Occasionally, unrelated incidents collide in novel insight. One such moment of clarity occurred recently to me. Late one Monday night, I got caught up watching a Japanese cartoon. Early the next morning, the weekly edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 2, 2010) arrived in the mailbox. (Yes, I am so old-fashioned that I prefer my news in print.) I studied the headlines on the front page and in the international supplement. My insight took shape around the word, yugen.
I separate my thoughts on yugen into two, linked posts. Here, in “Yugen Normal,” I trace the development of the concept and consider its presence in my Monday night cartoon. This post is for readers like myself: adults conversant with J-pop, who have an interest in East Asian history and contemporary Japanese cultural imperialism.
The second post, “Yugen Shock,” transplants the concept into the unlikely ground of American higher education. A hint of aesthetic play persists, but the tone grows suggestive and dark, like yugen itself. “Y-Shock” is a primer for parents of high school students, who are embarking on campus visits this summer. In its seven stanzas, I offer recommendations for identifying collegiate economic decline.
Whence Cometh the Darkness?
Yugen belongs to the realm of East Asian aesthetics. Its translation is a precariously aerial undertaking: the soaring, dipping, darting meanings are tied to historic and discursive contexts much like a wind-tossed kite is tethered to the hand that holds the string. The origins of yugen–like the origins of paper kites–lie in ancient China.
A distinctly Japanese word, yugen is composed of two kanji (idiographic characters), borrowed–as are all kanji–from Chinese writing. In Chinese, these characters are yu (deep, occult) and xuan (profound); they are not combined in common usage. However, the second word, xuan, shows up in intriguing phrases. For example, set before the character for “learning” (Chinese: xue; Japanese: gaku/manabu), xuan means “metaphysics.”
In conjunction with the character for “gate” (Chinese: men; Japanese: mon/kado), xuan represents the occult practice that began in the third century BCE and which we in the West call Taosim. (Tao is a different character, meaning “path, way,” and pronounced do or michi in Japanese.) I have a hunch that xuan entered the language during the Xia Period (2100 – 1800 BCE), when tribal shaman-kings rode dragons in the spirit world, gleaning the wisdom to guide their people. Even by Chinese standards, this is an ancient word, with undertones of primal power.
Let us fast-forward three millennia from mythical Chinese dragon lords to the historic Japanese period known as the Muromachi (1336 – 1573 CE). On the opposite side of the Eurasian continent, the Avignon Papacy was dividing Roman Catholic loyalties. In the Japanese archipelago, two rival imperial courts, the Northern and the Southern, vied for titular headship. One could argue that the Northern Court prevailed, because the present emperor, Akihito, descends from this line.
In their elegant capital of Kyoto, the Northern emperors depended upon the support of the Ashikaga shogun (military rulers). Unlike the Kamakura before them or the Tokugawa who followed, the Ashikaga never wielded complete civil and military control. Even within the Northern empire, provincial feudal lords (daimyo) exercised relative autonomy over their domains, their peasants and their samurai warriors.
Military commanders in a period of great unrest, the Ashikaga shogun preferred the pleasurable pursuit of the performing arts, and of young male performers. The latter practice was known euphemistically as “the way of adolescent boys,” or wakashudo. (The last Japanese syllable is the Chinese tao.)
In the year 1374 CE, the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu, accepted the son of a theatrical family as a gift from his father. Two decades later, he pacified the Southern troops and reunited the Court. History remembers Yoshimitsu for his martial skills, not his pederasty. The boy in question was Zeami Motokiyo (c.1363 – c.1443), and he grew up to become the founder of Noh, the most refined of Japanese performing arts.
No record reveals how repeated sexual abuse by a dissolute and powerful man at the young age of a contemporary middle school student warped Zeami. We know that as an adult playwright and actor, he placed yugen–the dark, the unnamed–at the heart of his aesthetic. Noh audiences appreciate that the face of the principal actor (shite) is hidden always behind a mask.
By bringing yugen into a central position in his stagecraft, Zeami was doing more than playing with nature metaphors of loss. He did play with nature metaphors–the bleaker, the better. As any source on this subject will relay, the sun setting behind a mountain or a boat passing behind an island revealed to Zeami the transitoriness of existence. (Of course, the transitoriness of existence was a familiar Buddhist theme of the period, but in the writings of Zeami, it acquires a distinctive quality, the exploration of which is beyond the scope of this post.)
This yugen of the masked performer and the sere metaphor is far removed from the xuan of the archaic shaman. Theatrical props and literary tropes operate as purely aesthetic devices. In contrast, and embedded in their cultural contexts, mystery rites preserve the commonweal. One sublimates the pain of living; the other restores harmony and balance to the world. Sadly, Zeami’s really was a social milieu beyond restoration or reconciliation. The boy who was given as a sexual plaything to an overlord became the grand master of a sublime escapism.
By the end of the Muromachi, Zeami’s legacy of yugen had penetrated the traditional arts of the tea ceremony, flower arranging, calligraphy and brush painting. And today, the shadow of yugen has not vanished from Japan, despite the massive social and economic transformations of five centuries. Beneath the surface optimism of a culture madly in love with Hello Kitty, the darkness pulses. To glimpse its popular manifestation, do as I did on a recent Monday night. Log onto www.animeboy.org and, if you are over the age of eighteen years, check out Sarai-ya Goyou (House of Five Leaves).
Sayonara, “Sarai-ya Goyou”
Like other anime, Sarai-ya Goyou (House of Five Leaves) began as a graphic novel (manga), serialized, in this case, in the magazine, Ikki. Written and illustrated by 33 year-old Ono Natsume, the serial began in 2006. It will conclude in the September issue of the magazine, which is scheduled for Japanese release today, July 24, 2010 CE.
The ending of Goyou should not to be taken as a sign of declining audience interest, as is the cancellation of an English-language, American television series. Manga and anime are often developed with a complete story arc. In this regard and in their reliance upon tired narrative conventions, these J-pop products resemble the Latin American soap operas called las telenovelas.
The print episodes of Goyou have been collected into seven volumes, available in English through San Francisco-based VIZ Media, LLC. This firm is the American subsidiary of a huge Japanese publishing conglomerate. Manglobe, another major player in the arena of J-pop production, provides the animated version. Big business is backing Ono, and Goyou is neither underground graphic novel nor indie anime.
Ono sets her story in the last years of the Tokugawa Period (1603 – 1868 CE), a time of social and economic dislocation greater even than the early years of the Muromachi. Two and a half centuries of peace, taxation and costly ritual obligations to the shogun have impoverished the warrior caste. To keep their floundering households afloat, daimyo have resorted to releasing samurai retainers from service.
That step–the release of warrior retainers–was, and is without parallel. For a samurai to be expelled from service should not be compared, for example, to an emerging manga artist losing a contract in today’s global economy. The Tokugawa had cut off social mobility and shut down international contact more ruthlessly than any regime in world history. The son of a late Tokugawa warrior household did not ponder his occupational choices. The boy knew that he would grow up to serve his lord, who, in turn, would provide for him.
When abruptly dispossessed of their feudal rank and privileges, many ronin (masterless warriors) wandered the countryside, aimless and mentally unhinged. Some found work as bodyguards (yojimbo) for the merchant houses that burgeoned at this time. Others swallowed their pride, hung up their swords and tried their hands at manual labor. But, a man trained from birth in the martial arts lacks the brute strength of a construction worker. Many ronin failed as farmers and day laborers.
Ono’s protagonist, Akitsu Masanosuke, is a clumsy, bumbling ronin with a hang-dog expression: a grown-up Charlie Brown with a long nose. Masa has made his way to Edo (the current Tokyo), where he wanders the poorer neighborhoods in search of food, shelter, work and the meaning of life. It is not long before the hapless fellow falls in with Yaichi, a mysterious, pale figure who is a bit like Robin Hood and a lot like Hannibal Lecter. In an uncharacteristic moment of disclosure, the cold-blooded Ichi finds Masa to be “not boring.”
Lonely and friendless in the big city, Masa becomes ever more entangled with Ichi and his little band of thieves, the Five Leaves of the title. To be precise, the Five Leaves are not thieves. They are kidnappers, and their victims are often unsuspecting boys, who are held, drugged and bound, until their parents pay the ransom.
The tension of psychological ambivalence draws the viewer into the underworld of the storyline. Will Masa muster the will to flee his new comrades? Will he succumb to Ichi’s machinations? What is Ichi’s real interest in Masa? Will either man escape the malaise of his existence? Is death–of a child victim, of Masa, of Ichi–the inevitable outcome? Stay tuned to find out.
Goyou fits into the seinen subgenre of manga and anime, targeted at young adult men. (Common wisdom holds that Japanese women do not enjoy such degraded subject matter, although at least one composes it without apparent damage.) The period setting links the work to chanbara, the samurai films which peaked in popularity during the Seventies.
However, with an ambience as brooding as a Forties film noir, Ono’s opus oozes yugen. The kidnapping plots are disturbing; the settings of brothels and cheap dives are depressing. The interiors are dim; the staircases are narrow. The howling of unseen dogs echoes through alleys. The back stories are fraught with tragedy.
Line work on the character animation is rough and sketchy, appearing rougher and sketchier against blurred backgrounds. The faces are unattractive: haggard, jaded, morose, and a dozen other cheerless adjectives. Every episode seems to contain images of clouds covering the moon, of dead leaves drifting down, of distorted reflections in a river.
There is the occasional ray of light, if not hope. For example, when another gang is hired by a barren woman to murder the illegitimate son of her husband, the leader feigns the child’s death rather than kill an innocent. But, the child cannot return home, and his best option is to take up with his kidnappers and descend into a life of crime. There is the rare touch of kawaii (cuteness), as in the scenes with a tabby cat sitting in a sunlit doorway, half listening to Masa’s self-pitying soliloquies.
However, the light and the cute do not begin to balance the dark and the dreary. Sarai-ya Goyou is a study in the inevitability of economic collapse, social deterioration and moral decay. A work of historical fiction, it is an eerie reflection of contemporary Japan as described by Tomiko Yoda, “an imploding economic system, a disintegrating social order, and the virtual absence of ethical or competent leadership” (in Napier, 2005: xvi). Finally, The House of Five Leaves is intended–by author/illustrator Ono, by the editors at Ikki, by the animation firm of Manglobe, and by American distributor VIZ Media–to be fun. Only in a culture of yugen is this cartoon fun.
not cheering,
dkb
Read Full Post »
Campus Notes 
Yugen Normal: Sarai-ya Goyou Ends Today!
Posted in Commentaries, tagged anime, child sexual abuse, Japanese aesthetics, Japanese pop culture, manga, Natsume Ono, Noh theater, shogun, Susan Napier, yugen, Zeami Motokiyo on July 24, 2010|
Occasionally, unrelated incidents collide in novel insight. One such moment of clarity occurred recently to me. Late one Monday night, I got caught up watching a Japanese cartoon. Early the next morning, the weekly edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 2, 2010) arrived in the mailbox. (Yes, I am so old-fashioned that I prefer my news in print.) I studied the headlines on the front page and in the international supplement. My insight took shape around the word, yugen.
I separate my thoughts on yugen into two, linked posts. Here, in “Yugen Normal,” I trace the development of the concept and consider its presence in my Monday night cartoon. This post is for readers like myself: adults conversant with J-pop, who have an interest in East Asian history and contemporary Japanese cultural imperialism.
The second post, “Yugen Shock,” transplants the concept into the unlikely ground of American higher education. A hint of aesthetic play persists, but the tone grows suggestive and dark, like yugen itself. “Y-Shock” is a primer for parents of high school students, who are embarking on campus visits this summer. In its seven stanzas, I offer recommendations for identifying collegiate economic decline.
Whence Cometh the Darkness?
Yugen belongs to the realm of East Asian aesthetics. Its translation is a precariously aerial undertaking: the soaring, dipping, darting meanings are tied to historic and discursive contexts much like a wind-tossed kite is tethered to the hand that holds the string. The origins of yugen–like the origins of paper kites–lie in ancient China.
A distinctly Japanese word, yugen is composed of two kanji (idiographic characters), borrowed–as are all kanji–from Chinese writing. In Chinese, these characters are yu (deep, occult) and xuan (profound); they are not combined in common usage. However, the second word, xuan, shows up in intriguing phrases. For example, set before the character for “learning” (Chinese: xue; Japanese: gaku/manabu), xuan means “metaphysics.”
In conjunction with the character for “gate” (Chinese: men; Japanese: mon/kado), xuan represents the occult practice that began in the third century BCE and which we in the West call Taosim. (Tao is a different character, meaning “path, way,” and pronounced do or michi in Japanese.) I have a hunch that xuan entered the language during the Xia Period (2100 – 1800 BCE), when tribal shaman-kings rode dragons in the spirit world, gleaning the wisdom to guide their people. Even by Chinese standards, this is an ancient word, with undertones of primal power.
Let us fast-forward three millennia from mythical Chinese dragon lords to the historic Japanese period known as the Muromachi (1336 – 1573 CE). On the opposite side of the Eurasian continent, the Avignon Papacy was dividing Roman Catholic loyalties. In the Japanese archipelago, two rival imperial courts, the Northern and the Southern, vied for titular headship. One could argue that the Northern Court prevailed, because the present emperor, Akihito, descends from this line.
In their elegant capital of Kyoto, the Northern emperors depended upon the support of the Ashikaga shogun (military rulers). Unlike the Kamakura before them or the Tokugawa who followed, the Ashikaga never wielded complete civil and military control. Even within the Northern empire, provincial feudal lords (daimyo) exercised relative autonomy over their domains, their peasants and their samurai warriors.
Military commanders in a period of great unrest, the Ashikaga shogun preferred the pleasurable pursuit of the performing arts, and of young male performers. The latter practice was known euphemistically as “the way of adolescent boys,” or wakashudo. (The last Japanese syllable is the Chinese tao.)
In the year 1374 CE, the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu, accepted the son of a theatrical family as a gift from his father. Two decades later, he pacified the Southern troops and reunited the Court. History remembers Yoshimitsu for his martial skills, not his pederasty. The boy in question was Zeami Motokiyo (c.1363 – c.1443), and he grew up to become the founder of Noh, the most refined of Japanese performing arts.
No record reveals how repeated sexual abuse by a dissolute and powerful man at the young age of a contemporary middle school student warped Zeami. We know that as an adult playwright and actor, he placed yugen–the dark, the unnamed–at the heart of his aesthetic. Noh audiences appreciate that the face of the principal actor (shite) is hidden always behind a mask.
By bringing yugen into a central position in his stagecraft, Zeami was doing more than playing with nature metaphors of loss. He did play with nature metaphors–the bleaker, the better. As any source on this subject will relay, the sun setting behind a mountain or a boat passing behind an island revealed to Zeami the transitoriness of existence. (Of course, the transitoriness of existence was a familiar Buddhist theme of the period, but in the writings of Zeami, it acquires a distinctive quality, the exploration of which is beyond the scope of this post.)
This yugen of the masked performer and the sere metaphor is far removed from the xuan of the archaic shaman. Theatrical props and literary tropes operate as purely aesthetic devices. In contrast, and embedded in their cultural contexts, mystery rites preserve the commonweal. One sublimates the pain of living; the other restores harmony and balance to the world. Sadly, Zeami’s really was a social milieu beyond restoration or reconciliation. The boy who was given as a sexual plaything to an overlord became the grand master of a sublime escapism.
By the end of the Muromachi, Zeami’s legacy of yugen had penetrated the traditional arts of the tea ceremony, flower arranging, calligraphy and brush painting. And today, the shadow of yugen has not vanished from Japan, despite the massive social and economic transformations of five centuries. Beneath the surface optimism of a culture madly in love with Hello Kitty, the darkness pulses. To glimpse its popular manifestation, do as I did on a recent Monday night. Log onto www.animeboy.org and, if you are over the age of eighteen years, check out Sarai-ya Goyou (House of Five Leaves).
Sayonara, “Sarai-ya Goyou”
Like other anime, Sarai-ya Goyou (House of Five Leaves) began as a graphic novel (manga), serialized, in this case, in the magazine, Ikki. Written and illustrated by 33 year-old Ono Natsume, the serial began in 2006. It will conclude in the September issue of the magazine, which is scheduled for Japanese release today, July 24, 2010 CE.
The ending of Goyou should not to be taken as a sign of declining audience interest, as is the cancellation of an English-language, American television series. Manga and anime are often developed with a complete story arc. In this regard and in their reliance upon tired narrative conventions, these J-pop products resemble the Latin American soap operas called las telenovelas.
The print episodes of Goyou have been collected into seven volumes, available in English through San Francisco-based VIZ Media, LLC. This firm is the American subsidiary of a huge Japanese publishing conglomerate. Manglobe, another major player in the arena of J-pop production, provides the animated version. Big business is backing Ono, and Goyou is neither underground graphic novel nor indie anime.
Ono sets her story in the last years of the Tokugawa Period (1603 – 1868 CE), a time of social and economic dislocation greater even than the early years of the Muromachi. Two and a half centuries of peace, taxation and costly ritual obligations to the shogun have impoverished the warrior caste. To keep their floundering households afloat, daimyo have resorted to releasing samurai retainers from service.
That step–the release of warrior retainers–was, and is without parallel. For a samurai to be expelled from service should not be compared, for example, to an emerging manga artist losing a contract in today’s global economy. The Tokugawa had cut off social mobility and shut down international contact more ruthlessly than any regime in world history. The son of a late Tokugawa warrior household did not ponder his occupational choices. The boy knew that he would grow up to serve his lord, who, in turn, would provide for him.
When abruptly dispossessed of their feudal rank and privileges, many ronin (masterless warriors) wandered the countryside, aimless and mentally unhinged. Some found work as bodyguards (yojimbo) for the merchant houses that burgeoned at this time. Others swallowed their pride, hung up their swords and tried their hands at manual labor. But, a man trained from birth in the martial arts lacks the brute strength of a construction worker. Many ronin failed as farmers and day laborers.
Ono’s protagonist, Akitsu Masanosuke, is a clumsy, bumbling ronin with a hang-dog expression: a grown-up Charlie Brown with a long nose. Masa has made his way to Edo (the current Tokyo), where he wanders the poorer neighborhoods in search of food, shelter, work and the meaning of life. It is not long before the hapless fellow falls in with Yaichi, a mysterious, pale figure who is a bit like Robin Hood and a lot like Hannibal Lecter. In an uncharacteristic moment of disclosure, the cold-blooded Ichi finds Masa to be “not boring.”
Lonely and friendless in the big city, Masa becomes ever more entangled with Ichi and his little band of thieves, the Five Leaves of the title. To be precise, the Five Leaves are not thieves. They are kidnappers, and their victims are often unsuspecting boys, who are held, drugged and bound, until their parents pay the ransom.
The tension of psychological ambivalence draws the viewer into the underworld of the storyline. Will Masa muster the will to flee his new comrades? Will he succumb to Ichi’s machinations? What is Ichi’s real interest in Masa? Will either man escape the malaise of his existence? Is death–of a child victim, of Masa, of Ichi–the inevitable outcome? Stay tuned to find out.
Goyou fits into the seinen subgenre of manga and anime, targeted at young adult men. (Common wisdom holds that Japanese women do not enjoy such degraded subject matter, although at least one composes it without apparent damage.) The period setting links the work to chanbara, the samurai films which peaked in popularity during the Seventies.
However, with an ambience as brooding as a Forties film noir, Ono’s opus oozes yugen. The kidnapping plots are disturbing; the settings of brothels and cheap dives are depressing. The interiors are dim; the staircases are narrow. The howling of unseen dogs echoes through alleys. The back stories are fraught with tragedy.
Line work on the character animation is rough and sketchy, appearing rougher and sketchier against blurred backgrounds. The faces are unattractive: haggard, jaded, morose, and a dozen other cheerless adjectives. Every episode seems to contain images of clouds covering the moon, of dead leaves drifting down, of distorted reflections in a river.
There is the occasional ray of light, if not hope. For example, when another gang is hired by a barren woman to murder the illegitimate son of her husband, the leader feigns the child’s death rather than kill an innocent. But, the child cannot return home, and his best option is to take up with his kidnappers and descend into a life of crime. There is the rare touch of kawaii (cuteness), as in the scenes with a tabby cat sitting in a sunlit doorway, half listening to Masa’s self-pitying soliloquies.
However, the light and the cute do not begin to balance the dark and the dreary. Sarai-ya Goyou is a study in the inevitability of economic collapse, social deterioration and moral decay. A work of historical fiction, it is an eerie reflection of contemporary Japan as described by Tomiko Yoda, “an imploding economic system, a disintegrating social order, and the virtual absence of ethical or competent leadership” (in Napier, 2005: xvi). Finally, The House of Five Leaves is intended–by author/illustrator Ono, by the editors at Ikki, by the animation firm of Manglobe, and by American distributor VIZ Media–to be fun. Only in a culture of yugen is this cartoon fun.
not cheering,
dkb
Read Full Post »