Michaux in Ecuador

Just a few lines here about Henri Michaux, a writer who really seems a genius - but, oh, what a quaint and peculiar genius! Some years ago I read his A Barbarian in Asia, and there was a sentence in there - "It would disgust me to own a house" - which serves as the perfect point of entry into the travelogue Ecuador, a thin and fragmentary book based on a journey made in 1927, to which I'd like to turn here.

There is so much I like in this work! His exasperation at Europe, his longing to talk to animals, to love something else than friends and women. And not least, his dread of cities, of vaults:

A mind of a certain size can only feel exasperation towards a city. Nothing can drive it more fully to despair. The walls first of all, and even then all the rest is only so many horrid images of selfishness, mistrust, stupidity, and narrow-mindedness.
    No need to memorize the Napoleonic code. Just look at a city and you have it.
    Each time I come back from the country, just as I am starting to congratulate myself on my calmness, there breaks out a furor, a rage…
    And I come upon my mark, homo sapiens, the acquisitive wolf.
    Cities, architectures, how I loathe you!
    Great surfaces of vaults, vaults cemented into the earth, vaults set out in compartments, forming vaults to eat in, vaults for sex, vaults on the watch, ready to open fire. How sad, sad… (p.60)

Openness.... and claustrophobia. A theme, it seems to me, that is central to Michaux, or at least to the Michaux that speaks throughout these pages.

And money, there's another theme:

Money, money, one of these days I will say something about you. There is not in this century one poet who will not attribute his actions to the pressure of money. As far back as you want, my life has been in this straitjacket. (p. 63)

No, he doesn’t want to accept any gifts, not of things too heavy to carry. He wants to escape. Wish you success, Henri. I hope you still live there somewhere, outside the vaults.


References:

Michaux, Henri (2001) Ecuador: A Travel Journal, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Teikoku shônen - art nouveau punk?

I read a comment about Teikoku Shônen (aka Imperial Boy) some time ago: ”I simply love.. So much so, that it breaks my heart a bit to know that I'll never live in such beautiful places.”

Here's a sample of his work (for more, see his web-page)

There's an excellent blog entry about him here: Hunting the Elusive. Below I'm going to quote a few passages from it, while adding my own commentaries. Since I'd like this entry to be something in the way of an inventory of themes that I find in these works, I will treat them under a number of headings: postmodernity and colonialism, nature and history, ecology and junk, and childhood and loss.


Postmodernity and colonialism

"What it really is, is a world without the ideas of minimalism or architectural modernism. It is a rejection of the simple for the complex, the space for the clutter. Roads and buildings are piled one upon the other like space is at a premium." This description is very much to the point. Without stating so explicitly, the statement suggest, I believe, the "postmodern" feel of this world. This in turn might be related to what the author of the blog calls "the unabashedly Japanese feel of his cities". Let me quote again: "This is no steam-punk imagining of European lineage. It is a strictly Japanese or Asian world which manages to look quaint/retro and technologically complex at the same time." Other elements that seem to reflect experiences of Japanese society might include the middle-class feel of these cities and the lack of overt class distinctions. So, is this a variety of techno-orientalism? Maybe, but if that is the case, I think we need to add that techno-orientalism itself is not simply an imaginary construct, but also contains a kernel of truth that is rooted in the way modern Japanese society developed.  

Look for instance at this:



The upper right half of the picture is grey, dominated by a huge-looking concrete bridge across which a tank is being transported. Below it glitters another world of teeming crowds and small-scale commerce. What the picture suggests is a form of colonial economy, in which the modernizing hand of the developmental state is heavily yet insecurely imposed on top of a local, older and more energetical economy. Much like in what economists call Japan's "two-tiered economy", two layers of economic activity seem to co-exist without integration. This colonial economy is also what produced the techno-oriental mix of high-tech and "tradition", which is thus not entirely a fictional construct but reflective of a certain path of state-led modernization.

I use the word "colonial" to describe this economy in order to stress the similarities between Japan and other non-Western countries. The techno-oriental mix of high-tech and premodernity can just as easily be found in Cairo or Abidjan. The gap between intellectuals and the "masses" - a prominent theme in debates in Japan during the early postwar decades and a central concern of intellectuals like Yoshimoto Takaaki - is another manifestation of the same mix. This is a gap we find in many developing countries, in which the efforts of the intelligentsia to connect to the masses are often handicapped both by the latter's indifference and by the allergy of authoritarian governments to a politically active citizenry. Situations that are "colonial" in this wide sense are conductive of a certain kind of postmodern semblance: in countries like this, enlightenment will always seem precarious, almost engulfed by the indifference of things and insignificant in relation to the complex workings of the whole. That Japan is sometimes labelled a postmodern society par excellence is partly explained by this fact. China and other authoritarian late-developers intent on pushing forward with a technological and economical development without popular participation for the masses will probably be great producers of postmodernity.


Nature and history

However, despite the city being the product of a modernization unevenly imposed from above, the city can hardly be said to have an inhuman feel. It can hardly be described as a machine-like and reified "second nature" in which inhabitants are little more than cogwheels. It seems to me that the explanation can be found in the pictures themselves. Looking at them, one has the distinct feeling that state-led modernization is no longer really relevant to the way citizens lead their lives. Although immense energies must once have been poured into erecting the towers, the bridges, highways and buildings, one feels as if all this was a thing of the past, as if all these immense structures had been there since very ancient times - perhaps like rocks, mountains or other geological formations - and that no really disruptive changes could really happen anymore. The changes that do happen - the proliferation of human habitat, small shops and passageways along the contours of these structures - are of another and smaller order, piecemal and improvised, similar to the growth of vegetation on top of slopes, rocks or fallen gigantic trees. This clutter and proliferation, one feels, cannot possibly have been planned or imposed from above.

     

Part of the nature-likeness of these cities is the sheer abundance of real organic nature in them: vegetation, water, clean air. "His cities are so bright and clean, they're almost an imagining of what technologically-advanced cities would be like without pollution... Wood, plants, trees and greenery are present throughout the cities, and he also has an obsession with waterways replacing roads as conduits".

Why doesn't this nature feel inhuman or oppressive? That's a great riddle (one which I once tried to solve in a book that discussed the "naturalized modernity" in the fiction of Murakami Haruki and other writers and how this modernity differed from the shocking and reified "second nature" of Lukács). Perhaps the best answer is simply to remind oneself that the agents of this nature-like proliferation are human beings - people who, regardless of governments or big organizations - try to arrange a habitable everyday life for themselves by building this or that or putting things here or there according to their needs and tastes, without any thought of the whole.

Let us recall that "history" - the concept usually counterposed to "nature" - is best described as an environment which allows itself to be changed and reshaped by the efforts of people and where one can also see the traces of or imagine the processes of change that has led to the present state. Defined in this way, we may, perhaps to our surprise, discover that things in nature often inspire feelings of history. Plants decay and wither. Forests don't stand still. Today we see moss growing where yesterday there was none. Everything seems pregnant with change which is easily imaginable. These cities are the same. They are nature in which humanity is part, not a nature opposed to humanity. Conversely, the humanity inhabiting it is one which no longer defines itself in opposition to nature. 

As mentioned, the experience of this nature is probably at least partly rooted in real experiences of Japanese modernization. What the pictures confront us with is therefore not solely a fantasy, but also the memory of our own real experiences. If we therefore ask, for instance, whether these pictures are not ideological in a bad sense - i.e. whether they attempt an impossible reconciliation between social forces that are in reality irreconcilable - we should also ask the same question of our own experiences. To the extent that we indulge in, and tolerate, the nature-like semblance of certain cities, aren't we also condoning a certain elision, a certain ideological foreclosure?


Ecology and junk

A word about junk here. I have already mentioned that "class" and segregation seems to have left no traces on the way these cities are organized (this is another difference compared to much cyberpunk fiction). How about waste then? Where would cities like this, if they existed, dispose of their waste? One of Teikoku Shônen's most impressive works depicts an undergrown arcade, according to the caption constructed out of waste materials and junk:



Above I quoted the perceptive statement that these cities seemed surprisingly ecological and lacking pollution. At the same time, I have argued that humanity itself "grows" on these cities in an unplanned way. Am I perhaps too bold if I interpret this to mean that here, where no junk is visible, all is junk? The city itself is made out of junk. Just as nature is no longer excluded, junk too is redeemed and for that very reason no longer appears as junk. If Hell is where all junk ends up, is Hell not exactly for that reason precisely so open, generous and free from exclusion as Heaven really ought to be? Is a junkheap an image of Heaven or Hell?




Childhood and loss

I would say: his pictures are attempts to resurrect the memory of how we once experienced things when we were children or adolescents - when everything looked big, exciting and full of wonder. Isn't this why everything in these cities seems so overdimensioned, so unfathomably complex and convoluted, so endlessly big? Looking at a world like this, who cannot help feeling that everything is beginning anew and that there is so much left to explore?

These pictures, then, not so much dream images of the future as nostalgic, loving flowerings of imagination around things that are disappearing. By watching them, we prepare ourselves mentally for the loss, reassuring ourselves that the best in what we are losing is preserved in them. This is not necessarily good, but the extent to which his images succeed in making us feel this way testifies to their power.

I asked above if these images weren't ideological. That was no more meaningful than to ask whether dreams are ideological. Very few people mistake dreams for reality. What is at stake is rather the desire expressed in the dream.

Murakami Haruki, reality, trauma

A just read Murakami Haruki's essay in the New York Times, "Reality A and Reality B".

Note first the inversion: something has happened which has made the real world change places with the unreal. The unreal, contrafactual world of what never happened has become more real to us than the real world we’re inhabiting.

The analogy seems to be that of traumatization. In a traumatized state, the ego is trapped in the past, which is more real than the present, which has turned into a meaningless and indifferent chaos. The structure of the inversion is the same.

Note Murakami's huge ambitions, which almost seem to border on hubris or at least on the heroic. Words must be coined, he asserts, that help connect past and future. The task he sets himself as a teller of stories is, in other words, the healing of the world – its recovery. The teller of stories takes on the role of a healing angel or boddhisattva surveying the disaster.

Many have written a lot about the shift from detachment to commitment in Murakami’s writings in the 90s. In the 80’s, he could still write – as he does in his masterpiece Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World – how life is like a beach where junk is washed ashore by the waves and then washed back into the sea.

When I look back over my life so far, I see all that junk on the beach. It’s how my life has always been. Gathering up the junk, sorting through it, and then casting it off somewhere else. All for no purpose, leaving it to wash away again.[…] This is all my life. I merely go from one beach to another. Sure I remember the things that happen in between, but that’s all. I never tie them together.

Here too an inversion has occurred. And it occurs on many planes. Compared to the earlier text, detachment has turned partially into commitment, acceptance of discontinuity into a stoic groping for words that tie together, and self-chosen isolation has turned into the shouldering of what almost appears as a communal task. But underlying it all is a continuity – a chilly sadness at what one of his contemporary soul mates, Thomas Pynchon, called ”the spilled, the broken world”.

I won’t venture further here into the many questions that open up here. Let me just say that I think there is much that speaks for a view of the world as traumatized, just as Murakami suggests. I once wrote that being an angel was revolutionary. That may sound silly. But in a traumatized world, it’s true.

In a bad world, being an angel is revolutionary (more comments on Vilks)

The Vilks controversy still rages in far-away Sweden (I’ve already explained my stance on this issue here). A very good and kind friend of mine – E. – is trying to keep me updated. Here’s a reply I wrote to her a few days ago (translated with a few revisions)

Hi E.,
  Good to hear you’re out moving around among people and listening to a lot of views. I’m rather isolated here, and maybe that’s why I always think I understand everything so well :)
  No, I’m really not the right person to disentangle your thoughts with.
  But there is one thing I can still say I truly believe, and that’s that one can’t judge everything according to how it relates to the freedom of expression. Of course there’s much else one needs to take into consideration.
  That seems to be what Dan Jönsson – in the article you sent me – also wants to point out, even though it’s a bit comical that he believes that the Vilks’ caricature "deserves a place in art history" just for having demonstrated the untenability of adopting an “institutional” attitude and behaving as if nothing outside the art world had the slightest importance. What a hyperbole! - for surely its self-evident that there’s a world outside art, a world where people can be hurt and where insults are not only art but precisely and above all insults.
  What (might) be interesting is why in heaven’s name people have suddenly started to judge everything according to the aspect of freedom of expression. You tell me about the crucifix in urine which was exhibited somewhere and made so many Christians upset, and you wonder why that felt more acceptable or ”better” than the Muhammad caricatures. I don’t know the circumstances, but I think Christians have a right to be angry about that, just as Muslims have a right to be angry now. As I wrote earlier, “I’m ready to die for your right to be angry”. What I want is not a law that gags artists and others, but that artists (and others of course) reflect a little on what they're doing and stop acting indignant and surprised when people are provoked by art that is meant to provoke them.
  Another interesting question is why artists have suddenly started to think that it’s artistically advanced and radical to challenge what they think is political correctness. This must be something new, mustn’t it? Picasso or Duchamp didn't scandalize their audiences by ridiculing other cultures. But today people seem to think that political correctness is an artistic convention which they need to reject in order to prove how artistically radical they are. Why has it become like that?
  Now I’m not the right person to judge if that is right or wrong. Maybe it’s right. Maybe it is “good” art. But even if it’s right it means that art has ended up in a big dilemma, since such art almost by its very definition will have to trample on minorities and other weak groups in society. Muslims today, disabled tomorrow? Maybe it's time to resurrect the humour of bodily defects?
  Dear E., you who are so good at softening people’s hearts, on helping that “which is not inferno” (Calvino). That is just what I want art to do! I want art to discover a way to be radical and transgressive in a way that liberates and makes people feel exhilarated and fantastic.
  Dada did it, punk did it – but throwing out insults against whole peoples sure doesn't.
  You won’t get any argument from me, because what I’m going to tell you is impossible to use in a debate: I want people – including artists – to be angels!

Having decided to publish this, maybe I should also explain the last sentence. Angels, I think, are people who don't insist on their right. But maybe what I want to say is impossible to explain. Let me just state that I don’t like the motives of those who speak so self-righteously about the freedom of expression nowadays and that I’m surprised and shocked at how little understanding there seems to be for those who feel offended by the caricatures. As Kajsa Ekis Ekman puts it, to say the words “freedom of expression” in Sweden today has become tantamount to saying “Shut up”, a way of depriving the offended of the right to reply.

To be right is not all that matters. If you believe that, you’ve got to have a heart of stone.

White and red

Let me just quickly try to disentangle one of the threads I happen to have on my mind.

Recall the red-and-white contrast of the figures and paintings showing Yamauba as an affectionate mother together with Kintarô (which I discussed here). Here we see, I believe, a confluence in one and the same art work of two quite separate ways of associating beings with the wilderness or the supernatural.

For the sake of simplicity, let me say that such beings seem to arrange themselves in a ”red” series and a ”white” series.

I’ve already touched on the ”red” series. It consists of the animals and beings usually portrayed with round eyes: tengu, oni, Deva kings, Bodhidharuma, Kintarô, tanuki, octopuses, tigers, lions, monkeys, horses, cows, and so on. They usually come with the color red, or colors close to red such as brown or a golden yellow.

The ”white” series consists of usually white or pale beings who are depicted with slanted, narrow eyes: foxes (kitsune), yûrei (ghosts), Yuki-onna (the snow-woman), Yamauba (Mountain-hag), cats and elephants. The ”O-Shira-sama” worshipped in the Tôhoku region also seems to belong here. Tanuki too are sometimes portrayed with narrow, slanted “fox-like” eyes.

What could this seemingly long-standing association white-narrow and red-round mean?

The partition of beings or animals in either one or the other group doesn’t seem to depend on any desire to portray them realistically. Foxes for instance are usually not white.

In general, the reddish round-eyes beings are powerful, and are not necessarily evil or harmful. The round eyes probably mean simply that they exude power. We find similar round eyes on human beings associated with great power or effort such as monks or warriors in battle. In addition, many of the ”red” beings, such as Deva kings and Bodhidharma, have a clear affinity with Buddhism, and tanuki and tengu were believed to be able to transform themselves into Buddhist monks or hermits. Tengu are usually portrayed as dressed in monkish robe (as on the 19th century ink painting below) and there are also famous pictures in folk art of oni dressed as Buddhist priests (the so-called ôtsue below).

Tengu, 19th century ink painting

Oni (Ôtsu-e)

The oni picture has been interpreted variously as a satire of Buddhism or as expressing the Buddhist truth that salvation is extended to all living beings, including oni (or even the mystical union of liberation and fallenness, nirvana and samsara). However, it could also simply be a product of the long-standing association in popular mind of all the ”superhuman” or ”inhuman” beings inhabiting the sacred sites such as the mountains – including wandering monks and hermits, animals, oni, and tengu.

To find a common denominator among the ”white” animals and beings is harder. We can observe, however, that rather than exposing strength and power, they appear to hide it, holding it back, or focusing it inwards. Even if some of them are feared for their supernatural power, like the foxes, this power is a potential rather than something that is shown openly.

Could it be their ability to conceal their powers that make many of them so dangerous and feared? The fox is thus an expert in deception, in bewitching human beings or tricking them by adopting human form (see right). The snow-woman (yukionna) similarly uses her likeness to a beautiful woman to deceive and kill people. The yamauma too is by no means rendered wholly benevolent by being cast in the role of loving mother, since she of course retains her fearsome ogre powers which are simply disguised or pushed to the background. The ghost (yûrei) too is uncanny precisely because of its likeness to the human form. Although it doesn’t deceive, it inspires terror through its resemblance to the dead, who were once our victims but who have now come back to haunt us equipped with new, superhuman forces.

To some extent this holds for cats as well. Look at the picture by Kuniyoshi below. The cat is white, has narrow eyes and are on the whole strikingly fox-like. Being pictured as behaving like human beings, they bear an uncanny resemblance to the foxes on the picture above who have just transformed themselves into humans. Cats were certainly not regarded as supernatural beings, but perhaps they too were regarded as beings that hid their strength? At least I have a healthy respect for these cute, furry and small animals, since I’ve seen them turn into lethal killer machines at a moment’s notice.

Kuniyoshi, Neko no odori

The elephants are admittedly more problematic. Elephants always seem to have been portrayed as white and with narrow, slanted eyes (for an early example see the reproduction below of a scene from Senmen Hokekyô Sasshi, in the collection of things related to Shôtoku Taishi and Hôkôji in Shitennôji temple). One might argue that they too are usually portrayed as being at rest, holding back their strength, but perhaps that would be a bit far-fetched? 

Then there are pure anomalies like this (an Edo period painting of a "nurikabe", a monster said to produce walls blocking the road for wanderers at night):

Here's a print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, "Kasane no bôkon" (1847-52), which according to Japan Times was recently rediscovered in Tokyo. Look at the interesting combination of the huge red "Daruma-san" eye with a narrow one.

Kuniyoshi, Kasane no bôkon, 1847-52

I'm sure art critics have a lot of things to say about this very suggestive print. Let me just point out that I think that the red eye can be explained by the ghost's agitation. When a ghost ceases to hold back, giving full vent to her rage and resentment and pouring out her strength, the usual narrow eyes are no longer felt to be appropriate. Instead, some element of roundness (and red-ness) becomes necessary. Hence the "Daruma-san" eye. 


Yin and yang

How do I get on from here? Let me toss out a guess. Maybe the white-narrow and red-round things are related to yin and yang? I have hesitated to make this association until now since yin and yang are amorphous categories and I'm fully aware that the association may be somewhat facile. However, if – just for the sake of trying – we simplify very much and try to relate ”red” and ”white” to yin and yang, then we would get:

Red – life, power, activity, sun, male

White – death, passivity, moon, female

The red-round things would be like the sun, exuding strength. Remember that the sun is associated with the color red in Japan. The white-narrow things would be more like the moon – passive, cold and associated with darkness and night. We could also add that red stands for blood, the pulsation of blood, the erection, masculinity, and birth (recall that babies are called red in Japanese, as in the words akago, akanbô or aka-chan). White stands for the opposite phenomena: the draining away of blood, the waning of power, impotence, femininity and death.

Once we make the association to yin and yang, many pieces fall to place. It’s easy to interpret the beings in the ”red” series as yang-symbols. The tengu’s long phallus-nose and the tanuki’s comically over-dimensioned scrotum (see below) spring to mind. And why is Bodhidharma depicted with a prostitute? As Amino Yoshihiko points out the staff – saibô or saitenbô – used by Buddhist monks as a weapon was a symbol of yang. Children used to run around with a similar staff to hit the behind of young women, shouting ”Crow-crow-crow, this is the mountain god’s saitenbô” (”Kaa-kaa-kaa, yama no kami no saitenbô”). On a medieval scroll, the Ippen hijirie, there is a comical scene depicting a monk with such a staff walking down a street, a scared woman running away from him.

The foxes, by contrast, were believed to take the form of a woman. Many of the ”white” characters are female, such as the snow woman and Yamamba. We can also add that normal human women were also usually portrayed as white or pale. The snow woman is furthermore associated with the cold. Some ”white” characters, like ghosts, also have an obvious relation to death. So does the mysterious white animal which appears to be dead. Pilgrims were dressed in white and this was also the clothing of the dead.


Trousers and undergarments

If I say yin and yang, then I am already moving in the realm of a mysticism in which the question of unity, of taichi, and its symbolic representation are not far removed.

As an example of such a representation, let me mention the dress of miko (Shintô shrine maidens), which consists of white jacket (haori) and red trousers (hakama).

Kannagi miko

One often hears that red and white are auspicious colors in Japan, and that they are often used for special occasions such as weddings and births. Even today they are often seen in shrines. The auspicious aspect of the colors also explains their use in the Japanese flag. However, both red and white also connoted dangerous and often supernatural forces and carried strong connotations of things like blood and death, things deemed ”polluted” in ancient Japan. Only by mastering or ”purifying” such forces could any auspicious effect arise.

The ”dangers” symbolized by the miko dress can be glimpsed in Takeda Sachiko’s discussion of trouser-wearing in ancient Japan.  In Japan, to which trousers were imported from China, the custom of wearing trousers became established at the court in the 8th century. Trousers originated as attire for officials and court functionaries. Priestesses, shrine attendants and the shrine princess (saiô) of Ise all participated in official rites and hence wore red trousers.  Red trousers were also worn by court women and soon spread to prostitutes (yûjo) and female entertainers (such as the kuse maimai below). What was the meaning of red trousers? Takeda speculates that ”perhaps red symbolized the sacred power invested in the person of the tennô [emperor]” (Takeda 1999:58). The color red, she believes, was associated with sex. So was the sacred power of the emperor. ”Red trousers, which were worn against women’s flesh and surely had some association with their sexuality, could express the wearer’s position of privilege within the inner court, in particular, their proximity to the sacral and sexual power of the monarch” (ibid 59).

Shirabyôshi dancer

Takeda’s analysis is helpful in bringing out the ”yang” element of the color red. However, if I’m correct in my juxtaposition of white and red in two ”series” both signaling wild or superhuman power, then it follows that it is insufficient to focus merely on the ”red” element as Takeda does. The miko’s red trousers cannot be understood in isolation from the white robe, since they together signaled a unification of yin and yang in the divine powers she represented.

A good illustration of the association of the color red with the emperor is the imperial ceremonial coat, red and covered with daoist symbols, with the great dipper in the center.

Although the color white seems absent here, we can recall that the emperor - in his role as the "polestar", the symbolic center of cosmos - was believed to personify the unification of yin and yang (Ooms 2009).

A similar symbolic message may well have lingered on in the use of the colors red and white among prostitutes and other female entertainers, who – as Amino argues – were associated with holy powers in the early middle ages. In fact, some miko were prostitutes, especially the itinerant miko (arukimiko) who weren't affiliated to shrines and functioned as shamans. "Women shamans were associated with prostitution from the earliest days. Brothels developed around the shrines, and many of the inhabitants of the brothels were shamans" (Fairchild 1962: 103; cf. also 60, 79ff). It also seems clear that the wandering miko were frequently associated with sex in popular consciousness. For instance, the wandering miko of Shinshu province were said to use a form of erotic dolls in their rites. Fairchild quotes a popular story about a man peeking inside the secret box of miko who had stopped at a house for the night. "The miko left the house and one man opened the box and saw the dolls. They were clay dolls and were kissing each other, their bodies entwined about each other" (ibid 82).

The combination red-white can also be seen in other groups closely linked to the sacred, such as outcasts (hinin). For instance, the leader of the hinin of Kôfukuji temple wore a red robe and had a white staff (Amino 1993:121).

There is in fact an element held in common by miko and outcasts. Purification was the occupation of two groups in society who are usually considered to have been widely apart in social status: on the one hand the Shintô shrine officials conducting purification rites (oharae) and on the other the outcastes responsible for removing defilement in dead bodies (kiyome). While the close connection between Buddhist monks and outcasts is well documented, Shinto is usually portrayed as allergically averse to associating with the outcasts, almost panically sensitive about associating with ”defilement” – at least in the books I’ve read so far. However apart they may have been socially, there is nevertheless a clear symbolic affinity between the two groups, and color symbolism is one way in which this is expressed.

To bring out the connection between Shinto and outcasts, we can return to the itinerant miko who were also closely associated with death (conducting funeral services, carrying sculls in their boxes etc) and sometimes shunned in a manner reminiscent of the way outcasts were shunned. During the Edo period many miko came from families (tsukimono-suji) who were regarded as related to animal spirits capable of possessing humans (tsukimono). As the ethnographer Fairchild reports "the fox spirit families were not Eta families... but like the Eta were avoided even though they were often rich and prosperous" (Fairchild 1962:38). The ostracization of the tsukimono-suji testifies to the close link that existed, if not officially then at least in popular consciousness, between the outcasts and religious practitioners dealing with the sacred or supernatural.

The red-white combination can also be seen in the Kumano bikuni, nuns of Kumano, a mountainous region on the Kii peninsula which attracted many pilgrims and was much associated with supernatural forces. As Tokita (2008) writes, the sacred site of Kumano ”was one of the few Buddhist precincts which was female–friendly and welcoming to women. The Kumano bikuni, nuns affiliated with the Kumano religious complex, were active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as both proselytisers of the Kumano faith and as fund-raisers, travelling throughout the country collecting donations for the Kumano shrines and temples”. In propagating the faith, the bikuni used pictures to show that salvation was attainable to all, whether rich or poor, pure or impure, man or woman. On one of these pictures (the Sankei mandala) below, we can see the bikuni in red robes and white capes next to a bridge.

Ninose bridge in Kumano. The Kumano bikuni are in red robes with white capes

Tokida also interestingly points out that these Kumano bikuni were ”a Buddhist transformation of the earlier itinerant shamanesses (aruki miko) of Shinto”. Furthermore, she sees them as ”remnants of the medieval itinerant religious practitioners, who were performers and entertainers, even prostitutes, and who continued as liminal figures operating on the margins of society”. Both the Kumano bikuni and the miko, then, had roots in the stratum of”holy” itinerants living in the interstices of settled society and were likely perceived to be close to the sacred or supernatural forces of nature, much like other ”non-agricultural” groups discussed by Amino.

Now, both yin and yang have an obvious sexual connotation. This may have been subdued in the case of hinin and shrine-affiliated miko (the case of bikuni is ambiguous, since the word was also used about travelling female entertainers and prostitutes), but comes right to the fore in the case of Dakini, the goddess worshipped in tantric forms of esoteric Buddhism, who is always depicted as dressed in white and red. She is also always riding on a white fox and was even believed to be a fox-spirit herself (cf Amino 1993:212ff).

Dakini, Edo period

Tantric Buddhism aspires to the unification of yin and yang forces through ritual reenactment of the sexual union. In Japan the worship of Dakini was central to the Tachikawa-ryû current in esoteric Buddhism, in which the sexual union was regarded as a means to achieve ”Buddhahood in this very body”.

Although Tachikawa-ryû was declared heretical and suppressed, the cult of Dakini as such was widespread. Sometimes it fused with Inari worship, the cult of the harvest god, and the cult of Dakini may have been the origin of the belief that foxes were the messengers or servants of Inari.

If the association I’ve made between red and yang, white and yin is correct, then the red-white outfit of Dakini could well be interpreted as a representation, in dress, of the old fertility couple – the dôsojin or sai no kami standing on guard outside the villages.

Dôsôjin, Gunma prefecture

In Seirei no ô, the religious scholar Nakazawa Shin'ichi, in a roundabout but suggestive discussion, actually links together the dôsojin with the couple Dakini and Heruka. And who, seeing the happy couple above, can refrain from thinking about the clay dolls in the miko's box, kissing each other with their arms entwined around each other?


References

Amino, Yoshihiko (1993) Igyô no ôken (The heteromorph monarchy), Tokyo: Heibonsha.

Fairchild, William P. (1962) ”Shamanism in Japan”, pp 1-122, Folklore Studies 21.

Nakazawa. Shin'ichi (2003) Seirei no ô, Tokyo: Kôdansha.

Ooms, Herman (2009) Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Temmu Dynasty, 650-800, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Takeda, Sachiko (1999) “Trousers: Status and Gender in Ancient Dress Codes”, pp 53-66, in Hitomi Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Haruko (eds) Women and Class in Japanese History, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Tokita, Alison (2008) “Performance and Text: Gender Identity and the Kumano Faith”, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 16 (March),

Onihaha

I'm a bit mystified by how Yamauba (Yamamba), the "mountain hag" of Japanese folklore, is portrayed. The Yamauba was feared as a man-eating demon who kidnapped children, preyed on travellers and sometimes deceived them by magic (for instance by taking on the appearance of a young woman).

In Nô-theatre - which I take to indicate how she was imagined in pre-Edo period times - we usually find her with round eyes and slightly reddish color.

During the Edo-period she seems to have been portrayed in two very different ways. Although there are intermediate forms, she either tended to be a witchlike ogre (oni-baba), as on this illustration by Toriyama Sekien (1712-1788):

Or else she is an affectionate and loving mother, as on the paintings below by Utamarô (1753-1806) and Kawanabe Kyôsai (1831-1889). 

The child is Kintarô, a boy of superhuman strength who according to legend was raised by Yamauba in the mountains where he wrestled with bears (note the bear on Kyôsai's painting).

Earlier I wrote that superhuman beings in Japan were often portrayed with round eyes. They were also often associated with the color red (as tengu, oni, Bodhidharma etc). These traits recur in how Yamauba was portrayed in Nô-plays.

Strikingly, however, she looks almost "human" whenever she is portrayed as a mother. Her eyes are narrow and her color is white or pale, just as the color of women on Edo period paintings. The only thing that marks her off as associated with superhuman power is her long and disheveled hair

We also find the Yamauba-as-mother motive in these sweet figurines from the late Edo-period, where even the hair is tied up and her human character even more emphasized:

Kintarô, by contrast, has retained the attributes of the supernatural - round eyes and red color. The result is a striking combination in both the paintings and the figurines of white and red, narrow eyes and round eyes, human appearance and superhuman appearance.

In the motherly figure of Yamauba, we recognize an image of an ideal mother, not so far removed from Kishiboshin, the Buddhist protector of children. I suspect there must have been a tendency in folk belief to fuse Yamauba with Kishiboshin.

The legends about Kishiboshin make this similarity even more striking. For simplicity's sake, let me quote Wikipedia:

Originally, Kishimojin/ Hariti was a cannibalistic demon. She had hundreds of children whom she loved and doted upon, but to feed them, she abducted and killed the children of others. The bereaved mothers of her victims pleaded to Śākyamuni Buddha to save them. Śākyamuni stole Aiji, youngest of Kishimojin's sons, and hid him under his rice bowl. Kishimojin desperately searched for her missing son throughout the universe. Finally, she pleaded with Shakyamuni for help. The Buddha pointed out that she was suffering because she lost one of hundreds of children, and asked if she could imagine the suffering of parents whose only child had been devoured. She replied contritely that their suffering must be many times greater than hers, and vowed to protect all children.

Just like Yamauba, Kishiboshin was once an ogre or demon, but, again like Yamauba, she is depicted in human form as soon as her motherly aspect is foregrounded.

Why are  Yamauba and Kishiboshin "humanized" as soon as they are portrayed as mothers? Probably because it was impossible to portay ideal mothers in any other way. In order to portray them as good mothers they had to be portrayed as human.

Fox eyes

There is much that puzzles me in Japanese art.

In my last entry I discussed the round eyes of supernatural beings like tengu. Let me show a piece of complicating evidence. Look at these two depictions of Commodore Perry made in the in the aftermath of his arrival to Japan in 1853. As historians like Gregory Smits (see this online lecture) or John Dower (see this online essay) point out, Perry is portrayed as a tengu.

Tengu came in two kinds: either bignosed goblins with glaring eyes or birdlike beings with wings. The "tengu" on top is of the former kind and the one below of the latter kind.

What strikes me is that the depictions show Perry with narrow and slanted eyes rather than the round eyes usually associated with tengu. Neither did Perry "in reality" have very narrow eyes. So why are the eyes narrow?

Interestingly, the portraits show that this time it is narrow eyes, rather than big round ones, that inspire fear. Could it be that these portraits reflect the emergence of a new cultural convention, common today, that associates narrow eyes with evil and round eyes with goodness? That's a tempting hypothesis, but I don't think it holds. Narrow eyes continued to be standard in portrayals of human beings in the Meiji period. Instead, we can note that there is something inhuman and fox-like in Perry's eyes.

Foxes (kitsune) are of course famous as tricksters in Japanese folklore, widely believed to be able to possess human beings, cause madness and conjure up hallucinations. As far as I can tell, foxes have always been portrayed with narrow slanted eyes.

But why do these fox-eyes emerge in the Perry portraits? And how do the narrow, slanted eyes of foxes relate to the round eyes of other beings with supernatural or superhuman powers?  

Clearly, I need to have a closer look at foxes and at how foxes have been thought about.

A hypothesis

Considering that round eyes become "cutified" in the course of the Edo period, could it be that Perry had to be given narrow "fox-eyes" in order to convery the proper sense of dread?

This is an attractive hypothesis.

Let us first look at some corroborating evidence.

First, let’s recall that Perry’s arrival was something extraordinary - the first time Westerners had a major impact on Japanese society. The Dutch in Dejima harbor or the Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century were never portrayed with anything like the same monstrous features, probably because they were never felt as a threat to Japanese society. Despite being referred to as "red-hairs" (kômô), or "southern barbarians" (nanban) the Portuguese and Dutch were surprisingly little exoticized in most pre-modern Japanese illustrations. As Smits writes, "they are clearly 100% human, with no monster-like features".

It is possible, however, to find pictures of foreigners with monster like features, both in the Edo period and in the modern times.

To the left is a detail of picture from around 1830 by Yanagawa Shigenobu. To the right is a wartime cartoon depicting president Roosevelt burning democracy with the torch of dictatorship. Both pictures use big round eyes to convey a sense of monstrosity.

We can note, however, that this "monstrosity" is no longer fearsome. While Yanagawa's picture purports to depict the bed room chamber of "southern barbarians", the male character is reminiscent of a Buddhist guardian god. Yanagawa being famous as a producer of shunga (erotica), his aim may very well have been to surely to suggest, under cover of portraying foreigners, the titillating motif of Buddhist deities engaging in sacrilegious sex. The round eyes, rather than inspiring fear, have become a comical sign of spiritual weakness and depravity.

Roosevelt is depicted as a devil (oni). But note how comical and desperate he looks. The cartoon is clearly not intended to show the allied leader as fearful, but rather as ridiculous.

These examples suggest that round eyes are no longer sufficient if you want to convey a real sense of threat or evil. While round eyes can still be used in illustrations to suggest a likeness to the traditional idea of devils or guardian kings, the beings equipped with such eyes seem to have lost the force to inspire dread. If fact, they've become powerless. The guardian deity is no longer in a reliable guardian against evil and Roosevelt clearly looks as if he's losing the war. The round eyes, then, have become signs of the very opposite of what they once used to signify: power.

 
So why aren't foxes cutified?
 
But why choose fox-eyes for the Perry portraits? For some reason, the "cutification" of monsters or other beings close to superhuman or sacred power during the Edo-period doesn't seem to apply to foxes. Why? Is there any discernable reason for the narrow, slanted fox-eyes to have been more dreadful than the big, round eyes of other monsters?

Let me suggest three reasons:

First, there are the inherent traits of foxes in popular imagination which may been hard to "cutify" - their association with deception and night, a time of day for which respect lingers on even in modern societies.

Secondly, one can move outside such inherent traits to search for broader and more general explanations. Superhuman beings of the round-eyes type seem to have been closely linked to Buddhism (think of the old association between Buddhist monks and mountains, tanuki, tengu etc). Foxes too once shared this link through their association with Dakini, but over time they came to be more closely linked to so-called Shintô though the Inari-cult (and through the cult of the mountain god, which which they were also associated). Now the Edo-period was a time when the revival of Shintô began (kokugaku) and Buddhism lost vitality, being institutionalized and ”tamed” by the state. This is probably the most important factor that explains why “round eyes” cease to be feared while foxes continue to be awed as carriers of sacred powers.

Finally, one might add the basic difference between the primary objects of worship in Buddhism and Shintô. As Motoori points out, the kami have nothing to do with good or bad. The only requirement is that they inspire awe. Even today, one finds Japanese who say that they are not afraid of going to Buddhist temples at night, but going to a Shintô shrine is another matter. Buddhas, by contrast, are benevolent, guiding all living beings towards liberation and peace. Even the most fearsome beings in the Buddhist pantheon – like Deva kings and tengu (who came to be regarded as protectors of Buddhism) – ultimately served this aim.

These factors help explain why foxes resisted the trend to the ”cutification” and why round eyes would not have conveyed the proper level of fear on the Perry portraits.