Wayo Style: The Japanization Mechanism (1992)

We have to begin by asking why an exhibition like this should be held in London now. Suffice it to say that the UK organisers of the Japan Festival 1991 wanted a core exhibition that would unravel, in their eyes, the mystery of Japan and we in Japan were asked to fulfill this requirement. We may, in addition, ask why such an exhibition is necessary after the millions of words that have been written in the English language about Japan in the last decade, but obviously these have been insufficient.

A plethora of forces is spewing forth from Japan—the globally expanding, invariably disproportionate forces of its economy; the bungling and farcical forces of its politics; the irrepressible forces of its culture still shrouded in the haze of exoticism. The effusion is irregular and unbalanced, yet exposed with ever-greater frequency to international gaze. Even if this exhibition were required to offer a sampling of clues for understanding the overall character of Japan today, it still might not leave anything behind beyond the age-old impression that "Japan is a curious country". As one who took part in the planning of this event, I feel I must make clear the standpoint on which we have taken up the challenge from the U.K. of producing this exhibition on Japan, today, in London, the capital of Great Britain.

Like Great Britain, Japan is an island nation. This geographic condition seems to have encouraged certain peculiarities in the development of our cultures. Both countries, throughout their histories, were perceived as lying on the fringes of a civilization centred on adjacent continents. This perception produced two vectors moving in opposite directions. One moved from the outside in, fostering a consciousness of the (external) continent as the political and cultural centre and the import of its artefacts and ideas. The other vector asserted the specificity and identity of its indigenous culture against the impinging forces of the external centre, prompting internally directed efforts to create features of distinction and self-assertion. The workings of these vectors can be seen in the pendulum swinging between the closing and opening of the country to foreign intercourse, the interplay of introverted and extroverted tendencies, the cycles of acceptance and rejection, and imitation and original creation.

A simple diagrammatic explanation would show the external centre providing a potentially universalizable spirit of the times to peripheral areas. In the case of Britain, the tides of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern styles reached the isles with a lag of fifty to one hundred years. The ideas and cultural styles thus introduced were quickly subjected to modification within the indigenous milieu, and out of that " Englishness" was fashioned.

In the case of Japan, the import of culture and ideas from the external centre (the Asian continent) occurred in overwhelming, periodic waves. Historically, Japan experienced widespread internal turmoil at four stages in its history. In the 7th century, a dispute over succession to the imperial throne galvanized provincial forces against the strong centralizing force of the throne (culminating in the Jinshin Disturbance of 672), and ending with the ascendency of the latter and the strengthening of the central government under Emperor Tenmu. In the late 12th century the country was torn by the struggle for ascendency between the warrior leagues led by the Taira clan, which exercised great power in the imperial court in Kyoto, and the Minamoto clan which had accumulated strength in the eastern part of the country. In the 16th century, the tenuous network of alliances among the numerous provincial warlords broke down, engulfing the country in a century of civil war known as the Sengoku (Warring States) Period. In the mid-19th century, internal, loyalist pressures against the prolonged rule of the Tokugawa shogunate were unleashed with the encroachment of the Western powers and led to the toppling of the old regime of two and a half centuries—the Meiji Restoration.

Each of these periods of internal turmoil, in fact, coincided with a peak of political and cultural tension vis-a-vis particular external forces. The common feature of these periods, moreover, is that once the turmoil...