ABSTRACT ART IN JAPAN
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It is very difficult to figure out which types of Japanese art have influenced the West and to what extent. Some Japanese wood-block prints were introduced to Paris in 1856, and in the last hundred years there have been various influences from Japan on contemporary art-movements in the Occident.
The interest which started with wood-block prints is now concentrated more on calligraphy and ink-drawings by Zen Buddhist monks, together with other works of a similar spirit. In the field of architecture, foreign interest has seemed to favor architecture connected with the tea ceremony -- a simple, functional type which Japan has developed in the last four centuries as well as landscapearchitecture of a similar nature. In other words, the Occident has been finding various different Japans in the last hundred years and finally is beginning to appreciate the fundamental characteristics of Japanese art -- simplicity, directness, and profundity. The western world, that developed what are known as the abstract art movements of the last half-century, is beginning to notice that certain types of abstract art have existed in Japan for centuries. (To my regret, there has so far been no publication which specifically points out this fact, but by and by the West is becoming familiar with fragments that describe the ancient abstract arts of Japan.) There have been artforms in Japan that were very abstract in their own ways, and it is my belief that most of them have long-lasting cultural values, possibly because of backgrounds which were profoundly philosophical and religious.
It may have been that Shinto, the original native religion of Japan for more than two thousand years, was primarily responsible for encouraging above all, clarity and simplicity. Geographically, the humidity which is extremely high here has almost enforced cleanliness and a clear-cut impression of design upon the inhabitants. The Chinese philosophy of Lao-Tzu and Taoism, with its emphasis on simplicity and also primitiveness, was imported to Japan almost fifteen hundred years ago, to be welcomed by the people, especially poets and artists. This has naturally given a profound philosophical background to the original preference for simplicity. Japanese Buddhism, also nearly fifteen centuries old, was strengthened in its history's latter half by the Zen sect, which appealed deeply to the Japanese mind. Extreme emphasis on directness in religious attitude and simplicity in daily life were demonstrated by Zen to encourage the native fondness for these qualities still further. Black ink-painting, in which the reality of the universe was rendered with a few strokes, became not only the people's favorite type of art, but the most respected. The fact that Chinese characters originating from pictographs, which the Japanese borrowed from China, allowed the art of calligraphy to be developed into an expressive abstract drawing. Both from practical necessity and artistic demand, the calligraphy of Japan developed perhaps further than the Chinese in the direction of abstract drawing.
The tea ceremony, together with its architecture and landscapearchitecture, owes most of its fundamental characteristics to Zen Buddhism; and in daily life, the most basic functionalism was practised through a genuine intuition. Perhaps there may exist a certain degree of misunderstanding about Zen. There are some who take it for a mysticism, but I believe that pure functionalism, which is at once intuitive and extremely rational -- in its design and execution of tea-architecture -- will persuade people to believe that besides being directly intuitive, Zen is super-rational instead of irrational and far from being purely mystical. Clarity and simplicity, first encouraged by native religion, have gained very strong support from Zen and further developed the various arts.
It is significant that a word corresponding to 'fine art' did not exist in Japan until about 1870. This does not mean that the fine arts did not exist in Japan. On the contrary, art permeated the life of the nation so widely and deeply that there was neither a word for art nor even a concept that denoted something distinct and apart.
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