Japanese Aesthetics and the Nature of Anime

by David Pascal

 

[Preface: A few years ago, astounded as I was by the incredible wealth of entertainment, profundity, and just plain weirdness in what was then called 'Japanimation', I went the way of all converts and decided that I should prostelytize, and go forth and tell the world about this extraordinary new art form. I did, twisting several friends' arms out of their sockets, telling them to go see every example of it possible. I also wrote a very long, very thorough, and now very boring essay on the subject.

Reviewing it recently, I've come to think that it's served its purpose. In the dark days before Otakon, Anipike, the Anime Channel, animesuki.com, etc., anime might well have needed some of its basic terms explained. There's no need anymore. If you don't know what anime is, or if you do know and don't like it, you are brain-dead, and need read no further.

Its purpose served, and better sources of information residing elsewhere, I decided to retire the essay. However, there was one section of it that has not been outdated -- surprisingly, the oldest, the section about ancient Japanese aesthetics and its influence on the fragmentary, allusive structure of anime and its narratives.

I think it's still possible to learn something about how and why anime is put together the way it is by learning how and why Japanese art has traditionally been put together the way it is. Japanese art, it has been said, does not so much state as suggest. It's an art of implication, not assertion. How such loose and oblique aesthetic methods can achieve such strong and arresting artistic effects is nothing short of fascinating.

The Japanese have managed to consistently fashion great art out of their inconsistent-seeming principles of construction. And so I would like to preserve that section of my essay which tries to give some clues as to why. Clever artists who are not Japanese may pick up a few tricks, and thoughtful anime viewers may learn to understand why some of the obscure things they're seeing are nonetheless as powerful and moving as they are.]

 

Key Terms

You can't fully appreciate Japanese art, or its anime, unless you have some grasp of its aesthetics. Sorry. Some basic terms:

Aware -- literally, pathos, sorrow, grief -- is perhaps the most famous. Volumes are devoted to it. A western critic once translated it as the 'ah-ness' of things.

Gradually aware took the form of mono no aware, which, translated, means 'the sadness of things', but more coloquially it refers to the artist's (or viewer's) sensitivity to beauty and its perishability, or rather to its implied pathos -- the force of an unwept tear or an unstated recognition or passion.

Currently it seems to mean 'wretched', but overall it refers to the (somewhat aristocratic) ability to grasp both the possibilities and the limitations of things in a single incident or gesture, often of a trivial nature

Miyabi -- from the Heian period: 'courtly refinement', but a refinement including (or rather striving to refine) love and social relations -- a shunning of the crude and the rustic, and (ergo) much of actual life.

Not terribly applicable to urban Japan today, miyabi nonetheless lives.

Yugen -- the profound, remote, mysterious; the inexpressible-in-words; symbolism: but not crude symbolism (ie flag=nation), but symbols implying metaphysical vastnesses too large to grasp. Aware is particular; yugen is cosmic. Eliot's 'moment in and out of time' comes close: yugen is not the presence of, but the hint, the glow, of the eternal, the incorruptible.

Its roots are apropos: the term Yu meant dim, dark, hard to see; and gen refers to the Taoist notion of Truth.

Kamo no Chomei described it thus: 'The limitless vista created in imagination far surpasses anything one can see more clearly.' 'Being, they are not. Not being, they are.' Speaking of the art of acting in No, he said, 'Whether the character one portrays be of high or low birth, man or woman, priest, peasant, rustic, beggar, or outcast, one should think of them as crowned with a wreath of flowers. Although their positions in society differ, the fact that thy can all appreciate the beauty of flowers makes flowers of all of them'. 'The ability to appear beautiful is the seed of yugen'. Another of his axioms: 'Beauty is the color of truth.'

More practically, said Zeami of yugen as applied to art: 'a simple softening of form is yugen'.

Sabi -- 'old'. But also pleasure in that which is old, faded, lonely; stripped of distracting externals; a love of imperfection.

Sabi differs from aware in that one does not lament for the fallen blossom, but loves it, and from yugen in that the flower does not (or rather need not) suggest greater eternities.

Tranquility, spiritual peace, are associated with sabi. A liking for the aged, the faded, the under-decorated. It has been called 'tranquility in the context of loneliness'.

Closely related: wabi -- lack, frustration, disappointment, poverty, but in a unique sense.

'Wabi' means to transform material insufficiency so that one discovers in it a world of spiritual freedom unbounded by material things. To complain of insufficiency is the (contemptible) polar opposite of wabi.

Interior richness of spirit within a rough (but not crude) exterior, is wabi. Age, yes; dirt, no.

Wabi locates more beauty -- history, character, individuality -- in the blemished than the unblemished, but it also refers to a curiously tranquil, severe beauty: the 'cool stark beauty of original non-being, muichibutsu,' the 'merest tinge of yang at the extremity of yin.'

Wabi is the beauty of not-quite-Spring, embodied in the first few blades of grass in a vista of snow: the exterior is cold; but the interior is bursting with potential life and beauty -- the beauty not of being or non-being, but of vital possibility.

The emotional perspectives of wabi are well describe by Yoshida Kenko: 'The man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was fulfilled, who bewails empty vows, who spends long autumn nights alone, who lets his thoughts wander to distant skies, who yearns for the past in a dilapidated house - such a man truly knows what love means.'

By knowing unrequited love or a love that cannot be fulfilled, one truly knows what love means, just as by starving one develops a deeper understanding of food.

Wabi has aesthetically structural as well as emotional consequences as well:

Murata Shuko (a student of Ikkyu): 'The moon is not pleasing unless partly obscured by a cloud.' -- ie, the incomplete or fragmentary thing is more evocative -- more beautiful -- than the perfect.

Shinkei: 'One should set one's heart only on the indistinct.' 'The heart requires few words. Excellence is to be found in verses that are cold and spare.' Beauty is housed in the 'elevated, aloof, cold and frozen,' the 'aged and worn'.

Chen shih-tao: 'Be awkward rather than skillful. Be plain rather than florid. Be rough rather than delicate. Be eccentric rather than conform to the popular norm. Poetry is all like this.'

The yuan-yu school: 'simple aged austerity is to be prized, skillfully wrought elaboration is to be despised.'

What has all this got to do with anime, you say (slightly agog)? Simply that while Japanese art and narrative is invariably built with suki (taste or refinement), willfully deliberate eccentricity is amply tossed in.

The asymmetrical, the unbalanced, the ambiguous, the fragmentary, 'space', art that hints rather than states: that is Japanese art, and it permeates the Japanese art of anime.

Western aesthetics has traditionally championed art which renders things explicitly clear and painstakingly outlined. Japan is different. Where old Zen ink drawings barely imply the outline of a leaf, Dutch drawings of the same period reflect a nearly photographic horticultural accuracy. Entire world-views are contained in that distinction.

The Japanese like their art loose and free, sketched rather than definite, mysterious rather than clear -- 'broken rather than whole'. Japanese artists love to imply, rather than state. And so the viewer of manga or anime will see faces half-sketched, backgrounds half-done, and things critical to the story never explained.

Like the viewer of the Rorschach Blot, he is expected to supply his own interpretation.

For some this is bad art. For others, it is the most involving sort of art possible. Japanese artists make room for the viewer to complete the work himself -- and perhaps discover something of himself in the process.

In Evangelion, for example, one of the characters is shot by someone not shown by the camera. Subsequently a security officer long in love with the character is shown weeping wretchedly. Is the officer the one that pulled the trigger? We don't know; and we never find out. We have to connect the dots ourselves.

This occurs in ways small as well as large. In Birdy, a schoolgirl perhaps beginning to fall in love with a troubled schoolboy leans close to him during a light rainfall. We see the top of her umbrella, obscuring what happens between them when she does so.

Does she kiss him? Do they speak? Does she only take his arm and say nothing? We aren't shown.

Some western viewers find this sort of thing infuriating - they want to know, not to think!

Anime is different. In anime some of the power of what we see stems from the fact that we have to decide for ourselves just what it is.

But the tendency to imply, while evocative and poetic when done with care, can be taken to extremes. Thus, not a few of the more ambitious animes end up like Kubrick's 2001 or Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, fascinating but incomprehensible mystic metaphors. Just what are the Angels in The End Of Evangelion all about? What does the inverted castle in Revolutionary Girl Utena signify?

When anime directors want to be profound, they become incoherent. And sometimes it seems that they become so because they think the incoherent is the profound.

The fact remains, anime artists feel under no obligation to make sense. And sometimes they do not make sense.

Is it nonetheless possible for a piece of anime to have shiori -- to be 'a poem ambiguous enough to sustain several varying interpretations' (high praise, this, to a Japanese) 'yet altogether yielding the mood of loneliness' - when the plot line often as nor involves two pre-teens inside giant robot armor beating the shit out of each other?

Incredibly, yes.

Note: no discussion of Japanese aesthetics as it relates to anime would be complete with mention of the great, inevitable, all-permeating -- 'kawaii'. Kawaii means 'cute'. And rare is the anime in which 'cute' is not larded on by the shovel-load, if not the avalanche.

Huge-eyed infants, vomitously endearing little animals, sniffling toddlers, lilting faux-naive girlish voices -- the Japanese have a capacity for indulging in the cute to a degree that would make a nation of diabetics out of any other people.

This cuteness is generally juxtaposed with enough savage gore, tragic dramatic action, psychological realism, and/or just plain cross-cultural weirdness that the viewer is never sufficiently revolted to dash away screaming. But cuteness is always there lurking, often in luxuriant abundance, and is a genuine aesthetic goal that anime creators strive for and (alas?) invariably achieve.

I follow that 'alas' with a question mark because 'kawaii' too can prove addictive: if beauty is the color of truth, it must be stated that 'kawaii' is at least one shade of beauty, and that Japanese animators employ it to great effect. Be prepared for it; and be prepared - to your astonishment - to enjoy it.