The Japanese Eye

Frog in the Well
Portraits of Japan by Watanabe
Kazan, 1793-1841
by Donald Keene
Columbia, 304 pp., $24.50

The rabbit hutch theory of Japanese society, popularized by the media some years back, depicted the Japanese as a nation of economic robots, happy to live in identical tiny houses while they slaved away building the GNP. Many Americans drew the conclusion that Japan's contemporary economic success was founded on a devaluation of the individual, and a corresponding over-willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good of a company and the nation.

And yet Japan, like any other nation or society, is now and always has been full of fascinating people of great individuality with nothing robotic about them. Donald Keene, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature Emeritus, and University Professor Emeritus, at Columbia, excels in finding such people and making them come alive for us. He has been doing so now for over 50 years through a steady stream of books on Japanese literature and culture, as well as through a plentitude of translations of classical and modern Japanese prose and poetry.

In recent years, Keene has produced three biographies of iconic figures. Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavillion described the creation of what we now think of as traditional Japanese aesthetics through the life of the medieval Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912 depicted the Emperor Meiji against the backdrop of the history of the Meiji period and the modernization of Japanese culture.

Now comes his latest book. This is the first full-length biography in English of an important samurai intellectual whose accomplishments as painter and statesman still reverberate in modern Japan. Watanabe Kazan's life, from the early years of poverty to service as an advisor to his lord, and then on to a tragic end, is narrated against the background of the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate. This is a portrait of one individual at a tipping point in history as Japan moved at a snail's pace from a policy of minimal contact with the outside world to the opening of its doors to foreign relations.

At the beginning of the 19th century it was already apparent to many Japanese politicians that the policy of seclusion instituted in the 17th century had to go. Kazan was one of those who saw the handwriting on the wall. The frog in the well, ignorant of the great ocean, was an image he used again and again in his essays to characterize his own contemporaries who were happy in their narrow world. Steeped in the Confucian classics, like others of his class, Kazan had every reason to become a staunch opponent of Western learning; but instead he came to "appreciate," as Keene puts it, "the magnitude of European civilization." He believed that Japan needed to open to the world, not only for the sake of national defense but also for the sake of pure knowledge.

Edo was the intellectual center of Japan then, just as its modern incarnation (Tokyo) is now; and Kazan was an Edo intellectual, one of a group of strong individuals as brilliant, opinionated, and imaginative as any New York intellectual of our own time. Of course, the crucial difference was that Edo intellectuals were quite literally taking their life in their hands if they so much as murmured against shogunal policy. Ideas could get someone in plenty of trouble, and Kazan's ideas turned out to be his misfortune.

He was arrested on trumped-up char-ges, and ultimately placed under house arrest. To support himself, he continued to paint and sell pictures, a crime when under house arrest. When it seemed that this might become known, and the repurcussions extend to the lord of his domain, he committed suicide. In spite of his ability to appreciate modern European knowledge, he retained to the very end a staunch loyalty to the Confucian values of his class. It was, as Keene says, a "turbulent life and tragic death." Watanabe Kazan was a casualty of the times.

Keene discussses in vivid detail all Kazan's major paintings and political writings, but what haunt me most are two portraits. One was of the giant zora Buzaemon, who was over seven feet tall. A timid giant, Buzaemon was taken to visit various prestigious people in Edo in the company of his master, the daimyo of Kumamoto. Everyone, even sober Confucian scholars, seems to have treated him as an object of curiosity and a subject for jokes. He hated being stared at, and wanted only to return to his country home as soon as possible.

Kazan's portrait of Buzaemon was made with a camera obscura, in order to capture his likeness as accurately as possible. Although Keene does not find it one of Kazan's most appealing works, he defends it against a Japanese scholar who wrote a detailed study claiming that it was "no more than a representation of a freak."

"This criticism seems to miss the sadness in Buzaemon's face," counters Keene. "This is not the portrait of a 'freak' but of a man doomed to lead a tragic life. It would be surprising if Kazan did not feel this."

The second portrait is that of Kazan's revered teacher of Confucian studies, Satô Issai. Like the portrait of Buzaemon, it was realistic; but unlike Buzaemon's portrait, it was not made with a camera obscura. Although Kazan had some familiarity with Western techinques of shading and coloring, Keene argues persuasively that neither these nor anything in earlier Japanese portraiture could have directly inspired him in this portrait, which was "totally unlike any previous portrait made by a Japanese, a work that seems to have sprung into the world without parentage."

In his discussion of this portrait, Keene confesses that he can not account for its dramatic intensity, or the vivid evocation of personality, which are what make it so unforgettable. This biography can be seen, in part, as Keene's attempt to answer his own question: "What enabled Kazan to create this extraordinary work?" He does not offer an outright answer, but in a sense, the entire book provides one. Surely, in this portrait, the two animating passions of Kazan's life--his Confucianism and his art--came together to inspire him, so that the realism at which he excelled was infused with something greater than itself.

In any case, in reading Frog in the Well, one acquires a sense of what it was like to be alive in those strange and turbulent days of the waning of the Tokugawa shogunate, and a sense of commonality with one of its most sympathetic figures. Much effort has gone into acquiring the illustrations, many of which seem to be in private hands in Japan. Perhaps the book will inspire a major exhibition of Kazan's work, one that will travel abroad as freely as Kazan would have wished.

Janine Beichman, professor of Japanese Literature at Daito Bunka University, Tokyo, is the author of Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry.