After visiting Thailand and Cambodia, Noguchi arrived in Japan on May 2, 1950, expecting to be viewed as “an embarrassing stranger.”1 During his 1931 visit, Japan’s growing nationalism and militarism had made him feel unwelcome. Now his warm welcome came as a surprise. At the airport were three of his half brothers and his stepmother, the woman who, nineteen years earlier, had pressured her husband to try to keep Noguchi from coming to Japan using the family name. Although this time he had planned only a brief stay, he extended it to five months.
Japan in 1950 was still rebuilding from the rubble of bombed-out buildings, and the country had been transformed by the American military occupation. “How great was my delight,” Noguchi wrote in his autobiography, “to find it altogether different. War had indeed improved my own relationship to the Japanese people in the most startling manner. Where there had been a certain reserve before, there was now an open friendliness. Indeed, nowhere have I experienced such spontaneous good will expressed between all people as there in Japan in the spring of 1950. My own explanation of this is that the war had leveled the barriers and hope was now everybody’s property.”2 In his 1950 report to the Bollingen Foundation, Noguchi wrote that the Japanese, having experienced the horrors of bombing, had “gained a strange peace of mind … they are as it were free, free from the responsibility of being powerful. Art is the one way left for expressing their personality, it is a strong tie to the West.”3
Noguchi’s care packages after the war had paved the way for his reunion with his half siblings and his stepmother. He stayed with them in a recently built house on the plot of land at Sakurayamu 42 in the Nakano section of Tokyo, where his father’s house had burned down. The day after Noguchi landed at Haneda Airport, the Tokyo newspapers ran stories about the arrival of this avant-garde American. Not only family members had been at Haneda to meet him, but also reporters who wanted to know why he had come to Japan. Noguchi told them that he wanted to meet young Japanese artists and architects.4
During the war, Japan had suppressed artistic freedom in favor of nationalistic art, and anything Western and avant-garde had met with disapproval. Noguchi was swamped by artists and artists’ groups wanting to learn from him. “I was kind of like the pigeon coming to Noah’s Ark.”5
In “The Artist and Japan,” part of his Bollingen report, Noguchi wrote about Japanese artists’ hunger for internationalism and their wish to be part of the modern world.6 Noguchi noted that familiar phenomenon, the urge of the vanquished to imitate the culture of the victors. Contemporary Japanese artists were painting in Matissean colors because they wished to “forget the drab years of war and be again a part of the bright comfortable world outside.”
Noguchi’s energy galvanized the Japanese art world. To “prime the pump of their renaissance” was, he felt, his duty.7 His advice to Japanese artists was not to imitate Western modes but to look to their own culture: “If one must rummage around in the past, better to pick the bones of our own dear dead ancestors.”8 The West, he pointed out, was in the process of learning from Japan, especially Japan’s handicrafts and architecture, its love of nature, and its gardens.
Noguchi’s essay on the artist in Japan reveals that he had once again immersed himself in the Japanese way of seeing. He wrote of the Zen ideals of wabi and sabi: “The ideal of poverty is expressed in the ceremonial drinking of a cup of tea … If the Hindu says AUM the word expressing Zen is Mu (nothingness, or the void). It is differentiated by such conditions as Wabi and Sabi (rust), the worn away and remaining shadow of materiality. In the least is the most.”9 Here he quoted a haiku poem by Bashō: “Sweeping the garden, / The snow is forgotten / By the broom.”
Soon after Noguchi arrived in Japan he attended Rengoten, a large exhibition of modern artists sponsored by the major Tokyo newspaper Mainichi shinbun. He despaired at seeing huge Western-style canvases, which could not possibly fit in a traditional Japanese house. “I wondered how they had gotten so separated from the ideas of their past.”10 There was, however, one painting in the show that appealed to him, a modest work depicting the rear end of a cow and painted with a kind of gesso of ground-up seashells and glue. He liked it for its “rather grey and worn (wabi)” quality, and he sought out the artist Sanko Inoue, who had been trained in Western oil painting and was now a fifty-one-year-old impoverished eccentric living in a mountain temple. It must have been during this visit that Sanko Inoue showed Noguchi an ancient Buddhist mirror, which is said to have been the inspiration for the sculpture called Mu that Noguchi would make a month later.
Within a week of his arrival, he was asked to deliver a lecture at the Mainichi shinbun’s main office. The hall was so packed that some members of the audience had to stand. Noguchi’s subject was the theme he had been exploring during his Bollingen travels: “Art and Community.” He talked about his travels and his desire to understand the function of sculpture in the past and its relationship to people’s beliefs and to leisure. “Architecture and gardens, gardens and sculpture, sculpture and human beings, human beings and social groups—each must be tightly linked to the other. Isn’t this where we can find a new ethic for the artist?”11 Noguchi went on to reiterate that while he recognized that the wartime restrictions on artistic expression now inspired Japanese artists to join currents of Western art, the Japanese should not imitate American culture. This advice did not sit well with everybody in the Japanese art world. There were those who found Noguchi’s enthusiasm for ancient Japanese art and architecture to be a form of patronizing exoticism. The Japanese did not want to wallow in nostalgia. The past was tainted by totalitarianism, war, and defeat. Although the Japanese were anxious to know what was happening in America, Paris remained for them the center of artistic culture.
But Noguchi’s recommendation that Japanese artists look to their own traditions did not fall entirely on deaf ears. In rejecting what Japan had become in the past fifteen years, some Japanese artists did turn to prehistoric Japanese artifacts from the Jomon period (1400 to 300 B.C.). Noguchi told Paul Cummings: “After the war the Japanese said ‘Oh, we are the Jomon people’” … They didn’t want to be Japanese. They wanted to be sort of pre-Japan.”12
To serve as his translator and guide, the Mainichi shinbun hired Saburo Hasegawa, a painter who worked in the tradition of Paul Klee. Hasegawa spoke English and French and, since Noguchi’s Japanese was inadequate, he became an indispensable companion. Two years younger than Noguchi, Hasegawa was sensitive and gentle, scholarly and spiritual. But he was also sophisticated and amusing. He had graduated from Tokyo Imperial University with a thesis on the great Japanese painter Toyo Sesshu (1420–1506). After visiting the United States in 1929 he spent two years studying painting in Paris, where he exhibited in the Salon d’Automne and took part in Abstraction-Creation, an international organization of abstract artists formed in 1931. After he returned to Japan in 1932 he spread the word about modernism to other Japanese artists and in 1937 he wrote a book on abstract art. During the war, when the government organized Artists for Greater Japan, Hasegawa refused to serve as a war propaganda artist. He was arrested, and finally he retreated to a village on Lake Biwa where he became involved with Zen, Lao-tsu, the tea ceremony, and haiku poetry.13
In a 1952 essay about Noguchi, Hasegawa said that their views were often “worlds apart” and that he and Noguchi had “heated debates.” “Nevertheless, from the very first day we met, I have been struck by how much alike we think.”14 They talked about modern European art, Japanese contemporary art versus ancient art, Zen, the tea ceremony, Japanese literature, and art’s relation to life. Both had a reverence for ancient Japanese culture and both believed in what Hasegawa called “the perfect union of life and art” as exemplified by the tea ceremony, flower arranging, and Japanese gardens and architecture. Both felt art should have a function. Each was pulled between East and West. Hasegawa appreciated a purity and simplicity that he saw in Noguchi, who told him, “These days I am becoming more and more like a child.” Hasegawa also detected Noguchi’s deep-seated loneliness: “Perhaps more than any other artist Noguchi feels a piercing sense of solitude.”15
Though he enjoyed it, Noguchi’s busy social schedule in Tokyo wore him out. Not long after he arrived in Japan, he was hospitalized for exhaustion. While recovering, he read avidly about the poetry of Bashō, D. T. Suzuki’s writings on Zen, and his own father’s writings on art and poetry. In addition, he began to read about Japanese culture and architecture in books by Bruno Taut, a German architect and theoretical writer who had fled Nazi Germany via Switzerland to Japan in the mid-1930s. Noguchi came to share Hasegawa’s enthusiasm for Bashō and the painter Buson, as well as for the sixteenth-century tea ceremony master Sen no Rikyu, and Ryōkan (1758–1831), a Zen poet, calligrapher, and monk. Hasegawa must have been bemused when Noguchi told him that “the Dadaist Duchamp is just like Ryōkan.”16
When he had recovered, Noguchi and Hasegawa made plans to travel to Kyoto on an overnight train. Just before they left, Noguchi had a kind of artistic epiphany when Hasegawa showed him his prized possession, a copy of Sesshu’s famous Four Seasons Scroll. Hasegawa cleared out a room in his house, laid down a blanket to protect the scroll, and then unrolled it. “I cannot express in words how much Noguchi admired it,” Hasegawa recalled.17 Hasegawa also showed Noguchi a collection of postcards illustrating prehistoric Japanese figurines, probably of the Jomon culture, in the collection of the National Museum in Tokyo. Noguchi pronounced these artifacts to be even better than haniwa. In Hasegawa’s memory, Noguchi grabbed his Japanese paper, ink, and brush and proceeded to draw some of the figurines. Before retiring for the night, and in spite of his exhaustion, Noguchi asked to have another look at the Sesshu scroll. “He stared at it as though punching holes in it with his gaze,” Hasegawa recalled. On his way to bed Noguchi stopped again, his eye caught by some detail in the scroll. “Wait just a minute,” he said, and he was pulled once more into the ink-brushed landscape with its changing seasons. With his eyes moving over the scroll, Noguchi kept up a running commentary about the composition, the brushstrokes, and the scroll’s vitality.
On May 31 Noguchi and Hasegawa, sponsored by the Mainichi shinbun, set out on a journey to see the ancient art of Japan and to “imbibe the tranquility of Zen, about which Hasegawa was an expert.”18 In his memoir Hasegawa wrote: “During our travels Mr. Noguchi sometimes spoke of the true meaning of kan (quietness), hin (austerity), and mu (nothingness), especially when he wanted to criticize the materialistic civilization which dominates today’s world.”19 When Hasegawa reminded Noguchi that many Japanese considered his passion for their ancient traditions to be a form of exoticism, Noguchi would answer with a smile and say that just as the Japanese are addicted to Western art, so he must be addicted to Japanese culture.20 A few years later, Hasegawa traveled to America and served as a Zen guru in San Francisco until his death, in 1957.
The first thing Noguchi and Hasegawa went to see after arriving in Kyoto was the exquisite seventeenth-century Katsura Detached Palace, a modest but beautifully proportioned house overlooking one of the most brilliantly designed gardens in Japan. Of the villa itself, Noguchi wrote that in its “ideal simplicity” the palace was a revelation that transported him into a “more perfect world.”21 The two artists were ecstatic about the unity of garden and architecture. Noguchi was especially moved by the Katsura stroll garden, which moves the visitor along a path that twists and turns around a pond and past small teahouses in such a way that at each stopping place rocks and plants that were hidden a moment ago come into view. “The two of us were nearly silent,” Hasegawa wrote, “watching … a ‘ballet of emptiness.’”22
During his travels, to help remember what he saw and to prepare for the essay on leisure, Noguchi took photographs, took notes, and made drawings and India ink rubbings. He was an almost hyperactive photographer, shooting four rolls of film at the Katsura Detached Palace and its grounds. “His camera always hangs from his shoulder,” Hasegawa recalled, “while under his arm he carries a bundle of Japanese paper, a writing brush, India ink, and an inkstone, all wrapped in a large Sarashina scarf.”23
In Kyoto Noguchi and Hasegawa visited numerous temples and gardens, including the famous Golden Pavilion: “While I was in Japan,” Noguchi recalled, “the Golden Pavilion, Kinkakuji burned down, set afire by a fanatical young priest—a double suicide.”24 Other favorite sites in Kyoto were the Zen gardens at Entsuji and Ginkginkakuji (the Silver Pavilion). The former is famous for its use of so-called borrowed scenery, meaning that the garden incorporates a mountain or some aspect of landscape in the distance as part of its total effect. The Silver Pavilion has an extraordinary garden of raked sand from which rises a conical mound of sand. Years later, dry gardens like this one would inspire Noguchi’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library garden at Yale.
Perhaps the temple precinct that most affected Noguchi’s later work was Ryoanji, with its small walled garden in which fifteen perfectly placed rocks suggest islands floating in the sea of pale raked gravel. This type of Zen garden is not for strolling, but for contemplating from the temple veranda above. Here Noguchi admired the way the space was made to feel immense: “In viewing this garden one has the sense of being transported into a vast void, into another dimension of reality—time ceases, and one is lost in reverie, gazing at the rocks that rise, ever in the same but different spot, out of the white mist of gravel … One feels that the rocks were not just placed there, that they grow out of the earth (the major portion buried), their weight is connected with the earth—and yet perhaps for this very reason they seem to float like the peaks of mountains. Here is an immaculate universe swept clean…”25 Noguchi would call his Chase Manhattan water garden “my Ryoanji,” and, as at Ryoanji, he placed his rocks so that they appeared to float.
When exploring the Buddhist temples of Kyoto, Noguchi and Hasegawa often sought out the company of the priests Hisamatsu Sensei (the Zen philosopher Shin’ichi Hisamatsu) and Daiki Osho at Daitoku-ji, a Zen temple complex founded in the fourteenth century in the northwestern section of Kyoto.26 At Daitoku-ji Noguchi and Hasegawa participated in the tea ceremony, which involved listening to “innumerable koans,” riddles such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” “After too much tea at the first two [temples],” Noguchi recalled, “the master of Mushakoji senkei serves us only hot water. Saburo is ecstatic, announces this is the ultimate ‘Tea.’”
Noguchi, who had read Kakuzo Okakura’s famous Book of Tea, published in 1906, came to love the tea ceremony, which satisfied his yearning for an art that incorporated ritual. After one of his journeys with Hasegawa he wrote about opening a teahouse gate made of twigs and passing “into another world, an inner world or world of dreams.”27 The approach to a teahouse, he said, is an important part of the whole experience. The visitor moves through a garden in which stepping-stones are laid out in an irregular manner so that he must be acutely conscious of the measure of each step. Finally, arriving at the teahouse, a simple but elegant structure with asymmetrical windows, the visitor sits outside on a bench. He then bends to enter through a low door, and the tea master serves tea with all the requisite gestures. During the tea ceremony, Noguchi said, “there is confinement, but no sense of confinement—one may, if one wishes, look out upon a desolate wabi garden; there is a feeling of time’s having stopped, of an infinity of winds having weathered and left a shell.”28
Next they traveled to the city of Uji to visit the eleventh-century temple complex called Byodo-in with its famous Phoenix Hall and a three-night fresh tea festival.29 Moving farther south they visited the great temple complex of Horyuji at Nara. The Golden Hall had burned down during the war, but Noguchi was stunned by the charred ruins. He set about capturing the blackened framework of beams with his camera. Seeing that Hasegawa was pained by the sight of Horyuji’s ruined timbers, Noguchi gave his companion a consoling look and asked, “Isn’t it more beautiful now?”30 Hasegawa told Noguchi: “To treasure the beauty of the ruin of Horyuji, you have to love sabi more than I do. I guess that means you are more Japanese than I am.”31 After sitting quietly for a moment, Noguchi, thinking of Arp’s quiet and pared-down simplicity, said: “Arp is just as Japanese as anyone in feeling.”