Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts

From Kishida Ryusei to Miyazaki Hayao

Michael Lucken, Francesca Simkin

• Éditeur: Columbia University Press
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231540544
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: Asian Art

The idea that Japanese art is produced through rote copy and imitation is an eighteenth-century colonial construct, with roots in Romantic ideals of originality. Offering a much-needed corrective to this critique, Michael Lucken demonstrates the distinct character of Japanese mimesis and its dynamic impact on global culture, showing through several twentieth-century masterpieces the generative and regenerative power of Japanese arts.

Choosing a representative work from each of four modern genres—painting, film, photography, and animation—Lucken portrays the range of strategies that Japanese artists use to re-present contemporary influences. He examines Kishida Ryusei's portraits of Reiko (1914–1929), Kurosawa Akira's Ikiru (1952), Araki Nobuyoshi's photographic novel Sentimental Journey—Winter (1991), and Miyazaki Hayao's popular anime film Spirited Away (2001), revealing the sophisticated patterns of mimesis that are unique but not exclusive to modern Japanese art. In doing so, Lucken identifies the tensions that drive the Japanese imagination, which are much richer than a simple opposition between progress and tradition, and their reflection of human culture's universal encounter with change. This global perspective explains why, despite its non-Western origins, Japanese art has earned such a vast following.

Part I

A Historical Construction

1

Copycat Japan

There is a substantial body of work in English, French, and German that depicts Japanese culture as one based on copying. Such portrayals can be found in everything from eighteenth-century texts to contemporary newspapers and magazines, in works about Asia in particular or in articles on ethnology in general. “Japan’s strength is its proclivity for compilation, or as others would have it, its ‘spirit of imitation,’” observed André Leroi-Gourhan.¹ Using the word “Japan” or “Japanese” in a passage stigmatizing a lack of imagination when it comes to action, or a lack of initiative when it comes to behavior, has virtually taken on the status of metaphor. In Les lois de l’imitation (The laws of imitation), Gabriel Tarde describes “sociable” people as having “the Chinese or Japanese capacity to mold themselves very quickly to their surroundings.”² “Japanese,” then, just as one might say “copycat” or “chameleon.” And yet it is not so much Japanese culture that seems wedded to imitation and repetition as Western discourse about Japan. Michaël Ferrier bewails French writing on Japan, noting that it often consists of nothing more than “old stereotypes compounded by new ones—ignorance and platitudes—and a relentless recycling of outdated theories and ideas, endlessly rehashed and repeated.”³

Going back in history, one notes that neither the letters of Francis Xavier’s companions, which are some of the first European eyewitness accounts of Japan, nor the descriptions provided by François Caron, who lived in Hirado and then Nagasaki from 1619 to 1641, report any such tendency.⁴ Nor do Jean Crasset’s Histoire de l’église du Japon (History of the Japanese church, 1689)⁵ or Engelbert Kaempfer’s seminal study Histoire naturelle, civile et ecclésiastique de l’empire du Japon (Natural, civil, and ecclesiastical history of the Japanese empire, 1727). The latter work certainly mentions the importance of Japan’s debts to China on more than one occasion, but always in a purely factual light. Kaempfer thus posits that “it is [to the Chinese] that the Japanese owe their polish and civilization”⁶ and explains that Buddhism and Confucianism came to Japan from the Chinese mainland.⁷ His only comment guilty of generalizing on this topic regards the city of Kyoto, about which he notes that “there is nothing that a foreigner can bring, that some artist or other inhabitant of this city will not undertake to imitate.”⁸ But in its context the comment has no negative connotations—the learned German is only attempting to showcase the vigor of industry and richness of trade in the capital of the empire. He paints a laudatory portrait of the diversity of Japanese arts, underlining their “imagination” and “unusual” character.⁹ More generally, he confidently credits China and Japan with “having invented early on the most useful of arts and sciences.”¹⁰ It therefore seems clear that, before 1700, the cliché of the Japanese as slavish imitators had not yet taken root.

During the course of the eighteenth century, however, the emphasis on manual dexterity and intellectual tenacity got suddenly transformed into a criticism—even though this was a period when, Japan being closed to virtually all foreigners, it was difficult for Europeans to learn anything new about it. In Histoire de l’établissement, des progrès et de la décadence du christianisme dans l’empire du Japon (History of the establishment, progress, and decadence of Christianity in the Japanese empire, 1715), we therefore read that “the Japanese, who have always acknowledged themselves to be [China’s] disciples, have in virtually no area the power of invention, but everything they produce is polished.”¹¹ The basic idea remains the same, but the angle has changed. Whereas Kaempfer was showcasing the intelligence of the Japanese and their capacity for reason, this author, Pierre de Charlevoix, reduces Japanese “ingenuity” to mere technical competence, an opinion that was to resurface in almost exactly the same terms in Histoire générale des voyages (General history of travel, 1752): “Although the Japanese have invented almost nothing, when they put their hand to something, they make it perfect.”¹² This sentence was to witness considerable success, since it is reproduced exactly not only in J.-F. La Harpe’s Abrégé de l’histoire générale des voyages (Concise general history of travel, 1786), which was a great publishing success, but also under the entry for “Japanese” in Abbé Migne’s Dictionnaire d’ethnographie moderne (Dictionary of modern ethnography, 1853).¹³

Charlevoix’s work thus seems at the root of the stereotype, but what we are dealing with here is a much broader phenomenon than the specific case of either Charlevoix or Japan. Of real importance is that, on the one hand, this comment got repeated and amplified throughout the course of the eighteenth century and, on the other, it can be found, expressed in virtually identical terms, in connection with most other peoples. The introduction to the General History of Travel thus tells us that “the Arabs did not have minds geared toward invention. They added almost nothing to the knowledge they got from the Greeks,”¹⁴ and in a slightly later work we are informed that “the Russian people are natural imitators. They imitate well and seem inclined toward everything. I know of no nation that is comparable in that respect.”¹⁵ Even the Americans were for a long time the target of acerbic comments on their inability to invent.¹⁶ Thus there is no evidence that Japan is being singled out. Discourse on the imitative nature of the Japanese is merely a reflection of Europe’s awareness of its own military and technological superiority, a fact that frequently found expression during the eighteenth century.¹⁷ It also suggests the relinquishment of the evangelical project, since imitation—primarily of Jesus—was something the missionaries sought to encourage; whereas in the sixteenth century, Francis Xavier’s companions rejoiced that the Japanese were “soft and gentle” and that their spirit was “very ready to receive the Gospel,”¹⁸ some of James Cook’s contemporaries felt only irritation and disdain, a feeling exacerbated by the related emergence of two typically orientalist themes: denial of a Japanese capacity to be individuals in their own right and a critique of the “despotism” of the Japanese princes, for whom to reign meant “taunting, persecuting, and murdering millions of men, only to then meet the same fate themselves.”¹⁹

The French Revolution and the success of Romanticism gradually quashed the advocates of classical imitation. So when Japan was brought to open its borders in 1854, no one apart from a few Christian missionaries was still suggesting that mimeticism was a good thing, and the stereotype of the Japanese as servile imitators had free rein to develop. All forms of borrowing were taken to be synonymous with degeneration and seen as inherently contemptible. Jules Michelet, writing in Le peuple (The people) in 1846, neatly captures the short shrift given to imitation and its practitioners: “You poor imitators, do you really believe in imitation? You take from a neighboring people something that thrives there and appropriate it as best you can despite its reluctance to be adapted—but it is a foreign body that you are trying to render into flesh, it is something dead and inert; you are merely adopting death.”²⁰ Given such a view, there was no chance of crediting the efforts of nations trying to use learning and study to narrow the scientific and technological gap separating them from Western countries. The reports of the first diplomatic missions thus mockingly portrayed Japan as sniffing out and hastily copying everything that related to foreign countries.²¹ In an issue of Le correspondant of 1864, an editor describes “the wonderful aptitude of its people to imitate what it sees”:

According to travelers, who can illustrate it with countless instances, the faculty of imitation is carried to excess in the Japanese. Thus, for example, when foreign consuls arrived with their retinues, they bought horses and harnessed them in the European style. Just a few months later, all the natives in their service used only such harnesses instead of the ancient straw stirrups common to the country. Soon thereafter the saddler refused to take on work, saying all his time was occupied making English-style saddles for the Japanese aristocracy. These saddles were examined; they had been made exactly as they would have been by the best workers of Paris or London. And such it was with everything that was trusted to the ingenious minds and skilled hands of the Japanese.²²

The stories taken from tourist accounts are similar, as we can see in Pierre Loti, who, with his usual outrageousness, writes in L’exilée, “All this servile imitation, admittedly amusing for passing foreigners, betrays in this people a fundamental absence of taste and even an absolute lack of national pride; no European race would accept to toss aside, from one day to the next, all its traditions, customs, and dress.”²³ The image depicted by writers of the latter half of the nineteenth century constitutes a hyperbolic variation on that of the eighteenth. Japan is no longer just dependent on China—it imitates all and sundry. From this period onward, there is no longer just one stereotype but a whole host of stereotypes unfolding around this theme.

The mimetic disposition of the Japanese is not merely commented on but explicitly mocked, with mockery and ridicule basically dressing a feeling of superiority in humor. We mock what we dominate physically or symbolically and, by extension, flatter our own ego. Criticism of Japanese imitation thus belongs very clearly in a power struggle. Of course, not all Western writers gave way to caricature. Félicien Challaye, Sergei Eliseev, and Émile Hovelaque, in France, and William E. Griffis and Sidney Gulick, in the United States, all lent subtlety to, not to say refuted, the idea that Japanese culture revolved around imitation of external models. Hovelaque, for example, notes that “Japanese art is never a simple representation of reality but rather the result of the forces that create it.”²⁴ Most of the time, however, such statements are defensive, consisting of attempts by experts to counter the dominant vision prevailing most conspicuously in novels and the general press.

When it is not mocked, Japanese imitation is presented as a threat, especially in texts on military and economic topics. When, between 1895 and 1905, assertions of Japanese power and the rebellions in China called the colonial order into question, Europe got scared, worrying that the Asians would manage to turn the weapons it had given them against it. The “yellow peril” was an upset of international order, because the student had overtaken the master.²⁵ Meanwhile, manufacturers constantly complained that the Japanese were “insuppressible counterfeiters,” whether this was in the realm of textiles, photography, equipment, or automobiles.²⁶ “This prodigious faculty of imitation constitutes, at least for the time being, a serious danger for some of our industries,” wrote a French engineer in 1898, adding, “The Japanese are instinctively counterfeiters, and their patent legislation, far from trying to suppress this tendency, does everything to promote it.”²⁷ The Western attitude toward Japan was thus disdainful in principle, but downright piqued and offended when its interests were at stake.

The two moral weapons used alternately by imitation’s critics were contempt and a claim to exclusivity. There are even cases where the two ideas combined, as witnessed by the many American propaganda images during World War II in which the Japanese are represented as threatening gorillas or chimpanzees.²⁸ They are ridiculous, because they are only apes, but they are dangerous, because they are beasts. In truth, it is their “dangerousness” that, from the end of the nineteenth century onward, sets Japanese imitators apart in the Western imagination, while other nations, most of which were occupied or conquered, had been led to obedience by colonial powers. The annoyance caused by the Japanese capacity to appropriate Western models was proportional to their capacity to remain independent. In other words, it is paradoxically because they were autonomous that they were particularly reviled as imitators.

This last point serves as a reminder of the political and ideological nature of the critique of imitation. Old-style colonization, underpinned by an evangelical mission, had a predatory dimension but granted imitation an important role. “Imitate us to imitate God,” it basically said. In missionary accounts, vernacular designations were avoided whenever possible; Japanese converts to Christianity were called Michael, Matthias, Joachim, and Bartholomew, and the descriptions of their lives left no room for exoticism.²⁹ Instead, everything was done to give the reader a sense of closeness and the impression that the faithful across the world shared a communal destiny and were members of the same church. In contrast, modern colonization relegated imitation to a subordinate position. A country like France certainly attempted to transmit its history and culture to the populations under its control, often quite clumsily, but the essence of modern colonialism was the “creation” of territorial empires and trade based on the exchange of primary material for finished products. Dominated populations could not, on principle, be assimilated to the dominant group because it was not possible to concede value to the mimetic project, especially following the end of the nineteenth century and the spread of evolutionary racialism. There is thus a direct correlation between disparagement of imitation and the form that colonialism took in the modern era.

This link has not always been clearly perceived, however, which is why many artists and intellectuals—often those with the best of intentions—have enjoined non-Western peoples to reject the path of imitation: “Stay Japanese!” Olivier Messiaen told his Japanese students,³⁰ while Elian-J. Finbert exhorted, “Don’t do like us. . . . Don’t imitate us. Seek in your own history the wisdom that will nourish your soul. You will get the better of foreign domination the day that you feel masters of your own fate. We can do nothing for you. You are rich in your own right.”³¹ Even though these artists and authors genuinely wanted the best for the nations and individuals they were addressing, they not only failed to see that their conclusions were biased from the outset by their own prejudices about imitation but also failed to understand that these prejudices were inherently related to the demiurgic compulsion at the root of modern colonialism. Denying the virtues of mimeticism and claiming the power to create a new world are two sides of the same coin. A similar mode of thought seemed to inform Annie Besant, one of the instigators of the Indian national liberation movement: “The artists of today,” she said in 1907, “lack ideals. They are more often copyists than creators. The true artist is a creator. He is original. It is not the work of a creator to simply copy.”³² On the one hand, she was...