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Japanese culture reflects an acute sensitivity to space and, therefore, to the look of things. This regard for visuality follows from a deeply rooted animistic past that remains present, even today. To this view, the sacred is not far away, but is approachable and visible. The space of here-and-now is significant, even to the point that symbols become undermined by their non-symbolic reading.
With the advent of Buddhism, the symbolic representation of a transcendental reality came to exist alongside this reverence for the mundane. This religion that the Chinese called “xiangjiao” (or image teaching) stimulated the creation of a rich iconography that linked this world with another higher one. But the tension between these two different ways of expressing the sacred continued to exist, lending itself to the Zen emphasis on practice as a way to connect the here-and-now with the transcendental order. In Japan, Buddhism thus came to have a distinctive look—the artificially natural garden, a concretely mysterious theater, and so on.
With the dawning of modernity, three semiotic trends form: phonocentrism, realism, and symbolic framing (or perspectivalism). As this occurs, the impressive figurality of Japanese cultural expression becomes disciplined and suppressed. Ideology configures reality, even to the point that animism becomes an expression of a national identity, and the emperor becomes a symbol of the state. Mass society forms by way of a fiction: the common understanding of certain key concepts that is actually a misunderstanding masked by the low figurality of the new look of Japanese culture.
Along with the dislocation that follows the loss and destruction brought about by World War II, continued technological development nudges the balance of semiotic forces back toward the grapheme and its expressive potential. Revealing its ability to survive modernity, animism lends itself to a postmodern explosion of visual expression.
Found here, then, are examples of Japanese visual culture, as they reflect this assertion, suppression, and re-assertion of figurality. I wish to thank my students for taking a real interest in trying to understand and appreciate various aspects of Japanese visual culture. |
