Japan's Renaissance

By ROBERT HUGHES

The gray plum tree on the brownish rice paper is twisty and knuckled with age. Plum trees regenerate themselves each year, and here the new sprouts burst like porcupine quills from the bark. The brush strokes have an extraordinary intensity--not so much delicacy as martial precision: one imagines the brush slashing down and up like a sword as it described the pair of sharply angular branches that project to the left of the tree. And so it probably did; for the painter, Kaiho Yusho (1533-1615) was the son of a warrior family, raised in a Zen monastery and reputedly a great swordsman. There could have been very little difference between the reflexes that drove the blade and those that aimed the brush.

This kind of relationship between the military and the aesthetic is almost unimaginable today: transpose it to America and you have a Pentagon lobbyist fiddling with a watercolor kit. We think of art as the product of mercantile classes. Yet one of the supreme moments in Japanese culture was almost wholly a military creation.

The Momoyama period, as it is called, lasted slightly less than 50 years, from 1568 to 1615. There could be no better introduction to it than the superb exhibition presently on show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Momoyama: Japanese Art in the Age of Grandeur," together with its exemplary catalogue supervised by the Met's assistant curator of Far Eastern art, Julia Meech-Pekarik. The title, puffy as it sounds, is not (for once) a piece of museological bombast. The Japanese government has cooperated to the hilt, or tsuba, lending many works which are inaccessible even to the Japanese: these registered National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties have never left Japan before. They include such extraordinary objects as the sliding doors that Kano Eitoku, aged 23, decorated with a design of a crane and a tree for the Juko-in temple in Kyoto, circa 1566, a youthful achievement that invites comparison to the 25-year-old Masaccio's frescoes in Florence; one of the grandest specimens of calligraphic painting in Japanese history, Konoe Nobutada's Six Principles for the Composition of Poems; and a coarse, cracked Shigaraki water jar that is said to have belonged to no less a master than Sen no Rikyu, the man who codified the tea ceremony as a formal art and was in effect the Petronius Arbiter of Momoyama taste.

The politics and culture of this time were dominated by three exquisitely discriminating and utterly ruthless daimyo, or warlords, who set out to unify the 200 squabbling fiefdoms of Japan: Oda Nobunaga and his successors, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Like the humanist condottieri of 15th century Italy, they built themselves impregnable and magnificent castles. "This room you see here," Hideyoshi would tell his guests as he gave them a tour of his seven-story castle at Osaka, "is full of gold, this one of silver; this other compartment is full of bales of silk and damask, that one with robes, while these rooms contain costly swords and weapons." It sounds like an Oriental Hearst at San Simeon, but the vast ostentation of the Momoyama warlords had a political aim: to dazzle visitors and cow supplicants. In private they practiced a cult of austerity the essence of which lay in the tea ceremony: the rough bowl, the unpainted wooden panel, the natural stone which, in manifesting sabi (simplicity or emptiness), embodied the ideals of the samurai class by repeating, in the aesthetic sphere, the discipline and frugality of a warrior's life.

Fabled Cipangu. These contrasts, within its art, between the spartan coarseness of a tea receptacle and the patient refinement of a makie lacquer box, between the swift brushwork of an ink painting and the daunting accumulation of labor represented by the embroidery of a silk No costume, have always given the Momoyama period a peculiar interest to Western eyes. This half-century was the point in Japanese culture that, in its secular largesse and curiosity about the real world, most resembled the European Renaissance. Indeed, it was during the Momoyama that the West's idea of Japan was shaped, as the Portuguese reached what had been since Marco Polo's time the fabled island of Cipangu -- an arrival no less deep in its implications than Commodore Perry's in Edo in 1853. The Met's show allows us to see, as never before, why our own cultural ancestors were so stricken with amazement.

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