REFERENCES

In the body of the text and in the Index, Japanese names follow the Japanese convention of family name first; in the References and Select Bibliography, names are listed as they appear in the publications, generally following the Western convention of family name last.

All gardens are located in Kyoto. All ceramics are post-2000 and from private collections, unless otherwise specified. Rather than note the exact size, which is often difficult given the irregular shape of much pottery, I would simply mention that all sake cups can fit comfortably into the palm of one hand, and most tea bowls into two cupped hands. (Several of the sake cups appear larger than life-size, and the tea bowls are all smaller than their actual size.)

INTRODUCTION TRANSFORMATIONS OF VISION

1  See Allen S. Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th-century Metaphysics (New York, 1995); Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture (New York, 1998); The Wind and the Source: In the Shadow of Mont Ventoux (Albany, NY, 2005); Varieties of Audio Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Landscape (Los Angeles, 2008).

2  Throughout this book I refer to the Japanese dry garden (karesansui) as a Zen garden. I am well aware of the current revisionist trend that denies the influence of Zen on this tradition, and I hope that my work will add to the debate. Shoji Yamada, in Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen and the West, trans. Earl Hartman (Chicago, 2009), argues that there is no historical evidence that the dry garden is a manifestation of Zen culture, and that this interpretation is a modern construct. While he convincingly reveals the lack of textual evidence for what has become a commonplace belief, it is nevertheless hard to believe that these gardens – originating in Zen temples and an integral part of their decor, framed by tea rooms and represented in paintings inspired by Buddhist iconography – are not integral to Zen-inspired culture. Here, a positivist concern with lack of textual evidence unfortunately obviates all other forms of hermeneutic endeavour. In response: (a) Why would everything in a temple complex except their gardens – commissioned by the priests at significant expense and requiring great effort in their creation, and occasionally designed by Zen priests themselves – be Zen inspired? (b) In any case, all Japanese art forms were a result of a vast syncretism, of which Zen is only a part, so to narrow down the issue to this degree is already to ask the wrong question. (c) There is a hermeneutic fallacy in reducing evidence uniquely to the textual and verbal, especially as the issue at stake concerns an iconic system, which is even more of a problem given that Zen is decidedly anti-cognitive. (d) Following the work of Aby Warburg, Irwin Panofsky, Ernst Cassirer and others, the symbolic implications of non-linguistic icons must certainly be taken into account.

3  Christine M. E. Guth, Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle (Princeton, NJ, 1993), p. 64. For an excellent introduction to tea culture, see Jennifer L. Anderson, An Introduction to Japanese Tea Ritual (Albany, NY, 1991).

4  Haga Kōshirō, ‘The Wabi Aesthetic Through the Ages’, in Tea in Japan, ed. Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao (Honolulu, 1989), p. 197.

5  The term chashitsu means ‘tea room’ while chaseki more generally signifies ‘a place for tea’, which can be either a room, hut, pavilion or house, of varying dimensions.

6  Rupert A. Cox, The Zen Arts: An Anthropological Study of the Culture of Aesthetic Form in Japan (London, 2003).

7  Joseph D. Parker, Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early Muromachi Japan (1336–1573), (Albany, NY, 1999), p. 111.

8  Cited in Gregory P. A. Levine, Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monestary (Seattle, 2005), p. 158.

9  Donald Keene, ‘Japanese Aesthetics’, in Japanese Aesthetics and Culture, ed. Nancy G. Hume (Albany, NY, 1995), p. 29.

10  Haga, ‘The Wabi Aesthetic’, pp. 195–9; D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture [1959] (New York, n.d.), p. 284.

11  See Edward S. Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings [1886] (New York, 1961), pp. 34 and 199.

12  Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics (Berkeley, CA, 2007), pp. 44–6.

13  An excellent recent study discusses the relation between the aesthetic and culinary significance of astringency in Japanese culture, Ryoko Sekiguchi, L’Astringent (Paris, 2012).

14  Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, p. 285.

15  In conversation, Michael Lazarin has pointed out that only things that were once exquisite can acquire wabi-sabi, for example, a ceramic doll, but not a plastic doll. But not all exquisite things can become wabi-sabi: jade can but not diamonds; the concrete walls of Andō Tadao are from the start shibui, but concrete can never become wabi-sabi. Thus, a chashitsu made of hinoki and sugi can become wabi-sabi; a knotty-pine cabin will not likely ever be shibui or become wabi-sabi.

16  See Cox, The Zen Arts.

17  Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, pp. 304–5.

18  Richard L. Wilson, The Art of Ogata Kenzan (New York, 1991), p. 195.

19  See the essays in Varley and Isao, eds, Tea in Japan, and Hume, ed., Japanese Aesthetics and Culture.

20  Louise Allison Cort, Shigaraki: Potters’ Valley (Bangkok, 2001), p. 129.

21  Ibid., p. 128. Recent revisionist research has suggested that the relation between Rikyū and Chōjirō is more originary myth than historical fact, but this hardly mitigates the vast importance of the relationship, whatever be the ratio of fact to fiction, within the history of the tea ceremony. See the exemplary historical study, Morgan Pitelka, Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practioners in Japan (Honolulu, 2005), to which this section of my book is indebted.

22  Ostentation is of course relative; compared to traditional Chinese forms as interpreted by the Heian court, the tea ceremony under the regent and the shoguns might appear austere, but at the same time, compared to wabi-sabi tea, the gold tea room and tea set owned by Hideyoshi, and his tea ceremony for thousands of connoisseurs at Kitano, cannot but be deemed extremely flamboyant.

23  Robert Smithson, ‘Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson’ [1970], in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Los Angeles, 1996), p. 251.

24  Allen S. Weiss, ‘In Praise of Anachronism’, in Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Arcitecture (New York, 1998), pp. 108–53.

25  See Robert D. Mowry, ed., Worlds Within Worlds: The Richard Rosenblum Collection of Chinese Scholar’s Rocks, exh. cat., Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (1997).

26  See Vincent T. Covello and Yuji Yoshimura, The Japanese Art of Stone Appreciation: Suiseki and Its Use with Bonsai (Rutland, VT, 1984).

27  Parker, Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts, p. 136.

28  See the engraving from Akisato Rito, Illustrated Guide to Famous Gardens in Kyoto [1799], reproduced in Hiroshi Onishi, Takemitsu Oba and Sondra Castile, Immortals and Sages: Paintings from Ryoanji Temple (New York, 1993), p. 14. Sāno Touemon is mentioned in Dore Ashton, Noguchi: East and West (New York, 1992), p. 43.

29  The revision of the iconographic history of Ryōan-ji proposed in the revelatory publication by Onishi, Oba and Castile, Immortals and Sages, is quite recent, based on the discovery in 1989 that four previously unidentified Momoyama-era (1570–1610) sliding wall-panel paintings acquired by the Metropolitain Museum in New York had originally been created for the Abbot’s temple of Ryōan-ji. My analysis is totally indebted to this groundbreaking work.

30  Hiroshi Onishi, ‘Chinese Lore for Japanese Spaces’, in Onishi, Oba and Castile, Immortals and Sages, p. 41.

31  Parker, Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts, pp. 190–96; see this work for a detailed study of Zen syncretism, especially in relation to its Chinese origins, and for a discussion of the theological implications of aesthetic miniaturization.

ONE TRANSIENT SYMBOLS

1  D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture [1959] (New York, n.d.), pp. 339–40.

2  Cited ibid., p. 258.

3  Ibid., p. 393.

4  Murata Shukō, cited in Haga Kōshirō, ‘The Wabi Aesthetic Through the Ages’, in Tea in Japan, ed. Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao (Honolulu, 1989), p. 197.

5  Yoel Hoffmann, trans. and ed., Japanese Death Poems (Rutland, VT, and Tokyo, 1986), p. 138.

6  Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA, 1967), p. 19. On the most recent catastrophe, see Michaël Ferrier, Fukushima: Récit d’une catastrophe (Paris, 2012).

7  John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, CT, 1995), p. 31.

8  Shikibu Murasaki, The Tale of Genji [11th century], trans. Royall Tyler (New York, 2000), p. 178.

9  Edward S. Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings [1886] (New York, 1961), pp. 286–7.

10  Cited in David A. Slawson, Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens: Design Principles, Aesthetic Values (Tokyo, 1987), p. 146.

11  Hijikata performed at Sōgetsu several times, beginning in 1961.

12  In conversation, Michael Lazarin suggests that the atomic bomb was not just a destruction in space but also through time, since generations live as pariahs due to fear of radiation-induced genetic defects, and he fears that the same will be true for the victims of Fukushima. On the topic, see the recent book by Michaël Ferrier, Fukushima: Récit d’un désastre (Paris, 2012).

13  Isozaki Arata, Japan-ness in Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 2006), p. 87.

14  Ibid., p. 88.

15  Ibid.

16  Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics (Berkeley, CA, 2007), pp. 44–6.

17  Isozaki, Japan-ness in Architecture, p. 88.

18  Ibid., pp. 99–100.

19  Cited in Louise Allison Cort, Shigaraki: Potters’ Valley (Bangkok, 2001), p. 297.

20  Ibid.

21  Bert Winther-Tamaki, ‘The Ceramic Art of Isamu Noguchi: A Close Embrace of the Earth’, in Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics: A Close Embrace of the Earth, ed. Louise Allison Cort and Bert Winther-Tamaki, exh. cat., Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC (Berkeley, CA, and London, 2003), p. 63.

22  Cort, Shigaraki, p. 112.

23  Ibid.

24  Yasushi Inoue, Le Maître de thé [1981] (Paris, 2009), p. 150 (translation by Allen S. Weiss). One of the best accounts of the life of Rikyū is given in the recent novel by Kenichi Yamamoto, Le Secret du maître de thé, trans. Yoko Kawada-Sim and Silvain Chupin (Paris, 2012).

25  A. L. Sadler, The Japanese Tea Ceremony (Rutland, VT, 2008), p. 30.

26  See Hoffman, Japanese Death Poems.

27  Yokoya Hideko, ‘Interview with Koie Ryoji’ (2002), published on Robert Yellin’s website www.e-yakimono.net; republished on www.ceramicstoday.com.

28  I would like to thank Michael Lazarin for this observation.

29  Teiji Itoh, Space and Illusion in the Japanese Garden (New York, Toyko and Kyoto, 1973), p. 73. The Japanese taste for miniaturization is evident in the little-studied art of suiseki, miniature landscapes resembling diverse forms of Japanese gardens, created around pebblesized stones. The term suiseki, or ‘water stone’, is a contradiction in terms which is at the core of the symbolism of the Zen garden.

30  Paul Claudel, L’Oiseau noir dans le soleil levant [1929] (Paris, 1974), p. 191. The earthquake occurred on 1 September 1923; Japan traditionally followed a unisolar calendar (until the Gregorian calendar was adapted during the Meiji period in 1873), thus at Claudel’s time the September moon and its poetic symbolism would still have been considered that of early autumn. The discrepancy between these two calendars occasionally creates confusion, especially in modern descriptions of ancient scenes.

31  Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, p. 11.

TWO ON THE CIRCULATION OF METAPHOR

1  Charles Baudelaire, letter to Armand Fraisse, 19 February 1860, cited in Walter Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, trans. Jean Lacoste (Paris, 1993), p. 336.

2  Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (New York, 1990), p. 17.

3  Cited in François Cheng, Souffle-Esprit: Textes théoriques chinois sur l’art pictural [1989] (Paris, 2006), pp. 37–8 (translation by Allen S. Weiss). In the West, we would need to await Monet, Turner and Whistler for such images.

4  Maurice Pinguet, ‘Paul Claudel exégète du Japon’ [1969], in Le Texte Japon, ed. Michaël Ferrier (Paris, 2009), p. 99 (translation by Allen S. Weiss).

5  Michel Foucault has shown how the medieval European system of classification of the natural world was in fact a function of resemblances, a worldview transformed by the beginnings of scientific investigation and the new order of things that resulted. See the section on classifying in The Order of Things [1966] (New York, 1970), pp. 125–65.

6  See Matsuo Bashō, Friches, trans. René Sieffert (Paris, 1992), pp. 72 and 200, and Mrs Paul Kincaid, Japanese Garden and Floral Art (New York, 1966), pp. 47–50, for precise details about the seven grasses; certain aliments, such as the highly prized sea bream, even bear a different name for each season.

7  Augustin Berque, Le Sauvage et l’artifice: Les Japonais devant la nature (Paris, 1986), pp. 21–4.

8  Ibid., p. 77 (translation by Allen S. Weiss).

9  Joseph D. Parker, Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early Muromachi Japan (1336–1573) (Albany, NY, 1999), p. 18.

10  Ibid., p. 19.

11  Yoshi Oida and Lorna Marshall, The Invisible Actor (London, 1997), p. 48.

12  Shikibu Murasaki, The Tale of Genji [11th century], trans. Royall Tyler (New York, 2000), p. 117.

13  Ibid., p. 137.

14  Berque, Le Sauvage et l’artifice, pp. 288–91 (translation by Allen S. Weiss).

15  Paul Claudel, L’Oiseau noir dans le soleil levant [1929] (Paris, 1974), p. 172.

16  Cited in Christine M. E. Guth, Art Tea and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle (Princeton, NJ, 1993), p. 61.

17  Sasaki Sanmi, Chado, The Way of Tea: A Japanese Tea Master’s Almanac, trans. Shaun McCabe and Iwasaki Satoko (Rutland, VT, 2005), p. 87.

18  Ibid., pp. 86 and 91.

19  See Hiroichi Tsutsui, ‘The Development of Formal Tea Cuisine’, Chanoyu Quarterly, L (1987), pp. 40–57.

20  Murata Yoshihiro, Kaiseki: The Exquisite Cuisine of Kyoto’s Kikunoi Restaurant (Tokyo, 2006), p. 16.

21  Michaël Ferrier, Sympathie pour le fantôme (Paris, 2010), pp. 94–6 (translation by Allen S. Weiss).

22  Cited in Dore Ashton, Noguchi: East and West (New York, 1992), p. 256.

23  The metaphoricity is even more precise, as there are also numerous subcategories of keshiki, for example sekkei, snowy landscapes. See Robert Yellin’s extremely informative website www.e-yakimono.net. It is interesting to note that in English-language catalogues on Japanese pottery, such metaphoric landscape effects are downplayed, if not completely ignored. This is a prime example of how the exigencies and limits of one aesthetic and epistemological system skew the understanding of another.

24  Louise Allison Cort, Shigaraki: Potters’ Valley (Bangkok, 2001), p. 5.

25  Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea [1906] (New York, 1964), p. 59.

26  Illustrated in Gabriele Fahr-Becker, Ryokan: A Japanese Tradition (Königswinter, 2005), p. 45.

27  Sōfū Teshigahara, This Boundless World of Flowers and Form (Tokyo, 1966), p. 109.

28  Murata, Kaiseki, pp. 106–7 and 138–9; see also Kenji Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox (Cambridge, MA, 1998). An excellent volume on Japanese food presentation and its relation to pottery is Yoshio Tsuchiya, The Fine Art of Japanese Food Arrangement (Tokyo, 2002); for more avant-garde possibilities, see Hisayuki Tekeuchi, Nouvelle cuisine japonaise (Paris, 2003).

29  Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit (Paris, 1983), vol. I, p. 76 (translation by Allen S. Weiss); on metaphoricity in landscape, see Allen S. Weiss, The Wind and the Source (Albany, NY, 2005).

30  For an excellent introduction, see Louise Boudonnat and Harumi Kushizaki, Traces of the Brush: The Art of Japanese Calligraphy, trans. Charles Penwarden (San Francisco, 2003).

31  Joseph M. Kitagawa, ‘The Japanese Kokutai (National Community): History and Myth’, History of Religions, XIII (1974), p. 224; cited in Tea in Japan, ed. Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao (Honolulu, 1989), p. 91.

32  Morgan Pitelka, ‘Rikyō and Chōjirō in Japanese Tea Culture’, in The Culture of Copying in Japan, ed. Rupert Cox (New York, 2008), p. 129.

33  I came to the same conclusion concerning representation in music and sound art, as expressed in Allen S. Weiss, Varieties of Audio Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Landscape (Los Angeles, 2008).

34  Gregory P. A. Levine, Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monestary (Seattle, 2005), p. 254.

35  Thomas Hoover, Zen Culture (New York, 1977), p. 105.

36  Ibid., p. 110.

37  François Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks, trans. Graham Parkes (Chicago, 2000), pp. 63 and 41.

38  D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture [1959] (New York, n.d.), p. 220.

39  Ever since the landmark exhibition ‘The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985’, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986, until the ‘Aux origines de l’abstraction, 1800–1914’ (Paris, Musée d’Orsay, 2003), even the most seemingly recondite abstraction has been seen to contain some level of representation, whether physical or metaphysical. The earliest allegorical readings of the stone arrangements at Ryōan-ji claim that it represents a mother tiger crossing a river with her cubs, taken from an ancient Chinese myth. This univocal sort of interpretation seeking absolute clarity, long abandoned, is at the antipodes of the current iconoclastic ones, intended to plunge us into Zen paradox.

40  Berque, Le Sauvage et l’artifice, p. 27 (translation by Allen S. Weiss). Consider in this regard the ground-breaking exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris by Arato Isozaki, ‘Ma: Space-Time in Japan’ (Paris, 1978), discussed in his book Japan-ness in Architecture, trans. Kohso Sabu (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 93–100. There exist nine levels of Noh performance, with snow falling in a silver bowl the seventh and the sun shining at night the highest. Translations of such terms are always complex: kū is literally ‘sky’, so the void here might be taken in the sense of aether; mu connotes nothingness as transience rather than privation.

41  Murasaki, The Tale of Genji, p. 373.

42  William Theodore de Bary, ‘The Vocabulary of Japanese Aesthetics’, in Japanese Aesthetics and Culture, ed. Nancy G. Hume (Albany, NY, 1995), p. 53.

43  Cited in Haga Kōshirō, ‘The Wabi Aesthetic Through the Ages’, in Tea in Japan, ed. Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao (Honolulu, 1989), p. 214.

44  Rupert A. Cox, The Zen Arts: An Anthropological Study of the Culture of Aesthetic Form in Japan (Abingdon and New York, 2003).

45  See Daniel Charles, ‘Gloses sur le Ryōan-ji’, in Gloses sur John Cage (Paris, 1978), pp. 269–88.

46  Günter Nitschke, The Architecture of the Japanese Garden: Right Angle and Natural Form (Cologne, 1991), p. 115.

47  Ibid., p. 92.

THREE ZEN MOUNTAINS, ZEN WATER

1  The modern garden at Zuihō-in, created by Shigemori Mirei, is extremely innovative. One striking feature is the form of the fields of gravel, which strongly resemble sand traps on golf courses. This seemingly iconoclastic observation is in fact not too strange, given that Shigemori designed many residential and commercial gardens and that landscape architecture has always incorporated quotidian as well as symbolic forms. The extent to which golf courses have come to dot the post-war Japanese landscape is striking, and it should not be surprising to find their unique forms incorporated into gardens.

2  Lafcadio Hearn, Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life [1895] (Rutland, VT, 1972), p. 260.

3  Ibid., p. 214.

4  André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole (Paris, 1964), vol. II, p. 214 (translation by Allen S. Weiss).

5  Ibid., p. 214.

6  Jim Holt, ‘The Mind of a Rock’, New York Times Magazine, 18 November 2007, pp. 19–20.

7  Günter Nitschke, The Architecture of the Japanese Garden: Right Angle and Natural Form (Cologne, 1991), p. 119.

8  Teiji Itoh, Space and Illusion in the Japanese Garden (New York, Tokyo and Kyoto, 1973), p. 48.

9  François Cheng, Souffle-Esprit: Textes théoriques chinois sur l’art pictural [1989] (Paris, 2006), pp. 69–70, 129; see also François Cheng, Vide et plein: Le Langage pictural chinois (Paris, 1991), p. 133.

10  Cheng, Souffle-Esprit, p. 166.

11  Loraine Kuck, The World of the Japanese Garden (New York and Tokyo, 1968), p. 153.

12  Bernard Rudofsky, The Kimono Mind (New York, 1965), p. 234. An egregious error is to be found on pp. 236–7, namely a two-page reproduction of an engraving bearing the following caption: ‘The notorious sand garden of Ryôanji Temple near Kyoto. The dotted lines of the woodcut convey the eerie beauty of the sand patterns far better than do photographs. From an undated garden book.’ Apparently Rudofsky’s sense of ‘architecture without architects’ (to cite the title of his most famous book) was far more accurate than that of his eye for gardens with gardeners, as neither the sand patterns, the stone formations and groupings, nor even the form of the garden, resemble Ryōan-ji. Even if the error is in the engraving, it is also in his eye.

13  Cited in Graham Parkes, ‘The Role of Rock in the Japanese Dry Landscape Garden’, postface to François Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks, trans. Graham Parkes (Chicago, 2000), p. 104. This passion continued into modern times, as evidenced by the small fortunes paid for extraordinary stones, for example the huge sajiishi stone from Tottori prefecture that painter Kaho Akira waited twenty years to obtain and for which he paid 20 million yen, as recounted in Michael Freeman, The Modern Japanese Garden (Rutland, VT, and Tokyo, 2002), p. 45.

14  Marc Peter Keane, The Art of Setting Stones (Berkeley, CA, 2002), p. 134. See also his Japanese Garden Design (Tokyo and Boston, MA, 1996).

15  Cited in David A. Slawson, Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens: Design Principles, Aesthetic Values (Tokyo, 1987), pp. 146–7. On the creation of dry waterfall scenes, see Masuno Shunmyo, ‘Arranging a “Dry Waterfall”’, in The New Zen Garden, ed. Joseph Cali (New York and Tokyo, 2004), pp. 58–9.

16  Steve McCaffery, ‘A Chapter of Accidents’, Public, 33 (2006), p. 69.

17  In Katsuhiko Mizuno, Landscapes for Small Places: Japanese Courtyard Gardens, trans. John Bester (Tokyo, 2002), pp. 100 and 67 respectively, we find both a contemporary version of a mythical landscape, namely the floating island of Mount Sumeru in the garden of Hashimoto Teru Orimono, and a representation of the contemporary Japanese landscape in the garden of the Matsumura residence, where all the materials come from the Kyoto area, and the garden itself represents the Kyoto basin.

18  Itoh, Space and Illusion, p. 27.

19  Isamu Noguchi, ‘Guggenheim Proposal’, in Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona and Bruce Altshuler (New York, 1994), pp. 16–17.

20  Bert Winther-Tamaki, ‘The Ceramic Art of Isamu Noguchi: A Close Embrace of the Earth’, in Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics, ed. Louise Allison Cort and Bert Winther-Tamaki, exh. cat., Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC (Berkeley, CA, and London, 2003), p. 63.

21  Jeff Shapiro, email communication with the author, 2008.

22  See Masakazu Kusakabe and Marc Lancet, Japanese Wood-fired Ceramics (Iola, WI, 2005), p. 57.

23  Winther-Tamaki, ‘The Ceramic Art of Isamu Noguchi’, p. 52.

24  Cited in Shoji Yamada, Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen and the West, trans. Earl Hartman (Chicago, 2009), p. 167.

25  Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (New York, 1990), pp. 101–2.

26  Augustin Berque, Le Sauvage et l’artifice: Les Japonais devant la nature (Paris, 1986), p. 75.

27  Cheng, Souffle-Esprit, p. 174.

28  Cited ibid., p. 76.

29  Cited ibid., p. 58.

30  Cited in Slawson, Secret Teachings, p. 71.

31  Cited ibid., p. 74.

32  Cited in Dore Ashton, Noguchi: East and West (New York, 1992), p. 260.

33  Since photography is generally not permitted at Daisen-in and Obai-in, the accompanying illustration is of Tōfuku-ji.

34  One site which was designed specifically to be viewed from the sky is Shigemori Mirei’s garden for the castle of Kishiwada-jo near Osaka, created in 1953; see Christian Tschumi, Mirei Shigemori: Modernizing the Japanese Garden (Berkeley, CA, 2005), pp. 34–43.

35  On the aesthetics of moss, see Véronique Brindeau, Louange des mousses (Paris, 2012).

36  Cited in David Toop, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory (London, 2004), p. 46. It was John Cage who first incorporated ‘small sounds’, those needing amplification in order to be heard, into music; many contemporary musicians, Japanese and others, are fascinated by sonic extremes, both loud and soft, as discussed in David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London, 1995).

37  Toop, Haunted Weather, p. 46.

38  Yasunari Kawabata, ‘The Hat Incident’ [1926], in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, trans. Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman (San Francisco, 1988), p. 65.

39  Hiroshi Teshigahara, cited in Dore Ashton, The Delicate Thread (Tokyo and New York, 1997), p. 95.

40  Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question (Cambridge, MA, 1976), p. 424. The magnum opus on the chthonic basis of music remains Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). For a broad assessment of the symbolism of music, see Victor Zuckerkandle, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ, 1956), and Allen S. Weiss, Varieties of Audio Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Landscape (Los Angeles, 2008).

41  Shikibu Murasaki, The Tale of Genji [11th century], trans. Royall Tyler (New York, 2000), p. 641. In traditional Japanese culture, cricket listening was a classic early autumn activity, and even today bamboo cricket cages can be found in markets everywhere. This interest led to particular discrimination in their musical qualities, such that the different sorts of crickets – notably pine crickets and bell crickets – were evaluated for the beauty of their song; see Murasaki, The Tale of Gengi, pp. 709–16.

42  A. L. Sadler, The Japanese Tea Ceremony, (Rutland, VT, 2008), p. 67.

43  Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country [1956], trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (New York, 1960), p. 127.

44  Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea [1906] (New York, 1964), p. 35.

45  Sadler, The Japanese Tea Ceremony, p. 152.

46  Murasaki, The Tale of Genji, p. 471.

47  Ibid., p. 471, n. 18.

48  D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture [1959] (New York, n.d.), p. 274.

49  Cited in Kumakura Isao, ‘Sen no Rikyū: Inquiries into His Life and Tea’, in Tea in Japan, ed. Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao (Honolulu, 1989), p. 62.

50  John Cage interviewed by Daniel Charles, in John Cage, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (Boston, MA, 1981), p. 222.

51  This is perhaps best illustrated by Cage’s Williams Mix (1952), a work of musique concrète consisting of a micro-montage of very short segments of assorted taped sounds. The nearly regular metre caused by the rapid cuts frames the infinitely rich and varied metres of the taped sounds; see Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham, NC, 1995), pp. 35–55.

52  The turning point in the plot of Woman in the Dunes is when the protagonist discovers that what he had intended as a crow trap – a small covered barrel buried in the sand – actually functions as a well, which motivates him to remain in the village. Fascinated by the discovery of water, he abandons the plot to attach a call for help to a crow’s leg. It is interesting that this apparatus appears as and functions like a suikinkutsu, and that this is one of the rare moments in the film when the soundtrack is somewhat aquatic.

53  The quotation is from two emails received from Steven Feld in 2008; the work was released on his album Suikinkutsu (VoxLox 106, 2006).

54  From a letter from Steven Feld to the author dated 30 September 2008.

55  Okakura, The Book of Tea, p. 64.

56  Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North [1694], trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (London, 1966), p. 123.

FOUR CRACKS

1  Cited in David A. Slawson, Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens: Design Principles, Aesthetic Values (Tokyo, 1987), p. 146.

2  Recounted in Teiji Itoh, Space and Illusion in the Japanese Garden (New York, Toyko and Kyoto, 1973), p. 28. On climate and gardens, see Allen S. Weiss, ‘Obituary to the Trees of Versailles’, Architecture New York, 27 (2000), n.p., accompanied by Toby Glanville’s photographs depicting the destroyed trees of Versailles in January 2000. On a somewhat more gentle note, I would once again point to the remarkable photographs of Mizuno Katsuhiko, who has depicted the Zen garden under varied meteorological conditions, including the always picturesque fog and the rarely represented snow.

3  Cited in Slawson, Secret Teachings, p. 173.

4  This would suggest the incursion of a Shinto kami into the Buddhist garden. However, this is not as far-fetched as it may appear, given the syncretism of Japanese religion. We are told that in the eighth century the god Hachimen revealed through an oracle that he wished to be moved from Usa in western Japan to the capital. This transfer was made with great pomp, and he was installed in a specially constructed shrine in one of the palaces, officiated over by Buddhist priests. G. B. Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History [1931] (Stanford, CA, 1978), p. 183.

5  Murielle Hladik, Traces et fragments dans l’esthétique japonaise (Wavre, 2008), p. 180. The ‘house surgery’ was most probably inspired by Arata Isozaki’s writings, curatorial work and architectural practice, as described in the chapter ‘Ma [Interstice] and Rubble’, in Isozaki, Japan-ness in Architecture, trans. Kohso Sabu (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 81–100.

6  The best English-language source for visualizing Japanese pottery surface effects is Masakazu Kusakabe and Marc Lancet, Japanese Wood-fired Ceramics (Iola, WI, 2005).

7  Kaii Higashiyama, Les Quatre saisons de Kyôto [1969], trans. Ryōji Nakamura and René de Ceccatty (Paris, 2007), p. 188.

8  In this regard, art theories inspired by gestalt psychology are particularly useful, notably Hans Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill [1922], trans. Erik von Brockdorff (Berlin, 1968).

9  There were, of course, crackled glazes in Korea and Vietnam, but such considerations are beyond the reach of this study.

10  Miyeko Murase, ed., Turning Point: Oribe and the Arts of Sixteenth-century Japan (New York, 2003), pp. 108–9; it is perhaps not by coincidence that Christianity was strongly present in the Kyoto tea milieu of the period, and it is believed that Oribe himself might have converted.

11  Cited in A. L. Sadler, The Japanese Tea Ceremony (Rutland, VT, 2008), p. 112.

12  See Yanagi Sōetsu, The Unknown Craftsman [1972], adapted by Bernard Leach (Tokyo and New York, 1989), p. 190. One might also note the importance of broken forms in pottery historiography: the most ancient of all Japanese pottery, the cord-patterned Jōmon works (the earliest-known pottery in the world, dating from the fourteenth millennium BCE, which along with the later Yayoi period pottery is widely considered to be one of the paradigms of Japanese artistic forms) is known mainly from fragments.

13  Kumakura Isao, ‘Kan’ei Culture and Chanoyu’, in Tea in Japan, ed. Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao (Honolulu, 1989), p. 141.

14  Compiled from Sadler, The Japanese Tea Ceremony, pp. 79, 127, 130, 153, 201, 204.

15  There are many reasons for wilfully damaging pottery. Katagiri Sadaaki, a tea master and antiques connoisseur, once found a very fine antique Chinese chamber pot in an old inn. After much insistence he bought it from the owner, only to have his assistant destroy it, claiming that he wanted to avoid the possibility that some other connoisseur might mistake it for a water jar and purchase it at a high price, and then use it in the tea ceremony, where its former uncleanness would make it an abomination. Ibid., p. 201.

16  Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman, p. 224.

17  Cited in Yoshiaki Inui, Hiroshi Teshigahara: Works, 1978–1987 (Tokyo, 1987), p. 255.

18  Email communication with Robert Yellin, 2008, see his extremely rich website on Japanese pottery, www.e-yakimono.net.

19  Cees Nooteboom, Rituals [1980], trans. Adrienne Dixon (Baton Rouge, LA, 1983), p. 133.

20  Ibid., p. 143. We find a similar gesture at the end of Kenichi Yamamoto’s novel, Le Secret du maître de thé, trans. Yoko Kawada-Sim and Silvain Chupin (Paris, 2102), where we find that after the suicide of the tea master, his wife smashes his most cherished possession, a tea caddy that was given to him by his first love.

21  Compare the innovative exhibition curated by James Bernauer at the McMullen Museum of Art in Boston, ‘Fragmented Devotion: Medieval Objects from the Schnütgen Museum, Cologne’ (2000), where the religious objects are exhibited in three different settings to reflect their complex destiny: public and private devotional settings of the Middle Ages; a room simulating Schnütgen’s own nineteenth-century private exhibition space; and a white cube recalling the modern space of the Schnütgen Museum created in 1932.

22  Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes [1958], trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (New York, 1981), p. 140.

23  Ibid., p. 72.

FIVE POTTERY LANDSCAPES

1  M.F.K. Fisher, ‘Serve it Forth’ [1937], in The Art of Eating (New York, 1976), p. 41. We tend to refer to sake as rice wine, but it is technically brewed more like a beer. While there exist sparkling sakes, unfiltered sakes of milky opacity, and even red sakes coloured by a particular strain of rice, they constitute a tiny minority.

2  An excellent introduction to Zen art is Stephen Addiss, The Art of Zen (New York, 1989).

3  This brings up the issue of the recent trend of drinking chilled sake. Until well into the second half of the twentieth century, probably around the 1980s, sake had always been drunk warm, even hot (hot sake is called atsukan or joukan, warm sake nurukan, chilled sake reishu, and the relatively rare sake over ice is called ‘cold falling snow’). Certainly one of the reasons was the fact that Japanese habitations were so sparely heated in winter that any means of getting warm was most welcome. Warm sake also enters the bloodstream somewhat more quickly, and thus hastens inebriation. The trend of drinking chilled sake would seem to have three major reasons: the widespread modern heating of buildings; the taste for white wine that developed with increased culinary interchange following the inception of French nouvelle cuisine, which was itself deeply influenced by Japanese cuisine (with many culinary interchanges between the two countries beginning in the 1960s); and the discovery of sake as another domain in which luxury and prestige goods could be produced, since drinking sake chilled permits much greater taste discrimination.

4  Among the most informative sources in English on contemporary Japanese pottery, including many examples of guinomi and chawan, is Anneliese Crueger, Wulf Crueger and Saeko Itō, Modern Japanese Ceramics: Pathways of Innovation and Tradition (New York, 2004).

5  Murata Yoshihiro, Kaiseki: The Exquisite Cuisine of Kyoto’s Kikunoi Restaurant (Tokyo, 2006), p. 12.

6  Rafael Steinberg, The Cooking of Japan (New York, 1976), p. 198.

7  In one instance, while I was examining a tenmoku (oil spot) guinomi by the Kyoto potter Kamada Koji, the gallerist filled it with water and insisted that I take it outside into the sunlight, which effectively transformed the piece.

8  Cees Nooteboom, Rituals [1980], trans. Adrienne Dixon (Baton Rouge, LA, 1983), pp. 134–5.

9  Cited in Yanagi Sōetsu, The Unknown Craftsman [1972], adapted by Bernard Leach (Tokyo and New York, 1989), p. 193.

10  Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Titres et quartiers de noblesse culturelle’, in La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979), pp. 9–106.

11  Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman, p. 178.

12  An excellent introduction to the material and technical aspects of Japanese ceramics is Herbert H. Sanders with Kenkichi Tomimoto, The World of Japanese Ceramics (Tokyo, 1967).

13  Robert Lee Yellin, ‘Keshiki: Ceramic Landscapes’, at www.e-yakimono.net. See Yellin’s website for a detailed, illustrated list of such effects. Given the types of effects and degree of metaphorization at stake, it would seem that the gestalt theory of perception, especially where it deals with issues of pattern recognition, in the hands of an art historian such as Ernst Gombrich, might serve as an extremely useful tool for the study of pottery.

14  See Dario Gamboni, Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Art, trans. Mark Treharne (London, 2002). This is the most far-ranging and detailed study on the topic of ambiguous and indeterminate images in Western art.

15  Robert Lee Yellin, Ode to Japanese Pottery (Tokyo, 2004), pp. 26–7 and 54. This is one of the rare texts in English devoted to guinomi and tokkuri (sake flasks).

16  Yasunari Kawabata, ‘L’Image de Kyôto – tout au fond de mon coeur’, preface to Kaii Higashiyama, Les Quatre saisons de Kyôto [1969], trans. Ryōji Nakamura and René de Ceccatty (Paris, 2007), p. 9.

17  Louise Allison Cort, Shigaraki: Potters’ Valley (Bangkok, 2001), p. 110.

18  Augustin Berque, Le Sauvage et l’artifice: Les Japonais devant la nature (Paris, 1986), p. 228.

19  Cited in A. L. Sadler, The Japanese Tea Ceremony (Rutland, VT, 2008), p. 101.

SIX THE TEA BOWL AND THE TOILET BOWL

1  Edward S. Morse notes a particular predilection for integrating weathered wooden fragments of shipwrecks as architectural features: Edward S. Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings [1886] (New York, 1961), p. 69.

2  Hans Bjarne Thomsen, ‘Individuality in a Communal Setting: Kyoto Ceramics and the Tradition of Innovation’, in Fukami: Purity of Form, ed. Andreas Marks, exh. cat., Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, Hanford, CA (2011), pp. 26–39.

3  The period between the two world wars saw the rise of the Mingei movement, a celebration of Japanese folk crafts, created in reaction to increased industrialization and internationalization, not unlike the earlier Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. The theoretical debates that developed from this reconsideration of traditional forms would inform the post-Second World War pottery debates, though the latter would be centred on questions of international modernism.

4  This discussion is indebted to Bert Winther-Tamaki, ‘Yagi Kazuo: The Admission of the Nonfunctional Object into the Japanese Pottery World’, Journal of Design History, XII/2 (1999), pp. 123–41.

5  The modern tatami measures: Edoma (Tokyo) 175.8 × 87.9 cm; Kyoma (Kyoto) 191 × 95.5 cm.

6  Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea [1906] (New York, 1964), p. 46. One might compare these series of boxes within boxes with the jūnihitoe, which are the twelve superposed kimonos traditionally worn by the empress during certain court ceremonies.

7  On the practical application of such strategies, see Richard L. Wilson, The Art of Ogata Kenzan: Persona and Production in Japanese Ceramics (New York and Tokyo, 1991). There are those, including Tanazaki, who claim that the calligraphy scrolls are placed in the tokonoma precisely so that the shadows make it difficult to decipher. On the Rikyū vase see D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture [1959] (New York, n.d.). p. 326.

8  Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North [1694], trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (London, 1966), p. 100.

9  Ibid., p. 126.

10  Okakura, The Book of Tea, pp. 30–31.

11  Murielle Hladik, Traces et fragments dans l’esthétique japonaise (Wavre, 2008), pp. 95–6.

12  Ibid., p. 99.

13  Two related issues have been suggested to me by Michael Lazarin concerning the temporality and spatiality of the tea ceremony: first, that the traditional iemoto system of apprenticeship practically guarantees that one cannot use or even touch certain great works until a quite advanced age; second, in terms of both the feel of a chawan and the proper gestures to be made within a tea hut, the rapid increase in the height and size of the Japanese in the modern, and especially post-war, epochs has almost certainly problematized the proportions of traditional architecture and objects. It would be interesting to survey the average sizes of chawan in traditional and modern periods.

14  See Christine M. E. Guth, Art, Tea, and Industry (Princeton, NJ, 1993) for a detailed account of the business of art and antiquities in the tea context.

15  See the Raku Museum website at www.raku-yaki.or.jp.

16  Flyer for the exhibition ‘Raku Kichizaemon XV: To Celebrate the 60th Anniversary, Part 1: From the Succession to “Tenmon”’, Raku Museum, Kyoto, September–December 2010.

17  Exhibition label from the exhibition ‘Raku Kichizaemon XV: To Celebrate the 60th Anniversary, Part 2: From “Tenmon” to Today’, Raku Museum, Kyoto, January–March 2011.

18  Ibid.

19  Koyama Fujio, Domon Ken and Kobayashi Hideo, Shigaraki Ōtsubo (Tokyo, 1965).

20  Jusetsu Miwa: A Retrospective (Tokyo, 2006).

21  Bert Winther-Tamaki, ‘Yagi Kazuo: The Admission of the Nonfunctional Object into the Japanese Pottery World’, Journal of Design History, XII/2 (1999), p. 129.

22  For a theorization of agency in art, see Allen S. Weiss, ‘The Trench and the Dump’, in Existed: Leonardo Drew, ed. Claudia Schmuckli, exh. cat., Blaffer Gallery of the Art Museum of the University of Houston (2009), pp. 19–25.

23  See Kenji Kaneko, ‘The Work of Ryoji Koie: A Proud Return to Earth’, in The Works of Ryoji Koie (Tokyo, 1994), pp. 18 and 21.

SEVEN IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLES

1  Maurice Pinguet, ‘Paul Claudel exégète du Japon’ [1982], in Le Texte Japon, ed. Michaël Ferrier (Paris, 2009), p. 81. Another example of this confusion is to be found in Hiroshi Onishi, Takemitsu Oba and Sondra Castile, Immortals and Sages: Paintings from Ryoanji Temple (New York, 1993), p. 11, where the ground plan of the garden details only fourteen stones.

2  David A. Slawson, Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens: Design Principles, Aesthetic Values (Tokyo, 1987), p. 98.

3  See Heino Engel, Measure and Construction of the Japanese House [1964] (Clarendon, VT, 1985); and Virginia Ponciroli, ed., Katsura Imperial Villa (Milan, 2005).

4  Günter Nitschke, The Architecture of the Japanese Garden: Right Angle and Natural Form (Cologne, 1991), p. 12.

5  Dore Ashton, Noguchi: East and West (New York, 1992), p. 112.

6  Nitschke, The Architecture of the Japanese Garden, p. 185.

7  François Cheng, Vide et plein: Le Langage pictural chinois (Paris, 1991), p. 107.

8  Edward S. Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings [1886] (New York, 1961), pp. 59 and 64.

9  See Michiko Rico Nosé, The Modern Japanese Garden (Rutland, VT, and Tokyo, 2006), pp. 165–7, and Arata Isozaki, Tadao Ando and Terunobu Fujimori, The Contemporary Tea House (Tokyo and New York, 2007), pp. 88–91.

10  Cited in Louise Allison Cort, ‘Japanese Encounters with Clay’, in Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics, ed. Louise Allison Cort and Bert Winther-Tamaki, exh. cat., Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (Berkeley, CA, and London, 2003), p. 118. I am indebted to this article for the information concerning Japanese pottery in the immediate post-war period.

11  Cited in Bert Winther-Tamaki, ‘Yagi Kazuo: The Admission of the Nonfunctional Object into the Japanese Pottery World’, Journal of Design History, XII/2 (1999), p. 128.

12  Cort, ‘Japanese Encounters with Clay’, p. 168.

13  Ibid., p. 147.

14  Sōfū Teshigahara, This Boundless World of Flowers and Form (Tokyo, 1966), p. 8.

15  Ibid., p. 104. That he made this claim in 1966 might suggest some influence of the avant-gardism of his son’s generation, though in fact it is coherent with his lifelong project of expanding the boundaries of ikebana.

16  Though ikebana is intimately related to tea (chabana is the specific form of flower arranging for chanoyu), most major tea schools would not share the passion for these new forms of experimentation. In the post-war period, the revolution in tea was more sociological than aesthetic, centred on a vast democratization and on creating a new base of women practitioners, who had traditionally been more or less excluded from the ritual of tea. It would still be quite a while before the major tea schools began to valorize the use of modernist utensils, and as for the performative aspects of the art, they are still for the most part directly linked to their original forms, instituted by Rikyū and his immediate successors.

17  Cited in Dore Ashton, The Delicate Thread: Teshigahara’s Life in Art (New York and Tokyo, 1997), p. 73 Among those who appeared at Sogetsu were Butoh pioneers Hijikata Tatsumi and Ōno Kazuo, John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The films of the vanguard of the American experimental cinema were also shown, such as those of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Jack Smith.

18  Michael Lucken, L’Art du Japon au vingtième siècle (Paris, 2001), pp. 165–70.

19  Noguchi met landscape architect, tea aficionado and ikebana specialist Shigemori Mirei (who had long collaborated with Teshigahara Sōfū in creating an avant-garde form of ikebana) in 1957, and they subsequently collaborated on the UNESCO garden project in Paris. Certain works of both artists could well be characterized as sculpted landscapes.

20  An anecdote of interest, mentioned in Ashton, The Delicate Thread, p. 70, tells that when Teshigahara Sōfū visited Salvador Dalí at Porto Ligato in 1959, he was so taken with the Surrealist that he offered him an ikebana of driftwood in a lacquer bowl.

21  Ibid., pp. 163 and 169, for illustrations of these two works.

22  Kumakura Isao, ‘Kan’ei Culture and Chanoyu’, in Tea in Japan, ed. Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao (Honolulu, 1989), p. 140.

23  Cited in Robert Yellin, ‘Suehara Fukami: Porcelain Horizons, Modern Monoliths’, in Japan Times, 31 August 2005, available at www.e-yakimono.net; see also Hans Bjarne Thomsen, Sueharu Fukami: Visions from the Shards of Sennyūji (New York, 2008).

24  Bert Winther-Tamaki, ‘The Ceramic Art of Isamu Noguchi’, in Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics, ed. Cort and Winther-Tamaki, p. 41.

25  Lafcadio Hearn, Kokoro: Hints and Echos of Japanese Inner Life [1895] (Rutland, VT, 1972), p. 87. On the myriad tones of the sky, see Hervé Chandès, Azur, exh. cat., Fondation Cartier, Jouy-en-Josas, France (1993).

26  Cited in Maezaki Shinya, ‘New Horizons of Ceramic Sculpture’, in Fukami: Purity of Form, ed. Andreas Marks, exh. cat., Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, Hanford, CA (2011), p. 24.

27  Ibid., p. 21.

28  Mark Halpern was kind enough to offer the following explanation of bekuhai: ‘The sake cup you describe is called bekuhai, written in Chinese characters as . The (apparent) meaning derivation is interesting and came from Chinese into Japanese. The second character, (pronounced hai or pai), is often used to denote a cup or cupful, as in ippai nomimashou (let’s have a drink; literally, “let’s drink one cup”) or as in the toast kanpai (“dry cup”). The basic meaning of the first character, (here pronounced beku, but more usually ka), is possibility. This character is frequently combined with other characters to form words. But in such combinations, is apparently (at least in Chinese) never the last character in the word. And since Chinese is written top to bottom, can never be the “bottom”. Thus, bekuhai, a cup which has no usable bottom.’ Email from Mark Halpern, 2012. One might add that certain sculptures also bear the same form, such as Fukami Sueharu’s Midair V-I (2003), illustrated in Marks, ed., Fukami, p. 132.

29  Both doll’s house miniatures and gigantic shopfront pots offer examples of different use values of works done in unusual scales.

POSTSCRIPT A LEAF

1  Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea [1906] (New York, 1964), p. 36.

2  Wallace Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, in Harmonium [1923], reprinted in The Collected Poems (New York, 1982), p. 76.