into all the possibilities of their language, and to create a theoretical
language that is not too far removed from contemporary usage.
Watsuji reminds the reader that philosophical questions can be for-
mulated in daily language, beginning with the basic question, “What is
Being?” The answer might well come from an analysis of the linguistic
structure of the question, which, transliterated from Japanese, is: “Aru
to iu koto wa dō iu koto de aru ka?” (lit., “The Thing [koto] called [to
iu] Being [aru], what kind of Thing [dō iu koto] is [de aru] that?”).
Directly related to this question are four interrogatives that Watsuji
formulates as follows: (1) Why does the Japanese language require
koto to indicate “thing” rather than mono, which, theoretically, refers
to the same “thing”? Why “aru to iu koto wa,” instead of “aru to iu
mono wa”? The difference between koto and mono must be clarified.
(2) Why does the verb “to say” (iu) precede koto in the expression “the
thing so-called” (to iu koto), and not another verb such as, for exam-
ple, “to make” (suru), as in “the thing so-made” (suru koto)? What is
the difference between these two expressions? (3) Who is the subject of
“saying”? Who is saying that this thing is called “Being”? Is it I, you, or
someone else? If the context does not require the presence of a subject
in order to understand the sentence, how is the sentence understand-
able? (4) There are two instances of “being” in the sentence, the being
(aru) at the beginning of the sentence, which we want to know about,
and the interrogative “is” (de aru ka) at the end of the sentence. Are
these two the same, or are they different? If they are different, how
8
Nakae Chōmin (1847–1901) was apparently the first in a long list of distinguished
intellectuals to argue that in Japan “there is no philosophy,” because of the lyrical
nature of the language, which lent itself to poetry and other literary pursuits rather
than to the logic of theory. Chōmin’s statement appears in Ichinen yūhan (One and a
half years [1901]); quoted in Fujita Masakatsu, Gendai shisō to shite no Nishida Kitarō
(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1998), p. 30.
do they differ? Before tackling the fundamental ontological question,

the thinker must solve these four basic problems, which—Watsuji
reminds us—“essentially belong to the original question.”9 Once these
questions are answered, the inquirer is on the way to an understand-
ing of Being.
Watsuji sees three different aspects in the etymology of koto. The
first, which appears when koto follows a verb, displays a sense of
movement, as in the examples “to move” (ugoku koto; lit., “the action
of moving”) or “to see” (miru koto; lit., “the action of seeing”). By fol-
lowing an adjective, koto indicates a state or condition, as in the case of
“quiet” (shizukanaru koto; lit., “the state of quietness”), or “beautiful”
(utsukushiki koto; lit., “the condition of beauty”). However, movement
and condition are part and parcel of the verb “to move” (ugoku) and
the adjective “quiet” (shizuka); they are not directly related to koto,
which simply shows the being (aru koto) of movement and quietness.
A more literal translation of “ugoku koto” and “shizukanaru koto”
would then be “the being of the action of moving” and “the being of
the state of quietness.” While ugoku mono (a thing moving) indicates
that something specific is moving, ugoku koto (the fact of moving)
points at movement itself.
Mono, on the other hand, refers to either a substance or to a psycho-
logical or a spiritual object. To be an expert (monoshiri) means to have
a specific knowledge of something (mono o shiru). To be absorbed in
thoughts (monoomou) means that a subject (mono) is lost in specific
thoughts (mono o omou) to the point that one cannot separate one-
self (mono ⠪ or “person”) from one’s thoughts, thus transforming
an action of specificity into an action of vagueness. Mono refers to an
orientation toward something that, no matter how unspecified and
indefinite it might be, is still the object of thinking (omowareru mono),
knowing (shirareru mono), or seeing (mirareru mono), thus assuming
a sense of specificity. Mono is the object of a heart or mind that is
always oriented toward something. This explains why the word “will”
is translated in Japanese as kokorozashi ᔒߒ, which literally means
“the heart/mind points to a thing” (kokoro ga mono o sasu). At the
same time, however, we must remember that expertness or the absorp-
tion in thoughts cannot exist aside from their being (to be an expert or
9
Watsuji Tetsurō, Zoku Nihon seishinshi kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1942),
pp. 416–417.
156 chapter eight
to be absorbed in thoughts), and that such a being is nothing but the

koto that makes the movement and the condition of action possible.
Whereas mono indicates the content of movement or the content of
quietness, koto indicates their Being. The specific being of the con-
tent (mono) always presupposes its existence or Being (koto). The fact
(koto) of seeing presupposes that something (mono) must be seen.
The second etymological implication of koto is the temporal/histori-
cal occurrence of an event, as in the example “something strange has
happened’’ (kawatta koto ga okotta). Koto is the foundation on which
an action takes place: for example, the collision of a train with a car.
While the train and the car are mono, the accident takes place on the
ground of koto—the ground of Geschehnis (occurrence, happening),
which in Japanese is translated as dekigoto ಴᧪੐. In its literal mean-
ing (“a thing coming out”) dekigoto implies the temporal idea of a sud-
den outbreak, the result of an “impulse” (dekigokoro ಴᧪ᔃ; lit., “the
heart coming out”). However, to avoid the sense that the happening
is the result of mere contingency, the free action of people is required
to make things (koto) happen. The directional structure of the human
will is part of the meaning of koto, as we see in the expression “I was
able to see,” or “I came to see” (watakushi wa miru koto ni natta). The
personal act of seeing, which I enabled myself to possess, has finally
come into being. The koto resulting from personal behavior and will is
ultimately grounded in the coming into being of the event (koto).
The third meaning of koto is “saying” (⸒), or “a thing as word”
(kotoba to shite no koto), as in the sentence, “to say difficult things”
(muzukashii koto o iu). In this case the word mono cannot be used; to
say “muzukashii mono o iu” would be a mistake. Again, here the refer-
ence is to the fact (koto) that an action takes place through something
(mono) called words. Words (koto ⸒) are subsumed under Things
(koto ੐) since the event is brought to the surface by words. Words
bring out the original nature of Things (Erschlossenheit or disclosure)
by disclosing them. At the basis of human behavior there is a mecha-
nism of disclosure of which words are the engine—a mechanism of
understanding known as koto.
To sum up, for Watsuji the basic difference between koto and mono
is that while koto is directivity, mono is the object that is directed. The
directivity of koto provides mono with a ground from which mono can
display itself. Koto is not any specific thing (mono) but is what makes
something belong to a thing (mono). Therefore, as Watsuji argues, “we
must distinguish koto from any specific thing (aru mono), and we must
exit from the borders of things (mono) in order to enter inside Things
(koto).”10 Koto is an a priori that is given to us only as “an understand-
ing of Things” (koto no ryōkai). Such an understanding shows itself in
the behavior of “entities called human beings” (hito to iu mono).
With regard to the second question—why koto is always preceded
by to iu (“so-called”)—Watsuji argues that the modifier to iu confirms
the sense of generality and universality implied by the expression koto.
In Japanese the question “What is this?” never omits the modifier “so-
called.” We would never hear this question formulated in Japanese as
“Aru koto wa ikanaru koto de aru ka?” The omission of to iu between
aru and koto reduces the Thing to a limited, circumscribed entity,
although such an entity remains indefinite (aru koto indicates “a lim-
ited, undefined thing”, so that, in order to restore universality to the
concept of koto, the sentence above must be correctly formulated as
“Aru to iu koto wa dō iu koto de aru ka?” (lit., “The so-called Thing
what kind of so-called Thing is that?”). The Thing (koto) finds itself
doubled in its meaning since the modifier to iu is simply another koto
⸒ (word), which highlights the essence of things. Koto (the Thing),
then, is nothing but the essentia (Wesen) of things.
Once the word mono is used, however, it would be a mistake to
make this specific entity a universal one, as we see from the fact that
the expression “aru to iu mono” would be wrong. With mono “a thing”
is always “aru mono.” If a modification appears, this occurs at the
level of place where the specific entities are located, as in “aru tokoro
no mono” (“the things gathered in a place”), abbreviated as “arayuru
mono” (“everything, all”). If koto corresponds to the Aristotelian essen-
tia, then mono refers to things existing (existentia). Watsuji’s privileg-
ing of the former over the latter is strengthened even further by the
precedence he gives koto—as Thing and saying—over suru—the praxis
of doing. Although it does not stand prior to action, the “so-called
thing” (to iu koto, which could also be translated as the “the Thing’s
saying”) is a mechanism that opens the way to “the self-realization
( jikaku) of the practical understanding of action. This self-realization
becomes a motive for action, thus leading to action and giving action
a form. This is what we call the concretization of ‘the so-called Thing’
10
Ibid., p. 437.
158 chapter eight
(iu koto)”11—a Thing that obviously holds the place of honor in Wat-
suji’s thought.
If the expression aru to iu koto (“the Thing so-called ‘to be’ ”) refers
generally to the infinity of Being (ari), how can the subject of the say-
ing (iu) be reduced to any specific, finite subject such as I, you, or she?
To define a specific subject as the one in charge of “saying” (koto ⸒)
would contradict the very nature of the Thing (koto ੐). The “Thing
called Being” cannot be called so by anyone who cannot express the
universality of the structure of koto. Therefore, according to Watsuji,
the subject can only be the place where I, you, or she does the act of
saying. This explains the absence of the subject in the Japanese sen-
tence since the personal pronoun does not make any difference to the
structure of the saying. The disclosure of “what is” (aru to iu koto) takes
place regardless of who the speaker is. This does not mean that no one
speaks. The fact that actually everybody speaks shows that there is no
need to indicate who is speaking. If an individual must be pointed out
as the speaker, only a human entity (mono ⠪) can speak (iu mono ੔
߁⠪). All individualities disappear in the totality of the saying (koto
⸒/੐). The exclusion of the subject from the sentence allows Being
(ari) to be presented in its universality.
Watsuji concludes the essay by pointing out the difference between
the two instances of aru (“being”) in the question “What is Being?”
(Aru to iu koto wa dō iu koto de aru ka?). The presence of to iu koto
following the first “being” tells us that the object of our inquiry is a
general, universal Being and not any specific entity such as aru mono
(“a thing”). The latter implies that something specific is (nani ka ga
aru), or that this is something specific (nani ka de aru). This individual
being (entity) corresponds to the second being (de aru), which intro-
duces the question “What is this?”—a question that implies an answer
in which Being is limited to something specific (“this is . . . something
particular”). While the first aru refers to the essence (essentia) of things,
the second points to their specific existence (existentia)—entities that
human beings actually possess. The second aru is, thus, equivalent to
the verb “to have”/“to possess” (motsu). In other words, Being cannot
stand aside from the particular entity and from the sphere of human
action. Existence unfolds as Being (koto), and this unfolding takes place
11
Ibid., p. 449.
on its own (ari no mama), without the intervention of any thought.

Koto (the Thing), then, is the Being of the possibility of unfolding.12
The difference between mono and koto has also been addressed
by one of Japan’s leading psychopathologists, Kimura Bin (b. 1931),
in the book Jikan to jiko (Time and self [1982]).13 In the first sec-
tion, “From the Question of thing [mono] to the Question of Thing
[koto],” Kimura relates the world of “things” (mono) to the ability
or inability of the eye to see both internal and external realities. As
objects of visions, mono always maintain a certain distance from the
viewer. Human beings are mono, like anything else with the potential
of becoming the object of someone’s gaze. “Theory,” to which phi-
losophy belongs, is the science in charge of the study of mono, as the
etymology of the Greek word theoria indicates: orao means “to see”
and, therefore, “to understand.”
On the other hand, “Things” (koto) bring with themselves a high
degree of anxiety since they cannot be reduced to the fixed pattern
of an object (mono). Koto refers to the status of being something or
somewhere, as in the example “My being here”. Koto does not come
with any particular color, shape, or size, and cannot be assigned to
any particular space. The sentence “I look at a view and I think that
it is beautiful” (Watakushi ga keishiki o mite utsukushii to omotte iru
koto), does not specify whether the aesthetic experience (koto) takes
place at the level of the subject “I” or at the level of the object “view”
or at a higher level encompassing both subject and object. Moreover,
in the aesthetic experience the distance between subject and object is
lost, since “I” and “view” become one in the perception of beauty. In
the world of aesthetic experience (koto), “things” (mono) are forgot-
ten. The self is “a state of being” (jibun de aru koto), and, therefore, it
is prey to the anxiety of Things (koto). As a result, the unsettled self
searches for the stability of the world of objects (mono) and, in the
process, transforms itself into an object—another mono. By objecti-
fying itself the self hides its true self and stops exposing its Thingly
(kototeki) nature: anxiety.
Rather than belonging to the structure of “whatness” or “Washeit,”
which determines the concept of things (mono), Things (koto) belong
12
For an extensive discussion of the epistemological implications of koto and mono,
see Hiromatsu Wataru, Mono, Koto, Kotoba (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1979).
13
Kimura Bin, Jikan to jiko (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1982).
160 chapter eight
to the structure of the subordinate conjunction “that” or “daß” (that-

ness/Daßheit). Kimura sees the structure of koto at work in the sphere
of sensitivity that he speculates formed the sensus communis of Japa-
nese society in ancient times. The aesthetic in the etymological sense
of aesthesis (“feelings”) provides, then, the model for an explanation
of koto, which Kimura clarifies by borrowing an often-quoted passage
from Nishida Kitarō’s (1870–1945) preface to Hataraku mono kara
miru mono e (From the actor to the seer [1927]):
It goes without saying that there are many things to be esteemed and
learned in the brilliant development of Western culture, which regards
form [eidos] as being and formation as the good. However, at the basis
of Asian culture, which has fostered our ancestors for over several thou-
sand years, lies something that can be called seeing the form of the form-
less and hearing the sound of the soundless. Our minds are compelled
to seek for this. I would like to give a philosophical foundation to this
demand.14
Thus, according to Kimura, koto would correspond to the moment
prior to the split of subject and object—a moment that Nishida, Japan’s
foremost philosopher, had called “pure experience” (junsui keiken) in
his maiden work, Zen no kenkyū (An inquiry into the good [1911]),
whose famous opening defines pure experience as follows:
To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in accor-
dance with facts by completely relinquishing one’s own fabrications.
What we usually refer to as experience is adulterated with some sort of
thought, so by pure I am referring to the state of experience just as it is
without the least addition of deliberative discrimination. The moment
of seeing a color or hearing a sound, for example, is prior not only to
the thought that the color or sound is the activity of an external object
or that one is sensing it, but also to the judgment of what the color or
sound might be. In this regard, pure experience is identical with direct
experience. When one directly experiences one’s own state of conscious-
ness, there is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and its objects
are completely unified. This is the most refined type of experience.15
According to Nishida, pure experience is prior to the movement of
intellectual discrimination. Consequently, it is also prior to verbal
14
English translation by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives; quoted in Kitarō Nishida,
An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990), p. x.
15
Ibid., pp. 1–2.
articulation. In his explanation of the word “koto” in the Iwanami

Dictionary of the Ancient Language (Iwanami kogo jiten), the linguist
Ono Susumu argues that in ancient Japanese society “koto” meant both
reality/events (koto ੐) and its expression in words (koto ⸒). Any dif-
ferentiation between reality and its verbal articulation was unknown
until the Nara and Heian periods, when the word “kotoba” (language)
claimed independence from “koto” (Thing).16 However, as the etymo-
logical meaning of kotoba (lit., “the leaves of things”) indicates, kotoba
(words), far from capturing the complexity of Things, had to content
itself with simply expressing the surface of reality. The alienation of
speech from reality impoverished the world of koto, although lan-
guage was essential for making things that could not be seen (mono)
audible to the ear. The question is, how can language capture not just
the “thingly” world of events (mono), but also the “Thingly” world of
Being (aru to iu koto), which would enable us to listen to what Nishida
called “the voice of the soundless”? To listen to either a natural voice
or to the voice of the heart means to participate in an event, rather
than making it into the object of gaze, as in the case of seeing. With
listening, the distance between self and reality is much shorter than the
distance between the seer and the seen.
Kimura argues that if mono refers to objective reality and koto
stands for the unsettledness of Being, “pure Being” (junsui na koto;
lit., “pure Thing”) ceases to be pure as soon as consciousness makes it
into a “thing” (mono). By becoming a “thing,” the different times of
Being—being sitting at a table, being listening to music, being writ-
ing this essay, all at the same time—are forced into a time reduced to
space, in which two different things cannot occupy the same space. The
unsettledness of Being is transformed into the specificity of particular
events unfolding within the time of the calendar, the measurable time
of the clock, a spatial time. Thus, the difference between mono and
koto can also be caught in the different temporalities informing the
two concepts: the “thingly” (monoteki) time of the watch that can be
seen with the eye, that can be represented and made into an image—
what Henri Bergson (1859–1941) had called “quantitative time”—
and the “Thingly” (kototeki) time of Being, or “qualitative time.”17 In
16
Ono Susumu, Satake Akihiro, and Maeda Kingorō, eds., Iwanami kogo jiten
(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974), p. 499.
17
“Immanent to our measurement of time is the tendency to empty its content
into a space of four dimensions in which past, present, and future are juxtaposed or
162 chapter eight
other words, the “Thingly” (kototeki) Being (aru) turns into “thingly”
(monoteki) existence (sonzai).
Kimura concludes his analysis of the ontological difference by relat-
ing the issue of koto and mono to a mental illness known as “deper-
sonalization.” Patients afflicted by this illness tend to lose their ability
to feel anything surrounding them. They stop experiencing any kind of
joy or sadness or anger or sympathy for others, although they are able
to recognize things around them. For example, they know what a ther-
mometer is and how to measure the temperature. However, they have
no feeling of either cold or hot, or of the changing seasons. Patients
suffering from depersonalization live in a constant state of discontinu-
ous “now,” and they never succeed in capturing time as an event of
continuity. They have totally lost the sense of “in-betweenness’’ (aida)
between different instances of “now” that tie together past and future.
Kimura argues that these patients have lost the sense of Being by living
a life that is exclusively concerned with things present at hand (mono).
What is “behind’’ (haigo) particular entities has totally disappeared
from their world. His professional experience with people who have
lost their sense of being and of self provides Kimura pointers to an
understanding of Being—a disclosure deriving from the disappearance
of the “Thingly” world (koto) from the world of “things’’ (mono).
In a recent book on Nishida Kitarō the historian of philosophy
Fujita Masakatsu (b. 1947) has analyzed the relationship between
language and the ontological difference set up by mono and koto.18
Fujita accepts the distinction made by Watsuji and Kimura that privi-
leges Being (koto) over things (mono). At the same time, following a
path opened by members of the Kyōto school such as Nishitani Keiji
(1900–1990), he identifies koto as the “surplus” of things that ordinary
language (kotoba) can hardly express. He calls language “the pollution
superimposed for all eternity. This tendency simply expresses our inability mathemati-
cally to translate time itself, our need to replace it, in order to measure it, by simulta-
neities which we count. These simultaneities are instantaneities; they do not partake
of the nature of real time; they do not endure. They are purely mental views that stake
out conscious duration and real motion with virtual stops, using for this purpose the
mathematical point that has been carried over from space to time” (Henri Bergson,
Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, trans. Robin Durie
[Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999], p. 42).
18
See the chapter “ ‘Mono’ to ‘Koto’ ” (‘things’ and ‘Things’), in Fujita Masakatsu,
Gendai Shisō to shite no Nishida Kitarō, pp. 131–155.
of Things” (koto no osen), since language fails to bring to life what is

“on the back” (haigo) of Things, that is, their Being. Language can only
articulate entities (mono). However, at the same time, language can
also alert us to the presence of the surplus meaning of Things. While
pointing at “things,” language has the potential to allow us to live in
this surplus of meaning. This special language is poetic language—a
medium that gives the reader a feel for reality. In other words, the
language of poetry acts like a pair of chopsticks that, in addition to
facilitating the consumption of food, tells us whether the food that
we grasp is soft or hard. Fujita refers to Bashō’s (1644–1694) famous
haiku, which Kimura also quotes in Time and Self:
Furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto.
The old pond
a frog jumps in—
the sound of the water.
The empty shell of the poem is made of a series of “things” (mono):
the old pond, the frog, the water, and the sound. However, the poem’s
meaning is elsewhere. Poetic language alerts us to the presence of a
deep tranquility that is conveyed by the “voice of the soundless”—the
silence broken by the splash of the frog jumping into the old pond.
Moreover, aside from pointing at real things, language also has a body
of its own, a sound that can be either pleasant or unpleasant to the
reader’s ear. This is another ruse that poetic language employs to make
the listener dwell within Things. Fujita refers to the following poem by
Tanikawa Shuntarō (b. 1931):
Iru ka iru ka
inai ka iru ka
inai inai iru ka
itsu nara iru ka
yoru nara iru ka
mata kite miru ka.
Are you here, are you not?
Aren’t you here, are you here?
Aren’t you here, aren’t you here, are you here?
When will you be here?
Tonight, will you be here?
Here again should I come?
164 chapter eight
Listening to this poem we hear the words as sounds (mono). However,

at the same time, these sounds bring about an emotional response
that has nothing to do with the content of the poem. How can we
explain this surplus of meaning unless we acknowledge the role played
by expressive action in conveying the Being (koto) of things? In poetry,
the importance of the objects (mono) described is minimal compared
to the process leading to the perception of these objects and to emo-
tional responses. Fujita highlights the importance of particles (tenioha)
connecting words and verses in classical poetry (waka and haiku),
which make the task of paraphrasing a poem or giving it a completely
rational explanation impossible. He gives the example of a poem by
Jōsō, one of Bashō’s disciples—a poem that the philosopher Nishitani
Keiji used in a famous essay to explain the inadequacy of grammar to
understand the language of Being:19
Sabishisa no
soko nukete furu
mizore kana.
The bottom of loneliness
falls off:
Oh, the falling sleet!
From a grammatical standpoint this poem is quite complicated, since
the reader does not really know where the sleet is actually falling. It
could be falling where the bottom of loneliness has come off. Or, it
could be falling through the bottom of loneliness that has come off. No
matter where the sleet is falling, however, the particles “no” (sabishisa
no) and “te” (nukete) bring together sections of the poems that are
apparently alien to each other: internal experience (“bottom of loneli-
ness”) and external event (“falling sleet”). Nishitani explains this ambi-
guity as follows:
When we try to paraphrase this verse in prose, the words “the bottom
of loneliness falls off ” are not very clear from a grammatical point of
view. . . . As I mentioned earlier, the continuation of the verse, “the bot-
tom falling off: falling sleet,” indicates that the sleet falls in the place
where the bottom of loneliness has fallen off, or in a way that the bottom
19
Nishitani gives a lengthy exegesis of this poem in “Kū to soku” (Emptiness
and sameness). For an English translation of the complete essay, see Michele Marra,
Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999),
pp. 179–217.
of loneliness falls off. . . . Here we have two actions that should become
two propositions with separate subjects: the bottom of loneliness has
fallen off, and the sleet falls. On the one hand, we have the inner event
of the author Jōsō; on the other, we witness an occurrence related to
the external world. But in this poem the two facts are collapsed into
one pattern. Interiority and exteriority are linked together; they become
one single event. This linkage is not a direct “relationship” such as the
inner is reflected in the outer or the outer affects the inner. Although the
heart which was originally sad has become bottomlessly lonely because
of the falling of sleet, at the same time this bottomless loneliness is also
the place where the sleet falls. The sleet is “the bottom of loneliness falls
off, falling sleet.”20
Borrowing from Nishida Kitarō’s philosophical language, Fujita reads
Nishitani’s passage as a declaration that particles in poetry point at the
“place” (basho) prior to the differentiation between feelings (koto) and
things (mono). In other words, poetry opens up a view on the world
of pure experience, while its language brings koto to light without ever
exhausting it. Things (Ding, mono ‛) are always “particular things”
(aru mono ᚗࠆ‛). However, for particular things to exist, they, first
of all, must “be” (aru mono ᦭ࠆ‛). The fact (Sache, koto ੐) that they
are is the difference that a thing makes to human beings (mono ⠪),
and this difference is voiced by the language (kotoba ⸒⪲) of poetry.
This language plays a major role in the disclosure of the ontological
difference (Sein and Seiende, koto and mono) in Heidegger’s “Dialogue
on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” which grows out of
the difference between “saying” and “speaking.” Only a dialogue that
says by speaking “from out of language” leads the path to Being—a
path (michi/dō ㆏) that many Japanese thinkers enjoyed treading with
their German colleague.
20
Ibid., p. 187.
CHAPTER NINE
A DIALOGUE ON LANGUAGE BETWEEN A JAPANESE

AND AN INQUIRER: KUKI SHŪZŌ’S VERSION
The title of my essay obviously refers to the “Dialogue on Language

Between a Japanese and an Inquirer” which the German philosopher
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) wrote in 1959, and which appears
in On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache). The dialogue
is a fictional reconstruction of an actual meeting that Heidegger had
with Tezuka Tomio (1903–1983), a Japanese scholar of German lit-
erature who visited the philosopher in Freiburg at the end of March
1954. The dialogue begins with a reference to the Japanese philoso-
pher Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941), who had met Heidegger in 1927 at the
house of Heidegger’s teacher, Edmund Husserl. In November 1927
Kuki attended Heidegger’s lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
as well as his seminar on Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human
Freedom, at the University of Marburg. In the spring of 1928 Kuki
audited Heidegger’s lectures on Leibniz’s Logic and his seminar on
Aristotle’s Physics. The Dialogue begins as follows:
Japanese: You know Count Shuzo Kuki. He studied with you for a
number of years.
Inquirer: Count Kuki has a lasting place in my memory.
J: He died too early. His teacher Nishida wrote his epitaph—for over a
year he worked on this supreme tribute to his pupil.
I: I am happy to have photographs of Kuki’s grave and of the grove in
which it lies.
J: Yes, I know the temple garden in Kyoto. Many of my friends often
join me to visit the tomb there. The garden was established toward
the end of the twelfth century by the priest Hōnen, on the eastern hill
of what was then the Imperial city of Kyoto, as a place for reflection
and deep meditation.
I: And so, that temple grove remains the fitting place for him who died
early.
J: All his reflection was devoted to what the Japanese call iki. (Heideg-
ger 1971, 1)
This paper was originally presented on March 10, 2007, at McGill University, Montreal,
Canada. The author wishes to thank Professor Victor Sōgen Hori for his kind invita-
tion and comments.
168 chapter nine
The dialogue presents a critique of Kuki, which is actually Heidegger’s

critique of aesthetics. Heidegger’s mistrust of aesthetics is well known:
with Kant the work of art had become autonomous but, as a result, it
had lost its cognitive power. No work of art could advance any claim
to truth once aesthetic judgment had been separated from a critique
of pure reason. Heidegger’s search for the Being of a work of art was
an attempt to give back to the work of art the truth of its existence,
thus reshaping the role that art plays in the formation of human exis-
tence, or Dasein. According to Heidegger, with Kuki things got even
more complicated: as a Japanese, Kuki adopted Western categories in
order to talk about the Being (Sein) dwelling in a house of language
which had nothing to do with Western houses. Heidegger questions
the validity of Kuki’s method in very clear terms, as one can see from
the Dialogue:
J: Later, after his return from Europe, Count Kuki gave lectures in Kyoto
on the aesthetics of Japanese art and poetry. These lectures have come
out as a book. In the book, he attempts to consider the nature of Japa-
nese art with the help of European aesthetics.
I: The name “aesthetics” and what it names grow out of European think-
ing, out of philosophy. Consequently, aesthetic consideration must
ultimately remain alien to Eastasian thinking.
J: Aesthetics furnishes us with the concepts to grasp what is of concern
to us as art and poetry.
I: Here you are touching on a controversial question which I often dis-
cussed with Count Kuki—the question whether it is necessary and
rightful for Eastasians to chase after the European conceptual systems.
(Heidegger 1971, 2–3)
Kuki never had a chance to respond to Heidegger’s charge—he had
died eighteen years before the publication of the Dialogue. However,
I believe that it is possible to elicit Kuki’s critique of Heidegger from
Kuki’s writings, although he was too polite to confront the venerable
master in any direct way. In this paper I will try to elicit this critique
using the poetry which Kuki wrote during his extensive stay in Europe
from fall 1921 until December 1928. To begin with the conclusion I
would argue that, had Kuki written a rebuttal to Heidegger’s Dialogue,
he would have probably stressed the fact that this is not a dialogue at
all. It is a monologue in which, at the end, Heidegger only encoun-
ters himself and no one else, as we can see from Heidegger’s use of
Kuki’s key aesthetic term, “iki,” which Kuki had discussed in his 1930
best-seller Iki no kōzō‫ߩޠ߈޿ޟ‬᭴ㅧ [The Structure of Iki]. Kuki had
defined iki—usually translated as “chic,” or “refined”—as the Being of
a dialogue on language: kuki shūzō’s version 169
an ethnicity shaped by Shinto rules of “allure” (bitai ᇪᘒ), Buddhist

rules of “renunciation” (akirame ⺼߼) and bushidō rules of “pride”
(ikiji ᗧ᳇࿾). The sum of the three qualities is the equivalent of iki. On
the other hand, for Heidegger, iki is “the gracious, the breath of the
stillness of luminous delight, the appropriating occurrence of the light-
ening message of grace, the coming of what has been, the emergence
into openness in the sense of unconcealedness, the reality of presence
in its essential origin” (Heidegger 1971, 44). In other words, iki is
Heidegger’s philosophical house.
Does an encounter with the Other take place in Heidegger, and is
such an encounter possible? It seems to me that to these questions Kuki
gives negative answers. I will try to prove it by comparing Heideg-
ger’s reading of Hölderlin’s poem “The Ister” to the poetry that Kuki
wrote in Paris in 1925–1926—poems which I recently translated in
English (Marra 2004). Heidegger dedicated the 1942 semester course
to a reading of “The Ister,” discussing the role that unhomeliness
plays in the formation of one’s homeliness. By unhomeliness I mean
the encounter with something that is outside oneself (and, therefore,
extremely difficult to know), something other than oneself, foreign to
oneself—in one word, the Other. Poetry is an eloquent example of
what happens when a poet encounters the Other—an exteriority which
poetry determines whether it can be known or not, whether it can be
penetrated or not. Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s poem centered
on the role that the Other plays in the construction of homeliness,
our feeling at home in our natural surroundings. Basically, Heidegger
posited the Ister (which is the Greek name of the Donau River) as an
enigma which, once it is solved, discloses the truth that an encoun-
ter with the Other is possible. My reading of Kuki’s poetry leads me
to draw exactly the opposite conclusion—a meeting with the Other
for Kuki was utterly impossible.1 If Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s
poetry and my reading of Kuki’s poetry lead to the conclusion that
their approach to the Other was diametrically opposed, this means
1
I reached this conclusion by looking at Kuki’s poetry, which reflects Kuki’s isola-
tion in Paris—an isolation that led him to refine the issue in later works such as Iki no
kōzō and Gūzensei no mondai ஧ὼᕈߩ໧㗴 [The Problem of Contingency, 1935]. In
these works, the meeting with the Other becomes the basic condition for the realiza-
tion of a self which is free from the necessity of totality thanks to daily actualizations
of chance meetings. See Saitō 2007, 1–3 and chapters five and six of Mayeda 2006.
170 chapter nine
that the two philosophers actually dealt with different kinds of Others.
Let us begin by reading Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister.”
Now come, fire!
We are impatient
To look upon Day,
And when the trial
Has passed through the knees
One may perceive the cries in the wood.
But, as for us, we sing from the Indus,
Arrived from afar, and
From the Alpheus, long we
Have sought what is fitting,
Not without wings may one
Reach out for that which is nearest
Directly
And get to the other side.
But here we wish to build.
For rivers make arable
The land. For when herbs are growing
And to the same in summer
The animals go to drink,
There too will human kind go.
This one, however, is called the Ister.
Beautifully he dwells. The pillars’ foliage burns,
And stirs. Wildly they stand
Supporting one another; above,
A second measure, juts out
The roof of rocks. No wonder, therefore,
I say, this river
Invited Hercules,
Distantly gleaming, down by Olympus,
When he, to look for shadows,
Came up from the sultry isthmus,
For full of courage they were
In that place, but, because of the spirits,
There’s need of coolness too. That is why that hero
Preferred to come here to the well-springs and yellow banks,
Highly fragrant on top, and black
With fir woods, in whose depths
A huntsman loves to amble
At noon, and growth is audible
In resinous trees of the Ister,
Yet almost this river seems
To travel backwards and
I think it must come from
The East.
Much could
Be said about this. And why does
It cling to the mountains, straight? The other,
The Rhine, has gone away
Sideways. Not for nothing rivers flow
Through dry land. But how? A sign is needed,
Nothing else, plain and honest, so that
Sun and moon it may bear in mind, inseparable,
And go away, day and night no less, and
The Heavenly feel warm one beside the other. . . .
(Hölderlin 1998, 253–57)
In his discussion of this poem Heidegger sees in the flow of the Donau
River an example of encounter with the foreign. Springing from the
Swabian Alps the Donau has shaped the culture of the many coun-
tries it runs through before entering the Black Sea. In Greece it takes
the name of Ister—the name that gives the title to Hölderlin’s poem.
Together with the Rhine, the Donau is a landmark of German culture,
the provider of a sense of ease and homeliness to the German people.
What does homeliness mean? It means that one has reached what is
nearest to him. However, Heidegger reminds us that what is nearest
to us is actually the most remote from us. One needs wings in order
to reach it. In other words, our local prejudices hardly guarantee us
a sense of homeliness unless they are confronted by what discloses
them as mere prejudices. Men are thrown into a world, but this world
is hardly homely unless it is confronted by what is foreign to it, what
is unhomely. The foreign brings to the notion of homeliness what is
absent from the place in which we have been thrown—an unhome-
liness which is an original ingredient of homeliness, and which will
eventually make one feel at home. The gods will finally live one beside
the other in warmness. Stated differently, homeliness cannot exist
aside from unhomeliness and the foreign.
The Ister is foreign to the Donau, although these two names refer to
the same river. The Ister flows in the land of the Indus, of the Alpheus,
and of Hercules who has been invited as guest to the coolness of the
Alps. The poem begins with an invitation to the fire of the sultry isth-
mus to find its way to the cool land of the Donau. Hercules brings
to Germany what Germany lacks: the fire of passion and inebriation,
the Dionysian moment that the German land of Apollo—the land of
cold rationality and planning—has forgotten. The Ister succeeds in
bringing to Germany this forgotten dimension since the calm waters
of the river look as if they travel backwards, back to their point of
172 chapter nine
origin. The incorporation of fire into this cold rationality gives the
German people an ultimate sense of homeliness—a sense that could
only be achieved with an encounter with a foreign land. Homeliness
is achieved only after passing through the unhomeliness of a foreign
Other. Once true homeliness has been reclaimed, the Donau clings to
the mountain, the regained origin, rather than going sideways like the
Rhine.
For the time being I will leave aside the ominous tone of Heidegger’s
words which were pronounced one year before Germany would bring
its call to to the battlefields of southern, Mediterranean Europe. The
question that I want to raise in this essay is what happens when the
foreign unhomeliness is utterly Other and the Other is not the source
of one’s homeliness. Then, the encounter with the Other must be much
more dramatic than the one Heidegger described with the word Stoss
(shock). I will turn to Kuki’s poetic work—a work that clearly indicates
that Heidegger’s dialectics of “homeliness–unhomeliness” is based on
a homogeneous type of otherness. If so, how can the unhomely be
truly Other? As Kuki’s critique points out, Heidegger’s unhomeliness
is not the result of an encounter with the utterly Other; it is simply an
incorporation of the same into the concept of homeliness. Greece was
much less foreign to Germany than Germany and France were foreign
to Japan. As a matter of fact, Kuki spent nine years studying and writ-
ing in Germany and France. His encounter with the Other was truly
unhomely. In other words, Kuki’s unhomeliness was truly foreign. His
level of discomfort in this encounter was much higher than Hercules’s
discomfort when he left the sultry isthmus for the well-springs and
yellow banks of the land of fir woods.
Kuki’s encounter with the other
How did Kuki experience his encounter with the Other? Kuki’s
encounter with Europe was quite brutal, although he did not suffer
from extended periods of discrimination, due to his aristocratic status
and great personal wealth. However, we can easily imagine the amount
of tension that Europe was producing with regard to racial matters.
The following is an account of Kuki’s arrival in Heidelberg in 1921 by
Hermann Glockner, a student of Heinrich Rickert who used to live in
his teacher’s house:
One day Rickert surprised me with the news that he had just decided
to give private lessons to a Japanese, a fabulously wealthy samurai who
had asked him to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with him. This
unusually distinguished gentleman looked totally different from the rest
of his countrymen. He was tall and slender, with a relatively narrow
face, a nose almost like that of Europeans, and unusually delicate hands.
His name was Kuki, which meant something like “Nine Devils” (as he
himself told us). (quoted in Marra 2004, 15)
Kuki produced a critique of racism which is humorous and quite inci-
sive in a poem titled “Yellow Face” (Kiiroi kao)—a dialogue between a
European who presents a racist argument based on the notion of sick-
ness, an Asian positivist thinker who introduces an argument based
on the notion of cause and effect, an Asian metaphysician whose argu-
ment is based on the notion of God, and a European critical thinker
whose argument is based on the notion of value. They all challenge
each other in finding the best explanation for the existence of different
skin pigmentation. The poem is included in a collection titled Sleep
Talking in Paris (Parī no negoto), and was originally published in the
journal Myōjō (Morning Star) in October 1926:
The European:
Your face is so yellow
Inhabitants of the southern countries of Spain
And Italy,
Unable to stand strong sunlight,
Have a brown face but
Not yellow.
It might be rude to say but
The Chinese and the Japanese have contracted
Something like a chronic jaundice. . . .
This is what we Europeans
Actually think.
The Positivist:
This seems a little harsh.
The place where we find skin pigments and
The layer where the yellow color of jaundice
Is present are different.
It seems that our ancestors
Somehow overate
Pumpkins and tangerines.
Maybe they also drank too much
Of the Yellow River and Yellow Sea.
The Metaphysician:
The distinction between races is inborn.
174 chapter nine
In a former life we committed mischief,

The gods got terribly upset,
Then the demons came upon us,
Caught us while we were running away,
Forced on our heads the filth of urine and feces.
Our yellow face
Stands as eternal memorial
To the merciless curse
Of just gods.
The Kritik Philosopher:
I am not going to mimic the arguments
Of the birdcatcher in the Magic Flute, but
There are yellow persons
As there are yellow birds.
The issue of becoming is a different complexity,
Reality is given as reality.
In short, we should establish appropriate categories
For the concept of yellow race
And look at it from the standpoint of value.
Well, how can a yellow face become white?
Let’s turn this problem from pure reason
To the realm of the practical. (Marra 2004, 55–57)
How did Kuki explain the issue of different skin pigmentation? He
did it by developing a philosophy of contingency—the race is deter-
mined by the rolling of the dice, a purely contingent act which breaks
the chain of necessity. There are three levels in Kuki’s structure of
contingency:
Categorical contingency (teigenteki gūzensei ቯ⸒⊛஧ὼᕈ), which
explains the individuality of race over the generality of being born as a
human being rather than as an animal or a tree. However, this contin-
gency is predicated on what Kuki calls “hypothetical necessity,” which
is the result of a cause and an effect. I was born Japanese because my
parents were Japanese. And yet, this necessity is predicated on a second
type of contingency:
Hypothetical contingency (kasetsuteki gūzen ઒⺑⊛஧ὼ). The encounter
(sōgū ㆣㆄ) between the Japanese parents happened by chance; it was a
chance encounter (kaikō ㆴㅑ). Again, this is not a pure contingency,
since it is based on what Kuki calls “disjunctive necessity.” Although the
Japanese parents met by chance, they worked in the same factory. This
necessity is, once again, predicated on a third type of contingency:
Disjunctive contingency (risetsuteki gūzen 㔌ធ⊛஧ὼ). Although the
parents worked in the same factory, they happened to be alive, a fact
which includes the possibility of the necessity of death and an opening
to the ultimate reality of nothingness.
In other words, human existence is a reality created by a series of con-

tingencies: an individual is characterized by its difference from another
for no necessary reason (categorical contingency); it meets by chance
with another for no necessary reason (hypothetical contingency); and
it eventually fades into nothingness for no necessary reason (disjunc-
tive contingency). Kuki discussed the issue of contingency in a poem
titled “Gūzensei” (Contingency), which we find in the collection Frag-
ments from Paris (Hahen, Parī yori, 1925).
Could you find a proof to the design
Of parallel straight lines?
That was your aim:
Did you withdraw your fundamental claim?
Did the central issue become
That to the angles of a triangle’s sum
Two right angles are equal?
Or was it less than a 180-degree sequel?
In Alexandria the old book was found,
Principles of Geometry two thousand years ago bound,
No matter whether the worms ate it or not,
Euclid is a great man, never forgot,
Who with lines and points the shape of the universe drew!
You and I, I and you,
The secret of a chance encounter I saw,
Of love the anti-law.
This is the geometry of life’s retribution,
Won’t you bring it for me to some solution?
At the straight line of cause and effect A we look!
The straight line of cause and effect B we took!
The principle that two parallel lines do not intersect,
To the intersection of parallel lines don’t you object?
With this, contingency is fulfilled,
With chaos Venus is filled,
Two people a string of pearls detect
Brought by the waves of cause and effect.
(Marra 2004, 51–52)
Kuki’s critique of Western philosophies of homogeneity
The challenge that Kuki’s thought presented to the homogeneity of

Western constructions of the Other was actually based on a series of
deconstructions which were quite in tune with Heidegger’s project
176 chapter nine
of dismantling metaphysics. It is paradoxical to notice that, while

Kuki was learning from Heidegger the need to deconstruct two thou-
sand years of Western philosophy, he was actually pointing out the
limitations of Heidegger’s philosophy by critiquing the homogeneous
nature of Heidegger’s Other. Kuki challenged all the major ingredients
of Western metaphysics—notions such as necessity, causality, the
primacy of identity, sameness, completion, and the law of non-
contradiction. We find in his poem “The Dialectical Method” (Benshō-
ronteki hōhō) a sarcastic attack on the Hegelian dialectics of thesis,
synthesis, and antithesis. (Kuki wrote two versions of this poem, the
second of which was composed in rhyming verse.)
Spirit!
Hell, paradise
Sobbing out a counterpoint.
Glaring at each other are clouds of rain,
Not even a canon
is born!
Living in a field at dawn
Hornets and red starlilies
Entwine to make honey,
Who can explain this?
God and witch
Plight their promise and give birth to humanity.
These are the rules of life,
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis,
The tone of logos,
The singer a priest,
How good, a triple time
Dancing the waltz.
Hell, paradise—they disappoint,
Sobbing out a counterpoint,
A journey is a fellow traveler’s grime,
Even a canon in vain
Misses the time.
Hornets and starlilies
Entwining to make honey with smiles,
Bless the fields in early summer wild,
Benevolent god and witch,
Embrace each other, become one twitch,
Give birth to a human child!
The tone of life,
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis’ strife,
Well now, call the tune,
Blind priest,
How grand, a triple feast,
Dance the waltz soon! (Marra 2004, 52–53 and 118)
Basically, Kuki asked the question, how could the contingency of
human life be reduced to a mathematical formula? How could the
experience of existence be described by any model of pure rationality?
The poem “The Geometry of Gray” (Haiiro no kika) is an eloquent
witness to the futility of such attempts.
A perfect circle wrapping a dream’s tips,
How many days going round and round,
The orbit an ellipse,
A fire burning in the focal point is found.
Waking up a triangle,
A theory born of the angle,
The chart a rectangle,
How many names for stars dangle?
A round square
= contradiction,
The awakening of the soul’s glare?
∞ opposition’s fiction.
The geometry of gray,
Is that the spirit solving human play? (Marra 2006, 114)
Human life is much too complex to be reduced to a law, a method,
whether Hegelian dialectics or Kantian categories. The following is
a short poem (#128) from the collection Sonnets from Paris (Parī
shōkyoku):
Hanchū ni How many years have I spent
Toraegatakaru Lamenting to myself
Onogami o This body of mine—
Ware to nagekite As difficult to grasp
Hetsuru ikutose As a category?
(Marra 2006, 92)
Rationalism by itself does not explain human life, at least not the
rationalism on which logic is based. The un-named, un-articulated,
un-expressed are as powerful tools to make sense of life as any fully
articulated techniques based on purely technical/technological terms.
The negative is as powerful as the positive once it comes to trying to
grasp the unnameable reality of existence. This is Kuki’s message in the
poem “The Negative Dimension” (Fugōryō, the Japanese translation of
Kant’s “negative Grösse”).
178 chapter nine
In a shadow there is the blessing of a shadow,

It is not just that the shadow is not exposed to sunlight.
Ice has the taste of ice,
It is not the same as cooled hot water.
You can pull out your white hair,
Black hair won’t grow.
A eunuch
Cannot become a lady-in-waiting.
Plus and minus—both extremes
Are affirmations second to none.
The law of contradiction regrettably
Is an odd pair, a one-eyed man, a man with one arm.
Glory to yin!
Glory to yang!
Good,
Smell the fragrance!
Evil,
Let the flower bloom! (Marra 2004, 51)
As several Western thinkers had already pointed out—the Frenchman
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) first among all—the inability to fully
articulate a philosophy of existence was due to the tendency of reduc-
ing it to quantitative time (temps-quantité), the measurable fixed time
of the clock, rather than explaining it in terms of qualitative time
(temps-qualité) of pure duration that no clock can catch. The latter
is heterogeneous, dynamic, and creative. Only the time of pure dura-
tion can explain the heterogeneity of human life, catching what falls
in the cracks of the time of the clock. Pure duration is the flowing of
inner life that no formula can catch. As Kuki argues in the poem “Pure
Duration” (Junsui jizoku, the Japanese translation of Bergson’s “dureé
pure”), quantitative time is nothing but the reduction of human life to
the homogeneity of space.
Falling in love with space
Time, what a shabby illegitimate child!
To give birth was a mistake in the first place,
To repent for it, a good-for-nothing goblin,
The cause of your worries night in and night out.
Hello tortoise, dear tortoise!
To lose to a rabbit in a race, isn’t that a victory?
A gull floating on the water says,
I will not be outrun by a duck!
You are thirty-something,
Still studying 31-syllable poems?
You say it is a 5/7/5/7/7 syllable poem?

That two stanzas 17/14 is the norm?
That three stanzas 12/12/7 is the poem’s original form?
Aren’t you rewriting the poem since the caesura splitting verses is bad?
Don’t mistake “line” for “nine”!
A stanza is not made of numbers.
Since homogeneity is the foundation of compromise,
Respect the tune of pure heterogeneity!
Recollection of the past as well
Depends on time:
To curl your fingers around moldy possibilities
Is the habit of the loser.
Shout in your heart!
A meteor
A flash of lightning
A melody
A color. (Marra 2004, 53)
Kuki’s other: the allure of the female
All the poems we have examined to this point are markers of Kuki’s
attacks on homogeneous time, homogeneous space, and the homoge-
neity of the dialectical method. Kuki clearly indicates that homogeneity
is not the right path to follow when we want to talk about human life.
Then, the big question remains, how do we talk about heterogeneity?
Is there a way to deal with heterogeneity? Or is heterogeneity just too
much to handle? The latter seems to be the conclusion that one must
reach looking at the unsuccessful attempts in Western philosophy to
do so. Maybe there is no way to deal with the Other, for the simple
reason that the Other is utterly foreign. Maybe the encounter with the
Other is just too brutal for man to be able to survive it and talk about it.
When one looks at Kuki’s poetry, one notices the repeated use of two
metaphors indicating the heterogeneity of the Other and, at the same
time, the desire that this Other produces: women and food—actually,
French women and French food. The topic is appetizing; the conclu-
sion is not. Kuki’s obsession for women includes dancers, high class
entertainers, as well as very plain streetwalkers. Thanks to his poetry
we know all the women’s names. We find Yvonne, Denise, Rina, Mari-
anne, Louise, Henriette, Jeannine, Renée, Yvette, and Suzanne.
180 chapter nine
Tomoshibi no The smiling profile

Moto ni Ivonnu ga Of Yvonne
Emu yokogao wa Under the light
Doga no e yori ya Seems to come out more starkly
Idete kiniken Than from a painting by Degas!
(Marra 2004, 67)
Yamite yaya Having fallen ill
Hō no hosoriken Her cheeks will be slightly thinner—
Donīzu ga When Denise
Emeba koyoi wa Smiles, how charming
Namamekashikere This evening will be!
(Marra 2004, 69)
Koyoi shi mo Saying,
Roshia no kouta Let’s sing the little Russian song
Shiyo mōshite This evening,
Rina ga nuretaru If only Rina would live
Me ni zo ikimashi In the damp pupils of my eyes!
(Marra 2004, 72)
Torikago ni A goldfish
Kingyo no oyogi Swims in the birdcage;
Minazoko ni A canary chirps
Kanaria no naku Underwater—
Mariannu ka na It must be Marianne!
(Marra 2004, 73)
Ruīzu ga Louise
Ware o mukaete Welcomes me
Yorokobase And makes me happy—
Nihon no nui no She leaves wearing
Kinu tsukete izu A garment of Japanese embroidery.
(Marra 2004, 74)
Pansuchiu to How hard to forget even
Anrietto ga Henriette’s
Namamekite Charming
Iitsuru kuse mo Habit of speaking
Wasuregatakari When she says, “Penses-tu?”
(Marra 2004, 74)
Janīnu ga Faintly a light rain
Mune naru bara no Fall dampening
Kurenai o The crimson
Kosame honoka ni Of the rose
Nurashitsutsu furu On Jeannine’s chest.
(Marra 2004, 80)
Furusato no My heart smells

“Iki” ni niru ka o A fragrance similar to
Haru no yo no The “stylishness” of my homeland
Rune ga sugata ni In the figure of Renée
Kagu kokoro ka na On a spring night.
(Marra 2004, 83)
Ivetto ga Feigning not to know,
Mi no uebanashi I listen
Ōuso to To Yvette
Shiredo soshiranu Boasting about herself,
Kao o shite kiku Though I know it’s a big lie.
(Marra 2004, 90)
Yakiguri ga An evening
Parī no tsuji ni When roasted chestnuts perfume
Kaoru yoi The street corners of Paris—
Tachite kuri hamu Yvonne, Suzanne
Ivonnu, Suzannu Stand and eat chestnuts.
(Marra 2004, 78)
(There is no doubt as to the profession of these women standing in
a street corner of Paris, warming themselves up while waiting for
customers).
These are all difficult encounters with the foreign Other—over-
reaching, impossible to grasp, superficial, unfulfilling encounters. This
obsessive search for the alluring West results in painful disillusions—
the realization that no encounter will ever take place with the Other.
In other words, the encounter with the Other is utterly impossible.
Any naïve attempts to believe otherwise would be like throwing pearls
to pigs, as Kuki says quoting from the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not
give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do,
they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you
to pieces” (Matthew 7:6). The encounter with the Other could turn
fatally smelly and unpleasant to witness, as we see in the poem “Pig”
(Buta).
I remember giving the pig the pearls
Of the fruit of the pearl oyster shell.
The pig swallows the pearls,
Grumbling with her muffled
Creak, squeak, creak,
And trots along here and there
In the mud.
Look in the ordure she dropped!
182 chapter nine
The pearl as well is the color of dirt.

I remember giving the pig the pearls
Of the fruit of the pearl oyster shell. (Marra 2004, 60)
It goes without saying that a feminist reading of this poem would turn
the tables on Kuki by positing the man as the squeaking pig.
Kuki’s other: craving for foreign food
Food is the other example in which the desire for the Other turns into
gourmandism with unpleasant consequences. We find many poems on
food in Kuki’s collections, starting with the long poem “Seafood Res-
taurant” (Sakana ryōriya) from Paris Mindscapes (Parī Shinkei, 1925).
[Man]
Oh, the sea, the sea
Born in an island country in the Far East
I pine for the blue sea,
The shore scattered with seashells,
White sand bathing in the morning sun,
The smell of seaweed, the sound of waves,
I wonder, you who grew up in Paris,
Do you understand my feelings?
Tonight let us go to Prunier
On Victor Hugo Avenue.
Pillars designed with the pattern of scallops,
Lamps shaped as sea crabs,
Watery foam on the walls,
Fish on the counters,
The ceiling a light turquoise,
The rug the crimson color of seaweed,
A faint floating light,
A scent more fleeting than a dream,
Like breathing at the bottom of the sea,
My favorite seafood restaurant.
[Woman]
What was your favorite dish?
Salmon roe sandwich,
Sea urchin in its shell
Sprinkled with lemon juice,
The chowder bouillabaisse
A specialty from Marseilles,
Lobsters the thermidor style
Not the American style,
I too like
The steamed flatfish Paris style.
For a dress I will choose clothes of black silk.
Don’t you like the way my figure looms over the silver wall,
One snowy white rose on my breast,
Pearls for necklace,
A platinum watch on my wrist,
A white diamond ring,
A hat the green color of laver
I will pull down over my eyes coquettishly?
Let me please make my lipstick heavy.
Do you still insist I am princess of the sea?
(Marra 2004, 46–47)
Several tanka also deal with food:
Toki to shite Since, at times,
Koki irodori no I pine for
Itaria ga The intense colors
Koishiki yue ni Of Italy,
Ichijiku o hamu I end up eating a fig.
(Marra 2004, 70)
Zensai no Vinegar dishes
Sunomono mo yoshi Are good appetizers, too,
Komayaka ni The finger’s gesture
Fōku o toreru In taking the fork delicately
Yubitsuki mo yoshi Also is good.
(Marra 2004, 74)
Maruseru to Won’t I find consolation
Aniesu to kuu In the seafood
Puriunie no Of Prunier,
Sakana ryōri ni mo Where I eat
Nagusamanu ka na With Marcel and Agnès?
(Marra 2004, 84)
Or, the first verse of the rhyming poem “Cointreau” (Koantorō):
To the streets of Paris I cling,
A restaurant late at night,
Small bottle of Cointreau, a bite,
The blessing of a fleeting spring. (Marra 2004, 113)
The outcome of the consumption of so much foreign food is quite pre-
dictable—an indigestion of unhomeliness that makes the poet vomit,
as we see from Kuki’s poem “Vomiting” (Hedo) from the collection
Windows of Paris (Parī no Mado, 1925).
184 chapter nine
At times I vomit.
Working alone,
Sitting in a chair in my study,
Suddenly nausea comes.
I bolt up without knowing what I am doing,
Poke my head out the window onto the street,
Ouch, ouch,
Vomit driven by distress:
Artichokes, asparagus,
Snails, frogs,
Entrails of crabs, jellyfish,
Rabbit’s testicles, pigeon’s liver.
Divine wrath of gourmandism!
Proof of indigestion!
Ouch, ouch,
It also smells of wine.
Formal wear, pleated skirt, don’t get close,
Surplice and priestly robe stay away,
School cap don’t come near,
Women, children run!
At times I vomit.
Not a case of appendicitis!
Not a pregnancy!
I must be possessed by an annoying fox. (Marra 2004, 65)
Conclusion
This poem confirms once again that the encounter with the Other
is nothing but a simple illusion, or better to say, a painful delusion.
What conclusions can we draw from the reading of Kuki’s poetry?
Kuki points at three different solutions of the enigma of the Other:
the Hegelian approach, the Heideggerian approach, and Kuki’s own
approach. The annoying fox makes the Hegelian synthesis impossible.
Hegel was able to digest the Other after mercilessly feeding on it in a
process in which the Other was completely digested, obliterated, and
expunged from the body. With Heidegger, the Other is recuperated
(the Ister flows back into the Donau), but, as we saw from Kuki’s
critique, it turned out that Heidegger’s Other was not totally other;
it was simply the other side of sameness, Germany’s local Orient—
Greece. This Other turned out to be a homogeneous Other, against
Heidegger’s own intention to overturn metaphysics and the principle

of self-sameness. What we learn from Kuki is that the true Other can
only be vomited. It is a rich food, an appetizing food, a tempting food,
but it is just too much food to handle. We are back to square one: how
do we deal with the truly Other? How does the truly Other inform our
feeling of homeliness? This certainly requires some further thought.
For the time being, I hope the reader enjoyed at least the poetry.
References
Heidegger, Martin
1971 On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco: Harper and
Row.
Hölderlin, Friedrich
1998 Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger. London: Penguin
Books.
Marra, Michael F.
2004 Kuki Shūzō: A Philosopher’s Poetry and Poetics. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press.
Mayeda, Graham
2006 Time, Space and Ethics in the Philosophy of Watsuji Tetsurō, Kuki Shūzō,
and Martin Heidegger. New York: Routledge.
Saitō Takako
2007 La question de l’Autre chez Kuki Shūzō. Revue d’ Études Japonaises du Cen-
tre Européen d’ Études Japonaises d’Alsace, Benkyōkai 2: 1–13. Aurillac: Pub-
lications Orientalistes de France.
CHAPTER TEN
FRAMEWORKS OF MEANING:
OLD AESTHETIC CATEGORIES AND THE PRESENT
It is hard to believe that in the second half of the nineteenth century,

at the very same time when the Impressionists were experimenting
with shapes and colors in Paris and in Provence, the academic painters
schooled in techniques that went back to the Renaissance were actively
engaged in reproducing mythological and Biblical themes that for
centuries had embellished churches and regal palaces all over Europe.
Traditional painters were still winning the major artistic competitions
in Paris, thus convincing the authorities of the Meiji state to hire a
member of the Barbizon school in order to teach Western painting to
a Japanese youth yearning for the “novelties” coming from the West.
This was the time when Van Gogh was actually inspired by the ukiyo-e
of Japan’s past. So, it is no wonder that in 1966, when Roland Barthes
(1915–1980), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Jacques Derrida (1930–
2004), Umberto Eco (b. 1932), and Luciano Berio (1925–2003) were
experimenting with avant-garde techniques, a seventy-four-year old
professor of aesthetics by the name of Etienne Souriau (1892–1979)
was delivering his annual course at the Sorbonne on “Catégorie Esthé-
tiques” (aesthetic categories), as if he were addressing a late nineteenth
century audience. The word “category” is ancient, as it goes back to
about 330 B.C., the alleged time when Aristotle wrote Kategoriai (The
Categories), in which he talks about the attribution of a predicate to
a subject in the formation of sentences according to quantity, quality,
time, relation, and so on. If the attribute of the sentence is related to
truth, then we deal with alethic categories; if the attribute is related to
the good, then we are faced with ethical categories. However, the appli-
cation of the word “category” to beauty explicitly entered the vocabu-
lary of aesthetics at the end of the nineteenth century, in 1892 to be
more precise, with the publication of Karl Groos’ Einleitung in die
Aesthetik (Introduction to Aesthetics). Groos introduced the notion of
“category” because he felt that the Hegelian definition of aesthetics as
This paper was originally presented on November 3, 2007, at the 16th Annual Meeting
of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (AJLS), Princeton University. The
author wishes to thank Professors Richard H. Okada and Atsuko Ueda for their kind
invitation and comments.
188 chapter ten
the science of beauty was simply too vague. The Aristotelian scheme
of subject and predicate allowed Groos to define aesthetic categories as
substantive forms (beauty, the sublime, the tragic, etc.) of predicatives
(beautiful, sublime, tragic, etc.) used in aesthetic judgment.1 In other
words, beauty became one of several aesthetic categories, not the fun-
damental one, as a result of the fact that what has aesthetic value is not
necessarily beautiful. Next to beauty, one could find the pleasant and
graceful from a sensorial point of view, or the sublime and tragic from
the emotional point of view. To be fair, we already find similar ideas
in the eighteenth century—for example in studies on the sublime by
Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1761), Immanuel Kant (Observations
on Feelings and the Sublime, 1764), and Moses Mendelssohn (On the
Sublime and the Naïve, 1771), not to mention the classical study of
the difference between beauty and the sublime, Kant’s Critique of
Judgment (1790). The notion of “grace” had already been examined
by Johann Winckelmann (From Grace in Works of Art, 1759), Henri
Home (second part of Elements of Criticism, 1762–65), and Friedrich
Schiller (On Grace and Dignity, 1793).
The word “catégorie esthétique” entered the French vocabulary in
1896 with the publication of Essais Critique sur l’Esthétique de Kant
(Critical Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics) by Victor Basch (1865–1944), the
holder of the first Chair of Aesthetics in Europe that was established
in Paris in 1919. It was, then, used by Charles Lalo, the successor of
Basch at the Sorbonne, in Notions d’Esthétique (Notions of Aesthetics,
1925), in which Lalo provided the following scheme:2
Harmony (Unity in Difference)
Searched Harmony Possessed Harmony Lost Harmony
Faculties:
Intelligence Sublime Beauty Spiritual
Will Tragic Majestic Comic
Sensibility Dramatic Graceful Ridiculous
Lalo further revised his table of categories in Esthétique du Rire (The
Aesthetics of Laughter, 1948) as follows:3
1
Karl Groos, Einleitung in die aesthetik (Giessen: J. Ricker, 1892).
2
Charles Lalo, Notions d’esthétique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1927).
3
Charles Lalo, Esthétique du rire (Paris: Flammarion, 1949).
frameworks of meaning 189
Searched Harmony Possessed Harmony Lost Harmony

(Toward high) (Flat) (Towards low)
the Terrible the Pleasurable the Laughable
(sublime, tragic, (beautiful, majestic, (spiritual, comic,
dramatic, pathetic, graceful, cute, funny, ridiculous,
epic) picturesque) grotesque)
It is no wonder that Etienne Souriau followed his teachers in Art et
Verité (Art and Truth, 1933), in which he created a rose of aesthetic
categories, further revising them in 1960, when he published Les Caté-
gorie Esthétiques (Aesthetic Categories), which became the textbook
for his courses. Years of thinking went into the ideation of the most
exhaustive description of the appreciation of works of art, and into
the setting up of antithetical categories such as beautiful-grotesque,
sublime-comic, tragic-pleasant, with noble, emphatic, and majestic
between beautiful and sublime; pyrrhic, dramatic, and melodramatic
between tragic and grotesque; caricatural, ironic, and satiric between
grotesque and comic; spiritual, fantastic, and picturesque between
comic and pleasant; graceful, poetic, and elegiac between pleasant and
beautiful. It must have come as a shock to Souriau to realize at the end
of his life that, as he sadly admitted, “all efforts to list aesthetic catego-
ries in an exhaustive system is a vain enterprise, since a new taste can
always rise at any time and be admired by people.”4
By the time Souriau was developing his aesthetic theories in the
1930s the very notion of aesthetic category was already suspicious in
Europe. In other words, the idea of developing in Japan a scientific
aesthetics by importing from Europe the notion of “aesthetic category”
(biteki hanchū), as Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959), the second chair
holder of aesthetics at the University of Tokyo, did in the 1930s, was
equivalent to the idea of inviting Antonio Fontanesi to teach western
painting in the 1870s, rather than Claude Monet or Auguste Renoir.
Following the Hegelian Theodor Fischer and the neo-Kantian Herman
Cohen, Ōnishi established the beautiful, the sublime, and the humor-
ous as a-priori structures in aesthetic experience. These three catego-
ries work in relation to what Ōnishi called “art-aesthetic moment” and
“nature-aesthetic moment.” When the “art-aesthetic moment” takes
the lead, the humorous emerges; if the “nature-aesthetic moment” is
4
Etienne Souriau, Categorie esthétiques (Paris: Centre de Documentation Univer-
sitaire, 1966).
190 chapter ten
predominant, the sublime dominates. When the two moments are

harmonized, the beautiful comes into being.5 Once this scheme was
applied to Japanese art forms, Ōnishi was bound to see the “nature-
aesthetic moment” predominant in Japanese art, leaving “the art-
aesthetic moment” to explain Western art, as one can see from his
conclusions:
Because of the advantageous position of the art-aesthetic moment in
the West, the three fundamental aesthetic categories, “the beautiful,”
“the sublime,” and “the humorous,” are transformed into “the graceful,”
“the tragic,” and “the comic” respectively; whereas in the East, because
of the advantageous position of the nature-aesthetic moment, they are
generated as “aware,” “yūgen,” and “sabi” respectively.6
Ōnishi dedicated monographic studies to each of these Japanese aes-
thetic categories—beginning with Yūgen to aware (Yūgen and Aware,
1939), and Fūga ron: sabi no kenkyū (On Refinement: A Study on Sabi,
1940), and culminating in his two-volume Bigaku (Aesthetics, 1959–
1960). Anyone acquainted with Japanese culture is very familiar with
the words “aware,” “yūgen,” and “sabi,” and equally acquainted with
the claim of their alleged un-translatability. Ōnishi took issue with the
idea that one must experience in order to know, and that experience is a
trait uniquely related to ethnicity. For him, philosophy represented the
means to explain rationally the immediacy of perceptions which defy
easy verbal articulations. For example, he explained yūgen in terms of
the German notion of “Tiefe” (depth)—not just a temporal and spatial
one, but a depth in the “spiritual” (seishinteki) sense of the word. In
other words, he saw in yūgen the counterpart of Western interiority.
However, he hurried to add, yūgen was a graceful and quiet depth, not
a depth informed by the darkness and fears of the Western Christian
world. For Ōnishi, yūgen was a metaphysical depth, a “cosmic feeling”
produced by what he called, deep “feelings for nature” (shizen kanjō).
That is to say, the realization that man is part and parcel of nature, and
not a simple observer, reduces the amount of anxiety that, otherwise,
the violence of nature is bound to inspire. Ōnishi’s aesthetic approach
5
Ōnishi Yoshinori, Bigaku, Ge: Biteki hanchū ron (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1960), 55.
6
English translation by Otabe Tanehisa, “Representations of ‘Japaneseness’ in
Modern Japanese Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Critique of Comparative Rea-
son,” in Michael F. Marra, ed., Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics
and Interpretation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 155.
led to an interpretation of yūgen as a derivative category from the sub-

lime, a local variation of what he considered to be a universal category
equally applicable to East and West.7 It goes without saying that the
apriorism that had made aesthetic categories already outmoded in the
1930s and 1940s, is also at work in the loss of historicity when it comes
to the dichotomy of East and West—a dichotomy which works as an
aesthetic category in Ōnishi’s argument.
If Souriau was the last person on earth to discuss art in terms of
aesthetic categories, my professor of Japanese literature at the Uni-
versity of Turin must have been the last person to introduce the
particularity of literary works in terms of the alleged universality of
aesthetic concepts: the poetry of the Man’yōshū was an expression of
truth (makoto), whereas the Tale of Genji was a monument of femi-
nine sensibility (aware), and the poetry of the Shinkokinshū was so
deep (yūgen) that there was no point in reading it—it was just too
deep for an undergraduate student to understand. In fairness to the
late professor, I should hurry to add that the cause of this schematic
introduction to Japanese literature had its roots in the application of
Ōnishi’s aesthetic categories to a classification of literary works on
the part of an army of Japanese literary historians, starting with the
renowned Hisamatsu Sen’ichi (1894–1976), a colleague of Ōnishi’s
at the University of Tokyo. Setting aside for the moment the impact
that discussions of makoto and aware had on the main line of Nativ-
ist scholars in the eighteenth century, and the continuities between
aspects of the kokugaku (national studies) movement and its kokubun-
gaku (national literature) epiphanies, one cannot deny the presence of
Ōnishi’s “fundamental aesthetic categories” of “beauty” (bi), “sublim-
ity” (sūkō), and “humor” ( fumōru) in Hisamatsu’s “humor” (kokkei),
“sublimity” (sōbi), and “elegance” (yūbi). Moreover, one cannot ignore
the application to Hisamatsu’s scheme of Ōnishi’s deductive method
in deriving “derivative aesthetic categories” from the “fundamental
aesthetic categories,” as one can see from the following scheme taken
from Hisamatsu’s The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics, an
extremely abridged English version of his monumental Nihon bun-
gakushi (History of Japanese Literature, 1955–1960):8
7
Ōnishi Yoshinori, Yūgen to aware (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten 1939), 85–102.
8
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics (Tokyo: Cen-
tre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1963), 9.
192 chapter ten
Period Humor Sublimity Elegance

Antiquity choku (uprightness) mei (brightness) sei (purity)
Middle Antiquity okashi (comic) taketakashi aware
(sensitivity) (sublimity)
Medieval mushin (witty) yūgen (profundity) ushin
(discriminating)
Early Modern kokkei (comic) sabi, karumi sui, tsū, iki
(tranquility, (knowing,
lightness) connoisseur-
ship, chic)
Modern — shajitsu (realism) rōman
(romanticism)
Literary historians found in aesthetic categories handy shortcuts to
explain the Japanese “classics,” inasmuch as general labels such as
makoto, yūgen, okashi, aware, wabi, sabi, and so on, allowed schol-
ars to find in them the alleged “essence” of the Japanese classics.
Such trends became particularly evident at times when the Japanese
intellectuals were urged to contribute to the nation’s formation of a
strong subject, as one can see from issues of the literary magazine
Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō (National Literature: Interpretation
and Appreciation) published during the Pacific War. In June 1940
a special issue appeared on “The Essence of Japanese Literature,” in
which Oka Kazuo (1900–1981) traced the genealogy of yūgen back
to the poetic exchange between Japan’s cultural hero, Shōtoku Taishi
(574–622), and a starving traveler whom the Prince helps on the way,
and who eventually turns out to be a Buddha.9 In 1942, the same jour-
nal dedicated the September issue to the “beauty of Japanese litera-
ture.” Nose Asaji (1894–1955), who was in charge of the section on the
Middle Ages, began his discussion of yūgen from the eighth imperial
poetic collection, the Shinkokin wakashū (New Collection of Ancient
and Modern Times)10—a choice undoubtedly inspired by the interest
that Japanese scholars developed in the 1920s and 30s for Western
symbolic poetry.11
9
Oka Kazuo, “Yugen ron,” Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō (June 1940), 42.
This is a reference to the Tominoogawa poem quoted in the Chinese Preface of the
Kokinshū.
10
Nose Asaji, “Chūsei bungaku bi,” Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō (September
1942), 25.
11
Iwai Shigeki, “Yūgen to shōchō: Shinkokin wakashū no hyōka o megutte,” in
Suzuki Sadami and Iwai Shigeki, eds., Wabi, sabi, yūgen: ‘Nihontekinaru mono’ e no
dōtei (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2006), 337–339.
Literary historians seldom problematized the aprioristic nature of

aesthetic categories and did not sufficiently underscore the fact that
choku, yojō, yūgen, ushin, taketakashi, and so on, were originally poetic
styles: the direct style, the style of overtones, the style of mystery and
depth, the style of deep feeling, and the lofty style.12 In other words, a
vocabulary originally devised for rhetorical purposes and for teaching
poets how to compose songs became the privileged source of materi-
als to be reconceptualized within the framework of aesthetic catego-
ries which transformed simple poetic styles in gigantic discourses on
nation, subjectivity, culture, the arts, and so on. This process created
a series of cultural amnesias, positing direct continuities between past
and present, and seeing in the past the logic of categorical formations
which were, actually, a product of modernity. A good example is the
lumping together in literary histories of poets far removed from each
other in time and cultural milieu, such as Saigyō (1118–1190), Kamo
no Chōmei (1155?–1216), Kenkō (ca. 1283–after 1352), and Matsuo
Bashō (1644–1694), thus creating the false impression that in pre-
modern Japan an “aesthetic and a tradition of reclusion” had existed
uninterrupted from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. No one
seemed concerned with the reality that the category of “inja bungaku”
(literature of reclusion) with all its array of aesthetic categories was
created in 1927 by the folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953) in an
article titled “Nyōbo bungaku kara inja bungaku e” (From the Lit-
erature of Court Ladies to the Literature of Reclusion).13 The heading
“literature of reclusion” does not appear in any history of Japanese
literature prior to the publication of Orikuchi’s article, although since
then no history of Japanese literature has failed to include a lengthy
chapter on it.
I do not mean to diminish the important role that aesthetic cat-
egories played when they came into being at the time of the forma-
tion of nation states. I simply want to point out problems related to
the use of such categories once one forgets the process that brought
them into being in the first place. In the hands of a gifted philosopher
12
For an example of a description of poetic styles one could refer to the “ten poetic
styles” that Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241) presented at the beginning of his poetic trea-
tise, the Maigetsushō (Monthly Notes, ca. 1219), see, Robert H. Brower, “Fujiwara
Teika’s Maigetsushō,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 40, no. 4 (Winter 1985), 410–412.
13
The essay is included in Orikuchi’s Kodai kenkyū (A Study of Antiquity). See
Orikuchi Shinobu, Orikuchi Shinobu zenshū, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1975),
265–320.
194 chapter ten
such as Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941), the use of the category of “iki” was
quite brilliant, as he demonstrated in Iki no kōzō (The Structure of Iki,
1930).14 The intricate relationships of grace and clumsiness (iki and
yabo), distinction and vulgarity (jōhin and gehin), the subdued and
the showy (jimi and hade), the astringent and the sweet (shibumi and
amami), which he worked out with geometric precision in his well-
known hexahedron, bring to the fore a varieties of tensions, between
opposite sexes, between I and you, between self and nature. Although
Kuki could not resolve the problem of apriorism that is inherent in
the very nature of an aesthetic category, and inevitably tied iki to
issues of ethnicity, his intellectual tour-de-force is quite impressive.
The intensional moments of iki are related to each other in a dialogue
in which allure (bitai), pride (ikiji), and renunciation (akirame) keep
each other in check and result in the best description of “cool” that
has ever been produced. The cultural aspect of the relationships of
these three moments with specific philosophies (Shintō, although Kuki
never used this word, Confucianism, and Buddhism) run the risk of
being too schematic and deterministic, but this is a problem intrinsic
to the method Kuki used, the structuralist method of which he was a
pioneer.
There are important facets to Kuki’s use of aesthetic categories. His
philosophy of sustained tension, transcendental possibility, and con-
tingency is a stern critique of Western philosophies of homogeneity,
and a frontal attack against racism. With Kuki, an aesthetic category
has the ability to transform itself into an ethical system which stands
as an alternative to Western types of morality. No more movement
could be given to an aesthetic category that by definition tends to be
static and a reflection of the principle of self-identity. In Kuki’s ethical
world destiny is never seen as a personal event, let alone the event of
a nation. Destiny is always considered from the viewpoint of possible
destinies, so that other people’s destiny can never be alien to us, since
their destiny could have been our own. Kuki did not need God in
order to reach this conclusion—a geisha was all he needed.15
14
For an English translation, see Hiroshi Nara, The Structure of Detachment: The
Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 7–92.
15
See Graham Mayeda, Time, Space, and Ethics in the Philosophy of Watsuji Tetsurō,
Kuki Shūzō, and Martin Heidegger (New York: Routledge, 2006), 121–201. See also,
Michael F. Marra, “A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer:
Kuki Shūzō’s Version,” in Victor Hori, ed., The Kyoto School: Neglected Themes and
Hidden Variations (Nagoya: Nanzan University, 2008), 56–77.
It would be difficult to find in Japanese intellectual history another

example of an aesthetic category which is made so profoundly relevant
to ethical and philosophical discourses. Even Ōnishi Yoshinori’s treat-
ment of the category of “aware” did not lead much further than to an
unspecified worldview, an amorphously universalized “kind of world-
weariness (Weltshmerz),” which is the conclusion he reached in his
detailed analysis of this concept.16 As with Kuki’s, Ōnishi’s categories
are also made of tensions, pairs of meanings that are seemingly contra-
dictory. For example, his idea of aware is made of the glory of bravery
(appare) and feelings of sorrows (aware). Even within the same notion
of aware, one finds feelings of joy and pleasure on the one hand, anger
and sorrow on the other. However, unlike Kuki, Ōnishi makes the
opposites coincide at the end, following the method of coincidentia
oppositorum (the sameness of opposites), which erases differences
between the two opposite terms, without, however, ingesting one of
the two terms, as in the case of the Hegelian digestive system.17 The
conflicting elements of reality are harmonized within aesthetic catego-
ries which, in Ōnishi’s case, overcome the particularism of language,
nation, and ethnicity, by simply displacing this particularism into an
amorphous and neutered universalism. It goes without saying that
Ōnishi’s construction of aesthetic categories was inspired by the need
to deal with conflicts between Japan and the Western powers—differ-
ences between opposites that Ōnishi tried not only to reconcile, but
to actually erase, in order to leave the two adversaries on an absolute
equal footing. In other words, Ōnishi was not in favor of Pearl Harbor,
but he was not pleased with the unequal treaties either.
In Kuki’s case, the tensions within the hexahedron must stay in
place and never be made to coincide. The relationship of the geisha
and her customers is one of possibility (it could be different, it could
be a better customer, it could be a more meaningful relation), rather
than fulfillment (I am his object, I love him)—a relationship that is
free from the bondage of love, a transcendental possibility (chōetsuteki
kanōsei) rather than an actual necessity (genjitsuteki hitsuzensei). Once
one element of the pair synthesizes the other, either by overcoming
the other and possessing him/her, or by melting into the other and
16
See Ōnishi Yoshinori’s essay on “aware” in Michele Marra, Modern Japanese
Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 137.
17
See Michael F. Marra, “Coincidentia Oppositorum: Ōnishi Yoshinori’s Greek
Genealogies of Japan,” in Marra, Japanese Hermeneutics, 142–152.
196 chapter ten
be subjected to him/her, the tension is lost, and a divorce is on the

horizon, if not a double suicide.18 Once the tension is relaxed, then a
fall into closed aesthetic categories is inevitable, as Kuki himself expe-
rience at the end of his life, when the contingencies of Paris gave way
to the eternal time of the ancient capital Kyōto.19
The limitations inherent to the concept of aesthetic categories are
the monumental walls within which they are confined, monadic con-
figurations that separate them especially from life and action—with
few exceptions, as in Kuki’s case. This must explain why so many
important Japanese aesthetic categories were associated with the arts
of reclusion in the Middle Ages. Yūgen, yojō, sabi, wabi, aware, all
call to mind the heroes sung in the anecdotal literature (setsuwa) of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the heroes of inja bungaku
(the literature of reclusion) who were known as “sukimono”—mad-
men who were obsessed with their arts, either poetry, archery, music,
painting, or religious enlightenment. The solitary environments from
which these recluses draw utmost enjoyment—especially what mod-
ern scholars have constructed as aesthetic pleasure—remind me of the
virtual spaces inhabited by the lonesome otaku generation in dialogue
with their computers all day long. By otaku (lit. your home) I mean
a generation of young people who spend most of their time secluded
in their rooms, passionately gathering anime and manga, especially
pornographic ones, and naively taking the virtual world of computers
to be the real world. In other words, otaku are maniacs whose excesses
extend to personal computer geeks, video games, graphic novels, and
so on. The reclusive youth of otaku is obsessed with gathering objects
in the cramped space of their undersize rooms, in the same way that
Kamo no Chōmei (1155–1216) was obsessed with gathering all the fads
of his time (the holy water shelf, pictures of Amida and the bodhisat-
tvas, books and scriptures, zithers and lutes, and so on) in his fictional
little hut.20
18
See my essay, “Worlds in Tension: An Essay on Kuki Shūzō’s Poetry and Poet-
ics,” in Michael F. Marra, Kuki Shūzō: A Philosopher’s Poetry and Poetics (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 6–41.
19
On the relaxation of tensions in Kuki’s philosophy see, Tanaka Kyūbun, “Kuki
Shūzō and the Phenomenology of Iki,” in Michael F. Marra, ed. and trans., A History
of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 340–344.
20
For a description of Chōmei’s reclusive space, see his Hōjōki (Account of My
Hermitage, 1212) in Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology, Helen Craig McCullough
trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 388.
The otaku generation has created its own aesthetic categories. Suki
(obsession with one thing) has been replaced by “moe,” which literally
means “budding”—a new aesthetic category that describes a person
who is attracted to fictional characters. For example, “meganekko moe,”
or “glasses-girl moe,” indicates someone who falls in love with fictional
girls wearing glasses. A “tetsudō-moe” (train moe) is someone who has
a passionate interest in trains. While the aesthetic categories of yūgen,
sabi, and wabi came to be used to portray the sadness, lonesomeness,
mystery and depth of the recluses who cut their ties from society, new
aesthetic categories have come to the rescue of Japan’s New Pop gener-
ation. For example, “kawaii” (cute) best describes the child-like char-
acter of the faces depicted by Murakami Takashi (b. 1962), sometimes
scary, as in the case of work by Nara Yoshitomo (b. 1959), but con-
stantly cute. Kawaii characters appear all over Japanese cartoons and
anime from Hello Kitty to Pokemon, from Doraemon to TarePanda
(Drooping Panda) and Anpanman (Bean Paste Bread Man). “Yuru-
kyara” is another category which combines a sense of looseness and
lethargy (yurui) with kyara, which stands for “characters.” Coined by
Miura Jun (b. 1958), a multitalented popular illustrator, this term con-
veys a sense of impotence, of sexual incapacity. The categories are new,
but they seem to work in ways reminiscent of pre-war discourses—
discourses that would have pleased neither Ōnishi nor Kuki. For exam-
ple, this is what the artist Murakami Takashi, a leading representative
of Japanese Neo Pop, has to say about yurukyara:
Like wabi and sabi, synonyms for Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, yurui
evades ready translation. The best way to comprehend the term is to
place it along the extended lineage of words such as aware (sensitivity
or subjective emotion) and okashi (emotional attraction), which appeal
to human emotion.21
Murakami explains yurukyara with the aid of traditional aesthetic
categories, mimicking the language of nationalistic aestheticians who
stressed the particularism of aesthetic discourses. However, by relying
on the abused language of the hermeneutics of the nation one runs
the risk of depriving contemporary Neo Pop artworks of the global
21
Takashi Murakami, “Earth in my Window,” in Takashi Murakami, ed., Little
Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (New York and New Haven: Japan Soci-
ety and Yale University Press, 2005), 137.
198 chapter ten
dimension that the artists wanted to infuse into their works, as art
critic Sawaragi Noi has eloquently pointed out:
The true achievement of Japanese Neo Pop is that it gives form to the
distortion of history that haunts Japan—by reassembling fragments of
history accumulated in otaku’s private rooms and liberating them from
their confinement in an imaginary reality through a critical reconstitu-
tion of subculture. In doing so, these artists have refused to take the delu-
sional path of resorting to warfare like Aum; instead, they have found a
way out through the universal means of art, transferring their findings
to the battlefield that is art history. In essence, Japanese Neo Pop, as
exemplified by the work of Takashi Murakami among others, visualizes
the historical distortion of Japan for the eyes of the whole world.22
Personally, I am not too sure how a jet of milk shot from the bulging
breast of a cute little girl in Murakami’s Hiropon (1997), or the spurt
of semen of My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), can liberate the otaku gen-
eration from the anxieties of confinement, although they are definitely
less fatal than the Sarin gas used by the Aum Supreme Truth group
in the 1995 attack of the subway in Tokyo. The dreamy eyes of the
boy and the girl perfectly fit the newly established aesthetic category
of “kawaii.”
Another interesting example of the use of aesthetic categories today
is what the philosopher, aesthetician, and poet Shinohara Motoaki
(b. 1950) has called “mabusabi.” This is the fusion of lonesomeness
(sabishisa) with glare (mabushisa). In other words, mabusabi is a post-
modern view of medieval sabi, a view of ancient Kyōto from the top
of its glittering, high-tech station. It goes without saying that sabi is an
aesthetic category associated with the sub-categories of “hie” (hiesabi,
or cool lonesomeness), “wabi” (wabisabi, or desolate lonesomeness),
and “kirei” (kireisabi, or beautiful lonesomeness). Leonard Koren
has explained sabi in terms of rusticity, simplicity, artlessness, fragil-
ity, imperfection, impermanence, incompletion, irregularity, unpre-
tentiousness, anonymity, discoloration, rust, tarnish, stain, warping,
shrinking, shriveling, cracking, nicks, chips, bruises, scars, dents, peel-
ing, and other forms of attrition which are a testament to histories of
22
Noi Sawaragi, “On the Battlefield of ‘Superflat:’ Subculture and Art in Postwar
Japan,” in Murakami Takashi, ed., Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture
(New York and New Haven: Japan Society and Yale University Press, 2005), 205.
use and misuse—in other words, “a fragile aesthetic ideology.”23 As Shi-

nohara confesses in Mabusabiki—Kūkai to ikiru (Account of Glaring
Lonesomeness: Living with Kūkai, 2002), the idea of mabusabi came
to him during his modern-day experience of reclusion—the experi-
ence of tanshin funin, the married man who has to leave wife and
children behind in order to follow his job. During his lonely days in
Tokyo, where he taught at Tokyo University of Fine Arts (Tokyo Gei-
jutsu Daigaku), the eighth-century monk Kūkai (774–835) appeared to
him in several dreams. The connection between Shinohara and Kūkai
comes from the fact that they are both from the island of Shikoku, Shi-
nohara having been born in the Kagawa prefecture, and Kūkai being
from the province of Sanuki. In one of these dreams Shinohara per-
ceived Kūkai as a waterfall of light which he felt inside the palm of his
hand, and which eventually wrapped around Shinohara’s entire body.
The feeling of this dazzling glare made him think of the word “glaring
lonesomeness” (mabusabi)—a sabi befitting a man of post-modernity
who is faced every day with transparent and translucent objects. Evi-
dently, Shinohara was influenced by the Shingon practice of meditat-
ing on the full moon (gachirinkan)—a type of meditation in which the
moon becomes so large in the practitioner’s mind that it envelops his
entire body. This vision inspired Shinohara to explain the experience
of mabusabi in poetry—an idea that led him to compose forty-eight
poems, which he titled Mabusabi no Shijūhachitaki (The Forty-Eight
Waterfalls of Glaring Lonesomeness) after the forty-eight holy places
in Shikoku. Using the technique of mitate, all poems refer analogically
to a waterfall.24 The following are a few examples:
2
(The Waterfall in Front of the Gate of the Benevolent King)
Aun no ma, banshō no, hibikitatsu
In the space of an a-hum all things come into sound
11
(The Waterfall of the Falling Stars)
Hoshi shizuku, mizuumi no, takitsubo ni
The stars drop into the basin of the lake’s waterfall
23
Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers (Berke-
ley: Stone Bridge Press, 1994).
24
Shinohara Motoaki, Mabusabiki (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 2002), 5–18.
200 chapter ten
15
(The Waterfall Falling Sultry with Heat)
Hoteru mi ni, jinwari to, ase shibuki
A splash of sweat, gradually on me, flushed
18
(The Thunderbolt Waterfall)
Oto ni shita yo, sō ieba, hikatta na
What a sound! To think about it, it actually glittered
23
(The Curtain Wall Waterfall)
Hikari tame, hikari ochi, hikari hae
The light accumulates, the light falls, the light shines
28
(The Waterfall of Falling Sadness)
Kanashimi o, ukekanete, namidatsubo
Unable to hold the sadness—basin of tears
30
(The Waterfall of Eros)
Aiyoku o, tamekanete, hitoshibuki
Unable to amass sexual desire—a splash
36
(The Clanking Bamboo Pipe Waterfall)
Shizukasa o, uchinarasu, take no oto
Clanking quietness—the sound of bamboo
41
(The Waterfall Opening the Door to Transcendental Short Poems)
Arashi yori, shi no ochite, kotoba chiru
Poems falling from a storm—scattered words
This is an example of what Shinohara calls “transcendental short poems”
(chōzetsu tanshi), in which a word can be divided into two parts, one
part of which acts as an interjection. The word “arashi ፲” (storm) can
be divided into “ara shi ޽ࠄ⹞” which means “oh, poetry!”
48
(The Waterfall of Glaring Lonesomeness)
Mabushisa no, sabishisa ni, furisosogu
Dazzling glare pours into lonesomeness
This last verse has become the poet’s mantra—a prayer that makes the
mabusabi experience an example of religious training, or, to use Shi-
nohara’s term, “the training of glaring lonesomeness” (mabusabigyō).
Again, we are back to the world of reclusion, of cramped spaces, of
walled cities, of categories that predetermine and limit the flow of

life—an apriorism that, after all, constitutes the very nature of form. It
is up to the artists to find ways to free themselves from the straitjacket
of patterns (kata) which regulate artistic expressions. Shinohara deals
with forms in truly creative ways, often making form the content of
his poems. After all, he refers to his own poetry as “hōhōshi” ᣇᴺ⹞,
“method poems.” “Arashi” is not just a storm, but also an encounter
with the stormy nature of language, “ara shi” (oh, poetry!). “Oyaji”
ⷫῶ (father) is not just a reference to a fatherly figure, but also a
reminder of his sedentary life, “oya ji” ߅߿∤ (oh, the hemorrhoids!).25
On March 20, 2004, Shinohara rented an old train car in the city of
Otsu, Shiga prefecture, and had a public reading from his collec-
tion Hyakunin hitodaki (One Hundred Waterfalls by One Hundred
Poets, 2003). The event was titled, “Short Train Verses: one Hundred
Waterfalls by One Hundred Poets on the Old Tram.” Each participant
was engaged in the reading of Shinohara’s collection—a decomposi-
tion and re-composition of the famous thirteenth-century collection
Hyakunin isshu (One Poem by One Hundred Poets) by Fujiwara Teika
(1162–1241). Shinohara created cards, similar to the Hyakunin isshu
cards used each year to celebrate the arrival of the New Year, and
spread them on the floor of the train. This was a trip to “knowledge,
action, and play” through a rail of words. Each card had the design of
a waterfall (the waterfall of words) falling into a receiving basin at the
bottom of the fall. A gigantic card was placed in front of the car that
had brought people back and forth from Otsu to Kyōto for over thirty
years. Now the car was put to a new, creative use, in the same way
that Shinohara was putting words to a novel, “transcendental” use.
In a sense, Shinohara does with poetry what Kuki did with aesthetics:
they both work within precise aesthetic categories, but they struggle to
make them alive and relevant to their world. They have thinned down
the thick walls of aesthetic categories, forcing the otaku generation out
from the solitary spaces of their tiny rooms. In other words, they have
put glare (mabu) into lonesomeness (sabi).
25
Shinohara Motoaki, Chōzetsu tanshishū: Monosawagi (Tokyo: Shichigatsudō,
1996), 8 and 31.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PARADOXES OF RECLUSION:
BETWEEN AESTHETICS AND ANTI-AESTHETICS
Reclusion obviously refers to a series of withdrawals: from the world

in which one acts socially and economically; from family and friends
which one loves and wants to protect; from ideas to which one has
grown accustomed through the years. Reclusion imposes the tolls of
forgetfulness of self and others, and of dissolution of the self into noth-
ingness. Nothing could be closer to perfect reclusion than the ideal of
liberation from cravings and attachments—an ideal that found fer-
tile ground in Buddhist thought. In Japan, the idea of reclusion was
brought to the attention of modern readers by scholars who found
in pre-modern times, especially medieval times, samples of reclusive
lives. The very act of uncovering what, in order to be ideal, needed
to remain hidden was already a fundamentally paradoxical act. How
could one even name a recluse and, at the same time, convince the
reader that this recluse embodied the idea of complete erasure? How
could a disembodied trace be presented in bodily shape?
It goes without saying that the paradox could not be resolved unless
one fell into an apophatic act—no one says anything of anyone, or,
at most, one proceeds with a negative description (via negativa), a
description of what is not. Scholars of medieval Japan tackled the
problem by splitting the recluse into two different types: the recluse
who wanted to be one but could not, because of his desire to talk about
reclusion; and the recluse whose silence was guaranteed by someone
else’s willingness to talk about him—the willingness of ending up as an
imperfect recluse. Unfortunately, the two categories of reclusion were
seldom kept apart, fearing that the disclosure of the paradox might
take clarity away from a concept, reclusion, which actually begged to
This paper was originally presented on October 26, 2009, at the International Sym-
posium “Fūga no Machizukuri: Kireisabi kara Mabusabi made” 㘑㓷ߩ߹ߜߠߊࠅ࡯
㧨߈ࠇ޿ߐ߮㧪߆ࠄ㧨߹߱ߐ߮㧪߹ߢ organized by Professor Shinohara Motoaki
at Kyōto University, Kyōto, Japan. The author wishes to thank Professor Shinohara
for his kind invitation and comments.
204 chapter eleven
be kept in the mist of un-clarity. After all, the recluse was supposed
to disappear in the mist of the mountain’s forests. When Ishida Yosh-
isada ⍹↰ศ⽵ (1890–1987) presented reclusion as a category to be
used as the marker of a specific literary genre called “the literature
of reclusion” (inja no bungaku 㓝⠪ߩᢥቇ), he never mentioned the
difference between the reporters of reclusion (Saigyō ⷏ⴕ, Kamo no
Chōmei 㡞㐳᣿, and Urabe Kenkōඵㇱ౗ᅢ) and the “ideal” recluses
spoken about (Zōga Shōnin Ⴧ⾐਄ੱ and Genpin Sōzu ₵ᢅ௯ㇺ).1
The reporters aimed at living the life of total freedom from the fet-
ters of social bonds that, apparently, the heroes of which they spoke
about had succeeded in achieving.2 In other words, reclusion came
at a cost—one can only experience it but will never be able to know
it, as no real recluse is there to tell. Ishida’s position is paradoxical;
on the one hand, he is there to tell us what reclusion is about, like
Kamo no Chōmei (1155?–1216) who gathered his stories on reclu-
sion in Hosshinshū (Collection of Spiritual Awakenings, 1214–1215);
on the other, he is unwilling to tell us that his heroes of reclusion
(Saigyō, Chōmei, Kenkō) failed where Saigyō’s (118–1190), Chōmei’s,
and Kenkō’s (1283?–after 1352) heroes of reclusion had succeeded.
In other words, Ishida is unwilling to talk about his own failures,
thus reproducing the same logic which was originally developed by
his literary/reclusive heroes. After all, we are talking about a paradox
of presentation, description, delivery—all qualities which one finds in
the courtly space originally occupied by Saigyō, Chōmei, and Kenkō.
They all shared an early fascination with the court: Saigyō as a personal
soldier of Retired Emperor Go-Toba ᓟ㠽㒮; Chōmei as the son of the
superintendent of the prestigious Lower Kamo Shrine; and Kenkō as
the scion to a family active in the Ministry of Religious Affairs. More-
over, they all grew disenchanted with the court and eventually joined
the silent spaces of reclusion—huts and other minuscule hermitages
in isolated mountains around the capital. Silence, however, was often
broken by the literary outputs of these three poetic giants whose new
reclusive environments did not succeed to make them forget the com-
forts of courtly life. On the contrary, it only made them all the more
1
Ishida Yoshisada, Inja no Bungaku: Kumon Suru Bi (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō,
1969).
2
See Michele Marra, “Semi-Recluses (Tonseisha) and Impermanence (Mujō): Kamo
no Chōmei and Urabe Kenkō,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 11, Number
4, December 1984, pp. 313–350.
between aesthetics and anti-aesthetics 205
sensitive to the comforts of the past. The reader of Chōmei’s Hōjōki

ᣇਂ⸥ (Account of my Hermitage, 1212) can only wonder at the
mystery of how the tiny, mobile hut in which Chōmei allegedly spent
the last part of his life could actually stretch to such a size as to contain
all the symbols of courtly life—Chōmei never stopped to be attached
to them:
After settling on my present place of retirement in the Hino hills, I
extended the eastern eaves about three feet to provide myself with a
convenient spot in which to break up and burn firewood. On the south
side of the building, I have an open bamboo veranda with a holy water
shelf at the west end. Toward the north end of the west wall, beyond a
freestanding screen, there is a picture of Amida Buddha, with an image
of Fugen alongside and a copy of the Lotus Sutra in front. At the east
end of the room, some dried bracken serves as bed. South of the screen
on the west side, a bamboo shelf suspended from the ceiling holds three
leather-covered bamboo baskets, in which I keep excerpts from poetry
collections and critical treatises, works on music, and religious tracts like
Collection of Essentials on Rebirth in the Pure Land. A zither and a lute
stand next to the shelf. The zither is of the folding variety; the handle
of the lute is detachable. Such is the appearance of my rude temporary
shelter.3
The paradox of expression derives from the paradox of apparently
contradictory spaces: the court on one side, and a no-land (or uto-
pia) of reclusion on the other. Reclusion becomes a necessity once
the capital is directly threatened by the calamities listed by Chōmei
in his account: the fires that reduced to ashes sections of Kyōto in
1177; the typhoon that left homeless those who survived it in 1180;
the devastating famine following a series of unprecedented drought in
1181; and the great earthquake of 1185. One could add to the list the
military struggle between the Taira ᐔ and Minamoto Ḯ clans (Heike
conflict) that was devastating the land and had caused the transfer
of the capital in 1180 from the city of “peace and tranquility” (Heian
ᐔ቟) to the unhealthy swamps of Fukuhara ⑔ේ, present-day Kōbe—
a move that was destined to be short-lived like the power of the Taira
family that had sponsored the move. These are historical events that
bridge the reality of the splendors of an aristocracy on its way out
of power and the fiction of an ideal reclusive space that cleanses the
3
English translation by Helen Craig McCullough, Classical Japanese Prose: An
Anthology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 388.
206 chapter eleven
city’s ashes with the clear waters of a mountain stream. In other words,
the space of reclusion is a fiction that discloses the co-presence of a
courtly aesthetics of refinement and politeness (miyabi/fūga 㓷㘑㓷)
on the one hand, and an anti-aesthetics of desolation and destruction
brought about by nature and human conflict on the other. As long as
the space of reclusion is presented by active participants in courtly life
as either poets, imperial agents, or both, such a space is bound to be
enshrouded in the colorful shades of courtly aesthetics, as Chōmei’s
aestheticization of his allegedly humble hut demonstrates.4 The porous
structure of reclusive dwellings which are constantly exposed to the
elements, is inhabited by a hermetically sealed world of artistic pursuits
which we would call today, with another paradoxical term, “culture,”
or agricultural cultivation by people of means. It goes without say-
ing that the contemporary interpreters of Chōmei’s world, including
the present author, mimic Chōmei’s desire for cultural distinction by
locating themselves within the space of some sorts of “court”—or dis-
tinctive space that is destined to beautify the no man’s lands of reclu-
sion. The space that was allegedly built as alternative to the rhythm of
everyday life at the court is eventually clad in the sumptuous fabrics of
the forbidden colors. That is to say, not only is the space of reclusion
narrated (paradox of expression); it is also confused with the opposite
to which it is contrasted (paradox of apparently contradictory spaces),
and eventually erased by the intervention of aesthetic practices (para-
dox of aestheticization). Reclusion, thus, works as a constant fiction—
the fiction of aesthetic possibility, the space that makes the aesthetic
possible.
A less fictional presentation of reclusion would require authors to
take leave from the exteriority of the court, and to concentrate instead
on a world of pure interiority. Such a world would be confronted by
the time dimension which is associated with death and desolation—the
time of impermanence that has become a keyword of medieval Japan:
mujō or, literally, no-permanence. Today we would call this a world
of contingency—a world in which things are by happenstance in the
absence of a law of constancy and immutability. However, it would be
hard to pinpoint in pre-modern Japan a specific literary work defined
4
I have discussed the concept of aestheticization in chapter four of The Aesthetics
of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature (Honolulu: Uni-
versity of Hawai‘i Press, 1991), pp. 70–100.
by interiority (in the sense of confessional literature)—a fact that has

led critic Karatani Kōjin ᨩ⼱ⴕੱ to observe that interiority was dis-
covered in Japan in the nineteenth century following the importation
to Japan of Western models along the lines of St. Augustin’s Confes-
sions.5 Interiority developed in Japan as practice—a practice imme-
diately related to silence and suspension of self, as one witnesses in
meditational practices perfected by practitioners of Zen. One would be
hard put to narrate a literature of silence, although, with appropriate
training, one can eventually experience it. In the absence of an immedi-
ate anti-aesthetics of reclusion in pre-modern Japan, one is constantly
reminded of the idea that reclusion in medieval Japan has been consis-
tently characterized as a preeminent aesthetic location. Even time—the
flowing waters of a river in constant motion—has been bracketed in
the creation of reclusive fiction. Not much attention has been paid to
discontinuous time in classifications of the literati of reclusion who
seem to occupy eternal, homogeneous time whether they lived at the
end of the Heian era (Saigyō), the beginning of the Kamakura period
(Chōmei), the Muromachi period (Kenkō), or even the Tokugawa
years should one add the haiku-master Bashō ⧊⭈ (1644–1694) to
the list of recluses. The flowing river of time seems to be irrelevant
to discussions of what has been hermetically sealed into an aesthetic
category—the category of “reclusion.”6 Readers are seldom reminded
that prior to 1927 such a category did not exist and, therefore, Kenkō,
at times, might have felt uncomfortable knowing that he was made
to share a common space with Chōmei and Saigyō, despite Bashō’s
obsession with the idea of traveling in Saigyō’s footsteps.7
The aesthetic encounters a major obstacle when it faces a barren
field of destruction and desolation from which it can only retreat in
despair, as in the case of the confrontation of narrative with the atomic
conflagration. No exterior wall is left to be sung; no human voice can
5
Karatani Kōjin, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham: Duke Uni-
6
Michael F. Marra, “Frameworks of Meaning: Old Aesthetic Categories and the
Present,” in PAJLS: Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies, Lit-
erature and Literary Theory, Vol. 9, 2008, pp. 153–163.
7
The folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu ᛬ญାᄦ (1887–1953) devised the category of
“inja bungaku” 㓝⠪ᢥቇ (literature of reclusion) in 1927 in the article “Nyōbo Bun-
gaku kara Inja Bungaku e” (From the Literature of Court Ladies to the Literature of
Reclusion)—an article included in Orikuchi’s Kodai Kenkyū (A Study of Antiquity).
See Orikuchi Shinobu Zenshū, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1975), pp. 265–320.
208 chapter eleven
be heard among the ruins; no animal life has been spared; and the
dried-up water has ceased to flow in the polluted river. Not even
human life can regenerate itself without devastating genetic muta-
tions which can only aim at the reproduction of non-humans. Only
the silent interiority of the survivor is left to remind readers that the
idea of “the loyal retainer who never serves two lords and the faithful
wife who never serves two husbands” is pure fiction—the result of an
aesthetic move that gave origin to the military code of honor (bushidō
ᱞ჻㆏, or the way of the warrior). This is the position taken by Saka-
guchi Ango ဈญ቟๋ (1906–1955) in Nihon Bunka Shikan ᣣᧄᢥ
ൻ⑳ⷰ (A Personal View of Japanese Culture, 1942) and Darakuron
ၿ⪭⺰ (An Essay on the Fall, 1946)—excellent manifestos of the
anti-aesthetic. During the devastating bombing of Tokyo in 1945,
when anyone who had stayed in the city was escaping to the coun-
tryside, Sakaguchi decided to remain behind because he felt, as a
writer, that true beauty can only come from destruction. Chōmei had
witnessed a similar destruction seven hundred years earlier, but for
Chōmei beauty had come to his rescue from the place to which he
had evacuated—a place of reclusion constructed on the memory of a
luxuriant past. For Sakaguchi, the past must burn down to ashes in
order for beauty to be born; beauty can only be born from ashes, since,
for Sakaguchi, beauty is what it is in everyday life. Beauty must know
no fiction and must be reconciled with whatever times (what he calls
“History”) call for in the present situation.
I yearn for those who lived true to their desires, the common man liv-
ing a common life without apology, the petty man living a petty life
with no regrets. I feel the same way about the arts: they must be honest.
And temples—they don’t come before the monks; they should be monks
and, only then, temples . . . Let the ancient temples of Kyoto and Nara
burn to the ground. The traditions of Japan would not be affected in the
least. Nor would Japanese architecture as a whole suffer. If a need exists,
we can just as well build the temples anew; the style of prefab barracks
would be just fine.8
Chōmei lived in a prefab barrack, but the thought of burning down
temples and shrines would have never crossed his mind. Destruction
8
English translation by James Dorsey, “A Personal View of Japanese Culture (Nihon
Bunka Shikan),” in J. Thomas Rimer and Van G. Gessel, The Columbia Anthology of
Modern Japanese Literature, Volume 1: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868–1945
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 832.
was the work of nature and human wars, and the only antidote against
them was the fiction of reclusion. On the other hand, Sakaguchi has
completely let go of exteriority as if he had truly interiorized Chōmei’s
message of no-permanence. No exterior structure is bound to last, as
Chōmei had blasted in his Account. In other words, Sakaguchi sounds
more like Chōmei than Chōmei himself; or, one could say, he has
devised a way to be one of Chōmei’s true heroes of reclusion by find-
ing impermanence in impermanence itself, and by narrating it from
the shores of impermanence. As an artist, what good would it do to
him to fly away to the countryside and become a recluse when true
reclusion can only be found from within destruction itself? It would
be difficult to find a place more fit to reclusion than the capital after
American bombers had leveled it to the ground in the spring and
summer of 1945.
I refused the kindness of several people who encouraged me to evacu-
ate, or undertook to provide me with a residence in the country, and
I held out in Tokyo . . . I thought that I might die, but without doubt I
more often believed that I would live. As for my ambitions once having
survived among the ruins, however, I expected nothing beyond survival
itself. Strange rebirth into a new and unforeseeable world. My curiosity
for this has been the most vivid thing in my life, and it was simply as if
I were strangely spellbound by the need to remain in Tokyo and thereby
pit this danger against the extraordinary degree of vividness which my
curiosity had attained.9
Plenitude of life must follow a fall—a fall that is intrinsic to the nature
of human life and its mortality. Human beings find the grounds for
survival in fall and mortality. One must manage to face the fall not
by escaping to a utopic land—death cannot be averted—but by devel-
oping skills that empower one to survive even in the direst circum-
stances. Sakaguchi points out that the Americans occupying the capital
at the end of the war misunderstood what they perceived to be loss
and prostration on the part of the Japanese survivors. The survivors
had mastered the art of coping with the unthinkable by being reso-
lutely resigned to a destiny with plenitude of life and an admirable
gravity that was born, to use terms originally employed by Kuki Shūzō
਻㝩๟ㅧ in his Iki no Kōzō‫ߩޠ߈޿ޟ‬᭴ㅧ (The Structure of ‘Iki,’
1930), from “resignation” (akirame ⺼߼) indeed, but with “pride”
9
English translation by Seiji Lippit, “Discourse on Decadence,” in Review of Japa-
nese Culture and Society 1:1 (1986), pp. 3–4.
210 chapter eleven
(ikiji ᗧ᳇࿾).10 As Sakaguchi points out, “what reigned in such great

destructions was destiny, not decadence. There was indifference, but
with a sense of plenitude.”
The Americans said that the Japanese immediately after the war were
bewildered and stupefied, but the nature of that procession of victims
just after the bomb attack was different in kind from bewilderment and
stupefaction—it was an astonishingly weighty, replete, innocence; they
were simply the obedient children of fate. The ones laughing were always
girls of 15–16 or 16–17. Their laughing faces were clear and delightful.
Raking among the ruins of the fire and tossing the crockery into a burnt
bucket, or basking in the sun as they stood guard over their scraps of
luggage, perhaps these young girls were unaffected by the present reality
because they were filled with dreams of the future, or perhaps it was due
to their great vanity. It was a pleasure for me to search out the laughing
faces of the young girls in that burnt wilderness.11
It is interesting to notice that Sakaguchi singled out the smiles of fif-
teen, sixteen year old girls as an example of plenitude of life in the
midst of an apocalyptic landscape of total destruction in what used
to be Japan’s most vibrant and lively city, the capital Tokyo. When,
exactly fifty years later, in 1995, Tokyo came once again to a standstill
following the deadly sarin gas attack on the capital’s subway on the
part of members of the Aum Shinrikyō religious sect, critic Miyadai
Shinji ችบ⌀ม (b. 1959) chose the same image of high-school girls
to symbolize perfect survivors. In 1995, Tokyo did not look like the
wasteland that observers witnessed at the end of World War II. And
yet, the years around 1995 were characterized by the long depression
of the Heisei ᐔᚑ era following the bubble economy that had brought
to a definite end the belief in continuous growth and prosperity. The
post-war slogan “if you endure you prosper” (ganbareba yutaka ni
nareru) had become “no matter how much you endure, you will never
prosper” (ganbatte mo yutaka ni narenai).12 The second half of the
1990s signals the lowest point in Japan since the end of the war, for a
youth that had lost faith in the possibility of playing any meaningful
10
Hiroshi Nara, The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki
Shūzō with a Translation of Iki no Kōzō (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004),
pp. 20–21.
11
Sakaguchi Ango, “Discourse on Decadence,” in Review of Japanese Culture and
Society 1:1 (1986), p. 4.
12
Uno Tsunehiro ቝ㊁Ᏹኡ, Zero Nendai no Sōzōryoku (Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobō,
2008), p. 17.
social role. Life ceases to have a purpose for a youth that is unable
to cope with the fluid condition of post-modernity—an age when
all “traditional” values and beliefs are severely challenged. In such a
moment of utter despair, the desire to reconfigure new social groups
and communities became fertile ground for recruitment on the part
of emerging religious groups and sects. Asahara Shōkō’s 㤗ේᓆᤩ
(b. 1955) Aum sect is just an example, but one that will be hard forgot-
ten because of the attack of March 20, 1995, that brought one of the
major world’s economies to a total standstill, killing 12 and injuring
5,510 daily commuters.
Immediately after the incident the Japanese media tried to find a
scapegoat among members of the so-called “otaku” ࠝ࠲ࠢgeneration.
Otaku (lit., “your home” ᓮቛ) could be considered the twentieth-
century version of the phenomenon of reclusion—a phenomenon that
immediately calls to mind medieval counterparts. The obsession on the
part of the otaku youth with gathering objects in the cramped space
of their undersize rooms (anime and manga, especially pornographic
ones, little figurines of sexy girls, video games, graphic novels, and
other computer geeks) is reminiscent of the obsession shown by the
medieval generation of “sukimono” ᢙነ‛, or people who lost them-
selves in the pursuit of a specific art: poetry, archery, music, painting,
or religious enlightenment. Kamo no Chōmei, whose hut was filled
with poetry books, Buddhist scriptures, images of bodhisattvas, and
musical instruments, could be called an otaku ante-litteram. Miyadai
took issue with the idea—simplistic in his opinion—advanced by the
media, according to which the consumption of cartoons (manga) and
anime on the part of the “new Homo sapiens” (shinjinrui ᣂੱ㘃)
born between 1956 and 1965—the generation to which belonged the
executive officers of the sect—was directly related to the gas attack
incident. As a matter of fact, most cartoons at the time focused on
the topic of the final battle of Armageddon and the destruction of
the world. For Miyadai, the causes were much more complex and
were related to what he called the phenomenon of “endless everyday”
(owarinaki nichijō ⚳ࠊࠅߥ߈ᣣᏱ).13
By “endless everyday” Miyadai means the loss of hope in any bright
future—a feeling widespread among young people since the first
13
Miyadai Shinji, Owarinaki Nichijō o Ikiro: Oumu Kanzen Kokufuku Manyuaru
(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1995), pp. 18–21.
212 chapter eleven
half of the 1980s. This is a world deprived of the sublime that one
could find in the manga Uchū Senka Yamato ቝቮᚢ⦘ࡗࡑ࠻ (Space
Battleship Yamato, 1973).14 Everydayness in school, for example, has
become an endless boring play. Unpopular guys will be unpopular for-
ever; dull guys will be forever dull. Boys prone to be teased in school
will always be teased. According to Miyadai, the second half of the
1980s was characterized by a “post-nuclear war community” of boys
surviving in the midst of ruins. This is the age of Miyazaki Hayao’s
ችፒ㛁 Kaze no Tani no Naushika 㘑ߩ⼱ߩ࠽࠙ࠪࠞ—a world filled
of poisonous gas. It is also the world of Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s ᄢ෹సᵗ
Akira‫ޡ‬AKIRA‫(ޢ‬1982–1990),15 filled with nuclear and psychic pow-
ers, drugs, and new religions. Then, the 90s arrived, whose darkness
came to be exemplified by the date clubs employing high school girls
and the sale of sex—a phenomenon that developed in the light of day
while the girls were on their way home back from school. For these
girls the city had become a sort of utopia in which money flowed in
the midst of a deep, economic recession. No one believed any longer
in Armageddon, the end of the world; life seemed to go on for ever
and ever. Without any hope left for Armageddon, one searched for
the freedom to put an end to his life, so as to finish the endless day,
as one can see from the popularity among boys of Tsurumi Wataru’s
㢬⷗ᷣ (b. 1964) Kanzen Jisatsu Manyuaru ቢో⥄Ვࡑ࠾ࡘࠕ࡞ (The
Complete Manual of Suicide, 1993).16 Miyadai constructs the attack on
the subway as an attempt to put an end to this endless everyday with
14
“The inhabitants of Earth secretly convert the ruins of the Japanese battleship
Yamato into a massive spaceship, the Space Battleship Yamato for which the story
is titled. In the distant future, the war between the human race and the Gamilon has
taken its toll on the planet Earth. Constant bombardment of radioactive asteroids
has rendered the planet’s atmosphere uninhabitable. As a means of relief aid, Queen
Starsha of the planet Iscandar offers the Earth Forces a device that can completely
neutralize the radiation off the planet. For this task, the space battleship Yamato is
launched from the remains of its World War II ancestor on a 148,000 light-year jour-
ney. However, the crew of the Yamato has only one Earth year to travel to Iscandar
and back, or the human race will come to an end.” http://www.animenewsnetwork
.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=338http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclo-
pedia/anime.php?id=338
15
“Set in a post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo, the work uses conventions of the cyber-
punk genre to detail a saga of turmoil.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_(manga)
16
“This 198 page book sold more than one million copies. It provides explicit
descriptions and analysis on a wide range of suicide methods such as overdosing,
hanging, jumping, carbon monoxide poisoning, etc. Moreover, it is not a suicide man-
ual for the terminally ill. There is no preference shown for painless or dignified ways
of ending one’s life. The book provides matter-of-fact assessment of each method in
one’s own abilities, knowing that one cannot count any longer on vir-
tual salvations by Armageddon.17
How can one survive in this landscape of spiritual desolation? Miya-
dai singles out the girls working for date clubs as the people most fit
for survival in the post-modern age. He noticed among these girls an
attitude of lethargy and acceptance which has sheltered them from
suffering the discomforts of the age of endless everydayness. Miyadai
argues that these girls had learned how “to take it easy” (mattari ߹ߞ
ߚࠅ) and keep their cool in the direst circumstances; he accepts this
sense of lassitude as the only way to cope with the postmodern reality.
The situation in which the youth found itself in the 90s was different
from the world that Miyadai had faced when he was a young student.
His generation still believed in the values of good family, a good mar-
riage lasting forever—values that had replaced those of the previous
generation, the baby boomers chasing after the illusion of revolution.
Of course, the aspirations of Miyadai’s generation (the same generation
as the executives of the Aum sect) were thwarted and, as a result, one
had to face the inability to cope with the endless everyday. Many boys
became introverted; many joined religious cults. They still believed in
and aspired towards improving themselves, waiting for the day of sal-
vation to come. On the other hand, the girls of the date clubs came to
know how to cope with a future that was deprived of hopes and aspira-
tions. These girls had no illusions (and, thus, no delusions)—only the
knowledge of how things actually are. They had learned from girl com-
ics (shōjo manga ዋᅚẂ↹) that no boy was ever there to save them in
some romantic fashion, and that sex free of love was pleasant. Women
had matured the skills to live in an endless everyday since they were
free from the sorrows of mourning a paradise lost. For them, there was
no paradise to begin with.18 In other words, there was no aesthetics in
these girls’ world, and no desire to create one.
It is interesting to notice that while Miyadai’s heroines are portrayed
as guarantors of survivability by living a life deprived of a glaring aes-
thetics, Miyadai actually constructs his own aesthetics by idealizing
these young call girls that are forced to stand the male gaze of the
terms of the pain it causes, effort of preparation required, the appearance of the body
and lethality.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Manual_of_Suicide.
17
Miyadai Shinji, Owarinaki Nichijō o Ikiro: Oumu Kanzen Kokufuku Manyuaru,
pp. 86–113.
18
Ibidem, pp. 124–170.
214 chapter eleven
otaku man who is obsessed with his little sexy figurines. That is to say,
Miyadai’s follows the logic of Kamo no Chōmei, who built an aesthetic
of awe for his alleged heroes of perfect reclusion. While Chōmei’s
source of admiration were holy men, Miyadai (like Sakaguchi Ango)
turns his attention to high school girls, not unlike Kuki Shūzō whose
model of survivability—the perfect combination of allure (bitai ᇪᘒ),
pride (ikiji) and resignation (akirame)—were 18th century geisha.
The question remains whether in the post-modern world of skepti-
cism, indifference, and everydayness, there is still room for the world
of high aesthetics that in Japan was theorized by aestheticians such
as Ōnishi Yoshinori ᄢ⷏స⑥ (1888–1959), the second chair holder
of aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. Ōnishi had classified with
philosophical precision all major aesthetic categories associated with
Japan, as one can see from the titles of his major publications: Yūgen
to Aware ᐝ₵ߣ޽ߪࠇ (Yūgen and Aware, 1939), and Fūga Ron: Sabi
no Kenkyū 㘑㓷⺰̆‫⎇ߩޠ߮ߐޟ‬ⓥ (On Refinement: A Study on
Sabi, 1940). Japan’s no man’s land of 1945 and 1995 would make one
conclude that the use of nuclear and chemical power on the land has
wiped out the possibility of finding any comfort in the furnishings of
Chōmei’s little hut. If such a high aesthetic could still survive in a post-
nuclear age, what shape could it take? In other words, can something
still be convincingly theorized today along the lines of the moribund
aware/yūgen/sabi/wabi genealogies? If I am not wrong—and he will
correct me if I am—my host today, the philosopher, aesthetician, and
poet Shinohara Motoaki ◉ේ⾗᣿ (b. 1950) would reply in the posi-
tive—a reply that, at the very least, should spark a debate. Shinohara’s
recuperation of high aesthetics is clearly informed by the crises and
paradoxes of aesthetics in a post-nuclear age—crises and paradoxes
that I have examined above. Shinohara builds his aesthetic system
around the aesthetic category which is the closest to the desolation
of post-war Japan—the category of “sabi” ኎. Let’s think a moment
about this term.
According to the influential dictionary of the classical language,
the Iwanami Kogo Jiten ጤᵄฎ⺆ㄉౖ, the word “sabi” indicates “the
decay of life’s vigor,” “the brittleness and eventual disappearance of
an original strength or form.”19 The word comes from a verb, sabu,
19
Ōno Susumu ᄢ㊁᤯, Satake Akihiro ૒┻ᤘᐢ, and Maeda Kingorō ೨↰㊄
੖㇢, Iwanami Kogo Jiten, p. 568.
which meant “to decay, to fall into ruin,” as one can see from the usage
that the seventh-century poet Takechi Kurohito 㜞Ꮢ㤥ੱ (active in
686–707) made of this verb while feeling pain at the sight of an ancient
capital in ruin, the city of Ōmi ㄭᳯ in today’s Shiga prefecture:
Sasanami no The hearts of the gods
Kunitsu mikami no Of the land of Sasanami by the rippling waves
Urasabite Have withered with grief,
Aretaru miyako And the capital lies in ruins.
Mireba kanashi mo Gazing, I am filled with sorrow.20
The same dictionary also associates “sabi” with the meaning of “feeling
desolate, feeling sad deep down inside one’s heart.” The example given
is a poem that Priest Manzei ḩ⹿ sent to Ōtomo no Tabito ᄢ઻ᣏੱ
(665–731) after the priest had left Dazaifu in far away Kyūshū, where
Tabito served as Governor-General, and had returned to the capital:
Masokagami Left behind by my lord,
Miakanu kimi ni Whom I never tire to gaze upon,
Okurete ya As upon a true clear mirror,
Ashita yūbe ni Now the mornings and the evenings
Sabitsutsu oramu Find me desolate.21
“Sabi” also points at the fading away of colors, as we find in a poem
by monk Kakuen ⷡ࿧ (1031–1098):
Yūzuku hi Beneath the grass
Iro sabimasaru Whose color increasingly fades away
Kusa no shita ni In the light of the setting sun,
Aru toshi mo naku The weakening voices of insects,
Yowaru mushi no ne Sometimes nowhere to be seen.22
20
Man’yōshū 1:33. Kojima Noriyuki ዊፉᙗਯ, Man’yōshū, 1, p. 82. English trans-
lation by Ian Hideo Levy, Man’yōshū: A Translation of Japan’s Premier Anthology
of Classical Poetry, Volume One, p. 55. Edwin A. Cranston translates this poem as
follows: “Ruin rusts the heart/Of the deity that guards the land/At Sasanami:/The
capital lies desolate,/And, oh, it is sad to see.” Edwin A. Cranston, A Waka Anthology,
Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup, p. 264.
21
Man’yōshū 4:572. Kojima Noriyuki, Man’yōshū, 1, p. 332. English translation by
Ian Hideo Levy, Man’yōshū: A Translation of Japan’s Premier Anthology of Classical
Poetry, Volume One, p. 276. Edwin A. Cranston translates this poem as follows: “My
lord, by you,/The spotless mirror that I never/Tire to gaze upon,/Am I abandoned;
morn and eve/I shall rust in solitude.” Edwin A. Cranston, A Waka Anthology, Vol-
ume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup, p. 563.
22
Gyokuyō Wakashū ₹⪲๺᱌㓸 5:812.
216 chapter eleven
In the poetry of the Man’yōshū ਁ⪲㓸, one finds the adjective

“sabushi” with the meaning of “lonesome, lonely,” as in the following
poem that Kawabe no Miyahito ᴡㄝችੱ (dates unknown) composed
in 711 upon finding “the corpse of a beautiful woman in the field of
pines at Himeshima:”
Kazahaya no Though I see the white azaleas
Miho no urami no By Miho Inlet,
Shira tsutsuji Where the winds are quick,
Miredomo sabushi I am lonely, for I think
Naki hito omoeba Of the one who is gone.23
In the tradition of court poetry (waka ๺᱌), the word “sabishisa” was
often paired with the concept of “withering” (kare), mainly because
of the double meaning of the verb “karu:” to whither (ᨗࠆ) and to
leave (㔌ࠆ). With autumn, winter became the preferred site for lone-
liness—a season when there were no blossoms appealing to potential
visitors of mountain villages, where those left behind had loneliness as
their sole companion. The following poem by Minamoto no Muneyuki
Ḯቬ੓ (d. 983) is an eloquent example:
Yamazato wa It is in winter
Fuyu zo sabishisa That the mountain village
Masarikeru Grows even lonelier,
Hitome mo kusa mo When I think that people’s eyes are nowhere to
be found
Karenu to omoeba And grasses wither as well.24
The medieval poet Jien ᘏ౞ (1155–1225) created a well-known varia-
tion (honkadori ᧄ᱌ข) on Muneyuki’s poem—a variation titled after
the upper verse of Muneyuki’s source, “It is in winter that the loneli-
ness of the mountain village comes to its peak” (yamazato wa fuyu
zo sabishisa masarikeru). In this song from his poetic collection, the
Shūgyokushū ᜪ₹㓸 (The Collection of Gathered Jewels, 1236), Jien
entrusts his forlornness to the metaphor of the dew—tears flowing
down his sleeves:
23
Man’yōshū 3:434. Kojima Noriyuki, Man’yōshū 1, p. 267. English translation by
Ian Hideo Levy, Man’yōshū: A Translation of Japan’s Premier Anthology of Classical
Poetry, Volume One, p. 220.
24
Kokinshū 6:315. Helen C. McCullough translates this poem as follows: “It is in
winter/that a mountain hermitage/grows lonelier still,/for humans cease to visit/and
grasses wither and die.” Helen Craig McCullough, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial
Anthology of Japanese Poetry, p. 77.
Yado sabite Lonely is my dwelling—

Hitome mo kusa mo Since people’s eyes are nowhere to be found
Karenureba And grasses wither as well,
Sode ni zo nokoru Only the white dew of autumn
Aki no shiratsuyu Remains on my sleeves.25
Fujiwara no Shunzei ⮮ේବᚑ (1114–1204) often used the expression
“sabi” in regard to the form of a poem, and talked about a “desolate
simplicity” (sabitaru sugata), a “sense of desolation” (sabite) reflect-
ing the feelings of someone who lived alone in a village deep in the
mountains, and who spent his time indoors, looking over a snowy
twilight.26
Sabi played an enormous role in the poetics of the Bashō School, as
one can see from a poem by Tanshi តᔒ, a disciple of Matsuo Bashō.
In this poem, Tanshi associates sabi with the coldness of the master’s
tomb.
Ku no sabi no Let’s deepen
Suji fukamete ya The line of poetic sabi:
Tsuka no shimo Frost on the mound.27
Leonard Koren has explained sabi in terms of rusticity, simplicity,
artlessness, and un-sophistication.28 He relates to sabi the follow-
ing keywords: fragility, imperfection, impermanence, incompletion,
irregularity (odd, misshapen, awkward, ugly forms), unpretentious-
ness (unstudied and unassuming), things modest and humble, things
unconventional, and anonymity—in other words, “a fragile aesthetic
ideology.”29 He also relates sabi to discoloration, rust, tarnish, stain,
warping, shrinking, shriveling, and cracking. Sabi comes with nicks,
chips, bruises, scars, dents, peeling, and other forms of attrition which
are a testament to histories of use and misuse.30 The sound of sabi
is “the mournful quarks and caws of seagulls and crows, the forlorn
25
Taga Munehaya ᄙ⾐ቬ㓳, ed., Jien Zenshū (Tokyo: Nanajō Shoin, 1927), p. 435,
n. 3989.
26
Ueda Juzō ਄↰ኼ⬿, Geijutsuron Senshū: Tōzai no Taiwa, KTS 14. Ed. by Iwaki
Ken’ichi (Kyoto: Tōkeisha, 2001), p. 206.
27
This poem appears in Senkuzuka ජฏႦ (The Mound by a Thousand Verses,
1704) by the haikai poet Jofū 㒰㘑. Fukumoto Ichirō ᓳᧄ৻㇢, ‘Sabi’: Shunzei yori
Bashō e no Tenkai (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō, 1983), p. 14.
28
Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers (Berke-
ley: Stone Bridge Press, 1994), pp. 21–23.
29
Ibidem, p. 9, 68, 71–72.
30
Ibidem, p. 62.
218 chapter eleven
bellowing of foghorns, the wails of ambulance sirens echoing through

canyons of big city buildings.”31 The colors of sabi “come in an infinite
spectrum of grays: gray-blue brown, silver-red grayish black, indigo
yellowish-green . . . And browns: blackish deep brown-tinged blue, blue
black, brown black, green black.”32 Aesthetically speaking, the magnifi-
cence of sabi appears in inconspicuous and overlooked details—it is
found in nature at moments of inception or subsiding. Beauty can be
coaxed out of ugliness—it is “homely but not excessively grotesque.”
From an ethical point of view, sabi requires getting rid of all that is
unnecessary—facing up to mortality and “the pleasure we get from
freedom from things,” as well as ignoring material hierarchies.33 Asym-
metry, irregularity, artlessness, simplicity, balance, and sobriety—all
elements related to sabi and the aesthetics of impermanence—continue
to inspire artists, architects, potters, and paper makers to this day.34
I believe that Shinohara Motoaki had the entire discourse on sabi
in mind when he devised the term “mabusabi” (glittering sabi) to
define his aesthetic system. Describing the rain washing over major
temples in Kyōto in his poetic collection Heian ni Shizuku ᐔ቟ߦߒ
ߕߊ (Drops on Heian, 1997), Shinohara uses the language of sabi on
several occasions. For example, with regard to Daiunji ᄢ㔕ኹ located
in the reclusive area of Iwakura ጤୖ, north of the ancient capital,
Dreams gather around my body, the sound of the waterfall of falling
tears, distant trees, everything vanishes as I wake up, I swallow cold
water . . .35
Or, in conjunction with the rain falling over the Daigoji ㉑㉓ኹ,
As I think longingly of the waters of the Dragon Palace, I sink in
beauty, darkness has come . . .36
Or, in relationship to the Otokunidera ਸ⸠ኹ in the old capital Nagaoka
㐳ጟ੩,
Even the capital comes with its pains, languid perpetual dark-
ness . . .37
31
Ibidem, p. 57.
32
Ibidem, p. 71.
33
Ibidem, p. 60.
34
See, for example, the work of Andrew Juniper, who runs the Wabi Sabi Design
Company in Southern England, and who has authored Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art
of Impermanence (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2003).
35
Shinohara Motoaki, Heian ni Shizuku (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1997), p. 13.
36
Ibidem, p. 17.
37
Ibidem, p. 21.
White clouds hang over the rustic entrance made of reeds at the
Byōdōin ᐔ╬㒮—the same entrance from which Hōnen’s rosary also
hangs, “wisteria on the eaves.”38 However, in Shinohara’s hands the
rustic bamboo screen becomes “jeweled”—a postmodern and techno-
logical reading of a medieval trope.39 In other words, the desolation of
sabi—desolation that Sakaguchi Ango and Miyadai Shinji portrayed
as a fixture in post-war and post-modern Japan—proves to be a space
in which there is still possibility for an aesthetic experience (unlike
in Sakaguchi and Miyadai’s cases). The age of speed and technology
is not simply an age of utter destruction; it is also filled with sparks
and glitter, as one experiences while watching the light refracted over
the glittering surface of Kyōto’s super-modern station. Open to the
public in 1997, this giant mass of steel and glass incorporates a shop-
ping mall, hotel, movie theater, Isetan department store, and several
local government facilities under one 15-story roof. This is the place
from which travelers begin their pilgrimages to Japan’s past—the city’s
ancient temples and monuments that provide visitors with experiences
of sabi in the only major Japanese city that was spared from the aerial
strikes of WWII. However, these are present experiences, experiences
that take place in the present world of consumerism and fast commu-
nication. There is a feeling of dazzling glare in the air that made Shino-
hara think of a post-modern sabi, a “glaring lonesomeness” (mabusabi
߹߱ߐ߮)—a sabi befitting a man of post-modernity whose everyday-
ness is shaped by transparent and translucent objects. Translucency
comes with a play of lights that do not highlight any specific spot as in
the case of a spotlight giving a sense of limits and depth. The play of
lights on the surfaces of Kyōto station comes from the intersection of
rays converging from a variety of angles and creating phantasmagoric
shapes in continuous flux. The encounter of these bundles of light is
the result of contingent acts that metamorphosize Kyōto station into
changing structures of colors, intensities, and refracted shapes—a cor-
relative on the building’s surface of the numberless chance encounters
taking place inside the station. Chance is a major element of Shi-
nohara’s aesthetics of mabusabi, as one can see from his long poem
Saiyūki ࠨࠗㆆ⸥ (Dice Game, 1992).
38
Ibidem, p. 25.
39
“A string of beads, the jeweled bamboo screen, who is taking it out, again,
rosary . . .” Ibidem, p. 25.
220 chapter eleven
Suddenly it has come to his mind

that even the Buddha gets annoyed;
what GokĬ saw returning to the Gate of the Fall
was a group of monkeys playing with dice.40
Gokū ᖗⓨ refers to Sun Wukong ቊᖗⓨ, the Monkey King from
the Chinese novel Xi You Ji ⷏ㆆ⸥ (Journey to the West), written by
Wu Cheng’en ๓ᛚᕲ (1504?–1582?). In the novel, the monk Xuan-
zang ₵ᅄ is called by the Bodhisattva Guan Yin ⷹ㖸 to travel to
India to obtain copies of certain important Buddhist sutras which
were unavailable in China. He is accompanied on his journey by three
disciples—the monkey king Sun Wukong, the pig-monster Zhu Bajie
ⁿ౎ᚓ, and the half waster demon Sha Wujing ᴕᖗᵺ—all of whom
have agreed to help the monk along the way as an atonement for past
sins. The poem’s opening is immediately followed by a reference to
Sthéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais n’Abolira
le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, 1897)—
an eloquent homage to the world’s most well known modern poetic
rendition of contingency.
Although he asked,
what is going on?
only one thing comes back,
M
o
Pensée gives the dice a shake.
k
e
y
K
i
n
g
P
Then, where is Monkey King?
n
s
é
e
40
Shinohara Motoaki, Saiyūki (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1992), p. 6.
Looking for him,

He sees written the name of Mallarmé, a black dot on the white surface
of the inner curtain.
Well, over there,
thinking that Mallarmé is the master deceiver,
he screams to the top of his lungs,
! Mallarmé !41
In his journey, Gokū becomes a prisoner of the dice in which he keeps
rolling over. Unless his dream comes to an end he cannot be free from
the dice—he cannot take leave from contingency. While “strolling to the
end of formless silence,” Gokū realizes that there is no way out of the trap
of contingency—a destiny which is inscribed in his other name, Akame
⿒⋡ (Red Eyes).
The eyes of the dice
close their eyes,
red eyes.
He makes
a thousand revolutions,
and yet, he has no way
to resurrect and recover.42
Gokū eventually becomes a prisoner of poetry and dice—the failed super-
man who has spun around the world like the six surfaces of a dice, dancing
his personal grudge like a meteor falling far in the distance, fighting the
goblins of the world, and leaving behind a simple X. Hints to these themes
appear in the collection’s last poem, Gokū’s Tomb.
x man
He came as certain from the universe
x dust
x poetry and dice
And became a prisoner of
x government officials
41
Ibidem, pp. 7–8.
42
Ibidem, p. 54.
222 chapter eleven
x cry
he spat the x the fall
Turning around the world, of
he listened to the x fallen leaves
x echo
he crossed the Milky Way
Running idle in the sky, x silvery
he suffocated in the moths
dust on the wings
He dances x on a jet black field
his personal grudge
meteor
A dragon x falling far in the distance
prosperity
The farce
of the one who has converted to the Buddhist world
x x
of the one who cannot come out of the world of things
The shock
dissolving
Keeping on spots
x in the midst of x dark
Fighting transformations
the goblins
sea of illusion
While sinking in his own x limits
ashes of words
It is better for him to leave only an X
poetry paper
As a mark of the x on x
death the Supreme43
I believe that, when it comes to contingency, we are still in sabi terri-
tory, as the transience of the human condition culminates in the neces-
sity of death. One needs to make a choice: whether it is still worthwhile
journeying to the West (aesthetics), as Gokū believed, or whether the
realities of the human condition make journeying a superfluous experi-
ence (anti-aesthetics). If one decides to pursue the journey, as Shinohara
seems to suggest, then, some light must brighten the path. It goes with-
out saying that a deep spiritual strand runs through Shinohara’s “glar-
ing lonesomeness,” as he points out in his Mabusabiki—Kūkai to Ikiru
߹߱ߐ߮⸥̆ⓨᶏߣ↢߈ࠆ (Account of Glaring Lonesomeness: Living
43
with Kūkai, 2002). The impact of Kūkai’s ⓨᶏ (774–835) philosophy

on Shinohara was profound, first of all because of genealogical rea-
sons. Shinohara and Kūkai came from the same province of Sanuki
⼝ጘ in the Shikoku island—an island where devotion to Kūkai and
to the eighty-eight sacred places associated with him continues to be
strongly felt. Since he was a child growing up in Shikoku, Shinohara
had perceived the presence of Kūkai as light coming to his dreams.
The image of the waterfall of light that Shinohara made famous in
his forty-eight poems Mabusabi no Shijūhachitaki ߹߱ߐ߮ߩ྾
౎Ṛ (The Forty-Eight Waterfalls of Glaring Lonesomeness, 2002)
originated from one of the poet’s oneiric experiences. He felt in the
palm of his hand a waterfall of light that dazzled him to the point of
making the poet think of the word mabusabi, glaring sabi. Meditation
on the full moon (gachirinkan ᦬ベⷰ)—a devotional practice com-
mon among members of Kūkai’s cult—let the moonlight radiate into
Shinohara’s body, and see in his dreams the face of a smiling Kūkai.
The recollection of the Nachi waterfall ㇊ᥓߩṚ in the sacred Kumano
ᾢ㊁ area of the Wakayama prefecture—a recollection going back to
the time of school trips—is another potent element of the mabusabi
experience.44 The falling of the waterfall reminds me of the fall of the
human condition—Sakaguchi Ango’s daraku ၿ⪭. Not only is human
destiny conceivable as a continuous fall from grace; the fall itself is
destined to eventually fall, thus leaving enough room for the aesthetic
experience to take place in an otherwise desolate space. The waterfall
washes out the fall of the human condition. Shinohara’s waterfalls are
luminous:
1
(The Waterfall of the Shiny Tears in the Sky)
Tosotsu yori, hikari naru, hitoshizuku
From the Tusita heaven, a light—one drop45
3
(The Waterfall of Drinking Light)
Hikari nomu, midori nasu, kuchihiraki
Drinking the light, green it becomes, its mouth open46
44
Shinohara Motoaki, Mabusabi Ki: Kūkai to Ikiru (Tokyō: Kōbundō, 2002),
pp. 5–18.
45
Ibidem, p. 40.
46
Ibidem, p. 40.
224 chapter eleven
18
(The Thunderbolt Waterfall)
Oto ni shita yo, sō ieba, hikatta na
What a sound! To think about it, it actually glittered47
20
(The Waterfall of the Scattering Rainbow)
Niji chitte, hōseki no, iro shizuku
Scattering rainbow—drops of color like gems48
23
(The Curtain Wall Waterfall)
Hikari tame, hikari ochi, hikari hae
The light accumulates, the light falls, the light shines49
In Shinohara’s aesthetic world, one does not find Kuki Shūzō’s young
geisha gleaming with allure, pride and resignation, or Sakaguchi Ango’s
fifteen, sixteen year old girls chuckling in the capital’s ashes, or Miya-
dai Shinji’s high school call girls who have learned how “to take it
easy” in a world deprived of aesthetic possibility. Instead, one finds a
space of aesthetic experience—a glittering experience among the ashes
of sabi. Shinohara has done this practically, by mobilizing communi-
ties of young people, and providing them with the whole mabusabi
experience. On March 20, 2004, Shinohara rented an old tram car
that had serviced passengers between Kyōto and Ōtsu for over thirty
years, and was now enjoying a well deserved retirement. Within this
old structure of labor and sabi—the rusty car—he held a poetry read-
ing together with a number of young people (students and interested
participants), who all tried to make sense of Shinohara’s post-modern
reading of the famous thirteenth-century collection Hyakunin Isshu
⊖ੱ৻㚂 (One Poem by One Hundred Poets) by Fujiwara Teika
⮮ේቯኅ (1162–1241). The decomposition and re-composition of the
medieval verses had led Shinohara to publish his Hyakunin Hitodaki
⊖ੱ৻Ṛ (One Hundred Waterfalls by One Hundred Poets, 2003).
The event was titled, “Short Train Verses: One Hundred Waterfalls by
One Hundred Poets on the Old Tram.” The trolley functioned as an
exhibition space where cards were elegantly spread out—cards fash-
ioned after the custom of the Hyakunin Isshu cards, popularly played
in Japan on New Year’s day. Shinohara’s cards were fashioned in such
47
Ibidem, p. 42.
48
Ibidem, p. 42.
49
Ibidem, p. 42.
a way that the poem would literally flow from the top, falling like a
waterfall of Shinohara’s words, and collecting in a basin at the bottom
of the card where Teika’s selections made their appearance. Mabusabi
rainfall curtains were actually hanging from the roof of the car; pas-
sengers facing the windows could actually read all the poems which
had been attached to the car above the luggage racks. A lonely branch
of hollyhock sprouted from Shinohara’s book on what used to be the
driver’s seat. The exhibit was an “act of mourning” for an old tram
that the poet had used since 1969, and was eventually replaced by the
subway. At the same time, it was a “resurrection” prompted by the
powerful stream of the poetic waterfalls.50
In addition to using the tram as an art gallery, Shinohara had put the
car to another glittering use—the gathering of young people who lived
first hand the mabusabi experience. The car that once overflowed with
busy commuters between two ancient capitals, Kyōto and Ōtsu, was
now overflowing with a brisk poetic activity—the space of an aesthetic
experience that provided the youth of a desperate post-modernity one
hundred chances to be human again. At the very least one could say
that the lonesomeness (sabi) of the post-modern world was lit once
again by the glare (mabu) of poetic sparks. It was up to the poet to
make this world translucent again; it was up to him to bring back to
life aesthetic concepts and experiences that, otherwise, would have lain
silent in the desert of the anti-aesthetic.
50
Keishin Bunka Fōramu 82: Shinohara Motoaki Hyakunin Hitodaki Ten, March
20–28, 2004.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE DISSOLUTION OF MEANING:

TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF NON-SENSE
Abstract
In this paper I will raise the issue of the relationship between text and inter-
pretation in the case of texts whose ultimate purpose is utmost resistance to
interpretation. Can a discipline such as hermeneutics, which has been tra-
ditionally associated with the analysis, construction, and interpretation of
meaning, survive the challenges that post-modern art posits to the very notion
of “meaning”? The paper begins with a historical outline of efforts made by
hermeneuticians from Johann Dannhauer (1603–1666) to Hans-Georg Gad-
amer (1900–2002) to explicate the concept of “meaning.” The relevancy of the
hermeneutical project to an understanding of Japanese letters will be estab-
lished by analyzing the work of Haga Yaichi (1867–1927) based on August
Boeckh’s (1785–1867) minute classifications of the philological sciences in
his Enzyclopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften (Ency-
clopedia and Methodology of the Philological Sciences, posthumous 1877).
The paper, then, turns to critiques of hermeneutics on the part of Martin
Heidegger (1889–1976) and Susan Sontag (1933–2004), and the challenges
that the field is currently experiencing in the American academia for having
been associated with conservative, male-biased, homogeneously non-hybrid,
homophobic, colonial, capitalistic enterprises. Hermeneutics is increasingly
seen as the mummified “ancient” in the quarrel between the ancients and the
moderns. As an example of this quarrel I will discuss two Japanese poems
composed by poets of the same generation, Aizu Yaichi (1881–1956) and
Yamamura Bochō (1884–1924)—the first totally absorbed in the construction
of meaning, the second devoted to its destruction.
The question, then, arises, is there anything left for hermeneutics to do in
an age in which the notion of “meaning” as conceived within the frameworks
of big narratives has been completely discredited? I will leave the Italian phi-
losopher Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936) to answer this question by focusing on
one of his first books—a book that is not very well known outside of Italy
and which is not translated in English, Poesia e Ontologia (Poetry and Ontol-
ogy, 1967). In this book, Vattimo calls for the need of an aesthetic of dis-
identification—a disruption of the logic of continuity and identity brought
This paper was originally presented on August 29, 2007, at the Fifth Conference of
the Asian Society of Arts, Ritsumeikan University, Kyōto, Japan. The author wishes to
thank Professor Kambayashi Tsunemichi for his kind invitation and comments.
228 chapter twelve
about by the poetics of the 20th century. In other words, with modernity,
and even more so in post-modernity, the artworks of the avant-gardes have
dictated and inspired aesthetic/hermeneutical discourses, constantly forc-
ing aesthetics and hermeneutics to re-think their basic premises. It seems to
me that this need to redraw the maps of critical discourses is made urgent
more than ever by contemporary trends in popular culture—trends that actu-
ally originate in Japan and East Asia. In the remainder of the paper I will
examine works by the Taiwanese-American artist Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954),
and the Japanese artists Yanagi Yukinori (b. 1959) and Nagasawa Nobuho.
I will also look at the “Superflat” project of Murakami Takashi (b. 1962) and
the Japanese Neo Pop—a project that has been particularly successful in the
United States since its inception in the year 2000. Aside from the reaction that
one might have to otaku culture, it is undeniable that these popular trends
force us at least to imagine what an aesthetics of the absence of meaning (or
non-sense) could be. My conclusions will be very speculative—an appeal to
recover at least some portions of contested meaning.
Key words:
Hermeneutics, Meaning, Philology, Heidegger, Ontological Difference, Sur-
realism, Aesthetics, Mushin, Mujō, Aesthetic Categories, Vattimo, Weak
Thought, Situation, Nonsense, Brittleness, Hybridity, Popular Culture, Super-
flat, Otaku, Reclusion, Moe, Kawaii, Yurukyara
In this paper I would like to raise the issue of the relationship between
text and interpretation in the case of texts whose ultimate purpose is
utmost resistance to interpretation. By interpretation I mean a desper-
ate effort to make sense of texts—in other words, continuous experi-
mentations towards the construction and reconstruction of meaning.
To make sense is an odd expression. Sense derives from the Latin
“sensus,” which means perception, either aesthetic or emotional. If we
want to attribute to the expression the meaning usually given to it (i.e.,
to explain rationally something that is ambiguously perceived by the
senses), we should rather talk about “making sense of sense,” and give
sense a rational explanation. To make sense is perceptual understand-
ing, an understanding based on perceptions, a fluid understanding if
you wish, but still a form of understanding. Meaning is more ratio-
nal than sense. The word “meaning” comes from the Middle English
menen, which means “to have a purpose, to intend.” And yet, even the
German “Meinung” is nothing but an opinion. The need to interpret
came about as a result of making perceptions and opinions accept-
able to people other than the bearers of the original perceptions and
opinions. By interpreting, one had literally to mediate among prices
and values (inter-pretium), but, in order to do so, he had to establish a
towards an aesthetics of non-sense 229
currency against which to judge the value of the merchandise, as well

as to calibrate the value of other currencies. Like most scholars of my
generation and older I was trained in the currency of hermeneutics—a
sustained effort to make sense of texts in light of their historicity. It
goes without saying that the hermeneutical project which flourished
in the nineteenth century became the object of fierce attacks in the
twentieth, to the point of risking becoming a fading memory of the
past in the twenty-first. By hermeneutical project I mean the very con-
struction of this sentence—to give meaning to a body of thought in
which a common denominator is found that is called hermeneutics, or
attention to interpretation.
The Latin word hermeneutica did not emerge until the 17th century
when it was first introduced by a theologian from Strasbourg, Johann
Dannhauer, as a necessary requirement of all the sciences that rely on
the interpretation of texts. He distinguished two kinds of truth: herme-
neutical truth, which strives to discover what is meant; and logical
truth, which seeks to find out if what was meant is true or not. Already
in Aristole’s Peri Hermeneias (De Interpretatione), interpretation dealt
with propositions that could be either true or false. The history of
interpretation exhibits a noteworthy obsession with uncovering alleg-
edly hidden truths—a fact that explains the race among interpreters
of later ages to establish complete monopoly over specific interpreta-
tions, the truthful ones. While philological hermeneutics concentrated
on the sensus litteralis or sensus grammaticus in which a mediator
(translator) uses his linguistic knowledge to make intelligible what
is not understood, what is no longer understood, theological herme-
neutics opened the door to a sensus spiritualis based on allegorical
exegesis. This basic scheme opened the doors to searches for all pos-
sible meanings hidden, first in the Greek mythological accounts, and
then in the West’s sacred text, the Bible. It became possible to say one
thing and mean something else, as the grammarian Pseudo-Heraclitus
(fl. first century A.D.) theorized in describing the rhetorical trope which
he called “allegoria,” allegory. Someone, like the Greek Father of the
Church Origen (c. 185–254), found three levels of biblical meaning:
a literal (historical-grammatical), a moral, and a spiritual (allegorical
or mystical) meaning. Someone else, like John Cassian (360–430/35),
made a fourfold distinction between levels of meaning: a literal, an
allegorical (or typical), a moral (or tropological), and an anagogic (or
mystical) meaning. In other words, a reader was invited to find in
the literal meaning what happened, in the allegorical meaning what
230 chapter twelve
to believe, in the moral meaning what he ought to do, and in the ana-
gogic meaning what he was striving toward.1
In the Middle Ages the cosmos became a puzzle in need of inter-
pretation. Language itself came to be seen as an act of interpretation
pointing at a deeper truth. In the words of St. Augustine (354–430),
the actus signatus or verbal sign was an incomplete translation or
faulty interpretation of the inner word, the verbum intimum or ver-
bum cordis. In a sense, St. Augustine was going back to the original
hermeneutical problem of meaning prior to the establishment of any
sense, either literal or spiritual. The political implications of interpreta-
tive acts signed the pages of the history of the Reformation in which
a rejection of allegoresis meant a rejection of the Pope’s authority
as unchallenged interpreter. When Martin Luther (1483–1546) pro-
claimed the primacy of scripture (sola scriptura) he aimed at bring-
ing back to the Bible the authority that Roman Popes were claiming
for themselves. The problem was that, even if the scripture was the
interpreter of itself, based on its alleged literal meaning (sensus littera-
lis), someone still needed to explicate this meaning to others. In other
words, the notion of an absolutely clear and univocal scripture was
absurd, as the Catholics pointed out by noticing marked variations
among Protestant interpretations.
The remaining history of hermeneutics coincided with the develop-
ment of the field of philology—whether one concentrates on Johann
Chladenius’ (1710–1759) study of obscurities, Georg Friedrich Meier’s
(1718–1777) theory of signs, Friedrich Ast’s (1778–1841) notion of
the author, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1768–1834) idea of misun-
derstanding, or August Boeckh’s (1785–1867) minute classifications
of the philological sciences in his Enzyclopädie und Methodologie der
philologischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia and Methodology of the
Philological Sciences, posthumous 1877). Boeckh provided the most
complete account of methodologies associated with historicism—
methodologies which are still very much alive in our daily scholarly
practices, including the way I am structuring this lecture. His vocabu-
lary is immediately recognizable, since I believe most of us are indebted
to it, as one can see from Boeckh’s differentiation between,
1
In this brief outline I follow Peter Szondi, Introduction to literary hermeneutics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
1.—a formal theory of the science of philology, which included,

1a) the theory of hermeneutics (grammatical interpretation, his-
torical interpretation, individual interpretation, and generic
interpretation);
1b) the theory of criticism (grammatical criticism, historical criti-
cism, individual criticism, generic criticism),
and 2.—material disciplines of the study of antiquity, which included,

2a) generic antiquity (national life, private life, religious art, sci-
ences);
2b) specific antiquity (public life of the Greek and Romans, their
private life, their religious art, and the sciences of ancient
times).
I would not have spent so much time giving an outline of the history
of hermeneutics if I thought that this was irrelevant to the study of
Japan. Instead, the hermeneutical model had a profound impact on
how philology, history, and the humanities came to be articulated in
Japan. In other words, whatever goes under the umbrella of Japanese
literature, art, religion, history, philosophy, and so on, would not exist
in its modern form without the paradigms that hermeneutics pro-
vided in forcing Japanese authors to talk about Japan with a language
which was originally devised for a reading of the Bible. Haga Yaichi
(1867–1927), one of the founders of kokubungaku (Japanese national
literature), spent most of 1900 studying Boeckh’s Encyclopedia in Ber-
lin. For Haga, in order to be a good critic and a good interpreter, a
philologist must master disciplines which are still well known to us
today: bibliographical studies, studies of manuscripts, paleography,
epigraphy, prosody, grammar, archeological material, ancient geogra-
phy, chronology of ancient history, weights and measures, antiquities,
mythology, archeology of the fine arts, ancient philosophy, literary his-
tory, and numismatics.2
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who is considered one of the major
voices in the history of hermeneutics in the twentieth century, chal-
lenged traditional views of this discipline, eventually questioning the
2
Michael F. Marra, “Fields of contention: Philology (Bunkengaku) and the philoso-
phy of literature (Bungeigaku)” in Joshua A. Fogel, & James C. Baxter eds., Histori-
ography and Japanese consciousness of values and norms (Kyoto, Japan: International
Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2002), pp. 197–221.
232 chapter twelve
overall validity of the enterprise. In a Dialogue on Language Between

a Japanese and an Inquirer (1959) Heidegger pointed out that already
in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) he had gone beyond Schleier-
macher’s general distinction between hermeneutics (“the art of under-
standing rightly another man’s language”) and criticism (“the art of
judging rightly the genuineness of written works and passages”), as well
as Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) idea of hermeneutics as the theory
of the art of interpretation of written artifacts. Heidegger argues that
“In Being and Time, hermeneutics means neither the theory of the art
of interpretation nor interpretation itself, but rather an attempt first
of all to define the nature of interpretation on hermeneutic grounds.”3
Heidegger confesses that eventually he had done away with the con-
cept altogether, since there cannot be a fixed standpoint in what can
only be a stop along the way.4 And yet, even in Heidegger, the project
of destruktion is still very much linked to a recovery of authenticity
which the interpretative process of Western metaphysics had alleg-
edly hidden from sight and forgotten. The quest for a recovery of the
ontological difference—the difference that Being makes to everybody’s
life—is still based on interpretative acts that Heidegger increasingly
turned toward poetry after the compilation of Sein und Zeit.5 Despite
Heidegger’s repeated statements on his attempts to overcome meta-
physics and all the disciplines based on metaphysical interpretations
of reality, it would be hard to deny the profound impact that theology
had on the shaping of Heidegger’s thought, as he himself admitted.6
3
M. Heidegger, On the way to language, trans. by P.D. Hertz (San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1971), p. 11.
4
“It can hardly have escaped you that in my later writings I do no longer employ
the term ‘hermeneutics.’ . . . I have left an earlier standpoint, not in order to exchange
it for another one, but because even the former standpoint was merely a way-station
along the way. The lasting element in thinking is the way.” M. Heidegger, On the way
to language p. 12.
5
In addition to the essays included in Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the way to lan-
guage, 1950–59), I am referring to Erläuterrung zu Hölderlin Dichtung (Elucidations
of Hölderlin’s Poetry), Heimkunft/An die Verwandten (Remembrance of the Poet),
Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung (Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry), Wozu
Dichter (What Are Poets For?), Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”
(Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germany” and “The Rein”), Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken”
(Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance”), and Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” (Hölder-
lin’s Hymn “The Ister”). See, Heidegger, M. (1975). Poetry, language, thought (Albert
Hofstadter trans.). New York: Harper & Row; Heidegger, M. (2000). Elucidations of
Hölderlin’s poetry (Keith Hoeller, trans.). Amherst: Humanity Books; and Heidegger,
M. (1996). Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister” (William McNeill, & Julia Davis, trans.).
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
6
“Without this theological background I should never have come upon the path of
thinking.” M. Heidegger, On the way to language, p. 10.
Such a theological ground which informs all acts of hermeneutical

interpretations, and which has constituted the basis on which Japa-
nese texts have been read in the academic traditions established in
the late nineteenth century, can be useful in reading texts which were
produced with such a background in mind. However, it is question-
able whether this can be equally applied to a fruitful understand-
ing of texts which purposefully try to escape the limits of a reality
shaped by historicist concerns. It would be sufficient to compare the
two following poems to notice that while we are justified in following
the hermeneutical path to understand the first, an interpretation of the
second along the same lines would be much more problematic. The
first poem is by Aizu Yaichi (1881–1956):
Ōtera no Walking on the ground,
Maroki hashira no Over the shadow of the great temple’s
Tsukikage o Round columns
Tsuchi ni fumitsutsu That the moon casts,
Mono o koso omoe Absorbed in thought.7
The second poem is by Yamamura Bochō (1884–1924):
Geigo Nonsense
Settō kingyo Theft goldfish
Gōtō rappa Robbery trumpet
Kyōkatsu kokyū Blackmail sitar
Tobaku neko Gambling cat
Sagi sarasa Fraud calico
Tokushoku birōdo Bribery velvet
Kan’in ringo Adultery apple
Shōgai hibari Assault skylark
Satsujin churitsubu Murder tulip
Datai in’ei Abortion shadow
Sōzō yuki Riot snow
Hōka marumero Arson quince
Yūkai kasuteera Abduction sponge-cake.8
Although I personally believe that hermeneutics can be applied to
untangle the second poem as well, Yamamura Bochō’s surrealist
approach to poetry forces the reader to question the need to make
sense of poetry, as the title of his poem, “Nonsense,” indicates. On
7
Aizu Yaichi, Nankyō Shinshō (New Songs from the Southern Capital, 1908–1924),
in Aizu Yaichi, Jichū Rokumeishū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988), p. 51.
8
English translation by Miryam Sas, Fault lines: Cultural memory and Japanese
surrealism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 19; with slight modifications.
234 chapter twelve
the other hand, Aizu Yaichi’s poem, which was composed at about
the same time as Yamamura’s, requires a “monumental” reading
of the round columns which he observes while walking through
the Tōshōdaiji temple in Nara—columns which, as he confessed, were
actually infused with his memory of the Parthenon in Athens.9 Not
only is Athens inspiring Aizu to write about the columns of a famous
temple in Nara; Greece and Western hermeneutics were at work in
Aizu’s entire career as an art historian, an aesthetician, and a poet
who wanted to resurrect in the twentieth century a vocabulary devised
by poets anthologized in a poetic collection of the eighth century, the
Man’yōshū (Ten Thousand Leaves, 759). Yamamura Bochō’s verses
were meant to dismantle the monument of language, as well as all
traces traditionally conveyed by such language. The question remains
whether one can use the language of hermeneutics, which developed
over centuries with the explicit purpose of establishing a meaningful
sense to things, to make sense of poetic nonsense.
While in the 1960s Heidegger’s disciple Hans-Georg Gadamer
(1900–2002) launched a stern defense of hermeneutics in Wahrheit
und Methode (Truth and Method, 1960),10 Susan Sontag waged a fierce
war against this most German of all German sciences by stating that
“in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”11 Since then it
has become increasingly difficult to talk about hermeneutics, mainly
because of its associations with discourses on historicism. These reser-
vations have stemmed from a naïve reading of hermeneutics in terms
of a theory that attempts to make one re-live the experiences of the
past, as this came to be experienced by authors within past contexts
and backgrounds. Such a view flattens the richness of the hermeneu-
9
In Konsai Zuihitsu, Aizu states, “When I closely search for the cause of my deep
love for the columns in the temples in Nara, it seems to me that it lies neither in
Tōshōdaiji and Hōryūji but in a sanctuary in a distant country in the distant past,
namely Greece . . . The columns in the Parthenon and the Theseion seem to have
made a very deep impression on my young heart so that even now they seem to keep
me interested in those columns in Nara.” (April 24, 1941). English translation by
Ono Michiko, “Tōshōdaiji no Marubashira” Eigoyaku ni Tsuite, in Shūsō 11 (1995),
pp. 21–22.
10
“Every work of art, not only literature, must be understood like any other text
that requires understanding, and this kind of understanding has to be acquired. This
gives hermeneutical consciousness a comprehensiveness that surpasses even that
of aesthetic consciousness. Aesthetics has to be absorbed into hermeneutics.” H.-G.
Gadamer, Truth and method, Joel Weinsheimer & Donald G. Marshall, trans. (New
York: Crossroad, 1992), p. 164.
11
Susan Sontag, Against interpretation (New York: Octagon Books, 1961), p. 14.
tic lesson by leveling against the practitioners of such a method the

charge of an alleged belief in the possibility of putting oneself in the
shoes of the dead. This skepticism tends to ignore the validity of one of
the major tenets of hermeneutics, which is the impossibility of dealing
with either the past or the other without beginning from the self in
the present. It is not a question of trying to figure out what went on
in the past; it is a question of how the present is constantly shaped by
the past. This applies to newer countries as well, such as, for example
Susan Sontag’s native land, the U.S., which makes massive efforts to
delete the past in order to live in the utopic promise of an economi-
cally prosperous future.
I personally experienced the uneasiness that the topic of herme-
neutics raises when in 2003 I organized at UCLA the twelfth annual
meeting of the Association for Japanese Studies on the topic of
“Hermeneutical Strategies: Method of Interpretation in the Study of
Japanese Literature.” The conference provided a forum for a variety
of methodological approaches to texts, such as postcolonial theories,
feminism, cultural criticism, intertextuality, narratology, psychoanaly-
sis, poetics, and aesthetics.12 However, when it came to hermeneutics
the reservations, although politely formulated, were nevertheless quite
palpable, as one can observe from the exemplary remarks on the part
of a speaker that “her-meneutics” should rather be called “his-meneu-
tics.” Evidently, there is a wide perception of hermeneutics as the most
conservative, male-biased, homogeneously non-hybrid, homophobic,
colonial, capitalistic enterprise. In other words, hermeneutics is cur-
rently associated with the mummified “ancient” in the quarrel between
the ancients and the moderns. If we follow this train of thought, then,
Aizu Yaichi would be inevitably classified as ancient, while Yamamura
Bochō would undoubtedly qualify as a modern. Although this classifi-
cation holds some truth in terms of the loyalties that these two poets
showed towards past and present, it would be disingenuous to think
that Yaichi’s interest in the past was not geared to the betterment of
the future, given his utter mistrust of the present.13 At the same time,
12
See Michael F. Marra, ed., in Hermeneutical strategies: Methods of interpretation
in the study of Japanese literature, in Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Liter-
ary Studies 5 (Summer 2004).
13
“My mature tears of indignation for the pitiful scene of our present century, a
century filled with deformity as a result of the abuses of the division of labor, are mixed
occasionally with the cold smile of the cynic.” This statement which Yaichi made in a
letter addressed to a friend on September 2, 1906, after graduating from Waseda Uni-
versity appears in Kambayashi Tsunemichi, “The aesthetics of Aizu Yaichi: Longing for
236 chapter twelve
Yamamoto’s rejection of the past was equally sustained by a mistrust

of the present. Although the two poets followed different methods
(integration and continuity in Yaichi, deconstruction and discontinu-
ity in Bochō), their aims remained quite similar.
If one follows the reminder by the Italian philosopher Gianni Vat-
timo that, aside from being used as a specific kind of interpretation,
hermeneutics stands today for a koiné of interpretative languages, then,
there would be no reason not to include within hermeneutics vocal
examples of political resistance, such as feminism, post-colonialism,
trans-nationalism, post-capitalism, and queer studies.14 In other words,
by definition hermeneutics requires the presence of the modern in the
querelle between ancients and moderns, since it always begins from
the interpretative act, i.e., the author in the present. Vattimo continues
to be one of the most convincing advocates of hermeneutics—a task
which is particularly welcomed by someone like me who was trained
in classical studies and, as a result, was deeply inspired by the herme-
neutical approach in the Biblical sense of the word: loyalty to the text,
respect for its author, attention to philology, obsession with linear
time which provides order to thinking; in other words, a careful search
for meaning devised along hermeneutical lines. My article, “Japanese
Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning,” strictly follows such lines:
it looks for a series of categories—either rhetorical (sugata, yūgen-tai,
ushin-tai, and the triad omote-ura-sakai), aesthetic (yūgen, yojō, mono
no aware), religious (mushin, shintai, santai, kotodama), and ethical
(makoto, mawaza) in order to explain how interpretative strategies
work in the reading of Japanese literary texts, mainly poetic texts.15
Research on these categories furthered my interest in the particu-
lar nature of Japanese modernity—especially the encounter between
the pliant, supple groups of ideas coming out from a Buddhist phi-
the south,” in Michael F. Marra, ed. & trans., A history of modern Japanese aesthetics
(Honolulu: The University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), p. 138.
14
“The hypothesis of the mid-eighties that hermeneutics had become a sort of koiné
or common idiom of Western culture, and not only a philosophy, seems yet to have
been refuted. This may of course be due, at least in part, to its being a weak hypothesis
that does not affirm a great many precise shared philosophical beliefs, but rather
describes an overall climate, a general sensibility, or simply a kind of presupposition
that everyone feels more or less obliged to take into account.” Gianni Vattimo (1997).
Beyond interpretation: The meaning of hermeneutics for philosophy, David Webb, transl.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 1.
15
Michael F. Marra, “Japanese aesthetics: The construction of meaning,” Philosophy
East and West, 45:3 (1995), pp. 367–386.
losophy of non-permanence, non-subject subjectivity, non-substantial

substance, and the patterns of strong permanence, strong subject,
and strong substance sustaining modernity in all its variations, west-
ern and not. On the one hand we find in Japanese tradition elements
which could easily be included in Gianni Vattimo’s philosophy of
weak thought, as I indicated in a lecture I gave here in Kyoto in 1997,
“Yowaki Shii: Kaishakugaku no Mirai o Minagara” (Weak Thought:
A Look at the Future of Hermeneutics): the notion of a soft subject
(no-mind or mushin)—a self that “is seen by others, that sees itself,
and that sees itself as other,” which is Zeami’s definition of the Nō
actor; or, the concept of soft time (mujō)—all elements that are part of
a philosophy of Nothingness developed by Buddhist thinkers in pre-
modern times, and re-grounded in logic in modern times by Nishida
Kitarō.16 At the same time, once these supple elements are made into
categories, such as aesthetic categories which impose an uncomfort-
able universality over an untamable particularity, they lose their pliant
nature and are reconfigured into patterns of violence, power, homo-
geneity: the nation, the emperor, the national language, the nation’s
laws, the national subject, inside (Japan) and outside (the West) with
no place for East Asia, frontside (omote/tatemae) and underside (ura/
honne) with all the implication of participation and exclusion.
Looking at trends in contemporary scholarship in the arts one
is bound to wonder whether the hermeneutical premises of critical
discourse have the ability to fit artistic expressions that are meant to
defy such basic hermeneutical categories. Vattimo’s project of slim-
ming down the heavy weight champions of metaphysical tradition was
undoubtedly inspired by the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth
century, as one can see from a book that he published in 1967—prob-
ably the book among the many written by the Italian philosopher that
is most related to the arts, and one of the few that has not yet been
translated in English, Poesia e Ontologia (Poetry and Ontology).17 This
book reflects a certain uneasiness on the part of a teacher of aesthetics
16
Michael F. Marra, “Yowaki Shii: Kaishakugaku no Mirai wo Minagara” (Weak
thought: A look at the future of hermeneutics) (in Japanese), 95th Nichibunken Forum
(1997), pp. 1–39. For revised versions in English see Michael F. Marra, “The new as
violence and the hermeneutics of slimness,” in Proceedings of the Midwest Association
for Japanese Literary Studies 4 (1998), pp. 83–102, and Michael F. Marra, “Japan’s
missing alternative: Weak thought and the hermeneutics of slimness,” in Versus,
83/84 (1999), pp. 215–241.
17
Gianni Vattimo, Poesia e Ontologia (Milan: Mursia, 1967).
238 chapter twelve
in dealing with his academic subject matter in light of the poetics of

the 20th century which were a response to and a resistance against
Hegel’s proclamation of the “death of art” in the sense that art was
allegedly superseded by philosophy. Vattimo argues that poetics in
the 20th century has replaced philosophy (and especially aesthetics),
by producing what philosophy has ceased to produce: reflections on
the arts. By challenging the notion of “meaning” as conceived within
the frameworks of big narratives, the avant-gardes have challenged the
notion of aesthetic pleasure which derived from the immediate under-
standing of such meanings. No meaning is relevant to the arts of the
avant-gardes aside from an ontological one, which is the fact that art
“is”—that is to say, an alternative between the intuitive knowledge of
art and the discursive knowledge of thought. Following Heideggerian
lines, Vattimo notes that in art the happening of a radical novelty takes
place on the level of being-in-the-world. As a result, by experiment-
ing with new linguistic forms, and also by engaging with a variety of
political and ideological stances, the 20th century avant-garde move-
ments have strongly emphasized the breaking of continuities. What-
ever “meaning” might be left in the works of impressionists, cubists,
and surrealists is a production of difference, distance, discontinuity.
In order to be explained, artistic experiments need an aesthetics of
dis-identification—a disruption of the logic of continuity and identity
brought about by the poetics of the 20th century. To put it in Vat-
timo’s terms, “it is art that configures itself today as the privileged
place for a negation of identity, and, therefore, the privileged place
for the happening of truth.”18 It goes without saying that for Vattimo
truth is a weak one, an uninterrupted process of interpretations that
undermine the possibility of a strong, unified truth.
The lack of a unifying focus, the blurred vision of refracted images,
the neutralization of meaning, the discontinuous relation to the real,
the search for the avoidance of a totality of visibility, the construc-
tion of chaotic sites where different arts collide, the proliferation of
everyday objects, and meaning burdening the work of art, were the
common threads running through the presentations at a three-day
conference at the Getty Center in Los Angeles last April. Titled “Raji-
karu! Experimentations in Japanese Art 1950–1975,” this conference
was part of a three month long series of events on Japan called, “Art,
18
Gianni Vattimo, Poesia e Ontologia, pp. 199–200.
Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar

Japan 1950–1970.”19 The latter title came from the classification that
Reiko Tomii presented of post-war Japanese art in which the anti-art
movements of the late ‘50s-mid ‘60s aimed at dismantling art, as one
can see from the works of the Gutai (Concrete Art Association) group.
The non-art movements of the mid ‘60s–ca.’ 70 presented critiques of
the production of art, as well as of the institution of art, as exempli-
fied by works of the Monoha (School of Things) group. Discussions
followed on the reduction of meaning to a displacement of joints, as
in the case of the Butō dances of Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986). In
their questioning of modernity and the challenge of its values, efforts
were made on the part of post-1945 Japanese artists to replace the
idea of “meaning” with the notion of “situation,” which fits more cor-
rectly post-modern perceptions of a reality in constant flux. “Art is
explosion,” in the famous words of Okamoto Tarō (1911–1996)—an
explosion of meaning, among other things, to the point that speech
becomes nonsense, and Akatsuka Fujio’s (b. 1935) world of nonsense
gag manga of farts is born. In a world in which meaning is lost, even
nonsense becomes problematic, as the manga of Katsumata Susumu
(b. 1943) shows in its refusal to hear, since “the one who declares
nonsense is full of it.”20
The brittleness increasingly experienced by the notion of meaning
over more than a century is also reflected in the porosity of borders
in postmodern societies which resist more and more ideas of nation-
hood and national borders. The themes of exile and diasporic move-
ments reverberated through a conference held at UCLA last May,
titled, “Migration, Empire, and Transformation.”21 This conference
also analyzed the role of artists in the global settings of post-moder-
nity. It opened with the screening of Fresh Kill, the 1994 movie by
the Taiwanese-American artist Shu Lea Cheang. Fresh Kills (from the
19
The conference, organized by the Getty Research Institute and the PoNJA-Gen-
Kon (Post-1945 Japanese Art Discussion Group), took place on April 27–28, 2007,
at the Getty Center, and was followed by a Graduate Workshop on April 29 at the
UCLA Armand Hammer Museum. The three-month series of events, which included
exhibitions, a video series, and the conferences, took place from March 6 until June 3,
2007, at the Getty Research Institute, Exhibition Gallery.
20
Presentation by Ryan Holmberg, Nansensu: The Practice of a Word Circa 1970
(Meow!), 2007.
21
This conference, which was held on May 16–18, 2007, was the first annual
conference of The Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities, “Cultures in
Transnational Perspective.”
240 chapter twelve
Middle Dutch word kille, which means “riverbed” or “water channel”)

is a stream and freshwater estuary in the western portion of the New
York City borough of Staten Island. It is the site of the Fresh Kills
Landfill, formerly New York City’s principal landfill. In the words of
Gina Marchetti:
The film revolves around the detritus of an urban consumer society in
which transnational corporations bring raw materials from the Third
World, contaminating goods and people in the process, and dump them
in the borough. Fresh Kill makes sense out of this refuse by exploring
connections among people on the edges of corporate capitalism and off-
center in a white, bourgeois, heterosexual world. From the beaches of
Taiwan’s Orchid Island, used as a nuclear waste site in the 1980s, to the
shores of New York’s Staten Island, Fresh Kill collapses the globe in soli-
darity against racism, sexism, and the excesses of transnational corporate
capitalism as resistance circulates through networks originally designed
to facilitate the exchange of labor, commodities, and capital.22
Hybridity is the keyword of this movie which deals with two young
lesbian parents raising a five year old daughter in the midst of a multi-
cultured New York City which is polluted by a multinational corpo-
ration producing a sushi scare and nuclear waste; it is definitely a
genre- and gender-bending masterpiece.
Among the many artworks presented at the conference was Yanagi
Yukinori’s (b. 1959) The World Flag Ant Farm which Yanagi worked
on while studying at Yale University and won him an award in the
Invited Artists Section at the Venice Biennale in 1993. A collage of dif-
ferent flags from all over the world, the World Flag Ant Farm reduces
the imposing structures of strong nations to the labor intensive world
of little ants, thus deconstructing national ideologies in the process.
Midori Yoshimoto presented the work of Nagasawa Nobuho, who
transformed the military structures of bunkers used in World War
II to defend Denmark into motels in a project titled, “Bunker Motel/
Emergency Womb” (1995). Nagasawa was inspired by the fact that
these bunkers had been used by boys and girls after the war for much
more peaceful purposes: to find a few moments of intimacy. All the
furnishings of the motels are made of military cloth, while each bunker
is filled with five hundred eggs in the size of a human womb—a testi-
22
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?FRESHKILL.
mony to the fragility of life in the form of as many eggs as a woman

produces in her lifetime, five hundred.23
Even if one still feels some reticence to follow Susan Sontag’s invita-
tion to have hermeneutics replaced by an erotics of art, it is becom-
ing increasingly questionable to have modern artistic expressions
discussed in terms of an aesthetics—maybe a non-aesthetics, or an
anti-aesthetics—which is not ready to deal with new media and new
interfaces. One of the reasons I accepted your kind invitation to this
conference was to get a glimpse of the major issues underlying the aes-
thetic discourses which deal today with contemporary arts produced
in non-Western countries, especially Japan and East Asia. Given the
immense creativity shown by Asian artists in current international
scenes, this might be an especially fruitful occasion for aestheticians
from China, Korea, Japan and other East- and South-East Asian coun-
tries to develop new critical approaches to the contemporary arts. The
urgency of the matter is highlighted by what is currently available in
the West in terms of contemporary Japanese aesthetics. Today, in the
United States, Japanese art is preponderantly represented by forms of
popular culture such as cartoons (manga) and anime. Therefore, criti-
cal discourses on the arts have tended to follow an extremely profitable
market that should raise a few eyebrows among art historians who still
cling to the notion of high art.
In the United States, Master and Ph.D. dissertations have begun
to be written on icons of popular culture such as, for example,
Murakami Takashi (b. 1962), whose trilogy Superflat was a hit in the
United States. As Murakami himself indicates, the trilogy began with
the question, “What is art?” in an attempt to understand the meaning
of art in Japan.24 This project started in the year 2000 with the publi-
cation of the book Super Flat and an exhibition with the same name,
first at the Shibuya branch of the fashion department store Parco, and
then at its Nagoya location; it eventually traveled to the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The second part was held in 2002 at
the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris with the exhibi-
tion “Coloriage” (no catalogue available). The project ended in 2005
23
Midori Yoshimoto’s presentation was titled, “Public Art as Catalyst of Social
Action: Transnational Collaborations in the Art of Nobuho Nagasawa.”
24
Takashi Murakami, “Superflat trilogy: Greeting, you are alive,” in Takashi
Murakami, ed., Little boy: The arts of Japan’s exploding subculture (New York: Japan
Society and Yale University Press, 2005), p. 151.
242 chapter twelve
with the publication and exhibition of Little Boy in New York. The
theoretical underpinnings of the project already appeared in a 1999
manifesto titled “Tokyo Pop” which appeared in the April issue of
Kōkoku Hihyō (Advertisement Criticism). This was an invitation to
leave behind the “childish, irresponsible society” following the collapse
of the bubble economy. The word “Superflat” goes back to the myth of
immanence that for centuries has accompanied Western perceptions
of Japan: Japanese culture cannot transcend the flat surface. Murakami
was inspired with the name by the comment that a gallerist in Los
Angeles made about his work: “It’s super flat, super high quality, and
super clean!”25 The basic principle behind this project is emphasis on
the flat surfaces of the contemporary world, which is made of com-
puter graphics, flat-panel monitors, and the compression of data in
images. The reference to the idea of Superflat also hints at the leveling
and the dissolution of the hierarchy between high art and subculture—
a hierarchy that Murakami states did not exist in Japan prior to the
importation of the notion of “art” from the West. In other words, the
powerful eruption of Japan’s subculture on the stage of high art in the
West stands as a resistance to the Western institution of art—a resis-
tance which is predicated on continuity between, on the one hand, the
artists of the Superflat and their consumers (the otaku generation),
and, on the other, the entertainers and craftsmen of Japan’s past, who
excelled in the arts while being shunned as outcasts. If we follow these
lines of thinking endorsed by the art critic Sawaragi Noi, then, one
should see in the struggle for “leveling” on the part of Superflat art-
ists a critique of hierarchies and discriminations, beginning with the
hierarchic notion of “art.”
However, if the Superflat project allows itself to be explained so
simply with the traditional language of hermeneutics, then, it might
not be as revolutionary as it claims to be. Or, hermeneutics should
be given more credit that it has been given for its ability to articulate
revolutionary programs of resistance. The question remains whether
the “art” of Superflat is as revolutionary as its program is meant to
make it. Is the so-called “otaku” generation endowed with the aspira-
tion for change, or isn’t it rather an expression of self-destruction?
25
Takashi Murakami, “Superflat trilogy: Greeting, you are alive,” in Takashi
Murakami, ed., Little boy: The arts of Japan’s exploding subculture (New York: Japan
Society and Yale University Press, 2005), p. 151.
By otaku (lit. your home) I mean a generation of young people who

spend most of their time secluded in their rooms, passionately gath-
ering anime and manga, especially pornographic ones, and naively
taking the virtual world of computers to be the real world. In other
words, otaku are maniacs whose excesses extend to personal computer
geeks, video games, graphic novels, and so on. These are the recluses
of the contemporary super flat world—a world of total alienation that
finds political expression in the terrorist acts of groups such as the
Aum Shinrikyō (Aum Supreme Truth) which in 1995 launched a Sarin
gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Sawaragi Noi has argued that the
achievement of Japanese Neo Pop is to have provided the otaku youth
with an alternative outlet to their obsessions that is not as potentially
violent as the charged statements of religious cults. Or, in Sawaragi’s
eloquent words,
The true achievement of Japanese Neo Pop is that it gives form to the
distortion of history that haunts Japan—by reassembling fragments of
history accumulated in otaku’s private rooms and liberating them from
their confinement in an imaginary reality through a critical reconstitu-
tion of subculture. In doing so, these artists have refused to take the delu-
sional path of resorting to warfare like Aum; instead, they have found a
way out through the universal means of art, transferring their findings
to the battlefield that is art history. In essence, Japanese Neo Pop, as
exemplified by the work of Takashi Murakami among others, visualizes
the historical distortion of Japan for the eyes of the whole world.26
Maybe, a jet of milk shut from the bulging breast of a cute little girl in
Murakami’s Hiropon (1997), or the spurt of semen of My Lonesome
Cowboy (1998), are not as fatal as a handmade bomb, particularly if
one looks at the cute, dreamy eyes of the boy and the girl. Seen from
the genealogical perspective of erotic manga of the Edo period in gen-
eral, and of Katsushika Hokusai’s (1760–1849) manga in particular,
these works can even find an aura of respectability. Murakami’s little
figurines can be found in Los Angeles and New York at the Giant
Robot stores, an extremely successful chain of stores selling control
designer flash drives, brickwall rings, Giant Robot mesh caps, Viking
T shirts, stationary, clothing, and “works of arts” at a very modest
price. Giant Robot is also the title of a magazine which is extremely
26
Noi Sawaragi, “On the battlefield of “Superflat”: Subculture and art in postwar
Japan,” in Takashi Murakami, ed., Little boy: The arts of Japan’s exploding subculture
(New York: Japan Society and Yale University Press, 2005), p. 205.
244 chapter twelve
popular among younger Asian Americans and the large numbers of

fans of otaku culture in the U.S. One of their founders, Eric Nakamura,
was recently recognized in Los Angeles at a fundraising dinner for the
Japanese American National Museum as a young, successful Japanese
American entrepreneur. The event was given luster by the presence of
the former Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, and the read-
ing of a letter of good wishes from Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii.
Evidently, the economic impact of these sub-cultures is massive. How-
ever, such impact cannot be disassociated from the transformation of
the cultural values of our youth, whose role models risk flattening an
entire history of search for depth and meaning, reducing that history
to the banal, the vulgar, and the mediocre—a vulgarity which emerges
quite clearly from the blog of Eric Nakamura, publisher and co-editor
of Giant Robot:
One reason why I don’t go to big events is Ticketmaster. They are crooks,
and a bunch of losers. Do you work for them? I know it’s a job, and it
sort of blows when people criticize your line of work, but Ticketmaster
is fucked up . . . American Airlines? Do you work here? This company at
least at LAX is one of the worst in their field.27
It might well be that the possibility of explaining Superflat with the
language of hermeneutics indicates the lack of avant-gardism in this
project, and emphasizes the cooptation of subcultures by big markets
and corporations. After all, Murakami Takashi sits on a multi-million
empire. In other words, Superflat could easily be associated with the
multinational corporation of Fresh Kill, rather than with the lesbian
parents turned activists. The links of otaku culture with Japan’s tra-
ditional past also re-inscribe this alleged postmodern phenomenon
within the cultural framework of categories developed by Japanese
hermeneuticians in late-Meiji. The reclusive youth of otaku obsessed
with gathering objects in the cramped space of their undersize rooms,
could easily be associated with Japan’s tradition of reclusion that put
inja bungaku (literature of reclusion) at the center of the Middle Ages.
The heroes sung in the anecdotal literature (setsuwa) of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries were known as “sukimono”—people com-
pletely dedicated to one art, either poetry, archery, music, painting, or
religious enlightenment, to the point of obsession and madness. As in
the case of Kamo no Chōmei’s (1155–1216) ten-foot square hermitage,
27
Retrieved June 30, 2007, from http://www.giantrobot.com/blogs/eric/index.html
or Saigyō’s (1118–1190) mountain retreat, their little huts were filled

with books on poetry, Buddhist scriptures, images of Amida and other
bodhisattvas, and musical instruments.28
The solitary environment from which these recluses draw utmost
enjoyment, especially aesthetic pleasure, is not unrelated to the virtual
spaces inhabited by the lonesome youth in dialogue with their com-
puters all day long. Suki (obsession for one thing) has been replaced
by “moe,” which literally means “budding”—a new aesthetic category
describing a person who is attracted to fictional characters. For exam-
ple, “meganekko moe,” or “glasses-girl moe,” indicates someone who
falls in love with fictional girls wearing glasses. A “tetsudō-moe” (train
moe) is someone who has a passionate interest in trains.
While the aesthetic categories of yūgen, sabi, and wabi came to be
used to portray the sadness, lonesomeness, mystery and depth of the
recluses who cut their ties from society—a sensibility that the prac-
titioners of the tea ceremony are enabled to re-live today—new aes-
thetic categories have been devised to talk about Japan’s New Pop
and Superflat. For example, “kawaii” (cute) best describes the child-
like character of the faces depicted by Murakami, sometimes scary,
as in the case of work by Nara Yoshitomo (b. 1959), but constantly
cute. Kawaii characters appear all over Japanese cartoons and anime
from Hello Kitty to Pokemon, from Doraemon to TarePanda (Droop-
ing Panda) and Anpanman (Bean Paste Bread Man). “Yurukyara” is
another category which combines a sense of looseness and lethargy
(yurui) with kyara, which stands for “characters.” Coined by Miura
Jun (b. 1958), a multitalented popular illustrator, this term conveys
28
In his Hōjōki (Account of My Hermitage, 1212), Chōmei describes his life alone
in the hut he built for himself on the hills outside the capital: “After settling on my
present place of retirement in the Hino hills, I extended the eastern eaves about three
feet to provide myself with a convenient spot in which to break up and burn firewood.
On the south side of the building, I have an open bamboo veranda with a holy water
shelf at the west end. Toward the north and of the west wall, beyond a freestanding
screen, there is a picture of Amida Buddha, with an image of Fugen alongside and
a copy of the Lotus Sutra in front. At the east end of the room, some dried bracken
serves as bed. South of the screen on the west side, a bamboo shelf suspended from
the ceiling holds three leather-covered bamboo baskets, in which I keep excerpts from
poetry collections and critical treatises, works on music, and religious tracts like Col-
lection of Essentials on Rebirth in the Pure Land. A zither and a lute stand next to the
shelf. The zither is of the folding variety; the handle of the lute is detachable. Such
is the appearance of my rude temporary shelter.” English translation by Helen Craig
McCullough, Classical Japanese prose: An anthology (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1990), p. 388.
246 chapter twelve
a sense of impotence, of sexual incapacity, which makes these char-

acters embrace opportunism by default. Murakami Takashi explains
yurukyara with the aid of traditional aesthetic categories, mimicking
the language of nationalistic aestheticians who stressed the particular-
ism of aesthetic discourses. He says,
Like wabi and sabi, synonyms for Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, yurui
evades ready translation. The best way to comprehend the term is to
place it along the extended lineage of words such as aware (sensitivity
or subjective emotion) and okashi (emotional attraction), which appeal
to human emotion.29
These artists seem not to realize that by relying on the abused lan-
guage of the hermeneutics of the nation they deprive their works of
the global aspect that they want to infuse into their works. This might
be due to the unresolved tension between universalism and particular-
ism—a tension that might need a new vocabulary if it wants to escape
the pitfalls of oversimplification. I am afraid I do not have a language
to describe postmodern artistic phenomena aside from the language
of hermeneutics. Therefore, I might not be able to make sense of non-
sense without the proper non-sensical vocabulary. At the same time,
I do not believe that the contemporary representatives of Japan’s pop-
ular arts do possess such a language. In conclusion, I can only advance
negative suggestions of what this aesthetics of the absence of meaning
could be:
1. It cannot be an aesthetics of the strong subject, either “Japanese,”

or “Chinese,” or “Korean”—it will have to pay attention to the
diasporic elements of geographic and emotive configurations (gen-
der studies, queer studies, lesbian studies, transnational studies,
etc.). It will have to be an anti-aesthetics of resistance dictated by
the social realities of the contemporary world. The supple elements
of Japanese traditional aesthetics will need not be reshaped into
categories, and should be kept as fluid as the migrations of people
from the countryside to the city, from foreign countries to Japan,
from Japan to foreign countries, and so on. Like Fresh Kill, it must
be a gender bender. In other words, it cannot be exclusionary.
29
Takashi Murakami, “Earth in my Window,” in Takashi Murakami, ed., Little boy:
The arts of Japan’s exploding subculture (New York: Japan Society & Yale University
Press, 2005), p. 137.
2. It cannot be theological—it will be a fierce attack on fundamental-

isms of all types, including all kinds of churches and institutions
working as categories. Examples of fundamentalism are bureau-
cratic democracies and legalistic democracies of the American type,
or the imperial institution, or theocratic forms of governments
called terrorism by other types of terrorists. This will be difficult
and unpleasant since monarchies (including Roman Catholicism
with which I sympathize from an aesthetic perspective in the ety-
mological sense of the word) tend to offer so much aesthetic appeal
to subjects in need of behavioral/ethical models (this last point
applies to the Japanese monarchy more than to the English one,
although the appeal factor is enormous in both monarchies).
3. It cannot be theoretically specific in the sense of embracing a theory
at the expense of another. This is where hermeneutics as interpreta-
tion is still quite valid, although, eventually, after all interpretations
are on the table, decisions will still need to be made. Japan can
play a decisive role in this area, because of the fluidity of theoreti-
cal orientations based since antiquity on the acceptance of different
epistemic systems (Shinto-Buddhist, Shinto-Taoist, Shinto-Confu-
cian types of syncretism)—systems that do not operate as exclusion-
ary categories such as Christianity, which explains the expulsion
from Japan of the Portuguese and Spaniards during the period of
national closure. However, Japan should make sure to avoid keep-
ing all theoretical orientations in the guest room on the first floor,
and keep living their lives in the secrecy of their study-room on
the second floor. In other words, the otaku who is filled with infor-
mation from the virtual world might want to leave his room for a
while, and take a walk outside, so as to make the art of Superflat
obsolete. At that point, we might learn to overcome once again our
fears of confronting ourselves with a world of depth. Who knows?
We might even be able to make deeper products that are appealing
to the general public and that are, as a result, economically profit-
able. Life might become once again worth living.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HERMENEUTICS OF EMPLACEMENT:
ON PLACES, CUTS, AND PROMISES
Basho (Place)
The spatial underpinnings of Nishida Kitarō’s (1870–1945) theory of

time are an essential guide to a reassessment of the importance that the
concepts of space and place have played, and continue to play in Japan.
The very idea of modernity is informed by the concept of time—a time
in the history of mankind, in which what is modern wins the querelle
between the ancients and the moderns. Never more than in modernity
has space found itself relegated to playing an ancillary role to progress,
whose ultimate goal is the erasure of whatever is past or present. It
comes as no surprise that the twentieth-century philosophical mas-
terpiece of modernity, Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) Sein und Zeit
(Being and Time, 1927), is an existential analysis of human life along
futural dimensions of time. Heidegger himself recognized the difficulty
of pursuing his study of Being in light of spatial dimensions—a diffi-
culty that deprived modern readers access to the challenges of a Sein
und Ort (Being and Place), a book that was never written.
At the same time, it comes as no surprise that challenges to West-
ern notions of modernity would come from countries like Japan in
which the vocabulary of philosophy, an essentially Western enterprise,
had to be interiorized before local knowledge could be articulated in a
manner that would be acceptable to the West. Modernity required the
articulation of knowledge in philosophical/scientific terms. Anything
that would fall short of this requirement would be labeled “mystical,”
and relegated accordingly to the obscurantism of a barbarian past.
Nishida secured his position as the “leading” Japanese philosopher
of the twentieth century by fully understanding the rules of modern
knowledge: the need to appropriate the language of philosophy in
Paper prepared for the International Symposium “Questioning Oriental Aesthetics

and Thinking: Conflicting Visions of ‘Asia’ under the Colonial Empires,” Interna-
tional Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyōto, Japan (November 8, 2010).
250 chapter thirteen
order to communicate a local “knowledge” that was originally shaped

by different rules. In other words, and as a way of exemplification,
the practice of sitting meditation commonly known as “Zen” had to
be translated into the language of subject, conscience, and will. At
the same time, the spatio/temporal categories of a body lying still in
the same position for hours at hand had to be rethought in terms of the
temporal categories of a society that is driven by a future of speed,
progress, and amnesia (of the past). The result was an inevitable cri-
tique of modernity in the language of modernity, or, at the very least,
the articulation of alternative models of modernity in which past and
present co-habit in the formation of the future.
Nishida’s critique of modernity acts as a reminder that values such
as progress, for example, are wide open to interpretation. In other
words, temporality in modern societies does not need to be an exqui-
sitely temporal category; it might well be a spatial temporality in the
way of pre-modern societies, even in examples of fast modernization
such as the Japanese one. Nishida spelled out the spatial elements of
time by linking temporality to his theory of “place” (basho႐ᚲ)—the
ultimate place that gives place to (“emplaces”) things, including time.
What did Nishida mean by “basho”? Basho is the translation of the
Buddhist notion of ultimate nothingness into the language of (West-
ern) philosophy, mainly Plato’s philosophy, as one can easily reconcile
basho with the idea of the “receptacle” (chōra) that the Greek philoso-
pher discusses in the dialogue Timeaus. Plato had set up the notion
of “place” as a third genre beyond the traditional opposition of logos
and mythos, the rational and the irrational—an attempt to overcome
the duality of oppositions by finding out the receptacle that was “giv-
ing place” (donner lieu)1 to these oppositions. Chōra stands in Plato’s
philosophy as the realization of the limits of Plato’s own thought that
is rooted in the opposition between the physical and the metaphysical,
the noetón (the mind) and the aisthetón (the senses). That is to say,
chōra is a reminder of the limits of metaphysics. Chōra is neither sub-
ject nor substance; at most, it can only receive oppositions and “give
place” to them, bringing them into being. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)
has pointed out that chōra is an apparently empty space, “an open
1
This expression is by Jacques Derrida, Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993), p. 18. For a
discussion of the relationship between Nishida’s basho and Plato’s chōra, see Jacynthe
Tremblay, Introduction à la Philosophie de Nishida (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007),
pp. 59–72.
hermeneutics of emplacement: places, cuts, and promises 251
overture, an abyss, or a chiasm,” in which the cleavage between the

sensible and the intelligible (body and soul) can come into being by
finding a place.2
In Nishida’s critique of chōra, Plato’s “receptacle” still remains “that
which locates itself in,” rather than “that in which” (ni oite aru basho)
things are located. Nishida believed that Plato’s chōra could still be fur-
ther included in a more enclosing structure, a structure that Nishida
called “place of absolute nothingness” (zettai mu no basho). As Nishida
argued in his essay Basho (Place, 1926), basho is the place that encloses
(tsutsumu ൮߻) all acts of conscience, the personal self (including the
opposition I/non-I), as well as the world of nature. Nishida’s logic of
place is made of three basho that he pictured as circles contained within
larger circles.3 Starting from the smaller circle and proceeding towards
the more encompassing, Nishida distinguishes 1) the basho of being
that determines the natural world and that finds its explanation in
the universal of judgment; 2) the basho of relative nothingness (non-
being) that determines the world of consciousness and is expressed by
the universal of self-consciousness; and 3) the basho of absolute noth-
ingness that determines the intelligible world and is explained by the
intelligible universal. In the basho of absolute nothingness the opposi-
tions, which are seen as auto-determination of this place, cease to be
simple oppositions since their identities are never fixed in advance,
being constructed by their location within this ultimate place. The
basho of absolute nothingness is the “that in which” of all oppositions,
without these oppositions becoming the object of determination, and
without them being one of the terms of the opposition; it is the “that
in which” comes into being the opposition between being and “oppo-
sitional nothingness” (tairitsuteki mu). Nishida argues that, “True
nothingness is not the nothing that opposes being and denies being;
it is what it creates the background (haikei) of being.”4 He gives the
example of what is not red vis-à-vis red—the non-red is still a color.
However, the place where the color is (iro ga oite aru mono wa) is not
a color, since both red and non-red are in it (kore ni oite aru). Basho
2
Jacques Derrida, Khôra, pp. 44–45.
3
Nishida visualizes the basho of absolute nothingness as “a circle without circum-
ference, whose center is everywhere”—a quotation from Pascal, who actually used the
word “sphere” rather than circle. See Nishida Kitarō, “Eien no Ima no Jiko Gentei,” in
Nishida Kitarō Zenshū, Vol. 6 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965), p. 187.
4
Nishida Kitarō, “Basho,” in Ueda Shizuteru, ed., Nishida Kitarō Tetsugaku Ronshū,
Iwanami Bunko Blue 124–4 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987), p. 77.
is “on the back” (haigo) where potential beings come into being, the
place of contradictions (mujun). This is the place where one can see
opposition-less objects, made of the fusion of form and matter.5 Basho
is beyond the standpoint of consciousness which is the standpoint of
nothing in opposition to being; it is the place where generic concepts
are broken and where one can see “true consciousness” (makoto no
ishiki). Basho is not a rejection of the standpoint of consciousness; it
is “the completion of consciousness.”6
Basho is the place of the negation of negation (hitei no hitei); there-
fore, in basho even things that are reflected on the place of opposi-
tional non-being can be negated. As Nishida points out in Basho, “The
field of consciousness can reflect objects as they are by truly emptying
the self.”7 This dialectic of negation at work in the field of absolute
nothingness dislodges the subject from its central location, and has it
absorbed inside the predicate.8 Whereas traditional logic moves in the
direction of the subject (shugo) of judgment, Nishida’s logic moves
in the direction of the predicate (justugo). In experiential knowledge,
realization becomes the predicate of experiential judgment. Nishida
points out that, “The self is not a ‘subjective unification’ (shugoteki
tōitsu); it must be a ‘predicative unification’ (jutsugoteki tōitsu). It is
not a point; it is a circle. It is not a thing (mono); it is a place (basho).
The fact that I (ware) cannot know the I is due to the fact that the
predicate cannot become a subject.”9 Or, “To be perceived by me, or
to come to my consciousness (watakushi ni ishiki ni serareru) means
5
Nishida Kitarō, “Basho,” p. 78.
6
Nishida Kitarō, “Basho,” p. 80. Here one can see Nishida’s attempt to provide a
logical explanation to the insight he introduced in his first major work, Zen no Kenkyū
(An Inquiry into the Good, 1911), in which he attempted to give a philosophical
foundation to the idea of a pure experience (junsui keiken) prior to any act of judg-
ment. During his entire life Nishida tried to explain philosophically the experience of
Buddhist enlightenment reached during meditation, so as “to know facts just as they
are, to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one’s own fabrica-
tions . . . without the least addition of deliberative discrimination.” (Nishida Kitarō, An
Inquiry into the Good. English translation by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives [New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990], p. 3). In other words, he wanted
to philosophize the experience of “seeing the form of the formless and hearing the
sound of the soundless.” Nishida made this statement in Hataraku Mono kara Miru
Mono e (From the Actor to the Seer, 1927). (Quoted in Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry
into the Good, p. x).
7
8
9
to be within the realm of such predicate.”10 Therefore, the self must be

considered “a predicative self”—a self that becomes a true subject “by
making the self into nothing (mu), and thus making it into a simple
basho (place).”11 Nishida called the absorption of the subject into the
predicate, “intuition” (chokkan). Only from within the place of abso-
lute nothingness the subject has an inkling of itself, or, to say it more
properly, “an intuition of itself.”12
Eien no Ima (Eternal Now)
If place in the form of basho plays such a major role in Nishida’s

thought, one inevitably expects from him the development of a spatial
theory of temporality. In this section of my paper I will discuss the
spatial elements of Nishida’s notion of time. Nishida follows Meister
Eckhart’s (c. 1260–c. 1328) definition of the end of time (the time
when God sent his son to earth) as the instant to which everything that
has happened over thousands of years is finally drawn, and into which
all has been absorbed. The eternal nature of time is underscored in
Plato’s theory of temporality. According to Plato, the creator, unable
to endow things with eternal life, produced a series of shades that move
eternally; these shades are nothing but time—something that has nei-
ther beginning nor end. Thus, time knows no past or future; it is all in
the present, an eternal present (nunc aeternum) from which an infinite
past and an infinite future are totally erased.13 Such an eternal present
is an absolute present (zettaiteki genzai ⛘ኻ⊛⃻࿷) that contains all
times. For Nishida, eternal time is not unchanging as in Plato’s case;
it is a “self-awakening of absolute nothingness” (zettaimu no jikaku
⛘ኻήߩ⥄ⷡ) in which time begins at any time and any place. The
infinite past and infinite future get extinguished at any point (ten ὐ)
of eternal time. This is also the point where time extinguishes itself.
For Nishida, time is definitely spatial, as he identifies the present as a
“there” (soko ߘߎ) or “place” (tokoro ᚲ) in which the self limits and,
thus, defines itself; a “here” (koko ᱝ) that is reached by everything
10
Nishida Kitarō, “Basho,” pp. 141–142.
11
12
13
Nishida Kitarō. “Eien no Ima no Jiko Gentei,” in Nishida Kitarō Zenshū, Vol. 6,
pp. 181–182.
that comes from an eternal past, and from which everything going to
an infinite future departs. This is “place in which” (koko ni oite ᱝߦ
ᣈߡ) the eternal past dissolves and where the eternal future begins.14
It is a “place” (basho ႐ᚲ) beyond “objective time” (kyakkanteki ji
ቴⷰ⊛ᤨ), i.e., beyond “history” (rekishi ᱧผ)—a place enveloping
(tsutsumu) an eternal dialectical movement of negation (hitei ุቯ)
and determination (gentei 㒢ቯ).15 The spatial dimension of Nishida’s
notion of time is also confirmed by the application of the same image
he used to visualize the basho of absolute nothingness to the circu-
lar determination of the eternal now: a circle without circumference,
whose center is everywhere—an image that is constantly present in
his essay “Eien no Ima no Jiko Gentei” (The Self Determination of the
Eternal Present).
In Nishida’s dialectical process of constant negation, the now is an
aspect of death which absolutely denies all times; at the same time,
the eternal now announces a birth in its denial of death—an absolute
affirmation. Nishida called this process “continuity of discontinuity”
(hirenzoku no renzoku 㕖ㅪ⛯ߩㅪ⛯), without ever positing a spe-
cific point of departure (either death or life) since times are the auto-
determination of the eternal now, and the present (whether death or
life) always determines itself. In Nishida’s circular time that escapes
any specific teleology or directionality one can easily envision the stage
of imperial successions in which the bodily expression of the sover-
eign changes, while its function has continued uninterrupted from
mythical times to the present (one hundred and twenty five genera-
tions), and well into the future. Nishida’s unfolding of the eternal now
can be visualized by calling to mind the enthronement ceremony of
the current emperor Heisei in November 1990. The extremely slow
movements of the imperial parade staging the Emperor preceded by
the imperial regalia (mirror, sword, and jewels), followed by Empress
Michiko, the Crown Prince, imperial princes, and other members of
the imperial family are a re-enactment of a ritual that is well known
to readers of the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712): the ultimate
positioning of the imperial couple under two canopies enshrining the
ancestral deities Izanagi (male) and Izanami (female). The circularity
of time (the iteration of acts and rituals) leaves no room for speedy and
14
Nishida Kitarō, ibidem, pp. 190–191.
15
Nishida Kitarō, ibidem, pp. 192–193.
straight movements towards future goals. The whole scene takes place
in the present, but a special present that encloses the whole history
of the land and its promised future: a discontinuous continuity that
is present, has been present, and (allegedly) will be present at every
single moment (shunkan ⍍㑆) of Japan’s historical time. The division
of time according to imperial epochs (we are now in the twenty-first
year of the Heisei era), rather than according to a foundational act
(the birth of Christ or of the first human emperor, Jinmu), assures
the circular determination of time, and the establishment of numer-
ous times whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere
to be found. In this sense, for Nishida, time is not a line of objective
determination, but rather a continuous self-determination of the pres-
ent according to a dialectic of absolute negation (death negating life,
life negating death). Through the intermediary of absolute nothing-
ness an instant proceeds to another instant in a constant process of
“continuity of discontinuity,” or “unity with a leap” (hiyakuteki tōitsu
㘧べ⊛⛔৻).16
Kire (Cuts)
The philosopher Ōhashi Ryōsuke (b. 1944) has translated Nishida’s idea
of “continuity of discontinuity” into what he calls, “cut-continuance”
(kire-tsuzuki ಾࠇ⛯߈).17 The scene of the imperial procession during
the enthronement ceremony, particularly the movement of the Emper-
or’s feet, is still relevant to a discussion of this term. The ritualistic
aspect of the slow movements—movements which would engender
laughter in the contemporary contexts of speed and instrumentality,
is well known to the spectators of the Nō theater. Actors on stage rub
their feet clad in white socks (tabi) on the floor, raising their toes, and
bringing one slow step to an end at the exact time when the other foot
begins a new slow step. One step comes to completion (cut, or kire) at
the same time that the cut movement continues (tsuzuku) into a new
movement. In other words, the emperor is dead but the monarchy
continues unabated. The movement of the emperor’s or actor’s feet
16
Nishida Kitarō, “Jiai to Taai oyobi Benshōhō,” in Nishida Kitarō Zenshū,
Vol. 6, p. 278.
17
Ōhashi Ryōsuke, ‘Kire’ no Kōzō: Nihonbi to Gendai Sekai (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha,
1986), p. 294.
does not follow the movement of a car’s tire which is constantly touch-
ing the road. Instead, they mimic the rhythm of breathing: inhaling,
exhaling, stopping a brief moment, then starting the same movement
again, until, one day, the breathing will stop forever, though life will
never end. In other words, the rhythm of “breathing” (iki ᕷ) is the
rhythm of life (iki ↢߈) and death—a rhythm of discontinuous con-
tinuity rather than of an impossible continuous continuity.18
Ōhashi has applied his notion of “cut-continuance” to a variety of
phenomena in Japanese culture. Swordsmanship, the supreme art of
cutting, has become the way of life for the samurai. The idea that life
can be cut-off at any time—an idea sustaining the warrior’s everyday-
ness, makes of death the necessary cut that is needed for the samurai’s
life to keep on going. In the art of flower arrangement the flower is cut
off from the nature of its roots so as to be made into a “living flower”
(ikebana ↢ߌ⧎)—a flower whose death (removal of the flower’s
resistance to time) guarantees the perennial expression of the flower’s
eternal existence in art. The poetic life of the haiku master Matsuo
Bashō (1644–1694) is also guaranteed by his being cut off from ordi-
nary life—a kire symbolized by the poet’s physical and spiritual jour-
neys. Dying to life is what enables the discontinuous movement of
the continuous stream of life—a movement expressed in the space of
seventeen syllables.19 One of Ōhashi’s most striking examples of the
“structure of kire-tsuzuki” is the dry garden (karesansui ᨗጊ᳓) of
the Ryōanji in Kyōto. In this garden rocks stand for mountains and the
sand stands for water. In other words, the rocks are “like” (gotoku/nyo
ᅤߊ) mountains; the sand is “like” water. Rocks and sand (the inor-
ganic world) cut off (kire) the garden from the organic world of nature
since the “real truth” (shinnyo ⌀ᅤ, lit., “true like”) stands on the side
of the “as if” rather than on the side of conventional landscape. Rocks
and sand are the true forms of nature. The tsuzuki part of the structure
is carried out by the earthen wall surrounding the garden—a wall that
also works as a second kire inasmuch as it cuts the garden off from the
surrounding landscape of fields and mountains beyond the wall. At
the same time, by allowing the viewer a glimpse of the reality beyond
18
Ōhashi Ryōsuke, ‘Kire’ no Kōzō: Nihonbi to Gendai Sekai, pp. 8–10.
19
Ōhashi Ryōsuke, “The Hermeneutic Approach to Japanese Modernity: ‘Art-
Way,’ ‘Iki,’ and ‘Cut-Continuance,’ ” in Michael F. Marra, Japanese Hermeneutics:
Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 2002), pp. 31–35.
the garden the earthen wall rejoins the inorganic world of the dry gar-
den with the nature outside the wall that is customarily (and errone-
ously) perceived as “real.” A continuation is established between the
internal dry landscape and the external “natural” world. The artistry
of the garden’s master, Musō Kokushi (1275–1351), works as a third
type of kire-tsuzuki since it separates and stitches back together natu-
ral beauty and artistic beauty—an artistry that succeeds in establish-
ing the “real” (in Buddhist terms) truth of nature.20 It goes without
saying that behind Ōhashi’s structure lays the ambition of reconciling
Kant’s aesthetics of nature (shizen-bi ⥄ὼ⟤) with Hegel’s aesthetics
of art (geijutsu-bi ⧓ⴚ⟤). Art restores beauty to a phenomenon, nat-
ural decay (withering and death), that, if left to nature, could only be
described in terms of ugliness.21 This was a rather complicated move
since Ōhashi needed to respond to Hegel’s allegations of the alleged
barbarism of “Asian” art—an overgrown garden deprived of the high
spirituality that only Romantic art possesses. Ōhashi found in Zen the
spirituality that comes to the rescue of the allegedly first and foremost
element of Japanese artistic expression—nature.
Nature notwithstanding, in his discussions of kire Ōhashi tends to
privilege the dimension of time over space. Even when it comes to
architecture—the most spatial of all arts, the cut between “nature”
and “artifice” (building as human construction) is predicated on the
alleged existence of an essentially “pure, pristine” time prior to all plas-
tic activities on the part of human beings (kizen ᯏ೨). The associa-
tion of Japan with nature and of artificiality with an “other” coming
from the outside (continental influences) are the structural elements
of kire—elements which become suspicious because of the artificial
associations inherited from centuries of nativist discourses. Tsuzuki is
represented by the alleged ability of the “Japanese” to incorporate the
natural into the artificial—a mark, according to Ōhashi, of the “soft
self-sameness/identity” (yawaraka na jiko dōitsusei ᨵࠄ߆ߥ⥄Ꮖห
৻ᕈ) of the local psyche: “Like water that remains unchanged while
fitting different molds.”22 Kire presupposes sets of dualities which
20
21
Ōhashi argues that Zeami’s (1363?–?1443?) poetics of “flower” (hana ⧎)—the
highest levels of proficiency in the performance of a Nō actor—is related to the aware-
ness of the perishability of a real flower that is subject to a process of continuous
“change” (ka ൻ) and decay. Ōhashi Ryōsuke, ‘Kire’ no Kōzō: Nihonbi to Gendai Sekai,
pp. 14–16.
22
Ōhashi Ryōsuke, ‘Kire’ no Kōzō: Nihonbi to Gendai Sekai, p. 31.
Ōhashi cuts and stitches back together with the thread of art—an art
that works like nature (or “structure” [kōzō ᭴ㅧ] to use Ōhashi’s
term) rather than like “design” (ishō ᗧඅ). “Natural structures” are
the hometown ( furusato ߰ࠆߐߣ, a sacred word that cannot be rep-
resented by non-indigenous glyphs) of the local culture—a culture of
constant “nostalgia” (dōkei ᙏᙔ) towards a pristine nature of sounds,
which foreign scripts (Chinese characters and continental architectural
styles) have cut off from their original ground. And yet, these alien
forms are needed in order to make this original ground live forever, in
a continuity that goes well beyond the frame of human time—a time
that needs to be “cut” in order to be overcome.23
Ōhashi explains Japanese modernity as the time when kire reached
a major impasse: modernity’s privileging of scientific language when
dealing with the natural world has led the arts to reproduce nature
objectively through processes of copying and imitation. Painters began
producing realistic, “naturalistic” portraits of nature. As a result, no
need was felt any longer for the “cuts” that traditionally had made
nature immortal by entrusting to the arts the cutting of the natural
roots of the objects of representation. The continuance between “natu-
ral beauty” and “artistic beauty” could not rely any longer on the cuts
that in pre-modern and early modern times had sublimated nature
into art. In other words, art was “naturalized” to the point that the
imitation of nature had finally led to the demise of art and of the
practice of cut-continuance. Once an unforgiving rationality had taken
control over the imagination—a process that Japan had to embrace in
order to compete with the Western giant, the process of kire was cut
off from its roots. The world of kire had become “a different world”
(isekai ⇣਎⇇)—a utopic “other” more related to the imagination
(and aspirations) than to everydayness. Paradoxically, with moder-
nity the West becomes Japan’s “self-world” (jiko sekai ⥄Ꮖ਎⇇) or
its true identity, while Japan’s past was reduced to “a different, alien
world.”24 However, attempts to resist Western modernity opened new
venues for the dialectic of kire-tsuzuki; these were the paths followed
by all those skeptics who pondered over the ills of modernization and
tried to stitch once again Japan’s future with its past. One could argue
that modernity stands as a major “cut” between a past that feeds on
23
24
nostalgic memories (a past continuously invented) and a monstrous

future of uncertainties (the abyss into which all values have crumbled).
In this sense, kire is reduced to a hundred years of history between
the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries—the crevice between
the pre-modern and the post-modern. It goes without saying that, for
Ōhashi, kire offers the key for the post-modern overcoming of moder-
nity. The cutting of a modernity that originally did not belong to
Japan, although it became the identifying force of the whole country,
is a precondition for a movement towards an age in which rationality
and functionality cannot continue to proceed unquestioned. In other
words, recycling the pre-modern is the only chance for modern Japan
to create a more meaningful post-modernity—a post-modernity that
excises the ills of modernity with the scalpel of the past.25
Ōhashi’s construction of oppositions such as inside and outside
(Japan and the West), nature and artifice, follows a narrative shared
by a variety of Japanese writers in the nineteen-seventies and eight-
ies—a rehearsal of themes championed in earlier times by members
of the Kyōto school. Someone today will undoubtedly take issue with
such constructions of an inner space so much distinct from the “inva-
sions” of outer cultural trends—an idea that goes back to members of
the National Learning Movement (Kokugaku), foremost among them
Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). However, behind this superficial read-
ing of Ōhashi’s work lays his ambitious project to reconcile a major gap
in the history of aesthetics: the slippage between Kant’s natural beauty
(shizen-bi ⥄ὼ⟤) and Hegel’s artistic beauty (geijutsu-bi ⧓ⴚ⟤).
With Hegel, nature disappears from the confines of beauty that are
occupied by the work of art. Nature is too wild and untamable to be
able to contain the spirituality that Hegel deemed to be the core value
of aesthetic beauty. It comes as no surprise if Hegel relegated Asia
to the first and less developed stage of aesthetic thought—the stage
which, in his opinion, was most deprived of spiritual depth. It was
sufficient to observe the dense and stubborn growth of vegetation in
tropical Asia to realize its “barbaric” dimension—a barbarism over-
come by the harmonious landscape of Mediterranean Greece and,
even more so, by the “spiritual” land of Hegel’s Germany. The jour-
ney of the spirit that Hegel described so powerfully in his Aesthetics
was destined to have an immense influence on subsequent aesthetic
25
thought which developed in secular forms ideas refined by centuries

of Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and Christianity. A major challenge
for Japanese aestheticians was to demonstrate that a culture so much
centered on the cult of nature (Shintoism, for example) could easily
combine nature and spirituality—a fact that explains the great empha-
sis put by Japanese thinkers, especially of the Kyōto School, on the
alleged “depth” of Zen spirituality. In other words, Japanese thinkers
attempted to explain Kant’s natural beauty (a beauty which is at the
core of Japanese thought) in terms of Hegel’s spirituality that finds its
sublimation in art. Evidently, Japanese philosophers were confronted
with the need to explain that the Japanese concept of nature (jinen
⥄ὼ, or coming-into-being-by itself) was different from the notions of
natura naturans and natura naturata that underscored Western ideas
of nature. Jinen excludes the confrontation of subject (the creator) and
object (the created), thus opening a path towards the solution of a
major aesthetic conundrum: what/who is in charge of the aesthetic
act? Is it the natural world represented in the work of art (the sublime
of landscapes), or is it the genius in charge of artistic representation?
Jinen is neither object nor subject—it is mediation between the two
in terms of the self-creating process of both nature and the work of
art. Are we faced with a work of art without author? Yes, in the sense
that once a database called “nature” comes into being (or, translated
in artistic terms, a set of poetic words or of artistic patterns—kata ဳ,
the counterpart of “styles” in the West), then anyone can access the
database and assemble words (or colors) in ways that the final product
could be anybody’s product—a fact that explains the irrelevance in
Japan of authorship until modern times. In other words, spirituality is
not premised on the central position reserved to man in Hegel’s phi-
losophy (man replacing the absolute subject, or God). It is the result
of the coming into being of an action shared by different subjects who
inhabit a similar space. That is to say, spirituality is a “place” rather
than a “time” called “man.”
In Kire no Kōzō Ōhashi takes on an issue of fundamental importance
by choosing to deal with Japan in terms of aesthetics, and by analyzing
the relationship between place and subject. The conclusion can be eas-
ily drawn in light of the massive literature that exists in Japan (and in
East Asia in general) on a weakened subject seen as a simple speck in
the order of things. Place triumphs over the weak subject, as Nishida
potently underscored when he talked about art as the way to stabilize
the form of the formless and the sound of the soundless. A poem is the
place where the formless and the soundless take on form and sound. As
for who acted within the place, this is definitely a curious biographical
happening that could not have occurred without a previously existing
poetic space. That is to say, with the poetics of the genius one does not
go very far in understanding Japanese aesthetics. This latter point also
indicates that when critical studies of the Japanese arts are made, bio-
graphical studies are much less justified than topological studies of the
archives made available to individual subjects. However, I doubt that
Ōhashi ever took his arguments this far, and drew the consequences
that I am drawing from his data. His concerns seem to be located in
the space of a person’s life and death (shōji ↢ᱫ)—i.e., in the temporal
dimension of the individual. The idea of “cut-continuance” is, after all,
the killing (kire) of nature (the religious training of a holy man as a
way to escape the bondage of everydayness), so as to be able to go on
living (tsuzuki) forever an authentic life of spiritual depth (as a recluse,
or an artist). In other words, Ōhashi’s notions of “nature” and “art”
are still very temporal along lines which are still very much Hegelian.
But, how can one respond to Hegel’s criticism of Asia’s barbarism
by maintaining Hegel’s idea of temporality—the journey of a “spirit”
which develops in time and over time from the barbarian Asian past
to the contemporary German Romantic movement? Can we return
jinen/shizen to its “original” spatial components? Can space/place
become a ground for a critique of Western-types of modernity? This
is a dangerous question in so far as the horrific path of soil and blood
comes immediately to mind as an alternative to the cult of unbridled
progress. After all, time has won two world wars over space; however,
current attempts to make the world homogeneous in terms of time
and space (globalization) may look successful on an economic level
(at least, for someone), but have been disastrous on a politics level, as
the ambiguous usage of the term “terrorism” confirm. Then, is there a
way to think space and place in less dangerous terms?
O-yakusoku (Promise)
Ōhashi’s temporal structure of “cut-continuance” provides me the

opportunity to deal spatially with the relationship between pre-modern
and post-modern times (continuance) via the cut of the modern era.
I will apply Ōhashi’s concept of kire to the century between the late
1860s (the time of the Meiji Restoration) and the late 1960s (the end of
the US “occupation”)—in a word, the time of Japan’s modernity. If we

bracket this century that witnessed the birth of everything modern in
Japan (science, technology, language, politics, economy, philosophy—in
a word, modern knowledge), and try to find a common denominator
between pre-modern and post-modern attempts to overcome moder-
nity, one is necessarily confronted with a re-thinking of the notion of
“progress.” That is to say, the obsession with time that characterizes
modernity (including Ōhashi’s category of kire) forces one to recon-
sider time in pre-modern Japan. It is not necessary to go back to an
age when the calendar had not yet been imported from the continent
via Korean emissaries. The calendar did not bring major variations to
the measuring of time that, being a courtly product, turned around
the seasonal recurrence of rites and ceremonies at the court. Protocol
defined action at the court, including the time in which such actions
took place—spatial seasonal boxes (spring, summer, autumn, and win-
ter) that sustained the structural framework of the political and cul-
tural life of the aristocracy. From 905 until 1439 emperors ordered the
compilation of twenty-one poetic anthologies organized around the
same seasonal blocks—another example of Nishida’s “eternal time” of
recurrence, or “discontinuous continuity.”26 This was a time made of
space—the space of the court and of courtly achievements that were
oblivious to “time” in the sense of progress as conceived by moder-
nity. At the death of an emperor a new era began (with a new name)
in order to avoid producing a sense of linear history. One always had
to go back to origins (the ancestral couple) in order to make sense of
what was happening in the present. The future was basically a repro-
duction of the past—an idea that finds very little support in modern
times. In other words, one had to go back to the original box, or to use
a word related to poetry and the arts, to the original “patterns” (kata
ဳ) codified by centuries of repetitive practices. In poetry, these “pat-
terns” (what today we would call “styles,” minus the temporal compo-
nent) were dictated by the choice of words that were set in the cultural
databases of the aristocracy—databases that were not easy to access, as
the intricate history of the appropriation of court culture on the part
of monks, warriors, and merchants demonstrates. The spatial nature
of these databases—words that had to be used independently from the
26
See Michael F. Marra, Seasons and Landscapes in Japanese Poetry: An Introduc-
tion to Haiku and Waka (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).
actual languages in vogue at the time—guaranteed that, structurally

speaking, poetry would follow the exact same structure at work at a
court that strove to maintain sameness and reduce otherness. That is
to say, people always knew what to expect from a poem on its way to
be formulated—an unbreakable “promise” (o-yakusoku) on the part
of the poet to apply the poetic database to his or her composition. No
surprises, no betrayals—or, maybe a small surprise, that tiny turn of
expression that would distinguish a great poet from a good one.
If kire seems to work relatively well in defining the cut between
pre-modernity and modernity (one should think of modern Japanese
poetry—aside from good tanka or haiku—in which rules are consid-
ered obstacles to the creation of good poetry), tsuzuki, then, could be
applied to post-modernity (us), with a word of warning. Our moder-
nity definitely continues (after God’s demise, one can only count on
a very personal subject); under no circumstance our modern self will
ever be short-circuited. At the same time, however, Japanese critiques
of modernity beg for a surgical removal of modernity and the stitch-
ing together of the walls of pre- and post-modernity. It is interesting
to notice in this regard the resurgence (with a vengeance) of databases
in contemporary culture—especially the popular culture of animation,
computer games, and cartoons (manga) which define Japanese post-
modernity more eloquently than any other artistic endeavor. Inter-
estingly, today in Japan the most popular “artistic” expressions—the
realm of the solitary otaku so often vilified by believers in “high”
culture—have replaced in popularity and charisma (read, the market)
the remnants of “court” culture and their epiphanies (the literature
known in Japan as “pure literature” or jun-bungaku ⚐ᢥቇ). Pure
literature continues to inquire about the deep crises of the subject and
its profound interiority, following a time line that defines the core of
modernity. On the other hand, animation presents de-subjectivized
characters which are made of common elements produced by data-
bases. That is to say, viewers already know what to expect from these
characters (no new existential surprises) since a promise has already
been made to them before they begin watching the film. Something
new will pop-up from the character (maybe the position of a single
hair on the character’s head which in Japanese is known as “ahoge” or
silly hair)—a slight variation that distinguishes a great anime from a
good one. The concept of slight variation defines what today we would
call originality—a reshuffling of the elements found in the database.
How did poetic databases work in pre-modern times?
Tani Motoko argues that in the composition of classical verse

(waka) places “come with ‘a promise’ (o-yakusoku).”27 The reference is
to what Japanese poets called, “the pillow of songs” (uta-makura ᱌ᨉ)
or, more generally speaking, “poetic language” (uta-kotoba ᱌ߎߣ߫).
Poetic language comes with specific promises that poets must keep—
acts of loyalty to and humility in front of the poetic databases that pro-
vide such language. The poet does not create any language; language
is given to the poet in the sense that the poet must find a location
within these databases. In other words, the place of poetry speaks, and
the ability of the poet is measured against his or her ability to place
the word within the right context. It is interesting to notice that in the
Heian period the general expression “poetic language” gave place to
the more specific term utamakura, a word that is mainly related to
concrete places (chimei ࿾ฬ). From as early as the ninth century
poetry was already considered a “place.” If the databases worked as
empty places inasmuch as, to use Edward Casey’s words, they acted as
“a reservoir of connections yet to come, or a least yet to be specified,”28
the finished poem worked as “a common place,” or a place that dic-
tates to poets the subject of composition. This becomes clearer if one
thinks of the practice of composing poems on specific geographical
areas (a famous mountain, a well-known river, or a barrier between
regions)—a practice which, by the way, is called, “uta-makura.” Tech-
nically speaking, these are not compositions about a place; they are
actually compositions by the place in the sense that the place dictates
to the poet the areas to be sung according to the database, what needs
to be seen, and the pathic relationships between the place, the poet,
and the listener (or reader in later ages). That is to say, places come
with a memory of their own—a memory constructed by earlier poems,
maintained by the poetic databases, and transmitted by later poets.
The subject is erased in favor of an alleged coming into being of the
Being of the place. The self (the poet) is meaningful only in so far as it
is presented as the disclosure of the place. Nothing more than a pillow-
song succeeds in making authorship (what Ōhashi referred to as the
human time of life-and-death or shōji) a secondary issue. Only with
the canonization (= historicization) of poetry, readers began paying
27
Tani Motoko, Waka Bungaku no Kiso Chishiki (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 2006),
p. 101.
28
This is expression is by Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical His-
tory (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 48.
attention to authors who with their newly acquired fame succeeded

in making these places immortal even in the mind of those unfamiliar
with poetry. A concrete example might help to envision the working
of the poetic database of places.
From hundreds of possible places that to this day are gathered in
alphabetical order in specialized dictionaries,29 I will choose a place
located in the heart of the Yamato culture, Hatsuse (or, Hase)—a
famous location in the Yamato Province, south of the ancient capital
Nara. This location corresponds to today’s Hase district in the city of
Sakurai of the Nara Prefecture. The region is shaped as a narrow gorge
surrounded by mountains on three sides (North, East, and West) with
a river flowing down through the valley. Higuchi Tadahiko (b. 1944)
considers this configuration to be one of Japan’s seven classical types
of landscapes, which he calls, “the komoriku type” (secluded valley,
hidden land) after a word provided by an ancient poetic database
of makura-kotoba (pillow-words)—epithets associated with specific
names. Komoriku 㓝࿖ (the hidden land) was actually an epithet which
used to introduce the name Hatsuse in ancient poetry. As Higuchi
points out, “The inner recesses form a secluded space, which is apt to
have a mysterious, otherworldly atmosphere about it.”30 Hatsuse was
also a place of burial or cremation from which the spirits were thought
to float about like clouds. Emperors Yūryaku (r. 456–479) and Buretsu
(r. 498–506) established their palaces in this area. Located on a major
thoroughfare to Ise, Hatsuse became a renowned center for the cult
of Kannon after the establishment of the Hase Temple in 686 on the
west side of the mountain. In 727 a statue of an Eleven-Face Kannon
was dedicated on the east side of the mountain. We find poems on
Hatsuse as early as the eighth century, the time when the poetic col-
lection Man’yōshū (Ten Thousand Leaves, 759) explained the meaning
of the name “Hatsuse” as “swift currents.” The poem is recorded anon-
ymously—a fact mirroring the diminished importance of the human
presence that is simply suggested by the attentive ear listening to the
rapids’ sound.
29
See, for example, Katagiri Yōichi, Uta-makura Uta-kotoba Jiten (Tokyo Kadokawa
Shoten, 1983).
30
Tadahiko Higuchi, The Visual and Spatial Structure of Landscape. Translated by
Charles S. Terry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1983), p. 95. See also,
p. 138.
Hatsusegawa On Hatsuse River

Nagaruru mio no The rapids in the current
Se o hayami Flow so swiftly
Ide kosu nami no There is cleanness in the sound
Oto no kiyokeku Of waves across the dam.31
The valley of Hatsuse became a site of production of human per-
ceptions—a deep, hidden bottom from which sounds, colors, and
fragrances reached the poet’s sensorial world. After all, Hatsuse
Mountain was known as “the hidden mountain” (Komoriku no Hat-
suse no yama),32 the mountain where one could perceive the presence
of the plum or cherry blossoms even when they were hidden from
sight, thanks to the fragrance reaching the poet’s nostrils. Fujiwara no
Shigeie (d. 1134) attempted to enjoy the view of the cherry blossoms
at their peak, only to realize that they were all shrouded in mist. The
fragrance, however, was such that he could visualize the white blossom
by admiring the white clouds trailing over the mountain.
Ohatsuse no Looking far in the distance
Hana no sakari o In search for the flowers’ full bloom
Miwataseba On Mt. Hatsuse—
Kasumi ni magau White clouds on the peak
Mine no shiragumo Scattered in the mist.33
The poet’s “ability to feel” (aware)—a central term in the vocabulary
of Japanese aesthetics—derives from the “nature of the place” (toko-
rogara), which becomes a “common place,” not in the sense of a trite
topos, but in the sense that the place must be sung by any poet worthy
of the name. The place dictates to the poet the imagery that is needed
in order to feel. It is not surprising that almost a century after Shigeie
composed his verses on the hidden flowers on hidden Mt. Hatsuse,
Fujiwara no Yoshitsune (1169–1206), the most powerful member of
the aristocracy in the late twelfth century, would try his hand at the
same theme:
31
Man’yōshū 7:1108. English translation by Edwin A. Cranston, A Waka Anthol-
ogy, Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993),
p. 652. Kojima Noriyuki, Kinoshita Masatoshi, and Satake Akihiro, eds., Man’yōshū 2,
32
Man’yōshū 13:3331.
33
Senzai Waka Shū 1:74. Katano Tatsurō and Matsuno Yōichi, eds., Senzai Waka
Shū, SNKBT 10 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), p. 32.
Hana wa mina All the flowers

Kasumi no soko ni Shine and fade
Utsuroite In the bottom of the mist—
Kumo ni irozuku Mt. Hatsuse
Ohatsuse no yama By the tinged clouds.34
This poem also appears in the Yamato Meisho Zue (Illustrated Descrip-
tion of Illustrious Places in Yamato), a guide to the Yamato region by
Uemura Ugen (d. 1782) and Akisato Ritō (fl. 1780–1814).35 The tour-
ists of the eighteenth century were guided along the bottom of the
Hatsuse valley by a string of poems that allowed them to experience
the feelings evoked by the spirit of the place. When, in 1772, Motoori
Norinaga traveled to Hatsuse during his trip to Yoshino, he was urged
by the place to compose a poem that would locate the poet within a
long line of distinguished versifiers:
We came down until we reached the front of a shrine called Yoki-no-
Tenjin. Here the river flowing beneath the wooden bridge was the Hat-
suse River, the river by the swift rapids. In other words, on the other side
of the river stood the village of Hatsuse. We stopped at a local inn, had
something to eat, and took a rest. Since the back of the house was set
against the riverbank, the waves resounded beneath the floor.
Hatsusegawa River by the swift rapids,
Hayaku no yo yori You come flowing from early times—
Nagare kite The waves on the rocks
Na ni tachiwataru Make the rapids
Seze no iwanami That gave you a name.36
The contemporary poet Takahashi Mutsuo (b. 1937) could not avoid
including Hase in his 2005 collection of “Poetic Matches of Scenic
Spots” (Utamakura Awase). Takahashi’s portrayal of the Hase River
associates the area with female pilgrims to the Hase Temple, one of
the few temples in ancient Japan that had allowed women onto its
ground since the Heian period. The river sustains the metaphor of
fluids associated with women: the sacred water purifying the monthly
cycles of menstruation, and the liquid life of discarded fetuses. To this
34
Shinchokusen Waka Shū 2:114. Nakagawa Hiroo, ed., Shinchokusen Waka Shū,
WBT 6 (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 2005), p. 27.
35
Tsuruoka Gorō, ed., Yamato Meisho Zue: Zen (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Meisho Zue
Kankō Kai, 1919), p. 368.
36
This quotation is from Norinaga’s Sugagasa no Nikki (The Sedge Hat Dairy). See
Michael F. Marra, The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey (Hono-
lulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), p. 42.
day the Hase temple is a site for the pacification of unborn children,
as one can see from the group of statues of baby Jizōs clad in warm
clothes and caps that strike the eye of today’s pilgrims. The Eleven-Face
Kannon enshrined in the temple stands for the benevolent mother, the
Buddhist manifestation of an original female local god (kami). Taka-
hashi indicates that the shape of the Hase area looks like a vagina that
has the power to give life, but also to withhold it or to abort it. The
silent tragedies of many women are carried by the swift rapids of the
river, which are made of the tears of grieving mothers. No monument
stands as a reminder of personal tragedies aside from waters in con-
stant flux.
Monoomoi The end of anxious thoughts
Hatsu wa hajimaru Is the beginning
Hatsusegawa Of the Hase River—
Sono minamoto no I will visit the tears
Namida tazunemu At its source.37
The collection is structured like an ancient poetic match (uta-awase)
written by the same person. Originally, poetic matches were composed
by two groups of people or by two poets, known as the poet of the
right and the poet of the left. A judge would decide the winner of each
match that could continue for a hundred, or six-hundred, or even a
thousand and two hundred rounds. There is no judge in Takahashi’s
match, only a commentary by the poet himself who provides some
interpretative keys. The poem on the Hase River is followed by a verse
on a sacred spot in the south-west of France, Lourdes, which lies in
a central position through which runs the fast-flowing river Gave de
Pau from the south. Between February 11 and June 16, 1858 the Virgin
Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous on twenty-two occasions in a
grotto on the riverbank. Every year thousand of pilgrims converge on
Lourdes in the hope that the water springing out of the grotto might
heal their diseases. In “hidden” (komoriku) Lourdes human suffer-
ing is purified by the compassionate mother of Christ. In Takahashi’s
poem, not even the purity of the water can bring consolation to the
myriad examples of human suffering that only the water can witness
in the concealed space of the grotto.
37
Takahashi Mutsuo, Utamakura Awase (Tokyo: Shoshi Yamada, 2005), p. 21.
Komoriku no The clear water

Rurudo ni kumamu That I try to scoop up
Mashimizu no In hidden Lourdes
Sumikimawaru wa Is so extremely pure
Kanashimu gotoshi As if it were grieving.38
Takahashi brings to life in the twenty-first century a twelve-hundred-
year-old practice of relying on ancient poetic databases that provide
him with time-revered rhetorical techniques such as “associated words”
(engo ✼⺆) and “pivot-words” (kakekotoba ដ⹖). Both poems are
structured around a series of associated words related to the fluid-
ity of life (river, tears, and clear water). Tears” (namida ᶡ) flow like
“waves” (nami ᵄ) in the rapids of the Hase River—a tour de force of
rhetorical skill in which engo and kakekotoba are actually combined in
the space of two words. “Hatsu” in the first poem means both “first,
beginning” and its opposite, “end.” The Chinese character hints at the
second meaning, although the first meaning introduces the verb “haji-
maru” (to begin) that modifies the name of the river “Hatsu-se” (swift
rapids, but also the rapids of beginning and end). By incorporating
several meanings in one simple expression pivot-words amplify the
voice of the place, almost silencing the poet who can hardly be found
in his compositions. The subject scooping up water is unidentified in
the original text—it could be the poet, the pilgrim, the reader, or any-
one in need of salvation—a salvation (or an omission of ) that only
comes from the landscape, the place from which the poems originate.
Takahashi has fulfilled the “promise” handed down to him by centu-
ries of poetic practice. His words, techniques, places, all come from
pre-modern poetic databases. His poems would be fully intelligible to
a tenth-century reader—with a minor exception, the inclusion of a
new name, “Rurudo” (Lourdes), that the reader would have searched
in vain in his dictionaries of famous places. However, had someone
told the reader that this was a place-name, he might have wanted to
add it to the dictionary. Lourdes was far away, but this was not a major
hurdle. Most poets who composed poems on famous places never had
a chance to actually travel to the places of their songs. This is why
they had uta-makura in the first place. Textual traces spared poets
the challenge of long and difficult journeys. The major challenge in
this particular case was posed by the fact that Lourdes did not have
38
Ibidem, p. 21.
a memory of its own—at least not yet, unless someone succeeded to

enter it into Japan’s general poetic database.
Okabayashi Hiroshi (b. 1952) argues that in the post-modern world
of anime, cartoons, and figurines—a world which has been labeled as
otaku—consumers of such “literature” derive most of their pleasure by
knowing “the promise of quotation” (o-yakusoku). At the bottom of
this pleasure there is an anti-individualistic attitude that prohibits one
from interpreting a character from an anime series, or a figurine rep-
resenting such character, apart from a referential scheme that makes
this character a quotation of another character that is already known
to the viewer. In other words, viewers already possess in their mind
an image of the new character even before they see it.39 Okabayashi
poses a sensus communis among consumers of post-modern popu-
lar culture that reminds one of the sensus communis of consumers
of pre-modern culture, the writers and readers of waka. According
to Okabayashi, knowledge among otaku consumers is actually created
by “the promise” that allows each and every member of the group to
profoundly enjoy the characters of anime. O-yakusoku is the mecha-
nism that creates the pleasure deriving from understanding. For exam-
ple, in Otaku no Bideo (The Video of Otaku, 1991), a comedy anime
on the phenomenon of otaku culture, the character of the pretty girl
Misty May comes on stage. This erotic image with bulging breasts and
rabbit-like coiffure reminiscent of Playboys bunnies would be lost on
most otaku experts were it not for being recognizable as a quotation of
Daikon IV Opening Animation, a short anime produced in 1981, in
which an elementary-school girl grows up into a bunny girl, an allur-
ing female fighting off a multitude of science-fiction monsters.
Okabayashi applies to his interpretation of anime characters the
tripartite scheme that Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941) employed to explain
the phenomenon of “iki.” In ‘Iki’ no Kōzō (the Structure of Iki, 1930)
Kuki explained iki in terms of the allure (bitai), pride (ikuji), and
resignation (akirame) that distinguish an accomplished geisha. Oka-
bayashi sees the first two elements in the concept of “tsundere,” in
which tsun refers to the girl’s will power that at times make her appear
aggressive and bad tempered to outsiders; dere, on the other hand,
39
Okabayashi Hiroshi, “Structure of ‘Otaku Culture’—Reorganized Aesthetic Con-
sciousness of ‘Iki,’ ” Paper presented at the Conference of the Asian Society of Arts
(Kyōto: Ritsumeikan University, 2007).
underscores the girl’s flirtatious behavior, similarly to a spoiled child

trying to sweet talk someone close to her in order to achieve her goal.
An example would be Ayanami Rei, the pretty and strong girl from the
Neon Genesis Evangelion series. There is also a cold, emotionless side
to this character that at times makes her look like an artificial being—
a component that Okabayashi explains in terms of resignation. These
elements, together with their expressive features, make up the “prom-
ise” of what otaku experts expect from a successful character, with all
the variations that only reinforce the original expectation. If these three
requirements (hard face, soft character, and detached component) are
not met, the promise is broken and the anime fails to please the “com-
mon sense” of the otaku consumers. This is the case, for example, of
Miss Ko, the “art” figure of Murakami Takashi (b. 1962) that, accord-
ing to Okabayashi, lacks these basic elements. This alleged departure
from the conventions of the successful anime character has led otaku
fans to criticize Murakami for not being a real otaku. In other words,
Murakami has broken the promise that generates knowledge among
and sustains the sensus communis of the otaku aficionados.
The contemporary critic Azuma Hiroki (b. 1971) has called attention
to the importance that databases have gained in contemporary Japan
to the point that his definition of post-modernity is directly linked to
what he calls “database model.”40 Unlike the “tree model” of moder-
nity in which the outer surface layer of things hides a deep inner layer
like the roots of a tree, the database model is an exchange of messages
within a double layer structure. In post-modernity the depth of grand
narratives is gone. Instead, a series of small narratives bounces off the
huge database in the background. The distinction between an original
and a forgery has disappeared since the elements provided by the data-
bases can be reshuffled in a countless number of ways and re-shaped
through a variety of media (television series, cartoons, anime, video
games, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and so on). The database provides the
visual vocabulary of the otaku’s narratives: the antenna hair, the cat
ears, the loose socks, the tail, the bells, the maid uniform, and so on.
40
Azuma Hiroki, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel
and Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 30–35. See,
also, Azuma Hiroki, Gēmuteki Riarizumu no Tanjō: Dōbutsuka Suru Posutomodan 2,
Kōdansha Gendai Shinsho 1883 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2007), p. 64: “Whereas the narra-
tors of ancient Japan (kataribe) lived within a collection of mythologies and folk tales,
and whereas modern authors, readers, and citizens live within naturalism, otaku live
within character databases.”
These elements appeal to the burning passion (moe) of the consumers

who become obsessed with the “cute” (kawaii) expressions of the char-
acters. Such an obsession is not dissimilar from the mad attachment
(suki) that medieval poets felt for their art.41 The database provided
the poetic words that were combined and recombined at a maddening
speed, so as to appeal to the expectations of readers who frantically
searched for the perfect expression of yūgen (mystery and depth). In
contemporary popular culture one witnesses an obsession for the most
appealing erotic figurine instead of the quietest image of autumnal
twilight. However, the idea of obsession remains the same—an obses-
sion that urges consumers to go back to the database and try new
combinations. Azuma talks about a desire for the database rather than
for the story, since the numerous simulacra (the individual stories) are
“woven together out of the same database.”42
Could this be the third space that Plato called “chōra” (receptacle)—a
receptacle that gives place to all oppositions, starting from the opposi-
tion between surface and depth, phenomenon and noumenon, noetón
and aisthetón—an opposition that underlines the very notion of meta-
physics? After all, the definition that Edward S. Casey has given of
Plato’s receptacle can be easily applied to Japan’s postmodern nar-
ratives which are inspired by the database model par excellence, the
World Wide Web: “If we can think of [Plato’s] Receptacle as some
kind of no-place, this is only because, as a reservoir of connections
yet to come, or at least yet to be specified, its place-full and place-
filing potentiality is always still to be realized in time-to-come. There
is, after all, a right and full time for places to come into being, and even
if we have found places to be pervasively present at the creation of
things, their destiny is also to be ongoing and ever-increasing in their
connectivity.”43 This connectivity may explain the pervasive resilience
of waka to this day, 1300 years after the first waka was anthologized.
The degree zero of expression of databases promises an infinite num-
ber of possible combinations that continue to drive to insanity the
practitioners of the poetic art. The openness of infinite possibilities is
41
I have discussed this issue of similarity in “Aesthetic Categories: Past and Pres-
ent,” in Takahiro Nakajima, ed., Whither Japanese Philosophy? Reflections through
Other Eyes (Tokyo: The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy, 2009), pp. 39–59;
and in “The Dissolution of Meaning: Towards an Aesthetics of Non-Sense,” in The
Asian Journal of Aesthetics & Art Sciences 1:1 (2008), pp. 15–27.
42
Azuma Hiroki, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, p. 55.
43
Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, pp. 48–49.
actually predicated on a closed system—the finite number of words

present in the poetic database. Similarly, the database of contemporary
popular culture offers a finite number of moe elements. And yet, as
in the case of waka, the possibility of playing with this kind of narra-
tives remains infinite. This might be an indication of the long-lasting
destiny of post-modern visualities that have been increasingly eclips-
ing the modern Japanese novel, apparently reducing its lifespan to as
little as one hundred and fifty years. Video games, cartoons, anime,
are here to stay and to redefine notions of literature—a redefinition
that, interestingly, draws a good deal from the spatial configurations
of pre-modern poiesis.
LITERATURE
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE HERMENEUTICAL CHALLENGE
When, a few years ago, Professor Eiji Sekine asked me to organize

the twelfth annual meeting of the Association for Japanese Literary
Studies, I accepted with great enthusiasm and some trepidation. The
enthusiasm came from the privilege of having to choose a topic for
discussion at what has become the most distinguished meeting for
Japanese literary studies in the country. The trepidation was the result
of knowing that, by suggesting a topic close to my heart, hermeneutics,
I would have had to ask speakers to talk more about themselves as
producers of interpretative acts than about any literary text they might
want to present. I know how polite and reticent scholars of Japanese
literature tend to be, and how reserved they are about acts of self-
disclosure. Therefore, in my call for papers, I send out a message that
emphasized the historical dimension of personal confession: “Given
the severe limitations of time, I would suggest that speakers concen-
trate discussing the main topic of the conference, ‘scholarly methods
used in the interpretation of literary texts,’ leaving aside lengthy pre-
sentations of specific works. In other words, the method rather than
the work is the object of discussion. The success of this conference
will be measured by the degree of awareness generated by an under-
standing of hermeneutical practices in the reading of literary texts. The
practices are the primary focus of interest; the texts are secondary, at
least for the purpose of this conference.”
The response to the call for papers was massive: forty-five papers
were presented in fifteen panels, in addition to four keynote speeches
and six comments by discussants, for a total of fifty-five presentations.
Needless to say, UCLA witnessed two and a half truly intensive days
from early morning on Friday, November 21 until noon on Sunday,
November 23, 2003. The papers which are included in these proceed-
ings are a sample of the topics discussed in the conference, and they
are a testimony to the variety of interpretative strategies currently used
in Japanese literary studies: postcolonial theories, feminist theories,
cultural criticism, intertextuality, narratology, hermeneutics, psycho-
analysis, aesthetics, and poetics. I feel, however, that the presence of an
278 chapter fourteen
array of methodological approaches does not necessarily guarantee a

direct confrontation with and challenge to the topic under discussion,
i.e., hermeneutics. This introduction gives me an opportunity to explain
further why I believe that the notion of hermeneutics is central to the
work of readers of Japanese literary texts, and of employees reporting
to Deans of Humanities in Colleges of Letters and Sciences.
During the conference I often had the impression that the cur-
rent resistance to the notion of hermeneutics derives from its asso-
ciation with the work of thinkers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher
(1768–1834) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)—a work very much
related to the project of historicism (culture seen as an expression of
an individuality or an era) against which most modern commenta-
tors have justly and strongly reacted. Both thinkers contributed to
making hermeneutics into a method of interpretation modeled after
scientific methodologies. However, when we look at the develop-
ment of hermeneutics in the twentieth century, especially the work of
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer
(1900–2002), we see a strong opposition to the idea of reducing the
human sciences to epistemological constructs that can be explained
with the methodologies of the natural sciences. Undoubtedly, Schleier-
macher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer shared the strong belief
that the truth of the humanities is not the same as the truth of the
sciences. They all kept in place the notion of truth—a notion that has
been quite vilified in the past fifty years. However, Heidegger and Gad-
amer had to overcome the aporia of explaining the alleged “truth” of
the humanities with the tools that the natural sciences had developed
in order to make sense of the notion of truth, at least since the age
of René Descartes (1596–1650): objectivity, verifiability, mathematical
proofs, etc. It is quite apparent that without a notion of truth—at least
for the purpose of deconstructing it—the humanities would not exist,
since they would lose the ground on which they justify themselves. The
deep crisis that the humanities face today is certainly related to the fact
that they cannot show the world the baby that they have discarded
along with the bath water. It is interesting to notice that the Deriddean
deconstructive practices that are taking the humanities apart (while,
at the same time, in my opinion, showing a path towards reconstruc-
tion) would not exist without the Heideggerian project of destruktion,
and that the fashionable feminist and post-colonial approaches have
trickled down from the Marxist project of consciousness that is firmly
rooted in the hermeneutical practices of the most humanistic of all
the hermeneutical challenge 279
humanist thinkers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), even

if he has been turned upside down. It goes without saying that Gad-
amer’s project of reconstruction would be unthinkable without the
deconstructions of his mentor Heidegger. No matter what kinds of
reservations we might feel towards hermeneutics, we cannot deny the
impact that hermeneutics has had on our conceptualizations of the
world, whether we consider hermeneutics in its technical sense (as a
study of how meaning comes about), or in its present, more general
sense (as a koine, or common language, spoken in an age of interpre-
tation, independent from the specific methods employed in our daily
interpretative actions).
How can deconstruction help us in the difficult path towards recon-
struction? This is the basic question that Gadamer asked in his mas-
terpiece of 1960, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), which I
will use in order to elicit questions related to Japanese literature. Truth
and Method begins with a contestation of aesthetic consciousness that,
according to Gadamer, makes access to the truth of art almost impos-
sible. For Gadamer, consciousness (Bewusstsein in German) is more
being (sein) than consciousness. Aesthetic consciousness deprives the
work of art of its being since it takes away from the work of art its
moral and cognitive dimensions, leading to the autonomy of art which
is a characteristic of modernism. Aesthetics has objectified the work of
art by isolating it from any consideration that is not strictly aesthetic.
Gadamer reminds us that aesthetic consciousness is the product of a
methodological consciousness—and, therefore, it is a product of sci-
ence. Dilthey’s attempt to create a methodology of understanding for
the human sciences (hermeneutics as ars intepretandi) has revealed that
method does not allow us to grasp properly the meaning of the human
sciences. For Gadamer, the work of art is participation in an experi-
ence of truth—an experience that the deadly alternative of method or
aesthetics does not allow us to catch. If we interpret truth according
to the norms of the natural sciences, i.e., strict objectivity, everything
which is labeled human sciences ends up being relegated to the realm
of aesthetics—a matter of simple taste with no scientific credibility.
The creation of the human sciences, then, comes at the highest price,
since they are robbed of the possibility of participation in the experi-
ence of truth. Don’t we call the work of a writer, “fiction”—a matter of
appearance and illusion, and don’t we invoke the name of mythology
when it comes to our great epics? The truth of art is, thus, trivial-
ized, and the remarkable experience of reality in art is completely lost.
Beginning with Schiller’s Letters on Man’s Aesthetic Education, our

education ceases to be through art and begins to be in art.
Gadamer asks a crucial question: “Is it right to reserve the concept
of truth for conceptual knowledge? Must we also not acknowledge that
the work of art possesses truth?” In order to rescue the work of art
from the abstractions of aestheticism, Gadamer insists on the onto-
logical contribution of the work of art. Far from being an expression
of lived experience (Dilthey’s Erlebnis and Bergson’s élan vital), art
becomes an experience of reality, of being, and of truth. Gadamer calls
this truth in art seinszuwachs, “a surfeit—or excess—of being.” In order
to recognize that art possesses a claim to truth, the Kantian subjectiva-
tion of the work of art—(an obsession with the spiritual states of the
observer)—must be overcome. The truth of art reminds us that we are
not in control of aesthetic experience; instead, we are captured as if we
were taken up by a game. It was not by accident that Gadamer put the
following lines by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) at the beginning of
Truth and Method:
Until you take again the ball that your hand has thrown,
It is nothing but skills and easy conquest—;
Only if all of a sudden you must take
The ball that an eternal playfellow
Has thrown in the core of your body
In a fair throw, in one of the arches
Of the bridge made by the great architect, God:
Only then to be able to catch it becomes virtue,—
Not your virtue, but of a world.1
We do not need to take the initiative: a ball thrown to us brings us
into the game. Far from being an act of subjectivity, the play is being
played. Who the eternal playfellow might be is a difficult question to
answer. The only thing we know is that the ball comes from a certain
height, like the message (aussage) that reaches us as a work of art. Art,
then, is a response to a throw, which unfolds not simply as enuncia-
tion (diktat), but as dialogue ( gespräch). The message (the ball) acts
on me and transforms me. Truth in the human sciences is the real-
ization that to understand how to live in the world comes to us from
somewhere else. As Heidegger reminds us, existence is an “exit”—a
1
Rainer Maria Rilke, Poesie II (1908–1926) (Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1995),
p. 254.
coming out from somewhere, a projection of our being into the world
(Geworfenheit). Heidegger’s metaphors turn up at every page of Truth
and Method; art is an unfolding of truth, an ontological process, a sur-
feit of being, the opening of a world. Art is recognition in the sense of
recollection (anamnesis): it opens to us the world for what it is.
Today we approach Japanese literature from a variety of view
points. These proceedings provide a good sample of the objectivations
of literary texts, based less on being than on consciousness. To use a
few titles from the conference’s program—a feminist reading of Hira-
bayashi Taiko resituates the maternal body as the site of ideological
contest; Japanese female writers watching a boy being beaten by his
father recall female fantasies of male homosexuality, psychoanalysis
and sexuality; the Lacanian gaze looks over postcolonial theories in the
literature of Koreans living in Japan; heternormativity and the politics
of the writing subject inform a reading of Zeami’s work; the semiotics
of excess stage the spectacles of kabuki and shunga; writing the politi-
cal, not just the personal, informs Tamura’s Shōwa period fiction; the
end of psychoanalysis explains anime and Konaka’s mirror stage . . . and
the list could go on forever. Instead, could something be said about the
relationship of art and truth in Japanese literature? Did a discourse on
truth develop in Japan and, if it did, how did such a discourse relate to
the notion of writing? These questions are not completely idle. Other-
wise, Saigyō (1118–1190) would not have composed the famous lines,
Utsutsu o mo/utsutsu to sara ni/oboeneba/yume o mo yume to/nanika
omowan
Since the ‘real word’ seems/to be less than truly real,/why need I sup-
pose/the world of dreams is nothing/other than a world of dreams?2
Is Saigyō’s claim made on epistemological grounds? Is it made on aes-
thetic grounds? Is it simply the result of a rhetorical play? What is
it? Or, even better, how does the relationship of truth and writing
relate to the temporality of our reading which, Gadamer reminds us,
is always the temporality of the present, the temporality of contem-
poraneity? One of Gadamer’s hermeneutical lessons is that the work
of art is realized only in its actualization: we must read Saigyō’s poem
in order for the poem to exist. The poem is a response to a series
2
The English translation is by William R. LaFleur, Awesome Nightfall: The Life,
Times, and Poetry of Saigyō (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003), p. 128.
of interrogations—questions addressed to Saigyō at the time of the

poem’s composition, questions that we address to Saigyō as well as to
ourselves when we actualize the poem in our mind. This is the rea-
son why in the call for papers I emphasized the need to focus on the
receiver of the message (ourselves), rather than on allegedly objec-
tive presences such as authors, texts, and the minutia of details that
will keep scholars busy until the end of history. In this respect, we
remain very much tied to the old hermeneutics of Dilthey and the
historicist school, for which an illusion of distance makes us resist the
idea of participatory communion in the work of art. There is a general
hesitation among scholars to confront themselves during the reading
of texts which are often kept at a spectacular distance. This attitude,
however, breaks two rules of Gadamerian hermeneutics: the rules of
application and of the fusion of horizons. We live in the shade of a
post-romantic epistemology that rejects the application of a meaning
to the present situation on the grounds that this act would be preju-
dicial to the objectivity of interpretation. Gadamer rehabilitates the
notion of “application” by referring to the rhetorical effectiveness of
the preacher’s subtilitas applicandi—the skill of applying the meaning
of the biblical text to the contemporary situation of the faithful. Read-
ers should not be ashamed to admit that texts have something to say
to them.
The second rule that the attitude of the alleged “scientific distance”
breaks is the well-known notion of the “fusion of horizons,” which
implies the presence of our own world in the process of interpreta-
tion. The construction of the horizon of the past always operates on
our present terms. The notion of the “fusion of horizons” gives indi-
vidual subjects their proper place, without ever putting them in any
privileged position. If existence is an exit from somewhere, existence
cannot begin with any individual subject. The subject always comes
from an elsewhere, and this elsewhere can only be a predicate, like a
Theos (God) who is never a substance or a subject. If the Gods were a
substance, human beings would be able to understand them. But this
is never the case with the Gods. As Homer reminds us, the Gods are
kreittones (the superiors). Therefore, we should not be afraid to locate
ourselves in the interpretative process, as long as we avoid placing the
subject in the seats of the Gods—a Kantian arrogance that needs to
be resisted. Gadamer’s “elsewhere” is a moment of foreignness that
makes him argue that, “the soul of hermeneutics consists in recogniz-
ing that perhaps the other is right.”3 In this regard, a study of subject
positions in ancient Japanese monogatari—as well as in their more
modern shōsetsu versions—would be a marvelous example of “fusion
of horizons,” in which the voices of characters, narrators, places,
times, and the voice of the actual readers (past and present) are made
the subjects of narrations. The “weak subject,” a major linguistic and
epistemological characteristic of Japanese culture, has been the object
of infinite studies informed by Buddhist philosophy, and masterfully
articulated in the works of the philosophers of nothingness culminat-
ing in the Kyōto school of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), as Professor
Fujita Masakatsu has pointed out in his keynote speech on Nishida’s
analysis of the predicative nature of the Japanese language. These issues
are very much relevant to contemporary philosophical discussions on
the subject, as the philosophy of “weak thought” advanced by one of
Gadamer’s most gifted students, Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936), attests.
The truth of the humanities, then, is the Socratic truth of knowing
that we do not know—a realization of the limits of human facticity. In
the human sciences, understanding refers to the ability of “being skilled
at something”—a skill that implies that we are never totally capable
of mastering it. The limit is this negative moment (human finitude),
that Heidegger reminds us is part and parcel of the notion of “truth:”
a-letheia (un-veiling), a lifting up of the veil behind which we always
find a lack. The description of being as event can be found in the litera-
ture of the “connoisseurs” (tsūjin) immortalized in the “books of taste”
(sharebon) of eighteenth-century Japan, whose knowledge depends on
their skills of negotiating everyday reality in order for them to be able
to survive in it. The anti-heroes of this world (the world of the plea-
sure quarters) are the boorish know-it-all (hankatsū), whose pedantry
reveals their inability to adapt to the changes and the challenges of
everyday life. The literal meaning of the word tsūjin is “a person who
can relate to the world,” a cultured person in the Gadamerian sense
of the word—the result of a process of formation (bildung). Since the
truth of the human sciences is the truth of formation, the connoisseur
fits quite well Gadamer’s paradigm of culture. Formation is not the
accumulation of factual knowledge, which is the realm of the pedant.
3
Quoted in Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer. Translated by Kathryn
Plant (Chesham: Acumen, 2003), p. 100.
For Gadamer, cultivated people are those who position themselves at

a distance from all the items of knowledge characterizing the pedant.
Thus, knowledge becomes a “feel,” a being, a sense. Here Gadamer
relies on Aristotle’s notion of “prudence” (phronesis)—the wisdom to
adapt oneself to particular situations. Gadamer’s experience of truth
is not the result of an epistemology; it is, rather, an event that unfolds
in our life, as in the case of Aeschylus’ “learning through suffering”
(pathei mathos). Formation, common sense, judgment, and taste—the
basic ingredients of knowledge for the humanities—are all seen from
the perspective of a practical wisdom.
Humanistic understanding does not derive from any epistemological
construct; it can only come from what is nearest to us—i.e., the dialog-
ical linguistic experience, the “uncannily near” (so unheimlich nahe)
that Gadamer labels, “the most obscure” ( gehört zum Auerdunkestel).
The dialogical process of everydayness makes possible the coming-into-
being of things that would otherwise escape our control. Therefore,
attention to language is of primary importance. Language possesses a
human logic that does not follow the model of logical demonstration.
This is the logic of rhetoric that constitutes an alternative to the logic
of the pronouncement, or of the proposition. If the statement contents
itself with methodological exactness and with its “pure” sense, human
language must confront the infinity of what is not said and what is
implied. Gadamer’s commitment to language entrusts the field of rhet-
oric with the task of recovering the “there” of Dasein (being-there), the
elsewhere from which we come and in which we are. Hermeneutics
goes well beyond a strictly propositional conception of language. Its
main attention is directed towards that elsewhere in which the unspo-
ken is found. This explains Gadamer’s statement that the world has
no being for us except in the “there” of language. And this “there”
can only be captured by paying attention to the tradition of rhetoric,
in which truth becomes a matter of belief, integrity, and probability,
and in which no ultimate foundation can be found. Rhetoric enacts
hermeneutic understanding by, first of all, restoring to concepts their
ontological meaning—a meaning that epistemology has concealed and
distorted by forcing pejorative meanings onto them. Gadamer pro-
vides several examples of distortions.
The most conspicuous example is the notion of the circle of under-
standing, better known as the hermeneutical circle. The geometric
interpretation of the circle points at the circularity of any argument
that is modeled after it: the circle does not lead anywhere but towards
itself, in a stultifying repetition of sameness. And yet, the humani-
ties spring from the circularity of finitude, as Heidegger had already
indicated in his positive assessment of the hermeneutical circle. No
understanding exists without anticipation (the anticipation of death),
and no interpretation takes place without a prior understanding. This
ontological, rather than epistemological, interpretation of the circle of
understanding leads to the realization that no question can be for-
mulated without a prior knowledge of the answer—maybe a partial
answer, but an answer nevertheless. Dasein is an object of care (sorge),
and the priority of care constitutes the future o f Dasein. In the urban-
izing words of Gadamer, no statement can be formulated outside of the
context of a dialogue. The statement is always already an answer to a
question, even if no concrete presence seems to appear in the dialogue.
Seen from an ontological perspective, the circle ceases to be a logical
vice, a vicious circle. Rather than avoiding it, we should jump into it
with resolution, since we are confronted every day with an existential
reality, not a geometric one. The phenomenological understanding
of the circle indicates that the paradox of the presupposition of what
needs to be proved is not such a demented thing in real life, since
all understanding comes from an anticipation of meaning. Nishida
Kitarō had already emphasized the existential importance of the circle
in 1911, when he ended the section on ethics of his first major work,
Zen no Kenkyū (An Inquiry into the Good), with a reference to Giotto’s
circle as an example of the realization of true selfhood that requires us
“to kill our false self ” in order to gain new life.4
The Heideggerian insight into the hermeneutical circle allowed
Gadamer to rescue the idea of tradition from all negative shadows
that the Enlighteners had cast upon it: the interpreter always belongs
to the object of understanding; whether he likes or not, he is tradition.
It goes without saying that the notion of anticipation rules over any
reading of Japanese poetry, past and present. What would a poem be
without a reference to a more ancient poem? Gadamer’s concept of
“contemporaneity”—that is very much akin to Nishida’s notion of “the
eternal present”—makes the voice of the twelfth century poet Saigyō
4
Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good, trans. by Masao Abe and Christopher
Ives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 145.
audible to the contemporary reader in the poetry of the seventeenth

century haiku master Bashō (1644–1694). The reader participates in
Bashō’s exchange with Saigyō and other famous poets of a canonized
tradition. While traveling to the Northern provinces, Bashō passes
through the rice fields near Ashino village of present-day Tochigi Pre-
fecture, and discovers the willow under whose branches Saigyō had
found shade four hundred years earlier. Bashō’s haiku is the famous,
Ta ichimai/ uete tachisaru/yanagi kana
I waited them to sow the whole field, /then I got up and left/
—Oh, that famous willow!5
In Bashō’s verse we hear Saigyō’s hesitation to leave the refreshing
shade of the willow tree during a tiring excursion away from home
during the sultry summer:
Michinobe ni/shimizu nagaruru/yanagikage/shibashi to te koso/tachi-
tomaritsure
In this willow’s shade, /where the refreshingly clear stream/flows on
by the wayside,/ thinking, ‘it will be only for a brief moment,’/ I stood
rooted to it.6
In Saigyō’s poem, the attentive reader—and Bashō was undoubtedly
a very attentive one—hears the voice of the tenth-century poet Sone
Yoshisada (fl. ca. 985), who takes shelter from the heat under a wil-
low tree, not in Tochigi Prefecture, but along the Tatsuta river of the
Ikoma district in Nara Prefecture:
Natsugoromo/Tatsuta kawara no/yanagikage/suzumi ni kitsutsu/narasu
koro kana
While getting used to these summer robes/I came to the cool side/of the
willow’s shade/on the Tatsuta riverbank.7
5
Toyama Susumu, ed., Bashō Bunshū, SNKS 17 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978), p. 116.
See also Donald Keene’s translation (“They sowed a whole field, /And only then did
I leave/Saigyō’s willow tree”), in Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku (Tokyo:
Kodansha International, 1996), p. 43.
6
Kubota Jun, ed., Shinkokinshū, Jō, n. 262, SNKS 24 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1979),
p. 102. See also Meredith McKinney’s translation (“Here in this willow’s shade,/where
the pure stream/flows on by the wayside/briefly, I pause/and stand”), in The Tale of
Saigyō (Saigyo Monogatari) (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University
of Michigan, 1998), p. 22.
7
Fujimoto Kazue, ed., Goshūi Wakashū, 1, n. 220, KGB 584–840 (Tokyo: Kōdansha,
1983), p. 325.
By reading Bashō’s haiku, the contemporary reader is invited to visit

Saigyō’s willow—an invitation that railway companies have shrewdly
exploited in recent times—and see whether it is still there, or whether
it withered, as the fifteenth century Nō playwright Kanze Kojirō
(1435–1516) indicated in the play Yugyō Yanagi (The Priest and the
Willow):
Water runs no more/between the river’s banks, /and here by the dry bed/
stands a withered willow, /so overgrown with ivy/and clinging creepers,
/it hardly can be seen. /Green moss buries its branches; /its appearance
truly bespeaks/its years of stars and frosts.8
The Gadamerian concepts of anticipation of meaning, adherence to a
tradition, participation, and sharing, well describe our contemporary
encounter with the poetic voices of the Japanese past. The circle of
the “eternal present” is not vicious as long as it reminds us of the
respect that we owe to our traditions, and of the gratitude that each
of us must feel for the wonders of being—what the Japanese language
has captured so masterfully in the word for “thanks” (arigatō, which
literally means “difficult to be”). This appreciation for what has been
handed down to us—an appreciation that does not exclude, but actu-
ally encourages, a desire for improvement—reminds us of the impor-
tance of shared experiences. This realization led Gadamer to rescue
concepts such as “common sense” (sensus communis) and “common
places,” which the Enlighteners had been attacking since the age of
Descartes as abstract notions built on indistinct foundations. Gad-
amer’s rehabilitation of “common places” goes back to Melanchton’s
(1497–1560) doctrine of loci communes in which the German reformer
explained how a shared experience makes communication possible.
As I indicated earlier, according to Gadamer, common sense is one
of the four major ingredients of knowledge for the Geisteswissen-
schaften, together with formation (bildung), judgment, and taste. In
Japan, the issue of “common sense” reached a peak in the philosophy
of Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), for whom the stability of a society
was based on a shared cultural experience that would elicit common
emotional responses from like-minded people—what he called mono
no aware, or the knowledge of being moved by external reality. Nori-
naga’s theory of common sense derived from his profound knowledge
8
The English translation is by Janine Beichman, in Donald Keene, trans., Twenty
Plays of the Nō Theatre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 225–226.
of poetics—especially the theory of “common places” (utamakura),

which entrust geographical locations with enormous poetic mean-
ing. Poets must master all the skills of their trade in order to sing the
being of these places. These common places are filled with memories
of ancient events sung in the poetry of ancient poets, whose memory
is kept alive by the very presence of the common places that modern
poets continue to sing.
When Saigyō reached the Shirakawa Gate during one of his ascetic
practices in the Northern provinces—what is known today as Fuku-
shima Prefecture—his attraction to the moon was made particularly
strong by the memory of a poet, Nōin (998–1050), who had visited
the same place a hundred and thirty years earlier,9 and left the follow-
ing poem:
Miyako oba/kasumi to tomo ni/tachishikado/akikaze zo fuku/Shirakawa
no seki
Though I set out/from the imperial city/with the rising of the springtime
haze, /the wind of autumn now blows/at Shirakawa Gate.10
In the preface to the poem Saigyō acknowledges that his “ability to
feel” (aware) derives from the “nature of the place” (tokorogara)—a
“common place” that automatically brings to his mind the question,
“when was the time that Nōin composed the poem on the ‘blowing
autumn wind’ ”? The expectation of a knowledge deriving from a
shared experience excites Saigyō to create the following poem:
Shirakawa no/sekiya o tsuki no/moru kage wa/hito no kokoro o/tomuru
narikeri
The light of the moon/slips through the gatehouse/at Shirakawa, /and
one finds it giving rise/to emotions deep and arresting.11
During his trip to the Northern provinces Bashō was so overwhelmed
with a poetic tradition of songs about the Shirakawa Gate that he was
9
Saigyō visited the Gate in 1155. Scholars believe that Nōin visited it in 1025.
10
This is a slightly modified version of H. Mack Horton, Song in an Age of Discord:
The Journal of Sōchō and Poetic Life in Late Medieval Japan (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2002), p. 114. The original text appears in Fujimoto Kazue, ed., Goshūi
Wakashū, 2, n. 518, KGB 585–1100 (Tokyo: Kōdansha 1983), p. 365.
11
The English translation is by H. Mack Horton, Song in an Age of Discord, p. 114.
The original text appears in Gotō Shigeo, ed., Sankashū, n. 1126, SNKS 49 (Tokyo:
unable to add his voice to a “common place” which was too sacred to
be further intruded upon. Instead, he recorded in his diary the poem
composed by his travel companion Sora (1649–1710), who pays his
respects to the tradition by concocting an image over six hundred
years old—the custom of adorning one’s head with flowers. In Sora’s
poem, the flower in question is the verbena (unohana) because of its
white color—a reference to the literal meaning of the Gate, “white
river” (Shirakawa). Sora’s poem says,
Unohana o/kazashi ni seki no/haregi kana
My clothes I change at the gate—/sprigs of verbena/thrust in my cap.12
It took Bashō several days before he could regain his composure and
recover from the excitement and, undoubtedly, the exhaustion of the
travel. Only after an old acquaintance had asked him how he had felt
crossing the Gate, Bashō came up with the following verses, in which the
poet implies that the Gate is such a sacred moment for poetry that the
rustic songs of the region’s rice planters can be considered to be
the original source of waka:
Fūryū no/hajime ya oku no/taueuta
The beginning of poetic elegance—/the rice-planting songs/of the Interior.13
Common sense, or bon sens, and common places are at the root of the
capacity for judgment, which in Gadamer is also related to the logic
of anticipation. Judgments are made with a series of pre-judgments
in mind, which Descartes and the Enlighteners cast in a disparaging
light. Prejudgments are nothing but prejudices—a notion that has
come down to us with profoundly pejorative connotations. Gadamer
is extremely critical of Descartes’ most pronounced prejudice: the
prejudice against prejudices. For Gadamer, prejudices are conditions
of understanding, since all accords between understanding and the
object to be understood are effectuated on the basis of prejudices. This
12
Toyama Susumu, ed., Bashō Bunshū, p. 117. See also Donald Keene’s translation
(“Sprigs of verbena/thrust in my cap—such will be/my fancy attire”) in Matsuo Bashō,
The Narrow Road to Oku, p. 47.
13
Toyama Susumu, ed., Bashō Bunshū, p. 118. See also Haruo Shirane’s translation
(“Beginning of poetry—/the rice-planting songs/of the Interior”) in Traces of Dreams:
Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998), p. 161.
does not mean that false prejudices cannot lead to misunderstandings.

It only implies the need to keep the circle of understanding open in
order to be able to modify whatever is found to be untenable. We need
to engage in a debate with the presuppositions of traditions if we want
to avoid falling into false prejudices.
During a presentation on the transmission of the Kokinshū—a prac-
tice known as “The Secret Teachings of Ancient and Modern Poems”
(Kokindenju)—a speaker spent the twenty minutes allotted for his
talk in deciphering two lines in Chinese written by the medieval poet
Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241) in which Teika denounced contemporary
“prejudices” (hekian ௼ ᩺ ) in the interpretation of poems from the
Kokinshū ( A Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems, 905). I raised
the question of the ontological status of the notion of “prejudice” in
Japan in medieval times—a question that I hoped would initiate a
conversation on the history of this concept in light of the possible
sources—not only from the field of poetics, but especially from more
epistemologically-oriented Buddhist sources—from which Teika was
taking the concept of prejudice. Unfortunately, the answer was tauto-
logical, “a prejudice is a prejudice.” As a matter fact, a “pre-judgment”
was made into a prejudice in modern times with the rise of science as
the defining paradigm of Western culture.
Gadamer’s emphasis on the subtleness of application also implies a
total historicization of the concepts under discussion—especially when
we are confronted with concepts from a different age and a different
culture. The rule of application implies that we must start from the
historicization of the meaning of the concepts which are part of our
contemporary vocabulary. However, this is only the beginning of our
search. The same process must be repeated with regard to the concepts
that tradition—whether ours or not is beside the point—has handed
down to us, and upon which we have forced our hermeneutical dis-
tortions. Gadamer is categorical on this point. Interpreters are asked
to operate from a position of continuous vigilance necessary to wake
up our own possibility of being. We cannot blindly accept a tradition
as it has been handed down to us. We must interrogate it, and see
whether we can live in it. Gadamer raised the same issue of distortion
with regard to the notion of “taste”—another object of the Enlighten-
ers’ ridicule. Gadamer argues that in the so-called human sciences,
judgment is a matter of taste in the moral sense of the word—a sense
of what is fitting and what is fair. To be without taste, or without tact,
is the result of faulty judgment. Therefore, taste can only have a pro-
foundly positive meaning.
In the humanities judgment is an unfulfilled search for the mot-juste,

the right word, since at the heart of hermeneutics is a wish to say the
unutterable. The third part of Truth and Method, which is completely
dedicated to the issue of language, is a powerful reminder of the need
to ask more questions about the nature of the Japanese language. Was
language seen as a simple conveyor of ideas, as in Plato’s instrumental
view of language—an order of signs that is always redundant, since
things can be known in themselves as ideas before they are articu-
lated in language? Or, is language an incarnate materiality of mean-
ing that cannot be separated from the interiority of thought, as in the
case of St. Augustine who—Gadamer reminds us—used the notion
of Incarnation to explain the identity between the internal (pure act
of thought) and the external (linguistic articulation) words? Gadamer
clearly follows the latter hypothesis, since he believes that thought can
never be deployed except in language, and that thought cannot think
outside of language. It is not a question of an explanation of words; it
is, rather, that explanations can only take place in words. This does not
mean that the word is always perfect; far from it, since imperfection
comes from the finitude of thought itself. Unlike the mind of God, the
human mind is not pure presence to itself, pure noesis noesos. The Gods
possess absolute transparency because they do not have a language.
However, this is not the case with humans. We do possess a language.
For Gadamer language is the only being which can be understood. In
our struggle to make sense of the world we are confronted with words
which hide more than they reveal. When we think that they have finally
revealed something, we realize that words open up a world of absences
and deferrals. This explains why Gadamer, like his mentor Heidegger,
privileged poetry as a revelatory moment of language.
If we turn to rhetorical techniques used in Japanese poetry to cap-
ture a meaning that constantly refuses to be tamed and contained
in the limits of language, we will find an array of devices that poets
have developed through the centuries in order to get closer to what
Gadamer has conceptualized as the truth of the humanities. What is
known as “overtones” (yojō), for example, has been thoroughly studied
by thinkers such as Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990) and Kusanagi Masao
(b. 1900).14 This technique is a search for an expression that always
exceeds the actualized possibilities of saying, a surplus of meaning, an
14
See, for example, the essays by Nishitani and Kusanagi in Michele Marra, Modern
Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999).
excess of having-to-say. Once it is successfully achieved, yojō makes

one realize not that something is there, but that there is a ‘there,’ and
that this ‘there’ is revealed to the reader while remaining hidden from
him. Another important technique used in Japan to make absences
visible is known as mitate ⷗┙ߡ—a technique that the eleventh-
century lady-in-waiting Sei Shōnagon perfected in the following entry
from her diary, Makura no Sōshi (The Pillow Book):
The snow piled up tall on the ground. It was an unusually early time of
the year to have the lattices closed. We had gathered to serve the empress
and were talking with each other, poking the embers in the brazier.
“I wonder, Shōnagon, how the snow is piling up on Incense Burner
Peak.” After the empress had spoken I had one of the lattices raised and
I rolled up the blind. The empress laughed.
“I knew those words,” the other ladies-in-waiting said, “and I used
to sing them as poetry, but it never occurred to me to do what she just
did. She appears to be quite fit to serve the empress.” (Makura no Sōshi,
step 280).15
Mitate literally means “to make the sight stand, to bring something
to stand, to bring something into a standing appearance.” Something
appears by “coming up” (tatsu), by “rising into view.” Mitate brings
into sight what is not apparent, what is not immediately in sight. In
this short narrative, Sei Shōnagon brings into sight several absent
objects. The main absence is the empress’ desire to see the snow piling
up on the ground outside her chambers. The room would be totally
dark—the wooden lattices (mikōshi) have been lowered to avoid the
cold coming from outside—were it not for the brazier (subitsu) around
which the ladies-in-waiting gather to find some solace from the freez-
ing weather. The empress does not simply issue the order, “Raise the
lattices so that I can see the snow.” Instead, she uses the image of
the brazier to conjure up a poetic image centered around the snow
of an absent mountain, a mountain far away in China, Mt. Hsiang-lu
(literally, “Incense Burner Peak”). The reference is to an absent poem
well known to everybody in the room—a poem in which the author
15
Hagitani Boku, ed., Makura no Sōshi, Ge, SNKS 12 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1977),
p. 231. See, also, Ivan Morris, trans., The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Volume 1 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 243. Morris translates Po Chü-i’s poem as
follows: “The sun has risen in the sky, but still I idly lie in bed;/In my small tower-
room the layers of quilts protect me from the cold;/Leaning on my pillow, I wait to
hear I-ai’s temple bell;/Pushing aside the blind, I gaze upon the snow of Hsiang-lu
peak . . .” Ivan Morris, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Volume 2, p. 180.
Po Chü-i (772–846) hesitates to leave the warmth of his bed during a

cold morning and pushes the blind aside in order to see the snow on
Mt. Hsiang-lu while leaning on his pillow. The empress indicates her
desire through a mimetic process: she shares with the Chinese poet a
yearning for letting the snow come into view. Although every single
lady-in-waiting in the room is familiar with this poem—they all have
recited it countless times in their native tongue (uta)—they are unable
to translate knowledge (a knowledge based on words present at hand)
into practical vision. Only Shōnagon fully masters the technique of
mitate, and brings into view the empress’ desire for everybody to see:
“she makes someone raise” (agesasete) the lattice door and she herself
“rolls up” (agetareba) the blind (misu) which is the last obstacle to the
disclosure of the external snow. Everybody “seems” (sabekinameri) to
have overcome the initial skepticism over Shōnagon’s fitness to work
at the court: Shōnagon has brought into full view her skills to bring
light to a room full of darkness, and the empress seems quite pleased
as she witnesses the event, “laughing” (warawasetamō) with Shōnagon
at those who thought she would be unfit for service.
This episode is a good example of how a non-epistemological inter-
pretation of language gives Sei Shōnagon the skills to survive in the
hostile environment of the court. Her knowledge is based on forma-
tion, common sense, good judgment, and outstanding taste—all quali-
ties that make her a master of the Gadamerian art of practical wisdom,
the art of hermeneutics.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PLACE OF POETRY, PLACE IN POETRY:

ON RULERS, POETS, AND GODS
Today I am going to talk about a poem from the Man’yōshū (Ten

Thousand Leaves, 759) which commentators have traditionally associ-
ated with one of the thirty-one journeys that Empress Jitō (r. 690–697)
made to her beloved detached palace in Yoshino, the southern part
of the Yamato province (Man’yōshū 1:38). The poem is attributed to
the revered Kakinomoto no Hitomaro about whom we know very
little—no more than what we learn from the poems which have been
attributed to him. Following the interpretation of the seventeenth-
century scholar Keichū (1640–1701), this poem has been traditionally
read as a panegyric to the empress whose virtues are compared to
those of a heavenly deity—a divine sovereign who has built a palace in
Yoshino from the top of which she can survey the land. The argument
goes that the poet sings the beauty of the surrounding nature, a boun-
tiful nature that provides the imperial table with proper offerings.1
My contention is that the poem is less about the sovereign’s jour-
ney towards asserting her authority than about the journey of poetry
towards securing its authority. In my remarks I will follow the state-
ment that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
made at the University of Freiburg in the summer of 1942 when, com-
menting on Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister,” he pointed out that what is
closest to us is the most far away from us. Nothing is more difficult to
fully understand than what one feels to be his home. To be at home,
or to be homely, is a deceiving concept, unless one takes the word
“existence” in its etymological sense of exiting from the homely and
be thrown into a world, a language, a culture that one must strug-
gle to possess in order to make it his own. This does not mean that
This paper was originally presented on July 2, 2006, at the Annual Meeting of the
Association for Japanese Literary Studies (AJLS), Josai International University, Tokyo,
Japan. The author wishes to thank Professor Noriko Mizuta for her kind invitation.
1
Keichū makes this comment in his commentary of the Man’yōshu, the Man’yō
Daishōki (A Stand-in Chronicle of the Man’yōshu, 1690). The text appears in Hisa-
matsu Sen’ichi, ed., Keichū Zenshū, Vol. 1 (Toyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1973), p. 343.
296 chapter fifteen
man is destined to remain homeless forever; it simply indicates that

comfort is the result of a dialectical process in which the alleged
“homely” must be exited in order to be reached through the unhomely.
Together with the Rhine, the Donau (Danube) is the river most famil-
iar to Germans—a river whose slow currents from the Swabian Alps
make the German people feel at home. And yet—Heidegger argues in
his summer semester course—were it not for its eastern lower progress
(Ister is the Donau’s Greek name), the Donau would be incomplete
and, therefore, un-understood by the people who felt so close to it.
The Ister brings from the land of Hercules what the German Donau
lacks: the fire of Dionysian intoxication that must complement the
cold rationality of the German Donau. On the other hand, the Donau
brings to Hercules, the courageous traveler from the sultry isthmus,
much needed shelter and coolness. Both Donau and Ister make the
land arable and homeliness possible by incorporating the other into
itself, even if this means that the Ister must flow backwards, back to
the Alps. Once a true homeliness is achieved, the river clings to the
mountain, unwilling to leave the home that it has finally succeeded in
making its own—not without a long journey back to its origin in the
remotest regions.
The law of being homely as a becoming homely consists in the fact that
historical human beings, at the beginning of their history, are not inti-
mate with what is homely, and indeed must even become unhomely with
respect to the latter in order to learn the proper appropriation of what is
their own in venturing to the foreign, and to first become homely in the
return to the foreign. This historical spirit of the history of humankind
must first let what is foreign come toward that humankind in its being
unhomely so as to find, in an encounter with the foreign, whatever is
fitting for the return to the hearth.2
Despite the ominous tone of these words which were pronounced one
year before Germany would bring its call for fire to the battlefields of
southern, Mediterranean Europe, Heidegger’s interpretation of what
he calls the river’s “enigma” reminds readers that the place determined
by the poetic word is nothing but the “there” of being human—the
Heideggerian notion of “human being,” or, more precisely, “being-
there” (Dasein). The “there” is a subtle trajectory that disabuses one of
the familiar terms used to define the surrounding reality of material
2
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Translated by William McNeill
and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 125.
place of poetry, place in poetry: rulers, poets, gods 297
objects. Were it not for the notion of “ontological difference”—the

difference between the material object “river” (das Seiende or being)
and the fact that the river is (Sein or Being), the Ister would not make
any difference to the “there” that makes us humans. In other words,
the river determines the dwelling place of human beings on earth, the
place where they are homely, thus bringing human beings into their
own and maintaining them in what is their own. However, without the
poetic sign, no one would be able to respond to the calling that comes
from the river—a calling to which the poet listens attentively, and
which he articulates with a language that helps unconceal the truth of
the river’s Being. The poet makes one dwell in the place determined
by the river—the place of poetry, where the dialectic of the unhomely
bringing one to homeliness is at work.
I find this dialectic which disabuses readers of what is perceived
as familiar to be a powerful tool in reading ancient Japanese poetry,
especially the poetry that was created prior to the strict codifications
put into practice in the tenth century with the compilation of the first
imperial collection, the Kokinshū (Modern and Ancient Songs, 905).
When we look at the songs from the Man’yōshū, we are immediately
confronted by lines of Chinese characters that defy any possible effort
to make this poetry sound somehow familiar. The text looks like clas-
sical Chinese, and yet it does not make any sense in the Chinese lan-
guage. There is no indication of the sounds with which these characters
should be associated—unless we rely on centuries of scholarly activi-
ties that have “translated” the characters into familiar sounds or, better
to say, sounds that the poetry of the imperial anthologies has made
familiar to us. The question remains whether these associations are
acceptable or not. If they are not, how can we be so confident about
extracting meaning from these poems? Man’yōshū 1:38 is preceded
by the headnote, “composed by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro during the
imperial progress to the Yoshino Palace.” The following is the text in
man’yō script:
቟⷗⍮ਯ ๋ᄢ₺ ␹㐳ᨩ ␹Ꮐ஻਎㗇⊓ ⧐㊁Ꮉ ᄙ⧓ᵤᴡౝ ዌ 㜞Ლ਱
㜞⍮ᐳ⠰ ਄┙ ࿖⷗਱ὑ൓ᇎ ⇥᦭ 㕍၂ጊ ጊ␹ਫ ᄺᓮ⺞╬ ᤐㇱ⠪
⧎ᝌ㗡ᜬ⑺┙⠪㤛⪲㗡ೝℂ৻੔‫ޔ‬㤛⪲ട኿ਯㅤ೽Ꮉਯ␹Უᄢᓮ㘩ዌ
઀ᄺ╬ ਄ἑ ዌ 㡻Ꮉ਱┙ ਅἑ ዌ ዊ✁ೝᷰ ጊᎹᲣ ଐᒂᄺᵹ ␹ਫᓮ
ઍ㡞
The major series of the Japanese literary classics (Iwanami,
Shōgakukan, and Shinchōsha) present a much more domesticated ver-
sion of the poem, in which the alien text becomes a web of familiar
298 chapter fifteen
expressions, immediately recognizable characters, and contemporary

concepts:
߿ߔߺߒߒ ᚒ߇ᄢำ ␹ߥ߇ࠄ ␹ߐ߮ߖߔߣ ศ㊁Ꮉ ỗߞᴡౝߦ
㜞Ლࠍ 㜞⍮ࠅ߹ߒߡ ⊓ࠅ┙ߜ ࿖⷗ࠍߖߖ߫ ߚߚߥߪࠆ 㕍၂ጊ
߿߹ߟߺߩ ᄺࠆᓮ⺞ߣ ᤐ߳ߦߪ ⧎߆ߑߒᜬߜ ⑺┙ߡ߫ 㤛⪲߆ߑ
ߖࠅ ߊ৻ߦ੔߰‫ޔ‬¢߽ߺߜ⪲߆ߑߒ‫߈ⴕޜޠ‬ᴪ߰ Ꮉߩ␹߽ ᄢᓮ㘩ߦ
઀ᄺࠆߣ਄ߟἑߦ㡻Ꮉࠍ┙ߜਅߟἑߦዊ✁ೝߒᷰߔ ጊᎹ߽ ଐࠅ
ߡ઀߰ࠆ ␹ߩᓮઍ߆߽
The reconstruction above is based on the following transliteration of
the man’yō text:
Yasumishishi/waga ōkimi/kamunagara/kamusabisesu
to/Yoshinogawa/tagitsukōchi ni/takadono
o/takashirimashite/noboritachi/kunimi o
seseba/tatanawaru/aokakiyama/yamatsumi no/matsuru mitsuki
to/haruhe ni wa/hana kazashimochi/aki tateba/momichi kazaseri
(hitotsu ni iu, “momichiba kazashi” )/yuki sou/kawa no kami
mo/ōmike ni/tsukaematsuru to/kamitsuse ni/ukawa o
tachi/shimotsuse ni/sade sashiwatasu/yamakawa mo/yorite
tsukauru/kami no miyo ka mo
Thanks to the song’s domesticated versions, the poetic enigma can eas-
ily be deciphered as follows:
My august sovereign,/a living god/who behaves like a god,/has built/a
tall palace/inside the river by the surging rapids—/the Yoshino River,
river of the Good Field,/she climbs,/and when she looks at the country,/
the mountains building a green fence,/layers upon layers,/the gods of
the mountain,/present their offerings,/in spring by crowning the moun-
tains with blossoms,/in the fall,/by adorning the mountains with maples,
(or “maple leaves,” according to another version),/the gods of the river
which flows along the Palace/make their offerings to the imperial table,/
by placing cormorants/at the upper shallows,/and by spreading nets in
the lower shallows,/even mountains and rivers/submit and serve,/this
must indeed be the age of the gods!3
The modern reading of the ancient text is a comfortable journey
through the homely, in which the unhomely is excluded, and the ratio-
nality of a modernist explanation is brought forwards to the reader.
3
There is no disagreement between the editors of the Iwanami and Shinchōsha
series. See, Satake Akihiro, et als., eds., Man’yōshū, 1, SKBT 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami Sho-
ten, 1999), p. 40, and Kojima Noriyuki, et als., eds., Man’yōshū, 1, SNKBZ 6 (Tokyo:
Shōgakukan, 1994), pp. 47–48.
A thick apparatus of footnotes and headnotes pinpoint to the exact

historical circumstances in which the song was created—allegedly by
Hitomaro during one of Empress Jitō’s visits to her palace in Yoshino.
The poet presents the sovereign as an embodiment of the kami (or
Shintō gods), in the act of surveying the kuni (or country), so as to
take possession of it, while the local deities of the mountains and riv-
ers present their offerings (flowers and fishes) to the ruler, a human
reminder that everybody is living in the age of the gods—an age in
which the gods are actually the ruler’s servants. If Hölderlin’s appeal
to the fire (“Now come”, fire!) sounds ominous to readers familiar
with the brown shirts, the godly ruler at the head of a nation-state
(kuni) called Japan undoubtedly disquiets anyone with knowledge of
the Pacific war, especially those who fought against an army led by a
kami. And yet, the familiarity that everybody in Japan has with kami
and kuni seems to make commentators embrace what the Japanese
philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) has called “discontinuous
continuity” (hirenzokuteki renzoku): nothing is more the same than
what seems to be different. As a matter of fact, nothing is more dif-
ferent than what seems to be the same, at least for the simple reason
that the implications conveyed by the Chinese characters “shen” ␹
and guo” ࿖ in seventh-century Yamato cannot be the same as what
the same characters convey to us today. And yet, these familiar mark-
ers jump from the page of the poem’s modern versions, together with
an array of words still in use today, such as “kawa” (river), “yama”
(mountain), “hana” (flowers), “kami” (above), “shimo” (below), “waga”
(mine) “miru” (to see), “noboru” (to climb), “motsu” (to have), etc. It
looks as if modern commentators have succeeded in making this song
accessible to anyone with an elementary knowledge of the language.
First-year students of Japanese should have no difficulty in recognizing
the Chinese characters of this poem and their meanings. Of course,
things would be different if the same student was given the original
text in man’yō script. Then, four years of intensive training would not
be enough to begin reading the first four characters.
The question is whether a way exists to get through the dense foli-
age of these ten thousand leaves by making the unfamiliar stand out
from the page, and by allowing the unhomely to disrupt the com-
fort of reading. If such a possibility indeed exists, would this allow us
to discern something about the act of poetic writing? In the remain-
der of this essay I will follow another technique which was dear to
Heidegger—the etymological path. It is true that, like philology,
300 chapter fifteen
etymologies are a product of modernity and, therefore, cannot erase

the distance between past and present. However, since there is no way
to approach the past apart from the present, I will employ a technique
that is extremely attentive to language, especially to poetic language,
considering the fact that poetry and etymology share the same inter-
est in probing the depth of language. I am not concerned with the
charge that linguists—the scientists of language—have leveled against
etymological practices, especially the practice of popular etymologies.
I believe that poetry is a popular etymology, and that there are few
alternatives once it comes to the business of paying attention to the
voice of poetry. Moreover, Japanese linguists have listed various ety-
mological theories about words, seldom assessing the acceptability of
these theories. Maybe we should stop searching for “reliable” etymolo-
gies, since they are all reliable, inasmuch as they have been used (or
misused) at some point in time.
My use of etymologies will not solve the first and most fundamental
problem in reading the song’s original text: are the current sounds
associated with the Chinese characters the correct ones? I have a
feeling that they are not, since all these sounds are shaped by met-
ric rules used in later poetry, beginning with the courtly practice of
waka (31-syllable poems). However, there is some truth in the present
custom of seeing the text as a combination of characters used ideo-
graphically and other characters used purely phonetically (as in mod-
ern kana)—a combination which is at work in present-day readings of
Man’yōshū. Therefore, my etymological reading will be based on the
premise that the current transliteration of the song is acceptable. In
other words, my reading is based on the same premises upon which
modern commentators base their own readings. I might be even more
biased than they are in following Motoori Norinaga’s (1730–1801) call
to interrogate the sound of words rather than the script—a capital
grammatological sin. However, this method allows me to elicit from
the poem what I believe to be its major concerns: the establishment of
a hierarchical order, and the positioning of poets (and poems) within
that order.
In other words, the question is not whether Kakinomoto no Hitomaro
wrote this poem as an encomium for Empress Jitō—a fact that might
be difficult to ascertain and, maybe, not even a relevant one. The ques-
tion is how the poet establishes a set of hierarchical positions within
a place called poetry, and how he positions himself (and the poetic
voice) in this hierarchy. There is no doubt that the poem addresses the
ruler: it begins with one of those “pillow-words” (makurakotoba), or

poetic epithets, which scholars like to ignore and set aside as untrans-
latable. The reason is that translations of makura-kotoba can only be
based on hypothetical readings which are based, in turn, on hypotheti-
cal etymologies. The ruler is addressed with the epithet, “yasumishishi,”
which has been recorded with different sets of characters: ቟⷗⍮ߒ,
which literally means, “to govern, or to rule, over the land peacefully,”
and ౎㓈⍮ߒ, which means, “to govern, or to rule, over the myriad
corners.” Our song follows the first set of characters, thus emphasiz-
ing the peaceful nature of the sovereign’s act of governing, as well as
the pacified nature of the land over which he/she is ruling. The second
set identifies the land over which the sovereign rules as a land made
of numerous islands—Ōyashima ᄢ౎ᵮ, a term commonly used in
ancient times to refer to the archipelago. The epithet refers to “waga
ōkimi” (venerable great king). “Waga” is an expression of reverence
for the ruler; it does not necessarily mean “mine,” as in the contempo-
rary usage. It would be risky to see in this expression the self-portrait
of a poet who presents himself as a “subject” in the etymological sense
of the word, someone who is subjected to somebody else. This might
not be the right marker to establish the position of the poet within
the hierarchy of the poem itself. What we can say is that the follow-
ing “ōkimi” ᄢ₺ (great king) is recorded in modern editions with
the character used today to indicate “you” (kimi ำ)—ōkimi ᄢำ (big
you). However, this is a very special “big you,” one in which kimi is
associated with the notion of “public” (౏)—a connotation which is
diametrically opposite of the one that modern readers associate with
the character “kimi” (the very private “you”). An etymological analysis
of the word “kimi” lends the following explanations:4
1. A communication with what is above (kami ਄).

2. Owner of a palace (kimochi ၔᜬ).
3. Protector of the land (kunimori ࿖቞).
4. My darling girl/boy (ko/ki, or child ሶ + mi, or body り).
The fourth and last explanation refers to the current use of the word
“kimi”—a usage that is also present in ancient times, although in a
4
The etymologies are based on Maeda Tomiyoshi, Nihon Gogen Daijiten (Tokyo:
Shōgakukan, 2005).
302 chapter fifteen
reversed order from the present one in which men address women
(or professors address students) with the less formal “kimi.” In the
Man’yōshū, most of the time women use “kimi” to address their
beloved. Beginning with the Heian period, this homely form came
to be used equally by men and women. However, this is not what
our poet meant. He was more concerned with establishing a form of
communication with someone who was well above him, the sovereign,
who was in charge of a palace from which he/she ruled the land.
The poet positions the ruler at the highest point of the hierarchical
structure, as we can see from the etymologies of words in the song’s
first three verses. The sovereign is described as someone who is like
a kami. The question is not whether this kami refers to a Shintō god,
or, more likely, to a deity from the pantheon of popular Taoism. This
difference would not be as big as the fact that the word introduces a
series of descriptions of the sacred, which can be summarized by list-
ing the word’s etymologies:
1. Above, the top (kami ਄).

2. Hidden body (kakurimi 㒶り).
3. Mirror (kagami ㏜).
4. Light (akami ᣿⷗).
5. Fragrance (kami 㚅⷗).
The ruler governs from the top of the world, as a body which is not
fully disclosed. A device is needed to bring him/her into view, in
order to catch the light that is reflected in a mirror—the very body
of the sovereign. Poetry provides the device by actualizing with words
the disclosure of the sacred enigma, which is too bright to stare in
the face. Poetic words articulate a presence that, otherwise, might only
be perceived through the sense of smell—the fragrance that comes from
above. It is not by chance that the poet chose the character “fragrant”
(kaguwashi ⧐) to write the name of the river where the Empress built
her palace, the Yoshino River ⧐㊁Ꮉ, usually recorded with the char-
acters, “good field” ศ㊁. The palace is “lofty” (takadono 㜞Ლ), like
a mountain rising far in the distance, as the etymologies of “high”
(taka 㜞) indicate:
1. Peak (take ጪ).

2. Height (take ਂ̗㐳).
3. Far (tōki ㆙).
4. To rise (tatsu ┙).
The detached palace rises in the sky like a mountain—a metaphor which
is not left to chance when we think of how rulers in ancient Japan
used to take possession of their land by surveying it from the top of a
mountain (kunimi ࿖⷗, looking over the land). This particular ruler
does not even need to make the effort of “climbing” (noboritatsu ⊓┙)
a lofty mountain, since her residence already incorporates the moun-
tain etymologically; the palace is lavishly decorated—layers and layers
of partitions like the mountainous green fences (aokakiyama 㕍၂ጊ)
surrounding it. She needs only to be in her residence in order to pos-
sess the land. The equation between the construction of the palace and
the possession of the land is also established by the word “takashiru”
(㜞⍮, to build a lavish and beautiful building). “Shiru”—which
in modern Japanese is related to knowledge (shiru = to know)—is
etymologically associated with the following explanations:
1. Possession, occupied territory (shiru 㗔).

2. Clear, white (shiro ᣿̒⊕).
3. Clear understanding (shiro ᕁᘦ).
By building a lofty palace the sovereign has taken possession of the

land—a country (kuni ࿖), if one wishes, as long as one does not read
a nation-state in it. However, once again, country is not what is at
stake here. The poet is concerned with the space occupied by the ruler,
a space which is hierarchically positioned below the lofty residence of
the august presence, as we can see from the etymologies of the word
“kuni:”
1. Land below (ku = below and ni =land).

2. Land covered with trees (ku = tree ᧁ and ni = land ࿯).
3. Huge land (ku = big ᄢ and ni = land).
4. To assemble (kumu ⚵߻).
The sovereign has assembled a lofty palace from which she rules over
an extended land, filled with life. From this life the sovereign receives
her spiritual and physical nutrition. At this point the poet sets up a
completely different space which is totally subjected to the imperial
glare surveying the land below. This lower space is inhabited by the
gods of the mountains (yamatsumi ጊ␹), and the gods of the river
(kawa no kami Ꮉਯ␹ ), who provide the sovereign with offerings
(mitsuki ᓮ⺞ ) and food for the imperial table (ōmike ᄢᓮ㘩).The
gods of the mountains make the mountains adorn themselves with
304 chapter fifteen
spring flowers and autumn maple leaves; the gods of the river supply
the imperial kitchen with a steady flow of fish. All gods are portrayed
as servants following their ruler from behind or, to be more correct,
from below, since below is the place from which they present their
offerings. The etymologies of the verb “tsukau” ઀, which applies to
all deities, are eloquent:
1. To follow, to come behind (tsuku ⌕).

2. To belong to (tsuku ዻ).
3. To toss up from below, to offer (tsukiau ⓭ว).
It goes without saying that the realms of the deities (mountains and
rivers) also “submit to” (yoru ଐ) and “follow” (tsukau) the imperial
command.
This poem has built a poetic space dominated by the sovereign at the
top and the deities, producers of nature, at the bottom. In other words,
the ruler is positioned in the Heavenly Plain of Heaven (Takama-no-
hara) which we know from the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712)
to be the place where the heavenly deities operate. On the other hand,
the earthly deities of mountains and rivers inhabit the human land
which the heavenly deities have occupied, conquered, and pacified.
Historians have explained the structure of this mythology in terms of
clans competing for power—clans which tried to find means of politi-
cal legitimation by relating their families to specific deities. Obviously,
the victorious Yamato clan established the most sought after geneal-
ogy by claiming direct descent from the Sun Goddess. However, the
poem does not go into any historiographical or mythological details.
It simply sets up a series of spaces organized hierarchically. The two
spaces mentioned above are mediated by the space of poetry that the
author reserves for himself. This space is midway between the lofty
position of the ruler and the humble position of the conquered deities
(nature submitting to a more powerful creator). The poet is not as
modest as one would expect from a courtly jongleur. He does address
the sovereign with all the due respect by using proper honorifics:
“kami sabisesu” (to behave like a kami) incorporates the polite form
“sesu” for “su” (to do something). The same polite expression is used
to indicate the imperial survey of the land (kunimi o seseba). How-
ever, there is no verb or particle indicating that the poet is actually
serving the empress. The level of honorifics employed to express the
poet’s position and the gods’ position towards the ruler is completely
different. The deities are in total awe of the ruler (tsukaematsuru, and
yorite tsukauru), as if their eyes could not reach the loftiness of the
ruler’s position, her lofty palace. The poet is not. In order to describe
the imperial apotheosis the poet must be part of it; he must participate
in the imperial acts, since he must record them. He sees the mountain
from the same viewpoint as the ruler, from the top of a mountain (or,
maybe, the top of the palace). It does not matter whether he was actu-
ally there, next to the empress. What matters is the imperial position
that he takes in order to describe the unfolding events. His poem is a
survey of the land (kunimi), a taking possession of the means to record
the sovereign’s conquest of the land with poetic signs. The poet affirms
his monopoly over expression—a process of representation over which
the gods have no claim. The deities have control only over the reality
at hand (flowers and fishes), but no control over words. The poet allots
to poetic expression a loftier position than the one assigned to the
earthly gods. Poetic expression has the power to articulate the dialectic
of heights and hierarchies which constitute the kernel of the song. The
poetic word definitely transcends the reality of the gods that would go
un-expressed without the intervention of the poet. The poet establishes
expression as the foundation of transcendence—a transcendence that
has nothing to do with any specific religious system, but that is inher-
ent in the nature of language and expression: the referent is always
beyond and above what it refers to. This should give pause to anyone
who still embraces the myth of Japanese immanence, according to
which the Japanese world is confined to the here and now.
Let’s listen once again to the song and all its etymological echoes:
Ruling over the land peacefully,/ the venerable great king,/owner of the
palace, protector of the land,/a hidden body,/a mirror of fragrant light
he is,/he behaves like what is above and at the top,/inside the river by
the surging rapids—/the Yoshino River, river of the fragrant field,/he has
built a lofty palace/as high as a peak,/ rising into the sky like a mountain,/
he has built a lavish and beautiful building,/taking possession of it,/he
has climbed the lofty mountain and palace,/and has looked down on the
land below,/a land covered with trees,/ a huge land,/layers upon layers/
of mountains like green fences,/offerings are served/by the gods of the
mountains,/who make the mountains adorn their peaks with flowers/in
spring,/and maples (“maple leaves,” according to another version)/in the
fall,/the gods of the river/which flows along the Palace/serve/the imperial
table/the bounty caught by cormorants/in the upper shallows,/and by
nets/in the lower shallows,/even mountains and rivers/bow, submitting
and serving,/tossing their offerings from below,/following the ruler/to
whom they belong,/this is indeed the age of the gods!
306 chapter fifteen
As soon as the author of this song was associated with the name Kaki-
nomoto no Hitomaro, the name became the object of the same dialec-
tic of hierarchies which the poet applied to his song. Hitomaro became
the transcendent signifier of all poetic compositions in the land, rising
to the rank of “saint of poetry” (uta no hijiri ), to be worshipped by
anyone with poetic aspirations. His portrait was hung on walls during
poetic matches, and revered as the effigy of the founder of the poetic
cult. This was no small achievement for someone whose existence is
barely recorded, and, if he indeed existed, whose ranking at the court
was too humble for the chronicler to bother including his name in the
imperial records. The process of Hitomaro’s beatification began with
the famous kana preface to the Kokinshū which lauded Hitomaro’s
ability to guarantee poetry a dignified position in the order of things.
Ki no Tsurayuki (868?–945?) did not hesitate to give the poet a fictional
rank by promoting him to the third, upper rank (ōkimitsu-no-kurai
ᱜਃ૏)—a rank which was reserved for ministers of the highest sta-
tion. Tsurayuki even attributed to Hitomaro the composition of a poem
on the cherry blossoms on the Yoshino mountains, which was actually
written by Tsurayuki’s colleague, Ki no Tomonori (d. after 905).5 Evi-
dently, poets, like rulers, needed some form of legitimation in order
to establish proper credentials. Many scholars noticed the mistakes,
including Keichū (1640–1701) and Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769).
However, aside from the issue of whether they were intentional or
not,6 these “mistakes” bespeak the concerns that Hitomaro (and his
loyal followers) felt for poetry: to dignify the poetic word by not con-
fining it to the space of simple entertainment, popular song, or play on
words. This was no small achievement on the part of “Hitomaro” who,
with a single poem, had placed poetry not too far from the imperial
seat, and had gotten away with it unscathed.
5
“ ‘[Yamato-songs] have been composed since ancient times, but the practice
spread beginning with the reign of the Nara Emperor. That emperor must have under-
stood the heart of poetry! At that time lived Kakinomoto no Hitomaro of the third,
upper rank: he was the saint of poetry. This must have been the result of a perfect
union between ruler and people. To the emperor’s eyes the maple leaves flowing in the
Tatsuta River on an autumn night looked like brocade. In Hitomaro’s heart the cherry
blossoms on the Yoshino Mountains on a spring morning appeared like clouds.” Oku-
mura Tsuneya, ed., Kokin Wakashū, SNKS 19 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978), p. 19.
6
This issue is discussed in Oda Shōkichi, “Kokinwakashū” no Nazo o Toku (Tokyo
Kōdansha, 2000), pp. 11–78.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PLAYING WITH JAPANESE SONGS:

POLITICS OR PLEASURE?
It would be difficult to think about Japan without linking it to the

natural landscape. Japanese writers and thinkers have consistently
associated nature and human nature, thus endowing natural phenom-
ena with the expression of all stages of human life.1 A young sprout
(wakana) stands for a little girl and a willow tree represents the allure
of a young woman, the scattering of the cherry blossoms signals the
woman’s ephemeral beauty, and, by extension, the impermanence of
human life. It is in poetry that Japanese associations with nature are
the greatest, as one can see from the major topics used since ancient
times to organize poetic collections. Each of the twenty-one poetic
anthologies (over 31,000 poems) commissioned by an emperor between
905 and 1433 begins with the customary four rubrics of the seasons:
spring, autumn, summer, and winter.2 Nature also plays a major role
This essay was originally presented as a paper on May 8, 2007, at the Nibei Foun-
dation, Los Angeles. The author wishes to thank Professor Paul Terasaki for his kind
invitation.
1
One may think of the title of the lecture that the novelist Kawabata Yasunari
(1899–1972) presented in Stockholm in 1968 when he received the Noble Prize for
literature, “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself,” in which Kawabata used Zen Buddhism
to describe the linkage between the outer nature of landscape and the meditative inner
nature. The work Manʾyōshū no Shizen Kanjō (Feeling of Nature in the Manʾyōshū,
1943) by the aesthetician Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959) remains a locus classicus in
the study of relationships between nature and human feelings in the first anthology of
poetry in Yamato language, Ten Thousand Leaves (759).
2
This is a list of the imperial poetic collections (chokusenshū): Kokin Waka
Shū (Collection of Ancient and Modern Times, 905), ordered by Emperor Daigo
(r. 897–930); Gosen Waka Shū (Later Collection, 951), ordered by Emperor Murakami
(r. 946–967); Shūi Waka Shū (Collection of Gleanings, 1005–1007), ordered by Retired
Emperor Kazan (r. 984–986); Go Shūi Waka Shū (Later Collection of Gleanings,
1086), ordered by Emperor Shirakawa (r. 1072–1086); Kinʾyō Waka Shū (Collection
of Golden Leaves, 1127–1127), ordered by Retired Emperor Shirakawa; Shika Waka
Shū (Collection of Verbal Flowers, 1151–1154), ordered by Retired Emperor Sutoku
(r. 1123–1141); Senzai Waka Shū (Collection of a Thousand Years, 1188), ordered
by Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa (r. 1155–1158); Shin Kokin Waka Shū (New Col-
lection of Ancient and Modern Times, 1205), ordered by Retired Emperor Go-Toba
(r. 1183–1198); Shin Chokusen Waka Shū (New Imperial Collection, 1234), ordered
by Retired Emperor Go-Horikawa (r. 1221–1232); Shoku Gosen Waka Shū (Later
Collection Continued, 1251), ordered by Retired Emperor Go-Saga (r. 1242–1246);
308 chapter sixteen
in the categories that followed the seasons: felicitations, parting, travel,

wordplays, love, hymns, Buddhist poems, and miscellanea. Poets of
waka (thirty-one syllable poems in the Yamato language) continued to
follow these categorizations until modern times. The massive presence
of nature in Japanese poetry has led to a variety of “aesthetic” read-
ings of such poetry, which has come to be appreciated for its colorful
imagery, depth of feeling, and simplicity of expression.3 Other readers
have focused on the ideological implications of these images of nature,
and tried to reconstruct the politics behind the beauty of the cherry
blossoms.4
The debate on the function of poetry—either to please or to
instruct—is an ancient one, but no debate can take place without a
basic knowledge of the “grammar” of Japanese poetry—a grammar
based on a series of associations between seasonal words which every
poet was required to know in order to express his or her feelings in a
song. In this book, I present a selection of major seasonal words—an
exhaustive list would fill many hundreds of pages. Each word is
accompanied by a selection of poems which include waka and haiku
(shorter seventeen syllable poems) from the eighth to the twentieth
century. This should help readers to become familiar with the basic
Shoku Kokin Waka Shū (Collection of Ancient and Modern Times Continued, 1265),
ordered by Retired Emperor Go-Saga; Shoku Goshūi Waka Shū (Collection of Glean-
ings Continued, 1278), ordered by Retired Emperor Kameyama (r. 1259–1274); Shin
Gosen Waka Shū (New Later Collection, 1303), ordered by Retired Emperor Go-Uda
(r. 1274–1287); Gyokuyō Waka Shū (Collection of Jeweled Leaves, 1313–1314), ordered
by Retired Emperor Fushimi (r. 1287–1298); Shoku Senzai Waka Shū (Collection of
a Thousand Years Continued, 1320), ordered by Retired Emperor Go-Uda; Shoku
Goshūi Waka Shū (Later Collection of Gleanings Continued, 1325–1326), ordered by
Emperor Go-Daigo (r. 1318–1339); Fūga Waka Shū (Collection of Elegance, 1344–
1346), ordered by Retired Emperor Hanazono (r. 1308–1318); Shin Senzai Waka
Shū (New Collection of a Thousand Years, 1359), ordered by Emperor Go-Kōgon
(r. 1352–1371); Shin Shūi Waka Shū (New Collection of Gleanings, 1364), ordered
by Emperor Go-Kōgon; Shin Goshūi Waka Shū (New Later Collection of Gleanings,
1383), ordered by Emperor Go-Enʾyū (r. 1371–1382); and Shin Shoku Kokin Waka
Shū (New Collection of Ancient and Modern Times Continued, 1439), ordered by
Emperor Go-Hanazono (r. 1429–1465). For a historical account of these collections,
see Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
3
An array of aesthetic terms has been associated with Japanese poetry, such as
mono no aware (pathos of things), makoto (truth), yūgen (mystery and depth), sabi
(rusticity), wabi (simplicity), etc. See Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics
(Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2007).
4
See Michele Marra, The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medi-
eval Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991).
playing with japanese songs: politics or pleasure? 309
conventions of poetic composition that no Japanese poet could ever

neglect whether he/she was engaged in solitary readings, or in the cre-
ation of poetry with fellow poets (renga, or linked poetry). These are
basic associations that one should memorize, in the same way that
poets used to memorize thousands of poems in the hope of coming up
with the one, good poem of their life. Creativity in waka was based on
the poet’s ability to come up with a slight variation on images set by
conventions and poetic traditions. Not a single word could be chosen
that was not encoded in and approved by such traditions. Even the
overturning of tradition, as happened in the comic form of haikai,
would have been meaningless without a reader who knew this tradi-
tion by heart. This book seeks to be a way into this tradition of poetic
images, a poetic guide which should help readers to decipher other
Japanese poems which they might encounter in the future. This is not
a historical account of Japanese poetry based on the life and times
of the poets—topics on which several excellent publications already
exist.5 Readers who are interested in the historical contexts surround-
ing the poems might want to take a look at the glossary where they
will find all the names of the poets represented in the book, and use it
as springboard for further research with the assistance of the English
works mentioned in the bibliography. My purpose in the present book
is to make readers familiar with the stylizations of the seasons, the
constraints within which poets worked, and the subtlety of their use
of conventions in the creation of little poetic masterpieces.
Once they have completed this basic footwork, readers should be
able to proceed with interpretations—a difficult endeavor when it
comes to Japanese poems which are often anthologized with limited
interpretative guidance. In the remainder of this introduction I will
give some pointers for the reading of Japanese poems which are meant
to indicate a few of the difficulties in the process of interpretation.
5
In addition to the work by Brower and Miner already mentioned, see Helen C.
McCullough, Brocade by Night: “Kokin Wakashū” and the Court Style in Japanese
Classical Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); Robert N. Huey, The Mak-
ing of Shinkokinshū (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002);
Steven D. Carter, The Road to Komatsubara: A Classical Reading of the Renga Hyakuin
(Cambridge and London: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987);
H. Mack Horton, Song in an Age of Discord: ‘The Journal of Sōchō’ and Poetic Life in
Late Medieval Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); and Haruo Shirane,
Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural memory, and the Poetry of Bashō (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998).
310 chapter sixteen
The First Japanese Song
Essays on poetry known in Japanese as karon (debates on poetry)

agree that the source of poetry in the Yamato language is a poem by a
deity, Susanoo no Mikoto, the mischievous brother of the Sun Goddess
Amaterasu.6 Laying aside for the moment the questionable attribution
of a poem to a God, the major difficulty involved in reading this truly
primitive song consists in the language in which it was transmitted—a
cumbersome transcription of phonemes using Chinese characters in
which the characters stand for sound rather than for meaning. In
other words, someone with a knowledge of classical Chinese would be
unable to read this poem, and no one would be able to assign precise
sounds to these characters were it not for the extensive research by
Japanese scholars in the eighteenth century. The poem was originally
written in a system which is known today as “manʾyōgana”—a refer-
ence to the letters used in the compilation of the Manʾyōshū (the first
example of Japanese poetry in the local Yamato language). Readers of
this book will find examples of “manʾyō letters” every time a poem is
taken from this collection.7 Once we look at the alleged “first” Japanese
song, we actually find two different versions which appear in two of
the most ancient chronicles of Japan, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient
Matters, 712) and the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720). This is
how the two versions are transcribed:
Kojiki version:
ᄛਭᲫᄙㇺદ⼺Ძᄛᐊ⾐ጘㇺ㤗⎴ᓸῺᄛᐊ⾐ጘㇺਭᵹᦦ⢻ᄛᐊ⾐
ጘⴹ
Nihon Shoki version:
ᄛฏ⨃ᄙ⪁દᒒᲫᄛⷓ㙈ጘ⪁⏴⺆ᤒῺᄛⷓ㙈ᨛㇺ୾⋝⿅ᑬᄛⷓ㙈
ጘᑫ
6
This point is made in Minamoto no Toshiyori’s (?1055–?1129) Toshiyori Zuinō
(Toshiyori’s Poetic Essentials, ?1115), Fujiwara no Sunzei’s (1114–1204) Korai Fūtei
Shō (Poetic Styles Past and Present, 1197), and, in more modern times, Motoori Nori-
naga’s (1730–1801) Isonokami no Sasamegoto (Personal Views on Poetry, 1763).
7
In this book, the original manʾyōgana version of poems from the Manʾyōshū is
always followed by a transcription of the same characters in the syllabic system of
modern Japanese, which is how the ancient poems are transcribed today in modern
Japanese editions of the Manʾyōshū.
It took the philologist Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) over thirty years

of hard archival work before he could match these Chinese characters
with Japanese sounds. Without this linkage the characters would be
totally incomprehensible. Norinaga was able to come up with a pho-
netic reconstruction of the poem:
Kojiki version:
߿ߊ߽ߚߟ ޿ߠ߽߿߳߇߈ ߟ߹ߏߺߦ ߿߳߇߈ߟߊࠆ ߘߩ
߿߳߇߈ࠍ
yakumotatsu izumoyahegaki tsumagomi ni yahegakitsukuru sonoyahe-
gakiwo
Nihon Shoki version:
߿ߊ߽ߚߟ ޿ߠ߽߿߳߇߈ ߟ߹ߏߺߦ ߿߳߇߈ߟߊࠆ ߘߩ
߿߳߇߈ࠌ
yakumotatsu izumoyahegaki tsumagomini yahegakitsukuru sonoyahe-
gakiwe
Although the characters used to record the two versions are very dif-
ferent, the phonetic result seems to be almost identical. Once the
phonetic enigma was solved, it became easy to assign Chinese charac-
ters to these sounds—characters that would match the meaning of the
Yamato words, as one can see from the following modern transcrip-
tion of the poem:
౎㔕┙ߟ ಴㔕౎㊀၂ ᆄ⯔ߺߦ ౎㊀၂૞ࠆ ߘߩ౎㊀၂ࠍ
Yakumo tatsu Izumo yaegaki Tsumagomi ni Yaegaki tsukuru Sono yae-
gaki o
However, the re-introduction of Chinese characters into the transcrip-
tion of local phonemes inevitably limited the meanings of the words
in question to the specific meaning of the Chinese characters used to
transcribe those words. As a result, different interpretations were given
of the poem, followed by different translations, as one can see from
the two most widely used English translations of this poem from the
Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki.
Translation from Kojiki:

The many-fenced palace of Izumo
Of the many clouds rising—
To dwell there with my spouse
312 chapter sixteen
Do I build a many-fenced palace:

Ah, that many-fenced palace!8
Translation from Nihon Shoki:
Many clouds arise,
On all sides a manifold fence
To receive within it the spouses,
They form a manifold fence—
Ah! That manifold fence!9
Both translations talk about rising clouds, fences and spouses. How-
ever, the first also hints at a specific geographical area (Izumo), and
to the act of building a palace—elements which do not appear in the
second translation. Let us keep in mind that we are talking about
the same poem. Evidently, the first translation responds to a specific
context—the one provided by the narrative which precedes the poem
in the Kojiki. This context refers to the descent to earth of the deity
Susanoo no Mikoto, and the pacification of the land—an act which
will eventually lead to the birth of the first human emperor, Jinmu,
the alleged descendant from the Gods and the ancestor of all the rul-
ers that followed down to the present time. The descent took place in
Izumo, in today’s Shimane Prefecture—the locale of the Izumo Taisha,
the Izumo Grand Shrine which is dedicated to Okuninushi no Mikoto,
the nephew of the Sun Goddess. The following is the context:
Hereupon Susanoo-no-Mikoto sought for a place in the land of Izumo
to build his palace. Arriving at Suga, he said: “Coming here, my heart
is refreshed (sugasugashi),” In that place he built his palace and dwelt
there. Therefore that place is still called Suga. When this first great deity
first built the palace of Suga, clouds rose from that palace. He made a
song, which said . . .10
This reading of the poem suggests a political ideology when it highlights
the construction of an imperial palace to be inhabited by the powerful
rulers of the Yamato clan who claimed divine descent. However, this
reading hinges on the interpretation of the word “izumo” ಴㔕 which,
as a matter of fact, has two meanings: 1) the geographical name of the
ancient province of Izumo (eastern part of Shimane Prefecture); and
8
Donald L. Philippi, trans., Kojiki (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968), 91.
9
W. G. Aston, trans., Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D.
697, Volume One (Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972), 53–54.
10
English translation by Donald L. Philippi, Kojiki, 91.
2) an abbreviation of “izuru kumo” ಴ߠࠆ㔕, which literally means

“rising clouds, or clouds that are coming out.” If one follows the first
interpretation, then the poem becomes an assertion of political power.
The second reading leads to an aesthetic interpretation of a poem orig-
inally conceived as a hymn to clouds and poetry, as Motoori Norinaga
argued in 1763 when he saw in this poem an every-day view of clouds,
as well as a manifesto of poetic beauty. The “aesthetic” reading of this
song hints at a poet singing the beauty of poetry.11
Many clouds rising,
Many layered clouds raising a manifold-fence
Hiding my bride from sight,
Clouds are forming a manifold fence,
Oh, that manifold fence!
The poet hides the beauty of the woman (= poetry) in eight layers of
clouds, so as to make sure that, unless one is a poet or has an apprecia-
tion for poetry one cannot have access to beauty. One has to be a poet
in order to appreciate the poem—unless one is a poet, this vision of
beauty will be entirely closed to him, as it was closed to the reader of
the Kojiki who, instead, gave an ideological reading of it. According to
Norinaga, the compiler of the Kojiki had lost track of the poet’s purpose:
to write a poem on poetry and its beauty. Instead, he interpreted the
poem as a genealogy of imperial power—an emperor descending from
a deity, occupying the deity’s palace, and making it into the imperial
palace. From the very beginning there was a question about whether
the function of poetry was political or merely aesthetic (or whether the
aesthetic could be separated from the political)—a debate that contin-
ues to the present day. Japan’s alleged “first song” prompts us to ask
this basic question about poetry from the very beginning. Norinaga
sided with those who believed that poetry had no political meaning
and should not be read with history in mind. This explains his desire
to remove the physical walls of the palace from the poem, reminding
us that the walls belonged to the clouds, not to a building—and, most
of all, not to an imperial building. For Norinaga, poetry was pleasure,
not politics. Actually, things were slightly more complicated.
11
For Norinaga’s reading of this poem see, Michael F. Marra, The Poetics of Motoori
Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007),
25–28.
314 chapter sixteen
The First Song from the First Collection in Yamato Language
By now readers should be aware of the difficulties involved in reading

the “manyō letters” used to transcribe the 4,516 poems collected in the
Manʾyōshū. The following is the first of the long series of poems in the
original “manʾyō letter” version, the modern syllabary (kana) version,
and a transcription in Roman letters (rōmaji). The song is attributed
to Emperor Yūryaku (r. 456–479).
☜Ძ⥜ ⟤☜Უ੃ ᏓਭᕁᲫ⥜ ⟤ᄦำᔒᜬ ᱝጪዌ ⩿ណ㗇ా ኅ
ศ㑄ฬ ๔⚓ᩮ ⯯⷗ᵤ ጊ〔ਫ࿡⠪ ᛼ᄹᚭᚻ ๋⸵ᦥዬ Ꮷศฬ
୚ᚻ ๋Ꮖᦥᐳ ᚒ⸵⢛㥵 ๔⋡ ኅ๭Ძฬ㓶Უ
☜߽ࠃ‫☜ߺޔ‬ᜬߜ‫ޔ‬ជਠ(߰ߊߒ)߽ࠃ‫ߺޔ‬ជਠᜬߜ‫ߩߎޔ‬ጪߦ⩿
៰߹ߔా‫ޔ‬ኅ⡞߆ߥ‫ޔ‬๔ࠄߐߨ‫ߟߺࠄߘޔ‬ᄢ๺ߩ࿖ߪ‫ߴߥߒ߅ޔ‬
ߡࠊࠇߎߘዬࠇ‫ߘߎࠇࠊߡߴߥ߈ߒޔ‬ᐳߖ‫ߪߘߎߦࠇࠊޔ‬๔ࠄ
߼‫ޔ‬ኅࠍ߽ฬࠍ߽
Komo yo, miko mochi, fukushi mo yo, mifukumi mochi, kono oka ni na
tsumasu ko, ie kika na, norasane, soramitsu yamato no kuni wa, oshina-
bete ware koso ore, shikinabete ware koso mase, ware ni koso wa norame,
ie o mo na o mo
If one follows Norinaga’s method of searching for Yamato sounds in
Chinese characters, this poem emerges as a love poem—the courtship
of a maiden by an emperor.
Your basket, with your pretty basket,
Your trowel, with your little trowel,
Maiden, picking herbs on this hillside,
I would ask you: Where is your home?
Will you not tell me your name?
Over the spacious Land of Yamato
It is I who reign so wide and far,
It is I who rule so wide and far,
I myself, as your lord, will tell you
Of my home, and my name.12
The poet is the master of language and the poem is on the power of
words. If used convincingly, the girl will reveal her name to the ruler.
The revelation of the name is tantamount to the release of her soul to
the man—an acceptance of the man’s advances and a pledge to sleep
12
Donald Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature: Earliest Era to Mid-Nineteenth
Century (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 33.
with him. Again, this is a poem on poetry’s power to use language prop-
erly. The ancient belief in the “spirit of words” (kotodama) encouraged
ancient people to be extremely careful in their use of language—only
the right words should be chosen. The wrong word, an unkind word,
a word pronounced at the wrong time could offend the listener, who
could well be a deity. And the deity could cause those who are care-
less in their choice of words all kinds of calamities and misfortunes.
The girl seems reluctant to disclose her name, although her resistance
will have little effect if the suitor is an emperor. This is how the poem
has been interpreted for centuries, based on the belief that “manʾyō
letters” are Chinese characters used to transcribe Yamato sounds. But,
what if the Chinese characters were to transcribe sounds, not from the
Yamato language, but from the language of ancient Korea—a hypoth-
esis not too far-fetched when one realizes that most scribes working at
the court prior to the Nara period were either Koreans or of Korean
descent? This is the hypothesis advanced by Youg-hee Lee in 1989—a
thought that has horrified legions of purists for whom the Korean con-
nection challenges the myth of homogeneity of the Yamato land. If
one accepts Youg-hee Lee’s interpretation, then the same poem comes
to assume a profoundly political meaning. Rather than wooing a girl,
the emperor, a ruler of Korean descent, announces that he has come to
colonize the local Yamato people. The following is an English render-
ing of Lee’s hypothesis:13
Oh you, people from Koguryo,
Oh you, people from Japan,
Standing on the line of previous emperors
I have built my house,
And now I announce this to you:
I have pacified you and I have become your ruler.
Here I came swiftly to let this be known to you,
Here I have come.
This reading of the poem has been conveniently ignored for centu-
ries in Japan, because the scholars who deciphered this poem in the
eighteenth century belonged to a movement, known as the Kokugaku
movement (National Learning), which aimed at asserting the cultural
autonomy of the Yamato culture, and at underplaying all possible for-
eign influences, particularly Chinese and Korean ones. With Japan’s
13
I Yong-hi, Mō Hitotsu no Manʾyōshū (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1989), 21–40.
316 chapter sixteen
occupation of East Asia and the colonization of Korea in the twentieth

century, the last thing that scholars of Japanese literature wanted to say
about their emperors Taishō and Shōwa was that their ruler’s blood
was mixed with the blood of the colonized. There is an element of
play in this ideological reading of the first poem from the Manʾyōshū:
the idea that ancient scribes conversant with both the Korean and the
Yamato languages could easily read the same poem in two different
languages, and thus enjoy meanings that were “hidden” to those who
did not have the same linguistic knowledge. In other words, they were
playing with secret codes.
Cherry Blossoms
It would be difficult to find an “aesthetic” reading of poetry that is

not informed by some ideological agenda. What appears to be the
most innocent love poem is inevitably enmeshed in a web of ideologi-
cal implications. When it comes to Chinese and Japanese poetry, the
rule of thumb suggests that while Chinese poetry is overtly political,
Japanese poetry is about cherry blossoms and willow trees. There are
reasons for this. The strong Confucian background informing Chi-
nese culture led the arts to promote moral good and to chastise evil
behavior. On the other hand, Japanese waka developed in a courtly
environment in which privileges were assured by birth, rather than
being the result of a meritocratic system based on national examina-
tions. The Chinese emperor ruled according to a mandate from heaven
that could be revoked at any time if such a rule was found to be unjust.
The Japanese ruler could not be unjust as long as he was thought to
descend from the Gods of the high plain of heaven. The only mistake
that a Japanese courtier could commit was to offend someone whose
birth had granted him superior status. In China, it was not uncom-
mon for a non-benevolent ruler or an inhumane bureaucrat to become
the target of a poet’s wrath, as in the case of the rapacious tax official
against whom the poet addresses his complaint in the famous poem
“Big Rat” from the Book of Odes (Shih-ching).
Big rat, big rat,
Do not gobble our millet!
Three years we have slaved for you,
Yet you take no notice of us.
At last we are going to leave you
And go to that happy land;

Happy land, happy land,
Where we shall have our place.
Big rat, big rat,
Do not gobble our corn!
Three years we have slaved for you,
Yet you give us no credit.
At last we are going to leave you
And go to that happy kingdom;
Happy kingdom, happy kingdom,
Where we shall get our due.
Big rat, big rat,
Do not eat our rice-shoots!
Three years we have slaved for you.
Yet you did nothing to reward us.
At least we are going to leave you
And go to those happy borders;
Happy borders, happy borders,
Where no sad songs are sung.14
One would be hard put to find the Japanese counterpart of this poem,
particularly should one look in the imperial anthologies which were
meant to promote the court’s taste and decorum. Instead, one finds
thousands of poems on the cherry blossoms which produce statements
that often contradict each other. For example, a poet wishes that the
blossoms would last forever, since they are so beautiful:
Harusame no Everyone feels grief
Furu wa namida ka When cherry blossoms scatter.
Sakurabana Might they then be tears—
Chiru o oshimanu Those drops of moisture falling
Hito shi nakereba In the gentle rains of spring?15
Another poet wishes that the cherry blossoms would scatter all at once,
so as to make sure that they would not remind one of life’s saddest
moment, death:
Nokori naku It is just because
Chiru zo medetaki They scatter without a trace
14
English translation by Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese
Classic of Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 88–89.
15
Kokin Waka Shū 2:88, Ōtomo Kuronushi (fl 885–897). English translation by
Helen Craig McCullough, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese
Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 30.
318 chapter sixteen
Sakurabana That cherry blossoms

Arite yo no naka Delight us so, for in this world
Hate no ukereba Lingering means ugliness.16
No matter how one perceives the cherry blossoms, nothing moves the
heart more than the view of the falling flowers that cause much anxiety
to sensitive viewers:
Yo no naka ni If ours were a world
Taete sakura no Where blossoming cherry trees
Nakariseba Were not to be found,
Haru no kokoro wa What tranquility would bless
Nodokekaramashi The human heart in springtime!17
If we took these images to be simple expressions of the natural world,
those who claim that Japanese poetry is essentially “aesthetic” would
be correct. However, it would be disingenuous to ignore the enormous
skills that Japanese poets demonstrated in hiding entire political state-
ments behind these images of nature. After all, poets were in charge
of language and language had to be used with extreme care. When it
comes to language, no one was more careful than Japanese poets of
old. Maybe the cherry blossoms were hiding much more than simple
references to old age, death, a sudden change of heart, or someone’s
unreliability. Likewise, the wisteria flower ( fuji no hana) stood in
the poet’s imagination for much more than a colorful spring flower. The
Chinese character used to record the word “wisteria” ( fuji ⮮) is the
same as the one used to write the name of Japan’s most influential polit-
ical family in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Fujiwara family—
a name which literally means, “field of wisterias” ⮮ේ. The follow-
ing poem on cherry blossoms and wisteria flowers hides a treacherous
political statement behind the apparently pleasing surface of a postcard:
Saku hana no Longer than ever before
Shita ni kakururu Is the wisteria’s shadow—
Hito ōmi How many are those
Arishi ni masaru Who shelter beneath
Fuji no kage ka mo Its blossoms!18
16
Kokin Waka Shū 2:71, anonymous. English translation by Helen Craig
McCullough, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poerty, 26.
17
Kokin Waka Shū 1:53, Ariwara no Narihira (825–880). English translation by
Helen Craig McCullough, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese
Poetry, 24.
18
Ise Monogatari (The Tales of Ise), dan 101, Ariwara no Narihira. English trans-
lation by Helen Craig McCullough, Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century
This song found a fitting home within the text of Ise Monogatari (The
Tales of Ise, 10th century) in which one finds the following narrative:
There was once a man called Ariwara Yukihira, the Commander of the
Military Guards of the Left. A group of courtiers, learning that Yuki-
hira’s household had produced some excellent wine, visited him one day
to sample it, and he entertained them with a feast at which Fujiwara
Masachika, the Middle Controller of the Left, was designated as guest of
honor. It happened that Yukihira, whose tastes were most refined, had
arranged several sprays of flowers in a vase, among them a remarkable
cluster of wisteria blooms over three feet long. The guests began to com-
pose poems about the wisteria, and were just finishing when the host was
joined by his younger brother, who had been told of the festivities. They
caught hold of the newcomer, demanding a poem. At first he tried to
decline, since he knew little of the art of poetry, but they refused to let
him off. He recited, “Saku hana no . . .”
“What is the point of your poem?” someone asked. “I was thinking
about the Chancellor’s brilliant career and the splendid accomplish-
ments of other members of the Fujiwara family,” he replied. The critics
were satisfied.19
Evidently, someone in the audience had noticed that this was a strange
poem. And indeed, this is one of Japan’s most overtly critical poems
against the powerful Fujiwara family that had infiltrated all branches
of government, similar to a vine of wisteria which clings to all the
surrounding plants, and that eventually causes them to wither. We
must remember that in the tenth and eleventh centuries the emperors
were usually chosen from the sons of women from the Fujiwara fam-
ily, and that the woman’s father, a Fujiwara, was automatically chosen
as the Regent for the infant emperor. In a few decades the Fujiwara
had wiped out from the political scene the country’s major noble fami-
lies, such as the Ki, Ōtomo, Sugawara, and Tachibana families. In this
poem, the poet Ariwara no Narihira, who was also a victim of Fuji-
wara power despite his direct descent from an Emperor, complains
about the fact that everybody is now allying with the powerful field
of wisterias (the Fujiwara), and forgetting about the past glory of his
own family, the Ariwara, which literally means, “the field of the past.”
Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 139. For a discussion of this poem
see, Michele Marra, The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval
Japanese Literature, 44–46.
19
English translation by Helen Craig McCullough, Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes
from Tenth-Century Japan, 138–139.
320 chapter sixteen
Narihira uses floral imagery ingeniously to disguise the names of the

two families: Fujiwara (the field of wisteria) and Ariwara (the field of
the past). Evidently, there is something more than cherry blossoms
to Japanese poetry. A more literal translation of the poem would be
something like,
Many are those people
Hiding beneath
The blooming flowers.
The wisteria’s shadow has become
Even larger than in the past.
The Murasaki Plant
At the imperial court of ancient Japan knowledge and practice of

poetry became basic tools for survival. Without knowledge of poetry
one could not understand the intentions, desire, fears, and commands
of others. An encounter between a man and a woman always began
and always ended with a poem, and whether the encounter was suc-
cessful or not was often determined by the quality of the poem and
the skill of the hand writing it down. Calligraphy was as important
as any other formal aspect of poetic composition. For a boy or a girl
raised with courtly values it was never too early to begin the study of
poetry, as the ten year old Murasaki found out when the eighteen-year
old Genji began courting her. I am referring to the great love between
Genji, the shining prince, and young Murasaki in Japan’s most famous
novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), written around the year
one thousand by the court-lady Murasaki Shikibu. The first poem that
Genji ever wrote to the young girl is all centered on the girl’s name,
Murasaki—a name that, by the way, also happens to be the name by
which the author came to be known.
Originally, “murasaki” was the name of a plant, the gromwell, the
roots of which were used for extracting medicines and as a purplish
dye. When the young Genji wrote his first love poem to the woman
destined to become the love of his life, Genji (and, to some extent,
Murasaki) knew the long poetic history of the word. This tradition
went back to three hundred years earlier, the eighth century, when
an amorous exchange took place between Princess Nukata (consort
of Emperor Tenji, r. 668–671) and Tenji’s younger brother, soon to
become Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–686).
Princess Nukata’s poem:

Akane sasu You go
Murasakino yuki Through the purple
Shimeno yuki Murasaki fields, the royal fields.
Nomori wa mizu ya Won’t the guardsman see you
Kimi ga sode furu Wave your sleeves to me?20
Emperor Tenmu’s poem:
Murasaki no If you,
Nioeru imo o Glowing like the purple root,
Nikuku araba Were odious to me,
Hitozuma yue ni Why would I long for you,
Ware koime ya mo Being the wife of another?21
As a result of this poetic exchange the noun “murasaki” came to be
associated with exquisite beauty and illicit love. Moreover, in the tenth
century “murasaki” came to indicate the connection between female
members of the same family. In other words, if one loves one girl of
the family, one murasaki plant, he is bound to love all the other girls
who are related to her by blood, all the other murasaki plants in the
field, as one learn from the following poem:
Murasaki no Because of this one
Hitomoto yue ni Precious murasaki plant,
Musashino no I feel affection
Kusa wa minagara For all the grasses and shrubs
Aware to zo miru Growing on Musashi plain.22
This idea was used in The Tales of Ise (chapter 41) in a story in which
two sisters get married, one to an impoverished man and the other
to a wealthy one. The sister married to the poor man was not used
to menial work and, while laying her husband’s formal cloak out to
dry, she accidentally tore apart the fabric, splitting it at the shoulder.
The woman kept weeping until the wealthy man of high rank, finding
her plight most affecting, sent a handsome blue cloak to the woman
together with a poem:
20
Manʾyōshū 1:20, princess Nukata.
21
Manʾyōshū 1:21, Emperor Tenmu.
22
Kokin Waka Shū 17:867, anonymous. English translation by Helen Craig
McCullough, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry, 190.
322 chapter sixteen
Murasaki no When the murasaki hue

Iro koki toki wa Is strong and deep,
Me no haru ni One can distinguish
No naru kusaki No other plant
Wakarezarikeru On the vast plain.23
In this poem, the murasaki plant stands for a transfer of affection from
the beloved to the kin. The strength of the dye and its capacity to stain
its surroundings was a metaphor for a deep relationship, even if not
necessarily sexual. We are now finally ready to read Genji’s first love
poem to little Murasaki in which a web of sexual relationships spins
out of control.
Genji’s poem:
Ne wa minedo Though I haven’t seen its roots
Aware to zo omou Dear to me is this plant
Musashino no Kin to the one in Musashino,
Tsuyu wakewaburu The one I cannot visit
Kusa no yukari o So thick is the dew.
Murasaki’s poem:
Kakotsubeki Not knowing why
Yue o shiraneba You should complain,
Obotsukana I am lost;
Ikanaru kusa no What plant might it be
Yukari naruran That I am kin to?24
“Ne” in the expression “ne wa minedo” in Genji’s poem has two mean-
ings: 1) root (ne ᩮ); 2) to sleep with someone (neru ኢࠆ). Thus, the
verse means, although I have not yet slept with you, you remind me
of that other murasaki plant which grows in the Musashino plain—a
plant that looks just like you, a plant with which I have slept in the
past. Genji has transferred his love from the old plant to the new
one, young Murasaki. The old plant is Fujitsubo, Genji’s impossible
love. Five years older than Genji, Fujitsubo was one of the emperor’s
consorts. The problem was that the Emperor was Genji’s father. In
23
English translation by Helen Craig McCullough, Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes
from Tenth-Century Japan, 99.
24
English translation by Norma Field, The Splendor of Longing in The Tale of Genji
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 163. I am indebted to Field’s work for
the explanation of the name “murasaki.”
other words, Genji had had an affair with his step-mother who, finally,
unable to stand the situation, had shaved her head and become a nun.
Murasaki was the daughter of Fujitsubo’s brother. She looked exactly
like her aunt Fujitsubo—a young murasaki plant in a field of mura-
saki. Of course, Murasaki was too young to know about Genji’s illicit
affairs. After all, this was her first serious attempt at poetry. Genji is
well aware that he has embarked upon a series of questionable rela-
tionships, first with his step-mother and then with a 10 year old child.
There is no doubt a sense of guilt in Genji’s words, as we can see from
the following poem by the shining prince:
Te ni tsumite When shall I pluck
Itsushika momin And hold in my hand
Murasaki no The young field plant
Ne ni kayoikeru Whose roots join the roots
Nobe no wakakusa Of the murasaki?25
The word “tsumite” ៰ߺߡ (plucking) incorporates the word “tsumi”
⟋ (sin)—a reference to the webs of illicit relationships taking place in
the field of the murasaki plant. What’s in a name? At the very least, a
very long novel!
A Double Acrostic
Thus far, we have seen poetry conveying feelings of love, expressing

regrets over old age and fear of death, advancing political claims, and
carefully disguising political discontent. My last example is a puzzle
that I would encourage the reader to solve. It is an example of poets
at play—two giant poets of the Middle Ages, Kenkō (1283-after 1352),
the author of the famous Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), and his
good friend Ton’a (1289–1372). Both have discarded the world and
live a life of reclusion, far away from the spectacular rituals and finan-
cial reward of the court. Both poems describe the loneliness and the
poverty of the recluse whose only consolation in the cold night is the
writing of poetry. They wish they could, at least, see each other, so as to
spend a few hours in conversation. However, the recluses have become
so used to living alone that they somehow hesitate to break their
25
English translation by Norma Field, The Splendor of Longing in The Tale of Genji,
160–161.
324 chapter sixteen
pattern of reclusion. Paradoxically, they both find themselves taking

pleasure in the object of their complaints, loneliness. At the same time,
the exchange disguises a very specific message, without uncovering
which the exchange would be completely meaningless.
Kenkō’s poem:
Yo mo suzushi Cold is the night:
Nezame no kariho Not far from autumn, the wind
Tamakura mo Blows on my arm—
Masode mo aki ni The pillow of my waking hut—
Hedatenaki kaze And on my sleeve.
Ton’a’s poem:
Yoru mo ushi What a wretched world,
Netaku waga seko This loathsome man
Hate wa kozu Who eventually does not come!
Nahozari ni dani Oh, if he could just visit for a moment,
Shibashi toimase Even if just for fun!26
In order to understand the message conveyed by these poems we
might have to reposition them and highlight the syllables in which
the messages of the poems are actually hidden.
Yo mo suzushi
nezame no kariho
tamakura mo
masode mo aki ni
hedatenaki kaze
Yoru mo ushi
netaku waga seko
hate wa kozu
nahozari ni dani
shibashi toimase
Once we read the first syllable of each verse and continue with the
last, we see a double acrostic at work in each poem. The poems are
much less about cold night and blowing winds than about an exchange
of concrete requests among recluses. These are the messages incorpo-
rated into the acrostics:
26
Nishio Minoru, ed., Kenkō Hōshi Kashū, IB 30–112–2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
1989), 81. For a discussion of this exchange see, Michele Marra, The Aesthetics of Dis-
content: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature, 133–134.
1) Kenkō’s request: Yone tamahe, zeni mo hoshi—“give me some rice,

I also need some money.”
2) Ton’a’s answer: Yone wa nashi, zeni sukoshi—“I have no rice, just
a little money.”
In others words, the playful nature of the exchange (the “aesthetic”

elements) and the less playful circumstances of the recluses’ life (the
“ideological” elements) beg for another translation, no matter how
unsatisfactory this is bound to remain:
Giddy I feel during the day,
very cold night, almost insane
me, here I go, quiet, pianissimo,
rising alone on my poor bed,
ceiling so low, old on my cane.
Noting my life to my dismay,
right now I see I go insane,
certainly I wait, silent, pianissimo,
on my poor bed, my bones are brittle,
lying alone, my heart is split.
And now we must begin with studying the seasonal grammar of
ancient Japanese poetry in the hope that we might come up with bet-
ter interpretations of Japanese songs.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CONTINUITY IN DISCONTINUITY:
THINKING THE TALE OF GENJI WITH JAPANESE THINKERS
Aestheticization Process
For the title of this lecture I am indebted to the philosopher Nishida

Kitarō (1870–1945) who taught at the imperial university of Japan’s
ancient capital a thousand years after the author of Genji Monogatari,
Murasaki Shikibu, had lectured to a young empress at the imperial
palace of the same capital. Nishida devised the expression “hirenzoku
no renzoku” 㕖ㅪ⛯ߩㅪ⛯ (continuity in discontinuity, or discon-
tinuous continuity) in an attempt to define modern time in light of the
Buddhist notion of “impermanence” (mujō ήᏱ). No one can bathe
twice in the same water of the Kamo River since the water keeps flow-
ing and changing (discontinuity); and yet, no one can deny the fact
that the Kamo River continues to exist (continuity). In other words, a
notion of permanence underscores the idea of impermanence. Within
the state of impermanence, in which everything changes, there is
one thing that never changes: the fact that everything continuously
changes, and never remains the same. There is one thing that always
remains the same in the Tale of Genji: its fame through the centu-
ries from the time when the poet Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204)
declared that, “composing poetry without knowledge of the Genji is
to be greatly deplored.”1 Shunzei praised especially the “Hana no en”
(The Festival of the Cherry Blossoms) chapter for its “sensuous charm”
(en ⦣).2 Since then Genji has inspired poets, writers, and scholars who
have kept this eleventh-century tale alive to this day. A grand narra-
tive has ensued that has transformed the originally rhetorical value of
This paper was originally presented on December 20, 2008, at the International
Symposium “Translations and Variations on The Tale of Genji,” Dōshisha University,
Kyōto, Japan. The author wishes to thank Professor Kishi Fumikazu for his kind invi-
tation and comments.
1
Shunzei made this comment in the Roppyakuban Uta-awase (Poetry Contest in
Six Hundred Rounds, 1192). Quoted in Haruo Shirane, The Bridge of Dreams: A Poet-
ics of ‘The Tale of Genji’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. xvii.
2
Kubota Jun and Yamaguchi Akiho, eds., Roppyakuban Utaawase, SNKBT 38
328 chapter seventeen
the tale into Japan’s aesthetic object for excellence. Genji has come to
epitomize the grace and refinement of Japan’s ancient capital and, by
extension, of the entire country. No discourse on Japan and beauty
can be attempted without reference to the Tale of Genji, as Kawabata
Yasunari (1899–1972) confirmed in his Nobel prize lecture, “Japan,
The Beautiful and Myself:” “The Genji was a wide and deep source of
nourishment for poetry, of course, and for the fine arts and handicrafts
as well, and even for landscape gardening.”3
The aestheticization of The Tale of Genji began in the eighteenth-
century with the formulation of the most well-known theory of this
tale, Motoori Norinaga’s (1730–1801) theory of mono no aware (the
pathos of things). This theory was truly epoch-making as it was formu-
lated around 1763, only a few years after the German Alexander Baum-
garten (1714–1762) had basically invented the science of aesthetics in
his Aesthetica (1750). Baumgarten defined aesthetics as “a science of
sensible knowledge” (scientia cognitionis sensitivae)—a definition that
was not too far from Norinaga’s insistence on the importance of “the
knowledge of sensitivity” (mono no aware o shiru ‛ߩຟࠇࠍ⍮ࠆ)
in the formation of an ethical community. The history of the aestheti-
cization of The Tale of Genji begins with a general paradox: on the
one hand Norinaga wanted to liberate fiction from the ethical implica-
tions of readings on the part of Neo-Confucian scholars who judged
the value of literary texts based on their ability to “promote good and
chastise evil” (kanzen chōaku ൘ༀᙼᖡ). Norinaga knew very well that
it would have been impossible to save the shining prince from charges
of immorality, given Genji’s loose sense of propriety when it comes
to the choice of lovers. The only way to liberate The Tale of Genji
from the attacks of moralists was to follow the same reasoning that the
German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) will follow in the
1790s: to endow the literary work with aesthetic value so as to free it
from the realms of ethics and logic. However, a paradox ensued when
Norinaga re-inscribed the alleged autonomy of the literary work—The
Tale of Genji—in a community of like-minded readers. These readers
were encouraged to find in the text a sensitivity to sensibility that was
required in order to live in a world ruled by taste rather than by laws.
After all, while reading The Tale of Genji with his students Norinaga
aimed at creating a “common sense” that would teach how to feel in
3
Kawabata Yasunari, Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1968.
thinking the tale of genji with japanese thinkers 329
a community in which the power of aware would ideally replace the

power of the police. Or, to put in Norinaga’s words,
Now, with regard to the difference between knowing mono no aware and
not knowing it, I would say that to know mono no aware is to be stirred
by the view of the wonderful cherry blossoms, or of the bright moon
while facing it. One’s feelings are stirred up because he understands,
deep in his heart, the moving power of the moon and of the blossoms.
The heart that is ignorant of this moving power will never be stirred,
no matter how wonderful the blossoms are and how clear the moon is
in front of him. In other words, this is what I mean by the phrase “not
knowing mono no aware.”
To know mono no aware is to discern the power and essence, not just
of the moon and the cherry blossoms, but of every single thing exist-
ing in this world, and to be stirred by each of them, so as to rejoice at
happy occasions, to be charmed by what one should consider charming,
to be saddened by sad occurrences, and to love what should be loved.
Therefore, people who know mono no aware have a heart; those who do
not are heartless.4
All major twentieth century aestheticians have been indebted to Nori-
naga’s painstaking analysis of aware, including the one who made
aware into an aesthetic category (biteki hanchū ⟤⊛▸⇵), Ōnishi
Yoshinori (1888–1959), the author of Yūgen and Aware (Yūgen to
Aware, 1939). Ōnishi argued that Norinaga’s approach to the matter
of aware was still informed by linguistics (due to Norinaga’s interest
in etymologies) and psychology, or, as Ōnishi wrote, “I believe there
is no fault in stating that Norinaga stopped at the threshold of ‘psy-
chological aesthetics’ and the counterpart of what we would today call
‘empathy.’”5 Ōnishi attempted to make aware and The Tale of Genji a
local aesthetic category endowed with universal value. In other words,
he wanted to surround aware with the same aura of respectability
and generality as the Western notions of “the beautiful,” “the sub-
lime,” “the graceful,” “the tragic,” and “the comic.” Thanks to Ōnishi’s
work aware came to assume the meaning of a specific worldview that
4
This quote comes from Norinaga’s treatise Isonokami no Sasamegoto (Personal
Views on Poetry, 1763). See Michael F. Marra trans. and ed., The Poetics of Motoori
Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007),
pp. 184–185.
5
This excerpt comes from chapter 4 of Ōnishi’s Bigaku (Aesthetics). See Michele
Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
1999), p. 133.
the aesthetician universalized by translating it into “a kind of world-

weariness” (Weltschmerz) that anyone could experience, including the
reader of The Tale of Genji in translation.
The major problem with aesthetic categories is that they work as
closed boxes into which everything is forced and to which everything
is reduced. The particularity of the object under examination—the
richness, profundity, and difference that make The Tale of Genji so
outstanding, in other words, its discontinuities—is subsumed under
the heading of a general category (aware, miyabi, etc., in other words,
its continuity) which inevitably silences and excludes everything that
does not lend itself to be contained inside the aesthetic box. Aes-
thetic categories work from the basis of an inevitable apriorism that
led Norinaga and Ōnishi to derive Japan’s literary masterpiece from a
single concept, either mono no aware or aware. Independently from
whether they felt that the presence of aware was warranted by the lit-
erary work itself (in other words, no matter whether one could elicit
from The Tale of Genji something called ‘aware’), once the concept
was made into a heuristic category, aware was destined to become the
irrefutable apriori from which any learned reading of the story had
to begin. Ōnishi Yoshinori was well aware of the loss of historicity at
work whenever one uses aesthetic categories, and knew that by the
time he used them in the 1930s and 1940s, the concept of aesthetic cat-
egory was already totally outmoded in Europe, despite a few isolated
efforts to keep them alive at the Sorbonne in Paris.6
A few modern Japanese scholars have taken issue with the reduc-
tion of The Tale of Genji to the notion of mono no aware, as Takahashi
Tōru has eloquently pointed out:
It has become a cliché to imagine the world of The Tale of Genji through
the concept of “mono no aware” or “miyabi.” . . . So much gets lost when
we reduce the theme of fifty-four chapters of The Tale of Genji to a
monophonic concept such as “mono no aware” and “miyabi.” Further-
more, we must be mindful of the ways in which the text has been made
to buttress the national myth of a single race and homogeneous culture
through the history of its reception.7
6
On Etienne Souriau’s (1892–1979) use of the concept of aesthetic category in
his lectures as late as the 1960s, and on the aprioristic nature of aesthetic catego-
ries see Michael F. Marra, “Frameworks of Meaning: Old Aesthetic Categories and
the Present,” in PAJLS, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies,
Vol. 9 (2008), pp. 153–163.
7
Takahashi Tōru, Genji Monogatari no Taiihō (Tokyo: Daigaku Shuppan, 1982),
i. English translation by Tomiko Yoda in an article in which she convincingly chal-
Takahashi links the notion of the ‘aesthetic category’ with the con-
cepts of ‘nation’ and ‘race’ whose boundaries are kept hermetically
sealed like the impervious walls of an aesthetic category. Several sets
of continuities are at work in Takahashi’s quotation: the construction
of the mythology of “aware” that provides a continuity to readings of
The Tale of Genji in terms of fiction (rather than religious or moral-
istic tract) and sensitivity (the aesthetic reading); the construction of
a national audience that takes pride in its ability to understand the
movements of the “Japanese” heart based on belongingness to a spe-
cific ethnicity, at the exclusion of anyone else who does not partake of
the same nation and race, as noted by a plethora of Japanese scholars.
I will only quote a brief statement by the aesthetician Okazaki Yoshie
(1892–1982):
In Japan even after culture had developed to a high level, aware became,
in a uniquely polished shape, the ground of our culture and the founda-
tion for the adaptation of complicated foreign cultures. We can further
speculate that the homogeneity of the Japanese people is reflected in
aware.8
I believe that one should avoid being too quick to come to an anachro-
nistic judgment of this quotation as Okazaki was voicing a feeling quite
widespread at a time of war. But these remarks should make us reflect
on the painstaking efforts of philosophers and aestheticians such as
Ōnishi Yoshinori who made allegedly local categories such as “aware”
understandable to anyone who did not belong to the Japanese nation
and ethnicity. This is the other side, the positive side, of the so often
belittled aesthetic category. If, on the one hand, the transformation of
the particular into the universal reduced The Tale of Genji to a single
concept (aware), on the other, the formation of an alleged “universal”
category in the reading of The Tale of Genji made The Tale of Genji
a “universal” work of literature. In other words, without the works
of aestheticians such as Ōnishi Yoshinori, and without the creation
of aesthetic categories subsuming particularity under the umbrella of
“universals,” The Tale of Genji would not have been translatable to a
non-Japanese audience. Philosophy came to the rescue of the icon of
lenges Masuda Katsumi’s “reduction of the text’s poetry to the ‘prosaic’”—a move that
she sees contiguous with “Norinaga’s subsumption of the Genji under the poetics.”
Tomiko Yoda, “Fractured Dialogues: Mono no Aware and Poetic Communication in
The Tale of Genji,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59:2 (1999), p. 524 and 530.
8
Okazaki Yoshie, Geijutsu Ron no Tankyū (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1941), p. 55.
local culture by making it, to use modern words, “international,” or

“global.”
Temporality of the Court
Is there something in The Tale of Genji that would allow one to talk
about continuities? Or, does this tale resist the notion of continuity by
inserting in the narrative cuts (kire ಾࠇ), dislocations which highlight
conflictual notions of truth based on series of discontinuities? I believe
the answer rests with readers and their take on the tale. Personally, I
believe that the answer can be elicited from the types of temporalities
that one finds in the story. Continuity (renzoku) is profoundly embed-
ded in the temporality of the court which underlines the whole Tale of
Genji. This is the temporality of repetition—the time of rituals which
create yearly cycles. It is the temporality of the seasons which stand at
the beginning of each of the twenty-one poetic anthologies commis-
sioned by imperial order (chokusenshū ഼ᠠ㓸). The detailed descrip-
tion of courtly ceremonies accompanied by minute explanations of
the clothes each man and woman was allowed to wear according to
his or her courtly rank, revolve around specific times of the year with
all its felicitous and tabooed days. The seasons came to be associated
not only with festivals and other forms of collective gatherings, but
also with specific moments of life, such as death, which in The Tale of
Genji is usually mentioned in relation to autumn. As with the poetic
tradition of waka which The Tale of Genji contributed to form, the
blooming and withering of plants and flowers took place at very spe-
cific times—a guarantee of the repetition of time, the continuance of
life, and the return of the same. Any slight variation in the reassur-
ing cycle of nature was cause of untold anxiety and concern—a threat
to the stability of the cosmic order, as well as the status quo, both
political and existential. Any crevice, cut, dislocation of such order
would send readers into a panic, as Ki no Tsurayuki (ca. 868–ca. 945),
the compiler of the first imperial anthology, the Kokinshū (Ancient
and Modern Songs, 905), wanted readers to feel with his choice of the
opening poem of the collection. He selected a song in which the arrival
of spring (the temporality of nature) actually preceded the time when
it was supposed to arrive according to the human calendar (man-made
temporality), on the first day of the year.
Toshi no uchi ni Within the year

Haru wa kinikeri Spring has come.
Hitotose wo What shall one call the remaining year—
Kozo to ya iwamu Shall we call it last year,
Kotoshi to ya iwamu Or shall we call it this year?9
Such fissures within the temporality of the court definitely disrupted
the expectations of tranquility deriving from the reassuring repetition
of cycles of permanence within the present. The present is the tem-
porality of The Tale of Genji, as the linguist Kumakura Chiyuki has
argued in his study of the tale’s narrative time and of the particles
(jodōshi) of the classical grammar:
The purpose of this study is to show that the narrator in Genji Monoga-
tari (The Tale of Genji) relates her story essentially in the present tense,
with the intent of creating a physically immediate and psychologically
intimate world to share with her audience. . . . The basic task [of the par-
ticle keri] is to explain the present stage of an ongoing aspect of the story
and it expresses more often than not the speaker’s sense of discovery,
awareness, realization, noticing, etc. Keri’s fundamental function, there-
fore, is to make the past exist as the time of present speech, and the way
it is used varies according to the narrative situation.10
According to Kumakura, the narrator in The Tale of Genji is respon-
sible for bringing the past into the present and for making the present
the temporal dimension of the tale. In other words, the temporality of
the court is the present. This must be a special present as it encom-
passes not only what takes place at the present moment but also what
has been taking place in the past and is expected to happen in the
future. This is something difficult to see in English translations of the
text in which the past tense is used to express what seems to be essen-
tially a present tense in the original text. The very beginning of the tale
is a good example:
In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great
rank, among all His Majesty’s Consorts and Intimates, enjoyed excep-
tional favor.11
9
Kokin Waka Shū 1:1, Ariwara no Motokata. Okumura Tsuneya, ed., Kokin Waka
Shū, SNKS 19 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978), p. 27.
10
Chiyuki Kumakura, The Narrative Time of “Genji Monogatari,” Ph.D. disserta-
tion, University of California, Berkeley, 1980, p. 1 and 174–175.
11
Royall Tyler, trans., The Tale of Genji, Volume 1 (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 3.
In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the
emperor loved more than any of the others.12
At the court of an Emperor (he lived it matter not when) there was
among the many gentlewomen of the Wardrobe and Chamber one, who
though she was not of very high rank was favoured far beyond all the
rest.13
The original text says, ޿ߠࠇᓮᤨߦ߆‫ޔ‬ᅚᓮ‫ࠄ߱ߐߚ߹޽⴩ᦝޔ‬
߭ߚ߹߭ߌࠆߥ߆ߦ‫߈ߥߣߏ߻߿ߣ޿ޔ‬㓙ߦߪ޽ࠄߧ߇‫ߋߔޔ‬
ࠇߡᤨ߼߈ߚ߹߰޽ࠅߌࠅ,14 which Kumakura translates as follows:
In the reign of a certain emperor it matters not when, there are in atten-
dance many lesser consorts and ladies of the wardrobe, among whom is
one of not very high rank, yet favored beyond all the rest.15
In this passage the reader witnesses two different courts at two differ-
ent times: the court of Empress Shōshi, Fujiwara no Michinaga’s (966–
1027) daughter, whom Murasaki Shikibu served; and an unidentified
ancient court, Genji’s court, in which the tale takes place. The narra-
tor brings the events of the past to bear on the present situation (the
reading of the tale at Shōshi’s court) by shortcutting past and present
through the use of a temporality that Nishida Kitarō has called, “the
eternal present” (eien no ima ᳗㆙ߩ੹). Nishida used the notion of
“the eternal present” in order to talk about the formation of self as well
as the relationship between self and other. There is continuity between
the “I” that I was yesterday and the “I” that I am today, despite the fact
that the “I” that I was yesterday cannot be the same as the “I” that I am
today—something has undoubtedly changed. What brings together the
two “I”s is not memory, as in the case of the French philosopher Henri
Bergson (1859–1941)—which explains why the narrator of The Tale of
Genji does not say, “I remember that I heard that in a past reign there
was a lady not of the first rank . . .” The two “I”s live together in an eternal
present in a dialectical process in which the two “I”s must pass through
a process of absolute negation (zettai mu ⛘ኻή). In other words, the
past “I” must deny himself in order to be born in the present, in the
12
Edward G., Seidensticker, trans., The Tale of Genji, Volume 1 (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1976), p. 3.
13
Arthur Waley, trans., The Tale of Genji, Volume 1 (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1970), p. 7.
14
Ishida Jōji and Shimizu Yoshiko, eds., Genji Monogatari 1, SNKS 1 (Tokyo:
15
Chiyuki Kumakura, The Narrative Time of “Genji Monogatari,” pp. 75–76.
same way as the present “I” must deny himself in order to encompass
yesterday’s “I” within himself. After all, it is the same “I” who is con-
tinuously reborn as a different “I” (as another) with regard to today.16
If one applies this reasoning to the temporality of The Tale of Genji,
one notices that the beginning of the tale points to the same court that
continues to be reborn to this day as a different court. This could only
be achieved in a system deprived of dynasties in which difference rather
than sameness would need to be philosophized. The discontinuity of
every single instant which is different from the preceding and following
instants must be encompassed in a structure of continuity if one wants
to justify an allegedly uninterrupted dynasty from the Sun Goddess to
the present (the many reigns of which one takes center stage in The Tale
of Genji). “Encompassing”—here is the keyword, as Nishida noted by
using the expression “tsutsumu” ൮߻ (to cover, to envelop, to encase)
in his definition of the eternal present as a spatial determination: “a
circle without circumference in which every place is its center.”17
To this day the eternal present continues to be the temporality of
the court—imperial temporality. One may remember the enthrone-
ment ceremony of Emperor Heisei in 1989—the extremely slow and
totally quiet movements of emperor, empress, crown prince, and other
members of the imperial family bringing into the present two millen-
nia of imperial history. Bodies completely still and hidden (tsutsumu
also means “to conceal”) in the forbidden colors, Emperor Heisei and
Empress Michiko quietly stood under their respective canopies—
present embodiments of the deities, Izanagi and Izanami, standing
on the Heavenly Floating Bridge at the time of the creation of the
land.18 It goes without saying that continuities come with discontinui-
ties (which is the structure of Nishida’s discontinuous continuity), so
that the emperor had to relinquish from his hands the Heavenly Jew-
eled Spear, which came to be replaced by the speech to the nation (the
ancient norito, or prayer) with its required reference to the Japanese
constitution—after all, a modern time prime minister Kaifū Toshiki
was in attendance.
16
Nishida develops this argument in the essay “Watakushi to Nanji” (I and You,
1936). Nishida Kitarō, Tetsugaku Ronshū 1. Ed. by Ueda Shizuteru (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1987), p. 281.
17
Nishida Kitarō, Tetsugaku Ronshū 1, p. 285.
18
The even is narrated in the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712). Donald
L. Philippi, trans., Kojiki (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968), p. 49.
Temporality of the Military
If the temporality of the court follows the pattern of Nishida’s con-

tinuity, the temporality of the military (bushi) and their philosophy
of death (Buddhism) could well exemplify Nishida’s notion of dis-
continuity. However, once it comes to the temporality of disruption,
one is almost forced to abandon the structure of courtly refinement
that bonded the first readers/listeners of The Tale of Genji (Murasaki’s
audience) together with its other readers related to the court (poets
of the Mikohidari, Rokujō, Nijō, Kyōgoku, and Reizei families who
kept The Tale of Genji in the highest esteem). One must enter the
world of a different readership—a readership more concerned with
conflicts, wars, deaths on the battlefield and the constant reminder of
impending death: the top military class (shōguns and daimyōs) that
was struggling to inject courtly values into martial virtues in order to
gain legitimacy with circles of power related to the court in Kyōto. In
other words, one must read The Tale of Genji through the lenses of
the Nō of Zeami (1363?–1443?), as in the case of the play Nonomiya
(The Meadow Shrine). Here, the most revengeful spirit of the whole
tale, the spirit of Lady Rokujō, comes onto the stage—the treacherous
woman whose jealousy had caused the death of three of Genji’s loves:
Yūgao, Aoi, and Murasaki. To confront her is a wandering Buddhist
priest, “without fixed abode,”19 whose difficult task is to transform
hatred and resentment into salvation. None is more far from the path
to salvation than Lady Rokujō whose uncontrollable anger reminds
the military audience of the hatred and vindictive feelings they must
endure in their daily life. No escape can be found from the wheel of
karma that mercilessly keeps turning with no end in sight:
In her small sight-seeing cart,/all bereft of power,/she is forced to see/
helplessly her true position;/even though she thinks of this,/no one can
escape/penalties imposed by sins/from our former lives./As her little ox-
drawn cart/turns and turns again/round and round returning still,/how
long will return/these dark delusions?/Save her from graciously,/these
dark delusions,/save her from them graciously.20
19
English translation by Kenneth Yasuda, Masterworks of the Nō Theater (Bloom-
ington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 52.
20
Kenneth Yasuda, Masterworks of the Nō Theater, p. 57.
Eventually Lady Rokujō will be able to leave behind the Burning

House and find the spiritual peace that the audience also needed to
find as temporary escape from their daily dealings with violence.
Nishida’s dialectic of absolute nothingness, which is very much
indebted to Buddhism, is a very good tool to understand the struc-
ture of discontinuity at work in Lady Rokujō’s death to herself in the
formation of the “I” called Lady Rokujō. She must kill yesterday’s
“I”—the angry and vengeful “I”—in order to be reconfigured as the
“I” on the path to enlightenment. At the same time, the same dialec-
tic is useful to understand the relationship between the audience and
the play which is modeled after Nishida’s “I-you” relationship. This
relationship is based on pure discontinuity: I and you are absolutely
other—no universal ever includes I and you, or, to put it in Nishida’s
words, “they are united internally by the fact that they are absolutely
other.”21 The internal union between the bushi in the audience and
Lady Rokujō on stage is based on a process of infinite auto-negation.
The bushi recognizes the absolute other (Lady Rokujō) inside himself
and, thus, understands himself by losing himself in this other, or, again
using Nishida’s words, “The ‘I’ knows himself thanks to a ‘you’ which
is absolutely other; the ‘you’ knows himself thanks to an ‘I’ which is
absolutely other.”22 Lady Rokujō determines the bushi through her
action (dying to herself in order to be born and, thus, establish a con-
tinuity through discontinuities), and she requires from the bushi the
same dialectic of auto-negation: he must die to himself in order to
incorporate within his vengeful self the salvation that the other (Lady
Rokujō) brings to his life. This kind of dialectic is not based on the
structure of a life seen as a big flowing of continuities; it is a continu-
ous birth in a series of eternal deaths (discontinuities). One is always
determined by the other, so that he must die to himself in order to
understand himself as an “I” in a process of unification in which yes-
terday’s “I” is finally unified with today’s “I,” although yesterday’s “I”
can never be today’s “I.” At the same time the “I” enters into commu-
nication with an unknowable “you”—the “I” does not know and can-
not know yesterday’s “you” or today’s “you.” This kind of knowledge
can only be elicited from “expressions”—the performance of Zeami’s
nō, or the reading of the nō libretto.
21
22
Temporality of the Merchants
At this point I would like to introduce a discontinuous moment with

regard to the temporalities of the court and the military—a third tem-
porality belonging to a much more despised social class, particularly
in the Edo period: the merchant class. I am not so concerned with the
treatment of merchants in The Tale of Genji—a topic for research that
might shed some new light on the tale, and tends to be neglected in
discussions of this story. Evidently merchants do not fit the categories
of “good people” and “the cult of beauty” that have informed readings
of Genji.23 Here I am more concerned with readers of The Tale of Genji
who did not belong to the aristocracy or to the samurai class. Motoori
Norinaga is such an example—the descendant of a prosperous cotton
wholesaler family living in the provinces, far away from major centers
of power. Nothing was more removed from him than the world of the
shining prince that reached him in textual forms via the study of waka
poetry that impoverished members of the aristocracy successfully mar-
keted by teaching eminent (and less eminent) members of the samurai
class, men and women of the cloth, as well as anyone who had enough
economic capital to foot the bill, including prosperous merchants. As
a member of the merchant class Norinaga needed to justify his access
to a tale of courtly refinement; in other words, he had to create a space
in which to insert the discontinuity of a social class (the merchants)
within the continuity of exegetical tradition. He could not claim access
to the secret transmission of texts (denju વ᝼) by direct transmission
of mouth from teacher to disciple that had characterized the study of
texts such as the Kokinshū in medieval times. His credentials were at
stake in securing enough authority to talk about a text that was born
from the capital’s court. This is where the pathic element of interpreta-
tion comes to Norinaga’s rescue: with his theory of mono no aware he
could easily argue that anyone was endowed with the ability to “feel”
a text, as long as this ability was the result of education rather then
birth. One did not need to be born at the imperial court in order to
23
“The ‘Good People’ and their Lives” and “The Cult of Beauty” are the titles of
two chapters of Ivan Morris’ The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient
Japan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964)—a book which has contributed to an aes-
theticized reading of Genji in the West. It goes without saying that the book was based
on research originally done by Japanese scholars, especially Ikeda Kikan’s Heianchō no
Seikatsu to Bungaku (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1953).
understand The Tale of Genji; one could learn directly from the read-
ing of poetry how people in the past had felt, and, thus, learn from
texts “proper” ways of feeling. This explains Norinaga’s insistence on
the fact that, “The purpose of The Tale of Genji is to make “aware”
known [to readers],” “to move the hearts” of people (ᔃേ߈), and
to “make people feel” (ੱߩᔃࠍᗵߗߒ߼).24 As a result, The Tale of
Genji was a text worth studying as a repository of a knowledge that
“speaks to the human heart” (ੱߩᖱߦㅢߕࠆ), “the knowledge of
the essence of things” (‛ߩᔃࠍ⍮ࠆ), that is to say, “knowledge of
world’s ways” (਎ߩ᦭᭽ࠍ⍮ࠅ). Schools began to replace churches
and court academies in the transmission of texts—let us not forget
that Kant’s establishment of the three critiques of independent subject
matters (logic, ethic, and aesthetic) ran parallel to the establishment
of the university as an entity independent from churches and kings’
academies. That is to say, mono no aware constitutes the space needed
by merchants to access the jewels of court culture that Norinaga con-
tributed to canonize as the literary masterpieces of the land at a time
when more secular institutions (merchants’ academies) were born all
over Japan.25
Self
Norinaga did not problematize the relationship between individual

and text, having being concerned mainly with communities of like-
minded people. The “self ” constituted as a separate entity from the
environment is a rather late discovery in Japan—the result of nego-
tiations with Western philosophies of individualism. The turbulence
that the notion of “individualism” brought to Japan during the Meiji
period is well known to readers of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916).26 The
low status in which the “self ” was kept by Buddhist thinkers continued
to be an issue well after such confrontations with the strong Western
“I” took place. The philosophy of Nishida Kitarō is a good example.
24
Norinaga made these statements in his long essay on The Tale of Genji, Shibun
Yōryō (The Essentials of Murasaki’s Work, 1763). Hino Tatsuo, ed., Motoori Norinaga
Shū, SNKS 60 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1983), pp. 51–52.
25
See Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō, Mer-
chant Academy of Osaka (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).
26
See Jay Rubin, “Sōseki on Individualism: ‘Watakushi no Kojinshugi,’” in Monu-
menta Nipponica 34:1 (Spring 1979), pp. 21–48.
His dialectics of continuous self-negation in the encounter with the

other is constantly brought about by an absolute negation which is
found at the very foundation of the self—a process that is made pos-
sible by the fact that “at the bottom of existence of the same self there
is the other, and at the bottom of the existence of the other there is
the self.”27 Absolute nothingness is directly related to the environment
(kankyō ⅣႺ) which every object possesses if it wants to be thought.
For Nishida the “I” does not start from the individual; it starts from
the environment. And, as Nishida pointed out, “The absolute environ-
ment that encompasses everything must be only what absolutely has
become nothing.”28 In other words, nothingness is indeterminate and
indefinable—it must eventually cut and stop the cycle of definitions;
it is infinite nothingness. Nishida confronted modern individualism
in light of Buddhist thought—a move that required solving a major
paradox: self and selflessness simply do not go together, unless their
mutual contradiction is resolved. Since at the bottom of “I” and “you”
there is absolute nothingness (definitely a Buddhist concept), “I” and
“you” are absolutely other—an idea that allowed Nishida to make “I”
and “you” to assert total independence from each other in the spirit
of Western individualism. The realization of the absolute other inside
oneself made communication between “I” and “you” possible. How-
ever, Nishida’s type of communication is very different from the one
underlying Norinaga’s philosophy of mono no aware. In Nishida we
find a spatial difference between “I” and “you” which in Norinaga is
completely erased—a social relation that Norinaga was forced to nul-
lify in order to secure readers of different social status with access to
classics such as The Tale of Genji. For Norinaga, an aristocrat, a bushi,
a monk, a farmer, or a merchant had equal access to the text as long
as they could master the skill to “feel.” In other words, Norinaga’s is a
philosophy of “com-passion” in the etymological sense of the word: to
feel together with someone else, to share the pain and joy of others, a
philosophy of sympathy. With Norinaga the relationship between “I”
and “you” is an entering into the pathos of the other—a philosophy
reminiscent of Theodor Lipps’ (1851–1914) notion of “empathy” (Ein-
fühlung). For Nishida, “I” and “you stand in constant opposition to
27
28
each other; they never come together in some form of mystical unity.
Their individuality is maintained (albeit transformed) even during the
process of self-negation. The “you” is essential to the formation of
the “I” and vice versa. In Nishida’s case one will never “feel with” the
characters of The Tale of Genji; however, one will be determined by
the characters of The Tale of Genji which will force him to deny him-
self in order to know himself. In Nishida’s words, “Rather than saying
that the ‘I’ knows the ‘you’ through a mutual way of feeling (dōkan
หᗵ, or sympathy), the ‘I’ knows the ‘you’ more by way of a mutual
contrast.”29 The mutual relationship between opposites can only take
place as an echo between the two—answering each other back and
forth, or, again in Nishida’s words, “In the other the ‘I’ can hear the
call of the ‘you,’ and the ‘you’ can hear the call of the ‘I.’ ”30
If followed through, Nishida’s dialectics work towards the negation
of the centrality of any center of power (court, shogunate, temple,
mercantile capital), thus assuring anyone access to the other (includ-
ing The Tale of Genji) through the mediation of absolute nothingness,
or, to use another Nishidean term, through the mediation of “basho”
႐ᚲ (the “place” where all opposites are erased in a world of con-
flicts). Whether this is what Nishida’s actually had in mind seems
problematic, particularly in light of his idea of “eternal present,” the
temporality of the court that remained a privileged site in Nishida’s
thought given his upbringing as a loyalist Meiji intellectual. Norinaga
also wanted to guarantee “equal” access to the text as long as an effort
was made to master it philologically and psychologically. This certainly
does not make Norinaga an “egalitarian” thinker, given his praises of
the Tokugawa shogunate;31 but it does widen the circle of Genji read-
ers who otherwise might have felt rather uncomfortable in stepping
on “sacred” ground.
29
30
31
“Politics, for Norinaga, was synonymous with respect for the ruler, but this
‘ruler’ was not the emperor in Kyoto as nineteenth-century restorationists argued but
rather the Tokugawa shogun in Edo.” Peter Nosco, Remembering Paradise: Nativism
and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London:
Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1990), p. 220.
In-betweenness
The Tale of Genji has often been associated with “yukari” ✼ (connec-
tion, tie), a notion that underlines a series of relationships between
Genji and several of his lovers based on kingship or physical resem-
blance. It is not unusual to find in The Tale of Genji surrogates that
replace earlier lovers in Genji’s affection. Genji fell in love with Fujit-
subo (a consort of Genji’s father) because of the woman’s resemblance
to Genji’s deceased mother, lady Kiritsubo. A blood tie caused Genji
to fall in love with a ten year old child by the name of Murasaki, a
niece of Fujitsubo, who reminded Genji of his impossible relationship
with his step-mother, now a secluded nun. The notion of “yukari” also
reflects on the original readership of The Tale of Genji—members of
the high aristocracy were often related to each other by blood (one
can think of the extended Fujiwara family to include emperors, politi-
cians, monks, writers, poets, and artists). Even during the Middle Ages
influential warriors still tried to forge ties with the court by marry-
ing a girl from a distinguished aristocratic family. The expansion of
readership of Genji behind the private walls or private families was
prompted by the accumulation of wealth on the part of merchants and
wealthy farmers who could afford hiring either teachers from aristo-
cratic families (mainly poets), or pupils of such teachers for sessions
of linked poetry (renga) and linked seventeen-syllable poems (haikai
sequences). All of these gatherings were headed by someone with
proper cultural credentials (usually the receiver of direct instruction
from a lineage of aristocratic poets). The opening of Genji’s recep-
tion to a wider audience required a reconstitution of the boundaries
between text and readers, as I indicated by looking at the philosophies
of Motoori Norinaga and Nishida Kitarō. A space had to be built in
which an encounter between strangers could take place—a dialogic
space in which a communication between apparently incommensu-
rable entities could take place. Before theorizing the possibility for a
non-Japanese to understand The Tale of Genji, one had to explain how
someone alien to the court could approach a cultural object from the
court. A social space had to be built which transcended the traditional
class division, reinforced by the Tokugawa regime. Following Nishida’s
steps, Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) portrayed human beings (ningen
ੱ㑆) as a unity of contradictories between individual and society—a
space of relationships that takes place “between person and person”
(ningen literally means “between people”). In an attempt to overcome
explanations of human beings in terms of the consciousness of the

isolated individual, Watsuji stressed the “in-betweenness” (aidagara
㑆ᨩ) between person and person. It goes without saying that Watsuji
was mainly interested in theorizing an ethics based on a dialectical
unity of the double characteristics that are inherent in a human being
(individual and society). Or, to use his words,
Insofar as it is a human being, ningen as an individual differs completely
from society. Because it does not refer to society, it must refer to indi-
vidual alone . . . Individuals are basically different from society and yet
dissolve themselves into society. Ningen denotes the unity of these con-
tradictories. Unless we keep this dialectical structure in mind, we cannot
understand the essence of ningen.32
Ningen partakes of the same structure as “seken” ਎㑆, the world—a
human being is thrown “into a world” ( yo no naka ਎ߩਛ ιn which
“yo” is at the same time temporality in the sense of “generation” ઍ
and spatiality in terms of “society, world” ਎). In classical poetry “yo
no naka” is the privileged space of lovers—a reference to the world
of love, and love is the privileged space of relationship between per-
son and person. If for Watsuji, who on this point followed the Ger-
man philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), the essence of a
human being was his thrownness into the world, entrance into the
world of Genji’s love—a literary work that throws the reader into a
world of complicated loves—was guaranteed by the existential nature
of human beings, independent from the specificity of the social space
they occupy. For Watsuji the structure of ningen is based on the rela-
tionship of the text-reader. It would have been impossible for him to
write without positing a reading other, and vice versa. No matter how
isolated the reader may feel in his room while reading a book, the act
of reading brings about a communication with the writer. Rather than
taking place at the level of “the consciousness of the I,” this process
develops in the “in-betweenness” between self and other. A writer is
made by his relationship with the reader—and vice versa. This rela-
tionship is not something that exists from the beginning; writers and
readers produce it. Watsuji called “the moment of individuality (kojin-
sei ୘ੱᕈ) of in-betweenness” the fact that “in-betweenness” cannot
exist without the existence of individual charter members. He called
32
Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter, trans., Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku:
Ethics in Japan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 15.
“the moment of the totality (zentaisei ో૕ᕈ) of in-betweenness” the

fact that without “in-betweenness” prior to the individual members
such members cannot be determined as members. He called the rela-
tionship between “individual” and “totality” the “double structure of
human existence” (ningen sonzai no nijū kōzō ੱ㑆ሽ࿷ߩੑ㊀᭴ㅧ).
The dialectic between individual and society is never static inasmuch
as the space of “in-betweenness” is made of the potentialities pre-
existing the encounter. We know that we are going to read The Tale
of Genji and this walk through the text has “already and previously”
been established by translators, annotators, commentators, and so on.
However, our goal is not to read The Tale of Genji—our goal is to
look for the “in-betweenness” that no one can set between us and the
text. In other words, the essence of our reading is the potentiality of a
relationship, the possibility of a human relationship that may happen
as a result of our encounter with the text, certainly not between us and
Fujitsubo, but between us and our prejudices on sexual mores.
Contingency
The notion of “potentiality” underscores the philosophy of another

member of the Kyōto School, Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941) who, although
did not talk about The Tale of Genji, inevitably had the world of Genji
in mind when he developed his theory of the encounter between an
“I” and a “you.” Potentiality for Kuki was the result of the contingent
nature of reality—the fact that things could have been different from
what they are. From Nishida Kuki adopted the idea that in an encoun-
ter an auto-erasure of the self does not lead to an obliteration of the
self. One must deny oneself in order to make room for an encounter
with the other (and the other must do the same), but the two never
come together in a stultifying unity of sameness. As we know from
Kuki’s Iki no Kōzō (The Structure of ‘Iki,’ 1930), the stylishness (iki) of
the encounter between a man and a woman lies in the tension which
must be kept alive between the two in order for the relationship not to
stagnate or die out into an unauthentic relationship. For Kuki, an ideal
relationship between a man and a woman was a relationship of pos-
sibility rather than fulfillment—a relationship that he saw at work in
the encounter of the geisha with her customers. Beside knowing how
to be alluring (bitai ᇪᘒ) the woman must be proud (ikiji ᗧ᳇࿾)
and strong enough to know that she must renounce (akirame ⺼߼)
the temptation to fall desperately in love with a man who is destined

to be nothing but a temporary companion. Kuki was not simply hint-
ing at the fact that the geisha deals with customers on a temporary
basis, but also, and more importantly, at the finitude of the man,
his existential mortality. The loss of space between man and woman
would deprive both of their individuality, thus making the relationship
doomed from the start. Jealousy caused by strong attachments, disillu-
sion derived from wrong expectations will inevitably lead the couple
to a loss of communication and, eventually, to divorce—an experience
with which Kuki was very familiar, being the child of divorced parents
and having seen his own marriage end in divorce. In other words, the
basic condition for the existence of iki is freedom from the shackles
of love. Whereas for Kuki love was a “necessity of reality” (genjit-
suteki hitsuzensei ⃻ታ⊛ᔅὼᕈ), iki was a “transcendental possibil-
ity” (chōetsuteki kanōsei ⿥⿧⊛น⢻ᕈ). Or, in Kuki’s words,
The main concern of coquetry—and the essence of pleasure—is main-
taining a dualistic relationship, that is to say, protecting the possibility
as a possibility . . . The essence of coquetry is to come as near as pos-
sible, and at the same time making certain that nearness stops short
of actual touch. Coquetry as a possibility is only possible as a dynamic
possibility.33
For Kuki, the “I-you” relationship must run on parallel lines that must
refuse to come together if the relationship wants to be ethically and aes-
thetically fulfilling (iki). As he argued in a poem titled “Contingency”
(Gūzensei), “The principle that two parallel lines do not intersect,/To
the intersection of parallel lines don’t you object?/With this, contin-
gency is fulfilled,/With chaos Venus is filled,/Two people a string of
pearls detect/Brought by the waves of cause and effect.”34 Kuki was
objecting to the intersection of destinies promoted by Neo-Kantian
thinkers such as Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) whose philosophy of
values promoted the image of the traditional marriage—a man and
a woman bound together for life. In Japan Watsuji Tetsurō upheld
the same idea of the cozy relationship between husband and wife—a
fact suggesting that Watsuji’s dialectics of negation failed to negate
33
English translation by Hiroshi Nara, The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic
Vision of Kuki Shūzō (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), p. 19.
34
Michael F. Marra, trans. and ed., Kuki Shūzō: A Philosopher’s Poetry and Poetics
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), p. 52.
the ultimate unity of the self-denying individuals (family and state).

Apparently, Kuki was more successful in preserving the individuality
of the charter members of Nishida’s dialectics of absolute nothingness.
In this sense he was more Nishidean than Watsuji or Nishida’s clos-
est student and successor at Kyōto University, Tanabe Hajime (1885–
1962). Kuki’s model for the ideal relationship came to him from the
world of kabuki (the world of the geisha), and also from The Tale of
Genji in which life long loyalty to a woman (Genji’s love for Murasaki)
did not prevent the prince from having many other partners. The same
freedom in sexual customs applied to women as well. While Genji
was having an affair with his father’s consort Fujitsubo (leading to the
birth of the Reizei Emperor), Genji’s consort Onnasan no Miya (the
Third Princess) was making love to Kashiwagi (and getting pregnant
with Kaoru). Kuki’s return to what a bourgeois society would call a
feudal uxorial system was prompted by his critique of Western moder-
nity and its blind application to Japan. In this sense, Watsuji had sold
out to Westerners, while Kuki reminded his readers that things could
be different. This difference was the direct outcome of Kuki’s interest
in contingency and of his belief that true freedom was the result of
the serendipity of reality—an idea developed by French thinkers with
whom Kuki was very familiar, from mile Boutroux (1845–1921) to
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).
Kuki’s detailed analysis of contingency—a project which culminated
in the publication of Gūzensei no Mondai (The Problem of Contin-
gency, 1935)—suggests that Genji was born an imperial prince because
of a categorical contingency (teigenteki gūzensei ቯ⸒⊛஧ὼᕈ), but
he would not have been born such were his father not an emperor
(hypothetical necessity). The encounter of his father and mother hap-
pened by chance (hypothetical contingency, or kasetsuteki gūzen ઒⺑
⊛஧ὼ), but this encounter would not have taken place were it not for
the fact that the emperor and lady Kiritsubo worked at the same court
in Kyōto (disjunctive necessity). Although the parents worked at the
same court, they met because they happened to be alive (disjunctive
contingency, or risetsuteki gūzen 㔌ធ⊛஧ὼ)—a reminder of the ulti-
mate inevitability of death that sustains the entire dialectics of nega-
tion, erasure, denial as generators of life.35 Aside from the necessity of
35
For Kuki’s three modalities of contingency see Kuki Shūzō, Le Problème de La
Contingence, French trans. by Omodaka Hisayuki (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press,
1966), pp. 7–8.
death, nothing in life was a product of necessity for Kuki; life was the
result of chance encounters (sōgū ㆣㆄ), the outcome of the rolling
of the dice. Therefore, there is no necessity behind one’s destiny—our
destiny is one of the many destinies that could have happened to our
life. Our destiny could have been different, in a positive and in a nega-
tive sense. This is the basic notion behind Kuki’s ethics. The destiny of
other people is never alien to our own destiny since their destiny could
have been ours. Kuki successfully brought together Motoori Norinaga
and Nishida Kitarō’s notions of self and other. From Norinaga Kuki
drew forth the notion that one is compelled to feel sympathy for the
other because he sees in the other’s life the possibility of his own; at
the same time, from Nishida, that one never loses his individuality in
the process. After all is said and done, one is left with only himself to
deal with, and no one else. It is true: I could have been born a shining
prince, like Genji, but I could have also been born a low-class servant.
Even if I were born a shining prince, I could still have become the
victim of cuckoldry, as Genji knew too well. The fact is that I must
deal with my own destiny, but I can change it inasmuch as I learn
from others the possibility of living someone else’s destiny. Within
this space of “intersubjective sociality” (kanshutaiteki shakaisei 㑆ਥ
૕⊛␠ળᕈ) one understands the wondrous nature of meeting the
other, be this a person, or a text such as The Tale of Genji. If, after the
meeting, we are left unchanged, then we missed the point of meeting
in the first place.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE AESTHETICS OF TRADITION:

MAKING THE PAST PRESENT
Michael E Marra
I will begin with a famous poem composed in 1186 by one of Japan’s

most distinguished poets, Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241):
Miwataseba Looking far, I see
Hana mo momiji mo No sign of cherry blossoms
Nakarikeri Or crimson leaves.
Ura no tomaya no A reed-thatched hut on a bay
Aki no yūgure On an evening in autumn.1
It is not an easy task to ascertain how the poem was interpreted at the
time Teika composed it. We can be sure, however, that the reception
by Teika’s contemporaries was far from flattering. As Teika himself
acknowledged in his collection of poems Shūi Gusō, critics challenged
his work of that time as “nonsensical”:
During the Bunji and Kenkyū eras (1185–1198) I was criticised by all
levels of society for writing faddish, Zen-nonsense poetry. I seriously
considered giving up waka composition.2
Teika was criticised for creating a style that was a poetic translation
of the paradoxical statements then in vogue among monks of the Zen
sect. Critics disparagingly called Teika’s poetry darumauta, or “poems
of Bodhidharma”—Bodhidharma being regarded as the founder of
Ch’an Buddhism. The criticism addressed matters of style, especially
the technical language of poetics. Teika’s alleged obscurities, which
critics compared to the paradoxical structure of a Zen dialogue (kōan),
This paper was originally presented on August 27, 2001, at the 15th International
Congress of Aesthetics, Tokyo, Japan. The author wishes to thank Professor Sasaki
Ken’ichi for his kind invitation and comments.
1
Shinkokin Waka Shū, p. 363. The English translation is by Steven D. Carter, Tra-
ditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
p. 197.
2
Jin’ichi Konishi, A History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 3: The High Middle Ages
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 189.
350 chapter eighteen
resulted from a peculiar use of the so-called “yūgen style” (the style of
profundity). This term was used in Taoism and Buddhism to indicate
a religious depth which the mind finds difficult to grasp; it entails the
presence of something that is hard to perceive. In Ch’an (Japanese
Zen) Buddhism yūgen came to express “the profundity within non-
being (Chinese wu; Japanese mu)”.3 Teika skilfully voiced this non-
being by stressing the absent seasonal marks: cherry blossoms and
maple leaves.
Kamo no Chōmei (1153–1216), a contemporary of Teika, acknowl-
edged the difficulty of describing the “yūgen style” by resorting to the
use of a series of negatives in what is perhaps the locus classicus of
definitions of yūgen in the 13th century. Chōmei explained this term
in a text on poetics, the Mumyōshō (Nameless Treatise, 1209–1210),
as follows:
Since I do not understand it very well myself, I am at a loss as to how
to describe it in a satisfactory manner, but according to the views of
those who have penetrated into the realm of yūgen, the importance lies
in overtones ( yojō), which are not stated in words and an atmosphere
that is not revealed through the form of the poem. When the content
rests on a sound basis and the diction excels in lavish beauty, these other
virtues will be supplied naturally. On an autumn evening, for example,
there is no color in the sky, nor any sound, and although we cannot give a
definite reason for it, we are somehow moved to tears. A person lacking
in sensitivity finds nothing particular in such a sight, he just admires the
cherry blossoms (hana) and scarlet autumn leaves (momiji) that can be
seen with his own eyes.4
Chōmei included this comment in a chapter in which he discussed
a controversy between ancient and new poetic styles. According to
Chōmei, yūgen is a style ( yūgen-tai) that is expected to bring about
a change in the quality of poetry at a time when poetry had reached
a dead end in expression and content. The repetitiveness of verses,
images, and associations between words had become so stifling that
poets felt a need to turn once again to ancient poems for help in creat-
ing new, original verses. Chōmei points out the difficulty in following
the new “yūgen style” in the composition of poetry unless one has
3
Ibid., p. 186.
4
Hilda Katō, trans., “The Mumyōshō of Kamo no Chōmei and Its Significance in
Japanese Literature”, in Monumenta Nipponica XXIII, 3–4 (1968): 408, with a slight
change in the translation. Emphasis is mine. The original text appears in Yanase
Kazuo, Mumyōshō Zenkō (Tokyo: Katō Chūdōkan, 1980), pp. 387–90.
aesthetics of tradition: making the past present 351
already mastered poetic techniques, and has already entered the realm
of poetry. Otherwise, Chōmei continues, the effect will be vulgar, like
a low-class woman who applies powder to her face without knowing
the technique of proper make-up. The simple repetition of “original”
verses in the yūgen style will lead to nonsense (mushin shochaku, liter-
ally “with no place for the heart to go”), and to the composition of what
Chōmei called “Bodhidharma’s poems”—the antithesis of yūgen.
Teika developed a technique of composition based on a stylistic pre-
dilection for making the negative effectual (there are no cherry blos-
soms), a possibility of being caught in the negative moment. It stands
opposed to earlier styles that used negative forms in conjunction with
conditional clauses in order to express wishful thinking, an impos-
sibility devised in order to appease the turmoil of the heart (at the
view of the scattering cherry blossoms). We see the latter approach, for
example, in the following poem composed three centuries earlier:
Yo non naka ni Ah, if in this world
Taete sakura no There were only no such thing
Nakariseba As cherry blossoms—
Haru no kokoro wa Then perhaps in the springtime
Nodokekaramashi Our hearts could be at peace.5
The same conditional clause that begs nature to stop its course was
applied to the maple leaves (momiji) in the following poem written a
few decades after the one mentioned above. Here, the logic of the poem
is reversed: the poet yearns for the maple leaves to continue to linger
rather than to disappear. The style, however, remains the same.
Ogura yama You autumn leaves
Mine no momijiba On the slopes at Ogura—
Kokoro araba If you have a heart,
Ima hitotabi no Put off your falling this once:
Miyuki matanan Till the Emperor’s visit.6
Teika does not simply omit the seasonal marks from his poem. This
omission becomes the topic of the poem from which a new percep-
tion of reality is born and an unfamiliar rhetorical topos is evoked:
5
The English translation is by Steven D. Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry, p. 77.
This poem by Ariwara no Narihira (825–880) is included in the first imperial anthol-
ogy, Kokinshū 1:53.
6
The English translation is by Steven D. Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry, p. 214.
The poem is by Fujiwara no Tadahira (880–949).
the quietness of humble dwellings fading in the twilight as distinctive

marks of autumn.
I stress the attention that Teika’s contemporaries paid to the rhetor-
ical elements of poetic composition since most poetic treatises (karon)
and judgements of poetic-matches (uta-awase) centred on the propri-
ety of vocabulary, expressive skills, and all sorts of rhetorical devices in
the formulation of poetic discourses. With a few exceptions aimed at
explaining poetry in terms of religious significance, mainly fragments
of Buddhist thought,7 we seldom see medieval poets engaged in the
discussion of broader issues which explain their rhetorical choices in
terms of what we would call “aesthetic discourses” today. Even when
we might think that the poet is genuinely concerned with descriptions
of Buddhist world-views, in most cases, he simply reduces complicated
doctrinal points to rhetorical topoi. For example, the discussion that
Teika’s father, Fujiwara Shunzei (1114–1204), gave of poetry in light
of the doctrine espoused in the Mo-ho chih-kuan (Great Concentra-
tion and Insight) in his treatise Korai Fūteishō (Essays on Ancient and
Modern Styles, 1197), is a revitalisation of an ancient rhetorical topos
centred around the challenge that Buddhist monks posed to poetry in
their critique of a secular language that was not directly subordinated
to religious concerns. Shunzei—preceded and followed by a line of
famous poets—searched for a answer to the monks’ criticism by creat-
ing the rhetoric of a “poetic path” (kadō) modelled after and running
parallel to the “Buddhist path” (butsudō). The topos became a kind of
exorcism, a magic formula that all poets had to follow in order to dis-
pel the possible evil consequences that might come from an improper
use of words, that is, a use removed from religious practice, which was
directly linked to the praise of the Buddha. The poets’ actual concern
was mainly poetic in the sense that they aimed at creating the language
of poetry, and making poetic language work differently from other
types of language.
On the other hand, when we look at modern interpretations of
Teika’s poem by Japanese scholars of medieval Japanese literature,
we cannot avoid being perplexed by the disappearance of the preemi-
nent emphasis on the rhetoric of the poem in favour of adherence
7
See William R. LaFleur, “Symbol and Yūgen: Shunzei’s Use of Tendai Buddhism”,
in The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), pp. 80–106.
to alleged “aesthetic discourses”, which came into being at least six

centuries after the time of the poem’s composition. Historically speak-
ing, however, these “aesthetic discourses” became theoretical bodies
only in the 20th century, no earlier than the 1920s. There seems to be
unanimous agreement among leading scholars of Japanese literature
on the fact that Teika’s poem stands for more than it was intended to
accomplish. This “more” is actually the product of the creation and
development in Japan of the field of aesthetics that began in the late
1870s and had an enormous impact on the creation of what goes in
Japan today under the label of “tradition”. Teika’s poem came to be
read in light of a series of aesthetic discourses that have transformed
words—which originally came from the field of poetics and were asso-
ciated with poetic styles—into local expressions of aesthetic experi-
ences. The “yūgen style”, one among several styles from which the poet
could choose in order to give the poem a lofty, melancholy, or comic
tone, became the “aesthetics of yūgen”, a complex world of experience,
perception, and communication related to a series of other aesthetic
discourses, such as the aesthetics of mono no aware, yojō, sabi, wabi,
mujō, and so on.
Once we look at Teika’s poem we notice that aesthetic concerns
are shared by all of the editors of the major collections of the Shin
Kokin Waka Shū in which the poem was anthologised in 1205. Hisa-
matsu Sen’ichi (1894–1976), who edited the collection for Iwanami
Publishing (first series), explains what he construes as the mood of the
poem by saying that despite the absence of the marks of beauty (cherry
blossoms and maple leaves) which are replaced by the thatched roofs
of the fishermen’s humble dwellings, the poet interestingly displays
a taste for mono no aware.8 Here, we are confronted with a series of
concepts which would have puzzled, and maybe even amused Teika,
had he been given the opportunity to follow Hisamatsu’s hermeneu-
tics: mood, beauty, taste, and the idea of mono no aware (the pathos
of things) seen as an aesthetic category. At the very least, Teika would
have needed a crash course on the genealogy of Stimmung, Western
debates on the notion of taste, the ideas of Kantian judgement and
Aristotelian catharsis, as well as Ōnishi Yoshinori’s systematisation of
Japanese aesthetic categories (biteki hanchū).
8
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, Yamazaki Toshio, and Gotō Shigeo, eds., Shin Kokin Waka
Shū, NKBT 28 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1958), p. 101.
Along similar lines, Kubota Utsubo (1877–1967) explains Teika’s

poem in terms of a paradox: despite the sadness elicited by the absence
of the marks of seasonal beauty (cherry blossoms in spring and maple
leaves in autumn) and the presence of a simple, poignant, moving
architecture (the straw roofs of humble workers), the poet sings the
“pleasure”, or “joy” ( yorokobi) of such a view. Kubota arrives at this
conclusion by referring to the antithetical technique of contrast used
by the poet: since cherry blossoms and maple leaves elicit a sense of
joy on the part of the observer, such a joy is suggested by referring to
the markers of pleasure in absentia. Kubota calls such a suggestion
yojō (overtones). He then proceeds with a further explanation of the
poem in terms of the vocabulary of Japanese aesthetics. The fact that
the poet makes the silence of an autumn evening with a hamlet of
fishermen in the background a reason for a greater rejoicing ( yoroko-
bashii) than the view of cherry blossoms and maple leaves, points to a
progression of aesthetic feelings: from en (charm) to aware (pathos),
and from aware to sabi (elegant simplicity, desolation).9 Teika might
have understood Kubota Utsubo’s comment were he given some
instruction on the notion of “aesthetic pleasure”, which he undoubt-
edly conceived differently.
In his commentary of Teika’s poem, Kubota Jun (b. 1933) adds
another aesthetic term. He argues that this poem “symbolizes the spirit
of wabi-tea (wabicha) in the tea ceremony”. Kubota adds wabi (quiet
elegance) to sabi.10 The major problem with this interpretation is that
the ritual of the tea ceremony postdates Teika’s poem.
The notion of “overtones” is carried over in the commentary
appended to the poem in the new Iwanami series of the Japanese clas-
sics, which has been recently published and in which we read that “the
negation ‘nakarikeri’ (are not) does not extinguish the image of the
cherry blossoms and the maple leaves”. They remain as an “afterim-
age of desolation” (sabireta) in the reader’s mind. Again, the aesthetic
notions of yojō and sabi are invoked in the interpretation of the poem,
together with the suggestion that Teika’s use of the negative, rather
9
Kubota Utsubo, Kanpon Shin Kokin Waka Shū Hyōshaku, Jō (Tokyo: Tōkyōdō,
1964), pp. 323–4.
10
Kubota Jun, ed., Shin Kokin Waka Shū, Jō, SNKS 24 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1979),
p. 133.
than dissolving the object of observation, produces a positive image,

that is to say that being ( yū) results from non-being (mu).11
This last comment takes us to the complex philosophy of “noth-
ingness” (mu) developed in the early 20th century by Nishida Kitarō
(1870–1945) and by his followers of the Kyoto School. Most discus-
sions on the nature of Buddhist mu are indebted to Nishida’s thought
and are grounded in the belief that the concern for “being” shown by
ancient Greek philosophers found a counterpart in Japan in the Bud-
dhist concern for “non-being” (mu), “emptiness”, and “void”.
To summarise the hermeneutical strategies followed in the past and
in the present to explain Teika’s verse, we can say that in the past,
a rhetoric was discovered in the poem that reminded readers of the
paradoxical logic of a developing Buddhist school which was strug-
gling for recognition at a time when the literati in the capital were not
particularly impressed with the antics of Zen masters. In the present,
the vocabulary of aesthetics is consistently used to talk about the poem
in terms of aesthetic categories while, at the same time, grounding
local aesthetic categories in the Buddhist logic of negation—a logic
that came to structure the philosophy of “nothingness” proposed in
Japan in the 20th century.
When we look at the responses of 20th-century interpreters to Tei-
ka’s poem we realise that the construction of Teika’s poetic discourse
was moulded by the interpreters’ aesthetic and philosophical con-
cerns. First of all, we must remember that the introduction to Japan
of the field of aesthetics was contemporaneous with the introduction
of Japan to the West as an aesthetic product. Whereas Japan had to
struggle to obtain recognition from the West as an economic and
industrial power, it easily capitalised on its exoticism and foreignness
thanks to the avid demand in European markets for cultural products
that could be vaguely associated with the current of “Japanese taste”
(Japonisme). By responding to the Western desire for the “mysteries”
of a recently “discovered” land, Japan aggressively moved to present
itself as a repository of Asian culture and beauty, and to satisfy the
demands of its Western customers. Within a few years of the open-
ing of the country to Western nations, Japan was able to set itself
11
Tanaka Yutaka and Akase Shingo, eds., Shin Kokin Waka Shū, SNKBT 11 (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1992), p. 117.
up as “a museum of Asiatic civilization”, to use a well known motto

from Okakura Tenshin’s The Ideals of the East.12 In Japan survived
the vestiges of an Indian and Chinese past that had vanished from its
countries of origin. Not only had Japan assured the world with the
preservation of Buddhism and the Confucian world of rituals; it had
also improved upon them by adding the aesthetic dimension, the urge
for beauty that Okakura saw exemplified in the tradition of Japanese
painting (Nihonga), which he helped to construct.13
As a result, today it is difficult to approach Teika’s poem without
inscribing it in an aesthetic discourse that brings into relationship one
of the basic tenets of Buddhism, “impermanence” (mujō), with the
notions of “art” (geijutsu) and artistic “beauty” (bi). The vocabulary
of aesthetics and the configurations of knowledge that this vocabulary
has created have become so intrinsically tied to modern subjectivity
that it is very difficult to look at the past without making it speak
the language of aesthetics. We can see this, for example, in the argu-
ment, widespread among scholars, that in classical times (the Nara
and Heian periods) the relationship between a person and his chang-
ing natural surroundings was essentially an aesthetic relationship, in
the etymological sense of aisthesis or a “feeling for” external reality.
For example, Karaki Junzō (1904–1980), a major scholar of Japanese
literature and intellectual history, begins his book on “impermanence”
(mujō) by locating the genealogy of the concept in an alleged “feeling
for impermanence” (mujō-kan, where kan is indicated by a character
meaning “to feel”) which characterised the response of the inhabitants
of the Heian court, especially female subjects, to the dreadfulness that
the anxiety of change (changing relationships, changing political and
familial circumstances, and so on) brought to their lives. According to
Karaki, the encounter of these subjects with the “nothingness” of exis-
tence (death and change) began as a simple perception, a feeling that
was not theorised until the 13th century when a monk by the name
of Dōgen (1200–1253) transformed the “feeling for impermanence”
into a philosophy, a “view on impermanence” (mujō-kan, where kan
12
Kakuzō Okakura, The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Arts of Japan
(London: John Murray, 1903), p. 5. See also Karatani Kōjin, “Japan as Art Museum:
Okakura Tenshin and Fenollosa”, in Michael F. Marra, ed., A History of Modern Japa-
nese Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), pp. 43–52.
13
See Satō Dōshin, Nihon Bijutsu Tanjō: Kindai Nihon no “Kotoba” to Senryaku
(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996).
is indicated with a character meaning “to see”, “to contemplate”, “a

view”, and we could also add “a world-view”).14
The argument for an emotional response to impermanence that
reduces the perception of change to a an exclamation of awe (eitanteki)
on the part of the people of the Heian period is also made by Kobayashi
Tomoaki (b. 1911) in his book Mujōkan no Bungaku (The Literature
of the Feeling of Impermanence).15 Kobayashi argues that, since litera-
ture is a vehicle for the expression of what one feels while confronting
change, the notion of impermanence came to be tied to the aesthetic
components of the literary work, mainly the notion of “beauty”. This
point was echoed by Karaki Junzō who later added to his explanation
of the genealogy of “impermanence”, the extended sense of aesthet-
ics as “a discourse on beauty” by arguing that “the feeling for imper-
manence” was actually a “feeling for the beauty of impermanence”
(mujōbi-kan). The arts which expressed the author’s feelings towards
change actually mediated the passage from the notion of “imperma-
nence” to the idea of “beauty” conveyed by the arts.
Literary historians of Japan transformed the aesthetic categories
related to change, impermanence, and “nothingness” into a literary
genre that in the 20th century came to be known as “the literature of
reclusion” (inja no bungaku). This genre wrought together the sepa-
rate threads of “detachment” (ridatsu), “vision” (me), “nature” (shi-
zen), “existential sadness” (sonzai no kanashimi), and the “arts of the
recluse” (injakei geijutsu) into a single pattern that synthesised 600
years of literary history.16 Scholars such as the influential Ishida Yoshi-
sada (1890–1987) grouped together in this category writers and poets
whose literature stressed the paradoxical desire to abandon worldly
desires and to become recluses. Their love for nature and power of
observation led to the formulation of a literary discourse praising the
values of detachment from worldly ties, and displacing the threat of
change and impermanence into the consoling stability of the literary
product. Historical details were bracketed and reduced to a common
love for a reclusive lifestyle, half monk-half layman (inton), that distin-
guished such vastly different and contextually mutually contradictory
literary figures as Saigyō (1118–1190), Kamo no Chōmei (1153–1216),
14
Karaki Junzō, Mujō (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1965), pp. 5–10.
15
Kobayashi Tomoaki, Mujōkan no Bungaku (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1965).
16
All these topics are the actual headings in the first chapter of Ishida Yoshisada,
Inja no Bungaku: Kumon Suru Bi (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō, 1969).
Yoshida Kenkō (ca. 1280–1352), masters of linked verse poetry (renga)

such as Kyūsei (?1282–?1376), Shinkei (1403–1475), and Sōgi (1421–
1502), and the master of haikai Bashō (1644–1694). A false impression
was created that in pre-modern Japan, an “aesthetic and a tradition of
reclusion” existed from the 12th to the 17th century, together with a
literature that sang the beauty of the negative—an impression which is
heavily at work in the commentaries on the poem by Teika mentioned
above. As a matter of fact, the term inja bungaku and the discourse
surrounding it were created in 1927 by the folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu
(1887–1953) in an article titled “From the Literature of Court Ladies to
the Literature of Reclusion” (Nyōbo Bungaku kara Inja Bungaku e).17
The heading “literature of reclusion” did not appear in any history
of Japanese literature prior to the publication of Orikuchi’s article,
although since then, no history of Japanese literature has failed to
include a lengthy chapter on it.
While literary historians have approached the issue of imperma-
nence from the perspective of folklore and literary genres, literary
critics and philosophers have given more genuinely philosophical
interpretations to the concept. The literary critic Kobayashi Hideo
(1902–1983), for example, attempted an existential reading of the
relationship between impermanence and art in an essay titled “Mujō
to Iu Koto” (On Impermanence).18 Kobayashi interprets the Japanese
concern for impermanence as the result of a search for permanence
in a life characterised by change and contingency. This search aims
at rising above the unsettledness of mujō in an effort to withstand
it. According to Kobayashi, the ideal of permanence—the impossible
victory over death—can only be found in the midst of impermanence
itself. Art would correspond to such permanence: an art that takes
form by making into an image the emptiness found in the storage of
emotions. Art manifests itself from a place of formlessness and blooms
in the midst of mortal history like the flower (hana) which the medi-
eval playwright Zeami (?1364–1443) took to represent the mastery of
technique on the part of a Nō actor.19 By blooming in the world of
17
The essay is included in Orikuchi’s Kodai Kenkyū (A Study of Antiquity). See
Orikuchi Shinobu Zenshū, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1975), pp. 265–320.
18
Kobayashi Hideo, Mujō to Iu Koto (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1954), pp. 55–113.
19
“Thus an actor who has mastered every aspect of his art can be said to hold
within him the seeds of flowers that bloom in all seasons, from the plum blossoms
of early spring to the chrysanthemums of the fall. As he possesses all the Flowers,
impermanence (mujō), the beauty and reality of a flower possess a

permanence and unchangeable form; and yet, such a form cannot be
separated from its origin, from impermanence. For Kobayashi, eter-
nity presents itself in the human world in the “flower”, the most weak
and fragile thing in the whole world. Reality takes on a special strength
by manifesting itself in what is most frangible—a truth teaching the
following lesson: that mujō is the form taken by eternity to show itself
to us. The eternity, which we can neither see with our eyes nor touch,
appears in the form of mujō. Man’s finiteness and sorrow lie in the fact
that eternity takes the form of mujō in this world. This explains why
mujō was linked to beauty. Unable to make itself discernable directly,
eternity shows itself to mankind in the form of beauty within mujō.
Art provides emptiness with an image, a form.
The field of aesthetics mediates the articulation of the notions of
“finiteness” and “eternity” in discussions on this subject by members
of the Kyoto School of philosophy. Concerned with the issue of West-
ern nihilism and the question of how to overcome it, Nishitani Keiji
(1900–1990), a leading member of the School, developed an entire
metaphysics of aisthesis beginning from the Chinese character indicat-
ing the sky (Japanese sora). The same character was used in the past to
denote emptiness (Japanese kū). The poets’ use of this character made
the sky a popular metaphor to indicate the notion of emptiness. A
famous example comes from the poetry of Saigyō, who was canonised
among the leading voices of the literature of reclusion:
Yami harete The mind is a sky
Kokoro no sora ni Emptied of all darkness,
Sumu tsuki wa And its moon,
Nishi no yamabe ya Limpid and perfect, moves
Chikaku naruran Closer to mountains in the west.20
In an essay titled “Kū to Soku” (Emptiness and Sameness) Nishitani
calls the view of a blue sky—the infinite visible to the naked eye—a
he can perform in response to any expectations on any occasion”. From Zeami’s

“Fūshikaden” (Style and the Flower), in J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu,
trans., On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami trans., (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 53.
20
William R. LaFleur, trans., Mirror for the Moon: A Selection of Poems by Saigyō
(1118–1190) (New York: New Directions, 1978), p. 45.
“metaphysical feeling” (keijijōteki kankaku).21 Nishitani posits a direct

linkage between the visible sky (sora) and the invisible “teaching of
emptiness” (kū no oshie). He stresses the fact that the image (Build,
keishō) of the sky is more than a simple metaphor pointing at empti-
ness. The degree of closeness between the concrete sky and the invis-
ible concept is greater than is required by metaphor. In fact, the visible
sky, which we call an “image”, has no form (katachi naki mono) and
therefore, in a strict sense, cannot be called an image. Nishitani can,
then, argue that the concrete, visible phenomenon (the sky) is actually
formless. At this point, the relationship between visible and invisible
becomes less clear. According to Nishitani, the sky that we see with
our eyes is actually the infinite, unlimited world that cannot be seen
with the eye. The sky is emptiness (kū).22
Descending to earth, the sky permeates the world and sustains the
invisible atmosphere surrounding man. It also opens up at the bottom
of the heart of man who responds emotionally to this atmosphere. This
opening is what Nishitani calls “the formless place at the bottom of
the heart that comes into appearance by taking different forms”. Such
a place cannot be seen by the naked eye; rather it is seen by the eye
of the heart. The sky that opens at the bottom of the heart comes into
view within knowledge (shiru), within the working of a heart which is
made, first of all, of feelings (kankaku), intellect (chisei), and will (ishi).
Knowledge is a transparent, formless space in the heart, the most pro-
found essence of the heart. Accordingly, “to know” could be called
“the sky within the heart”. By feeling, we become one with objects
and we directly live/experience the objects. Feelings, however, are also
endowed with knowledge. Moreover, the most original form of knowl-
edge is the senses/feelings (kankaku). The “sky” is the space prior to
our living together with objects in feelings. A knowledge within feel-
ings (or the knowledge possessed by feelings) develops. When the
objects are transparent to us and are made into images, the transpar-
ent sky at the bottom of our heart appears. Several images and forms
develop from our heart through the mediation of the power of concep-
21
See Nishitani Keiji, Nishitani Keiji Chosaku Shū, Vol. 13 (Tokyo: Sōbunsha,
1987), pp. 111–60. For an English translation, see Michele Marra, Modern Japanese
Aesthetics: A Reader, pp. 179–228.
22
Here I follow a reading of Nishitani’s essay by a contemporary member of the
Kyoto School, Hase Shōtō, “Kū to Mujō”, in Nihon Bungaku to Bukkyō, 4: Mujō
(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), pp. 299–333.
tualisation/imagination (kōsōryoku). Then, white clouds start trailing

through the sky. Once images develop from the bottom of a formless
heart, thanks to the imagination, art (geijutsu) is born. Religion, on the
other hand, makes transparent the images that have developed in the
process, and enables man to see the formless blue sky.
Emptiness is not a place external to mujō that overcomes mujō; it
is the opening of a path that overcomes mujō from mujō itself. To
transcend mujō means to leave mujō. But the problem is: how can
we find a place outside mujō from which to transcend it? The main
characteristic of the thought of emptiness is that emptiness is not a
different world from mujō but is mujō itself. Kū is permanence in
the midst of impermanence; it is the place of the transformations of
mujō. Kū is not the other bank of the river of impermanence; it is the
overcoming/transcendence of impermanence on the same bank of the
same river. The transformations occurring in emptiness are not prod-
ucts of mediations; they are “equalities/sameness” (soku) as when we
say “death-qua-life” (shi-soku-sei), or “cravings-qua-enlightenment”
(bonnō-soku-bodai), or “impermanence-qua-Buddha-nature” (mujō-
soku-busshō).
Nishitani Keiji developed similar arguments in his works Shūkyō to
wa Nani ka (What is Religion?) and Zen no Tachiba (The Standpoint
of Zen). Here, he argued that kū and mu are not objects that can be
looked at. They actually disappear if we take such an objectifying atti-
tude. Therefore, kū has no form that can be pointed out to others. It is
the absolute bank from the midst of mujō, and it opens as a transcend-
ence of this world. This transcendence, however, does not have the
religious meaning of transcendence. It is not a permanence against an
impermanence, an immortality or spirit against death as in Western
metaphysics and other religious systems that posit a God at the end.
Kū does not partake of a structure in which a lower being destined to
die and disappear is placed in relation to a higher Being that is per-
manent, eternal, and unchangeable. Absolute emptiness (zettai k ū )
is “things as they are” (ari no mama). Things are not metaphors of
the absolute; they are an absolutisation of themselves. Nishitani calls
the Buddhist “metaphors” of Zen “ultimate entities bereft of a specific
character” (enjō jissei; Sanskrit parispanna-svabhāva). These “meta-
phors” make absolute the relativity of what is permanent and what
is eternal. The transcendence that is found in kū is essential in order
to solve the anxiety of nihilism and meaninglessness, since there is
no way we can overcome both by taking a path outside such anxiety.
The anxiety of nihilism and meaninglessness has already penetrated

the presences of permanence (God, man), which were entrusted with the
task of overcoming impermanence in the first place. We find a con-
firmation of this truth in the inability of technologies related to the
natural sciences to cope with such anxieties. Contemporary nihilism
has reached and engulfed notions of permanence such as God and
progress. According to Nishitani, kū (emptiness) is an indicator of the
way to transcend nihilism from inside nihilism itself. Here lies the pos-
sibility of a philosophy of emptiness for the modern age.
Nishitani reminds us that a powerful event has taken place in the
creation of the Japanese traditions of “emptiness” and “nothingness”.
Rather than looking at Teika’s poem mentioned at the beginning of
the paper as a source of the “literature of reclusion”, an “aesthetic
of impermanence”, and “a philosophy of negation”, we might want
to see it as the result of a modern process of interpretation which
has called Teika into a dialogue with existentialism, phenomenology,
and other philosophical currents. Then can we actually understand
the enormous role played by Western thought in the creation of the
so-called “Japanese traditions”—preeminently ideas related to nihil-
ism, which sparked in Japan discourses on the need to overcome it,
particularly after the ultimate destruction of World War II. In 1949,
Nishitani wrote a popular book on the subject, Nihirizumu (Nihilism),
which stands as a monument to the fact that “Japanese traditions”
would not exist without the impact that modernity (the West) has had
on Japan since the latter half of the 19th century. Japan’s encounter
with the Other (the West) prompted Japanese thinkers to ponder over
the notion of the Seif—a process that led to the creation of a series
of traditions. The so-called tradition of “emptiness” is less a continu-
ation of an alleged discourse on issues related to Buddhist thought
than a response to a suffocating reality that the philosophy of nihilism
had portrayed so powerfully. Nishitani’s hermeneutic response to exis-
tential nihilism highlights the dialogical nature of Japanese traditions,
which came into being out of a concern for the future rather than for
the past, as we can see from Nishitani’s discussion of the meaning of
nihilism for Japan:
Creative nihilism in Stirner, Nietzsche, Heidegger and others was an
attempt to overcome the nihilism of despair. These attempts, conducted
at varying depths, were efforts (in Nietzsche’s words) “to overcome
nihilism by means of nihilism”. The tradition of oriental culture in gen-
eral, and the Buddhist standpoints of “emptiness”, “nothingness”, and
so on in particular, become a new problem when set in this context.

Herein lies our orientation toward the future—Westernization—and at
the same time our orientation toward the past—reconnection with the
tradition. The point is to recover the creativity that mediates the past to
the future and the future to the past (but not to restore a bygone era).
The third significance of European nihilism for us is that it makes these
things possible.23
Although in the quotation above, Nishitani still maintained a strong
notion of “tradition”, in this paper I have tried to dilute the weighty
presence of tradition by showing it is a modern construct in a process
of continuous making.
23
Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans., Graham Parkes with Setsuko
Aihara (Albany: SUNY, 1990), p. 179.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
NATIVIST HERMENEUTICS:
THE INTERPRETATIVE STRATEGIES OF MOTOORI
NORINAGA AND FUJITANI MITSUE
Abstract
This paper analyzes a few hermeneutical strategies used by two major mem-
bers of the Nativist movement (Kokugaku ࿖ቇ), Motoori Norinaga ᧄዬት
㐳 (1730–1801) and Fujitani Mitsue ን჻⼱ᓮ᧟ (1768–1823) in addressing
the notion of Japanese poetry. While contributing to the development of the
field of Japanese philology, Motoori articulated a philosophy of transpar-
ency in which the voice of language was perceived as the immediate sound
of transcendent signs. Motoori discussed this issue in texts such as Ashiwake
Obune (A Small Boat Amidst the Reeds, 1757), Aware Ben (A Discussion on
Aware, 1758), Shibun Yōryō (The Essentials of the Tale of Genji, 1763), and
Isonokami no Sasamegoto (Personal Views on Poetry, 1763). Fujitani Mitsue,
on the other hand, opposed Motoori’s notions of spontaneity, immediacy,
and transparency in works such as Makoto Ben (An Explanation of the Truth
of True Words, 1802), Hyakunin Isshu Tomoshibi (Light on The One Poem by
a Hundred Poets, 1804), Kadō Kaisei (Sobering to the Way of Poetry, 1805),
and Kadō Kyoyō (The Essentials of the Way of Poetry, 1817). In Kitabe Zuinō
(Kitabe’s Poetic Treatise) Fujitani challenged Motoori’s interpretative model
of “frontside-underside” (omote/ura), adding a third interpretative possibility
(sakai or “border”) that questioned Motoori’s belief in the straightforward
recoverability of meaning. This paper is a simple prolegomenon to a history
of Japanese hermeneutics that has yet to be written.
Key words:
Hermeneutics, Speech, Signs, Pattern Words, Voice, Representation, Etymol-
ogies, Expression Indication, Language, Mono No Aware, Intersubjectivity,
Disclosure, Aesthetics, Transparency, Time, Kotodama.
1 Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutics of Disclosure
1.1 Speech
When confronted with the articulation of a discourse on poetry, the
Edo scholar Motoori Norinaga insisted upon the need to clearly dis-
cern the major components of poetry before analyzing the role played
366 chapter nineteen
by poetic language in the contingency of the present. Motoori singled

out the categories of “voice” (kowe ჿ) and “written signs” (aya ᢥ)
cooperating in the creation of a “poetic form” (sama ᫢ or sugata
ᆫ), that once externalized, would work towards the formation of
an intersubjective model of communication (mono no aware ‛ߩ
޽ߪࠇ). The privileging of the voice in the process of signification
Motoori shared with other scholars of the Nativist movement that his
thought deeply contributed to shape. These scholars all participated
in the belief that language had the power not only of representing but
also producing external reality. Words and things were mutually inter-
changeable (kotodama ⸒㔤/੐㔤 “the spirit of words/things”). The
transparency of “mythical language”—koto in Japanese meaning both
“thing” (੐) and “word” (⸒)—provided Nativist scholars with power-
ful arguments in favor of an allegedly sacred origin of voice, “a divine
sign expressed in words.”1 The lifting up of words (kotoage) in the
context of liturgical ceremonies transferred material reality back to its
original sacredness from which, according to the Nativists, it had been
separated by thick layers of culture.2 The recovery of correct naming,
therefore, was paramount to the recovery of the original, divine voice.
The philologist was then entrusted with uncovering “the true voice of
the spirit of language” (kotodama no shingon ⸒㔤ߩ⌀⸒)3 that was
transmitted through ancient poetry. Homophony supported the bur-
den of proof for the Nativist hermeneutical act that entrusted “ancient
words” ( furukoto ฎ⸒) with the voicing of “ancient facts/history”
( furukoto ฎ੐).
1
This expression is Keichū’s definition of kotodama. In the Rectification of Japanese
Names (Waji Shōranshō ๺ሼᱜỬ㊶), he noticed that in the Man’yōshū, the charac-
ters of “word” and “thing” were interchangeable in the recording of the word koto-
dama. From this observation he derived the theory of the coextension of expression
and event, the linguistic and the ontological. Toyoda Kunio, Nihonjin no Kotodama
Shisō, KGB 483 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1980), pp. 184–185. Unless otherwise specified, all
translations are mine.
2
See Roy A. Miller, “The ‘Spirit’ of the Japanese Language,” in The Journal of Japa-
nese Studies 3; 2 (Summer 1977), pp. 251–298.
3
This expression is coined by Motoori Norinaga, who developed his argument in
the Uiyamabumi, Kojikiden, Kuzuhana, etc. Toyoda, Nihoniin no Kotodama Shisō,
pp. 188–189. Motoori clearly stated the preeminence of “both heart and words” (kokoro
mo kotoba mo) of the poetic voice (uta) in understanding “the spontaneously risen
meaning of the age of the gods of our august land” (waga mikuni no onozukara no
kamiyo no kokorobae ࠊ߇ᓮ࿖ߩ߅ߩߕ߆ࠄߩ␹ઍߩᔃ߫߳). Hino Tatsuo, ed. Motoori
Norinaga Shū, SNKS 60 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1983), p. 414.
interpretative strategies of norinaga and mitsue 367
In a major treatise on poetry, Personal Views on Poetry (Isonokami

no Sasamegoto ⍹਄⑳ᶻ⸒, 1763), Motoori emphasized the futility
of applying the hermeneutical enterprise to scriptive traces—the
imported mass of Chinese signs—before understanding the mean-
ing of the voice4 to which, Motoori argued, Chinese characters had
been improperly attached. He took issue with the graphically ori-
ented struggle of philologists who “read foreign characters in Yamato
language” (wakun ๺⸠). In Motoori’s opinion, such an act privileged
the sign (moji ᢥሼ)—the character for poetry, uta ੓ᄙ, for exam-
ple—rather than focusing attention on the native sound that Motoori
recorded in man’yōgana as ੓ᄙ and that he argued, “was expressed
in words since the age of the gods” (kamiyo yori ihikitareru kotoba
␹ઍࠃࠅ޿߭᧪ߚࠇࠆ⹖). Motoori compared words (kotoba ⹖) to
the root of signification and explained signs (moji) as the tree’s twigs.
While the sound was “the master” (shu ਥ), its written representation
was nothing but “a servant” (bokujū ௢ᓥ), “a borrowed temporary
device” (kari no mono ઒ [୫] ߩ‛) that could easily be replaced by a
different Chinese character, thus making writing an unreliable object
of study.5 The fracture of meaning following the improper association
of a foreign script with the native language had already been a major
concern of the philosopher Ogyū Sorai ⩆↢␲ᓭ (1666–1728), whose
theories Motoori knew through the mediation of his teacher Hori
Keizan ၳ᥊ጊ (1688–1757). It was Keizan, who in his The Inexpress-
ible (Fujingen ਇዧ⸒) had noticed the awkwardness of translating
Japanese language into Chinese characters, thus providing those alien
shapes with native meaning (wakun ๺⸠).6 Motoori had taken up his
teacher’s lesson in an earlier poetic treatise, A Small Boat Amidst the
4
The importance of the “voice” (uta no kowe ⹗ߩჿ) in “the recitation of poetry”
(utayomi) had already been stressed in medieval times by the poet Fujiwara no Shun-
zei ⮮ේବᚑ (1114–1204), who emphasized “how dependent poetry was on the voice”
in his poetic treatise Korai Fūteishō ฎ᧪㘑わᛞ. According to Shunzei, the prolonged
sustaining of the voice in the vocal articulation of poetry explained the reason why
“short poems” (mijikauta ⍴᱌) were often called “long poems” (nagauta 㐳᱌) in
earlier poetic treatises. Such practice, which the Man’yōshū discredited, derived from
the custom of lingering over the sound of a short 31-syllable poem, and of “run-
ning” in the reading of longer poem. The Man’yōshū’s more mechanical explanation
was based instead on the count of syllables—31 being the number reserved to “short
poems” and “envoys” (hanka ෻᱌). Hashimoto Fumio, et al., eds. Karonshū, NKBZ
50 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1975), pp. 298–299.
5
Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, pp. 264 and 316–317.
6
Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, p. 316, n. 1.
Reeds (Ashiwake Obune ឃ⧃ዊ⦁, 1757), in which he attacked the

practice of earlier commentators to analyze the character uta ᱌ rather
than its sound, not realizing that “kanji are harmful to the language
of our country”.7
Motoori’s privileging of speech/action over representation/object
was rooted in his attempt to distinguish native speech from the “alien”
continental script inherited from China.8 Paradoxically, he based his
defense of the lyric nature of native poetry (uta ੓ᄙ), to be distin-
guished from Chinese poetic language (shi ⹞), on the canonical Chi-
nese definition of poetry that appears in the Book of Documents (Shu
jing ᦠ⚻) “the poem (shi) articulates what is on the mind intently
(zhi); song makes language ( yan) last long” ⹞⸒ᔒ᱌᳗⸒.9 The origi-
nal text explains poetry as the articulation of the poet’s intentionality
by a special language whose musical pattern makes the word last a long
time through the chanting of “stretched out” words. Motoori, how-
ever, forced the original by disjoining the sentence as if the author was
dealing with two different kinds of activities, one more prosaic result-
ing from an act of will, and the other more spontaneous following the
singing impulse of a lyrical heart. It goes without saying that Motoori
read the first clause—“poetry expresses intent (kokorozashi)”—as the
definition of Chinese poetry, while using the second—“the act of sing-
7
Sasaki Nobutsuna, ed. Nihon Kagaku Taikei, 7 (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1957),
p. 254.
8
In the West as well, the notion of “the spirit of language” found its moment of
glory contemporaneously with the formation of European nations. A need for the
creation of collective identities and the orchestration of ideological consensus were
essential to the formation of linguistic theories centered on the power of a national
spirit. The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer has pointed out that the most explicit
formulation of the notion of “the spirit of language” in the West appeared in a work
by J. Harris entitled Hermes or a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Gram-
mar (1751) in which we read: “We shall be led to observe, how nations like Single
Men, have their peculiar Ideas; how these peculiar Ideas become the genius of their
language, since the Symbol must of course correspond to its Archetype; how the wis-
est nations, having the most and best Ideas, will consequently have the best and most
copious Languages.” Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1: Language
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 144. The ideas of Geist
and Genie came to dominate the German linguistic scene from J. Grimm’s Lexicon to
J. G. Herder’s Kritisches Wäldchen.
9
Katō Jōken, ed., Shokyō, Jō [SKT 25] (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1983), p. 43. This trans-
lation by Stephen Owen appears in his Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 26.
ing (utafu wa) makes language last long”—to characterize the native
voice.10
The “sustained stretching of the voice”11 (nagamu ⹗) becomes for
Motoori a distinctive mark of the native uta that keeps it apart from
the intellectualistic bent of Chinese poetry aiming at “expressing inten-
tionality” (kokorozashi wo ifu ⸒ᔒ). As Keichū ᄾᴒ (1640–1701) had
already noted in his annotation of the Kokinshū, the Commentary to
the Excess Material of the Kokinshū (Kokin Yozai Shō ฎ੹૛᧚ᛞ,
1692), shi stops at the level of intentionality (kokorozashi no koto
ᔃߑߒߩ⸒ or “the words of the will”), while uta implies the presence
of the language of music. However, Keichū denied any basic differ-
ence between the two forms of lyric, arguing that “in the Chronicles of
Japan, Continued (Shoku Nihongi) and in the Collection of Ten Thou-
sand Leaves (Man’yōshū) songs (uta) are called poems (shi).”12
The recovery of the native voice thus became a top item in Motoori’s
philological agenda that underlined the fracture between what he called
“the voice of writing” (moji no kowe ᢥሼߩ㖸, ji no kowe ሼߩ㖸)
forming “scriptive meaning” ( jigi ሼ⟵, moji no giri ᢥሼߩ⟵ℂ),
and the “voice of speech” permeating “local meaning” (kotoba no
kokoro ⸒ߩᗧ, konata no kotoba no gi ᱝᣇߩ⸒ߩ⟵). This defense
of song’s orality was based on the realization of the musical origin of
poetry as a performative act.13 In order to prove the primacy of the
voice in the process of signification, Motoori attacked the philological
methodology that explained local terms according to the etymology of
Chinese characters because of the discrepancy between signifiers and
signifieds.14 Motoori addressed his criticism against philologists, such
10
Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, p. 323. Likewise, Motoori read the state-
ment from the Record of Ritual as follows: “Poetry expresses its intent; the act of
singing sustains (nagamuru) the voice for a long time”. Idem.
11
This is the definition given of the shimonidan verb nagamu in Ono Susumu, et als.,
eds. Iwanami Kogo Jiten (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974), p. 946.
12
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, et als. eds., Keichū Zenshū 8, (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1973),
p. 7.
13
The musical aspect of “song” (uta) was presented as the genealogical moment of
poetry in the major poetic treatises of Motoori’s time. See, for example, the beginning
of the first chapter, “The Origin of Poetry” (Kagen Ron), of Kada Arimaro’s (1706–
1751) Eight Essays on the Country’s Poetry (Kokka Hachiron, 1742): “Poetry sustains
the voice for a while, while clearing the mind.” Hashimoto Fumio, Ariyoshi Tamotsu,
Fujihira Haruo, eds. Karonshū, NKBZ 50 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1975), p. 533.
14
Motoori was indebted on this point to Kamo no Mabuchi’s Essay on Poetic Epi-
thets (Kanji Kō) where an attack was levelled against those who “without knowing the
past of the imperial reigns, explain the language of this land with Chinese phonetics.”
as Hosokawa Yūsai ⚦Ꮉᐝᢪ (1534–1610) and Keichū, whose inter-

pretation of the word “poem” (uta) followed the explanation given for
the Chinese character “to sing” (ge ᱌) in Liu Xi’s ഏᾨ Explanation of
Words (Shi ming ㉼ฬ): the etymon of ka (᱌) was found in the char-
acter ke (ᩅ) meaning “branches,” since “the upward and downward
modulation [= pitch] of the singing voice was like the movement of
leaves on a branch [at the blow of the wind].”15
Motoori faulted Japanese scholars with collapsing the meaning of
native expression—in this instance the phoneme uta—with a scriptive
trace whose origin might well have been grounded in Liu Xi’s inter-
pretation but whose adaptation to the local voice remained essentially
an alienating, fracturing act. According to him, the freezing of speech
in writing implied a series of contextual translations that distanced
the native signifier—graphically represented in man’yōgana (੓ᄙ for
uta)—from its scriptive representation (᱌). This explains Motoori’s
skepticism towards the etymological enterprise (goshaku ⺆㉼) that
was alleged to recapture a universal meaning from an alien root of
signification.
When confronted with the explanation of the etymon of the native
voice for “poem” (uta), Motoori rehearsed the theory that he had
learned from the Proofs to Understand the Chronicles of Japan (Nihon
Shoki Tsūshō ᣣᧄᦠ♿ㅢ⸽), a commentary to the Nihon Shoki by the
Ise Shintō scholar Tanigawa Kotosuga ⼱Ꮉ჻ᷡ (1709–1776). In this
work Kotosuga quoted a senior colleague, Tamaki Masahide ₹ᧁᱜ⧷,
saying that “the act of singing, reciting a poem aloud” (utafu ᱌߰)
was related to “the act of appealing to someone” (uttafu ⸷). Hori
Keizan further explained the etymology of “song” as “an expression of
grievances piling up inside the heart to be relieved in order to dispel
its gloom.”16 Poetic signification was rooted in the articulation of an
excess of feeling that the heart could hardly contain. Poetry, therefore,
acted as a safety valve that would guarantee the person’s physical and
mental well being. However, Motoori refused to either corroborate or
reject his teacher’s theory, dismissing the matter by stating that “now
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, ed. Kamo no Mabuchi Zenshū, 8 (Tokyo: Zoku Gunsho Ruijū
Kanseikai, 1978), p. 8.
15
Hosokawa Yūsai followed Liu Xi’s explanation in the Eiga no Taigai Shū, a com-
mentary of Fujiwara Teika’s poetic treatise Eiga no Taigai. Keichū gave the same
quotation in the Kokin Yozai Shō. Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, p. 324, n. 2;
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, Keichū Zenshū, 8, p. 7.
16
Quoted in Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Zenshū, p. 320, n. 5.
there is nothing more we can say about it” (kono hoka ifubeki koto
imada kamugaezu ߎߩᄖ޿߰ߴ߈ߎߣ޿߹ߛ⠨߳ߕ).
In a later work addressed to beginning scholars, the First Steps
into the Mountain (Uhiyamabumi ቝᲧጊ〯), Motoori openly voiced
his distrust of the etymological method, stating that “etymologies
are not that essential . . . and they do not deserve too much scholarly
attention.”17 Evidently Motoori was distrustful of a method that would
attempt to recapture meaning from the root of a scriptive trace from
which meaning had originally been fractured. Therefore, he encour-
aged a more historical approach to the study of language that would
analyze temporal changes in the usage of words and of their attributed
meanings. As he stated in the Uhiyamabumi, “more than being con-
cerned with the original meaning (moto no kokoro ᧄߩᗧ) of such
and such a word, we should think to which uses such words were put
by the ancients, and we should clarify what meaning such and such
a word had at that time.”18 If the etymological enterprise could find a
justification, this was limited to the uncovering of the roots of speech,
the study of native words whose transcription in an alien script was
purely phonetic (man’yōgana).
As an example of the etymologist of the native voice at work, Motoori’s
philological explanation of the “act of singing” is particularly eloquent.
He focused on the several Chinese characters—⺒⺍૞—that were
associated with the sound yomu (ਈ— in man’yōgana) indicating, in
Motoori’s words, “the act of reading/making a poem by having the
voice imitate words/concepts already in use (moto yori sadamarite
aru tokoro no kotoba wo ima manebite kuchi ni ifu ᧄࠃࠅቯ߹ࠅߡ
޽ࠆߣߎࠈߩㄉࠍ੹߹ߨ߮ߡญߦ޿߰) . . . as in the case of count-
ing numbers (mono no kazu wo kazufuru wo ‛ߩᢙࠍᢙ߰ࠆࠍ) . . .
without any melody attached to it or any particular intonation (utawazu
shite߁ߚߪߕߒߡ).”19
The presence of melody or intonation, on the other hand, explains
the expression “to sing a poem” (uta wo utafu ᱌ࠍ᱌߰), with par-
ticular regard to an ancient composition that is not a creative act on
the reciter’s part. Motoori reminds us that the sound utafu ੓ᄙᏓ
(“to sing”) was also conveyed by the character ei ⹗, whose other
17
Yoshikawa Kōjirō, Satake Akihiro, Hino Tatsuo, eds. Motoori Norinaga, NST 40
18
Yoshikawa Kōjirō, et als., Motoori Norinaga, p. 526.
19
Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, pp. 228–230.
reading, nagamuru (ᄹᚒ—ᵹ,” to sing/to sigh”), becomes Motoori’s

ground for an act of philological bravery. He explains the poetic act
(nagamuru) as “a long reverberation of the voice” (kowe wo nagaku hiku
ჿࠍ㐳ߊᒁߊ) expressing the “lamenting heart lost in deep thoughts”
(monoomohi shite nageku koto ‛ᕁ߭ߒߡགྷߊߎߣ). Motoori related
the act of singing (nagamuru) to the act of sighing (nageku ᄹቱਭ),
which, according to what Tanigawa Kotosuga and Kamo no Mabuchi
had previously argued, derived from the expression “a long breath”
(nagaiki 㐳ᕷ).20 As Motoori himself had pointed out in the Kojikiden,
“a lament (nageki) was the shortening (tsuzumari) of a long breath
(nagaiki)”. It was also the shortening of “a long life” (nagaiki 㐳↢)
since, as Kaibara Ekiken ⽴ේ⋉イ (1630–1714) had recorded in his
Japanese Etymologies (Nihon Shakumyō ᣣᧄ㉼ฬ), lending credit to a
widespread popular etymology, “the living (iki-taru) human being has
breath (iki); with death there is no breath.”21 “To sustain the breath”
(iki wo nagaku suru ᕷࠍ㐳ߊߔࠆ) in poetry meant to reproduce
semantically the process of life at the time when “the shortening of
breath” deriving from human emotions threatened the body’s organic
functions.
The complex web of signification emanating from the naming of
poetry included a pneumatological theory of existence that made
breath the major component of human life, translating sighs of regret
and relief into the articulations of poetry. Poetic language restores life
to a body deeply threatened by overwhelming passions. Poetry is, then,
defined as “the spontaneous sigh of relief following the deep movement
of the heart, the clearing of a gloomy disposition.”22 Several organs and
senses are engaged in the poetic process. In particular, Motoori singled
out the role played by the voice (kowe) that transforms the deep breath
(nagaiki) in exclamatory particles—ana 㒙㇊, aya 㒙ᄛ, aa 㒙‫ޘ‬, aware
㒙ᵄ␞—which, as we will see later, are at the center of Motoori’s con-
cept of intersubjectivity. The eye also—Motoori continues—came to
play a fundamental role in the process of poetic signification starting
from the time of the Senzaishū and Shinkokinshū, when nagamuru
came to include the meaning of “to stare at an object.” The fixed gaze
of the observer further contributed to the depressed state of the man
20
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, Kamo no Mabuchi Zenshū, 8, pp. 173–174.
21
Ekiken Kai, Ekiken Zenshū, 1 (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankō Kai, 1945), p. 40.
22
Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, p. 341.
“sunk in deep thoughts” to which the word nagamuru also refers.23

By combining all the different meanings that make up the Japanese
word for poetry, the poetic act could then be defined in some Heideg-
gerian fashion as “the voicing of the deep breath of the long life of a
still, pensive Being” (nagaiku ᄹᚒએਭ / nageku ᄹቱਭ / nagamuru
ᄹᚒ—ᵹ).24
The same distrust for the written word that sets apart Motoori from
several generations of philologists can be seen in Motoori’s reconstruc-
tion of the etymology of the word “Yamato” ᄛ㤗⊓. First conceived
as the name of the geographical area where the capital was located, it
eventually became a general term including in its meaning the entire
land of Japan (ame no shita no sōmyō ᄤߩਅߩᗉฬ). Motoori chal-
lenges the explanation given to this name in the Private Documents
on the Chronicles of Japan (Nihongi Shiki ᣣᧄ♿⑳⸥), a record of
commentaries on the Nihon Shoki compiled during the Heian period.
According to this work, after the separation of heaven and earth, peo-
ple were forced to live in the mountains since the ground had not
yet solidified, still remaining in a muddy stage. This would explain
the large number of “footprints left in the mountains” ( yamaato ጊ〔)
from which the name Yamato ጊ〔 allegedly derived. Moreover—the
document continues—since in ancient times “to live, to dwell” was
indicated by the character to ᱛ (“to stop”), Yamato ጊᱛ also means
“to dwell in the mountains”.25
Motoori contends that according to the eighth-century mytho-
logical records, the early history of a not yet solidified land preceded
the birth of the two ancestral gods and, therefore, the Japanese land
(Ooyashimaguni ᄢ౎ᵮ࿖) could not have been created. He argues
that, since there was no textual proof of people living in the mountains
during the first stage of human history, the argument advanced in the
Nihongi Shiki must be rejected. Keichū, Motoori admits, was already
very critical of an interpretation that would single out only one land,
the Yamato province, as the place where the ground had not yet solid-
ified. However, by still accepting the theory that the name Yamato
derived “from the many traces left by people in the mountains since
23
24
25
Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, p. 364. Kitamura Kigin accepted this theory
in his commentary to the Kokinshū. Yamagishi Tokuhei, ed. Hachidaishū Zenchū, 1
(Tokyo: Yūseidō, 1960), p. 7.
the Yamato province was surrounded on four sides by mountains,”26

Keichū was blinded to the fact that the explanation was built on Chi-
nese characters—Yamato ጊ〔 that were meant to be taken phoneti-
cally rather than literally. Motoori also pointed out that this incorrect
interpretation caused the malpractice of wrong intonation during
poetry meetings in which the singer would linger on the word Yamato
as if it was made of two words, yama and ato.27
Motoori also discarded as “modern philosophizing” (nochi no yo
no gakumonzata ᓟ਎ቇ໧ᴕ᳸) and “pretended smartness” (sakashi-
dachitaru setsu ⾫ߒߛߜߚࠆ⺑) the theory that explained Yamato
as a contraction of “Ya(shi)ma(mo)to” ౎ᵮర or “the original land
among the eight islands.” Motoori grounds his rejection on the fact
that, unlike the Nihon Shoki, the Kojiki states that the first island of
what we know today as the Japanese archipelago created by the ances-
tral deities was Awaji, while Yamato—which is the Honshū island—
was the last. Too much reliance on a work centered around the rhetoric
of written embellishmeat (kazari Ả⦡), such as the Nihon Shoki, at the
expense of the natural simplicity (sunaho ฎ⾰) of the pure word as
expressed in the Kojiki—Motoori continues—leads to the loss of the
signifying codes that were in use during the age of the gods.28
Moreover, Motoori noticed that the interpretation of Yamato as an
auspicious name (kagō ཅภ) attached to a sound that was destined
to become the signifying mark of the entire land, wrongly privileged
the debates that originated with the need to find a proper character
for Yamato (moji no sata ᢥሼߩᴕ᳸), rather than explaining what
for Motoori counted the most, the reason for the voice of the word
(kotoba ⸒).29
Then, where should we be looking for the correct etymology of the
sound “Yamato”? Of course, in the oldest native songs, such as in the
following, which the Kojiki attributes to the legendary Yamato Takeru
no Mikoto:
Yamato wa Yamato is
Kuni no mahoroba The highest part of the land;
Tatanazuku The mountains are green partitions
Aogaki Lying layer upon layer.
26
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, Keichū Zenshū, 8, p. 6.
27
28
29
Yamagomoreru Nestled among the mountains,

Yamatoshi uruwashi How beautiful is Yamato!30
Being a land surrounded by mountains—“the green fences” that,
according to another poem quoted by Motoori, “shield” the land pro-
tecting it from the outside31—Yamato ጊಣ simply means “mountain-
ous place”. North, on the back of this land lies the Yamashiro province
ጊ⢛—today’s Kyōto prefecture—that literally means “on the back of
the mountains.”32 The poetic voice restores credibility to the etymo-
logical enterprise whose relation to the written sign threatens to sink
it into discredit.
1.2 Signs
I will now address the issue of Motoori’s inscription of the voice into
the symbolism of the sign, as well as his views on the relationship that
scriptive signs have with the vocal articulation of speech, the presence
of the unseen, and the external materiality of the world. The latter
stands at the bottom of Motoori’s priorities because of the great atten-
tion paid to the seen by Neo-Confucian pragmatists whom Motoori
targeted in his nativist philosophy. Motoori was concerned with the
cherry blossom as voice and scriptive trace rather than as firewood.
He, therefore, privileged the language of aesthetics (adagoto) over the
language of practicality ( jitsuyō). The former was the result of a com-
bination of what he called “pattern words” (aya ᢥ), the unmediated
expression of a pristine voice transmitting “the heart of things” (koto
no kokoro/mono no kokoro). The latter was conveyed by “common
30
The English translation is by Donald L. Philippi, trans. Kojiki (Tokyo: University
of Tokyo Press, 1968), p. 248. The original text appears in Nishimiya Kazutami, ed.
Kojiki, SNKS 27 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1979), p. 169.
31
The Kojiki attributes this poem to the consort of Emperor Nintoku, Iwanohine
no Mikoto, who wrote it “at the entrance of Nara mountain”, during her journey to
Yamashiro:
Ao ni yoshi I pass by Nara
Nara wo sugi Of the blue clay;
Odate I pass by Yamato
Yamato wo sugi Of the little shields.
Donald L. Philippi, Kojiki, p. 310; Nishimiya Kazutami, Kojiki, p. 210.
32
words” (tada no kotoba), simplified signs communicating the “reason”

(kotowari) and “meaning” (i) of the world of objects.33
Motoori explained his privileging the poetic voice—the expression
of “patterns”—on the grounds of what he called “the principle of
spontaneity” ( jinen no myō ⥄ὼߩᅱ): a graphic visualization (aya) of
speech, the translation of sound into “spontaneous expression” (ono-
zukara kotoba ߅ߩߕ߆ࠄ⹖) that goes well beyond the sphere of
pedestrian skill (takumite shika suru ni wa arazu Ꮑߺߡߒ߆ߔࠆߦ
ߪ޽ࠄߕ). The pattern (aya) of such expression was the result of the
“stretching of the poetic voice” (kowe wo nagaku shi ჿࠍ㐳ߊߒ).34
In a move reminiscent of the Derridean critique of Western phono-
centrism, Motoori argued that the formation of the semantic field of
“pattern words” preceded the act of vocal articulation inasmuch as aya
already structured the singing voice (kowe) of the living realm (ujō
᦭ᖱ).35 This “specialized” language—the language of creation spoken
by all living creatures—provided a common, universal ground that
tamed the violent threat of difference and brought the other back to
the source of signification.
33
At the beginning of the eleventh century, Fujiwara Michitoshi ⮮ේ㆏ବ (1047–
1099) mentioned “the needlework like” (nuhimono) nature of the sign (kotoba), a
“brocade pattern” (nishiki nuhimono) that Michitoshi considered a major compo-
nent of poetry together with “heart” (kokoro) and “voice” (kowe). Fujiwara no Shunzei
quotes Michitoshi’s poetics in his Korai Fūteishō. Hashimoto Fumio, Karonshū,
pp. 175–176.
34
In the Isonokami no Sasamegoto Motoori argues that whereas the common word
for expressing sadness would be a simple repetition of the adjective “sad” (kanashi
kanashi ᖤߒᖤߒ), only the spontaneously arising sigh of sadness—“Oh, how sad, no,
no . . .” (ara kanashi ya nō nō ޽ࠄᖤߒ߿ߥ߰ߥ߰—can liberate the heart from gloom
and convey the depth of human sensitivity” (fukaki aware). Hino Tatsuo, ed. Motoori
Norinaga Shū, SNKS 60 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1983), pp. 306-308.
35
“Not only human beings, but all sentient beings including wild animals have
poetry (uta) in their voice. We should remember the passage in the Preface to the
Kokīnshū that says, ‘Listening to the voice of the nightingale singing on the cherry
blossom, or to the croaking of frogs living in the water, which living creature, as long
as it is alive, does not sing its poem?’. The presence of patterns in the harmonious,
crying voice of even birds and insect makes all their voices poetry.” Motoori Nori-
naga, Isonokami no Sasamegoto 1. Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, pp. 252–253.
Hino Tatsuo interprets the word aya simply as “beauty” (utsukushisa). However, the
matter seems to be more complicated by the very citation that Mr. Hino gives in
his commentary to Motoori’s essay. He quotes a passage from Ogyū Sorai that an
entry from Motoori’s diary proves to have been known to Motoori before he wrote
Isonokomi no Sasamegoto. The passage says, “Language is a pattern of words (koto
no bun). Language struggles to become a pattern. How does it struggle to become
a pattern? By beaming the word of the sage.” Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū,
p. 253, n. 5.
When we look at Chinese etymologies36 of the character that

Motoori used to indicate the word “pattern” and its most distinguished
extensions—“letters” and “literature”—we read that aya (Ch. wen; Jpn.
fumi, bun) “consists of intersecting strokes, representing a crisscross
pattern,”37 as well as “an image in writing of the shape of the things
written about.”38 These two definitions include both the symbolic and
the syntactic/semantic aspects of “literary patterns,”39 and emphasize
the fictional nature of the sign that subsumes under its representa-
tional power the “natural qualities” or “inner substances” (zhi ⾰)
of the objects of representation. The privileging of the “likely”40 over
36
Although Motoori might not have approved of this hermeneutical move for the
reasons stated in the section above, the reader will bear with me so as to articulate
with words what Motoori reduced to the concept of “spontaneity”.
37
This is the etymology provided in the most ancient Chinese etymological dic-
tionaiy, the Shuo Wen Jie Zi (Explanations of Simple and Compound Characters, ca.
A.D. 100) by Xu She. Here we read that Can Jie, a scribe in the service of the Yel-
low Emperor, devised the system of Chinese writing observing the prints of birds
and other animals on the ground, thus representing graphically the configuration of
things by a process of analogy. Quoted in James J.Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 7. See also François
Jullien, La Valeur Allusive: Des Catégories Originales de l’Interprétation Poétique dans
la Tradition Chinoise (Contribution à une Réflexion sur l’Alterité Interculturelle) (Paris:
École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1985), p. 27.
38
This etymology appears in the Book of Changes (Zhouyi), according to which Pao
Xi traced the first scriptural marks—the eight trigrammes of the Book of Changes—in
order to communicate with the power of the universe (shenming) after noticing the
marks (wen) on the body of birds and other animals. Quoted in Haun Saussy, “Syntax
and Semantics in the Definition of Wen.” Paper Delivered at the Annual Meeting of
the Association of Asian Studies (Boston, March 27, 1994), p. 8. See also François
Jullien, La Valeur Allusive, p. 26.
39
“Le terme de wen qui a servi de noyau à l’élaboration de la notion de littérature
en Chine se prête ainsi à une double enquête, sémantique et symbolique. “François
Jullien, La Valeur Allusive, p. 22.
40
Likewise, in medieval Western poetics, fiction (Lat. fictio) was related to the
act of “pretending” ( fingere), or of “coming up with a composition that is not true”
(excogitare et componere quod verum non est). Ugoccione da Pisa, as quoted by Sergio
Cecchin in Dante Alighleri, Opere Minori, 1 (Turin: Utet, 1983), p. 478, n. 9. The
human understanding of the divine process occurs within the strict limitations of a
privileged poetic language that reproduce god’s activity (poiein = “to make”, poire =
“to compose/create”, “poetry”, “poet”) by using grammaticaJ, syntactical and rhetori-
cal rules. The Florentine poet Dante defines poetry as “a fabrication created through
rhetoric and music” (que nihil aliud est quam fictio rethorica musicaque poita). De
Vulgari Eloquentia 2: IV. 3. Dante, Opere Minori, p. 478. To indicate the composi-
tional pattern of poetry Dante used the image of the fagot ( fascis) that highlights the
“tying together” (aviere/ligare) of rhythm, meter, and melody into a memorable verse.
He followed the etymology provided by Uguccione da Pisa: “Avieo. es idest ligo. as; et
inde autor idest ligator”. Dante, Opere Minori, p. 460, n. 3. See De Vulgari Eloquentia.
“volentes igitur modum tradere quo ligari”. (p. 474); “es demum, fustibus torquibusque
the closure of mimetic reproduction keeps the process of significa-

tion open to the possibility of production, the divine source of infinite
creation.
A question remains as to how the scriptive sign relates to the source
of signification, a question that has been at the very core of metaphys-
ics from its inception. Following the studies on grammar by Kamo no
Mabuchi, Motoori found in the letters of the Japanese syllabary (Gojū
Onzu ੖ච㖸࿑) repositories of sacred speech, the utterances of the
gods.41 As Mabuchi had already argued in his Reflections on the Mean-
ing of Words (Goi Kō ⺆ᗧ⠨), “the voice of the unseen” (itsura no
kowe ޿ߟࠄߩ㖸), whose secret source—itsura means “somewhere
although no one knows where”—only the gods knew, were nothing
but “the voice of the fifty linkages” (itsura no kowe ੖ච⡧ߩ㖸), “the
sacred voice that is subjected to no transformation,” “the voice of
heaven and earth” (tenchi no kowe ᄤ࿾ߩჿ).42 This led Motoori to
categorize five kinds of “divine expressions” (kami no kotoba ␹⺆)
that he argued in the eleventh book of the Kojikiden to have actually
existed.43
Known as “the theory of sound/meaning” (ongi setsu 㖸⟵⺑), this
interpretative model was rooted in commentaries of Buddhist scrip-
tures, such as the Hannyakyō Ongi ⥸⧯⚻㖸⟵ and the Hokekyō Ongi
ᴺ⪇⚻㖸⟵. By applying this theory to the reading of the Japanese
paratis promissum fascem, hoc est cantionem, quo modo viere quis debeat instruemus”
(p. 488); “Preparatis fustibus torquibusque ad fascem, nunc fasciandi tempus incumbit”
(p. 502). In his De Lingua Latina, Varro relates the verb viere (= aviere) to vates (“the
man who ties” = the poet).
41
In the West the esoteric, mystic interpetation of divine language as manifested in
the power of the alphabet and its combinations was a major goal of the Jewish Cabala
since its inception during the Babylonian captivity (586–332 B.C.). Since language—
both oral and written—was a gift of god to humanity, the twenty-two letters of the
Jewish alphabet were listed among the elements of creation together with numbers.
The word had the power to reveal the voice of the prophets, whose interpretation
became the rabbi’s duty: the appearance of the word ʿālef (= one thousand) six times
in the scriptures, for example, will mean that the world is bound to last six thousand
years. Soures for Cabalistic hermeneutics are The Book of Creation (Sefêr Yasîrâh,
7th–8th c. A.D.) and The Book of Splendor (Sefêr ha-Zōhar), which is attributed to the
rabbi Sim∂ōn ben Yōhâ’î (121 A.D.), although it is probably a work of the thirteenth
century. Giorgio Raimondo Cardona, Antropologia della Scrittura (Turin: Loescher,
1981), pp. 204–353.
42
Quoted in Toyoda Kunio, Nihonjin no Kotodama Shisō, p. 188.
43
Toyoda Kunio, Nihonjin no Kotodama Shisō, p. 191. For further information on
the role played by the Japanese syllabary in Motoori’s philosophy see the outstanding
work of Koyasu Nobukuni, particularly his Motoori Norinaga (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
1992) and Norinaga Mondai to wa Nani ka (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1995).
classics—Kojiki, Nihongi, and Man’yōshū—Nativist scholars believed

that they could recover divine speech in either the sound of each syl-
lable (ichion ichigi ha ৻㖸৻⟵ᵷ) or in each line (ichigyō ichigi ha
৻ⴕ৻⟵ᵷ) of the kana system. In this regard we see a common
pattern developing among late Nativist scholars who shared the view
that “nothing is outside language” (Suzuki Shigetane ㋈ᧁ㊀⢬1812–
1863) and that, as the breath of heaven and earth, “kotodama was god
(kami) dwelling in the spoken word” (Kawagita Tanrei Ꮉർਤ㔤).
The creational power of the fifty sounds was underlined by Tachibana
Moribe ᯌ቞ㇱ (1741–1849), who argued thai “the first sound of the
syllabary, “a”, was the origin of the world (aji hongen setsu 㒙ሼᧄర
⺑). His debt to Buddhist philosophy is apparent when we consider
that Moribe was resurrecting an ancient Buddhist doctrine developed
in the Shingon school, according to which, the sound “a” was the
alpha and omega of the world, the principle of the unperishable truth
of emptiness (aji honfushō 㒙ሼᧄਇ↢). Other Nativists followed suit
by finding the principle of truth in different letters of the syllabary.
Fujitani Mitsue ን჻⼱ᓮ᧟ (1768–1823), for example, believed that
the key to the explanation of the world was in the letter “u” (uji hongen
setsu ቝሼᧄర⺑).44
Motoori’s attention to scriptive signs was not limited to the reading
of lexemes and morphemes—what is usually referred to by Japanese
grammarians as “discourse on particles” (teniwoha). He repeatedly
stressed the preeminent role played by the rhetorical dimension in the
poetic reconstruction of divine language. On this topic, Motoori was
quite indebted to what James J.Y. Liu has called a “metaphysical con-
cept of literature”45 as it was developed by Chinese thinkers. Although
it might appear paradoxical to search for interpretative keys in what
Motoori rejected as a misleading root of signification, the relevance for
Japanese Nativists of the Chinese discourse on literature can hardly be
underestimated.
We must think of the distinction achieved in China by the con-
cept of analogy as a rhetorical figure in providing the major linkage
between ontology and its metaphysical ground: the wen of men and
44
See Toyoda Kunio, Nihonjin no Kotodama Shisō, pp. 194–204.
45
James J.Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago and London: The Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 17.
the wen of the Sky (tianwen-renwen ᄤᢥੱᢥ).46 The locus classicus

of this analogical patterning is the passage in The Book of Changes
that exhorts to “contemplate the patterns (wen) of heaven in order to
observe the changes of season, as well as to contemplate the patterns
(wen) of men in order to accomplish the cultural transformation of the
world.”47 The French sinologist François Jullien has called the relation-
ship between the Dao and the immanence of wen “co-naturality” that
the Sage must reestablish in order to understand the configurations of
the cosmos.48
In the eighth-century the Chinese poet Bo Juyi ⊕ዬᤃhad developed
the concept of the three patterns—celestial, terrestrial, and human. He
and his followers gave analogical readings of the wen of the Sky (sun,
moon, and the stars), the wen of Earth (mountains, rivers, and trees),
and the wen of Man (the content of his conscience as shaped by edu-
cation). The reciprocity of Being, beings, and representation implied
the notion of an omnipervasive Dao as origin (yuan ේ) of a creative
46
François Jullien argues that in China, analogy takes the place held in the West
by “imitation” (mimesis), the explanation of “art” on the ground of its imitation of
nature. He gives the example of the analogic force contained in the image of the wind
( feng 㘑) to define the power of words in classical Chinese poetics. In the commen-
taries of the Book of Songs, Confucian hermeneutics privileged the allegorical reading
of the wind that stood for the indirectness of poetic expression in its penetrating
mission of assisting the government in the process of “culturalization.” Rather than
an object for imitation, nature was the carrier of influence that, once it scatters the
leaves of words (kotoba) leads to the transformation and refinement of human nature.
The Confucian notion of power—a diffused set of relationships whose order must be
maintained more by moral example than by the power of the sword—found in the
rhetorical usage of an insinuating wind an indirect way of voicing political criticism,
as well as eliciting improvements from rulers and subjects alike. The analogy between
the pattern of the “sky” and the pattern of the text was strengthened by the power-
ful wind of “a moral lyricism” (“lyricism de la moralité”) that was one of the major
poles of the Confucian discourse on culture, the other being the “lyricism of void”
(“lyrisme de la vacuité”) inspired by Buddhist and Daoist aesthetics. See the follow-
ing statements from the “Preface” to The Book of Songs. “The word ‘airs’ ( feng) is
used here to express the influence of instruction: the wind puts into movement and
the instruction causes a transformation . . . The notion of ‘wind’ implies the fact that,
like the wind, those above influence and transform those below. Like the wind, those
below criticize those above. Through literary expression, complaints are governed by
patterning (wen): there is no blame in those who criticize, and those who have ears
for these critical remarks will know how to improve themselves. This is what the word
‘airs’ implies.” For the original text and an English translation of the “Preface” see
Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, p. 38 and 46. François Jullien,
La Valeur Allusive, pp. 34, 97–102, and 113.
47
Adapted from James J. Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature, pp. 25–26.
48
François Jullien, La Valeur Allusive, p. 30.
process whose mechanisms the professionals of the word reproduced

in their acts of literary production. Liu Xie opened his famous The Lit-
erary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin Diaolong, 5th c. A.D.)
with a quotation from The Book of Changes indicating “the power of
Words to initiate the movement of the World.” This resulted from the
fact that “words are the pattern (wen) of Dao.”49
Since nature (tiandao ᄤ㆏ or daoti ㆏૕ was considered the root
and the poet’s emotions the branches, the analogic pattern of poetry
articulates itself through rhetorical devices playing on the coexten-
sion of what the West has hierarchized as natura naturans and natura
naturata. Linkage, then, becomes the rhetorical keyword of Chinese
and Japanese poetry, as we see from major techniques of expres-
sionistic referentiality, such as the “analogic rapprochement” (lian lei
ㅪ㘃 and “metaphorical projections” (tuo wu, jie wu yi yin huai ⸤‛
୫‛ᗧᒁᙬ.50
How this reciprocity works in Motoori’s philosophical scheme is
the subject of his theory of communication. Once he had established
the perfect correspondence between sound and sign, Motoori could
then proceed to explain how this divine pre-language allowed people
to communicate in the world.
1.3 The Perfect Language

After dealing with the concepts of “voice” and “sign,” let’s now exam-
ine the role played by poetry in the formation of an intersubjectiv-
ity that allows communication with an outside. I have discussed the
preeminence of the voice in Motoori’s philosophy of meaning. Now
I must address the problem of how this voice gets communicated in
a way that guarantees understanding among the receivers of the mes-
sage. Western readers are probably most familiar with Western mod-
els of communication, first among them the phenomenological answer
49
Shih, Vincent Yu-chung, trans. and annot. [Liu Hsieh] The Literary Mind and the
Carving of Dragons (Taipei: Chung Hwa Book Company, 1974), p. 12. See François
Jullien on the topic of reciprocity and literary genealogy in China: “Une genèse globale
de toute création linéraire est ainsi élaborée en fonction de ces trois termes fondamen-
taux: le Dao comme totalité cosmologico-morale, le Sage comme premier auteur (en
même temps que l’auteur par excellence), le texte canonique comme premier texte (en
même temps que le texte par excellence).” François Jullien, La Valeur Allusive, p. 40.
50
The expressions “rapprochement analogique” and “projection métaphorique” are
by François Jullien, La Valeur Allusive, p. 166.
to the question how man can communicate the truth of his immediacy
to an other that is located outside the original self. Edmund Husserl
singled out the double connotation of the concept of “sign” (Zeichen):
while the truth of reality is concealed in the sign as expression (Aus-
druck), the process of communication takes place through indicative
signs, signs as indication (Anzeichen).
The meaningful sign of expression existed in consciousness. Its exte-
riorization—ex-pression means “to bring out”—was left to the voice of
language that transfened to others one’s own self-presence, the ownness
of one’s own. In order to be meaningful, speech must be expressive: it
must restore the immediacy of presence of a pure active intention—
spirit, psyche, life, will—that is otherwise exiled in the approximation
of indications, the surface of language that constrains truth to the strait
jacket of the written sign. Speech restores the immediacy of living con-
sciousness by asking the imagination (Phantasie) to reduce the interior
monologue to the imagined (vorgestellt) words—not the real (wirklich)
words of indication that must be bracketed off together with empirical
worldly existence—of living experience. Speech escapes the fictitious
nature of the written sign since, as Jacques Derrida has argued in his
critique of Husserl, “speech is the representation of itself.”51
Words are alive because they never give themselves completely out
to others. Words never leave the utterer and never cease to belong
to him. The voice is heard by others as it is heard by oneself so that
it never becomes a phenomenon “outside” consciousaess: the voice
communicates the transcendence of itself without the mediation of
the body of/as signifier. Without giving itself out to the world and to
space, the sound maintains the highest ideality, uncovering the self-
presence of life/truth without stepping outside the ideal. Since speech
is in no need of signifier in order to be present to itself, it will never
know a moment of crisis which only occurs when a sign is involved
in “producing,” “re-presenting,” “mimicking” external objects. The
effacement of the distance between signifier and signified—the brack-
eting of space and time—is for Husserl a major condition for the
“unproductive” and “reflective” voice to recapture the independence
and originality of the spiritual process of life (Geistigkeit/Lebendigkeit).
51
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of
Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 57.
Deirida has brilliantly summarized Husserl’s phonological version of

metaphysics as follows:
The voice is the being which is present to itself in the form of universal-
ity, as consciousness; the voice is consciousness. In colloquy, the propa-
gation of signs does not seem to meet any obstacles because it brings
together two phenomenological origins of pure auto-affection. To speak
to someone is doubtless to hear oneself speak, to be heard by oneself;
but, at the same time, if one is heard by another, to speak is to make
him repeat immediately in himself the hearing-oneself-speak in the very
form in which I effectuated it. This immediate repetition is a reproduc-
tion of pure auto-affection without the help of anything external. This
possibility of reproduction, whose structure is absolutely unique, gives
itself out as the phenomenon of a mastery or limitless power over the
signifier, since the signifier itself has the form of what is not external.
Ideally, in the teleological essence of speech, it would then be possible
for the signifier to be in absolute proximity to the signified aimed at as
intuition and governing the meaning. The signifier would become per-
fectly diaphanous due to the absolute proximity to the signified. This
proximity is broken when, instead of hearing myself speak, I see myself
write or gesture.52
The externalization—“ex-pression”—of self and voice is required
if we want to achieve the “transport” necessary to communication.
Although in a pre-Freudian society the locus of exit could hardly be
defined as “consciousness,” its most likely counterpart—“the heart,”
“the mind,” or in between—was entrusted with the same labor of
movement. In 1763, the same year that Motoori was working on his
Isonokami no Sasamegoto, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau was finding in the imagination the mediatory device that would
bring communication about. As he stated in his essay On the Ori-
gin of Languages, pity—Husserl’s expressive sign—which is native to
the human heart, must be activated by the imagination in order to be
“expressed” outside the self. The knowledge of the other, then, presup-
poses the double movement of externalization and identification that
Rousseau described as follows:
52
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 80. Of course Derrida is very critical
of Husserl’s theory of signs, as well as of the entire metaphysical project, as we can see
from the following remarks that Derrida appended to his essay: “The history of meta-
physics therefore can be expressed as the unfolding of the structure or schema of an
absolute will-to-hear-oneself-speak. This history is closed when this infinite absolute
appears to itself as its own death. A voice without difference, a voice without writing,
is at once absolutely alive and absolutely dead” Ibidem, p. 102.
How are we moved to pity? By getting outside ourselves and identifying

with a being who suffers. We suffer only as much as we believe him to
suffer. It is not in ourselves, but in him that we suffer. It is clear that
such transport supposes a great deal of acquired knowledge. How am
I to imagine ills of which I have no idea? How would I suffer in seeing
another suffer, if I know not why he is suffering, if I am ignorant of what
he and I have in common. He who has never been reflective is incapable
of being merciful or just or pitying. He is just as incapable of being mali-
cious and vindictive. He who imagines nothing is aware only of himself;
he is isolated in the midst of mankind.53
This theory Motoori Norinaga called “the moving power of things”
(mono no aware), the restoration of godly nature to those who allow
themselves to be moved by the awesomeness of external reality. The
potential for intersubjectivity—the very possibility of communica-
tion—was contained in the power of things (= words) to elicit the
same emotions from different perceivers. Communication was made
possible by the subjugation of difference on the part of a universal
principle of sameness—“sacred speech” inscribed in “pattern signs.”
Motoori proceeded to the explanation of his theory of communi-
cation by concentrating on his etymological understanding of aware
in a manner reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s etymological labors.
He lets language speak through the path of speculative etymologies
in an attempt to capture the spring of signification.54 He explained
53
John H. Moran and Alexander Gode, trans. On the Origin of Language (New
York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966), p. 32.
54
For examples of Western speculative etymologies we might think of those medi-
eval thinkers who found in the irretrievable language of Adam the ground of lin-
guistic dissemination. Since language was a divine gift, Dante argued, the first word
ever pronounced by a human being could only be “God”—“El” that, according to a
medieval tradition, was the first and most important name of God in Hebrew. Basing
his argument on what Dante called “the proof of reason,” (ratio)—to be distinguished
from proofs based on autoritas (“authority”)—since man was created by God and for
God, the idea that man might have named something different from his creator was
simply preposterous. Since God was happiness (gaudium) and nothing but happiness
lived in God, the beginning of speech was a happy event. However, following Adam’s
original sin—man’s first utterance changed into a cry—“ah!” (Lat. heu)—to express
the pain transgression—“Quid autem prius vox primi loquentis sonaverit, viro sane
mentis in promptu esse non titubo ipsum fuisse quod “Deus” est, scilicet El, vel per
modum interrogationis vel per modum responsionis. Absurdum atque rationi vid-
etor orrificum ante Deum ab homine quicquam nominatum fuisse, cum ab ipso et in
ipsum factus fuisset homo. Nam sicut post prevaricationem humani generis quilibet
exordium sue locutionis incipit ab “heu”, rationabile est quod ante qui fuit inciperet
a gaudio; et cum nullum gaudium sit extra Deum, sed totum in Deo, et ipse Deus
totus sit gaudium, consequens est quod primus loquens primo et ante omnia dixisset
the expression aware as the result of the combination of two emotive

particles—“aa”+hare”=“aware”—indicating the initial surprise that
the subject experiences before “the movement of the heart” (kokoro
no ugoku nari) could properly respond to the challenges of the realm
of feelings. Such challenges were conducive to the disclosure of Being
(kami). Motoori considered aware the Japanese translation of the Chi-
nese exclamation “Ah!” (Ch. Wu hu; Jpn. Aa 㡆๭,55 an expression of
hidden-kept grief (tansoku ᱎᕷ in need of linguistic articulation.56
“Deus”. De Vulgari Eloquentia 1:IV. 4. Dante Alighieri, Opere Minori, p. 390. Dante
brings ths Latin semantics of human suffering (heu) back to the original Word of
signification (El) in Hebrew. This, according to the Florentine poet, was the linguistic
form (forma locutionis) spoken by Adam and inherited by the sons of Eber (= the
Jewish people) before the linguistic dissemination that followed the erection of the
“tower of confusion” in the city of Babel.
55
In the eighteenth century the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico argued
that languages derived from the voicing of interjections following the articulation of
human passions. The awesome appearance of thunder in the sky that the ancients
associated with the presence of god produced in man the voice of astonishment “pa!”
In the opinion of the Neopolitan scholar, the doubling of this emotive particle, “pape!”
became the root of god’s title “father (pater) of men and gods” (Jupiter). Vico explained
this association by means of onomatopoeia, according to which, the sound of thunder
produced the articulation of the Latin name “Ious”. The Greeks named “Zeús” after
the whiz of thunder. The sound of the burning fire gave to god the name “Ur” in the
Orient from which derived the Greek word “sky” (ouranós). “Ed esso Giove fu da’
latini, dai fragor del tuono, detto dapprima “Ious”; dal fischio del fulmine da’ greci
fu detto Zeús; dal suono che dà il fuoco ove brucia, dagli orientali dovett’essere detto
“Ur”, onde venne “Urim”, la potenza del fuoco; dalla quale stessa origine dovett’a greci
venir detto ouranós, il cielo, ed ai latini il verbo “uro”, “bruciare”. Principi di Scienza
Nuova 2: 4. Giambattista Vico, La Scienza Nuova e Altri Scritti, p. 424. “Seguitarono
a formarsi le voci umane con l’interiezioni, che sono voci articolate all’èmpito di pas-
sioni violente, che’n tutte le lingue sono monosillabe. Onde non è fuor del verisimile
che, da’ primi fulmini incominciata a destarsi negli uomini la maraviglia, nascesso
la prima interiezione da quella di Giove, formata con la voce “pa!” e che poi restò
raddoppiata “pape!”, interiezione di maraviglia, onde poi nacque a Giove il titolo di
“padre degli uomini e degli dèi”, e quindi appresso che tutti gli dèi se ne dicessero
“padri”, e “madri” tutte le dèe; di che restaron ai latini le voci “Iupiter”, “Diespiter”,
“Marspiter”, “Iuno genitrix”. Vico, La Scienza Nuova e Altri Scritti, pp. 424–425. For
a discussion of Vico’s “naive fancy of a purely speculative ‘etymology’, totally unham-
pered by critical or historical scruples” see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms 1: Language, p. 149. For Martin Heidegger’s etymological tours-de-force, see his
On The Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971; 1st German ed., 959).
56
Motoori Norinaga, Shibun Yōryō 1. Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shп pp.
110–111. For a reading of this etymology, see Amagasaki Akira, Kachō no Tsukai:
Uta no Michi no Shigaku, GBS 7 (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1983)㧘pp. 222–241, In Iso-
nokami no Sasamegoto Motoori denies the validity of the etymology that he had previ-
ously defended in a work entitled Discussion on Aware (Aware Ben ቟ᵄ␞ᑯ. 1758).
Motoori’s first hermeneutical attempt was based on a passage from the Kogo Shпi
reporting the happiness and awe that followed the sun’s reappearance in the sky—
Amaterasu’s unconcealment from the cave as described in the Kojiki myth. According
In order to trace genealogy of the native poetic voice, Norinaga went

back to what he considered the origin (hajime) of Yamato poetry: the
vocal exchange between the deities Izanami and Izanagi prior to their
copulation and production of the land. In Isonokami no Sasamegoto
Norinaga quotes the following passage from the Kojiki:
“Then Izanagi no Mikoto said first: “Ah, what a cute maiden!” (ana ni
yashi, e wotome wo). Afterwards, his spouse, little sister Izanami no Mikoto
said: “Ah, what a handsome lad!” (ana ni yashi, e wotoko wo).57
Motoori explained ana 㒙㇊ as an exclamatory particle like aya 㒙ᄛ
and aa 㒙㒙 indicating the reciprocal surprise that the “young man”
(wotoko)58 and the “young woman” (wotome) feel at the discovery of
sexual difference. The choral nature of the exchange—vocal expression
(tonafu ໒߰ followed by a reply (kotafu ๺߰—underscores the pres-
ence of a major element that is required in all acts of communication:
the need for an other to be present in order to be moved by a fictional
character’s joy or pain leading to the experience of mono no aware. A
sounding trace of the heart’s outburst, aware requires the presence of
like-minded witnesses who share in the aesthetic experience and help
the experiencing subject to unburden himself/herself of the power of
feelings by becoming a new transmitting agent in an uninterrupted
chain of communication.59
to this etymological theory the amazement (aware 㒙ᵄ␞㧕of the gods at the view of
the Sun-goddess was the result of the clearing of the sky (amehare ᄤ᥍㧕after a long
period of total darkness. This interpretation was widespread durng the Edo period; it
appears, for example, in Kaibaru Ekiken’s Japanese Etymologies (Nihon Shakumyō).
In Isonokami no Sasamegoto Norinaga argues that the semantic field of aware goes
well beyond the signification of a simple sigh of relief; it conveys the entire range of
perceptions. Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shп, pp. 285–286.
57
Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shп, p. 260. The original Koiiki text appears in
Nishimaya Kazutami, ed. Kojiki, SNKS 27 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1979), p. 30.
58
In the commentary to the Kojiki—the Kojikiden—Motoori reminds his readers
that up to the time of the compilation of the Man‘yōshп, the word otoko, being the
counterpart of otome (“a maiden”), only referred to “young men.” The extension of
the word to indicate all men irrespective of their age points to a new and later devel-
opment in the history of this expression. Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shп, p. 262,
n. 2.
59
Motoori developed his theory of mono no aware in The Essentials of the Tale of
Genji (Shibun Yōryō, 1763). Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shп, p. 131 and 236–237.
As previously noted, Motoori was indebted to Chinese metaphysical theories of lit-
erature that used the image of the “wind” ( feng) as a scriptive conductor of emotions.
Although the wind cannot be seen directly, its presence is conveyed by the bending of
grasses and leaves. Likewise, emotions are indirectly communicated (tong ㅢ) by fic-
tional situations that literature makes its duty to represent. The transfer of perceptons
According to Motoori, the reading of monogatari, a genre whose

distinction was sealed by its commitment to “recording human feelings
as they are” (ninjō no arinomama wo kakishirushite), opens the door
to a concealed world of feeling and perceiving, allowing the reader
to recognize himself/herself in the characters, and thus reducing the
psychological burdens of which the reader had originaly thought to be
the only victim. This ability to relate also functions as a yardstick to
measure the degree of one’s sensitivity and make sure of one’s ability
“to rejoice at a person’s joy and to be sad in the presence of sadness.”60
The insensitive person (mono no aware wo shiranu hito) is the one
who does not cry when someone is in tears and is deaf to the “ah-
invoking nature” of things.61 Communication entails participation in
a set of relationships in which the speech of the unseen is recovered
and distorted by the sign of poetic writing. Speech and sign rejoin the
world of exteriority to the lost trace of an original Being whose pres-
ence is housed in the flow of language.62
that culminate in the movement of the experiencing heart find its best analogy in the
passage of wind. See François Jullien, La Valeur Allusive, pp. 113–114.
60
61
A poetics of “interemotivity” had been basic to the composition and interpretation
of Chinese poetry since the first commentaries on The Book of Songs (Shi jing),
culminating in the theories of Bo Juyi. According to such poetics, human nature
(xing ᕈ) is moved (dong േ) by external reality (wu ‛) thanks to its sensitivity to
emotions (gan ᗵ). The Wenxin Diaolong describes this process as follows: “Man is
endowed by nature with seven kinds of sentiments that are the results of an incitation
(xing ⥝) produced by the external World. Moved by this external World, man sings
what he feels in his interiority; nothing is there that is not natural.” This natural
incitation puts in motion a relational process in which exteriority/objectivity and
interiority/subjectivity move back and forth through a net of unending correspondence.
See François Jullien, La Valeur Allusive, pp. 67–73.
62
According to the philosopher Sakabe Megumi, the metaphysical aspect
recaptured by language in experience of mono no aware is evidenced by Motoori’s use
of the expression mono rather than koto. Although both share in the same meaning,
“thing,” Sakabe argues, the two words differ substantially as far as the thing implied
is concerned. Koto catches the “thing” in what makes it different from other things,
as the expression kotonari (੐ᚑࠅ) = “to be a thing, to become a thing”/⇣ߥࠅ =
“to be different“) indicates. Koto stops at the level of the empirical object. On the
other hand, mono implies the presence of “a person” (mono ⠪), and of “a possessing
demon” (mono no ke ‛ߩᕋ) that lends the word a more “vital” and “metaphysical”
signification. Mono no aware then describes a set of relationships between the
empirical object, the experiencing subject, and the metaphysical ground. Norinaga’s
theory—Sakabe continues—becomes the basis of “an aesthetics (bigaku ⟤ቇ and
of an hyper-ethics (chō-rinri ⿥୶ℂ) that transcends the level of the intramundane
(naisekaisei ౝ਎⇇ᕈ) properly known as human.” Sakabe Megumi, Kagami no Naka
no Nihongo: Sono Shikō no Shujusō, CR 22 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō 1989), pp. 81–82.
Motoori found keys to the interpretation of intersubjectivity and

communication in the realm of perception in which he believed a per-
fect language was stored that did not require the presence of fracturing
scripts. The language of mono no aware provided Motoori with a uni-
versal pattern of signification beyond the articulation of language into
words and sentences. This was the goal of the linguistic research of
Western medieval scholars as well, who were searching for the origi-
nal language of the angels, the privileged creatures that were believed
to perfectly communicate their thoughts without a need for linguistic
articulation.63 According to Motoori, poetry and monogatari had the
power to trigger a silent communication that brings expression back
to its original locus, and reduces language to a device that must be
discarded after the message has been ‘in-pressed” again in the readers’
fantasy.
Unlike the dangerous conceptualizations of logic that limit the pos-
sibility of communication to the stiffness of formal linguistic categories
thus distorting the truth of all messages, the realm of feelings (aesthet-
ics) recaptures the message’s presence to itself by going beyond verbal
communication. Motoori argued that it was the purpose of poetry “to
sing human feelings” so as to awake others to the meaning of human
nature since the time when the “Great Preface” (Daxu ᄢᐨ) to The
Books of Songs was compiled in China (1st c. A.D.). Following on this
point the lesson of Ogyū Sorai,64 Motoori believed that later exegeti-
cal traditions misundertood the language of poetry and took pride in
misreading the “truth of self-presence” or “the human true passion-
ate nature” (hito no makoto no nasake ੱߩ߹ߎߣߩᖱ) as the com-
mon language of craft, cunning, and action. The affectation of scholars
For a French translation see Megumi Sakabe, “Notes sur le Mot Japonais hureru”.
Revue d’Esthetique, Nouvelle Série II (1986), p. 48.
63
See Umberto Eco, La Ricerca della Lingua Perfetta nella Cultura Europea (Bari:
Laterza, 1993).
64
Ogyū Sorai writes in his Distinguishing the Way (Bendō ᑯ㆏): “The bad practices
of Tsu Ssu. Mêng Tzu, and those after them consist in that, when they explained [the
Way], they made it in the minutes detail [wishing thereby] to make the listeners easily
comprehend [the truth]. This is the way of the disputants; they are those who want to
sell their theories quickly . . . When we arrive at Mêng Tzu, we find that he proclaimed
his clamorous message by means of casuistry and quibble; and he wished thereby to
make people submit themselves. Now, a person who [attempts] to make people submit
by words is certainly a person who is not [yet] able to make people submit themselves.
For a teacher ministers to people who trust him.” Ogyū Sorai, Distinguishing the Way
[Bendō], trans, by Olof G. Lidin (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970), pp. 78–80.
eager to engage rhetoric in a game of self-interest—to convince others

with logical arguments of poetry’s bearing over the moral issues of
good and evil—and the pride they take in making shows of smart-
ness (sakashigenaru koto ⾫ߒߍߥࠆߎߣ), have blinded readers to
the poetic truth that the language of poetry does not rely (monohaka-
naku ‛ߪ߆ߥߊ) on the consolation of specific purposiveness nor on
the presence of a peculiar content (adaadashiu ޽ߛ޽ߛߒ߁). The
spontaneity of perception that is best represented in the “language of
women and children” (onna warabe no kotomeki ᅚ┬ߴߩ⸒߼߈)—
Motoori continues—resists the embellishing makeup (tsukurohikazari
ߟߊࠈ߭㘼ࠅ) of words’ deceptive surface (itsuwareru uwabe னࠇࠆ
߁ࠊߴ).65
Motoori metaphorically constructed this fight between logic and aes-
thetics by essentializing the other (China) to itself (Japan). He found
reasons for the Chinese signifying practices in the realm of politics.
China’s alleged babelic confusion followed the repetition of evil politi-
cal practices that encouraged new dynasties to devise words of legiti-
mation and forge a language of pretended virtue that only covered
with the logic of education a reality of disloyalty and immorality. On
the other hand, the Adamic language of the native soil sprang from the
immediacy of the world of nature whose order the deities maintained
by entrusting public matters to themselves and by delegating power to
their imperial epiphanies.66
Motoori argued that the recovery of perfect language takes place
in the realm of native poetry that freezes history by presenting the
universal of “the age of the gods” (kami no yo ␹਎) in the particu-
lar of poetic form (kokoro kotoba ᗧ⹖). This was made possible by
the alleged power of poetry to erase any mediation between expres-
sion (kotoba) and intention (kokoro) and to find in the language of
the gods the immediacy and directness (nahoku ⋥ߊ of words and
things. Unlike the discerning faculty of reason that mediates knowl-
edge with an analytical apparatus, according to Motoori, the spon-
taneity and immediacy of the senses must be translated into poetic
language. The “movement of the heart” or “feelings of love” ( jō ᖱ)
are then recognized as a privileged topos of the native poetic voice, not
65
66
Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, pp. 408–409. Motoori developed further
this point in Rectifying Spirit (Naobi no Mitama ⋥Ჩ㔤). See Yasuko Ichihara de
Rénoche, “Naobi no Mitama,” Il Giappone 26: 1986 (1986), pp. 69–85.
to be confused with “the passion of desire and craving” (yoku ᰼) that

is still rooted in the intentionality of self-interest and as such cannot
reach the depth of true feeling (mono no aware).67
Motoori constructed the immediacy of feelings as “an original pres-
ence” (moto no aru yō ᧄߩ޽ࠆ߿߁), “the essence of things” (moto
no tai ᧄߩ૕), which Motoori classified grammatically as “nouns”
(tai ૕). At the same time, the articulation of mono no aware produced
effects in the realm of praxis that opened themselves to be appropri-
ated for hermeneutical purposes. This effect Motoori called “the vir-
tuous merit” (kudoku ഞᓼ) of poetry, the “pragmatics of presence”
(yō ↪) that worked in the pattern of communication in the same way
that a verb (yō↪) functioned in a sentence.68 As an example of the lat-
ter, Motoori quoted the remarks made in the preface to the Kokinshū
in which poetry is seen to have the power to move heaven and earth,
influence the realm of the unseen, and appease domestic relations. The
translation of the articulation of mono no aware in the world of the
seen was hermeneutically explained as the potential that the poetic
word had in achieving concrete results that were otherwise inexpli-
cable, such as, for example, the sudden fall of rain or the resuscitation
of the dead (kadoku setsuwa ᱌ᓾ⺑⹤).69
The concept of articulation, however, is a major crux of Motoori’s
philosophy since immediacy cannot be retained if it needs the media-
tion of articulation in order to be communicated. How could a sign
convey the truth of presence to itself ? The straightforwardness of
presence—Motoori argued—requires a communicational vessel that
expresses the reality of the senses in the same way that those essences
wece perceived when they came into being during the age of the gods.
As a result of the fact that both the senses and expression have changed
since that age, the recovery of meaning must be conducted by getting
as close as possible to the Adamic/Amaterasic language. Here is where
rhetoric comes into play since it is the art of words that allows the poet
to escape the distortions of contemporary language and to reconstruct
the expressions of an otherwise irrecoverable past.
67
68
Here I am following the explanation given by Hino Tatsuo who interprets tai
and yō respectively as “essence” and “function.” Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū,
p. 441, n. 11.
69
A paradox, however, becomes immediately apparent when we think

that the recovery of the “truth of feeling” (makoto no kokoro ታߩᖱ)
is entrusted to the working of a linguistic deception (itsuwari னࠅ).70
Motoori addressed this paradox by stating that the spontaneity of the
present is far from meaning the presence to itself. Poetic truth (makoto
ታ) is not the expression of the poet’s instantaneous inner thoughts
(ima omofu koto wo arinomama ni yomu ੹ᕁ߰ߎߣࠍ޽ࠅߩ߹߹
ߦࠃ߻). It is the result of the poet’s exposure to and mastery of “the
correct, refined heart of the past” (uruhashiku miyabiyakanaru inishihe
no kokoro ߁ࠆߪ ߒߊ㓷߿߆ߥࠆฎ߳ߩᖱ). Motoori explained this
deferral of immediacy by arguing that what at first might look like a
forced attempt at appropriating the past eventually develops into a
natural habit that enables the poet to present rather than re-present
the perfect language of self-presence.71
Since this was recovered within poetic form, the exclusion of the
present in terms of both language and experience from the act of
poetic composition did not limit the validity of poetry as a heuristic
act. Motoori shows that a poet cannot allow himself to “be inspired”
by his own contemporary world and follow his “natural talents” on the
ground that the immediacy of the past is the result of a skillful pattern-
ing (takumi Ꮑ) that, unlike what other Nativists were proclaiming,
was already present in the most ancient native songs.72 For Motoori
immediacy meant the complication of expression, the inscription of
the unseen into the pattern of the seen text. Far from conveying the
immediacy of presence, an uncomplicated, clear expression was all
that was needed to end up with a second rate poem (ni no machi no
koto ੑߩ↸ߩߎߣ).73
The bypassing of the historical present in the recuperation of imme-
diacy had for Motoori noteworthy consequences on the political level
inasmuch as poetic language broke the pattern of historicity and its
privileges. While the mastery over perfect language allowed an emperor
to sympathize with his subjects and assume the persona of a farmer
in his compositions,74 the lower classes were made to experience the
70
71
72
Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, pp. 468–469. Motoori already stressed the
attention paid by the poets of the Manʾyō shū to their craft in his Ashiwake Obune.
73
Ibidem, p. 471.
74
See, for example, Emperors Tenji and Kōkō, who impersonated a farmer
respectively in Gosenshū 6: 302 and Kokinhū 1: 21.
world above the clouds by bracketing the reality of the present in the
immediacy of presence.75 By so doing, however, history was recuper-
ated again by having the creation of intersubjectivity—as well as of
aesthetics—entrusted with the production of ideology.76
1.4 Motoori’s Hermeneutics

If the complex problem of Motoori’s hermeneutics could be reduced
to a simple formula, I would say that Motoori entrusted philology
with the unveiling of an alleged “original meaning” whose density had
been made impenetrable by the sedimentation of historicism. Motoori
argued that the adding of historical, philosophical, and religious details
to the process of interpretation obscures and distorts the poetic voice,
leading interpreters to commit serious mistakes even in the field of
their expertise, philology. We can see Motoori’s insistence on the need
to recover the root of signification in the painstaking arguments that
he developed in order to explain the origin of the word “poem.”
It was Motoori’s opinion that the expression “Yamato poem”
(yamato uta ᄛ㤗⊓੓ᄙ) indicating the local poetic production was
the result of reading the characters for waka ୸᱌ in the Japanese
pronunciation. The expression waka—Motoori continues—was either
modelled on the Chinese practice of defining types of poetry according
to the geographical area where the poem was produced, or, more gen-
erally speaking, it indicated a kind of poetry not to be confused with
the Chinese poetic field (morokoshi no kaski ໊ߩ᱌⹞). Motoori seems
to prefer the latter explanation on the grounds of a traditional need to
distinguish the local (yamato ๺) from the alien (kara ṽ). By focusing
on the rare passages where the word waka appears in the Man’yōshū,
Motoori warns his readers not to confuse the expression waka ୸᱌
indicating “Japanese poem” with the homophonous word currently
employed in Japan to indicate native poetry (waka ๺᱌). The latter
originally referred to a poem written in response (kotafuruuta ╵᱌),
what came to be known in later collections as “envoy” (kaeshi ㄰ߒ).
Far from meaning “a poem from the country of harmony,” this latter
use of the word waka derived from the Chinese practice of replying to
75
76
I have briefly hinted at this problem in the epilogue to my Representations of
Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1993), p. 174.
a poem (shi ⹞) by using the same rhyming pattern employed in the

original poem. This was known in China as heyun (Jpn. wain) ๺㖿
or “fitting rhyme.”77
The association of “poetry” (uta) and “the Yamato land” (Yamato)
in the expression “yamatouta” with which Ki no Tsurayuki opens his
preface to the Kokinshū—“Japanese poetry has the human heart as
seed . . . (Yamatouta wa hito no kokoro wo tane to shite)”78 was then
a misreading of a word that simply meant “poem” (waka ୸᱌) and
nothing more. Motoori takes issue against medieval traditional inter-
pretations of the word “poetry” that overread in it the history and
mythology of the land. He was targeting works such as Sōgi’s ቬ␧
(1421–1502) commentary to the Kokinshū, the Kokin Waka Shū Ryōdo
Kikigaki ฎ੹๺᱌㓸ਔᐲ⡞ᦠ, in which yamatouta was interpreted as
“the poem that softens the heart of the Yamato people,” with reference
to the harmonizing role played by the ancestral deities Izanagi and
Izanami as symbolized in the union of sun and moon.79 Motoori was
also rejecting a theory introduced by the Shintō scholar Asai Shigetō
ᵻ੗㊀㆙, according to which yamatouta indicated a form of poetry
filled with the refinement of the capital as opposed to the vulgar verses
made in the countryside (hinaburi ᄱᦛ).80
Motoori was extremely critical of other Japanese scholars who sup-
ported their explanations with what he considered alien theories that
could hardly be applied to the native land. Not even the revered mas-
ter Keichū was spared Motoori’s rebuke since Keichū had resorted to
yin yang philosophy in his interpretation of the 5/7/5/7/7 pattern of
waka. Giving credence to the yin yang doctrine, according to which
odd numbers ware considered symbols of the sun (yang 㓁) while
even numbers represented the moon (yin 㒶), in the Kokin Yozai Shō
Keichū argued that the three upper verses of a poem (kami no ku) and
their 17 syllables were related to the sun. The two lower verses (shimo
no ku) and their14 syllables were instead to be read as symbols of the
moon. The relation of the kami no ku to the sky explained the length
77
78
Okumura Tsuneya, ed. Kokin Waka Shū, SNKS 19 (Τokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978),
p. 11. For the English translation see Helen Craig McCulllough, trans. Kokin Wakashū:
The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1985), p. 3.
79
80
This theory appears in Tanigawa Kotosuga’s Nihon Shοki Tsūshō, Hino Tatsuo,
Motoori Norinaga Shū, p. 353, n. 3.
and the power of the first three verses when compared to the shorter
and less important final verses that were closer to earth.81
Keichū also supported the idea of the importance of relating each
of the five verses to the Five Elements (wuxing ੖ⴕ) of metal, wood,
water, fire, and earth, as well as to the Five Constant Virtues (wuch-
ang ੖Ᏹ) of humanity, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faith-
fulness. This latter theory had many supporters during the mid-Edo
period thanks to the efforts made by Neo-Confucian scholars, such as
Yamazaki Ansai ጊፒ㑧ᢪ (1618–1682), to interpret the native Shintō
creed in the light of Confucian and other Chinese philosophies. Mod-
els of symbolic interpretations reached the public through very popu-
lar publications, such as The Manyfold Fence of Waka (Waka Yaegaki
๺᱌౎㊀၂).82
Motoori could easily ground his rejection of the Chinese dialectic of
the symbolism of heaven in the “truth” of local mythology. Far from
being a powerful male figure, the sun in the Kojiki was represented
by a female deity, Amaterasu, while the moon was no other than the
brave male deity Tsukiyomi no Mikoto.83 Once again the fracture of
meaning came to the rescue of an interpreter who resisted the idea of
having the explanation of the “local” poetic production reduced to an
“alien” epistemological system.
Motoori warned his readers against the temptation to inject gratu-
itous meaning in the process of interpretation. He levelled his criticism
against ancient and modern critics alike, with a particular animosity
toward those who practiced a contextual reading of poetry. Accord-
ing to Motoori, the contextualization of the poetic act that character-
ized the development of native literature from its inception by forging
compositional “occasions” of poems and by freezing them in histori-
cal time, had robbed poetry of its “eternal” dimension.84 For Motoori
81
Hisamatsu Sen’chi, Keichū Zenshū, p. 14. For an account of yin yang philosophy
see Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1963), pp. 244–250.
82
83
84
We might think of the role played by “prefaces” (kotobagaki) in poetic antholo-
gies where the interpreter, who might as well be the poet himself, explains to his
readers the time, place, and occasion that let to the poet’s lyric need. On a larger
scale, we might also think of the development of Japanese prose in the early tradition
of monogatari, in which poems provided the occasion for the unfolding of fiction.
Poems-tales (uta-monogatari), such as The Tales of the Ise (Ise Monogatari) and The
Tales of Yamato (Yamato Monogatari), are eloquent examples.
poetic language was the carrier of a privileged signification uncon-

taminated by the marks of contingency.
Motoori’s “aesthetic” reading of ancient poetry can be glimpsed in
his interpretation of the famous song attributed to the deity Susanoo
after his descent to the human world, his subjugation of the dragon,
and his marriage to Kushihinadahime, the daughter of an earthly deity.
Both Kojiki and Nihongi present the poem in the context of Susanoo’s
settling down with his new bride in the newly constructed palace at
Suga, in the province of Izumo. Standard translations of this poem all
refer to the contextualized meaning of the mythical accounts. To men-
tion the most quoted English translation, the poem goes:
Yakumo tatsu The many-fenced palace of Izumo
Izumo yahegaki Of the many clouds rising—
Tsumagomi ni To dwell there with my spouse
Yahegaki tsukuru Do I build a many-fenced palace:
Sono yahegaki wo Ah, that many-fenced palace!85
Although this translation is deeply indebted to the critical work of
Motoori, something still remains that might have invited Motoori’s
blame. He would have probably accepted the rendering of the first
word “yakumo” ౎㔕 as “many clouds.” Following the explanation
provided by Keichū in the Kokin Yozai Shō, Motoori noticed that this
expression which literally means “eight clouds” does not refer to a pre-
cise numerical layer of clouds—it is not “eightfold” (yahe ౎㊀)—but
it more generally describes a numerous number of layers, as in the
expressions “double cherry blossoms” (yahezakura ౎㊀᪉) and “dou-
ble-petaled Japanese yellow rose” (yaheyamabuki ౎㊀ጊ็).86 Keichū
was challenging a previous allegorical reading of the poem by the
critic Kitamura Kigin ർ᧛ቄี (1624–1705) who, in his Commentary
to the Eight Imperial Collections (Hachidaishū Shō ౎ઍ㓸ᛞ, 1682),
had related what he interpreted as “clouds of eight different colors”
(yairo ౎⦡) to the place where lived the eight-tailed dragon (yamata
no orochi ౎ጘᄢⰬ) slain by Susanoo. The place was now the residence
of the victorious god who was reminded of his achievements by the
85
Donald L. Philippi, Kojiki, p. 91. For the original text see Nishimiya Kazutami,
Kojiki, p. 57. The Nihongi has the variation “tsumagome ni”, the meaning, however,
remains the same.
86
Motoori’s text appears in his Isonokami no Sasamegoto. Hino Tatsuo, Motoori
Norinaga Shū, p. 266.
constant presence of these symbolic clouds.87 Keichū was also disprov-

ing a medieval interpretation presented in the Notes to the Preface to
the Kokinshū (Kokin-jo Chū ฎ੹ᐨ⸼, ca. 1320), in which the expres-
sion “yakumo” was seen as a contraction of “yakigumo ὾㔕” or “burn-
ing clouds” from the smoke rising from the dragon first slain and then
burnt by Susanoo.88
In order to lend further credence to Keichū’s theory, Motoori
reminds his readers of the etymological meaning of the word “eight”
(yatsu ౎). For this purpose he relied on Tanigawa Kotosuga’s Nihon
Shoki Tsūshō, according to which yatsu would derive from “iya ᒎ”
meaning “many, numberless”, and “tsu ᵤ” meaning “ports.”89 The
indeterminacy of the etymological root transforms the precise repre-
sentation of contingency into the veiled expression of poetic truth.
Susanoo’s dwelling becomes then the metaphorical reading of meta-
phor itself that everything displaces without ever allowing the reader
to enjoy the security of a temporal, geographical, “historical” interpre-
tation. Many are the clouds that rise in a multilayered structure over
the house of poetry. How can, then, poetry be made banal by reading
in these “rising clouds” (izumo ಴㔕)—literally “the clouds that are
coming out”—the name of a geographical area such as the “Izumo
province” ಴㔕? It is on this issue that Motoori would have disagreed
with the poem’s standard translations.
Keichū had already criticized the contextualized reading of the poem
made in the eighth century by the compilers/interpreters of the Kojiki
and the Nihongi. He had noted that “since the name Izumo was given
to the province after the time of the poem’s composition, we cannot
read the verse ‘many clouds rising’ (yakumo tatsu ౎㔕┙ߟ) as a ‘pil-
low word’ (makurakotoba)—the rhetorical technique that has concrete
names preceded by epithets—of ‘Izumo’. “Keichū argued that “izumo”
޿ߠ߽ is the contrition of “izuru kumo” ಴ߠࠆ㔕 (“clouds that are
coming out”). Therefore, rather than in the presence of a riddle, the
reader was faced with a simple repetition—“many clouds” (“yakumo”
౎㔕), “clouds coming out” (“izumo” ಴㔕).90
87
Yamagishi Tokuhei, Hachidaishū Zenchū, 1, p. 10.
88
Hino Tatsuo, Motoori Norinaga Shū, p. 266, n. 3. Keichū’s text appears in
Hisamatsu Sen’chi, Keichū Zenshū, 8, p. 14.
89
90
Ηisamatsu Sen’ichi, Keichū Zenshū, 8, p. 14. Ιnterestingly, W.G. Aston is very
careful to avoid in his translation mentioning the geographical area of Izumo. His
translation reads, “Many clouds arise,/ On all sides a manyfold fence,/ to receive
By fully supporting Keichū’s theory, Motoori lays the ground for

rejecting the making of the “numerous fences” (iyahegaki ᒎ㊀၂) into
the historical walls of Susanoo’s palace. The “fences” are simply “the
many layers of rising clouds” (“izumo iyahegaki” ಴㔕ᒎ㊀၂) hiding
from view the locus of signification, poetry. In the present case poetry
is female since, as Motoori says in his explanation, “the clouds build
numerous fences by piling one upon the other in order to hide from
view my woman” (“tsumagomi ni yahegaki tsukuru”).91 The novelty of
Motoori’s interpretation lies in seeing the “fences” as barriers made
by clouds, which Motoori compares to “mist” (kiri 㔵) in their power
“to obstruct from view something when the viewer departs from it.”
These barriers are metaphorical walls that cut from sight the object
of the viewer’s admiration. They are not, as both Kitamura Kigin and
Keichū had previously interpreted,92 real dwellings within which the
viewer lives together with his beloved. Then, Motoori might have been
less critical of the following translation that well fits his definition of
the poem as a repetitive variation around the theme of clouds:
Yakumo tatsu Many clouds rising,
Izumo yahegaki Many layered clouds rising a manifold-fence
Tsumagomi ni Hiding my bride from sight,
Yahegaki tsukuru Clouds are forming a manifold fence,
Sono yahegaki wo Oh, that manifold fence!
Rather than centralizing meaning in the concreteness of accessibility,
Motoori hides the signifying power of poetry in the hermeneutical
horizon of the veiled truth. The unwrapping of the image threatens
the life of poetry if the interpreter eschew a mighty confrontation
with the encroachments of history. Motoori’s hermeneutics targets
the removal of the sedimentation of earlier interpretations, embrac-
ing an idealistic aesthetic view, one which reminds me of the follow-
ing words written sixty years ago by the Italian philosopher Benedetto
within it the spouses,/They form a manyfold fence—/Ah! that manyfold fence!”. He

adds in a note: “The poem no doubt alludes to the meaning [“issuing clouds”] and also
to the name of the province, but it seems probable that the primary signification of
idzumo here is that given in the translation.” W.G. Aston, trans. Nihongi: Chronicles
of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972), pp. 53–54.
91
92
Yamagishi Tokuhei, Hachidaishū Zenchū, p. 10; Hisamatshu Sen’ichi, Keichū
Zenshū, 8, pp. 14–15.
Croce (1866–1952): “A veil of sadness seems to wrap Beauty, but it is

not a veil, it is the face itself of Beauty.”93
2. Fujitani Mitsue’s Critique of Motoori Norinaga
2.1 Transparency
In examining Motoori Norinaga’s theory of signs the reader is repeat-
edly confronted with the concept of “spontaneity” ( jinen ⥄ὼ) that
lends transparency to the hermeneutical act and made Motoori believe
in a straightforward recoverability of meaning. Faith in the linear path
of the past leading to the voice of pristine truth was the justificatory
ground for Motoori’s philological enterprise that was expected to facil-
itate the development of a theory of communication: a heart trained
to the moving depth of things could easily share his experience with
like-minded readers whose hermeneutical skills allowed the recovery
of voices from the past. The honesty (makoto) and straightforward-
ness of the way of the gods (shintō) resides in the hidden voice of
language (kakurimi) whose disclosure is the interpreter’s role. Such
a belief was predicated on the fact that a similar straightforwardness
could be found in the present, making of makoto a universal, unfold-
ing category to whose disturbance by the history of alien hermeneuti-
cal strategies—mainly Buddhist and Confucian—the native poet and
critic were finally asked to put an end.
The transparency of the metaphysical ground—the way of the
gods—was posited as a requirement in Motoori’s dialectic of recu-
peration that he consistently adopted in the reading of the Japanese
classics, foremost among them The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari).
Motoori’s critical strategy aimed at differentiating two interpreta-
tive levels, one superficial and limited to the apparent signification
of words—“the surface meaning” or omote no gi ⴫ߩ⟵, the other
profound, a concealment of the author’s “real intentions” (shitagokoro
ਅᔃ) behind the pattern of words—what Motoori called “the under-
side meaning” (ura no gi ⵣߩ⟵). Motoori alleges to have found his
own “surface/back theory of reading” (hyōri no gi ⴫ⵣߩ⟵) in the
93
Bernedetto Croce, La Poesia: Introduzione alla Critica e Storia della Poesia e della
Letteratura (Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 1994; 1st ed., 1936), p. 23.
narrative structure employed by Murasaki Shikibu in her famous

defense of monogatari in the “Fireflies” chapter of The Tale of Genji.
While on the surface Murasaki entrusted Genji with a fierce attack
against fiction, thus voicing the contemporary, male, and Buddhist
reservations about the function of the literary act, on a deeper and
more intentional level Murasaki conducted a strenuous defense of the
genre by making Genji a carrier of her—and now Motoori’s—double
interpretative strategy. This, Motoori clearly stated in his critical work
on Genji, The Essentials of The Tale of Genji (Shibun Yōryō, 1763):
In her tale Murasaki Shikibu expressed straightforwardly the real purpose
(ho-i ᧄᗧ) for writing The Tale of Genji in the charter entitled “Fire-
flies” (“Hotaru”). Although she does not spell it out in any definite way,
she distinguishes herself from the authors of the usual, ancient stories
by showing her hidden purpose (shitagokoro) in the dialogue between
Genji and Tamakazura. Since in the ancient commentaries there are
many mistakes, and it is hard to single out the author’s purpose, not
to mention numerous misinterpretations, I will extract the entire pas-
sage from the text, providing my commentary to each section. This shall
become a guide through the text that will uncover Murasaki’s hidden
purpose to write the story.94
A detailed analysis of words follows that delivers the promised uncov-
ering of the author’s “real intention”, “unstated purpose”, “hidden
agenda”—in a word, Motoori’s theory of communication (mono no
aware). The unmediated access to the author’s mind, however, becomes
a problem immediately apparent to Motoori himself when, a few pages
later, he must explain how the alleged shitagokoro works, where it finds
legitimation, how it comes into being, what its relationship with the
written sign is, and how it links the past (the way of the gods) with
the present. The answer betrays Motoori’s loss in circular thought in
which a series of tautological sentences fail to prove Motoori’s thesis of
the independence of aesthetic communication from pragmatic, didac-
tic purposes. To quote Motoori’s text:
Distinguishing two interpretative moments ( futashina ੑ⒳) in The Tale
of Genji Murasaki states her purpose in writing the tale. Earlier on she
had indicated that the possible presence of truth in the genre shows the
pathos of things (aware). This purpose aims at moving the heart for no
explicable reason by having the scene somehow appealing to the reader’s
heart. As for how to make this purpose work, [the tale] must move the
94
Hino Tatsuo ed, Motoori Norinaga Shū, p. 47.
reader’s heart and make him know the pathos of things. By knowing
the pathos of things, the heart moves and [the experience] appeals to
the heart. Therefore we should realize that there is no didactic purpose
whatsoever in the writing of fiction.95
The weaknesses of Motoori’s theory were apparent to another Nativ-
ist, Fujitani Mitsue (1768–1823), who challenged Motoori’s concepts
of spontaneity, immediacy, and transparency.96 He debated this point
in several essays on language, such as An Explanation of The Truth of
True Words (Makoto Ben ⌀⸒ᑯ, 1802) and Sobering to the Way of
Poetry (Kadō Kaisei ᱌㆏⸃㉕, 1805). How can man posit a moment
of pristine bliss, Fujitani argued, when there are no textual proofs that
such a time ever existed? He predicated the impossibility of recaptur-
ing the transparent immediacy of the past on the fact that mythological
accounts disprove the argument of original purity. Fujitani reminds the
reader of the evil circumstances that prompted the deity Susanoono-
Mikoto to compose the poem “yakumo tatsu” or “the many-fenced
palace of Izumo” that was traditionally taken to be the genealogi-
cal moment of poetic production in Japan. This song that Susanoo
recited when he took possession of the land of Izumo, followed the
deity’s exile from the sky after his confrontation with the Sun-goddess
Amaterasu. The alleged “purity of heart” taken by Nativists as a proof
justifying the need “to return to the origins” was already lost from the
very beginning, as the episode of Susanoo “breaking down the ridges
between the rice paddies” and throwing his faeces “in the hall where
the first fruits were tasted” attests. On this account, Fujitani contin-
ues, we should beware of Motoori’s hermeneutics that single out “our
land” (waga kuni ࠊ߇࿖ ) for its alleged “divine laws”.97
95
Hino Tatsuo ed, Motoori Norinaga Shū, pp. 53–54.
96
Fujitani Mitsue has been quite negleted by scholars of Japanese literature. On the
other hand, philosophers such as Sakabe Megumi have recently called attention to the
important role played by Fujitani in critique of Motoori’s interpretative method. See
Sakabe Meguni, “Kotodama: Fujitani Mitsue no Kotoba Ron Ichimen,” in his Kamen
no Kaishakugaku (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1976), pp. 211–239. For an
outstanding study of the silenced voices of the Kokugaku movement, including Fuji-
tani Mitsue’s, see the recent dissertation by Susan Lynn Burns, Contesting Exegesis:
Visions of the Subject and the Social in Tokugawa National Learning (Ph. D, disserta-
tion, The University of Chicago, 1994).
97
Fujitani’s attack on earlier Nativists reminds of Derrida’s famous criticism of
Lévi-Slrauss’ “A Writing Lesson”, Lévi-Strauss’ reading of his own experiences among
the Nambikwara. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 101–140. For on English translation of
Susanoo’s poem see Donald Philippi, trans. Kojiki (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press,
2.2 Time
How poetic language fulfills what Fujitani defined as the pattern of
time is the topic of the present section in which I will examine the
praxis with which Fujitani entrusted the language of poetry. In an act
of defiance against the setting up of aesthetics as the autonomous,
independent realm of the arts, Fujitani resurrected the Neo-Confu-
cian notion of ethics in his study of native poetics. The articulation of
poetic language from the realm of human passions reinscribed poetry
into the world of action thanks to the potential of poetry to penetrate
the heart and correct the distortions of human nature.
According to Fujitani, far from being the repository of a mirror-
ing transparency, the human heart was either the victim of violent
passions—what he called “the passionate heart”98 (hitaburugokoro—
ะᔃ), or the victim of dialectical thought—“the prejudiced heart”
(hitohegokoro ஍ᔃ). The “prejudiced heart” is plagued by dual cat-
egorizations of reality such as “right and wrong, good and evil” ( jasei
zen’aku ㇎ᱜༀᖡ). Excessive dependence on either one of the oppo-
sites is wrong because of the lack of a universal definition of real-
ity that can be applied to all phenomena independently of the law of
temporal change. Such a law Fujitani called “the proper time” ( jigi
ᤨቱ), an elasticity to circumstance that might dictate apparently con-
tradictory messages according to situational necessities. The “border-
line of truth” (makoto no sakai ⌀ߩߐ߆߭) is located within a space of
adjustment that is dictated by the “propriety of time.” The “way of the
gods” (shintō ␹㆏) guides the human heart towards the goal of truth
by training man to master the economy of time and space through the
inducement of “right speech and action” (mawaza ⌀ὑ). However,
the constrictions imposed upon the trainee might well result in wors-
ening “a prejudiced heart” into “a passionate one”, thus causing “the
breaking of the pattern of proper time” ( jigi wo yaburi).
The restorative act of transforming a “non-action” (hiwaza 㕖ὑ)
into a “true action” (mawaza)—the restoration and the “fulfillment of
time” ( jigi wo mattōsuru ᤨቱࠍో߁ߔࠆ)—takes place within the
1968), p. 91. Fujitani’s Kadō Kaisei appears in Miyake Kiyoshi, ed. Shinpen Fujitani
Mitsue Zenshū, 4 (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1986), pp. 697–698.
98
There is in ihe word hitaburu (literally meaning; “unidirectional”) a connota-
tion of criminality which Fujitani provided in his explanation of the word. He quotes
Murasaki’s association of hitaburugokaro with “criminals such as robbers and such”
as it appears in The Tale of Genji.
“sacred wisdom-space” (sei to ifu kiwa ⡛ߣ޿߰߈ߪ) of “the way

of poetry” (kadō ᱌㆏) rather than in the rational dictates of logic
(kotowari ℂ). The aesthetic experience of witnessing in poetry “the
form of a passionate heart that is going to break the pattern of proper
time” (toki wo yaburinamu to suru hitaburugokoro no kaitachi wo
uta ni miru annihilates the power of personal gloom that diverts the
attention from its proper path. Fujitani explained his privileging of
poetry on the ground that in songs (uta) the reader finds a balanced
combination of what Fujitani calls “the rule of the three restraints”
(mitsu no tsutsushimi ਃߩᘕ) the restraint of logic (kotowari ℂ),
aesthetic (kokoro ᔃ), and action (waza ⴕ). None of them has an
absolute value but is subject to variations according to the pattern of
proper timing. This elasticity to change comes to poetry from the fact
that “words necessarily house spirit and spirit necessarily houses the
mysterious articulation” (kotoba kanarazu tama ari tama kanarazu
myōyō ari ⸒ᔅ㔤޽ࠅ㔤ᔅᅱ↪޽ࠅ). The excitement in the reader’s
heart (kandō ᗵേ) is the result of such articulation.99
As an example of the perfect mastering of time, Fujitani quotes the
mythical exchange that appears is the Nihongi between Ooanamuchi
no Mikoto and Sukunahikona no Mikoto during the final touches
of the creation of the land. The passage reads as follows in Aston’s
translation:
Now Oho-na-mochi no Mikoto and Sukuna-bikona no Mikoto, with
united strength and one heart, constructed the sub-celestial world. Then,
for the sake of the visible race of man as well as for beasts, they deter-
mined the method of healing diseases. They also, in order to do away
with the calamities of birds, beasts, and creeping things, established
means for their prevention and control. The people enjoy the protection
of these universally until the present day. Before this Oho-na-mochi no
Mikoto spake to Sukuna-bikona no Mikoto, and said:—‘May we not say
that the country which we have made is well made?’ Sukuna-bikona no
Mikoto answered and said:—‘In some parts it is complete and in oth-
ers it is incomplete.’ This conversation had doubtless a mysterious pur-
port (kono monogatari koto kedashi aran fukaki mune ᤚ⺣਽⬄᦭ᐝᷓ
ਯ⥌).100
99
This appears in Kadō Kaisei. Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū,
4, p. 698.
100
W.G. Aston, trans. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D.
697 (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1980; 1st ed., 1896), pp. 55–60.
Fujitani explains the “mystery” of the exchange by noticing the

improper behavior of the male deity (Ooanamucbi no Mikoto) whose
resistance to continue with the “agony of labor” (rō wazurashita-
maheru tokoro ഭᾘߒߚ߹߳ࠆ ᚲ) and “desire for some idle rest”
(an’itsu naramakoshiku oboshimeshishi yue ni ቟ㅺߥࠄ߹߶ߒߊ߅
߷ߒ߼ߒߒ᡿ߦ) makes him self-assured of the value of what he has
already achieved and ready to believe that the work is now completed.
The female deity (Sukunahikona no Mikoto), however, knows that a
lot is still left to be done. The problem is how to correct “the preju-
diced heart” of her mate, convincing him to continue with the produc-
tion of the land. Is order to do so, she must activate the mechanism
of “the propriety of time” ( jigi) that recognizes the presence of real-
ity neither in “good” ( yoshi) nor in “evil” (ashi), but “somewhare out
there” (kanata). Should she agree with her husband and acknowledge
that “things are indeed done” and “relax heart and body” (shinshin
ni yudan dekite ᔃりߦᴤᢿ಴᧪ߡ)㧘she might well please Ooana-
muchi no Mikoto, but the process of creation would stop at the risk
of losing what they had already created. Should she disagree with him
and remind him that a lot was still left to be done, Ooanamuchi’s feel-
ings might get hurt and he might abandon the woman, leaving the
land incomplete. Sukunahikona decides to let her husband relax for a
moment, knowing that “time shall certainly come when no harm will
follow idleness.”
By neither denying nor validating his claim, Sukunahikona succeeds
in “deeply moving ( fukaku kanjioboshimeshitarikerashi ߰߆ߊᗵߓ
߅߸ߒ߼ߒߚࠅߌࠄߒ) Oonamuchi no Mikoto to acknowledge the
fact that things were indeed as she had indicated.” Thanks to Suku-
nabikona’s understanding of the “configuration of time” (toki no shochi
ᤨߩᚲ⟎), the land was completed and could then finally be entrusted
to the rule of gods’ descendants. Fujitani praises Sukunahikona as the
perfect interpreter whose knowledge of “timing” deflects what could
have been a cosmic tragedy. Her “deep affection” (on utsukushimi
ᓮ߁ߟߊߒߺ‫ޜ‬for Ooanamuchi was the result of a “love tempered
with fear” (iai ⇊ᗲ).101
101
This is discussed in the second chapter (The Purpose of the Way of the Gods,
or “Shintō no Shishu”) of Makoto Ben’s first roll. Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani
Mitsue Zenshū, 4, pp. 726–729.
A timed use of words, however, is ineffective unless the language

is appropriate to the situation. In this regard Fujitani referred to the
exchange between the primeval male and female deities (Izanagi and
Izanami) at the time of the conception of the land—a proclamation
(kotoage) that Fujitani considers to be “the beginning of poetry” (eika
no ranshō ⹗᱌ߩỬߒࠂ߁). The female deity (megami 㒶␹) starts
her speech—“Ah, what a handsome lad!” (ana ureshi ya, umashi otoko
ni ai)—before giving her mate a chance to speak. This results in the
repetition of the sexual ritual and the male deity’s (ogami 㓁␹) utter-
ance—“Ah, what a cute maiden!”.
Fujitani argues that there is something deficient in the speech of
both deities. Izanami’s mistake derives from her reliance on a pas-
sionate heart that is unable to contain its delight at the thought of
the approaching intercourse. Her expression is marred by a speech
delivered at the wrong time in the wrong mode, “an extremely private,
personal (watakushi ⑳) outburst.” On the other hand, although her
mate “does not break the pattern of time” in delivering his speech,
Izanagi is faulted with repeating someone else’s tune, thus question-
ing the “sincerity” (makoto ⌀) of his own expression. The purpose of
poetry (ho-i ᧄᗧ) is neither private expression nor objective, untruth-
ful presentation: it is rather in the experience/action leading to the
pacification of a heart that has lost all sense of propriety. The power
of the deities’ exchange, therefore, is hidden outside the words of their
utterances, and beyond both the subjective/internal (ware ᚒ) and the
objective/extenal (kare ᓐ) economies of speech.102
Among the four kinds of speeches (waza) from which a poet can
choose in writing his poem—the “neutral speech” (karawaza ⓨὑ)
that brings no loss nor gain to the utterer, the “private speech” (wata-
kushiwaza ⑳ὑ) whose dependence on the self deprives it of all reli-
ability, the “public speech” (ōyakewaza ౏ὑ) that binds the poet to
rules and principles, depriving him of the power to move the reader,
and the “true speech” (mawaza ⌀ὑ) that penetrates the surface of
reality and “brings out” (uchiidetaru߁ߜ಴ߚࠆ) the being of things
thus moving deities and men—only the latter accomplishes the goal
that is asked of poetry.
Fujitani’s definition of poetic truth (makoto ⌀⸒) requires the
copresence of “a private heart and a public body” (kokoro wa watakushi
102
This appears in the first chapter (“The Purpose of the Way of Poetry” or “Kadō no
Shishu”) of Makoto Ben’s first roll. Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū,
4, pp. 711–712.
nite, karada wa ōyake nari ᔃߪ⑳ߦߡりߪ౏ߥࠅ/kōshin shishin

౏り⑳ᔃ) that curbs the poet’s tendency to make of personal desire
the object of poetic expression. The respect of the public rule—worship
of the deity, for example—in a moment of personal crisis might well
move the heart of the god if the expression of worship is sincere.
It is most effective particularly at the time when rather than being
required, such an honorable expression of respect comes as the result
of unselfish behavior. An unexpected ( fusoku ਇ᷹) outcome follows
the poet’s skill to restrain the “internal body of his heart” (shinshin
ᔃり) and the “external body of time” ( jishin ᤨり), as in the case of
the lover of liquor who admonishes in his poetry the public danger of
a private practice, or the bitter poet who in spite of his wretched heart
knows how to deeply move the reader.103
As Fujitani further points out in his Light on The One Poem by
a Hundred Poets (Hyakunin Isshu Tomoshibi ⊖ੱ—㚂᾽, 1804), the
suitability of the body to the proper pattern of time is what he calls
“the concealment of the body” (kakurimi 㓝り), a private practice of
erasure that follows the veiling of “the passionate heart” and the dis-
closure of the “law of the gods” (kami no nori ␹ౖ).104 Fujitani even
provides a sketch of his thoughts that appears translated below:
Misfortune
(wazawahi ⑒) (4)
language/action
kotowaza ⸒ⴕ Body (mi り)
disclosure
(arawami)
Time (5)
toki ᤨ passionate heart heart logic
(hitaburugokoro —ะᔃ) (kokoro ᖱ) (kotowari ℂ)
(2) (1)
Good fortune
( fuku ⑔) (3)
poetry
(eika ⹗᱌)
concealment
(kakurimi 㓝り)
103
Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4, pp. 712–717.
104
Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4, pp. 217–218. This idea
explains Fujitani’s hermeneutical belief in the power of philology to uncover the “hid-
den self of the poet” (utanushi no kakurimi). Ibidem, p. 222.
(1): “Inside my body, logic constrains feelings.”

(2): “Being constrained by logic, my feelings cannot find solace.”
(3): “When I replace language and action with poetry, thus hiding myself,
in the end good fortune shall come. Since time immemorial this is the
form of poetry’s inspiration.”
(4): “When I entrust language and behavior to my feelings, failing to
hide myself, in the end I shall drown in misfortune.”
(5): “As the presence of reality to itself, time occurs when I have a hard
time expressing my feelings in words and action.”105
Time as recuperated by poetry is the moment of the production of
“difference” (tagahe), “the impact of a subject (ware) that imprints a
difference on the configurations of reality [existing prior to the arrival
of the subject] with an object (kare) that imposes changes upon the
thinking process (shoshi ᚲᕁ) of the subject.” Such an impact pro-
duces “a suspension of personal judgement (waga shoshi ni matsuro-
wanu koto ࠊ߇ᚲᕁߦ߹ߟࠈߪߧߎߣ) . . . that makes the other all
mine while making myself the other.” The other to myself sees me as
an other, in the same way that I see the other as other. The fluidity of
the positions of subject and object makes Fujitani’s category of time
the privileged space of understanding that human passions break and
poetry rescues.106
2.3 The Rhetoric of Kotodama
Fujitani shared with other members of the Nativist school the belief in
the role played by human interiority in the articulation of the unseen
through linguistic activity. Nativist scholars took issue with the posi-
tioning of rationality outside language and “the heart” of human beings
in the abstraction of external “principles” to which human nature was
asked to conform. The latter position was embraced by a Neo-Confu-
cian orthodoxy—Chu Hsi’s interpretation of the Confucian classics—
that in eighteenth century Japan became a common target of criticism
on the part of Nativists and Confucianists alike.
105
Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4, p. 224.
106
The category of time is discussed in the section “Explanation of Time” (“Toki
no Ben”) in the second roll of Makoto Ben. Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue
Zenshū, 4, pp. 735–736.
As Fujitani saw it, “language was a guest in a process hosted by the

spirit of things” (kotodama wo shu to shi, koto wo kyaku to shite 㔤ࠍਥ
ߣߒ‫ࠍ⸒ޔ‬ቴߣߒߡ),107 the verbal articulation of the internal move-
ment of the heart whose coordination was prompted by kotodama. In
an Hegelian reading of Fujitani’s thought, the philosopher Tsuchida
Kyōson ࿯↰᧙᧛ (1894–1934) has interpreted Fujitani’s concept of
kotodama as a synthesis of a dialectic of affirmation and negation,
presence and absence, that gives life to the process of thought, articu-
lating thought into language before a further articulation into praxis
takes place.108
The power of poetry resides within “the spirit of words” (kotodama
⸒㔤) to which Fujitani gives a grammatical turn by defining it “the
mystery of inflection” (katsuyō no myō ᵴ↪ߩᅱ), the power of syn-
tagmatic elements combined in the signification of the word. We must
remember the nature of the Japanese language that supplements the
Western categories of conjugation and declension with that of agglu-
tination, the addition of particles to nouns and to the inflected stems
of adjectives and verbs. The “mysterious working (myōyō ᅱ↪) of the
living articulation of words”—“Fujitani reads the first character of
the compound katsuyō ᵴ↪ as ikite ᵴߡ or “being alive”—is thus
entrusted with bringing into being the border space between pub-
lic body and private heart. A “perfect fitting” (uchiafu ߁ߜ޽߰) is
required for the spontaneous arousal of kotodama as in the case of
inebriation following the consumption of rice-wine (sake ㈬) or the
production of fire by flints. In Fujitani’s metaphorical readings, a cor-
rect dosage of rice and water can produce massive intoxication in spite
of the relative safety of both ingredients. Likewise, the flint does not
catch on fire although it might be the source of conflagrations. Events
are, therefore, the result of the “in-betweenness” (aida 㑆) of things.109
107
Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4 (Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shup-
pan, 1993), p. 56.
108
Tsuchida Kyōson, Kokubungaku no Tetsugakuteki Kenkyū (Tokyo: Daniichi
Shobō, 1927), pp. 82–88. For an introduction in English to the thought of Tsuchida
Kyōson see Eugene Soviak, “ Tsuchida Kyōson and the Sociology of the Masses”,
J. Thomas Rimer, Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals During the Interwar
Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 83–98.
109
Fujitani discusses “the power of words” in the section from Makoto Ben entitled
“An Explanation of the Spirit of Words” (“Kotodama no Ben”). Miyake Kiyoshi, Shin-
pen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4, pp. 736–738.
Kotodama establishes its presence by discriminating between two

languages, “poetic language” (eika ⹗᱌) and “common language”
(gengo ⸒⺆). The latter is the site of the articulation of the duality
subject/object (kareware ᓐᚒ), the privileged space for the reproduc-
tion of action (waza) by the “passionate heart”, and the locale for the
breaking of the pattern of proper time. Although it shares with poetic
language the same range of words (kotoba wa hitotsu nagara ⹖ߪ߭
ߣߟߥ߇ࠄ)—which Fujitani defines “the vessel reflecting the human
heart” (kokoro wo utsusu utsuwa ᔃࠍ߁ߟߔེ), common language
has no preestablished form (mukei ήᒻ) that might contain the pres-
ence of Being (tama 㔤). A victim of configurations of error that make
everyday language a source of renewed danger—the voice of flattery,
slander, etc.—common language lacks the rhetorical structure that
houses the “spirit of language” in its own form (yūkei ᦭ᒻ).110 The
voice of Being “kills the gloom that urges to action” (waza wo unagasu
utsujō wo koroshi), thus guaranteeing forever the efficacy of the poetic
act: by “residing as a living entity inside the word”, kotodama assures
the reader of all ages with deliverance from the dangers of action and
passion.111
Unlike reason, however, passion can be confronted, overcome and
mastered because, according to Fujitani, the deity (kami) or interior-
ity of man presides over the realm of the senses (yoku ᰼), providing it
with the potential for change and improvement. Reason (ri ℂ), on the
other hand, is subjected to the exteriority of the self or man (hitoੱ); its
limitation goes parallel with the limits of the human mind. The expla-
nation of reality in descriptive terms relies on the direct language of
man and of his limited mind. The metaphorical language of aesthetics,
on the other hand, speaks the perfect language of the gods.112 Then a
difference must be posited between the two languages.
The presence or lack of straightforwardness in the perfect language
is a major indicator of the localization of kotodama. Common language
is straightforward communication and as such it is not privileged to
voice the spirit of words. On the other hand, poetic language speaks by
110
By “form” (kata ᒻ) Fujitani means the number of words and verses in set poetic
patterns such as chōka and tanka.
111
The difference between the two kinds of language is discussed in the chapter “Dif-
ference Between Language and Poetic Language” (Gengo Eika no Betsu”) of Makoto
Ben. Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4, pp. 738–742.
112
Fujitant develops this argument in Light on the Record of Ancient Matters (Kojiki
Tomoshibi). Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 1, p. 67.
detours and rhetorical figures that require the poet to master the art of
concealment. These ideas Fujitani developed in an essay entitled The
Essentials of the Way of Poetry (Kadō Kyoyō ᱌㆏᜼ⷐ, 1817) in which
he argued that the avoidance of direct expression led ancient poets to
mask their feelings under the imagery of nature (kachō fūgetsu ⧎㠽
㘑᦬). The power of words was believed to be of such a magnitude
that any direct confrontation with the disclosure of meaning could
be fatal. Fujitani based his argument on a passage from the Nihongi
that extols the virtues and dangers of language at the time when the
first “human” emperor, Jinmu, transmitted the knowledge of language
from his heavenly ancestors to the earthly ancestor of a local clan, the
Ōtomo house. The passaage reads as follows in Aston’s translation:
On the day on which he first began the Heavenly institution, Michi no
Omi no Mikoto, the ancestor of the Ohotomo House, accompanied by
the Oho-kume Be, was enabled, by means of a secret device received
from the Emperor, to use incantations ( fūka ⻈᱌) and magic formulae
(tōgo ୟ⺆) so as to dissipate evil influences. The use of magic formulae
had its origin from this.113
What Aston translated as “magic formulae” are literally “reversed
expressions” (sakashimagoto ୟ⺆), which, according to Fujitani, “are
like saying ‘I do not go’ when I actually go, and ‘I do not see’ when
I actually see. Reversals are applicable to events as well as to feelings.
You do not reveal your thoughts; instead you build with words what
you do not think. On purpose you invert the signification of words:
This is the mysterious principle that makes people participate in your
feelings.”114
Fujitani explains metaphorically the process of “reversed expres-
sion” with the example of the person who would rather receive spon-
taneously something that he deeply desires as a gift, rather than either
stealing it or having to ask for it since the act of asking would already
reveal the person’s greed. The secrecy of the poetic act must spontane-
ously elicit a response of participation from the reader, although this
might invite the criticism that poetic expression is either untrue ( fujitsu
ਇታ) or unclear—“a puzzle” (nazo ⻘). By using a straightforward
language in expressing his feelings, the poet would fall into the trap
of the private (watakushi), thus revealing the greediness of expression.
113
W.G. Aston, Nihongi, p. 133.
114
Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Zenshū, 4, p. 766.
The technique of dissimulation was well mastered by ancient poets

who when leaving on a trip, would rather refer to “a robe which they
had grown accustomed to over the years”, than directly stating their
feeling for the beloved left behind.115
Fujitani distinguished between two kinds of “reversed words,” To use
expressions devised by Western rhetoricians, we may call them meta-
phor (hiyu Ყ༙) and metonymy (sorasu ߘࠄߔ). Fujitani explains
the former as the employment of scattered flowers to indicate the
transience of life (mujō ήᏱ), or the transferral of meaning from the
image of the evergreen pine-tree to the concept of longevity (kotobuki
ኼ). The latter is a further deferral of meaning inasmuch as “it evades
to the outside” (soto he sorasu ᄖ߳ߘࠄߔ) any direct confrontation
with the object of representation. Fujitani mentions the effectiveness
of an expression such as “I want to visit your house” on the part of a
lover yearning for a meeting with his beloved, rather than the more
direct, more prosaic, and less convincing, “I want to see you”.116
Direct expression ( jiki ⋥) loses the power of supplementarity, the
potential articulation of metaphorical and metonymic transferral that
accommodates “what is left behind” (amari ૛) by common language.
Fujitani reminds his reader that “true language” (makoto ⋥⸒) is not
“direct language” ( jiki ni koto wo tsukemu to su ⋥ߦ⸒ࠍߟߌ߻ߣ
ߔ), thus warning him against a literal reading of the word makoto as
the “straightforward expression of one’s true feelings or of real cir-
cumstances.” The artless expression of the child does not recover “the
deity perfectly housed in language” (kotoba ni wa kotogotoku kami
yadoritamahite ⹖ߦߪߎߣߏߣߊ␹߿ߤࠅ⛎߭ߡ). To entrust
the heart to the direct expression of personal feelings fails to convey
115
Fujitani argues that the metaphorical power of language was lost with the prac-
tice of writing poems on set topics (daiei “㗴⹗”) after the tight organization of the
seasonal poems in the Kokinshū. The loss of the density of metaphorical signification
led poets to sing nature (kachō fūgetsu) for the sake of singing. The surface meaning
took center stage at the expense of the “implied” meaning. The formalization of the
poetic activity kept poetry from assisting the ethical sphere that remained a major
concern in Fujitani’s development of a theory of communication. Miyake Kiyoshi,
Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4, pp. 766–777.
116
Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4, p. 768. In Kadō Kaisei Fuji-
tani argues that “the house is the face of the girl”, reiterating once again the need to
sing “either what is next to the object of representation or what the object of repre-
sentation is not.” Ibidem, p. 689.
language’s potential for discourse that “the spirit of words” (kotodama)

continuously renews.117
The act of poetic deferral is achieved through what Fujitani calls
“an economy of language” (kotosukuna ⸒ߔߊߥ) that conforms to
the ancient belief in the evil consequences that may derive from the
wrong use of words at the inappropriate time.118 Here Fujitani was
deeply indebted to the linguistic research of his father, Nariakira
ᚑ┨ (1738–1779), one of the first major Japanese grammarians. From
Nariakira he borrowed the idea that language needs to be “dressed up”
in order to be ready for its moment of disclosure. The distance cre-
ated by rhetorical figures in the composition of poetry spares poetic
language from the immediacy and the dangers of everyday language.
Mitsue refers to what his father called “the three fabrics” (sangu ਃౕ)
of poetry: the “hairpin” (kazashi ᝌ㗡) made of adverbs, pronouns,
conjunctions, interjections, and fixed modifiers; the “dress” (yosohi ⵝ)
made of verbs, adjectival verbs, and adjectives; and the “strings” (ayuhi
⣉⚿) made of particles, auxiliary verbs, and suffixes.119 Mitsue also
added the techniques of “associated words” (yose ነ), by which he
meant “prefaces” (joshi ᐨ⹖), and “shorter associated words” (uchi-
yose ᛂߜነ), such as “crown words” (kanmuri kotoba ᨉ⹖), by which
he meant “pillow words” (makura kotoba ᨉ⹖).120
Mitsue defined all these techniques the products of a gestural
(teburi ᚻᝄࠅ) past in which words were in no need of articulation
(kotoage senu kuni) since reality was constantly made present to itself
by the presence of gods.121 And yet, it is exactly against the idea of
117
118
This explains the use in the Manʾyōshū of the expression, kotoage senu, “without
making a proclamation, without disclosing the word”. See, for example, Manʾyōshū
12: 2919.
119
Fujitani Nariakira explains these expressions in his An Interpretation of Hairpins
(Kazashi Shō). Takeoka Masao, ed. Fujitani Nariakira Zenshū, Jō (Tokyo: Kazama
Shobo, 1961), pp. 25–32.
120
121
Fujitani refers to the following poem from the Manʾyōshū (13: 3253) by
Kakinomoto no Hitomaro: “The rice abounding land of Reed Plains/By following the
will of the gods/Is a land that need no verbal articulation/And yet today I am going
to lift up my word:/That good luck might come to you . . .” The original text appears in
Kojima Noriyuki, Kinoshita Masatoshi, and Satake Akihiro, eds. Manʾyōshū, 3, NKBZ
4 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1973) p. 390. A complete English translation of the poem
appears in H.E. Plutschow, Chaos and Cosmos: Ritual in Early and Medieval Japanese
Literature (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), p. 90. For Fujitani’s quotation see Miyake Kiyoshi,
Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4, p. 772.
“self-presence” that Mitsue posited his theory of signification. As he

stated in his Sobering to the Way of Poetry, studies on ancient lyric
had been completed by scholars, such as the Tendai priest Senkaku
(1203–1272) and, more recently, Keichū and Kamo no Mabuchi.
However, in their research on the Manʾyōshū, Fujitani argues, they
had all attempted to recover a voice from the past without paying
attention to the deflecting screen of language. Fujitani finds the cause
of their innocent readings in the native skepticism toward the prod-
ucts of deflection—double readings, hidden signification (kakaretaru
koto 㓝ࠇߚࠆ੐), plays of metaphors and metonymies—that the local
scholar associated with “the Chinese prejudice” (Karabito no kokoro
no kuse ߆ࠄੱߩᔃߩߊߖ).122 This might also explain the relative
neglect of which Fujitani’s work has been a victim in the past one
hundred years both in Japan and in the West.123
2.4 Meaning
According to Fujitani the examination of the internal movement of
literary language eliminates the danger of applying to interpretation an
external code, such as the privileging of the lachcymose elements mak-
ing up expressive theories, or a concentration on the didactic aspect
of literature on the footsteps of the exegetical tradition of the Book of
Songs (Shijing), the most eloquent example of didactic readings. The
122
Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Zenshū, 4, p. 678. Fujitani reminds his read-
ers that when the poet Ariwara no Narihira was singing maples, cherry blossoms,
mountains, and birds, far from being interested in the particularity of the images, he
was trying to express private feeling in the public context of his relationship with a
future empress, the Empress of the Second Ward (Nijō no Kisaki). Greater attention
to the kotobagaki preceding the poems, Fujitani argues, would help readers in their
hermeneutical act. Ibidem, pp. 694–695. For a reading of The Tales of Ise along the
lines indicated by Fujitani, although at the time I was unaware of Fujitani’s work, see
my The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), pp. 35–53.
123
In a recent issue of the authoritative Interpretation and Appreciation of National
Literature (Kokubungaku: Kaisahaku to kanshō 57: 3, 1992) entirely dedicated to “Clas-
sical Scholars from Ancient to Early Times” (Koten Gakusha no Gunzō: Kodai kara
Kinsei made), the reader will be unable to find the name of Fujitani Mitsue, in spite
of the fact that his collected works run eight volumes, each approximately 800 pages
long. Konishi Jin’ichi, however, has recently mentioned Fujitani Mitsue together with
Zeami and Bashō as the author of “theories that would have startled Western scholars
like Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Crowe Ransom and other New
Critics.” Konishi Jin’ichi, “Japanese Literature in East Asia”, in The Japan Foundation
Newsletter XXII: 1 (May 1994), p. 7.
latter had already been the target of Motoori’s criticism which encour-
aged embracing a philosophy of feelings in order to provide texts
with a certain autonomy. Fujitani’s rejections of both sets of theories
(kyōkai ᢎᖎ) stems from his belief is the relativity of the act of ruling
that produces in the text whatever the reader wants to find in it (sono
uta wo miru hito no kokoro nite ߘߩ᱌ࠍ⷗ࠆੱߩᔃߦߡ). This
explains Fujitani’s location of “emotions” (kandō ᗵേ) outside what
he calls “the five rules of poetry” (eika goten ⹗᱌੖ౖ) listed below:
1) “the prejudiced heart” (hitohegokoro ஍ᔃ); 2) “the knowledge of
time” (chiji ⍮ᤨ); 3) “the passionate heart” (hitaburugokoro —ะᔃ);
4) “the singing of songs” (eika ᵒ᱌); and 5) “time fulfillment” (zenji
ోᤨ). These five processes curb the power of emotions by rewriting
them in the language of poetry.124
This “specialized” (sen’yō ኾ↪) language inquires an interpreta-
tion of words that goes well beyond the simple “surface” (omote ⴫)
of things. Fujitani argued that in order to get to the “truth” (makoto
⌀)of signification the reader must target what he called “the three
levels of meaning: surface, underside, border” (omote ura sakai ⴫ⵣ
Ⴚ). Each word is endowed with a multiplicity of meanings that the
attentive reader must be alerted to uncover in order to avoid the trap
of stopping at the mere appearance of the sign. Fujitani acknowledged
that the pattern of signification may be much more complicated than
a tri-layered structure. However, he states that he has chosen to limit
himself to these three elements in deciphering meaning, given the dif-
ficulty of the subject matter—“something that goes beyond my knowl-
edge” (waga chi no ayobanu tokoro sahe ࠊ߇ᥓߩࠍࠃ߫ߧᚲߐ߳).
According to this theory, the presence of “sadness” (surface meaning),
for example, implies what is excluded from its trace, such as “the fact
of not being sad” (underside meaning) as a sine qua non for the defini-
tion of the real meaning of “sadness,” which is the tragic experience of
poetic expression (the border meaning). The initial complaint voiced
in the surface meaning—the poet’s private moment—explodes in the
voice of universal tragedy, the border meaning, once it has confronted
the public reality governed by the mechanical principle (kotowari) of
things—the underside meaning. At the stage of the border meaning
124
The “five rules” are discussed in the section “Essay on Expressive and Didactic
Theories” (Kyōkai no Ron) of Makoto Ben. Mīyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue
Zenshū, 4, pp. 742–744.
the reader “meets with the poet’s spirit” (sono nushi no tamashihi ni
afu kokochi ߘߩߧߒߩ㔤ߦ޽߰ߎߦߜ).125
In Kitabe’s Poetic Treatise (Kitabe Zuinō ർㆻ㜑⣖) Fujitani explains
the “surface, underside, border theory” with the following example. In
the case of the word “pine-tree”, the immediate, most apparent mean-
ing (1) refers to a plant that is different from other plants, such as,
for example, the oak. The underside meaning (2) is the one which
is excluded, the “oak” from which the pine-tree is differentiated. The
border meaning (3) is the intended, symbolic signification that, in the
context of the East Asian tradition, relates the pine-tree to the notion
of “longevity.”126
The contemporary aesthetician Amagasaki Akira (b.1947) clarifies
the theory by applying it to sentences, in which case, following Fuji-
tani’s interpretation, the command “close the door!” would mean: 1)
An order to close the door and not the window. 2) The fact that the
door is open. 3) The fact that the person issuing the order might be
concerned with the cold or the noise coming from the outside. The
third meaning—the “border meaning”—is the most problematic since
it is the result of fallible conjecture.127
Fujitani applied this theory to the reading of Fujiwara Teika’s
Hyakunin Isshu. We see it in his Light on The One Poem by a Hundred
Poets. The following is Fujitani’s interpretation of a famous poem by
Sagawara no Michizace (845–903):
Kono tabi wa For this travel
Nusa mo toriaezu I could not offer the deity
Tamukeyama The paper offerings:
Momiji no nishiki Instead I will be presenting him
Kami no manimani With the brocade of maples.
Beside the literal meaning—the first level of interpretation and the
most personal to the poet—Fujitani reminds the reader of the extraor-
dinary circumstances in which the poem was composed. The reader
125
This is described in the chapter entitled “As Explanation of Surface, Underside,
Border” (“Omote Ura Sakai no Ben” ) of Makoto Ben. Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fuji-
tani Mitsue Zenshū, 4, pp. 756–758.
126
Sasaki Nobutsuna, ed. Nihon Kagaku Taikei, 8 (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1958),
p. 99.
127
Amagasaki Akira, Kachō no Tsukai: Uta no Michi no Shigaku (Tokyo: Keisō
Shobō, 1983), p. 257.
can surmise it from the the fact that, had the poet planned his travel,
he would have had plenty of time for the preparation of the custom-
ary offerings. The poet’s inner desire to provide the deity with proper
donations was thwarted by the fact that the travel in question is Michi-
zane’s trip into exile that prevents him from discharging his duties—
the second interpretive level, which is related to the public moment of
signification. The “border meaning” is the poet’s profound resentment
against the government at the thought that he has been deprived of
his only chance to assure himself with divine protection during the
dangerous trip to Dazaifu in the Kyūshū island.128
The deity speaks through the “spirit” of Michizane’s words (koto-
dama) and it is with such deity that the attentive reader is blessed with
a meeting. The deity is housed within the form of language as well as
within human action. When passion distracts from proper enuncia-
tion, the pattern of the sacred is broken and man becomes a victim of
his own rage. The channeling of the excrescence of feelings in the pat-
terned structure of poetry restores action to the “spirit of language,”
transforming human behavior into the deed of a god. At that point
man fulfills “the pattern of time” by assuring himself with control over
his own destiny.129
128
Miyake Kiyoshi, Shinpen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4, pp. 249–250. For an inter-
pretation of Fujitani’s hermeneutical strategy see Amagasaki Akira, Kachō no Tsukai,
pp. 260–261.
129
The relationship between passion (kandō ᗵേ, kantsū ᗵㅢ), language, and
kotodama is discussed in the last section of Makoto Ben, which is entitled “An Expla-
nation of Feelings” (“Kan no Ben”). Here Fujitani provides an example of what be
considers an ideal mastery over the self by the lady protagonist in an episode from
the tenth-century Tales of Yamato (Yamato Monogatari, dan 149). This lady channels
in her poetry the jealousy that is welling up in her heart after she has been abandoned
by her husband who is now living with a wealthier woman. The lady hides so magnifi-
cently her feelings that the man, realizing the tragedy and the composure of his wife,
eventually comes back to her, learning how to despise wealth when it is not paired
with dignity and endurance. Had the woman unleashed her jealousy, thus breaking
the pattern of proper timing, she would have lost her husband forever. By entrusting
her deep feelings to the “spirit” of language, she has let language calm the woman’s
rage, move the fickle husband, and restore their relationship. Miyake Kiyoshi, Shin-
pen Fujitani Mitsue Zenshū, 4 pp. 759–761. For an English translation of the episode
from the Yamato Monogatari see Mildred M. Tahara, trans. Tales of Yamato, A tenth-
Century Poem-Tale (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1980), pp. 102–103.
CHAPTER TWENTY
AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL F. MARRA

BY ROBERT D. WILSON
RW: You have written a book about Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801).1

Just how important were Norinaga’s writings to the Japanese poetics
of his day and what kind of influence, if any, do they have on current
day Japanese poetry?
MM: Norinaga was already well known as an outstanding philologist
and poetry teacher while living in Matsusaka and practicing medicine
every day in his town. He gathered several thousand students, many of
whom became poets, including several women. Many late eighteenth-,
early nineteenth-century scholars read with great care Norinaga’s
essays on matters related to archeology and ancient history, sometime
providing detailed rebuttals to his theories. In poetry composition
Norinaga was much more traditional than in his scholarly work on
the Japanese “classics.” His creativity in buttressing the interpretation
of poetry with historical documentation is quite impressive. The com-
position of poetry has changed a lot since the late nineteenth century,
when Japanese translations of Western poetry had an impact even on
the writing of traditional waka. I doubt any member of the Nativ-
ist School to which Norinaga belonged has had any major impact on
contemporary Japanese poetry.
RW: You state in your book that “Norinaga believed in the power of
the poetic word to recapture spontaneity and the immediacy of the
voice of gods (kami). Would you expound on this and what Norinaga
was referring to when he wrote of “the voice of gods?”
MM: I believe that Norinaga hoped to create a world without words—a
world in which there was no need of linguist articulation in order to
communicate perfectly. However, in order to reach such a stage people
1
Michael F. Marra, The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey
(Honolulu: The University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007).
418 chapter twenty
had to learn how to react properly to common situations (pain, joy,

anxiety, etc.). This could only be achieved through language—poetic
language. For Norinaga, poetic language reestablished things to their
own thingness, without reducing them to simple names. It is something
like the phenomenological dream: to make things appear as they are,
in the literal sense of “phenomenon” ( fainesthai, or “to appear”). The
poetic voice was sensitive to the appeal of the Gods, in the literal sense
of the word “utau” (to sing) which comes from “uttau” (to appeal to).
The interesting thing is that the original appeal was wordless—hence,
the difficulty of recording with words the wordless appeal.
RW: Norinaga is well known for his conceptualization of the term

mono no aware. Would you describe this conceptualization and, per-
haps, include an example or two?
MM: Mono-no-aware simply means to be moved by exteriority. It
is the appeal that external things have on people perceiving them.
“Aware” conveys the idea of the moving power of “things” (mono).
For example, let’s say that a brush fire destroys an entire mountain,
and that in the fire ten people die, and a thousand people lose their
homes and everything that took them a lifetime to accumulate. Mono
no aware refers to the reaction that people who never experienced a
devastating fire should have (and the key word here is the categorical
imperative “should”): they should feel the pain of those who have lost
everything, including their lives. One might say, this is only natural,
but that’s not the case. It would be sufficient to turn on the TV in
Los Angeles during one of the many Southern California brush fires
and to listen to the broadcasters’ comments: the fires are consistently
“spectacular, breathtaking, sublime (because broadcasting comes from
the safety of Hollywood offices), marvelous, sometime even beautiful.”
Listening to these comments one inevitably feels that the broadcast-
ers are actually the ones responsible for setting the fire in the first
place, just to make sure they have the “spectacular” news. Now, for
Norinaga, to be moved by “things” is not the result of a natural pro-
cess everybody develops from birth (the broadcasters of my example
are living proofs that Norinaga was right). The ability to be “moved”
(aware) is the result of arduous study, especially poetry and the classics
that help readers realize the meaning of affects. Apparently, in Hol-
lywood poetry and the classics are not very popular. For Norinaga,
ethics is actually the result of aesthetics which is the result of poetics:
an interview with marra by wilson: on norinaga 419
one knows how to behave because he/she has learned how to feel.
But one does not know how to feel unless he/she knows how to read
poetry.
RW: The utilization of mono no aware is more evident in Japanese

tanka than in English language tanka. Do you agree with this and if
so, why the gap?
MM: I believe that Japanese language is a pathic language—it is filled
with particles that denote a variety of emotions. These particles are
not easily translatable in Western languages. There are markers fol-
lowing verbs that denote the fact that someone experiences an action,
and others that stress the allegedly objectivity of the action without
denoting any experience. These markers are usually rendered in Eng-
lish with the past tense—something that does not make any sense in
the original text, and yet they cannot be left untranslated…
RW: If Norinaga were alive today, would he tolerate or give his

blessing to an English-language tanka that was not entirely based on
truth, in light of what he wrote in his essay “The Habit of Creating
Appearances”:
To argue that moon and flowers are moving but the glow of a woman
does not draw one’s attention is not the product of the human heart. It
is nothing but a terrible lie. This being the case, since to fabricate and
to embellish appearances has become a habit everywhere, shouldn’t we
blame this habit and denounce it as deceit?
MM: I don’t think Norinaga meant that a waka should be based on any
particular truth. I think he meant that a waka should be true to itself
in the same way that a poet should be true to himself. In other words,
a poet cannot take language lightly, and pretend to sing things that a
reader would immediately understand are contrived. It is a question
of credibility. The poet must be credible and so is the language that
he/she employs.
RW: Explain for me the pathos (mono no aware) in Norinaga’s

poem, excerpted from Suzunoya Shū (The Collection of The House
of Bells):
How many springs now
Has it lasted through,
420 chapter twenty
Watching its reflection?

The deeply moving
Willow tree by the river.
As he wrote this poem, did he become the tree, in order to fully under-
stand the tree; an empathic transference?
MM: I don’t believe it is a case of emphatic transference. It is a case
of accumulated experiences and associations. The willow tree has been
traditionally associated with tears, fragility, insubstantiality (a reflec-
tion). It is also the tree to which an imperial concubine hung her robe
before drowning herself in a pond in the ancient capital Nara as soon
as she had lost the Emperor’s favors. There are so many stories asso-
ciated with willow trees that a poet and a reader of waka must know
in order to appreciate and understand the meaning of willows. If one
understands all these implications, he/she is bound to be moved by the
willow, and will never look at it with inattentive eyes.
RW: I’ve noticed in your translations of Norinaga’s tanka that you

capitalize the first letter in each line and end each tanka with punctua-
tion. What is your reasoning for this, since the tanka was originally
written without capitalization and punctuation?
MM: Pure convention that, by the way, has been challenged on
numerous occasions. Once it comes to Norinaga’s poetry, I stick to
convention because Norinaga’s verses are profoundly conventional,
not necessarily in the negative sense of the word. They tend to con-
form to convention, with very interesting results. It is not revolu-
tionary poetry. I don’t believe Norinaga’s poetry should be used as a
ground for experimentation for the simple reason that his poetry was
not experimental.
RW: Norinaga, like all poets and philosophers of his era, was deeply
influenced by the Chinese. I find it odd that a man of his social rank-
ing would assert in an essay (“On Songs”): “What we call uta does
not exist in any other country.” Yet prior to making this pronounce-
ment, he mentioned that the word uta exists in the Chinese. How are
the two country’s usages different and what does Norinaga mean by
his pronouncement that “what we call uta does not exist in any other
country?”
an interview with marra by wilson: on norinaga 421
MM: I believe Norinaga meant that in China there are poetic forms
which he calls “poems” (in Japanese, shi), poems that were written not
just by Chinese poets, but also by Korean and Japanese poets. These
are poems in the Chinese language. “Uta” is a poetic form composed
in Yamato language—i.e., classical Japanese. When he says that “what
we call ‘uta’ does not exist in any other country,” he does not mean
that other countries do not have poetry; he means that other coun-
tries do not possess this particular poetic form. Norinaga took issue
with calling Japanese poetry “Yamato uta” (songs from Yamato)—an
expression which he considered tautological, although it was used in
the Preface to the Kokinshu (Modern and Ancient Songs, 905). For
him, uta could only be in Yamato language, so why bother to state the
same thing twice? He also argued that the Chinese characters used to
write the word “waka”—the characters indicating Yamato and song—
do not mean “Yamato uta” (Japanese song). “Waka” simply meant “a
poem composed in response to another poem,” following the Chinese
tradition of poetic exchanges.
RW: Norinaga emphasized, as you say, four key concepts: koe (voice),
aya (pattern), sama/sugata (form), and mono no aware (the pathos of
things). Would you expound on these key concepts as they relate to
waka and how they differ, if they do, from Ki no Tsurayuki’s concept
of the same four key concepts?
MM: The Introduction of the book is dedicated to these basic con-
cepts. Readers might want to refer to it for an explanation.
RW: What was your inspiration for writing a book on Motoori

Norinaga?
MM: I remember seeing a copy of Norinaga’s Sugagasa Nikki when I
was an MA student at Washington University over twenty-five years
ago, and I always wanted to read it. The editions of the diary back
then were not very well annotated. I was delighted when I saw that
the diary was included in the new series of the Iwanami Collection of
Japanese Literary Texts (Shin Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei). I imme-
diately invited the editor of the text, Professor Suzuki Jun, to teach a
course on the diary at UCLA. The course was so good that I decided
to translate Norinaga’s text into English.
422 chapter twenty
RW: On a personal level, what struck you most from your readings
and study of Motoori Norinaga’s writings?
MM: The breadth of Norinaga’s knowledge that stretched over what
today we would call literature, history, archeology, philology, epigra-
phy, philosophy, linguistics, and so on. Let’s not forget that he did all
this while practicing medicine on a daily basis, and writing poetry—
over ten thousand verses. These are definitely impressive achievements.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
FIELDS OF CONTENTION: PHILOLOGY (BUNKENGAKU)

AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LITERATURE (BUNGEIGAKU)
It is not uncommon to find in Japanese universities today a mutual

suspicion between scholars of “national literature” (kokubungaku),
whose field of expertise is mainly the Japanese “classics,” and the
more philosophically-oriented scholars of “aesthetics” (bigaku), who
are trained in Western philosophy and often write on the Japanese
“classics.” The first dismiss the latter as abstract thinkers who do not
ground their speculations in the “science” of philology, while the
aestheticians attack the literature scholars for their alleged short-
sightedness and obsession with textual detail that allegedly make them
lose sight of the larger, philosophical implications of textual production
and consumption. This struggle is then reproduced in American and
European academic institutions concerned with Japanese studies,
where scholars are asked to join a specific camp, either Japanese lit-
erature or Japanese thought, sending to comparative literature those
who have been rejected by both the hard-line “philologists” and the
hard-line “philosophers” (mainly “Buddhologists”).
In this paper I want to outline the major issues related to this strug-
gle by focusing on the formation of the Japanese field of classical lit-
erature that to this day is dominated by “the philological approach”
and yet heavily borrowed from the aestheticians’s vocabulary to talk
about the “classics.”
Philology: Integration and Specialization
Since most of modern Japan was built on German models, we must

inevitably begin by mentioning German philology, a field that reached
its peak with August Boeckh (1785–1867)—professor of philology at
This essay was originally presented as a paper on January 29, 2001, at the UCLA-
Nichibunken Workshop, University of California, Los Angeles. The author wishes to
thank Professor Suzuki Sadami for his comments.
424 chapter twenty-one
the University of Berlin from 1811 to 1865—who constructed classical

philology as a science in his monumental work Encyclopädia and Meth-
odology of the Philological Sciences (Encyklopädie und Methodologie
der philologischen Wissenschaften, posthumously published in 1877).
Here philology was made equivalent to historical knowledge, a privi-
leged access to the truths of the past.1
In Japan the notion of philology found its most zealous supporter in
the work of the literary historian Haga Yaichi (1867–1927), a student
of Konakamura Kiyonori at Tokyo Imperial University and, later, a
professor of Japanese literature at the same university from 1898. Haga
spent a year and a half at the University of Berlin from 1900. As he
noted in his Journal (entry 12/14/1901), he purchased the two volumes
of the Outline of German Philology (Grundriss der Germanischen Phi-
lologie, 1889–1893) edited by Hermann Paul, which contains a famous
quotation from Boeckh: “Philology is the knowledge of what is known
[Philologie ist das Erkennen des Erkannten] and, therefore, a recogni-
tion of a knowledge which is already given. But to recognize what is
known means to understand it.”2 Other entries from the same journal
(7/1/1902, 9/16/1902) attest to the fact that Haga spent several months
familiarizing himself with the work of Boeckh, finally completing his
readings on the night of September 18, 1902.3 As for which work
by Boeckh Haga was reading, we might infer from his article “What
is Japanese Philology?” (“Nihon bunkengaku to wa nan zo ya”) that it
was Boeckh’s Encyclopedia, which we find quoted there together with
the work of another famous classical philologist, Friedrich August
Wolf (1759–1824), the author of the Description of the Science of the
Study of Antiquities (Darstellung der Altertums-Wissenschaft, 1807).4
1
See on this topic Maurizio Ferraris, Storia dell’Ermeneutica (History of Hermeneu-
tics) (Milan: Bompiani, 1988), pp. 144–145.
2
This quotation appears at the beginning of Paul’s book, in the chapter “The Notion
and Task of German Philology” (“Begriff und Aufgabe der germanischen Philologie”).
Hermann Paul, Grundriss der Philologie (Strassburg: Karl. J. Trubner, 1981).
3
For the biographical information on Haga Yaichi I relied on Fukuda Hideichi,
“Haga Yaichi: seiyō riron ni yoru Nihon bunkengaku no juritsu” (“Haga Yaichi: The
Establishment of Japanese Philology according to Western Theories”). In Kokubun-
gaku: kaishaku to kanshō 57:8 (August 1992) (A special issue on “Portraits of Schol-
ars of the Classics, Continued: from Meiji to the Shōwa Period Prior to the War”),
pp. 19–24.
4
“What is Japanese Philology” was originally the text of a series of lectures that
Haga gave at Tokyo Imperial University in the 1907 academic year. It was published
posthumously in 1928 by students of Haga, eventually becoming the first chapter of
Bunkengaku no teishō: Nihon bunkengaku (Lectures on Philology: Japanese Philology).
philology and the philosophy of literature 425
Boeckh divided his major work into two parts: (1) the formal
theory of the science of philology (“Formale Theorie der philologi-
schen Wissenschaft”), subdivided into (a) the theory of hermeneutics
or “Theorie der Hermeneutik” (further subdivided into grammatical
interpretation, historical interpretation, individual interpretation, and
generic interpretation), and (b) the theory of criticism or “Theorie der
Kritik” (likewise further subdivided into grammatical criticism, his-
torical criticism, individual criticism, and generic criticism); (2) the
material disciplines of the study of antiquity (“Materiale Disciplinen
der Alterthumslehre”), subdivided into (a) generic antiquity or “Allge-
meine Alterthumslehre” (further subdivided into national life, private
life, religious art, sciences), and (b) specific antiquity or “Besondere
Alterthumslehre” (further subdivided into the public life of the Greek
and Romans, their private life, their religious art, and the sciences of
ancient times).5 According to Haga, the first part of Boeckh’s work
was meant as a methodological ruse to recover the concrete reality of
antiquity which was described in the second part, so as to “know once
again at the present time what was known to ancient peoples in the
same manner as it was known to them.” The work of the philologist
consists of inquiring scientifically into all facets of ancient cultures as
a first step toward the understanding of ancient languages. Quoting
from a commentator of Boeckh, Karl Elze (1821–1889) and his An
Outline of English Philology (Grundriss der englischen Philologie, 1887),
Haga argued that philological knowledge comes about through a pro-
cess of “reconstruction of the political, the social, and the literary, a
construction by a given people.”6 This last sentence was of monumen-
tal importance for Haga since it clarified for him the starting point of
the hermeneutical process, by allowing him to recognize that all acts
of reconstruction of the past are actually acts of personal construc-
tion. This is an inescapable law since, as Haga argues—and these are
his own words and not a quotation from a German source—“the eyes
which contemporary people turn towards the past must differ from
See Haga Yaichi senshū 1 (Selected Works by Haga Yaichi) (Tokyo: Kokugakuin
Daigaku, 1994), p. 67.
5
August Boeckh, Encyklopädie und Methodologie der Philologischen Wissenschaften
(Leipzig: Druck und Verlag von B.G. Teubner, 1886). For a partial English translation
of the work see, August Boeckh, On Interpretation and Criticism, trans. John Paul
Pritchard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968).
6
Haga Yaichi senshū 1, p. 67. The original sentence appears in Karl Elze, Grundriss
der englischen Philologie (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1889), p. 9.
the eyes of the people of old.”7 This recognition is meant by Haga as

an invitation to his fellow Japanese scholars to keep this distance in
mind in order to be, first of all, good historians.
Haga also mentions the definition of philology given by Gustav
Körting (1845–1913), the author of The Encyclopedia and Methodol-
ogy of English Philology (Encyklopädie und Methodologie der englischen
Philologie, 1888) and The Encyclopedia and Methodology of Romance
Philology (Encyklopädie und Methodologie der romanischen Philologie,
1884–88). The purpose of philology is, according to Körting, a means
“of understanding the life of a specific people or a specific racial group,
within the limits of what is discovered and can be discovered, by
examining their language and their written records.”8 Haga draws the
conclusion that the purpose of philology is not the knowledge of lan-
guage for its own sake, but rather a means of explaining the national
character through etymological research; or, to use Karl Elze’s words,
“a construction by a specific people.”9 This concept of philology was
common currency at the time Boeckh was teaching in Berlin, insofar
as Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), a colleague of Boeckh,
the head of the Prussian Department of Education and the founder of
the University of Berlin, argued that philology was “the science of the
nation.” Haga had no problem identifying the German version of this
science with the Japanese movement of Nativism (kokugaku).
From the very beginning of his inquiry into what he calls “Japa-
nese philology” (Nihon bunkengaku), Haga states that this science is
certainly not unknown to Japanese scholars, since it was practiced all
along by Nativists. The study of German philology, however, led Haga
to take a complex position towards Nativism which, on the one hand,
he accepted for its potential to make the classics relevant to the politi-
cal development of the Japanese nation but, on the other, criticized
for being blind to its cultural past, particularly the Chinese (kanbun)
experience that the kokugaku movement had erased from the literary
canon. Haga was critical of the rigid ideological agenda of Nativists
like Motoori Norinaga, who in their zeal to attack a long tradition
of interpretation rooted in Confucian and Buddhist theology—such
as, for example, the 31 syllables of a Japanese poem being made to
7
Haga Yaichi senshū 1, p. 67.
8
Gustav Körting, Encyklopaedie und Methodologie der romanischen Philologie
(Heilbronn: Verlag von Gebr. Henninger, 1884), p. 82.
9
Elze, Grundriss der englischen Philologie, p. 9.
correspond to the 32 marks of the Buddha—grounded their scholar-

ship in a prejudice that totally excluded China from their studies. The
knowledge of the spiritual life of a people—Haga argued—could only
be brought to life by a historical study of that people’s language and
literature, as well as by comparative studies.10
Haga introduced two key concepts which are at the center of Boeckh’s
definition of philology, “criticism” (“Kritik/hihan”) and “interpreta-
tion” (“Interpretation/kaishaku”). While criticism is entrusted with the
search for the intrinsic historicity of the text (its real author, date and
place of composition, authenticity, etc.), interpretation investigates
the text’s “true meaning”—shin’i in Haga’s words—by relating it to
other texts which belong to the same epoch or to the same genre.11 In
order to be a good critic and a good interpreter, the philologist can
count on the help of several disciplines that Haga listed as follows: (1)
“bibliographical studies” (Bücher-kunde/shoseki kaidai); (2) “studies
of manuscripts” (Handschrift-kunde/komonjogaku); (3) “paleography”
(Paläographie/komojigaku); (4) “epigraphy” (Epigraphik/kinseki moji-
gaku); (5) “prosody” (Metrik/onritsugaku); (6) “grammar” (Grammatik/
bunpōgaku); (7) “archeological material” (Materielle Disziplinen der
Altertums-Wissenschaft/kōkogaku shiryō); (8) “ancient geography” (Alte
Geographie/kodai chirigaku); (9) “chronology of ancient history” (Alte
Geschichtschronologie/kodaishi nendaigaku); (10) “weights and mea-
sures” (Metrologie/doryōkōgaku); (11) “antiquities” (Altertümer/kodai
10
11
Kurt Mueller-Vollmer provides the following explanation of these two terms as
they are used by Boeckh: “In his Encyclopedia Boeckh introduced another important
distinction, namely, the distinction between interpretation and criticism which E.D.
Hirsch in his book Validity in Interpretation has recently resurrected. Boeckh argues
that all acts of understanding can be viewed in two ways. First, understanding may be
directed exclusively toward the object itself without regard to its relationship to any-
thing else; and second, it may be directed only toward the relationship in which the
object stands to something else. In the first instance, understanding is absolute and
functions solely as interpretation; that is, one concentrates on comprehending the
object and its meaning on its own terms, that is, intrinsically. In the second instance,
ones understanding is purely relational: one concentrates on the relationship which
the object entertains with other phenomena, such as its historical circumstances, the
linguistic usage of its time, the literary tradition in which it stands, and the value sys-
tems and beliefs which are contemporary to the interpreter. In his actual work the phi-
lologist must continually rely on both interpretation and criticism. His understanding
would be uncontrolled and unmethodical if he were not always aware of the interrela-
tionship between the two.” Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of
the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present (New York: Continuum,
1992), pp. 22–23.
no ibutsu); (12) “mythology” (Mythologie/shinwagaku); (13) “archeol-

ogy of the fine arts” (Archäologie der Kunst/geijutsu ni kansuru kobu-
tsugaku); (14) “ancient philosophy” (Alte Philosophie/kodai tetsugaku);
(15) “literary history” (Literaturegeschichte/bungakushi); (16) “numis-
matics” (Numismatik/kosenkagaku).12
Haga recognized that Japanese philology did not need to be as
complicated as its European counterpart since the linguistic systems
used in Japan—Haga referred to classical Japanese, Chinese (kanbun)
and the Ainu language—were relatively simple when compared to the
linguistic reality of Europe (Gothic, Nordic, German, Dutch, English,
French languages in Paul’s system, and French, Catalonian, Spanish,
Portuguese, Italian, Romanic, Rumanian languages in Körting’s
system).13 In view of this fact, and in view of the earlier scholarship
of the Nativist movement, Haga reduced the sixteen categories, which
in his earlier opinion constituted the Western system of philology,
to the following five: language (gengo), literature (bungaku), law (rit-
surei, hōsei), ancient customs (yūsoku), and Shintōism (shintō).14 Each
field—linguistic studies, literary studies, legal studies, studies of liter-
ary histories—is explained according to a specific methodology in a
concerted effort “to increase the specific national beauty of our coun-
try and to stimulate the perfect development of our people”—what
Haga called “national science” (“Nationale Wissenschaft”), and “the
ideal and destiny of Japanese philology.”15
The end result of Haga’s hermeneutics brings him in line with the
mainstream literary historians of German Romanticism from whom
he derived the very definition of science: the subsumption of par-
ticularity under the all-encompassing category of the absolute, the
restoration of partition and division into an organic, relational body
culminating in the absolute of an Idea, Literature. The particularity of
the dismembered text must be reinserted into the body of its system,
since “the task of literary history”—Haga argues—“is primarily to look
at isolated texts and bring them into relationship with each other.”16
However, such a process of synthetic recomposition (sōgoryoku) is
unattainable without a thorough analysis (bunsekiryoku) of particular
12
Haga Yaichi senshū 1, pp. 77–78.
13
Ibid., pp. 71–72.
14
Ibid., p. 78.
15
Ibid., pp. 64 and 144.
16
Ibid., p. 141.
texts. Textual criticism (tekisuto kurichikku), then, becomes a major

task of the philologist who is confronted with clarifying the four major
elements of “time” (toki), “space” (basho), “personhood” (hito), and
“work” (sakuhin).
The recovery of the “time” of composition is essential for taking the
pulse of the “epoch’s intellectual sentiments” ( jidai no shisō kanjō) and
for establishing transformations occurring between different epochs as
well as within the same epoch.17 However, Haga maintains the notion
of an epoch’s “characteristics” (seishitsu) that, although changing
in time, preserve a core of ideality without which the vocabulary of
Idealism would become meaningless.18 While “time” keeps an epoch
stitched together vertically—Haga continues—the notion of “place”
unites it horizontally, inasmuch as it helps clarify the cultural differ-
ences among peoples, as derived from different climatic/geographic
environments (fūdo). Such differences work not only at the level of dif-
ferent countries but also between different areas of the same country—
Haga gives the example of Sparta and Athens in Greece.19
The notion of “personhood” has psychological and social implica-
tions. On the one hand the biography of an author helps clarify “the
mental characteristics” (shinsei) that for either genetic (iden) or edu-
cational (kyōiku) reasons have had an impact on the author’s imagina-
tion and, consequently, on the production of the text. On the other,
Haga argues, it is important to know what kinds of readers the author
was addressing, so as to better understand the “circumstances” (jijō)
and the “motives” (dōki) of composition. A formalistic analysis of the
“work”—rhetoric, vocabulary, syntax, metric, rhythm—will help to
establish the text’s “originality” by comparing the specific text to others
belonging to similar genres. The study of a text’s external (form) and
internal (content) characteristics elicits a judgment on the part of the
philologist who, at the end of his research, should be able to acknowl-
edge the presence or absence of “aesthetic value” (biteki kachi).20
Haga described the process of aesthetic judgment as an “extraction
of the text’s essence (essensu o saishu suru), “a distinction of jewel
17
Haga was very sensitive to the arbitrariness of the division of history into epochs
and invites his readers to avoid considering them hardened clusters of time. This, in
his opinion, would be a mistake since it would not do justice to the notion of change
that is the major characteristic of time. Ibid., p. 136.
18
Ibid., pp. 135–136.
19
Ibid., pp. 136–137.
20
Ibid., pp. 137–141.
from stone” (hōseki o wakachi)—expressions which imply a process

of comparison eventually leading “to the discovery (hakken) of the
hidden thread which ties together on the underside (ura ni) the literary
development (bungaku hattatsu),” “the discovery of Being (Sein) from
within Becoming (Werden).”21 The recovery of the text’s essence allows
the “understanding of the general characteristics of specific peoples,
as well as of the culture and intellectual history which are reflected
in them.” As in the case of the Romantics who were searching for a
literary absolute located beyond the specificity of place, time, and race,
Haga warned philologists not to stop at the level of mere subjectivity
( jiko), but to “proceed towards the study of the literature of human-
ity at large.” Literary history has now become the absolute, while the
philologist, by “knowing the past, being able to foresee the future, and
guiding the people,” plays the role of the Creator who brings the word
(= the world) into being.22
Haga’s insight into the scholarly shortcomings of the Nativist
school—blindness to ideology—and his attention to hermeneutical
strategies which allowed him to establish a totally new ground for the
study of Japanese literature, did not open to view the strong underpin-
nings of Romantic ideology which would set the tone for much interpre-
tative work on Japan for years to come. On the one hand, Haga clearly
saw the “religious” function played by the Nativists—“in a sense they
were men of religion”—whose Shintō background made them reject as
impure whatever they felt was mixed with the culture of an allegedly
original, pristine past. As a result, Haga argues, they fell into the trap
of the hermeneutical circle since “as this was their point of departure,
this also was their point of arrival.”23 Haga noticed that by positing
an original world free from foreign influence at the beginning of
Japanese civilization, and by inventing an allegedly pure Japanese lan-
guage (“the language of the gods” based on the theory of the fifty sounds
or gojūon-setsu),24 the philologists of the Edo period proceeded with
their search by placing at the beginning of their inquiry the results that
their belief in the Shintō gods made them willing to find. Naturally,
they could only find what they felt they would undoubtedly encoun-
ter. While uncovering the Nativists’ prejudice and inviting scholars to
21
Ibid., p. 142.
22
Ibid., pp. 142–144.
23
Ibid., p. 144.
24
See the enlightening pages that Haga wrote on this topic in ibid., pp. 84–93.
adopt a more fair and objective viewpoint, however, Haga was creating
a hermeneutical circle of his own. He encouraged scholars to accept
“everything, even things coming from the outside” as a kind of nec-
essary knowledge without which the philologist could not fulfill his
task, as long as such knowledge fit into the categories of “beauty and
good” (zen/bi), in order for the philologist to make his mark in “the
development of a healthy nation.”25 Haga was projecting onto Japan
the Romantic myth of kalokagathia which took Greece—the imagined
world of beauty and justice—to be the ideal world of which Europe
had been robbed by division and separation.
By following Boeckh’s synthetic approach in which a variety of
scholarly disciplines were reintegrated under the umbrella of the gen-
eral and broad category of “philology,” Haga was presenting to Japan
a humanistic version of scholarship. A scholar was required to pos-
sess a detailed knowledge of all possible disciplines—including philo-
logical knowledge in a strict sense—so as to be able to recuperate the
past (philology in the broad, Boeckhian sense) through a “scientific”
analysis of the text. The philological activity in the narrower sense
enabled the scholar to understand “the spirit of an age”—which was
the ultimate achievement of the philologist who was aware of the true
(= broad) meaning of philology. The ambivalence of such an approach
in which particulars were constantly confronted with universals, was
at the root of the different approaches taken by later scholars of Japa-
nese literature who either privileged the narrow sense of philology as
textual analysis (which I will call the textual approach), or rejected it
in favor of an allegedly more universal category, be this called beauty
(the aesthetic approach) or the social reality (the ideology critique
approach).
The narrow approach of specialization was well known to Haga
who, in a lecture at the Kokugakuin University which he published in
the university journal Kokugakuin zasshi in 1903, mentioned special-
ization as the inevitable result of the quickly developing pace of schol-
arship. Haga associates this movement in philology with the name of
Hermann Usener (1834–1905) and his Philology and the Science of
History (Philologie und Geschichtwissenschaft, 1892). While rejecting
Usener’s method, Haga took the path of August Boeckh, who had
encouraged the integration of all “knowledges.” This implied not only
25
Ibid., p. 144.
the combination of different fields such as Japanese literature, art, his-

tory, law, etc. (what he called “the horizontal approach” or yoko ni
tsuite no ron), but also the knowledge of the same field in different
countries such as, for example, Japanese, Chinese, and European law
(“the vertical approach or tate ni tsuite no ron) so as to acquire the
most perfect knowledge by a method of comparison.26
According to Haga, the dismembered disciplines must find a point
of reunion within the philologist because of the very nature of his job,
which is the recovery of the specificity of a particular people in a par-
ticular time. Such a specificity—which Haga calls “one heart” (hitotsu
no kokoro)—will become apparent no matter what kind of document
the scholar uses—literary, historical, or legal. The reintegration of the
severed disciplines within the scholar’s cognitive horizon is for Haga a
means to recuperate “scientifically the living conditions and the activi-
ties of a whole society making up one people.” It is, therefore, the
philologist’s duty to bring about this reintegration that Haga consid-
ered to be already at the center of the activities of Nativists such as
Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736). “Where is the field of Nativism
(kokugaku)”—Haga asks—“if scholarship must become a specialized
enterprise? If the scholar of law deals with the law, the historian with
history, the literary scholar with literature, the linguist with linguistics,
the art historian with the fine arts, the field of Nativism dies out. At the
same time that scholarship falls into the hands of different specialists,
what becomes of Nativism?”27
Since when Haga talks about Nativism he actually has “the philo-
logical method” in mind,28 the answer comes from the role that he
assigns to the philologist whose field—he says—“is not the knowl-
edge of ancient words, since to know words is just a simple means.
To do research in ancient languages and to understand those words
are both tools for studying ancient societies.”29 And in order to do so,
the philologist must be equipped not just with the sum of the sev-
26
“Kokugaku to wa nan zo ya” (“What is the Nativist Science?”), in ibid., pp. 157–158.
27
Ibid., pp. 153–154.
28
Haga makes the remark that Wilhelm von Humboldt used the expression “sci-
ence of the nation” (Wissenschaft der Nationalität) to indicate philology, which
has the same meaning as kokugaku (the science of the nation or Nativism). This is
important insofar as it allows us to see the impact that the German discourse on the
nation had on the Japanese expression at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ibid.,
p. 159.
29
Ibid., p. 155.
ered cognitive parts, but also with the ability of finding relationships
between these parts. The ultimate purpose is the understanding of
“the specific characteristics of a people” (kokumin no tokusei o shiru)
which must be searched in the past, since with the process of mod-
ernization engulfing the world and readily available communications
between countries—Haga concludes—such characteristics are becom-
ing increasingly diluted. The equation of people with nation led Haga
to further specify the purpose of philology/Nativism as “the under-
standing of the national polity” (kokutai o shiru).30 The method had to
be “synthetic (sōgōteki), critical (hihanteki), comparative (hikakuteki),
and analytical (bunkaiteki).”31
Haga’s “synthetic approach” found a major obstacle in the reorgani-
zation of the University, when in 1901 Japanese language and literature
became an independent entity within Tokyo Imperial University. As
a matter of fact, the previous courses in “national language, literature,
and history” were reestablished as two groups of two courses each, one
in “national language and literature” (kokugogaku kokubungaku)—
Haga himself was the first professor to hold the second course after
he came back from Europe in 1902—and the other as “national
history.”32 The university was marching towards further specialization
and professionalization in spite of Haga’s remarks that “the university
is divided into specialized disciplines such as literature and history,
but at the Kokugakuin we should practice what Boeckh preached, and
have a chair in all learning with at the center one nation, as the name
“Science of Nativism” (kokugaku) indicates.”33
A tendency towards specialization in the departments of Japanese
literature is noticeable both at the Imperial University of Kyoto (Kyōto
Teikoku Daigaku), where in 1906 the first course in “national lan-
guage and literature” was taught by Fujii Otoo (1868–1946) and the
University of Tokyo, where Fujimura Tsukuru (1875–1953) had suc-
ceeded Fujioka Sakutarō (1870–1910) after the latter’s premature
death. While Fujioka proceeded along lines which were still very close
to Haga’s project, privileging the importance of literary history and of
the contextualization of particulars within a unified framework, with
30
Ibid., pp. 161–162.
31
Ibid., p. 163.
32
See Mori Shū, Bungakushi no hōhō (The Methodology of Literary History) (Tokyo:
Hanawa Shobō, 1990), pp. 68–69.
33
Fujii and Fujimura annotations and textual studies became increas-

ingly the privileged activity of the literary scholar. Rather than cen-
ters struggling to produce “enlightened ideas,” as was the case in early
and mid-Meiji, Japanese universities after the Sino-Japanese (1894)
and Russo-Japanese (1905) wars became more and more autonomous
entities, producing specialists who tended to reproduce themselves. As
Osamu Shū (1917–1993) has observed, the Kantō earthquake of 1923
further increased the emphasis on textual studies among literary his-
torians, as the massive loss of documents required a specialized effort
to create new annotated copies of the classics.34 Among the major
efforts in this direction were The Philological Study of National Litera-
ture (Kokubungaku no bunkenteki kenkyū, 1935) by Sasaki Nobutsuna
(1872–1963) and A Study of the Critical Treatment of the Classics
(Koten no hihanteki shochi ni kansuru kenkyū, 1941) by Ikeda Kikan
(1896–1956).
This is not to deny that, in spite of the increased specialization in the
field of classical Japanese literature, scholars such as Sasaki Nobutsuna
still located the purpose (mokuteki) of the field outside the immediate
concerns of philology, finding it in “the understanding of the essence of
the spiritual life of our ancestors, and its transformations, through the
many literary works born to the Japanese folk (Nihon minzoku) since
ancestral times.”35 The underlying notion of Sasaki’s literary project
was a belief in the incremental development of the human spirit, a
development that supposedly built upon the past in an uninterrupted
process of self-amelioration. However, Sasaki argues, the major role of
literary history (bungakushi kenkyū) is the analysis of the literary work
(bungaku sakuhin) as an example of “cultural reality” (bunka jijitsu).
On the other hand, “literary criticism” (bungaku hihyōteki kenkyū) was
entrusted with the decision over the “literary value” (bunka kachi) of
the work, which was thus positioned in a hierarchical space. Neither
one nor the other of these two approaches could take place—Sasaki
continues—without what he called “methodological reconsideration”
(kenkyū hōhō no hansei), which is a “philological study” (bunkenga-
kuteki kenkyū) of the text privileging the authenticity and the historic-
ity of the literary work. In a word, the marriage between “the literary
34
Mori Shū, Bungakushi no hōhō p. 73.
35
Sasaki Nobutsuna, Kokubungaku no bunkengakuteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1935), p. 1.
text” (kokubungaku no sakuhin) and the context consisting of “histori-

cal records” (rekishiteki kiroku).36
Sasaki did not depart from Boeckh’s definition of philology, inas-
much as he viewed it both in the narrow sense as textual study, and
in the larger sense as “science for the elucidation of the characteristics
of the spiritual life of a folk.” He also adopted the categories of “criti-
cism” (hihyō) and “interpretation” (kaishaku) which Boeckh made
famous in his Encyclopedia. However, Sasaki’s inability to accept the
Boeckhian’s theory of philology as mere tool, and his inclination to
actually consider it more as an end in his daily practice as philologist
of the Japanese classics, made him confront the paradox of having
“philology” (bunkengaku) defined as both the very object of the study
of literature, and the method through which literature as object should
be clarified.37 This paradox resulted from Sasaki’s privileging the need
for a textual criticism which was based on the philological recon-
struction of a text into “a definite edition” (teihon) that should be as
close as possible to the original—an activity which required the study
of the time of the work’s composition, of the circumstances surround-
ing textual production, as well as biographical information on the
text’s author.
The philological approach upheld by Haga and Sasaki became
the major methodological path for graduates of the department of
“national literature” (kokubungaku) of Tokyo Imperial University
(Tōkyō Teikoku Daigaku) which is known today as Tōdai. One of
its most illustrious graduates, Hisamatsu Sen’ichi (1894–1976), who
later became a professor at the same university and was probably
the major voice of the Shōwa period (1926–1989) in the field of the
Japanese classics, wrote his B.A. thesis on “The Philology of Keichū”
(Keichū no bunkengaku, 1916).38 Once he became a graduate student,
Hisamatsu worked on “Studies of the History of Japanese Philology”
(Nihon bunkengakushi no kenkyū). Although, when he first entered
the University of Tokyo as an undergraduate, Haga Yaichi was travel-
36
Ibid., pp. 2–3.
37
“Literature studies philology itself; at the same time it clarifies the characteris-
tics of national literature through philology—a worthwhile purpose in itself.” Sasaki
Nobutsuna, Kokubungaku no bunkengakuteki kenkyū, pp. 13–14.
38
For biographical information on Hisamatsu Sen’ichi I am indebted to Shida
Nobuyoshi, “Hisamatsu Sen’ichi: bungakushi to bungaku hyōronshi” (“Hisamatsu
Sen’ichi: The History of Literature and the History of Literary Criticism”), Kokubun-
gaku: kaishaku to kanshō 57:8 (August 1992), pp. 96–101.
ling around the world, Hisamatsu could count on an array of teachers

deeply trained in philology: Ueda Mannen (1867–1937) was in charge
of Japanese linguistics; Fujimura Tsukuru (1875–1953) was lecturing
on Saikaku and Chikamatsu; Sasaki Nobutsuna (1872–1963) held
courses on the Man’yōshū and the history of waka; Kaito Matsuzō
(1878–1952) taught the history of Japan’s ancient usages and customs
( yūsoku kojitsu), as well as literary methodology.
The scholarship of Hisamatsu Sen’ichi was sustained from the begin-
ning of his career by the categories of “critical text” (honbun hihyō)
and “annotations” (chūshaku) which he applied to the publication of
a Critical Edition of the Man’yōshū (Kōhon Man’yōshū, 1924–25) and
The Collected Works of Keichū (Keichū zenshū, 1929). The role played
by German historicism in the formation and training of Japanese
scholars of the literary classics is apparent in Hisamatsu’s endeavor
to explain the texts in terms reflective of the history of hermeneutics,
which would forbid literary historians from discussing any text inde-
pendently from the history of its reception. The history of literature
became the history of its history, as we see from the attention that
Hisamatsu paid to the linkages between the Man’yōshū and its appre-
ciation during the Edo period in the book Studies of the Man’yōshū
(Man’yōshū kōsetsu, 1934). We also see it in the monumental work
that Hisamatsu dedicated to The History of Japanese Literary Criticism
(Nihon bungaku hyōronshi, 1932–1947),39 one of the very few works
39
In 1932 the first volume appeared, Nihon bungaku hyōronshi: keitairon no sōgō
kankei wo chūshin to shite (The History of Japanese Literary Criticism, with an Empha-
sis on the Interrelationships of Formalism). In 1936 he published the two volumes
Nihon bungaku hyōronshi: kodai chūsei hen (The History of Japanese Literary Criticism:
Volume on the Ancient and the Middles Ages) and Nihon bungaku hyōronshi: kinsei
saikinsei hen (The History of Japanese Literary Criticism: Volume on the Early Modern
and Modern Periods). In 1939 appeared the volume Nihon bungaku hyōronshi: sōron
karon hen (The History of Japanese Literary Criticism: Volume of General Remarks
and on Poetic Treatises). The first volume was revised after the war in 1947 when it
appeared as Nihon bungaku hyōronshi: keitairon hen (The History of Japanese Literary
Criticism: Volume on Formalism). From 1968 to 1969 the entire work made up five
of the twelve volumes of Hisamatsu Sen’ichi chosaku shū (Collection of the Works of
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi). Three volumes were published under the sub-headings of Sōron
karon keitairon hen (Volume of General Remarks, on Poetic Treatises, and on Formal-
ism), Kodai chūsei hen (Volume on the Ancient and the Middle Ages), Kinsei kindai hen
(Volume on the Early Modern and Modern Periods). The fourth volume was entitled
Nihon bungaku hyōronshi: Shikaron hen (The History of Japanese Literary Criticism:
Volume on Poetics). The fifth was given the subtitle, Rinen hyōgenron hen (Volume on
Ideas and Theories of Expression). The same organization was maintained in the 1976
printing of the eight volumes Hisamatsu Sen’ichi senshū (A Selection of Hisamatsu
Sen’ichi’s Works).
published in Japan on literary hermeneutics, which was the outcome

of a series of lectures that Hisamatsu gave starting in April 1914, as
soon as he became an Associate Professor of Japanese literature at the
University of Tokyo.
As Hisamatsu himself later wrote in a book of reminiscences, he
had been influenced to write such a history while reading a manuscript
of Fujioka Sakutarō (1870–1910), who had lectured at the University
of Tokyo from September 1908 until February 1910 on “the history of
Japanese criticism” (Nihon hyōronshi). The manuscript, however,
ended with the end of the seventeenth century, the Genroku period,
due to the premature death of the author. Spurred to continue the
work of Fujioka, Hisamatsu searched for analogous books dealing with
Western criticism during his trips to Europe and the United States. He
was surprised to find so few surveys of the history of literary herme-
neutics, with the exception of George Saintsbury’s (1845–1933) A His-
tory of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts
to the Present Day (1900–1904).40
The fact that Hisamatsu’s acquaintance with the German field of
philology began early in his career is attested to by his Biography of
Keichū (Keichū den), which he started writing in 1917 and published
two years later. In a chapter on “The Concept of Classical Studies and its
Methodology” (“Kotengaku no gainen to sono hōhōron”) he followed
the same route traced by Haga Yaichi, first stating that, according to
Hermann Paul, the first appearance of the word “German philology”
occurred in the title of Harsdorffer’s Specimen Philologiae Germanicae
(An Example of German Philology) of 1646.41 He then introduces
August Boeckh’s notion of philology as the knowledge of what is
already known, further elaborating upon it with the explanations given
by Karl Elze (philology is the reconstruction of the political, social,
and literary structures of a given people), Hermann Paul (philology
is knowledge of what has been produced by the human spirit),42 and
Gustav Körting (the purpose of philology is the understanding of
the life of a specific racial group through the analysis of speech and
40
Hisamatsu, Watakushi no rirekisho (My Curriculum Vitae) (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai
Shinbunsha, 1970); Hisamatsu, Kokubungakuto no omoide (The Recollections of a
Companion in National Literature) (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1969), p. 210.
41
Hisamatsu, Keichū den (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1969), p. 251. For Paul’s statement see
Hermann Paul, Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, p. 3.
42
“Philologie ist das Erkennen des vom menschlichen Geist Producierten.” Ibid.,
pp. 1–2.
writing). Following Karl Elze, Hisamatsu argued that rather than being
an autonomous science with its end in itself, as is the case with linguis-
tics, philology is a means towards understanding the cultural phenom-
ena of a specific people.43 Hisamatsu, then, concludes that philology is
essentially a means to understand “a people’s culture (kokumin bunka)
as seen through its language,” as well as “the cultural spirit (bunka
seishin) flowing into that culture.” “Philology,” Hisamatsu states, “is
essentially the science of culture (bunkagaku)” but—and here he bor-
rowed from Hermann Paul—of ancient culture, “at the exclusion of
the modern one.” By translating the German concepts of “national
science” (National Wissenschaft) with the word kokugaku (or Nativist
studies) and of “the science of antiquity” (Altertumswissenschaft) with
kogaku (or ancient studies), Hisamatsu came up with a diagram that
explains philology (bunkengaku) in terms of (1) its “object” (mokuteki)
or “content” (naiyō), i.e. “ancient culture,” and (2) its “methodology”
(taido hōhō) or “form” (keishiki), i.e. “philological” (bunkenteki). The
discipline of national science has for its object the study of its ancient
culture, and it must be conducted with an archeological/philological
method.44
object . . . . culture (ancient). . . . content

Philology
methodology. . . . philological. . . . form
The similarities that Hisamatsu perceived between the German sci-

ence of philology and the Nativist School of Learning (kokugaku) are
apparent when we compare this diagram with the one that Hisamatsu
created to explain the Nativist movement, in which its “purpose/
content” was “the ancient way” (kodō)—by which he meant essen-
tially Shintoism—and its “methodology/form” was “ancient studies”
(kogaku)—by which he meant the archeological methods of disciplines
such as ancient history, poetics (kagaku), and the traditional study of
ancient practices and usages (yūsoku kojitsu).45
43
“The difference between linguistics and philology is that the former is based on
the study of language ‘for its own sake’, whereas the latter has the purpose of ‘essen-
tially learning the cultural conditions of a specific people as these are represented in
that people’s entire literature’. For the former, speech is the purpose, while for the
latter it is a means.” Elze, Grundriss der englischen Philologie, p. 6.
44
Hisamatsu, Keichū den, p. 253.
45
Ibid., p. 250.
object . . . . ancient way . . . . content

Nativism
methodology. . . . .ancient studies. . . . form
The methodologies of philology and Nativism, Hisamatsu argues, are

“exactly the same”—a combination that we find in Keichū’s “studies
of the classics” (kotengaku). The difference resides in the target object
of the two approaches, inasmuch as Hisamatsu perceives the Nativist
object as more dogmatic in its attempt to present ancient studies as
a religion (Shintοism), particularly with the work of Hirata Atsutane
(1776–1843). At this point Hisamatsu seems to be unaware of the ide-
ological implications of historicism, and of its successes in translating
into a secularized language an idiom which is very much religious.
Hisamatsu seems to prefer the word “kotengaku” (“classical studies”)
as a counterpart of the German “Philologie” because of its broader
implications that branch off to different disciplines making up the
notion of “culture.” “Bunkengaku,” in his opinion, is too restrictive
inasmuch as it limits the study of “philology” to the history of texts—
something that would be better described by the word “shoshigaku”
(“bibliographical studies” that include paleography, epigraphy, etc.,
but exclude concerns which are not specifically textual).
The methodology employed by Hisamatsu in his “studies of the clas-
sics” (kotengaku) or philology is indebted to all the German authors
mentioned above, starting with August Boeckh’s division of the disci-
plines making up philology into “formal theories” (hermeneutics and
criticism) and “material theories” (generic and specific antiquity). As
Hisamatsu argues in “The Concept of Classical Studies and its Meth-
odology,” further subdivisions were made by Karl Elze, who added
to hermeneutics and criticism the disciplines of geography (Geogra-
phie), history (Geschichte), the private life in ancient times (Privatal-
terthümer), literary history (Literaturgeschichte), and the history
of language (Geschichte der Sprache).46 Hermann Paul—Hisamatsu
continues—mentioned interpretation, criticism, the history of lan-
guage, and literary history, and he also talked about mythology,
legends, poetics, economy, law, military matters, customs, the arts, and
German folklore. As for the category of criticism, Hisamatsu reminds
46
Ibid., pp. 253–254. As a matter of fact all these categories quoted by Hisamatsu
are easily found in Boeckh’s Encyclopedia, a fact that makes one wonder whether
Hisamatsu actually consulted Boeckh’s work.
his reader of Paul’s division between “textual criticism” (Textkritik)

and “aesthetic criticism” (Aesthetik Kritik).47 Once applied to the Japa-
nese context, the German categories are reduced to the following six
which, according to Hisamatsu, should take care of every category of
study where the classics are concerned: the three basic disciplines of
“bibliographical studies” (shoshigaku), “textual criticism” (honbun
hihyō), and “explanation by annotation” (chūshaku), as well as the dis-
ciplines of “linguistics” (gengoteki kenkyū), “literary criticism” (bun-
gaku hihyōteki kenkyū), and “cultural history” (bunkashiteki kenkyū).
Hisamatsu uses the expression chūshaku (“explanation by annota-
tion”) as the equivalent of Elze’s Auslesung (“explanation, exegesis”),
arguing that Elze distinguished between a linguistic aspect (study of
lexicon, grammar, style, and meter), and a content aspect of exegetical
activity. The latter was supposed to start once the linguistic analysis
was completed, so as to proceed from the parts to an understanding
of the meaning of the whole.48
Still quoting from Elze, Hisamatsu defines “textual criticism” as
what Boeckh called “the criticism of authenticity and inauthenticity”
(“Die Kritik des Echten und Unechten”). Such a critical enterprise is
aimed at restoring the “original text” from the accretions resulting
from the process of the text’s circulation, by procedures of recensio
(the comparison of copies and their relationship to printed texts) and
emendatio (restoration of lost words and sentences in the text). This
activity requires the comparison of all available circulating editions
(Jp. rufubon) and variants (Jp. ihon) as well as detailed studies of the
vocabulary, grammar, style, and prosody used in those texts. The phys-
ical restoration of a text is also part of “textual criticism,” inasmuch as
a text can be damaged by (1) external factors such as decay or worms,
(2) mistakes on the part of a copyist, and (3) a wrong ordering of parts
of the text as a result of a faulty transcription.49
“Aesthetic criticism” implies a comparison of the text with other
texts belonging to the same genre and, as a result, a positioning of the
47
I have been unable to locate this division in Paul’s work. It appears instead in
Elze’s Grundriss der englischen Philologie, pp. 82–85, which is most probably Hisa-
matsu’s source.
48
Hisamatsu, Keichū den, pp. 254–255; Elze, Grundriss der englischen Philologie,
pp. 41–49.
49
pp. 60–74.
text within the hierarchy of literary history. This requires a knowledge

of the historical circumstances surrounding the work and its author.50
In conclusion, Hisamatsu rehearses the notion that the purpose of
philology is to explain and clarify the “essential flow of cultural devel-
opments.” Quoting again from Elze, Hisamatsu states that “the con-
sciousness and thought of a people which are implicitly powerful in
that people’s political and cultural history, are expressed in literature
in a direct and explicit manner.” Literary history conveys the spiritual
characteristics of a people which vary with time, and are contingent
upon the specificity of a place’s climate and of a people’s racial char-
acteristics.51 This last remark will later take Hisamatsu into an analysis
of literature based on the notion of “geographic climate” ( fūdo).52
Hisamatsu does not take issue with the “cultural-history-oriented”
approach of German philology. The only reservation expressed in
the article concerns the order of the three major steps of philologi-
cal activities, (1) chūshaku (“explanation by annotation”), (2) “tex-
tual criticism,” and (3) “aesthetic criticism;” Hisamatsu argues that
“explanation by annotation” should actually follow the activity of
“textual criticism.” Moreover, he notices a major discrepancy between
textual and aesthetic criticism—a fact that must be due to the differ-
ence between Elze and Hisamatsu’s interpretations of “aesthetic criti-
cism.” Hisamatsu perceives “textual criticism” to be much closer to
the exegetical enterprise of annotation, so that he seems to privilege
the following sequence: “bibliographical studies” (shoshigaku kenkyū),
“studies on text-critique” (honbun hihyōteki kenkyū), “annotations”
(chūshakuteki kenkyū), “critical studies” (hihyōteki kenkyū), “linguistic
studies” (gengoteki kenkyū), and “cultural studies” (bunkateki kenkyū).
He calls the first three “basic studies” (kisoteki kenkyū) and the latter
three “essential studies” (honshitsuteki kenkyū), arguing that they all
appear in some form in the works of Keichū (1640–1701), the forerun-
ner of the Nativist movement.53
In the case of Hisamatsu the mediation of German scholarship in the
molding of his theoretical framework was double layered inasmuch
50
pp. 82–85.
51
Hisamatsu, Keichū den, p. 258; Elze, Grundriss der englischen Philologie, p. 232.
52
See, for example, Hisamatsu, Kokubungaku (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai,
1954).
53
Hisamatsu, Keichū den, pp. 258–259.
as, in addition to the impact that the “philological school” had on his
work, he also turned to the work of aestheticians such as Ōnishi Yoshi-
nori (1888–1959) and Okazaki Yoshie (1892–1982), whose scholarship
was heavily influenced by the vocabulary of German idealism and phe-
nomenology. We see it, for example, in articles such as “The Types
of Beauty in Ancient Japanese Literature” (“Nihon kodai bungaku ni
okeru bi no ruikei,” 1953) in which “literary beauty” is formalized
according to Japanese aesthetic categories which are actually adapta-
tions of Western discourses on beauty. Here we see the impasse that
resulted from an encounter between the philological and the aesthetic
methods, given the antithetical nature of the two approaches, the first
one being historical, the second, philosophical. The method employed
by aestheticians in bracketing history and reducing the multiplicity of
becoming to the alleged universality of an idea is apparent in Hisa-
matsu’s description of Japanese literary history in terms of the cat-
egories of “humor,” “sublimity” (sōbi), and “elegance” (yūbi) which
he consistently applied to the five major historical ages of Japan: the
“ancient period” (jōdai/Nara period), “middle antiquity” (chūko/
Heian period), “the medieval period” (chūsei/Kamakura and Muro-
machi periods), “the early modern period” (kinsei/Edo period), and
“the modern period” (kindai/Meiji period). By finding for each epoch
an aesthetic category that would match the three major categories—
choku, okashi, mushin, kokkei being subcategories of humor; mei,
taketakashi, yūgen, sabi/karumi, shajitsu being examples of sublim-
ity; and sei, aware, ushin, sui/tsū/iki, rōman belonging to elegance—
Hisamatsu struggled to mediate the gap between history and philoso-
phy by “showing historical patterns in Japanese aesthetics.54
The Philosophy of Literature
No one spoke out more than Okazaki Yoshie (1892–1982) against

what he considered to be the stagnation in the field of classical studies.
A philological approach to this field, in his opinion, was excessively
restrictive in that it reduced this artistic field to the positivism of the
54
For a summary in English of Hisamatsu’s work in aesthetics see, Hisamatsu,
The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural
Studies, 1963). The quotation in question comes from p. 8.
natural sciences (shizen kagaku). In an article originally published in

1920 in the Kokugakuin zasshi—the same journal in which Haga Yaichi
had presented his philological program twenty years earlier—Okazaki
criticized the tendency towards specialization embraced by scholars
of classical literature, particularly their propensity for considering the
activities of textual criticism and annotation to be the main purpose of
the study of the classical literary arts (koten bungei kenkyū). According
to Okazaki, professional scholars have lost the intuition and insight
shown by writers and poets of the Meiji and Taishō periods in critiqu-
ing and appreciating literary texts. He urged, however, to combine
the critical acumen of the Meiji artists with the professional scholars’
ability to conceive of the works in terms of their structure, since fresh
insights can be marred by the fragmentariness of opinions that are
destined to remain simple impressions unless organized into logical
and scientific patterns.55
Okazaki’s reaction to the philological leanings of the University of
Tokyo can also be seen by his resignation in December 1919 from
both that university and the Kokugakuin University, where he had
been employed as a lecturer (kōshi) of the history of Japanese classical
literature since September of the same year. He returned to his home
village of Kōchi in the island of Shikoku, after extending his “farewell
to the world of national literature.”56
The opening of the field of literature to an approach informed by
aesthetics was elicited by the unusual training that Okazaki received
as a student at the University of Tokyo, where he was instructed by
the philologist Haga Yaichi and the aesthetician Ōtsuka Yasuji (1868–
1931). The title of his B.A. thesis, “Symbolic Mood in Japanese Poetry”
(“Nihon shika no kibun shōchō,” 1917), attests to the new angle from
which Okazaki intended to analyze the Japanese literary tradition.
Kibun shōchō (“symbolic mood”) was actually the Japanese translation
of the German term Stimmungssymbolik as this word was employed
55
The article, entitled “Kobungaku no shinkenkyū (“A New Study of Ancient
Literature”) and published in the April 1920 issue of Kokugakuin zasshi, was later
revised, retitled “Koten bungei kenkyū no taido” (“Attitudes Towards the Study of the
Ancient Literary Arts”), and included in Okazaki’s Nihon bungeigaku (The Science of
the Japanese Literary Arts, 1935). For an overview of this article, and for biographical
information on Okazaki, I am indebted to Kikuta Shigeo, “Okazaki Yoshie: Nihon
bungeigaku no teishō” (“Okazaki Yoshie: An Advocate of the Science of the Japanese
Literary Arts”). In Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kanshō 57:8 (August 1992), p. 124.
56
Ibid., p. 124.
by the aesthetician Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930) in his System of Aes-

thetics (Das System der Ästhetik, 1905–1914) to indicate the feelings
of objects which usually do not possess any feeling and yet are able to
find expression as living beings through aesthetic appreciation.57
Okazaki’s interest in issues related to aesthetics was further nurtured
by his appointment to Tōhoku University in 1923 where he lectured
on classical Japanese literature, surrounded by outstanding scholars
such as the English literature specialist Doi Kōchi (1886–1979), the
scholar of German literature Komiya Toyotaka (1884–1966), the lin-
guist Yamada Yoshio (1873–1958), the aesthetician Abe Jirō (1883–
1959), the intellectual historian Muraoka Tsunetsugu (1884–1946),
the Chinese literature specialist Aoki Masaru (1890–1961), and the art
historian Kojima Kikuo (1887–1950).
Kikuta Shigeo argues that the popularity in Japan of the Literatur-
wissenschaft (bungeigaku or “science of literature”) method spread at
the beginning of the Shōwa period as a reaction to the philological
approach taken by literary scholars during the Meiji period, and as a
result of the introduction from Germany of publications dealing with
this kind of methodology. The translation of the following books into
Japanese had a major impact in this area: Werner Mahrholz’s (1889–
1930) Literargeschichte und Literarwissenschaft (Literary History and
Literary Science, 1923), which was translated in 1930, and the articles
included in Emil Ermatinger’s (1873–1953) Philosophie der Literatur-
wissenschaft (The Philosophy of Literary Science, 1930), which appeared
in Japanese in 1932–33.58
Among scholars of Japanese literature, Kaito Matsuzō (1878–1952)
was among the very first to apply the notion of phenomenology to
the analysis of literary texts, insisting on the importance of formalis-
tic issues.59 Kazamaki Keijirō (1902–1960) attacked as too facile the
appreciation of the classics provided by scholars of the philological
school, advocating instead the importance of the intrinsic value of a
text and the need for adequate studies to clarify this value.60 In 1934
the journal Bungaku (Literature) dedicated the entire October issue to
57
Takeuchi Toshio, Bigaku jiten (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1961), pp. 75–77.
58
Kikuta Shigeo, “Okazaki Yoshie: Nihon bungeigaku no teishō,” p. 125.
59
Kaito Matsuzō, Nihon bungaku kenkyū hōhō: jō (Research Methods in the Study
of Japanese Literature, 1) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1931), and his Bungaku riron no
kenkyū (A Study of Literary Theory) (Tokyo: Furōkaku Shobō, 1932).
60
Kazamaki Keijirō, “Nihon bungeigaku no hassei” (“The Genesis of Japan’s Liter-
ary Science”). In Kokubungakushi (October–November 1931).
the topic of “Japan’s literary science” (Nihon bungeigaku), in which

Okazaki Yoshie presented his specific brand of analysis based on
aesthetic inquiries into the formalistic aspects of literary texts—a brand
whose originality is attested by the fact that it came to be known as
“the Okazaki literary science” (Okazaki bungeigaku).61
Okazaki began his major work on the subject, Bungeigaku (The
Science of the Literary Arts, 1935) by specifying a need to approach
the field of literature from a metalinguistic perspective. In order to
transform literary studies into a science, scholars had to find a way to
create a scientific method that would study literature in the same way
that the physical sciences questioned nature. A “science of literature”
(bungakugaku) had to be formulated, starting with the designation of
a name for it. According to Okazaki, the awkwardness of the double
sound/character gaku (“science”) in bungakugaku justified the use of
the word bungeigaku instead, which well expressed the idea of a science
(gaku) that was responsible for the study not just of “literature” (bun-
gaku) but of all the “literary arts” (bungei).62
Okazaki described literature as one of the arts whose essence was
“beauty” (bi) and whose expression made itself visible as form (yōshiki).
He argued that in addition to the need to pursue the study of literature
from a philological perspective that was basically grounded in histori-
cal research, a different approach was needed in order to examine cat-
egories of universal validity whose use was not restricted to any specific
literary tradition, such as, for example, the notion of the “literariness”
(bungeisei) that made a text literary. In the case of the Japanese literary
tradition, however, the universal category of “literariness” that made
the work accessible to everyone all over the world, also had a specific
characteristic that distinguished the local literary product from non-
Japanese works. Okazaki called such a distinctive pattern “the form
of the Japanese literary arts” (Nihon bungei yōshiki)—a form that was
allegedly common to all artistic expressions produced in Japan.63
While the fields of “aesthetics” (bigaku) and of “the science of art”
(bijutsugaku) were mainly entrusted with the “general” (ippan) aspects
61
Okazaki’s article, originally entitled “Nihon bungeigaku no juritsu ni tsuite” (“On
the Establishment of Japan’s Literary Science”), was retitled “Nihon bungeigaku juritsu
no konkyo” (“The Foundation of the Establishment of Japans Literary Science”) and
used as the first chapter of his Nihon bungeigaku.
62
Okazaki Yoshie, Bungeigaku, pp. 4–5.
63
Ibid., pp. 14–15.
of universal categories, the field of the “science of the literary arts”

(bungeigaku) confronted the specificity of the literary product. Since
the universal notion of beauty resides within the works of individual
writers, Okazaki argued, the work of the aesthetician was to focus on
beauty itself, while the scholars of bungeigaku were invited to ana-
lyze the manifestations of beauty from within concrete and specific
examples. The latter played the role of mediators between the his-
torian and the philosopher, insofar as they needed to pay attention
to the historicity of the specific and individual characteristics, from
within which originated the “universal/specific” artistic form. Such
historicity was found in the racial and cultural specificity of individual
peoples (minzoku), who are all endowed with specific and distinguish-
ing “racial forms” (minzokuteki yōshiki). These, in turn, were the prod-
ucts of several inner forms, including geographical, social, historical,
and individual forms as they found expression in the specifically Japa-
nese version of the literary arts (Nihon bungeigaku).64
Okazaki was well aware of the potential for contradiction that was
found in the formula Nihon bungeigaku in which the particular (Nihon
or Japan) and the universal (gaku or science) struggled for recogni-
tion. He proposed a synthesis of the two by collapsing specificity and
universality into one single science (ikka no gaku), a middle ground
between history and epistemology, between “Japan’s literary arts sci-
ence” (Nihon no bungeigaku) and “the science of the Japanese literary
arts” (Nihon bungei no gaku). The result was what Okazaki called “the
grasping of the unified aesthetic meaning” (tōittentaru biteki igi no
haaku) of the literary work—a task that helped distinguish the activity
of the “literary scientist” from that of the literary historian.65
Okazaki argued that spirit was a “form” (yōshiki) of human life
and that “beauty” (bi) was a form of the spirit. Art (geijutsu) was
“the phenomenalization of the aesthetic spirit” (biteki seishin no jit-
sugen) through language, in whose imaginative power beauty resided.
He defined form as “the essence that is perceived as specificity in its
external manifestations, and as generality in its interiority.” Forms,
in Okazaki’s vocabulary, were manifestations of life in the progres-
64
Ibid., pp. 16–18.
65
Ibid., pp. 22–29. See also Okazaki’s article “Bungei yōshiki no honshitsu” (“The
Essence of the Forms of the Literary Arts”), originally published in the January–March
1938 issue of Bungaku, and later included in his Nihon bungei no yōshiki (The Forms
of Japan’s Literary Arts, 1939) with the revised title, “Yōshiki ron” (“Formalism”).
sive shapes of spirit (seishin), beauty (bi), the arts (geijutsu), and the
literary arts (bungei) which, in turn, manifested themselves in smaller
forms such as the lyrical (jōjōteki), the narrative (jojiteki), and the dra-
matic (gikyokuteki) forms.66
Okazaki distinguished “external forms” (gaibu shoyōshiki gun) cen-
tered around the notions of “space” (tokoro), “person” (hito), and
“time” (toki), from “internal forms” (naibu shoyōshiki gun) such as
waka, renga, haikai, and all that distinguishes formally the Japanese
literary production from the non-Japanese. He argued that research
related to the former categories—historical analyses of authorship,
time and place of composition, etc.—were preparatory stages towards
the realization of the actual goal of bungeigaku, which was essentially a
clarification of the “aesthetic styles of representation” (biteki hyōgentai)
that were specifically present in Japanese works. By analyzing histori-
cally the changes in style ( fūtei), Okazaki believed that it was possible
to recover what was specifically local (Nihonfū). Okazaki identified
this “local artistic will” with the notion of “way” (michi), which was
brought into being, he argued, by the styles as these were expressed
as “artistic forms” (bungeiteki shoyōshiki). The study of specific styles
was entrusted with the recovery of the general style that Okazaki per-
ceived to be common to the entire local artistic production, a “non
oppositional style.”67
Kikuta Shigeo has noticed how indebted to Okazaki’s theory of
“non-opposition” is the work of the contemporary scholar of classi-
cal Japanese literature Konishi Jin’ichi (1915–2007), who applied it to
the theoretical introduction to his monumental History of the Japanese
Literary Arts (Nihon bungeishi, 1985).68
66
See the chapter “Gaku no taishō to shite mitaru Nihon bungei” (“The Japanese
Literary Arts as Objects of Science”) in Nihon bungeigaku, especially pp. 43–47.
67
Ibid., pp. 56–58.
68
Konishi argues that a major characteristic of Japanese literature is the lack of
“stark oppositions” such as “1) the lack of an opponent and systematic oppositions;
2) the lack of distinction between the human and the natural; 3) the nonexistence of
class barriers in literary kinds; 4) the tendency to harmonize the individual with the
group; 5) the relation of mutual dependence between author and audience.” Jinichi
Konishi, A History of Japanese Literature, 1: The Archaic and Ancient Ages. Trans. by
Aileen Gatten and Nicholas Teele (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 12.
The original text appears in Konishi’s chapter “Taishō to shite no Nihon bungei” (“The
Japanese Literary Arts as Object”), in his Nihon bungei shi (A History of the Japanese
Literary Arts) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1985), pp. 35–36. For Kikuta’s remarks, see Kikuta
Shigeo, “Okazaki Yoshie: Nihon bungeigaku no teishō,” p. 127.
A strong polarization between the “philological” (kokubungaku)

and “aesthetic” (Nihon bungeigaku) approaches took place as a result
of disparate notions of “history” held by the participants in the debate.
Orthodox literary historians trained in academies where truth was
mainly equated with historical reliability were—and still remain to this
day—skeptical about the possibility of creating philosophy out of liter-
ary texts. Even the supporters of bungeigaku disagreed on the degree
to which a scholar should be allowed to indulge in poetic license. Ishi-
yama Tetsurō (1888–1945), for example, a professor of Japanese clas-
sical literature at Hokkaidō Imperial University who wrote, in 1929,
the first book on the notion of bungeigaku, was quite critical of what
he perceived to be Okazaki’s lack of attention to the historicity and
social implications of the literary arts. We must not forget that Ishi-
yama had brought aesthetics into “national literature” by remarking in
his An Outline of the Science of Literature (Bungeigaku gaisetsu, 1929)
that “the literary arts are the aesthetic expression of human conscious-
ness through language.”69 Ishiyama voiced his reservations towards
“the Okazaki literary science” in an article that he wrote in 1936 as
a response to the publication in the previous year of Okazaki’s Nihon
bungeigaku.70
Ishiyama stressed the concreteness of the artistic product that by
being immersed in historical circumstances can never be perceived as
a simply abstract, formal object. According to Ishiyama, the specific-
ity of the characteristics of the Japanese literary arts requires scholars
to pursue their research along the lines traced by the “philologists,”
thus paying attention to all the works of a specific author and a spe-
cific period, as well as to comparisons of works written in different
periods.71 Ishiyama was dubious as to Okazaki’s success in fulfilling
the promised union of “the historical and logical approaches,” arguing
that Okazaki wrongly favored a “psychological aesthetics” (shinriga-
kuteki bigaku) of an idealistic nature that neglects history in the treat-
ment of the literary arts.72 Ishiyama criticized Okazaki’s embracing a
metaphysical system that positions the object of “the science of litera-
69
Ishiyama Tetsurō, Bungeigaku gaisetsu (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1929). Quoted in
Nihon kindai bungaku daijiten (Dictionary of Modern Japanese Literature) (Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1984), p. 117.
70
Ishiyama Tetsurō, “Bungeigaku to Nihon bungeigaku,” Kokugo to kokubungaku
13:12 (1936), pp. 1–13.
71
Ibid., pp. 4–5.
72
Ibid., pp. 7–8.
ture” in an allegedly abstract idea called “the Japanese literary arts”

(Nihon bungei) which would encompass different works from different
historical periods. Okazaki called this idea “literariness” (bungeisei),
one which found expression in what he labeled “Japan’s artistic form”
(Nihon bungei yōshiki). The latter provided a common ground shared
by all artistic works produced in Japan that, while giving a distinctive
shape to the work, also allowed the recognition of that work as part
of a specific canon which was made understandable by the universal
character of form. Being posited as a transcendental a priori, Okazaki’s
paradoxical notion of form—Ishiyama continues—dehistoricizes the
representation of a product that is essentially historical, imposing onto
it “from above” (Aesthetik vom oben or “aesthetics from above”) a
preestabhshed formal scheme. Ishiyama called Okazaki’s metaphysics
“medieval theology” (chūseiteki shingaku). Although Ishiyama did not
deny the need for different approaches where the study of history and
the study of bungeigaku were concerned—a topic on which he agreed
with Okazaki—he stressed the need for a phenomenological examina-
tion of the latter, a topic which deserves further study.73
73
Ibid., pp. 9–11.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE POETRY OF AIZU YAICHI
The eighteenth century philologist Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801)

points out that “Yamato” was originally the name of a province
(Yamato no kuni) in what is known today as the Nara basin of the
Kansai region. Only after the mythical Emperor Jinmu (660–585 B.C.)
established his capital in Kashiwara no Miya and other emperors fol-
lowed suite in establishing their capitals in the Yamato province, did
Yamato come to be used as a general name for the whole country.1
The relationship established between Jinmu, the alleged first human
emperor, and Yamato was sufficient to endow this region with a myth-
ical aura; and it made Yamato the cradle of Japanese culture. Many
classical texts could easily be summoned as proof of the sacredness of
Yamato, beginning with the eighth-century Nihon Shoki (Chronicles
of Japan, 720), which takes the construction of the Kashiwara capital
in Yamato (Yamato no kuni Kashiwara no Miya) to mark the end
of a period of uncertainty and unsettledness in Japanese history. In
other words, ancient records set up Yamato as the original signifier
of political and social fullness (culture). Subsequent emperors, such
as Shōmu (701–756), would issue edicts to find appropriate Chinese
characters for writing the name “Yamato,” which by then had become
the sign for the whole country, as the Shoku Nihongi (Chronicles of
Japan, Continued, 797) attests. This information was readily available
to eighteenth-century readers of the Yamato Meisho Zue (Illustrated
Description of Illustrious Places in Yamato), a guide to the Yamato
region by Uemura Ugen (d. 1782) and Akisato Ritō (fl. 1780–1814),
which begins with a section on the Yamato province (Yamato no
kuni). In this section readers could also find an etymological expla-
nation of the name Yamato, based on Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714)’s
The central ideas of this essay were presented on July 19, 2005, at Kobe College,
Kobe, Japan, and on April 21, 2006, at the International Symposium “The Making of
an Ancient Capital: Nara,” University of California, Los Angeles. The author wishes
to thank Professor Hamashita Masahiro for his kind invitation to Kobe and for his
comments.
1
Norinaga makes these remarks in Isonokami no Sasamegoto (Poetic Whisperings,
1763). Hino Tatsuo, ed., Motoori Norinaga Shū, SNKS 60 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1982),
pp. 353–354.
452 chapter twenty-two
Nihon Shakumyō (Japanese Etymologies, 1699), according to which

Yamato ጊᄖ literally means “outside the mountains.” This reading of
the name Yamato referred, again, to the mythical times of Emperor
Jinmu, who marched westward from Hyūga, proceeded from Naniwa
to Hirakata, crossed the Ikoma Mountain, and entered Yamato. The
place was allegedly named after the fact that it was located “outside”
(to ᄖ) the Ikoma “mountain” (yama ጊ). North of the Ikoma Moun-
tain stood the Yamashiro province ጊ⢛, which literally means “at the
back of the mountain.” These etymological explanations of the Yamato
(Nara) and Yamashiro (Kyōto) provinces ran parallel to the naming
of the Kawachi region ᴡౝ (Ōsaka)—a name which literally means,
“within the river.” Indeed, Kawachi is the name of the province sur-
rounded by the Yodo River.2
It is no wonder that Aizu Yaichi (1881–1956), also known by the
pen name Shūsō Dōjin, whose love for Greek culture was nurtured by
the Romantic bent of his teacher Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), would
turn to the Yamato region in his frantic search for the origins of Japa-
nese culture. Hearn was born in Greece of Greek and British parents;
with Hearn Aizu read the poetry of George Byron (1788–1824), who
had volunteered as soldier in the Greek war of independence. In 1920
Aizu founded the Greek Society of Japan (Nihon Girisha Gakkai),
moved by the belief that “at the height of Greek civilization, every-
thing was perfectly complete and full of life in itself.”3 The question
for Aizu was whether an age of cultural fullness could be located in
Japan. The answer came from the Yamato region which provided Aizu
the means to experience Greece in Japan. A man born in the northern
province of Echigo (Niigata) and educated at Waseda University in
Tokyo, Aizu made his first trip to the Yamato province in 1908, at
the age of twenty-eight. He was shocked by the state of disrepair in
which he found temples and Buddhist statues, as he sang in twenty-
one poems titled Saiyū Eisō (Leaves of Grass on my Western Journey).
He visited the ancient capital Nara again in 1920 and 1921, continu-
ing to add poems to a collection which he published in December
1924 as Nankyō Shinshō (New Songs from the Southern Capital). Later
2
Uemura Ugen and Akisato Ritō, Yamato Meisho Zue (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Meisho
Zue Kankōkai, 1919), pp. 1–8. For Ekiken’s explanation, see Ekiken Zenhsū 1 (Tokyo:
Kokusho Kankōkai, 1973), pp. 21–22.
3
Michael F. Marra, ed., A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (Honolulu: Uni-
versity of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), p. 139.
the poetry of aizu yaichi 453
he embarked upon the study of art in the Nara period, publishing at

his own expense Nankyō Yoshō (Additional Songs from the Southern
Capital) in 1933. In 1940 he collected all his poems (three-hundred
and thirty) in an anthology titled Rokumeishū (The Deer’s Cry). Two
years later Aizu published a series of essays, Konsai Zuihitsu (1942),
which can be considered a commentary on his poetic anthology. In
1953 he published a self-annotated edition of his poetry, titled Jichū
Rokumeishū (Self-Annotated Deer’s Cries), the last book to appear
prior to Aizu’s death in November 1956. After his death, commen-
taries of two other poetic collections, Jichū Sankōshū (Self-Annotated
Mountain Light) and Jichū Kantōshū (Self-Annotated Cold Lamps),
were published in Aizu’s collected works (Aizu Yaichi Zenshū).
The purpose of the present translation is to provide readers with a
poetic guide to the sites in the Yamato province, based on the poems
Aizu wrote during his numerous trips to Nara, where he often took his
students from Waseda University. With regard to the order of the sites
visited in Nara and the Nara basin, I followed the same trajectory that
Aizu indicated in Nankyō Shinshō. I added poems from other collec-
tions as well, in order to give readers a better sense of Aizu’s description
of the major holy sites to which he refers in his poetry. This book can
be considered Aizu’s own description of illustrious places in Yamato,
in the footsteps of the Yamato Meisho Zue which I already mentioned,
and the Yamato Meisho Waka Shū (A Poetic Collection on Illustrious
Places in Yamato, 1779) attributed to the old man from Ikaruga Nagao
Keifuku, in which all major spots in Yamato are described with the aid
of ancient poems.4 Unlike many contemporary Japanese poets who
tried to break free from traditional meters, dictions, and styles, Aizu
used the classical style of waka (31-syllable poem) all through his col-
lection. In the style and diction of ancient poetry, especially the poetry
of the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, 759) compiled
during the Nara period, Aizu found a world of linguistic order which
stood in stark contrast to the chaotic state of disrepair in which the
monuments of the ancient capital laid. For Aizu the sound of the past
could only be conveyed by the Yamato language (Yamato kotoba)—
a language made of a limited number of words, each of which had a
variety of meanings. Not a single Chinese character appears in Aizu’s
4
See, Nara-ken Shiryō Kankōkai, ed., Yamato Meisho Waka Shū, Yamato Shi,
Nihon Sōkoku Fudoki (Nara: Toyosumi Shoten, 1978).
poetry, as a result of his conscious effort never to close off the polyph-
ony of Japan’s ancient language within the limits of monograms.
Aizu explains his poetics in an essay, “Uta no Kotoba” (The Lan-
guage of Songs), written on March 16, 1942. He immediately acknowl-
edges his indebtedness to the language of the Man’yōshū, although
he takes issue with Shakuchōkū (Orikuchi Shinobu, 1887–1953), who
had labeled Aizu’s poetry “Yakamochi soybean paste” (Yakamochi-
miso), in reference to the revered Man’yō poet Ōtomo no Yakamochi
(717?–785). Aizu was impressed by the way the Man’yō poets felt, and
by their attitude towards language, especially their ability to make
sound reverberate in their poems. However, this reverence should not
be assumed to be a simple repetition of ancient expressions, since this
attitude would ignore the sense of contemporaneity that the Man’yō
poets were able to create. They did not hesitate to include in their
vocabulary expressions that at the time were simply loanwords from
alien cultures such as, for example, “tera” (temple), or “Hotoke” (Bud-
dha), or “tō” (pagoda). Rather than repeating vocabulary in a trite
manner, Aizu’s poetry attempts to reproduce the spirit and attitude
that he found in the poetry of the Man’yōshū. Aizu believed that this
could be accomplished by using expressions found in ancient poetry,
as long as the poet found in these expressions new meaning which
took into account the changes that language undergoes though the
centuries. As an example, Aizu mentions the criticism he received for
using the word “kakafuri” with a different meaning from the one codi-
fied in the Man’yōshū. This word originally meant “crown,” and was
never associated with women in the Man’yōshū. Aizu used it with ref-
erence to peasant women cutting rice in the dry fields. He thought that
this word would convey perfectly the image of the cloth tied around
the women’s cheeks—a popular custom among farmers who needed a
facecloth to wipe off their sweat. After all, he was observing this scene
on his way to Nara, the ancient capital (poem 3):
Wasada karu As I was looking
Otomegatomo no At the white headbands
Kakafuri no Worn by the maidens
Shiroki o mitsutsu Who were cutting the fast-ripening rice,
Michi Nara ni iru The road turned towards Nara.
This is what Aizu meant by “Man’yō spirit:” not to refer to specialized
dictionaries in order to use language the way it was used over a thou-
sand years ago, but to enrich the current language with expressions
rooted in a thousand-year long history. Such a view claims that the

present cannot exist apart from the past, in the same way that the past
can only be recreated in the present.5
Aizu again confirmed the co-presence of past and present in the
poetic act in the essay “Kaiko no Taido” (Nostalgic Attitude), writ-
ten on August 16, 1941. Here he introduces comments made by two
friends on his poetry. The first calls Aizu’s poems “hymns of ruins,”
implying that, had Aizu lived during the Nara period, he would have
been unable to be a poet. According to this friend, Aizu was drawn
to poetry by the absence of the present dimension that was lost a
long time ago. On the other hand, the second friend made exactly
the opposite comment, saying that Aizu’s poetic attitude was actually
“restorationist”—the reflection of many years of archeological stud-
ies that drove him to recreate the past in the present. Aizu admits
his fascination with the desolation of the ancient capital, Nara. How-
ever, at the same time, he points out that this fascination comes from
a past that he tries to portray in the present in its original form. In
other words, the singer of the hymns of ruins chases after the dream
of restoring the past in the present. Both attitudes are inseparable from
each other. As an example of his restorationist efforts, Aizu quotes the
following poem (poem 35), in which he reminds readers that in the
past Buddhist statues were not as colorless and ancient-looking as they
look today:
Asetaru o People say that
hito wa yoshi tou Faded colors are good,
Binbaka no But the mouth of the Buddha
Hotoke no kuchi wa Should glow red,
Moyubeki mono o Like an apple.6
With regard to the sense of decay conveyed by his poetry, Aizu indi-
cates that many Man’yō poets manifested the same attitude when sing-
ing the old capitals of Asuka, Shiga, Kuni, and Nara. He gives the
example of Takechi no Kurohito who wrote the following song while
being taken by sadness at the thought of the ancient capital Shiga in
the Ōmi province:
5
Konsai Zuihitsu, in Aizu Yaichi Zenshū, 7 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1982),
pp. 246–253.
6
Aizu also quotes Kannon’s red lips of poem 153 and the Buddhas embroidered on
the flags of poem 89.
Inishie no Am I a man
Hito ni ware are ya From the past?
Sasanami no So sad I am when I look
Furuki miyako o At the ancient capital
Mireba kanashiki By the small waves.7
The Man’yō poets are reminders of the intensity of the grief felt at
the time when the capital was moved to a different site, leaving their
“hometown” to become prey to “deep grasses.” The depth of their
sorrow derives from the fact that they witnessed the actual process
undergone by the capitals in a few years of abandonment. Kakinomoto
no Hitomaro was about fifty years old when the capital was moved
from Shiga to Asuka. He was an eye-witness to the state of disrepair
into which the Shiga palace fell. In Aizu’s case, twelve-hundred years
had passed since Nara was discarded. And yet, the contemporary poet
could rely on centuries of written knowledge on ancient sites that were
unavailable to the ancient poets, not to mention standing ruins which
continue to be living reminders of past glories. These were all sources
of inspiration and encouragement for poets not to let their atten-
tion be exhausted by the boring details of daily reality, in which Aizu
indicates most Japanese contemporary poets seemed to be absorbed.
Rather than wondering whether Aizu would have been a poet had he
lived in the Nara period, we should ask what kind of poetry Hitomaro
and Kurohito would have written, had they lived in the present age.
Most probably, just like Aizu, they would have been moved by the
state of disrepair in which the temples of the Asuka and Nara periods
were kept at the beginning of the twentieth century.8
Aizu’s journey begins with a city, Nara, which is known as the first
Japanese example of a stable capital: a capital which would continue to
be the site of government even after the death of the emperor. In Nara
eight emperors held the throne between 710 and 784 (from Empress
Genmei to Emperor Kanmu), until the imperial palace was moved first
to Nagaoka in 784 and then to Heian (Kyōto) ten years later. By the
beginning of the ninth century Nara had become the discarded capi-
tal, a far cry from the splendors of the days when Emperor Shōmu
(r. 724–749) had made Nara a center of the Buddhist faith, memorial-
ized with the construction of the majestic Tōdaiji temple. For Emperor
7
Man’yōshū 1:32. Aizu also quotes Man’yōshū 1:33, 1:305, and Kakinomoto no
Hitomaro’s elegy for the desolate capital Ōtsu (Man’yōshū 1:29).
8
Konsai Zuihitsu, pp. 191–198.
Heizei (r. 806–809), who ruled from Kyōto and was known as the
Nara Emperor, Nara was already an object of longing, the “native
place” ( furusato; lit., “the old village”), which would eventually grow
to become the native place of an entire nation. He clearly stated this in
a poem included in the imperial anthology Kokinshū (Poems Ancient
and Modern, 905):
Furusato to Even in the capital Nara
Narinishi Nara no That has become
Miyako ni mo An old village,
Iro wa kawarazu The cherry trees bloom,
Hana wa sakikeri Their colors unchanged.9
The name Nara allegedly means “flat.” At least, this was a popular
etymology in the Edo period—an etymology based on an entry from
the Nihon Shoki (tenth year of the reign of Emperor Sujin, 88 B.C.).
In an attempt to overthrow the emperor and to take command over
the land, Take Haniyasuhiko and his wife Atahime led an offensive
from the Yamashiro province. The imperial army gathered on the
Nara Mountain, trampling on and “leveling” (narasu) all the grasses
and bushes around. As a result, the place came to be known as Nara,
“the leveled area,” which explains why the name is also written with
the characters Heijō ᐔၔ, “flat capital.”10 This story was also used to
9
Kokinshū 2:90, preceded by the headnote, “A poem composed by the Nara
Emperor.” The expression “Nara no furusato” (Nara, the old town) already appears
in the Man’yōshū, with reference to the Heijō Imperial Palace when an attempt was
made in 740 to transfer the site of the Heijō capital to the new Kuni capital. All
courtiers with the fifth rank and above were prohibited from living in the old Heijō
site. Although the plan was abandoned three years later for lack of funds, poets such
as Ōtomo no Yakamochi (see Man’yōshū 6:1044–1046) and Yamabe no Akahito
mourned the state of disrepair in which the Heijō site had fallen in a few years. See,
for example, the following poem by Akahito, who is staying alone in his old house in
Heijō (Man’yōshū 17:3919):
Aoniyoshi Although the capital Nara
Nara no miyako wa Of the blue-dark clay
Furinuredo Has become old and desolate,
Moto hototogisu It is not as if
Nakazu aranaku ni The cuckoo bird is not crying, like in the past.
10
This etymology appears in Kaibara Ekiken’s Nihon Shakumyō, p. 25, and Yamato
Meisho Zue, p. 8. Poets also associated Nara with the character “nara” ᬰ (oak-tree)—
a character which was also used to indicate the capital. See, for example, the following
poem by Priest Kōchō (d. 1296) (Shoku Shūishū 7:542):
Nara no ha no I wish the cuckoo bird
Na ni ou miya no Singing on the leaves of the nara oaks,
Hototogisu Of which the capital bears the same name,
explain the epithet (makura-kotoba) “aoniyoshi,” which was commonly

associated with Nara in ancient poetry and which Aizu used in poem
28. Before the fight against Haniyasuhiko and his wife, the imperial
army sacrificed to the deities with offerings of sake. The cup used for
the occurrence was a “blue cup” (aoshi 㕍Ↄ), so that Nara came to be
known as “Nara of the blue cup.”11 Another interpretation, currently
accepted in dictionaries of the ancient language, associates “aoniyoshi”
with the clay (aoni 㕍ਤ) extracted from the city’s ground, in which
case the city was sung as “Nara of the blue-dark clay.” The Man’yōshū
records eleven poems in which Nara is identified with this epithet.12
In the following poem by Ono no Oyu Nara’s “blue-dark clay” is
colored further by the red from the flowers in full bloom (niou ⮍;
lit., “colored in red clay”):
Aoniyoshi In the capital of Nara
Nara no miyako wa Of the blue-dark clay,
Saku hana no The blooming flowers
Niou ga gotoku Are now at their peak,
Ima sakari nari As if red color was exuded by them.13
Yoyo ni furinishi Would tell me about ancient things

Koto kataranan That took place generation after generation.
This poem was inspired by verses that Fun’ya no Arisue wrote in response to
Emperor Seiwa’s question about the date of the composition of the Man’yōshū
(Kokinshū 18:997):
Kaminazuki This anthology of ancient words
Shigure furikeru Goes back to the time of the capital
Nara no ha no Bearing the same name as nara oaks,
Na ni ou miya no On whose leaves the showers
Furugoto zo kore Fall in the Godless Month.
11
Yamato Meisho Zue, p. 8. The Nihon Shoki states, “Take Haniyasuhiko and his
wife Atahime conspired to revolt, and arrived suddenly with an army which they had
raised. They came each by different roads, the husband by way of Yamashiro, the wife
by Ōsaka. They intended to join their forces and attack the capital. Then the Emperor
sent Isaserihiko no Mikoto to attack the force led by Atahime. He accordingly inter-
cepted it at Ōsaka and put it all to a great rout. Atahime was killed, and her troops
were all slain. Afterwards he sent Ōhiko and Hikokunifuku, the ancestor of the Wani
no Omi, towards Yamashiro to attack Take-haniyasu. Here they took sacred jars and
planted them at the top of the acclivity of Takasuki in Wani. Then they advanced with
their best troops and ascended Mount Nara and occupied it. Now when the imperial
forces were encamping, they trod level the herbs and trees, whence that mountain
was given the name of Mount Nara.” English translation by W. G. Aston, Nihongi:
Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972), Volume
One, p. 157.
12
Man’yōshū 1:80, 1:328, 2:1638, 3:3237, 4:3602, 4:3612, 4:3728, 4:3919, 4:4008.
4:4107, and 4:4223.
13
In the Man’yōshū Nara is introduced with numerous references to col-

ors, as if in an attempt to underline the bright colors of temples and
statues which characterized the urban architecture in ancient times,
following the model of a gaudy China. Emperor Shōmu sang the black
bark of trees from the Nara Mountain which adorned the bed chamber
of the house of the Minister of the Left Nagaya, where the emperor
was a guest during a party:
Aoniyoshi I never tire, no matter how long I stay,
Nara no yama naru Of the rooms made of
Kurogi mochi Black trees
Tsukureru muro wa From the mountain of Nara
Imasedo akanu kamo Of the blue-dark clay.14
Whether Nara is associated with red flowers, black trees, or white
clouds, the city becomes the poet’s palette, as the following song from
someone who was reminded of a travel poem, confirms once again:
Aoniyoshi I never tire, no matter how long I
stare at them,
Nara no miyako ni Of the white clouds
Tanabikeru Trailing in the sky
Ama no shirakumo Of the capital Nara
Miredo akanu kamo Of the blue-dark clay.15
It goes without saying that Aizu’s portrait of Nara is much less color-
ful than the one offered by Man’yōshū poets. After all, he was singing
the pain of treading upon the capital’s ruins where the young sprouts
were mixed with withered grasses (poem 141). Aizu’s sky is distant, as
removed from the viewer as the age for which he longs (poem 149).
The paintings of the Buddha that once graced the temple walls with
bright colors are gradually fading away (poem 199), and the walls are
now “misty” (poem 210). The red color sung in Aizu’s poetry usually
belongs to a sun setting on a past which only the poet can hope to
bring back to life (poem 201). The red color of the kaki that caught
Aizu’s eye on several occasions (poems 79, 84, 130, 131, and 158) is not
the lively and fresh reminder of the capital’s splendors; it is a poignant
seasonal marker of an autumn at its very end. Only in one instance is
the sky of Yamato tersely blue, like lapis-lazuli (ruri no misora) (poem
256). However, in this particular poem Aizu uses the image of the
14
15
sun-filled Mediterranean sky of southern Europe to sing what he con-

sidered to be the sunny south of Japan, the “southern capital” (nanto)
Nara.16 Here the heart and imagination of the aesthetician are at work.
As Kambayashi Tsunemichi has pointed out, Aizu, a man from snowy
northern Japan, was well aware of the longing that northern Europe-
ans such as Johann J. Winckelmann and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
felt for the blue sky of Italy and the Mediterranean Sea. Tired of the
constantly overcast sky of Niigata and the cold currents of the Japan
Sea, Aizu followed the footsteps of European travelers, in search of a
mild southern climate which he found in Japan’s Greece—the Yamato
region.17 Therefore, the poem on the “clouds rising/in the lapis blue
sky/over the way crossing the Yamato region” is more a description of
the Mediterranean sky than of the sky stretching over Nara. The latter
is distant (poems 61 and 149), clouded (poem 100), unreachable (poem
101), funereal (poem 143), misty (poem 167), autumnal (poem 176),
stormy (poem 177), hidden (poem 214), and empty (poem 226).
From the very beginning of his journey Aizu employs the vocabu-
lary of poetic tradition. He arrives in Nara by the conventional “michi”
(way, or road): “the road turned towards Nara” (poem 3). However,
as he indicates in the headnote, this was a railroad, since he wrote this
poem “on the train bound for Nara.” It was not the mountain path
whose steepness was a cause of distress for the anonymous poet of the
Man’yōshū, particularly when the mountainous road was compared
to the capital’s thoroughfares. The main avenue, the Suzaku Great
Avenue, boasted a width of seventy meters; the average major street
(ōji) was about twenty-four meters wide.
Aoniyoshi Although it is easy to proceed
Nara no ōchi wa Along the large avenues of Nara
Yukiyokedo Of the blue-dark clay,
Kono yamamichi wa This mountain path
Yukiashikarikeri Is truly tiring.18
16
In the Edo period the “left side” (sakyō) of Nara was known as “the southern capi-
tal” (nanto); the “right side” (ukyō) was called “the western capital” (saikyō). Yamato
Meisho Zue, p. 9.
17
Kambayashi Tsunemichi’s article, “The Aesthetics of Aizu Yaichi: Longing for
the South” appears in Michael F. Marra, A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics,
pp. 133–147.
18
Upon his arrival in Nara Aizu used to take shelter at the Hiyoshikan,
an inn across the Nara National Museum on Ōmiya Avenue, which
stands to this day, although it has remained closed for over twenty
years. The inn is located next to one of Nara’s major landmarks, the
Kasuga Plain, which the Yamato Meisho Zue marks as the area “east of
the large torii (in the middle of today’s Nara Park), up to the Kasuga
Shrine.”19 The name Kasuga, which literally means “a spring day,”
apparently came from a shout of joy on the part of the Sun-goddess
Amaterasu who rejoiced on a calm day of spring at the thought of hav-
ing brought peace to the land and its people. The occasion was marked
by the construction of a shrine by Kogoto-no-Musubi-no-Mikoto on
Mt. Mikasa, the mountain where the Kasuga Shrine stands. The dei-
ties worshipped at the Kasuga Shrine are all associated with the Fuji-
wara family. One of them, Takemikazuchi-no-Mikoto, is the God of
the Kashima Shrine (lit., shrine of the deer’s island) who, according
to legend, descended upon the mountain riding a white deer in 768.
Since then, the deer has been a fixture inseparable from the landscape
of Kasuga, to the point of becoming the topic for the paintings of the
Shika Mandara (The Mandala of Deer).
Kasugayama How cold
Mine no arashi ya Mt. Kasuga must be,
Samukaran Its peak in the midst of a storm!
Fumoto no nobe ni The deer are crying
Shika zo nakunaru In the fields at the foot of the mountain.20
Aizu was fascinated by the number of deer which in 1921 he found to
be “as numerous as my students at Waseda Junior High School.”21 He
was so moved by the view of the deer freely wandering all over the city
that he gave the name “The Deer’s Cries” (Rokumeishū) to his poetic
collection. In an essay titled “Two Poems on Deer,” written on August
8, 1941, Aizu addresses the issue raised by a few scholars, according
to whom he had derived the title of his collection from the poem
“The Deer’s Cry” in the section Elegantiae of the Shi Jing (Book of
Songs). Aizu responded by indicating that while the ancient Chinese
poet sang the happy and joyous cry of the deer during a banquet, he
19
Yamato Meisho Zue, p. 12.
20
This poem from Nara Hakkei (Eight Views of Nara) is quoted in Yamato Meisho
Waka Shū, p. 11.
21
Konsai Zuihitsu, p. 3.
was personally moved by the sad sounds of the deer as he was visit-
ing the city of Nara alone.22 In another essay, “Nara’s Deer,” written
on November 10, 1941, he points out that the most striking feature
of Nara for someone who visits the city for the first time is the close
encounter with deer who are not scared off by the human presence.
Although the Man’yōshū records several poems on deer, they never
portray a poet in close proximity with them. Usually, only the dis-
tant cry reaches the poet’s ear. Rather than roaming freely in the city’s
streets, in ancient times deer tried to find shelter from threatening
hunters. This is not to say that people were totally unaware of a deer’s
feature such as, for example, the short antlers of a stag in summer—an
image used as an introduction ( joshi) to the concept of “brief time” in
the following poem:
Natsu no yuku How could I forget
Oshika no tsuno no The heart of my beloved,
Tsuka no ma no Even just for a short moment,
Imo ga kokoro o As short as the antlers of a stag
Wasurete omoe ya Roaming the fields in summer?23
However, even in this instance the poet did not describe something
that was taking place in front of his eyes. During the Kamakura period
the sight of numerous deer in the city was still considered a miracu-
lous occurrence, as we can see from the Kasuga Gongen Kenki (An
Account of the Miraculous Deeds of Kasuga Gongen, 1309), which
records the gathering of several deer every day at the Kōfukuji in occa-
sion of Inmyō’s reading of the holy scriptures, as well as the gathering
of thirty deer at the Tōdaiji in 1203, at the time of Myōe Shōnin’s
visit to the temple. We must wait until the Meiji period before we
begin seeing the deer wandering in the streets of Nara. While mourn-
ing the loss of the wild nature of deer which the Man’yō poet could
fully enjoy, Aizu welcomes what the ancient poets never could have
imagined: the presence of living deer walking through the desolation
of temples left in a state of utmost disrepair. The proximity of these
breathing deer allowed him to create new poetic images of an old real-
ity which could easily become the object of stereotypical portraits—a
charge from which Aizu was not totally free. The use of deer as poetic
material is totally justified in Aizu’s eyes. Problems arise when a
22
23
Man’yōshū 4:502, by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro.
painter in the Japanese style (Nihonga) portrays a young woman of

the Tenpyō era playing with a deer, or depicts a scene from the age
of the gods in which Yoshino is indicated by the extensive bloom-
ing of cherry trees. Aizu took issue with these anachronisms. Arguing
that if a painter wants to be true to the popular notion of “sketching”
(shasei)—a notion that, according to Aizu, had been abused by having
being used too often—he should pay more attention to the changes
that deer undergo during the year. His antlers fall in spring, regener-
ate in the summer as small, round bones, harden in the fall, and fully
develop in winter. His coat is smooth and beautifully colored with
white spots in spring and summer, becoming rough and grey in the
fall. Paintings tend to portray deer with the antlers of fall, the coat of
summer, and the quiet eyes of summer—and the great painters Sesshū
(1420–1506) and Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795) are no exceptions.24
As a matter of fact, Aizu’s portraits of deer include the stag’s fighting
antlers (poem 8), the bloodshot eyes (poem 9), the restless jaw (poem
12), and the fluffy ears (poem 22).
Another mark associated with Kasuga Daimyōjin, to whom the
Yamato Meisho Zue attributes the composition of the following poem,
is the moon:
Ware o shire Take notice of me!
Shakamunibutsu no I am the one who appeared in the world
Yo ni idete Of Śakyamuni Buddha,
Sayakeki tsuki no The one who makes the world of the bright
moon
Yo o terasu to wa Shine.25
Aizu’s poems dealing with the Kasuga area focus mainly on the
description of moonlit nights (poems 4 and 5), lonely deer calling
their mates (poems 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24),
and prayers offered to the Kasuga deities (poems 56, 57, 58, 59, and
60). The worshippers are mainly soldiers going off to war, who come
with their mothers to pray for their safe return, knowing that they
will most probably die in foreign fields. Worshippers have been lin-
ing up for centuries at the Kasuga Shrine, hoping that their request
would be granted. In the past, the medieval poet Fujiwara no Shunzei
(1114–1204) entreated the Kasuga deity that his offspring might regain
24
25
Shoku Kokinshū 6:687. Yamato Meisho Zue, p. 13.
the dignity of their status as descendants of the powerful statesman

Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), and be spared the humiliation of
tonsure which he was forced to receive:
Kasuga no no Show a divine sign,
Odoro no michi no At least to my descendants,
Umoremizu That we come from a hidden stream
Sue dani kami no Flowing along a path covered with bushes
Shirushi arawase That leads to Kasuga.26
Aizu continues his journey, creating, at the heart of his poetry, a ten-
sion between fictional and historical events. To sing the ancient capital
meant to refer to the many legends and stories that were often created
in later ages in order to provide a legitimating origin to temples and
other famous places in Nara. Aizu was well aware of this tension, often
talking about it in apologetic terms, as if the poetic act needed justifi-
cations. He pointed out the importance that beliefs have in making the
human heart more attuned to the greatness and pain of other people’s
feelings—an affective experience that could only increase one’s pathic
capital. In the essay “Kinukake Yanagi” (The Willow on Which She
Hung Her Clothes), written on December 4, 1941, Aizu confesses his
fascination with the story of the imperial concubine (uneme) who threw
herself in the Sarusawa Pond after feeling that the emperor’s passion
for her had cooled off. The poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro made the
event memorable with a famous poem.27 Aizu realizes the thin histori-
cal credibility of the event, since the first two rulers after the transfer
of the capital to Nara were females (Empresses Genmei and Genshō).
If we were to see Emperor Shōmu as “the Nara Emperor” of the story,
then we would be hard press to explain how Hitomaro could have wit-
nessed the scene in 719, since he was already dead by then. The willow
tree to which the girl hung her clothes before committing suicide is
nowhere to be found in the story which the Yamato Monogatari (The
Tales of Yamato) made famous. Evidently, this was a later addition,
to make a tragic event sound even more dramatic. Despite all these
inconsistencies with the historical record, Aizu could not avoid being
struck by the poignancy of this story which inspired him to write two
poems (26 and 27)—something about which, he points out, “I do
26
Shin Kokinshū 19:1898, by Fujiwara no Shunzei. The poem is quoted in Yamato
Meisho Zue, p. 12.
27
See footnote 25 to Aizu’s poem # 27.
not feel any shame.” We have all learned—he argues—that the earth
moves, not the sun. And yet, we cannot blame ourselves for believing
that the sun sinks in the western mountains when we look at the actual
sunset. The Sarusawa Pond, south of the Kōfukuji temple, was the first
landmark in Nara he visited during his first trip to the city in the sum-
mer of 1908. At that time he had taken lodgings at the Taiyamazakura
inn, near the Teigai Gate of the Tōdai temple. He bought a guide to
the city for ten sen from a little gift shop in the corridor of the second
floor. Then he began his first tour of the city. In those days he was an
instructor at a junior high school in his Echigo province and did not
know anything about Nara. It was a rainy day; he left the inn in his
bathrobe (yukata), with a coarse oil-paper umbrella borrowed from
the inn. He went straight to the Sarusawa Pond, looking for the willow
tree. Since then, every time he was in the area, he could not keep the
image of the desperate girl away from his mind—a haunting presence
that his memory could never delete.28
The tension between reality and fiction that Aizu described in his
essays was actually a reflection of his belief that the past can only be
encountered in the present. The poet’s dialogue with the numerous
temples and Buddhist statues mentioned in his verses takes place in the
space between the classical age of the Nara capital and a modernity that
makes Aizu look at the past through the lenses of archeology, art, and
aesthetics. In his essays Aizu responds to remarks on his poems made
by critics by stressing that scholarship is necessarily mediated by the
tools that one brings to the clarification of the past. At the same time,
however, the good scholar does not allow his modern prejudices to
distort the past by imposing on it interpretations that are not germane
to the issues at hand. The space stretching between reality and fiction
is the same space covered by the scholar who, despite his efforts to give
an “objective” portrayal of the past, cannot avoid bringing himself to
his scholarly discussions. In other words, the scholar is also a poet. In
Aizu’s case the reverse is true: the poet is constantly restrained by the
impulses of scholarship. In “Kazai no Butsuzō” (Buddhist Statues as
Poetic Materials), written on December 8, 1942, Aizu praises the acute
remarks of his friend and colleague Hamada Kōsaku (1881–1938) of
Kyoto Imperial University, who had understood Aizu’s poetry as the
poetry of a deep connoisseur of the arts. Several critics had pointed
28
out that Aizu’s portrayal of the statues of bodhisattva Kannon held

at the Kanshinji, Murōji, and Hokkeji temples was colored with an
eroticism of Aizu’s making. These critics were referring to the “eye-
brows of the awesome Buddha” (poem 251, note 220), the elbows of
“a shiny beauty, as white as a mulberry tree” (poem 251, note 220),
“the soft flesh of the holy Buddha’s elbow” (poem 237), and Kannon’s
“red lips” (poem 153). Hamada emphasized Aizu’s skills in bringing
out from the statues a sensuality that was a trademark of sculpture
during the glorious Fujiwara (Heian) era. This was not the irreverent
act of a layman who did not hesitate to eroticize a major icon of the
Buddhist faith. This eroticism had been intended by the original mak-
ers of the statues in their attempt to add an aesthetic dimension to
these objects of worship. The scholar Aizu was well aware of this trend.
A profound knowledge of art history had enabled him to sing the sen-
suality of a Buddhist enchantress who had graced several temples in
the early Heian period. Aizu’s portraits of Kannon were not simply
secular readings of religious images, a modernist fiction based on an
irretrievable past; they were the result of a modernist urge to be as true
as possible to the object of inquiry.29
At the same time, however, the poet cannot be totally led by the
scholarly imperative—an imperative that Aizu disobeyed with a deep
sense of guilt. The best example comes from his essay “Tōshōdaiji no
Marubashira” (The Round Columns of the Tōshōdaiji Temple), writ-
ten on April 24, 1941. This essay is a commentary on a poem which
the author says was composed “at the Tōshōdaiji,” on the moon cast-
ing the shadow of the temple’s round columns on the ground over
which the poet walked while being absorbed in thought (poem 163).
Talking with a young artist in a corridor of a theater, Aizu is reminded
that the round columns portrayed in the poem are not those of the
Tōshōdaiji. The young man remembers seeing the poet at the Hōryūji
at sunset, when the moon, high above the tall pine trees in the gar-
den of the Saiin sub-temple, cast the shadow of the cloister’s round
columns over the ground. When the young artist saw him, Aizu was
looking out of the lattice door, whispering in a low voice the words,
“great temple… round… columns… round columns.” All of a sudden,
Aizu remembers whispering these words in the silence following the
roar of the gate as the temple was closed. At that point he boarded the
29
bus for Nara in front of the Yumedono. On the way back to the city,
he had stopped at the Tōshōdaiji, entering it from the eastern gate
when the night was already quite deep. The moon was shining in the
middle of the sky, far from the temple’s trees. While walking over the
stony ground in front of the Golden Hall, he came up with the verses,
“walking on the ground,/absorbed in thought.” Aizu admits that, seen
from the eyes of an art historian who is concerned with the historical
details of buildings, his attitude in this particular instance was truly
“contemptible,” since the poem, technically speaking, was not com-
posed at the Tōshōdaiji, as the preface indicated. The composition was
the result of a process that took place at two equally famous temples,
both Tōshōdaiji and Hōryūji. He feels like a photographer who, after
a long journey spent taking pictures, mislabels one of the pictures.
However, Aizu continues, it is not uncommon for a photographer to
take a cloud from above the sea over here and put it on top of the
mountain over there. There are montages commonly used in the film
industry, in which a shot of the shore in Echigo is followed by a shot
of a different shore in Satsuma. Aizu feels that a certain “indiscretion,
or “impudence,” is allowed in the world of art. As a matter of fact, he
confesses, the round columns that he described in his poem belonged
neither to the Tōshōdaiji nor to the Hōryūji. While writing his poem,
he had in mind the columns of the Parthenon in Athens, by whose
beauty he had been mesmerized for over thirty years. As a matter of
fact, the Greek columns had generated his interest for and apprecia-
tion of the temples in Nara. For him, a grain of fiction was inevitable
in the appreciation of the past. After all, an aesthetic approach to art
was grounded in the pre-knowledge that the aesthetician brings to the
objects of his observation.30
Together with the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō’s (1889–1960) best-
seller Koji Junrei (Pilgrimage to Ancient Temples, 1919), Aizu’s poetry
is undoubtedly the most influential writing on the city of Nara in the
twentieth century. Aizu’s poetry, which soon became very popular,
and his efforts to preserve the monuments of the ancient city were
powerful contributors to the establishment of Nara as a cultural icon
in the modern age. It is very common today to see one of Aizu’s poems
inscribed on a stone monument in front of major temples, usually in
the author’s unmistakable calligraphic style. Some of these inscriptions
30
were already in place during Aizu’s life. In the essay “Watakushi no

Kahi” (Stone Monuments with My Poems) Aizu describes the honor he
received in 1950, the year he turned seventy, when three poem-stones
were commissioned to be placed in the garden of Waseda University,
in front of the Great Buddha Hall of the Tōdaiji, and in his birthplace
in Niigata. The inevitable sense of pride and gratitude which Aizu felt
for his friends’ promotion of the event is inevitably tempered by a
concern that poems in the Yamato language might not be proper for
stone monuments, which were usually inscribed in the austere kanbun
(Chinese) style. At that time—Aizu indicates—there were already two
monuments with his poetry standing in Nara. One was located in front
of the small hall where the fragrant Yakushi was worshipped at the
Shin-Yakushiji—a 1942 gift to the temple from Shimanaka Yūsaku,
the president of the Chūō Kōron publishing house. The poem chosen
for the inscription (poem 67) sang Aizu’s sadness at the realization
that not a single look came from the Buddha, although the poet got
very close to the statue, looking up at the holy face. The statue was
actually stolen some time after the setting of the monument, prompt-
ing Miyata Shigeo (1900–1971 to publish in a newspaper a manga
with a variation of Aizu’s verse, “how sad/not to see one single look/
coming from the holy Buddha,” reading, “how sad/not see one single/
Buddha.” The event further prompted Yoshii Isamu (1886–1960) to
publish the following poem in a journal:
Kōyakushi Read the song
Moto no midō ni By Shūsō Dōjin that says,
Kaere yo to Return
Shūsō Dōjin The fragrant Yakushi
Uta yomitamae To its original hall!
Aizu feels that, since the statue was not recovered, his poem stood as a
memento of a statue that had vanished, no one knew where.31
The second monument to which Aizu refers in his essay was made
at the author’s own expense as homage to the Kasuga Plain which was
so dear to his heart. The monument was inscribed with the song on
the moon shining on the Plain—a sign that the autumn evening had
arrived (poem 4). Aizu wanted the stone to be placed somewhere in the
fields of Kasuga, but severe rules had prohibited him from doing so.
Therefore, it was located in the garden of the Kannon-in, a sub-temple
31
of Tōdaiji. Since then, the monument was celebrated in a painting by

Sugimoto Kenkichi (1905–2004), and in a photograph that Aizu’s old
friend Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) had taken of himself during a visit
to the Tōdaiji. Then, all of a sudden, when Aizu had already given up
the idea of placing the stone in the right setting, thinking that it must
have been forgotten under the moss, Miyagawa Tadamaro (d. 1961),
a younger brother of Baron Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945), became
the head-priest of the Kasuga Shrine. Miyagawa asked Aizu in a letter
whether he would like his poem-stone moved to the Kasuga Plain—an
offer which he accepted with great joy.32
Today we can find many more monuments with Aizu’s poems,
spread all over the city: a two-meter monument east of the corri-
dor of Tōdaiji’s Main Hall, with the song on the huge statue of the
Great Buddha filling the whole world (poem 86); the monument at
the Akishinodera, with the song on the sun setting on the Ikoma Peak
(poem 159); the monument at the Hokkeji, singing the red lips of the
Eleven-Face Kannon worshipped in the temple (poem 153); the mon-
ument at the Kairyūōji, praying that winter showers will not fall too
heavily, and will thereby protect the red pigments of the Golden Hall’s
pillars (poem 151); the monument at the Tōshōdaiji, with the poem
on the shadow of the round columns cast on the ground (poem 163);
the wooden plaque at the Yakushiji, with the poem on the heavenly
maidens soaring above the pagoda (poem 176); the stone monument
in front of a private house in the Ikaruga village, with the song on
the Guze Kannon of the Hōryūji, benevolently smiling at the poet’s
loneliness (poem 193); the stone monument at the Hōrinji, singing
the shadow of Kannon’s crown flickering on her white forehead (poem
212); and the stone monument originally kept in the garden of the
Hiyoshikan on the stags crossing the busy streets (poem 23), which is
now found in the garden of the adjacent Asuka-en coffee shop. These
are all testimonials to the learning and skills of a poet who has built
the image of Nara which is with us today, and thereby left an indelible
mark on the ancient capital.
32
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
POETRY AND POETICS IN TENSION: KUKI SHŪZŌ’S FRENCH

AND GERMAN CONNECTIONS
Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941), one of Japan’s most original thinkers of the

twentieth century, has been the object of divided critical evaluations
since the time he published a work that was destined to make him a
truly popular philosopher, rather than simply an academic one: Iki
no Kōzō (The Structure of Iki, 1930).1 As Kuki himself noticed in a
short essay entitled “Dentō to Shinshu” (Tradition and Progressivism,
1936),2 as soon as The Structure of Iki appeared, first in the pages of the
journal Shisō (Thought), and then as a monograph eight months later,3
he was immediately attacked by Marxist critics as a “fervent tradition-
alist.” Kuki accepted the charges, but only after qualifying his position
towards tradition. He would hardly have spent eight years in Europe
and dedicated most of his life to the study of Western philosophy—he
argued—if he wanted simply to promote the maintenance of “the old
customs of tradition” in his land. The simple mentioning of the issue
was, in his opinion, “obvious, banal, ands almost ludicrous.” If, by
“traditionalism,” on the other hand, one meant the realization of the
role played by traditions in the formation of one’s “Being,” then the
charge of traditionalism was not only justified but actually welcome.
Kuki’s commitment to an understanding of language—a topic that is
central to the articulation of Sein (Being)—was reduced by Marxist
This paper was originally presented on October 5, 2002, at the 11th Annual Meet-
ing of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (AJLS), Purdue University, West
Lafayette, Indiana. The author wishes to thank Professor Eiji Sekine for his kind invi-
tation and comments.
1
Two versions of this work are currently available in English: John Clark’s Reflec-
tions on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997), and
Hiroshi Nara’s The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Visions of Kuki Shūzō
(Honolulu: Hawai‘i University Press, 2004).
2
The essay appears in the section on “Unpublished Essays” (Mihappyō Zuihitsu) of
Kuki Shūzō Zenshū [hereafter abbreviated as KSZ], 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980),
pp. 207–208. I am indebted to the editors of Kuki’s Collected Works for providing
the date of the composition of this essay. See “Kaidai” (Explanatory Notes) in KSZ, 5,
p. 477.
3
Iki no Kōzō appeared in the January and February 1930 issues of Shisō (Numbers
92 and 93). The book was published by Iwanami in October 1930.
472 chapter twenty-three
critics to an avowal of nationalism, particularly in light of the changed

political circumstances that were silencing all opposition in name of
military expansionism.
This charge has haunted Kuki’s reputation to this day, threaten-
ing to obfuscate the originality of a truly cosmopolitan philosopher
whose “guilt” has been established chiefly by association. In Japan
no one dared to talk about Kuki after the war because of his associa-
tion with the so-called “Kyōto School” that was accused of provid-
ing the government with the intellectual justification for nationalistic
and expansionistic policies. This argument is based on the premise
that Kuki worked in the department of philosophy at Kyoto Imperial
University, together with Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), Tanabe Hajime
(1885–1962), and other members of the School whose thought was
deeply affected by Nishida’s system. We must wait until the 1980s
before we see Kuki become the focus of scholarly attention in Japan
and the West, at the same time as a reevaluation of the alleged war
responsibilities of members of the Kyoto School.4 It is ironic, however,
to notice that, while Kuki’s association with the School hurt him to a
considerable degree, he is seldom included in discussions of the Kyoto
School, and appropriately so, since he was intellectually rooted in the
philosophy department of Tokyo Imperial University, and he very sel-
dom took a public stand on the issue of imperialism.5
4
The journal Shisō dedicated half of its February 1980 issue to “Kuki Shūzō: Poetry
and Philosophy.” See, Shisō 2 (1980), pp. 65–140. The two major monographs on Kuki
in Japanese, Sakabe Megumi’s Fuzai no Uta: Kuki Shūzō no Sekai (Songs of Absence:
The World of Kuki Shūzō) and Tanaka Kyūbun’s Kuki Shūzō: Gūzen to Shizen (Kuki
Shūzō: Chance and Nature), were published in 1990 and 1992 respectively. Daitō
Shun’ichi’s Kuki Shūzō to Nihon Bunkaron (Kuki Shūzō and Japan’s Culturalism)
appeared in 1996.
5
Several English translations of works by the major members of the Kyoto School,
such as Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji appeared between 1970
and the present. David A. Dilworth has been writing on Nishida since the late 1960s.
However, evaluations of the School as a whole have taken place only during the past
two decades. See Thomas P. Kasulis’s review article, “The Kyoto School and the West:
Review and Evaluation,” The Eastern Buddhist 15:2 (Autumn 1982), pp. 125–144. The
major accounts of issues related to the Kyoto School and nationalism are the articles
included in James W. Heisig and John Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto
School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994).
In this book the only reference to Kuki Shūzō comes in the article by Andrew Feen-
berg (p. 151), who mentions Kuki together with Tanabe Hajime and Watsuji Tetsurō
as one of Japan’s major thinkers who “defended Japanese imperialism.” Feenberg’s
authority for this statement is Peter Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). For a more recent account of the School, see James
W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu:
kuki shūzō’s french and german connections 473
Furthermore, Kuki’s association with the German philosopher Mar-

tin Heidegger (1889–1976), with whom he studied in the fall of 1927
and the spring of 1928, has led several critics to see a commonality of
aims between the two philosophers who are, thus, presented as “typi-
cal ideologues of nineteenth-century imperialism.” This is the posi-
tion taken by Karatani Kōjin, who has had a particular influence on
historians and literary critics writing on Kuki in the West. Karatani
sees Kuki’s and Heidegger’s speculations on Being as developments of
nineteenth century discourses on “spirit,” which led both thinkers to
arrive “respectively, at the ‘Great East Asian Coprosperity Sphere’ and
the ‘Third Reich.’”6 Karatani’s “hermeneutics of national being” are a
rehearsal of the Marxist critiques which Kuki himself talked about in
“Tradition and Progressivism.” Karatani follows an argument made by
Marxist critic Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) in Nihon Ideorogīron (An Essay
on Japanese Ideology, 1935), in which Tosaka highlighted the parallel-
ism between the aesthetic practices of German Romanticism and the
aesthetic ideologies of Japan’s ultranationalism.
Tosaka’s and Karatani’s arguments are fully at work in Leslie Pin-
cus’ Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan, the most extensive work
on Kuki in English, published in 1996. In this monograph, Kuki is
accused of following a methodology—the hermeneutical method—
that, allegedly, “has lent itself to conservative, even reactionary, per-
spectives on history.”7 The reference is, of course, to Heidegger,8 who
provided Kuki with a “cultural hermeneutic,” “a national ontology,”9
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001). The only relevant reference to Kuki in Heisig’s
book comes in a note on p. 276, in which the author mentions the entry on the
Kyoto School in the 1998 version of the Iwanami Dictionary of Philosophy and Ideas:
“Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō, both of whom had taught philosophy and ethics
at Kyoto for a time during the period of Nishida and Tanabe, are properly listed as
peripheral.” For an account of the postcolonial critique of Nishida Kitarō, although
Kuki is not mentioned, see Yoko Arisaka, “Beyond ‘East and West’: Nishida’s Univer-
salism and Postcolonial Critique,” in Fred Dallymayr, ed., Border Crossings: Towards
a Comparative Political Theory (Lanhman: Lexington Books, 1999), pp. 236–252.
6
See Karatani Kōjin, “One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries,” translated by Alan
Wolfe, in Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, eds., Postmodernism and Japan
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 267.
7
Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise
of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 142.
8
“But it was only after the encounter with hermeneutics, particularly in its Heideg-
gerian form, that Kuki was able to pull this diverse assortment of lists and notes into
the tight symbolic weave of collective meaning and value.” Leslie Pincus, Authenticat-
ing Culture in Imperial Japan, p. 53.
9
Ibidem, p. 121.
and a “logic of organicism,” that made Kuki intellectually responsible

for the government’s expansionistic policies in China.10 Pincus reads
Kuki’s philosophy in light of Marxist interpretations of Heidegger,
especially interpretations by one of Heidegger’s most severe French
critics, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who created the term “national
aestheticism” to define Heidegger’s views of cultural organicism, and
from whom Pincus derived the subtitle of her book, Kuki Shūzō and
the Rise of National Aesthetics.11 Karatani’s and Pincus’s interpretations
of Kuki have become quite authoritative among scholars of literature
in the West, who tend to rely on their assessments when referring to
Kuki’s thought.12
Realizing that inattentively conceived links between the philosophies
of Heidegger and Kuki have significantly distorted the latter, some crit-
ics have attempted to detach Kuki’s thought from Heidegger’s philoso-
phy of Being, pointing out Kuki’s predominant use of French thought,
in which he specialized and lectured extensively at the University of
Kyoto.13 Research in this direction has contributed powerful analyses
10
“In the final analysis, the logic of organicism—a logic that Kuki first articulated
in ‘Iki’ no kōzō and simply presumed in the later essays—underwrote the Japanese
invasion of China in particular, and the excesses of national aestheticism in general.”
Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Cuilture in Imperial Japan, p. 231. The philosopher Gra-
ham Parkes has written a brilliant critique of the conspiracy theory of which Kuki
has become a target. See his article, “The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School and
the Political Correctness of the Modern Academy,” in Philosophy East and West 47:3
(July 1997), pp. 305–336, in which he writes: “One must again protest this practice of
condemning a Japanese thinker, even at second hand, on the basis of his association
with Heidegger. When evaluating philosophical ideas or the integrity of philosophers,
assigning “guilt by association” is as questionable a tactic as it is in the real world of
law.” (p. 325). See, also, Parkes’s review of Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan,
in Chanoyu Quarterly 86 (1997), pp. 63–69, in which he writes: “Since Kuki’s writings
provide so little in the way of evidence for his alleged fascist proclivities, Pincus tries
to establish some guilt by association through invoking his relations with Heidegger,
whose credentials in the area of political incorrectness apparently need no establish-
ing.” (p. 66).
11
Ibidem, p. 210.
12
See, for example, the following statement: “This concept of Asia as a unified field
of culture or spirit reflects, of course, the various political discourses mobilized to
justify Japan’s military expansion throughout Asia and Southeast Asia, including the
‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ or ‘East Asian Cooperative Community,’
which was advocated by intellectuals such as Kuki Shūzō and Rōyama Masamichi.”
Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002), p. 226.
13
We find this trend in the essays by Hiroshi Nara, J. Thomas Rimer, and J. Mark
Mikkelsen, in Hiroshi Nara, The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki
Shūzō. In “Capturing the Shudders and Palpitations: Kuki’s Quest for a Philosophy of
of the differences between Kuki’s and Heidegger’s hermeneutical phe-

nomenology.14 The answer to the question of relationships ultimately
lies with Kuki himself who, in the essay “Tōkyō to Kyōto” (Tokyo
and Kyoto),15 compared his links to Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and
Martin Heidegger to the relationship he had with the two cities most
dear to him, the city where he was born and raised (Tokyo), and the
city where he spent the second half of his life (Kyoto). If, as Goethe
had pointed out, talent was built in quietness while character devel-
oped in the midst of activity, then Kuki could argue that his personal
experience was a fertile ground for the development of both. Raised
in the modernity of Japan’s capital, the city of Bergsonian and Pari-
sian vitalism, he was developing his philosophy in the stillness of the
ancient capital Kyoto, which afforded him the quietness of Heidegger’s
Black Forest. The names of the two philosophers can hardly be sepa-
rated in Kuki’s thought. His cosmopolitanism was the result of fortu-
nate circumstances that brought him into the world as a member of
one of Japan’s most distinguished and culturally/politically influential
Life,” Nara states: “Ultimately, Kuki’s thinking about iki aligned itself with Bergson’s
thinking. Like his mentor, he thought that conceptual analysis—the mainstay of Neo-
Kantian—failed to connect its findings . . . In general, one might say that Kuki’s debt
to Bergson was real and warm and human. The same cannot be said about his debt to
Heidegger.” (pp. 139–140). He also points out that, “As Tom Rimer shows elsewhere
in this volume, Kuki’s colleagues at Kyoto thought of him as a Francophile. That can’t
have done his standing much good in a department committed to German idealism,
a school of thought he had turned away from in the late 1920s. His chronology (in
this volume) shows how often he lectured on French philosophy. Though he divided
his time fairly equally between German and French schools of thought, Kuki’s lecture
schedule attests to special interests in, for example, Bergsonian vitalism. In fact, his
contemporary Amano Teiyū characterizes Kuki as a scholar working in French phi-
losophy.” (pp. 163–164). On Kuki’s French connections, see also the excellent book
by Stephen Light, Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre: Influence and Counter-Influence
in the Early History of Existential Phenomenolgy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni-
14
See, for example, Mikkelsen’s article “Reading Kuki Shūzō’s The Structure of ‘Iki’
in the Shadow of Le Affaire Heidegger,” in Hiroshi Nara’s The Structure of Detach-
ment, pp. 206–237. Mikkelsen states: “I suggest that this linkage [between Heidegger
and Kuki] should not be taken for granted, that the common practice of highlighting
Kuki’s relationship to Heidgger has not generally served Kuki well, and that the prac-
tice of linking the name of Kuki with that of Heidegger has actually distorted efforts
to appreciate fully Kuki’s work and its significance. To suggest that the names of Kuki
and Heidegger should, in effect, be de-linked is not, however, the same as claiming
that there are no grounds for linking them.” (p. 206). This statement is followed by an
analysis of problems related to attempts to “make Kuki into a Heidegger.”
15
KSZ 5, pp. 190–194.
families and that allowed him an unusually lengthy stay in Europe16

where he could engage in conversation with the major philosophical
figures active in France and Germany.
In this paper I will address Kuki’s connections with French and Ger-
man philosophies in relation to his poetry and his essays on poetry.
I will try to point out how the tension between poetry and poetics
in Kuki’s production and discussion of poetry is related to his eclec-
tic attempt to create a philosophy which incorporates philosophical
elements that, far from being integrated in a cohesive unity, stand
in striking opposition to each other, bringing each other into sets of
mutual contradictions.
Kuki’s poetry challenges all the major themes of metaphysics sus-
taining Western thought: necessity, causality, the primacy of identity,
sameness, and completion. While writing his poetry during his stay
in Paris from October 1925 to March 1927, Kuki was meeting with
Henri Bergson and Émile Bréhier (1876–1952), then professor of phi-
losophy at the Sorbonne, who apparently introduced him to a young
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).17 In Paris Kuki read the books of Émile
Boutroux (1845–1921) extensively, especially Boutroux’s work on the
challenges that contingency continuously poses to the realm of neces-
sity. Sartre later developed this topic into a philosophy of action, free-
dom, and responsibility.18 In his lectures Kuki introduces the work of
Boutroux’s student, Bergson, on the relationship between temporal-
ity (of which contingency is a major element) and freedom (liberté).19
16
Japanese scholars would usually spend a couple of years in Europe, sponsored by
the Japanese government to study Western learning in European universities. How-
ever, Kuki’s independent wealth afforded him the privilege of spending eight years
in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, from 1921 to 1928, while engaging in
conversation with Nobel-prize winners, diplomats, and the leading intellectual voices
of Europe.
17
See, Stephen Light, Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre: Influence and Counter-
Influence in the Early History of Existential Phenomenology, pp. 99–141, in which the
author includes a notebook by Kuki titled “Monsieur Sartre.”
18
Kuki was familiar with Boutroux’s La Nature et l’Esprit (Nature and the Spirit)
and De la Contingence des Lois de la Nature (The Contingency of the Laws of Nature).
Of the latter we find the French, English, and German versions in Kuki’s library. See
Kuki Shūzō Bunko Mokuroku (Kōbe: Kōnan Daigaku Tetsugaku Kenkyūshitsu, 1976),
pp. 30–31. For Sartre’s development of the notion of contingency, see his L’Être et le
Neant (Being and Nothingness), especially Part Four on “Having, Doing, and Being.”
19
See Kuki’s explanation of Bergson’s philosophy in his Gendai Furansu Tetsugaku
Kōgi (Course on Contemporary French Philosophy) in KSZ 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
1981), pp. 294–354, especially the section on “freedom,” pp. 319–322.
Kuki discusses the topic of contingency in one of his poems, which

challenges attempts to explain human life in terms of the inflexible
rules of necessity. He included this poem, appropriately titled “Con-
tingency” (Gūzensei), in a collection known as “Fragments from Paris”
(Hahen, Parī yori).20
Contingency
Could you bring to prove the signs
Of the parallel straight lines?
That was your aim:
Did you withdraw your fundamental claim?
Did the central issue become
That to the angles of a triangle’s sum
Two right angles are equal?
Or, was it less that a 180 degrees sequel?
In Alexandria the old book was found,
Principles of Geometry two thousand years ago bound,
No matter whether the worms ate it or not,
Euclid is a great man, never forgot,
Who with lines and points the shape of the universe drew!
You and I, I and you
The secret of a chance encounter I saw,
Of love the anti-law.
This is the geometry of life’s retribution,
Won’t you bring it for me to some solution?
At the straight line of cause and effect A we look!
The straight line of cause and effect B we took!
The principle that two parallel lines do not intersect,
To the intersection of parallel lines don’t you object?
With this, contingency is fulfilled,
With chaos Venus is filled,
Two people picked up of pearls a string
That the waves of cause and effect to them bring.
In this poem Kuki concentrates on what he called, “hypothetical con-
tingency,” the chance encounter between a man and a woman that
breaks the law of cause and effect, introducing the element of fortu-
itousness which challenges the rationality of Euclid’s geometry and dis-
rupts the notion that parallel lines theoretically do not come together.
They do come together in practice, however, when two people who
are unknown to each other and who, although they travel towards the
20
KSZ 1, pp. 131–133.
same destination (death), and do it on separate, parallel paths, meet

by chance and their paths come to intersect. The event is unforesee-
able and geometry has a hard time conceptualizing it. On the other
hand, poetry seems to be a more appropriate tool for bringing life to
contingency by giving it form. Borrowing an expression from Paul
Valéry (1871–1945), Kuki calls poetry “the pure system of the chances
of language.” For Kuki the success of poetry was found in its ability
to express contingency (meaninglessness, nonsense, the unconscious,
dreams, etc.) in a world of necessity known as the world of meaning.
Rhyme was “the awakening of logos as melos (song),” a melos that pro-
vided an opening to a more authentic perception of reality. “Language
as content of meaning” pointed at necessity and the self-sameness of
a subject, whereas “language as sound” referred to contingency and to
the continuous disruption of a solid, unified subject. Kuki argued that
rhyme was the chance encounter of two sounds, “the twin smiles” of
Paul Valéry who had called rhymes “philosophical beauty.” The fact
that rhyme, besides bringing to life a chance encounter of sounds, was
also the medium for the repetition of the same sound, indicated to
Kuki that rhymes contain at the same time necessity and contingency
(same sound, different words), sameness and difference. Thus, rhym-
ing poetry was “freedom following reason” based on “objective rules,”
while free poetry was an “arbitrariness following drive.” The chance
encounter of rhyming sounds was a good symbol for the recurring
cycles of necessity and contingency.21
Far from being limited to the sphere of rhetoric, contingency for
Kuki had profound consequences in the areas of ethics and morality.
Because of contingency, human existence is something in which man
is thrown by chance, whose only law is that it could have been totally
different. One cannot consider other people’s existence to be alien to
oneself, since others bear the destiny that could have been one’s own.
By understanding that one’s own existence could be exchanged—
that one might have lived someone else’s existence—one realizes the
wondrous nature of the meeting with others. According to Kuki, one
21
Kuki developed these themes in the lecture course that he gave at the University
of Kyoto in 1933 (published as Bungaku no Gairon or An Outline of Literature). See,
especially, the section on contingency and poetry. KSZ 11, pp. 86–124. See also Kuki’s
long essay ‘Nihon Shi no Ōin” (Rhymes in Japanese Poetry), an essay published in
1931 which appeared in an extensively revised version in his later Bungeiron (Essays
on the Literary Arts, 1941). KSZ 4, pp. 223–513.
should respect one’s own destiny, as well as others’, as something to

“be grateful for” (arigatai) in the literal sense of the word, “difficult
to be.” This should be an encouragement to develop a sympathy for
the existence of others. At the same time, understanding the nature of
contingency should enable the conduct of a free and flexible life which
is continuously open to what may occur and to those whom one has
the chance of meeting.
Let me give you a further example of Kuki’s resistance against
another major element of the metaphysics of presence, the dialectical
method that becomes the target of Kuki’s critique in a poem titled
“Dialectical Method” (Benshōronteki Hōhō), in which Kuki disparag-
ingly compares the Hegelian logic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis
to the three rhythmic measures of a waltz:22
The Dialectical Method
Spirit!
Hell, paradise
Sobbing out a counterpoint.
Not even a canon
Is born!
Living in a field at dawn
Hornets and red starlilies
Entwine to make honey,
Who can explain this,
God and witch,
Plight their promise and give birth to humanity.
These are the rules of life
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis,
The tone of logos
The singer is a priest,
How good, a triple time
Dance the waltz.
In this poem Kuki challenges the complacent geometricity of a dialecti-
cal method that arrogantly pretends to reduce the rules of life to a pre-
established order, which he sarcastically compares to the triple pattern
of a waltz. Here Kuki followed Henri Bergson who in La Pensée et le
Mouvant argued as follows: “Hence a thesis and an antithesis which
22
KSZ 1, pp. 133–135.
it would be vain for us to try logically to reconcile, for the simple

reason that never, with concepts or points of view, will you make a
thing.”23 Being shaped by the ungeometric paradigm of contingency
(the destiny of suddenness and unexpectedness), human nature was
much too complex to be reduced to a law, a method, whether Hegelian
dialectics or Kantian categories. We see Kuki express this hesitation
to entrust the vitality of human life to philosophical laws in one of
his short poems (tanka) from the collection Sonnets from Paris (Parī
Shōkyoku):
Hanchū ni How many years have I gone through
Toraegatakaru Lamenting as myself
Onogami wo This body of mine
Ware to nagekite That is as difficult to grasp
Hetsuru ikutose As a category?24
Kuki’s attack on the laws of contradiction, another major moment of
Western logic, takes place in the poem opening Kuki’s Parisian Frag-
ments, which he entitled “The Negative Dimension” (Fugōryō, the
Japanese translation of Kant’s “der negativen Grössen”). In this poem,
a real opposition between two equally positive substances succeeds in
explaining what a logical negation does not. Thus, Kuki stresses the
positive value of privative nothing (nihil privativum), the blessing that
can be found in a shadow, the glory of the female, negative, moon-like
image of yin which stood in Chinese philosophy as the equally power-
ful pair of the solar, male, positive yang. As Kuki’s poem says, “plus
and minus are both affirmations second to none.”25
The Negative Dimension
In a shadow there is the blessing of a shadow,
It is not just that the shadow is not exposed to sunlight.
Ice has the taste of ice,
It is not of the same type as cooled hot water.
You can pull out your white hair,
Black hair does not grow.
A eunuch
Cannot become a lady-in-waiting.
Plus and minus, both extremes
23
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 207–217.
24
KSZ 1, p. 190, n. 128.
25
KSZ 1, pp. 130–131.
Are affirmations second to none.

The law of contradiction regrettably
Is an odd pair, a one-eyed man, a man with one arm.
Glory to yin.
Glory to yang.
Good,
Smell the fragrance!
Evil,
The flower bloom!
Even when it comes to the question of temporality, Kuki’s poetry is
profoundly critical of traditional notions of time. He acknowledges
openly his debts to the thought of Henri Bergson. According to Berg-
son, the world of human sensations and consciousness can only be
caught in the inner experience of real time, which he called “pure
duration” (durée pure)—a time which is qualitative (temps-qualité),
heterogeneous, dynamic, and creative. The time of pure duration pro-
vides an explanation for the heterogeneity of life. It is the time of con-
tingency and the space of difference. In the real time of duration, the
states of consciousness permeate one another. Pure duration is the
flowing of inner life (fluidité même de notre vie intérieure), the notes of
a tune “melting, so to speak, into one another,”26 “the effect of a musi-
cal phrase which is constantly on the point of ending and constantly
altered in its totality by the addition of some new note.”27
On the other hand, man lives in “quantitative time” (temps-quantité),
the homogeneous time of the watch that can be measured easily, the
time of sameness, a spatialized time, a time made into space. It is an
emptying of the content of time into “a space of four dimensions in
which past, present, and future are juxtaposed or superimposed for all
eternity.”28 Quantitative time is a mathematical replacement of dura-
tion with a series of simultaneities which can be counted, instanta-
neities which do not endure. By indicating “a numerical multiplicity”
(multiplicité numérique), homogeneous time is the time of the clock.
In other words, quantitative time is “the ghost of space,” the space
of science in which real change is eliminated and human beings are
26
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Con-
sciousness, transl. by F.L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971; 1st ed.,
1910), p. 100.
27
Ibidem, p. 106.
28
Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe,
transl. by Robin Durie (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999), p. 42.
made into machines, rather than being analyzed as free individuals.

Real time has no time to count itself, although man does it all the time,
living outside himself, hardly perceiving anything but his own ghost,
a colorless shadow, thus living for the external world rather than for
himself; thus speaking rather than thinking.
We find in Kuki’s collection of poetic Fragments a song dedicated to
Bergson’s idea of “durée pure,” titled “Pure Duration” (Junsui Jizoku),
in which Kuki attacks the measurable inauthentic time of quantity as
“the shabby natural child” of space, the cause of daily worries that
makes people regret their decisions. To be imprisoned in quantitative
time means to bemoan one’s own destiny and to grieve over missed
opportunities, a continuous lament in the name of compromise and
at the cost of enjoying the value of one’s own decisions, irrespective
of their final outcome.29
Pure Duration
Falling in love with space
Time, what a shabby natural child!
To give birth was a mistake in the first place,
To repent for it, a good-for-nothing goblin,
The cause of your worries night in and night out.
Hello turtle, dear turtle!
To lose to a rabbit in a race, isn’t that a victory?
A gull floating on the water says, I will not be outrun by a duck!
You are thirty-something,
Still studying thirty-one syllable poems as always?
You say it is a five/seven/five/seven/seven syllable poem?
That two stanzas seventeen/fourteen is the normative?
That three stanzas twelve/twelve/seven is the poem’s original form?
Aren’t you rewriting the poem since the caesura between verses is bad?
Do not mistake “line” for “nine”!30
A stanza is not made out of numbers.
After all, homogeneity is the foundation of compromise,
Respect the tune of pure heterogeneity!
Recollection of the past also
Depends on time,
To curl your fingers31 around moldy possibilities
29
KSZ 1, pp. 135–37.
30
“Line” in Japanese is ku, while “nine” is kū.
31
It means “to count.”
Is the habit of the loser.32

Shout in your heart!
A meteor
A flash of lightning
A melody
A color.
The reference in the poem to the rabbit addressing the turtle (“moshi
moshi kame yo kame san yo”) is not simply the echo of an Aesopian
fable praising the determination of a steadily advancing turtle who
wins the race with a rabbit because of the latter’s overconfidence and
sluggishness—a fable which became a popular song during the Meiji
period.33 Kuki had also in mind the paradox of the Eleatic philosopher
Zeno (c.495–c.430 B.C.), according to which Achilles will never reach
the turtle in a race if the turtle is given a proper advantage since, by the
time Achilles reaches the point where the turtle started the race, the
turtle has already moved ahead beyond that point. Zeno had chal-
lenged appearance, reducing movement to absurdity.
The problem of Zeno’s paradox lies in the illusion that a series of
indivisible acts can be identified with homogeneous space. Bergson
argued that Achilles, after all, was not a turtle chasing after another
turtle. Achilles’ movement was irreducibly individuated by its charac-
ter as an action. We cannot reduce action to a spatialized present for
all of time. Therefore, for a turtle, to lose to a rabbit in a race can only
be a victory, if the event is seen from the perspective of the turtle’s
authenticity, for the sake of the nature of the turtle itself, and not for
the sake of the nature of speed. Likewise, Kuki argued, poetry rejects
any compromise with measurability—the strict form of a tanka made
of 31 syllables in 5 verses distributed according to the pattern of five/
seven/five/seven/seven syllables, unless the “tune of pure heterogene-
ity” is able to spring forth from such a pattern. The elements of con-
tingency must be accounted for if we want to grasp life and poetry in
their ultimate nature of fortuitousness, suddenness, unexpectedness,
32
It refers to the regrets that a person has once he starts thinking, ‘Oh, if only I had
done this, or if only I had done that.’ Such a regret is an indication that the person is
still imprisoned in quantitative time.
33
The song by Ishihara Wasaburō appears in Horiuchi Keizō, Inoue Takeshi, eds.,
Nihon Shōkashū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1958), p. 106.
duration, change, and heterogeneity—a meteor, a flash of lightning, a

melody, a color.34
When we examine Kuki’s essays on poetry, the notion of temporal-
ity undergoes profound changes. In “Bungaku no Keijijōgaku” (The
Metaphysics of Literature, 1940)35 Kuki introduces three types of tem-
poralities based on past, future, and present. In the first type, time
originates from the past, flowing from the past towards the future; it is
the temporality of history. Calling this view of time “biological,” Kuki
linked it to the genres of novels and monogatari (tales) in which the
author “tells” (noberu) a story or, playing on an homophonous word,
“stretches” (noberu) the story in time while unrolling the scroll in space,
thus presenting “a past present” (kakoteki genzai).36 The privileging of
the past was directly related to the philosophy of Bergson who had
raised the past to ontological status, by considering it being-in-itself.37
The present cannot be considered Being since it no longer exists; it
has already ceased to be. Paradoxically, the past is contemporaneous
with the present that it has been. Past and present coexist: “one is the
present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which
does not cease to be but through which all presents pass.”38 Bergson’s
34
In the lecture course Bungaku no Gairon Kuki discussed the relationship that
poetry has with quantitative and qualitative time. On the quantitative side Kuki
singled out the measurability of Japan’s poetic rhythm—12 syllables divided in the
5/7 or 7/5 pattern. According to Kuki, poetic rhythm was related to human breath-
ing: a poetic verse comes into being on condition that it can be sung in a breath.
The French Alexandrine line is also made of twelve sounds (hexameter); the Italian
hendecasyllable is made of eleven sounds; the English iambic pentameter is made of
ten sounds; the German tetrameter and pentameter Iamb are made of eight or ten
sounds. However, the temporality of poetry is not quantitative; it is qualitative. Kuki
argued that the temporality of poetry is duration (durée), and that the rhythmic pat-
terns actually underscore the tensions of duration characterizing the flow of poetry.
For example, the accent in Italian poetry always falls on the tenth sound (qualitative
time), independently from whether the verse is a hendecasyllable (11 sounds), a dac-
tylic (twelve sounds), or a trochee (ten sounds)—the so-called quantitative time. The
accent endows quantitative time with quality. The same result is brought about by the
length of the vowels, whether short or long, as we can see in Greek and Latin poetry.
Modern poetry has replaced the length of the vowels with the accent. The more atten-
tion to sound a poem discloses, the more the poem is caught in its qualitative time of
duration. KSZ 11, pp. 148–54.
35
This essay was originally part of a course, Bungaku no Gairon (An Outline of
Literature), which Kuki delivered at Kyoto Imperial University in 1940. Kuki included
this essay in his last book, Bungeiron (Essays on the Literary Arts), which was pub-
lished posthumously in 1941. See KSZ 4 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1981), pp. 7–59.
36
Kuki Shūzō, “Bungaku no Keijijōgaku,” in KSZ 4, pp. 31–40.
37
Here I am using Heideggerian language to explain Bergson’s temporality.
38
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, transl. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberiam
(New York: Zone Books, 1988; original French ed., 1966), p. 59.
notion of “duration” is grounded in the authority of the past, since

“duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the
future and which swells as it advances.”39
The second type of temporality emphasizes the future, and makes
the future its starting point. According to this view, the difference
between time and everything else is found in the fact that only time
has a future. Kuki calls this view “ethical,” since within this tempo-
rality, man struggles after a moral purpose located in the future by
having his consciousness anticipate a goal in the realm of the future.
He associates this temporality with drama, a genre that develops from
the future, since it is premised on a crisis preceding the tragic conclu-
sion of a tragedy, or on a joyful resolution coming before the final
act of a comedy. Kuki defined the temporality of drama as a “futural
present” (miraiteki genzai).40 Kuki’s source for this future-oriented
temporality was Heidegger, for whom man exists in the etymological
sense of the word (ek-sists): he “stands out” into future possibilities,
into a past heritage, and into a present world. Heidegger stressed the
futural aspect of man’s Da-sein. Human life begins with the future
since authentic existence involves facing up to mortality and accepting
the finitude of one’s possibilities. The key to Heidegger’s temporality
was “anticipatory resoluteness,” which indicates one’s responsibility to
take a stance and making an authentic choice of a way to be.41
Kuki’s third model of temporality is the one privileging the present.
This view is based on the consideration that neither past nor future
actually exist: while the past is already gone, the future has not yet
come; only the present exists. In the past and the future, only the
memory of the former and the anticipation of the latter exist. Kuki
called this temporality “psychological,” “since it is based on the origi-
nal impression within the present of the phenomenon of time.”42 This
is the general temporality of art. In the lecture course Bungaku no
Gairon, Kuki indicated his indebtedness to Augustine (354–430) and
39
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, transl. by Arthur Mitchell (Mineola: Dover
Publications, 1998; 1st ed., 1911), p. 4.
40
Kuki Shūzō, “Bungaku no Keijijōgaku,” in KSZ 4, pp. 40–45.
41
“The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the
future.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, transl. by
Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996; 1st German ed.,
1927), p. 303.
42
Kuki Shūzō, “Bungaku no Keijijōgaku,” in KSZ 4, p. 34.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) in formulating this theory of time cen-

tered around the present.43
Kuki found in the work of Augustine and Husserl inspiration for
the development of a fourth type of temporality, a temporality which
he fully embraced and made into the structural pillar of his essays on
poetics: time as a circle, a “recurrent time” (kaikiteki jikan), an “infi-
nite present” (mugen no genzai), the “eternal now” (eien no ima).
We can add a fourth theory of time. The past is not simply something
that has already gone. The future is not simply something that has not
yet come. The past comes again in the future; the future has already
come in the past. If we follow the past far enough, we return to the
future; if we follow the future far enough, we return to the past. Time
forms a circle; it is recurrent. If we locate time in the present, we can
say that this present possesses as present an infinite past and an infinite
future, and also that it is identical with a limitless present. The present is
the eternal present with an infinite depth; in short, time is nothing but
the infinite present, the eternal now.44
Kuki did not agree with Heidegger who approached time as “human
time,” “finite time,” the time between birth and death, the time whose
being makes itself visible, “is out there” (Da-sein). In “Der Begriff der
Zeit” (The Concept of Time), a lecture delivered to the Marburg Theo-
logical Society in July 1924, Heidegger had challenged the notion of
eternal time whose explanation required an act of faith, a belief in an
eternal God. Quoting from Einstein’s theory of relativity, Heidegger
argued that absolute space and absolute time do not exist in them-
selves, since space exists only “by way of the bodies and energies con-
tained in it,” and time “persists merely as a consequence of the events
taking place in it.” Accordingly, Heidegger defined time as “that within
which events take place.” The clock loses the futuricity of time or, as
Heidegger put it, “only if I say that time authentically has no time to
calculate time is this an appropriate assertion.” Rather than reducing
time to a continuous present—in which the past is interpreted as a
no-longer present and the future as indeterminate not-yet present—
Heidegger reminded his audience that “the possibility of access to
history is grounded in the possibility according to which any specific
43
Kuki discusses these issues in the section “Time and Literature” of Bungaku no
Gairon, in KSZ 11, pp. 137–161.
44
Kuki Shūzō, “Bungaku no Keijijōgaku,” in KSZ 4, p. 33.
present understands how to be futural. This is the first principle of all

hermeneutics.”45
Kuki was not ready to accept Heidegger’s notion of “horizontal
time,” or time seen as an integral unity of its ecstasies. Kuki never fully
integrated in his philosophy Heidegger’s deconstruction of the meta-
physics of presence. The safety net of metaphysics was one that Kuki
never agreed to give up. As he confessed in the poem “An Autumn
Day” (“Aki no Ichinichi”):
After all, I am lonesome,
The loneliness of the one who follows darkness, the grief of the
one who pursues an invisible shadow,
A philosophy without metaphysics is lonesome,
I wish for a metaphysics that problematizes human existence
and death.46
Kuki associated metaphysical time, the time of Kuki’s temporality, with
poetry, by which he meant lyrical poetry. For Kuki, poetry was the
intuition (chokkan) and the emotion (kandō) of the present instant. By
singing the “eternal present,” the rhythm of poetry was an indication
of the “eternal return of the present.” Rhymes, repetitions, and other
rhetorical devices were means for the reader to stop at the place of the
same present and concentrate on the unending instant of the eternal
present. Kuki called the temporal structure of poetry “the present pres-
ent” (genzaiteki genzai), the same structure found in all arts.47
In the first lecture that he gave at Pontigny, in the outskirts of Paris,
on his way back to Japan, “La Notion du Temps et la Reprise sur le
Temps en Orient” (The Notion of Time and Repetition in Oriental
Time, August 11,1928), Kuki articulated a notion of time that he
hoped would bring the depth of metaphysics back to time.48 Instead
45
Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, transl. by William McNeill (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), p. 20E.
46
KSZ 1, pp. 128–129.
47
Kuki Shūzō, “Bungaku no Keijijōgaku,” in KSZ 4, pp. 45–52. Kuki noticed a
similarity between the arts and religion since both were concerned with the notion
of “eternity.” The difference was that while religion dealt with the potentiality of the
infinite (sempiternitas) and, therefore, its temporal nature was a metaphysical pres-
ent (keijijōgaku genzai), art was centered around the notion of the present power
of eternity (aeternitas) and, therefore, its temporal structure was phenomenological
(genshōgakuteki genzai).
48
There are two English translations of Kuki’s Pontigny Lectures. See, Stephen
Light, Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre: Influence and Counter-Influence in the Early
History of Existential Phenomenology, pp. 43–67, and David A. Dilworth and Valdo
of Heidegger’s “horizontal time,” he introduced the view of a “self-

escaping perpendicular time,” a mystical time seen as an eternal pres-
ent. This was a critique of modern time as a time “alienated towards
the future,” in which the present is always meaningless, time being
always directed towards a future purpose—a straight, infinite, abstract
line. Kuki presented what he felt to be the structure of Eastern time, a
returning/recurring time, the cyclical time of transmigration (rinne),
in which what he called the “great cosmic year” (daiuchū nen) repeats
itself infinitely. The same instant that takes place in the present is found
in the infinite “great cosmic year” of past and present; as a result, every
instant is “the eternal present” (eien no genzai). Kuki called the awak-
ening to the truth that each instant actually is “the eternal present,”
“the vertical casting off the self” (suichokuteki datsuga), i.e. the experi-
ence of mystical time.
In the second Pontigny lecture, “L’Expression de l’Infini dans l’Art
Japonais” (The Expression of the Infinite in Japanese Art, August 17,
1928), Kuki connected “vertical time” to art by arguing that “verti-
cal time” is the time of art, especially the time experienced in poetry.
Poetry (tanka and haiku) liberates the infinite from time. The infinite
realizes itself “in an asymmetric and fluid form” (the 5–7–5–7–7 pat-
tern is not symmetric). In such an asymmetrical form, “the idea of
liberation from measurable time is realized.” In the circular time of
Japanese poetry, time past is brought back to the present so that ordi-
nary time is broken. The “infinite present” of poetry gives concreteness
to Kuki’s notion of the “great cosmic year”: poetry brings vertical time
(ecstatic time/ the outside of time/ past/ the eternal present) into the
present, inauthentic, spatial, horizontal time.
In conclusion, Kuki used the notion of the “the eternal present” as
he talked about poetry and the arts, but his poetry foregrounded the
very different idea of “duration.” Kuki’s circle of eternal time does
not present the characteristics of Bergson’s expanding circle, a circle
that by expanding shows openness, but by remaining at any instant a
circle affirms that it is still closed. Kuki’s circle is closed at all times,
marking the boundaries of a circumscribed space in which time is fro-
zen in an a-historical eternity, the eternity of the “reigns of the gods”
(kami no yo) of mythical memory. Kuki’s fourth type of temporality
H. Viglielmo, with Augustin Jacinto Zavala, eds., Sourcebook for Modern Japanese
Philosophy: Selected Documents (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), pp. 199–219.
presents all the characteristics of imperial time, the Japanese emperor

being a reminder of his sacred ancestors, all living in the eternal pres-
ent. Before drawing a hasty conclusion, however, we should not forget
that Kuki was deeply imbued with the education of the Meiji period,
a time when the emperor stood as the symbol that had crushed the
feudalism of the shōgunal regime, rather than as the symbol justifying
the atrocities of the contemporary military regime. If I am allowed to
borrow the language that Bergson developed in Les Deux Sources de
la Morale et de la Religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,
1932),49 a book with which Kuki was familiar, Kuki’s spatialized tem-
porality is ambiguously located between the closed society of moral
obligation and the open society of moral aspiration. His philosophy
of contingency was a centrifugal movement involving open sociabil-
ity and dynamic spirituality. Its potential was somehow silenced by
his philosophy of necessity (recurring time and eternal present) which
was a centripetal movement of closure. In the philosophy of necessity,
the in-group of family, nation, and race excludes the differences of the
out-group. Once again, space (the space that Kuki had portrayed bril-
liantly in his poetry as the world of quantity, homogeneity, sameness)
was privileged over time—the world of Bergson’s “pure duration,” het-
erogeneity, difference.
49
See Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, transl. by R. Ash-
ley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1977).
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HISTORY AND COMPARABILITY
Let me begin by thanking Miriam Wattles for organizing this meeting

and for inviting me to briefly address the group this morning. Origi-
nally, Miriam asked me to talk about my work in Japanese aesthetics;
eventually I found out that the topic of today’s discussion had slightly
changed due to the presence of originally two, then three, giants of
Japanese studies—the topic for discussion is now “history and com-
parability.” While I would hesitate to talk about history, though to
this day I have been unable to let the Hegelian curse go once for all,
I would like to address the notion of comparability, a notion that I
believe cannot be avoided as long as one deals with Japan from the
position of the “other” (US, Europe), and maybe even from a “local”
position of Japan itself.
The first thing that comes to my mind when thinking of compara-
bility (which means the possibility of comparison) is the image of a
parent who has two children. Though I should be the last person to use
this example, since I do not have children, I believe that parents should
never compare their children to each other for the obvious reason that
someone might get hurt in the process. Comparison implies the pres-
ence of a measure, a yardstick against which things (or children) are
compared—in other words, one needs a tertium comparationis, a third
something (the ideal child). When we begin to compare we realize
that, although we originally thought we only had two children, it turns
out that we actually had a third—the ideal child, the one destined to
never exist, the child without the big ears, the sweet one.
Then, when it comes to Japanese studies, and we inevitably step onto
the ground of comparison, the question is: who is the good child that
makes the comparison possible? The answer depends on who gives
These remarks were delivered on May 10, 2008, at the Japanese Arts and Globaliza-
tion UC-Multi-campus Research Group Workshop, University of California, Santa
Barbara. The author wishes to thank Professor Miriam Wattles for her kind invitation
and comments.
492 chapter twenty-four
it. First, if you ask those Western philosophers who knew very little
about Japan or the Far East, and who never traveled to those lands
like, for example, Leibniz, Voltaire, or Heidegger, then the good child
would turn out to be a utopia that they thought could only be found
in Japan or the Far East.
Second, if you ask those scholars who labor to sell their knowledge
of Japan to the West (I am sure we all recognize ourselves in this
category), then the good child is the one who is able to approach our
object of study (Japan) critically—and here, critically is the key word.
As you know too well, it would be sufficient for a reviewer to use the
magic word “critical” either to make or to unmake someone’s career.
When you see the words “uncritical study” attached to your work,
you immediately start worrying whether you already have tenure or
not, in the same way that in our business, at the end of a talk, you are
supposed to ask a question that shows that you are more critical than
the speaker. In other words, after the Enlightenment, the good child
is one who underscores the imperialistic, dystopic nature of the whole
Japanese cultural enterprise.
Third, and lastly, if you ask a Japanese person writing from Japan,
you might be given the impression that he had identical twins (the
West and the Orient) born at slightly different times, and that the Ori-
ent was made of Siamese twins with a Japanese heart. This is the case,
for example, of the aesthetician Ōnishi Yoshinori who constantly used
the expression “The East or Japan” and “The East especially Japan”
when talking about the Siamese twins, and who, at the same time,
used the method known as concidentia oppositorum (the sameness of
opposites) when comparing East and West—no matter how big the
differences are, at the end these differences all coincide and are bound
to disappear.
It seems to me that these three ways of talking about self and other
were dictated not by the Other (Japan) but by the very methods used
to pursue the comparison of self and other, as well as (which is to
reiterate the same point) by the ideologies that such methods contrib-
ute to creating. In other words, all these comparisons tell us very little
about Japan (posited that such an object ever existed), and very much
about ourselves. Of course, my own methodology of setting up a triad
in my own comparison of Voltaire, Ōnishi, and us squarely falls in the
second category of post-Enlightenment critical desire.
When I came to the United States as a graduate student in the 1980s
I witnessed a boom of theory in Japanese studies. This was the time
when the exotic names of Foucault, Bourdieu, Lacan, and, to a certain
history and comparability 493
extent, Althusser and Derrida began to be increasingly used in rela-

tion to Japanese studies. This was indeed an interesting time which
witnessed fierce and often irreverent debates in which the bastions
of orthodoxy (the Oriental departments at Harvard, Columbia, and
UC Berkeley) were under severe attack by the off-centered positions
of Masao Miyoshi and the Chicago School of Harry Harootunian to
whom we are very much indebted for spicing up our fields. Basically,
they reminded us that maybe Santa Claus did not exist after all, and
that a translation preceded by an introduction was not necessarily an
innocent enterprise. They also made me think that, independently from
the critical or uncritical position that one took in his or her studies,
the Hegelian off-shoots of the digestive process were very much alive
in Japanese studies. I felt that we all somehow feasted on Japan as we
did on sushi, ingesting it, chewing on it, eventually spitting it out and
expunging it, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes in disgust. What
was left of this food (the blood) was basically the blood of theory, and
this theory always came from the West. Of course, the body processes
the food, and, usually, the “critical” West had the upper hand in the
operation.
In the 1980s and 1990s the word “Japaneseness” became an obses-
sion. It was difficult to go to a conference and not hear the word “Japa-
neseness” splashed all over the room, with the obvious implication
that we were too smart and too critical not to notice the imperialistic
underpinnings of Japaneseness. The operations in dealing with Japan
from a “critical” perspective reminded me of the aesthetic process
in which an observer is posited as a subject who is empowered to
do whatever he or she likes with the object under scrutiny. No one
seemed to be concerned too much with turning a painting (or Japan)
into an object without ever allowing the painting to turn the observer
into an object. Everybody likes to look, particularly at objects that do
not look back. However, the turning of the subject into an object is
exactly what the critique of aesthetics does—a critique that alerts us to
the need of uprooting the observer from his seat of observation. Once
the viewer or scholar cannot rely on any fixed place from which to
observe, nor on any fixed theory, nor any majestic God, can he or she
still approach the work of art, the object of study? I believe she can,
but with no cushions underneath.
Personally, I felt that a relativization of subjective stances could be
somehow realized by becoming more aware of such subjective stances—
and I thought that this could be a first step in a critique of “critical”
studies. In my work I used the term “hermeneutics” in the sense of
494 chapter twenty-four
the construction of interpretations—a series of messages exchanged

back and forth through the centuries on texts in general. Of course,
the association of “hermeneutics” with the Bible down to the very last
historical representatives of the movement could only invite suspicion,
particularly in relation to a critique of critical post-Enlightenment. Is
he trying to bring us back to the Middle Ages?—is the first suspicion that
comes to people’s mind. However, this desperate need to relativize the
thinking subject seems to me a first step in diluting the imperialistic
stance of this thinking subject. Is there a more imperialistic subject
than the one talking about imperialism? In Europe, over twenty-five
centuries of debates on knowledge and power had gone into the inter-
pretations that led to the theories of Foucault, Bourdieu, Althusser,
Lacan, and Derrida—and all that knowledge was now transferred to
an interpretation of Japanese texts. Then, the question was, aside from
texts, didn’t Japan have any hermeneutical mechanism (interpretative
modes, if you wish) on which relationships of power and knowledge
were founded? And wasn’t the task of historians of literature, art, reli-
gion, and historians of history of Japan to remind us how these inter-
pretative constructs worked through the centuries in Japan?
The horrific processes of domestication that to this day continue to
be conducted on Japanese soil and texts—and I am the first to be guilty
as charged—are not simply limited to The Tale of Genji, as a student
of Professor Miyoshi reminded us twenty years ago. This castration of
texts also applies to the reading of Buddhist statues and hanging scrolls,
Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, and the archives related to shōen in the Heian
and Kamakura periods. Such acts might look innocuous to us, because
they leave things as they are. But they also impoverish us because they
fail to talk about our own prejudices—and I mean the word prejudice
in a positive, pre-Enlightenment sense of pre-judgment, the inevitable
a priori without which we could not even begin the process of think-
ing. It is not a question of overcoming critically prejudices that, as
the Enlighteners wanted us to believe, were necessarily wrong; it is
a question of having necessary a priori confronted by the possibility
that something different can exist. After all, I believe that difference is
what has led me to the study of Japan—otherwise I would have stayed
home. At the very least, I guess I studied Japan because I thought that
the encounter with an obvious Other could make a difference to my
life. Otherwise, why bother?
Acts of domestications are not harmless all the time. They can also be
downright treacherous, particularly when it comes to issues of imperi-
history and comparability 495
alism. Imagine, if in the name of an alleged “critical” impulse you were

accused of being a “typical ideologue of nineteenth-century imperial-
ism,” the founder of a “cultural hermeneutic” and a “national ontol-
ogy” which made you responsible for Japan’s “expansionistic policies
in China”? How would you feel if you could hear statements like these
made fifty years after your death, and if you knew that these charges
ran exactly opposite to what you had set out to do in the first place?
How would you feel? It is true that historians can rely on the wisdom
of irrelevance—which is to say, they are privy to judgments after the
facts, particularly when such judgments carry no weight whatsoever
on the present. And it is true that it would be impossible for anyone
to make a statement that would not get you in trouble at some point
in the future. However, one should at least exercise some care when it
comes to make statements on behalf of the dead. Even if these state-
ments turn out to be true (which I believe it would be impossible to
prove in this particular case), who is going to underline the imperial-
istic stance of the statement itself?
And this is my final point: How can a contemporary critique of
Japanese imperialism be conducted from the safe seat of an American
university from which one can easily discredit the world (and eas-
ily find consensus in a politically correct environment), without tak-
ing into account the seat of imperialism from which we preach so
comfortably? Why should the subject be exempt from the charges he
moves against the object, and how can such an act bring comfort and
solace to a group of like-minded people?
Richard Hideki Okada, “Domesticating the Tale of Genji,” in Journal of the American
Oriental Society, vol. 110, n. 1 (January–March 1990), pp. 60–70.
Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of
National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 121 and
231.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MICHAEL F. MARRA’S WORKS
Books
Michael F. Marra, Japan’s Frames of Meaning: Hermeneutics Reader. Honolulu: The

University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010, 437p.
Michael F. Marra, A Poetic Guide to an Ancient Capital: Aizu Yaichi and the City of
Nara. Baltimore, Maryland: Modern English Tanka Press, 2009, 153p.
Michael F. Marra, Seasons and Landscapes in Japanese Poetry: An Introduction to
Haiku and Waka. Lewinston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008, 295p.
Michael F. Marra, The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey. Hono-
lulu: The University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007, 293p.
Michael F. Marra, ed. Hermeneutical Strategies: Methods of Interpretation in the Study
of Japanese Literature, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies
5, Summer 2004, 517p.
Michael F. Marra, ed. and trans. Kuki Shūzō: A Philosopher’s Poetry and Poetics.
Honolulu: The University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004, 357p.
Michael F. Marra, ed. Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Inter-
pretation. Honolulu: The University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002, 247p.
Michael F. Marra, ed. and trans. A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics. Honolulu:
The University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001, 398p. (hardcover and paperback editions).
Michele Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 1999, 322p. (paperback edition, 2002).
Michele Marra, trans. Seminando Semi di Comprensione (Italian Translation of Oka-
matsu Yoshihisa, Tane wo Maku). Kyoto: New Color Photographic Printing, 1997,
179p.
Michele Marra, Representations of Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993, 240p. (hardcover and paperback edi-
tions).
Michele Marra, The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japa-
nese Literature, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991, 222p. (hardcover and
paperback editions).
Michele Marra, trans. I Racconti di Ise (Introduction and Italian Translation of Ise
Monogatari). Turin: Einaudi, 1985, 162p.
Michele Marra, trans. Ihara Saikaku: Storie di Mercanti (Introduction and Italian
Translation of Saikaku’s Nihon Eitaigura and Seken Munezan’yō). Turin: UTET,
1983, 290p.
Articles and Book Chapters
“Aesthetic Section: Overview,” in James Heisig, Thomas Kasulis, and John Maraldo,
eds., Sources in Japanese Philosophy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, forth-
coming).
“The Creation of the Vocabulary of Aesthetics in Meiji Japan,” in J. Thomas Rimer,
ed., Japanese Art of the Modern Age (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, forth-
coming).
498 bibliography of michael f. marra’s works
“Aesthetic Categories: Past and Present,” in Takahiro Nakajima, ed., Whither Japanese
Philosophy? Reflections Through Other Eyes (Tokyo: The University of Tokyo Center
for Philosophy, 2009), pp. 39–59.
“Italian Fireflies into the Darkness of History,” in Whither Japanese Philosophy? Reflec-
tions Through Other Eyes (Tokyo: The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy,
2009), pp. 61–79.
“Continuity in Discontinuity: Thinking The Tale of Genji with Japanese Thinkers,”
in Genji: Genji Monogatari no Hon’yaku to Hensō (Kyoto: Dōshisha Daigaku
Daigakuin Bungaku Kenkyūka, 2008), pp. 55–80.
“Frameworks of Meaning: Old Aesthetic Categories and the Present,” in Atsuko Ueda
and Richard Okada, eds., Literature and Literary Theory, Proceedings of the Asso-
ciation for Japanese Literary Studies (PAJLS), Vol. 9 (2008), pp. 153–163.
“The Dissolution of Meaning: Towards an Aesthetics of Non-Sense,” in The Asian
Journal of Aesthetics & Art Sciences 1:1 (2008), pp. 15–27. It also appears in Jale N.
Erzen, ed., International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Vol. 12 (2008), pp. 33–52.
“Japanese Aesthetics in the World” (in Japanese), Shinohara Motoaki, ed., Iwanami
Kōza: Tetsugaku, Vol. 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2008), pp. 179–202.
“A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer: Kuki Shūzō’s Version,”
in Victor Sōgen Hori and Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, eds., Neglected Themes and
Hidden Variations, Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy 2 (Nagoya: Nanzan Institute
for Religion and Culture, 2008), pp. 56–77.
“Place of Poetry, Place in Poetry: On Rulers, Poets, and Gods,” in Eiji Sekine, ed.,
Travel in Japanese Representational Culture: Its Past, Present, and Future, Proceed-
ings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (PAJLS), Vol. 8 (Summer
2007), pp. 35–46.
“Conrad Fiedler and the Aesthetics of the Kyōto School,” Proceedings of the Third
International Congress for Aesthetics (forthcoming).
“Aizu Yaichi no Nara Uta ni Tsuite,” in Aizu Yaichi to Nara, Commemorative Issue of
the 50th Anniversary of the Death of Aizu Yaichi (Niigata: Aizu Yaichi Kinenkan,
2006), pp. 12–18.
“Introduction: The Hermeneutical Challenge,” in Michael F. Marra, ed., Hermeneuti-
cal Strategies: Methods of Interpretation in the Study of Japanese Literature, Pro-
ceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (PAJLS), Vol. 5 (Summer
2004), pp. 1–16.
“On Japanese Things and Words: An Answer to Heidegger’s Question,” Philosophy
East and West 54:4 (October 2004), pp. 555–568.
“Poetry and Poetics in Tension: Kuki Shūzō’s French and German Connections,” in Eiji
Sekine, ed., Japanese Poeticity and Narrativity Revisited, Proceedings of the Associa-
tion for Japanese Literary Studies (PAJLS), Vol. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 79–97.
“The Aesthetics of Tradition: Making the Past Present,” Ken’ichi Sasaki, ed., Aesthetics
of Asia (Singapore and Kyoto: NUS Press and Kyoto University Press, 2010), pp.
41–55. Also available in Ken’ichi Sasaki, and Tanehisa Otabe, eds., Proceedings of
the Fifteenth International Congress of Aesthetics in Japan 2001, CD-Rom, The Great
Books of Aesthetics (2003), pp. 1–13.
“Estetika Tradicije: Narediti Preteklost Prisotno,” in Borec (Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2002),
pp. 160–174. Translation of “The Aesthetics of Tradition: Making the Past Present,”
Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Congress of Aesthetics in Japan, 2001.
“Fields of Contention: Philology (Bunkengaku) and the Philosophy of Literature
(Bungeigaku),” in Joshua A. Fogel and James C. Baxter, eds., Historiography and
Japanese Consciousness of Values and Norms (International Research Center for
Japanese Studies, 2002), pp. 197–221.
“Bungaku Kenkyū ni Okeru Ronsō: Bunkengaku to Bungeigaku” (in Japanese), in
Ōsaka Daigaku Bigaku Kenkyūkai, ed. Bi to Geijutsu no Shunposhon (Tokyo Keisō
Shobō, 2002), pp. 311–322.
bibliography of michael f. marra’s works 499
“Coincidentia Oppositorum: The Greek Genealogies of Japan,” in Michael F. Marra, ed.

Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation (Hono-
lulu: The University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 142–152.
“Tairitsu Suru Mono no Itchi: Nihon no Girishateki Keifu” (in Japanese), Nihon no
Bigaku 30 (2000), pp. 90–104.
“Nihon no Bigaku: Imi no Kōchiku” (in Japanese), in Kambayashi Tsunemichi, ed.,
Nihon no Geijutsu Ron: Dentō to Kindai (Essays on the Japanese Arts: Modernity
and Tradition) (Kyoto: Minerva Shobō, 2000), pp. 3–26.
“Japan’s Missing Alternative: Weak Thought and the Hermeneutics of Slimness,” Ver-
sus, 83/84 (May 1999), pp. 215–241.
“The New as Violence and the Hermeneutics of Slimness,” Proceedings of the Midwest
Association for Japanese Literary Studies 4 (Summer 1998), pp. 83–102.
“Nativist Hermeneutics: The Interpretative Strategies of Motoori Norinaga and Fuji-
tani Mitsue,” Japan Review Bulletin of the International Research Center for Japanese
Studies, Number 10 (October 1998), pp. 17–52.
“Yowaki Shii: Kaishakugaku no Mirai wo Minagara” (“Weak Thought: A Look at
the Future of Hermeneutics”) (in Japanese), 95th Nichibunken Forum (December
1997), pp. 1–39.
“Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning,” Philosophy East and West 45:3
(July 1995), pp. 367–386.
“The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan,” The
Journal of Asian Studies 52:1 (February 1993), pp. 49–65.
“Zeami and Nō: A Path Towards Enlightenment,” Journal of Asian Culture, vol. XII
(1988), pp. 37–67.
“The Development of Mappō Thought in Japan (II),” Japanese Journal of Religious
Studies, vol. 15, Number 4 (December 1988), pp. 287–305.
“The Development of Mappō Thought in Japan (I),” Japanese Journal of Religious
Studies, vol. 15, Number 1 (March 1988), pp. 25–54.
“The Conquest of Mappō: Jien and Kitabatake Chikafusa,” Japanese Journal of Reli-
gious Studies, vol. 12, Number 4 (December 1985), pp. 319–341.
“Semi-Recluses (Tonseisha) and Impermanence (Mujō): Kamo no Chōmei and Urabe
Kenkō,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 11, Number 4 (December 1984),
pp. 313–350.
“Major Japanese Theorists of Poetry: from Ki no Tsurayuki to Kamo no Chōmei,”
Journal of Osaka University of Foreign Studies, Literature 67 (1984), pp. 27–35.
“Mumyōzōshi, Part 3,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. XXXIX, Number 4 (Winter 1984),
pp. 409–434.
“Mumyōzōshi, Part 2,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. XXXIX, Number 3 (Autumn
1984), pp. 281–305.
“Mumyōzōshi: Introduction and Translation,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. XXXIX,
Number 2 (Summer 1984), pp. 115–145.
“The Michizane Legend as seen in the Nō Drama, Raiden,” Journal of Osaka University
of Foreign Studies, 64 (1984), pp. 437–446.
Book Reviews
Nara Hiroshi. The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō (Hono-
lulu: The University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), in The Journal of Asian Studies, 64:1
(February 2005), pp. 198–199.
Robert N. Huey, The Making of Shinkokinshū (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia
Center, 2002), in The Journal of Japanese Studies 29:1 (2003), pp. 192–195.
500 bibliography of michael f. marra’s works
Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National
Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), in
Comparative Literature Studies 40:1 (2003), pp. 96–99.
Rajyashree Pandey, Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan: The Works of the
Poet-Priest Kamo no Chōmei (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, 1998), in
The Journal of Asian Studies (1999), pp. 853–856.
Silvio Calzolari, trans., Il Dio Incatenato: Honchō Shinsenden di Ōe no Masafusa. Storie
di Santi e Immortali nel Giappone dell’Epoca Heian (794–1185) (Florence: Sansoni,
1984), in Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 41, Number 4 (Winter 1986), pp. 495–497.
Unpublished Material
Michele Marra, La Tradizione Classica in Kawabata Yasunari, Doctoral Dissertation

(University of Turin, 1979, 450 pages).
INDEX
Abe Jirō 17, 444 Dessoir, Max 120

Aizu Yaichi 17, 227, 233, 235, 452–453 Dilthey, Wilhelm 140–141, 231,
Akatsuka Fujio 239 278–280, 282
Akisato Ritō 267, 451 Dilworth, David A. 10, 146, 472, 487
Allioux, Yves-Marie 21 Dōgen 7, 13, 63, 356
Amagasaki Akira 17, 65, 69, 77, 385, Doi Kōchi 443–444
414
Aoki Masaru 444 Eco, Umberto 187
Ariga Nagao 27 eien no ima 254, 334, 486
Aristotle 167, 187, 284 Elze, Karl 425–426, 437, 439–441
Asahara Shōkō 211 Ermatinger, Emil 444
Ast, Friedrich 230
Augustine, St. 230, 291 Fabbri, Paolo 18
Fenollosa, Ernest F. 17, 37–42, 46
Banu, George 21 Féty, Françoise 21
Barthes, Roland 187 Fiedler, Conrad 131–138, 142, 144–146
Basch, Victor 188 Fischer, Theodor 189
Baumgarten, Gottlieb 49 Fontanesi, Antonio 45, 189
Bergson, Henri 141, 161, 178, 334, Foucault, Michel 187, 492, 494
475–476, 479, 481–484, 488–489 Fujii Otoo 433
Berio, Luciano 187 Fujimura Tsukuru 433, 435
Berque, Augustin 21 Fujioka Sakutarō 433, 437
Boeckh, August 227, 230–231, Fujita Masakatsu 18, 137 n. 19, 137,
423–427, 431, 433, 435, 437, 439–440 162–165, 283
Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten 14 Fujitani Mitsue 6, 15, 53, 75–78, 365,
Boutroux, Émile 346, 476 379, 400–414, 415 n. 129
Bréhier, Émile 476 Fujitani Nariakira 411
Briot, Alain 21 Fujiwara no Kintō 32
Brock, Julie 21 Fujiwara no Michinaga 32, 334, 464
bungeigaku 443–449 Fujiwara no Shunzei 12, 52, 64–67, 70,
bunkengaku 424, 426, 435, 438 217, 327, 352, 367 n. 4, 376 n. 33
Byron, George 124, 452 Fujiwara no Tadanobu 32
Fujiwara no Takaie 32
Cappelletti, Giovanni Vincenzo 45 Fujiwara Teika 13, 42, 51–52, 54,
Cassian, John 229 67–68, 70–71, 77, 193 n. 12, 201,
Chang Chiu-ling 32 224–225, 290, 349–356, 358, 362,
Charles, Daniel 21 370 n. 15, 414
Chladenius, Johann 230 Fukada Yasukazu 17
Christin, Anne-Marie 21 Fukuoka Kōtei 38
Cohen, Herman 189
Collignon, Maxime 118 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 227, 234,
278–285, 287, 289–291, 412 n. 123
Dannhauer, Johann 227, 229 Geiger, Moritz 124
Derrida, Jacques 61–62, 71, 86, 187, Genpin Sōzu 204
250, 382, 383 n. 52, 400 n. 97, 492, Glockner, Hermann 172
494 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 124,
Descartes, René 49–50, 278, 287, 289 154, 460, 475
502 index
Go-Toba 67, 204, 307 n. 2 Ishida Yoshisada 204, 357

Groos, Karl 187–188 Ishiyama Tetsurō 448
Izutsu Toshihiko 7–10
Haga Tōru 17
Haga Yaichi 227, 231, 424, 435, 437, Jien 216
443 Jung, Carl 128
Hamada Kōsaku 465–466
Hamashita Masahiro 17 Kada no Azumamaro 432
Harootunian, Harry 493 Kaibara Ekiken 372, 451
Harrison, Jane Ellen 118 Kaito Matsuzō 436, 444
Hartlaub, Gustav Friedrich 120–121, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro 295, 297,
129 300, 306, 456, 464
Hartmann, Eduard von 41, 46 Kakuen 215
Hashimoto Noriko 21 Kambayashi Tsunemichi 17, 460
Hatano Seiichi 42 Kamo no Chōmei 54, 71, 193, 196,
Haven, Joseph 31 204, 211, 214, 244, 350, 357
Hearn, Lafcadio 452 Kamo no Mabuchi 306, 372, 378, 412
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 279 Kant, Immanuel 6, 16, 34, 42, 83, 136,
Heidegger, Martin 12–15, 59, 61, 78, 140, 167, 172, 177, 188, 257, 259–260,
86–87, 88 n. 5, 89–91, 109, 144, 328, 339, 480
149–153, 165, 167–169, 171–172, Karaki Junzō 356–357
175–176, 185, 227–228, 231–232, 234, Karatani Kōjin 17, 43, 59, 106, 207,
238, 249, 278–281, 283, 285, 291, 473
295–296, 229, 343, 362, 373, 384, Kasulis, Thomas 62, 63
473–475, 485–488, 491 Katsumata Susumu 239
Heine, Steven 7–8, 12–14 Katsushika Hokusai 243
Hibbett, Howard 4 Kawabata Yasunari 307, 328
Hijikata Tatsumi 239 Kawabe no Miyahito 216
Hirabayashi Taiko 281 Kawagita Tanrei 379
Hirata Atsutane 439 kawaii 197–198, 228, 245, 272
hirenzoku no renzoku 254, 327 Kawatake Toshio 21
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi 5, 9–10, 191, 353, Kazamaki Keijirō 444
435–436 Keene, Donald 4, 5 n. 4
Hisamatsu Shin’ichi 56 Keichū 151 n. 3, 295, 306, 366 n. 1,
Hölderlin, Friedrich 169, 171, 295, 299 369–370, 373–374, 393–397, 412, 439,
Hori Keizan 52, 367, 370 441
Hosokawa Yūsai 370 Kenkō 8 n. 14, 13, 43, 193, 204, 207,
Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm von 426 323–325, 358
Hume, Nancy G. 5, 20 Ki no Tsurayuki 34, 50, 52, 306, 332,
Hume, Robert Ernest 118 393, 421
Husserl, Edmund 167, 382–383, 486 Ki no Yoshimochi 23, 25, 43
Kikuta Shigeo 444, 447
Ikeda Kikan 434 Kimura Bin 159–163
iki 6, 7 n. 10, 13–14, 20 n. 53, 55, Kisen 25
167–169, 181, 192, 194, 209, 256, 270, Kitabatake Chikafusa 44
344–345, 372, 471 Kitamura Kigin 373, 395, 397
Iki no Kōzō 13, 55, 168, 194, 209, 270, Kobayashi Hideo 23, 52–53, 358
344, 471 Kobayashi Tomoaki 357
Imamichi Tomonobu 17, 21, 46 Kobayashi Yasuo 21
Inaga Shigemi 17 Kojima Kikuo 444
Inamura Sanpaku 23, 26 Komiya Toyotaka 444
Inoue Enryō 42 Konakamura Kiyonori 424
Inoue Tetsujirō 27, 42 Konishi Jin’ichi 412 n. 123, 447
Inouye, Daniel K. 244 Konoe Fumimaro 469
index 503
Körting, Gustav 426, 437 Morris, Ivan 4, 292 n. 15

Kubota Jun 354 Motoori Norinaga 15, 28, 52, 54, 60,
Kubota Utsubo 354 73–75, 91–95, 97, 100–101, 107, 151
Kūkai 199, 222–223 n. 3, 259, 267, 287, 300, 311, 313, 328,
Kuki Shūzō 13–15, 17, 55, 167–169, 338, 342, 347, 365–379, 381–400, 413,
172–185, 194–197, 201, 209, 214, 224, 417, 426, 451
270, 344–347, 471–489 mujō 15, 60, 63, 106, 206, 237, 327,
Kumakura Chiyuki 333–334 353, 356–359, 361, 410
Kusanagi Masao 17, 291 Murakami Hidetoshi 27
Kyūsei 358 Murakami Takashi 22, 197, 228, 241,
244, 246, 271
LaFleur, William R. 10–12, 57 Muraoka Tsunetsugu 444
Lalo, Charles 188 Murasaki Shikibu 93–95, 320, 323,
LaMarre, Thomas 18 327, 334, 336, 342, 346, 399
Lascault, Gilbert 20 mushin 6, 15, 34, 52, 63, 106, 192,
Lee, Youg-hee 315 236–237, 351, 442
Light, Stephen 14 Myōe Shōnin 462
Lipps, Theodor 127–129, 340
Liu, James J. Y. 379 Nagasawa Nobuho 228, 240
Liu Xi 370 Nakae Chōmin 36, 45, 154 n. 8
Liu Xie 381 Nakagawa Shigeaki 17
Luther, Martin 230 Nakamura, Eric 244
Nara Yoshitomo 197, 245
mabusabi 198–200, 218–219, 223–225 Natsume Sōseki 339
Mahrholz, Werner 444 Nietzsche, Friedrich 59–62, 64, 83–89,
Mallarmé, Sthéphane 220 110, 116–119, 120 nn. 14–15, 126,
Maraldo, John 18 128–129, 362
Marchetti, Gina 240 Ninomiya Masayuki 21
Maruyama Ōkyo 463 Nishi Amane 12, 17, 30–35, 40, 42, 46,
Matsuo Bashō 28, 54, 193, 217, 256 49, 359
Mayeda, Graham 14 Nishida Kitarō 8, 10, 17, 56, 131, 137,
McCullough, Helen Craig 4, 51 n. 6, 142, 144, 160–162, 165, 237, 249, 283,
216 n. 25 285, 299, 327, 334, 339, 342, 347, 355,
Meier, Georg Friedrich 230 472
Meli, Mark 18 Nishitani Keiji 17, 56, 109, 162,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 109–110 164–165, 291, 359, 360–363, 472 n. 5
Mill, John Stuart 35 Noguez, Dominique 21
Minami Hiroshi 103–105 Nōin 288
Minamoto no Muneyuki 205, 216 Nose Asaji 192
Mineta, Norman 244
mitate 199, 292–293 Odebrecht, Rudolf 121
Miura Jun 197, 245 Odin, Steve 19–20
Miyadai Shinji 210–214, 219, 224 Ogyū Sorai 367, 376 n. 35, 388
Miyagawa Tadamaro 469 Ōhara Reiko 21
Miyazaki Hayao 212 Ōhashi Ryōsuke 15, 17, 55, 255–262, 264
Miyoshi, Masao 493–494 Okakura, Tenshin 5, 17, 113, 356
moe 197, 228, 245, 272–273 Okamoto Tarō 239
mono no aware 6, 7 n. 10, 15–16, 28, Okazaki Yoshie 104–105, 331, 442–449
52, 54, 73–74, 94, 97, 100, 102–105, Ōmori Ichū 38, 40
236, 287, 308 n. 3, 328–330, 338–340, Ōmori Shōzō 53
353, 366, 384, 386–388, 390, 399, Ōnishi Hajime 17
418–419, 421 Ōnishi Yoshinori 6–8, 11, 15, 17, 29,
Mori Ōgai 17, 40 n. 48, 41, 59 55, 74, 100, 103, 114, 189, 195, 214,
Morita Shiryū 56 307 n. 1, 329–331, 353, 442, 491
504 index
Ono no Oyu 458 Sesshū 463

Opzoomer, C. W. 30 Shimamura Hōgetsu 17
Origen 229 Shinkei 182, 358
Orikuchi Shinobu 193, 207 n. 8, 358, Shinohara Motoaki 198–201, 203 n. 1,
454 214, 218–219, 222–225
Osamu Shū 434 Shirane, Haruo 18, 293
Ōta Takao 17 Shōtetsu 42, 54
Otabe Tanehisa 17 Shu Lea Cheang 228, 239
otaku 22, 196–198, 201, 211, 214, 228, Shūsō Dōjin 452, 468
242–244, 247, 263, 270–271 Siffert, René 21
Ōtomo Katsuhiro 212 Silesius, Angelus 13
Ōtomo no Tabito 25, 215 Sōgi 358, 393
Ōtomo no Yakamochi 454, 457 Solger, K. W. F. 114
Ōtsuka Yasuji 17, 46–47, 443 Sontag, Susan 227, 234–235, 241
Sora 69, 289, 359–360
Parkes, Graham 18, 19 n. 51, 474 n. 10 Souriau, Etienne 187, 189, 191,
Paul, Hermann 424, 437–440 330 n. 6
Peschard-Erlih, Érika 21 Sugawara no Funtoki 25
Pincus, Leslie 473–474 Sugimoto Kenkichi 469
Plato 36, 49, 72, 82, 84, 97, 250–251, sukimono 196, 211, 244
253, 272, 291 Suzuki Jun 421
Pseudo-Heraclitus 229 Suzuki Sadami 17
Suzuki Shigetane 379
Ragusa, Vincenzo 45
Rilke, Rainer Maria 280 Tachibana Moribe 319, 379
Rimer, J. Thomas 18, 475 n. 13 Takahashi Tōru 330–331
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 124, 383 Takayama Chogyū 17
Takechi Kurohito 215, 455–456
Sabbah, Monique 21 Tamaki Masahide 370
sabi 6, 7 n. 10, 11 n. 22, 15, 20 n. 53, Tamba Akira 20
28, 54, 104–105, 190, 192, 196–199, Tamba-Mecz, Irène 21
201, 214–215, 217–219, 222–225, Tanabe Hajime 346, 472
245–246, 308 n. 3, 353–354, 442 Tanaka, Stefan 18
Saigyō 193, 204, 207, 245, 281–282, Tanigawa Kotosuga 370, 372, 396
285–288, 357, 359 Tanikawa Shuntarō 163
Saintsbury, George 437 Tanshi 200, 217
Saito Yuriko 19 Tatsui Takenosuke 21
Sakabe Megumi 17, 21, 79 n. 37, Tezuka Tomio 13, 149–152, 167
107–110, 151 n. 3, 387 n. 62, Tomii Reiko 21, 22 n. 59, 239
400 n. 96, 472 Ton’a 323–325
Sakaguchi Ango 208–210, 214, 219, Tosaka Jun 473
223–224 Toyama Masakazu 41
Sakai, Naoki 17 Tsubouchi Shōyō 17, 27, 41
Sakuma Shōzan 45 Tsuchida Kyōson 407
Sartre, Jean-Paul 346, 476 Tsuda Sōkichi 115
Sasaki Ken’ichi 17, 114 Tsujimura Kōichi 21
Sasaki Nobutsuna 434, 436 Tsurumi Wataru 212
Sawaragi Noi 198, 242–243
Schelling, F. W. 114, 167 Ueda Juzō 17, 142–146
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 230–231 Ueda Mannen 435
Sei Shōnagon 4, 292–293 Uemura Ugen 267, 451
Seidensticker, Edward 4–5 Usener, Hermann 431
Sekine, Eiji 277 ushin 6–8, 192–193, 442
Senshi Naishinnō 33
index 505
Valéry, Paul 478 Yamabe no Akahito 34, 457

Vattimo, Gianni 15, 18, 59 n. 3, 61, Yamada Yoshio 444
85–86, 88–91, 97, 143, 227–228, Yamamura Bochō 227, 233–236
236–238, 283 Yamazaki Ansai 394
Véron, Eugène 36, 45 Yanabu Akira 28, 53
Viglielmo, Valdo H. 10 Yanagi Yukinori 228, 240
Viswanathan, Meera 18 Yanagita Kunio 469
Volkelt, Johannes 444 Yoshii Isamu 468
Yoshimoto, Midori 240
wabi 7, 9, 15, 20 n. 53, 28, 54, 56, yūgen 6, 10–15, 19–21, 28–29, 33, 36,
192, 196–198, 214, 245–246, 308 n. 3, 39, 54–55, 71, 78, 101, 103, 190–193,
353–354 196–197, 214, 236, 245, 272, 308 n. 3,
Waley, Arthur 4 329, 349–351, 353, 442
Watsuji Tetsurō 17, 104–105, 153–158,
162, 342–343, 345–347, 448, 467, 472 Zeami 7, 9, 13, 28–29, 34, 40, 44,
n. 5, 473 54–55, 109, 237, 257 n. 22, 281,
Winckelmann, Johann J. 115, 188, 460 336–337, 358, 412 n. 123
Wolf, Friedrich August 424 Zeno 483
Worringer, Wilhelm 128–129 Zōga Shōnin 204
Wu Cheng’en 220

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Essays on Japan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by

and Sergio Mamino (1956–2003)—

The devil is in the details,

the fun is somewhere else…

List of Original Publications ............................................................ ix

1. Japanese Aesthetics in the World ............................................. 3

14. The Hermeneutical Challenge .................................................. 277

16. Playing with Japanese Songs: Politics or Pleasure? ............... 307

Bibliography of Michael F. Marra’s Works ..................................... 497

1. ‘Japanese Aesthetics in the World,’ in Shinohara Motoaki, ed., Iwa-

11. ‘Paradoxes of Reclusion: Between Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics.’

21. ‘Fields of Contention: Philology (Bunkengaku) and the Philosophy

JAPANESE AESTHETICS IN THE WORLD

Although this section is titled, “Japanese aesthetics in the world,” my

Muromachi periods were interpreted as a time of perishability, irregu-

(1894–1976). In Hisamatsu’s The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aes-

We must wait until the 1980s before witnessing the beginning of a

i.e., to look at the mode of ushin as an external form of linguistic

age and death, “the ephemeral coagulation of phenomenal things and

category in light of Buddhist scriptures such as the Lotus Sutra and

microcosm is amplified in the macrocosm. This is the unique aspect of

without reason,/forgetful of itself, oblivious to our vision.”31 For Heine,

say, I analyzed the formation of aesthetic categories within the context

as a matter of fact, profoundly resisted any attempt of explanation.43

aesthetics of Japan,” without ever considering the possibility of a mod-

and anti-art (han-geijutsu).59 The former, exemplified by Gutai (Con-

THE CREATION OF THE VOCABULARY OF

the character “bi” in his Chinese Preface to the Kokinshū (Collec-

hard?”10 The nuances of gracefulness and exterior beauty increased in

In Sango Benran (Handbook of Three Languages, 1857) the scholar

actors had to struggle their whole life to achieve. The expression

ruler’s moral behavior. Confucian, Platonic, and utilitarian concerns

Turning to the Japanese history of the word “kashu” ૫⿰ (good

injustice), aesthetic feelings allow man to distinguish beauty from

eras” ( geijutsu no shi ⧓ⴚࡁ჻; lit., gentlemen of art), which are

of art. Each work must be appreciated according to its individual laws,

A genuinely thought-provoking clash between realism and idealism

“ideological paintings,” paintings based on “thoughts,” drawing

this art of poetry” in order to facilitate the reader’s understanding,

the sense of profession. He makes the following statement in Tsurezu-

Traditional meanings of the word “geijutsu” are still present in the

idealistic aesthetics on which he had previously lectured at Waseda

As Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) indicates at the

apriori that “I am because I think” (cogito, ergo sum).2 René Descartes’

concept of “experience of self-illumination” ( jishō taiken), had on the

to be commensurable with the idea of “beauty:” “Hana” ⧎ (flower)

the essay on Nō and the body by Zeami’s son-in-law and legitimate

scholar Hisamatsu Shin’ichi (1889–1990), who was a member of the

JAPANESE AESTHETICS: THE CONSTRUCTION

Recently, much has been made in the West of poststructuralist modes

Void and Nothingness

When we observe the map of the contemporary process of capital

able fable of the metaphysical world.3 The Nietzschean Übermensch is

“Weak Thought”: Poetic Representations. There is some sort of com-

philosophy, ultimate values are superfluous inasmuch as they block

devoted to showing the metaphoricity and circularity of all structural

The grasping of the interrelatedness of opposites requires in Zen

cannot catch the immediacy of experience. This reminds us of Nietz-

on the viewer’s mind; it was rather the result of poetic representa-