6

Up until the time that Ashikaga Yoshimasa took up residence at the Ginkaku-ji, he had contributed almost nothing to the welfare of the Japanese people of his time or to the culture of future generations. He had been a total failure as shogun: although he bore the title of “barbarian-subduing great general,” he had subdued neither barbarians nor civilized men. He had never commanded an army in the field or negotiated an alliance that might have strengthened the shogunate, which had grown progressively weaker until, toward the end of his reign, the military governors could ignore its wishes with impunity.

Some recent scholars have praised Yoshimasa’s good sense in refusing to get involved in the senseless Ōnin War. This was, at best, a negative merit. His refusal to head the shogunate forces during the war was not a decision reached after agonizing over his proper course of action but a passive recognition of his impotence as a leader at a time when resolute action was needed. In his own day and ever since, Yoshimasa has ranked as one of the least effective shoguns in all of Japanese history.

Yoshimasa was no more successful in his private life. His many early involvements with women (including Imamairi, his mistress or surrogate mother, put to death perhaps by his order) brought him no lasting joy, and his married life was a disaster. Accounts of the period, beginning with Ōnin ki, depict him as a man so lacking a will of his own that he was no more than a helpless tool in the hands of his fearsome wife, Hino Tomiko. Perhaps such accounts are exaggerated and Yoshimasa was actually not so completely under Tomiko’s dominance, but this was how he appeared to the world. He could not control her least attractive feature, her craving for money, and this may have been why he eventually broke with her and the two lived apart. His relations with his son Yoshihisa were equally unsatisfactory, though the causes of their mutual hostility can only be conjectured. By the time the Ōnin War ended, Yoshimasa probably seemed a failure even to himself, in both his public and his private life.

However, if we turn our attention to the latter part of Yoshimasa’s life, especially to his activities after he went to live at the mountain retreat he built in the Higashiyama area of Kyoto, our impressions of the man are likely to be quite different. The Higashiyama era was one of the most brilliant periods of Japanese cultural history, and the guiding spirit was the same Yoshimasa who had been a failure in everything else he did. Of course, not every cultural development of the Higashiyama era can be credited to this one man, but Yoshimasa’s taste was reflected in many of the distinctive artistic developments of the time. His cultural legacy to the Japanese people has been immense.

Only two buildings of Yoshimasa’s retreat survive. Perhaps their most unexpected feature is that the interiors do not surprise us or give us the feeling that a great lapse of time separates Yoshimasa’s world from our own. Far from it—the rooms look very familiar, so like those in countless other Japanese buildings we have seen that it is easy to forget that they are half a thousand years old.

We would not have the same feeling if, by means of a time machine, we were able to step into a room of a Heian palace. It would certainly look unfamiliar, though we would be aware that the building was Japanese. We might recognize certain features even without any special knowledge of Heian architecture, if only because similar rooms are depicted in the magnificent horizontal scrolls illustrating The Tale of Genji and other classics of Heian literature. Murasaki Shikibu so magically evoked the characters that we may feel we know and understand them, but they lived in buildings that belonged to another world.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the lives of the Heian aristocrats she describes was the manner of courtship. We learn from the novel, for example, that Genji might never have had so much as a glimpse of a woman with whom he thought he was in love and to whom he sent poems expressing the depth of his feelings. It is hard for us to imagine a man’s passion being inflamed by a woman’s handwriting or by a glimpse of her sleeves, all that was visible as she sat inside her kichō (“screen of state,” in Arthur Waley’s translation). Indeed, he might not actually see his lady friend until they had became lovers and perhaps not even then. The kicho—the elaborate curtains that protected women from the eyes of male visitors—were probably the feature of a Heian palace room that would most surprise us.

We know also from Heian paintings that bright green tatami mats covered only a small part of the floor. (It was not until the Higashiyama era that tatami covered the entire floor.) A Heian room contained almost no immovable furniture: there was no cupboard in which to store kimonos that were not in use, no case in which to put books, no wall space on which to display objects of art, no desk on which to write a letter, no table from which to eat a meal. The rooms probably were not only uncomfortable but also dark. Shutters known as hajitomi let in some light, but because they also had the function of protecting court ladies from the gaze of people outside, the shutters contributed to the darkness of a room rather than illuminating it.

Shōji, like those used in modern Japan, which admit light through translucent paper, had not yet been invented in Heian Japan,¹ but they are found in the Dojinsai,² the tea room of the Tōgu-dō, one of the Ginkaku-ji’s two surviving buildings. The shoji, intended originally to admit light to the desk in one corner of the room, became an indispensable feature of later Japanese architecture. They help account for the familiarity we feel on entering the Dojinsai, and they make us forget how much else has changed in Japan since Yoshimasa’s day.

The Dōjinsai, four and a half tatami in size, resembles innumerable similar rooms in temples and private houses all over Japan for the simple reason that it was their model. Every Japanese-style building constructed since the sixteenth century owes something to the architecture here. The shōji, the chigaidana (staggered shelves), the layout of the tatami in the tea room, the ceiling, the square interior pillars, the desk, and the space provided for the display of flowers or objects of art all are characteristic of the shoin-zukuri architecture, which reached definitive expression in Yoshimasa’s retreat. Almost any Japanese, even if he lives by choice in a reinforced-concrete apartment house, is likely to feel a sense of “coming home” when he enters the Dōjinsai. This architecture is a part of the living culture of Japan; by contrast, a Heian room is a distant ancestor.

It is not only the interiors of the buildings at the Ginkaku-ji that seem familiar and peculiarly Japanese. The gardens (both green and sand), the ponds, the trees, and the surrounding scenery all contribute to a feeling of a total immersion in nature, the ideal of countless Japanese over the centuries. Here Yoshimasa watched the four seasons as they came and went, and he was constantly aware of the birds and insects that each season brought. We, too, can share in his pleasures, and we are likely to feel that we are in a truly Japanese place.

Love of the moon and of nature in general is well attested in Japanese literature from a very early period and deserves its place as a central part of the “soul of Japan.” It also is part of the “soul of England,” as anyone knows who has visited the gardens of England or read English poetry. But if one is looking for a specifically Japanese example of this phenomenon, I wonder whether the best place to find it is not Yoshimasa’s mountain retreat.

Much of the tangible culture of the Muromachi period has disappeared. The Ōnin War and the battles of the sixteenth century destroyed most of the temples, palaces, and other buildings. Miraculously, two buildings of the Ginkaku-ji escaped the flames, though the others were destroyed during the warfare of 1548. The surviving buildings—the Ginkaku and the Tōgu-dō—have been restored on several occasions, and certain features altered, but they are essentially unchanged, and standing inside the Dojinsai, it is not difficult to imagine a tea ceremony presided over by Yoshimasa.

It might even be possible to assemble bowls, chashaku (tea ladles), mizusashi (jugs), and other utensils of the tea ceremony that Yoshimasa had personally used, but this is not necessary; the scene does not require priceless antiques to be convincing. There is no need, either, for the Chinese paintings with which Yoshimasa decorated his retreat, though some of them have also survived the perils of the centuries. What is essential is the atmosphere engendered by the tea room. If we were enabled by a time machine to attend a chanoyu gathering of Yoshimasa’s time, probably little would surprise us because the traditions have remained unbroken.

The first structures to be completed in 1482 at the Higashiyama retreat were the gate and the kitchen, followed in the ninth month of 1483 by the tsunenogosho, or living quarters.³ Yoshimasa moved to this building as soon as it was ready. He seems to have been eager to shake off his past life as quickly as possible.

Yoshimasa probably had long considered exactly how he wished to have his retreat decorated. Hardly had the first building been erected than Kanō Masanobu set about painting on the fusuma the Eight Views of the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers. Although Masanobu, the founder of the Kanō school of painting, had never visited China and therefore had no personal knowledge of the celebrated scenery along the two rivers, he was familiar with their features from Chinese paintings of the subject, and inspired by old models, he painted his conception of what the rivers were like. When he had finished the set of paintings, they were embellished by poems in Chinese describing the scenery, composed by monks.

Yoshimasa was evidently pleased with Masanobu’s paintings. When the Saishi-an, the hall for Zen meditation, was built in 1485, Masanobu was asked to paint the fusuma, and later the same year he was commanded to paint the fusuma at the Tōgu-dō. This hall was erected in keeping with the other half of Yoshimasa’s Buddhist beliefs, his worship of Amida Buddha. A statue of Amida was the central divinity (honzon) of the Tōgu-dō. At Yoshimasa’s command, as we have seen, Masanobu painted the Ten Monks on the fusuma.⁴

On receiving this commission, Masanobu is reputed to have said to Yoshimasa, “It might seem advisable to do the paintings in the style of the Sung painter Ma Yüan, but in that case, it would be the same as the study in the Saishi-an. I plan to follow the style of Li Lung-mien instead. I’ll send you a sample.”⁵ Yoshimasa asked his art adviser, Sōami, to search in the shogunal storehouse for works by Li Lung-mien that he might inspect before approving Masanobu’s plan. However, Sōami was in mourning for his father, and Yoshimasa was unable for some time to examine Li Lung-mien’s paintings. He was determined to make sure that paintings in this style met his standards before he gave final approval, even though this delayed the completion of the Tōgu-dō until 1486.

Kanō Masanobu’s decision to paint the Ten Monks in the style of Li Lung-mien, rather than of Ma Yüan, the Chinese painter most esteemed in Japan, perhaps stemmed from a desire to display his ability to paint in different styles. He seems not, however, to have considered the possibility of painting in the Yamato-e or some other Japanese style. Masanobu’s decision probably reflected Yoshimasa’s love of everything Chinese. The Higashiyama era was a time when karamono—Chinese things—were prized, imitated, and even worshiped, to the exclusion of specifically Japanese forms of expression.

The love of Chinese art certainly did not begin at this time. Ever since the Nara period, members of the aristocracy had greatly admired and imitated all aspects of Chinese culture, but with Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, this admiration of China developed into uncritical worship. As we have seen, Yoshimitsu was so eager for trade with China that he submitted to the demand of the Chinese court that Japanese wares be labeled as “tribute” from a vassal state to the Middle Kingdom. He accepted this humiliation in part because of the profits that accrued from trade with China but mainly because he was overwhelmed by the beauty of the articles the Chinese emperor bestowed on his vassal, the King of Japan.

Zenrin kokuhō ki, a collection of documents on trade between China and Japan compiled by Zuikei Shūhō (1391–1473), a Zen priest who served both Ashikaga Yoshinori and Yoshimasa, lists the presents bestowed on Yoshinori in 1433 by Emperor Hsüan-tsung. They included three hundred taels in silver, a vast amount of silk fabrics, a palanquin and chairs decorated in red lacquer and gold, silver dishes, saké vessels, brushes, ink, paper, incense wood, tiger and leopard skins, and other rare and exotic treasures. Yoshinori was dazzled by the gifts, and his infatuation with things Chinese was passed on to his son. Yoshimasa ordered from China not only luxuries but also books of Buddhist teachings and Neo-Confucianist philosophy that had yet to reach Japan.

The Zen priests were perhaps even greater worshipers of China than the shoguns. Ever since Zen Buddhism was first introduced to Japan, the models for worship, for the organization of the priesthood, for the architecture of the temples, and for the daily activities of the priests had been obtained from China. The priests initiated trade with China on their own, deriving considerable profits for their temples, but they also served (in their capacity as experts on China) as envoys of the shogunate. They composed the missives that the shoguns sent to China, and when Chinese envoys arrived in Japan, the priests received them. The shogun and the intellectuals of the time turned to Zen priests less for Buddhist enlightenment than for what they might learn from them about Chinese civilization.

The shoguns of the Ashikaga family were aware of being culturally inferior to members of the aristocracy. Although they dutifully studied such avocations of the nobility as the composition of waka, the playing of traditional musical instruments, and kemari (kickball, the sport favored by the nobles), they probably were resigned to never being able to attain the level of men whose families, from the time of remote ancestors, had been devoted to these accomplishments. The shoguns’ enthusiasm for Chinese paintings and antiques thus may have been occasioned by their pleasure in finding an artistic domain in which they could be more expert than the nobles.

The collection of Chinese art formed by Yoshimasa and his immediate predecessors with the guidance of Zen priests was extremely large for that time. A catalogue of the Chinese paintings in the shogunal collection, Kundaikan sō chōki, was compiled by Nōami (1397–1471), a “companion” (dōbōshū)⁶ of the shogun and the keeper of Yoshinori’s and Yoshimasa’s collection. Theirs was by no means the only notable collection of Chinese paintings in Japan. Zen temples possessed many of the paintings imported from China, especially during the fourteenth century, and others were owned by daimyos; but the shogunate’s collection, especially as it developed during the Higashiyama era, was by far the most important. Nōami listed 74 landscape paintings, 91 flower and bird paintings, and 114 Taoist and Buddhist paintings. The painter best represented in the collection was Mu Ch’i, with 103 paintings, followed by Liang K’ai, with 27. All together, some thirty masters of the Sung and Yüan dynasties were represented. But even the 279 paintings that Nōami mentioned were not the shoguns’ entire collection; rather, he seems to have confined his catalogue to the masterpieces. The shogun or one of his advisers would periodically go through the collection, weeding out inferior paintings and putting them on sale.

From the beginning, there was the problem of fakes. Once the Chinese learned of the Japanese preference for such artists as Mu Ch’i and Liang K’ai, they happily turned out plausible-looking fakes signed with the names of these artists. Yoshimasa, who had access not only to the shogunal collection but also to the holdings of temples and daimyos, studied the different works attributed to popular artists and eventually became the most accomplished authenticator of Chinese paintings.⁷

The existence of an excellent collection of Chinese paintings was a source of inspiration to Japanese painters. They were fortunate in that Yoshimasa and his predecessors had chosen to acquire works from the finest periods of Chinese painting—the Northern Sung, Southern Sung, and Yüan. The Japanese painters at first devoted themselves to close imitation of the Chinese masterpieces, but gradually they began to assimilate the different Chinese styles and made them their own.

The ink paintings were of particular importance because they created a new variety of Japanese painting. The origin of ink paintings had been a rejection of color, stemming ultimately from Taoist thought.⁸ Lao Tzu had said that “the five colors make people blind,” meaning that if one’s attention is distracted by the colors of things, one will be unable to detect their true forms. A painting in ink, in contrast, was believed to contain all the colors.

The earliest examples of ink painting in Japan were religious. The portraits of Daruma (Bodhidharma) indicate that Zen monks were the first in Japan to experiment with copying Chinese ink paintings as a means of expressing religious beliefs. Being fairly skillful artists, such priests probably did not find it difficult to imitate the techniques of Chinese ink paintings, and the works they produced were competent if not remarkable.

The first truly distinguished priest-painter of the Muromachi period was Josetsu, whose Catching a Catfish in a Gourd, painted by command of Ashikaga Yoshimochi, was considered by artists of the Kanō school to be the origin of their art, the earliest successful example in Japan of a distinctive Chinese style of ink painting. A pupil of Josetsu’s, Tenshō Shūbun, the official painter (goyō gaka) of the shogunate, ruled over the world of Japanese painting in the late fifteenth century. His dates are not known, but he was active during the Higashiyama era and may have painted for Yoshimasa. Very few authenticated paintings by Shūbun survive. Despite his high reputation, the quality of his work has been questioned.⁹

The most famous painter of the Higashiyama era was Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506). He entered orders as a Zen monk at the Shōkoku-ji while also studying painting with Shūbun. For years he spent much of his time copying Chinese paintings, an experience that probably contributed more to his development as a painter than did his study with Shubun. In 1467, the year of the outbreak of the Ōnin War, Sesshu, then in his forty-eighth year, traveled to China aboard a ship sent by the shogunate to the Ming court. During his two years in China, he is known to have completed some paintings. One account states that he was chosen to do a painting on a wall of the Ministry of Rites at the imperial palace in Peking.¹⁰ He also made numerous sketches of Chinese landscapes.

Sesshū showed an unusual ability to paint in many different Chinese styles, but he went beyond skillful imitation to achieve a distinctive style of his own. In later years, he recalled his disappointment in the painters he had met in China, a discovery that increased his respect for Josetsu and Shūbun.¹¹ To show his independence of the Chinese masters, he sometimes signed his paintings Nippon Sesshū, or Sesshū of Japan.

Sesshū returned to Japan in 1469. Kyoto had been devastated by the war and did not seem like a good place for an artist to find work. Yoshimasa, his most likely patron, already had two painters-in-attendance: Kanō Masanobu and Oguri Sōtan (1413–1481). There seemed to be no room for Sesshū in Yoshimasa’s service, so he decided to accept the generous patronage of two enlightened daimyo families: the Ōuchi of Suō and the Ōtomo of Bungo. Their patronage enabled him to devote himself to painting without financial worries. He never returned to Kyoto, but in 1483, when Yoshimasa was looking for someone to replace Sōtan (who had died two years earlier), he recalled that Sesshū had been a disciple of Shūbun and asked him to decorate his Higashiyama retreat. Sesshū declined the honor, saying it was not appropriate for a mere priest to paint pictures in a “golden palace.” He recommended instead Kano Masanobu, whose work he particularly admired; he seems not to have been aware that Masanobu was already painting for Yoshimasa.¹² It was generous of Sesshū to propose Masanobu, but one cannot help regretting that Sesshū took no part in decorating the Ginkaku-ji.

Nōami not only compiled a catalogue of the shogunal collection of art but also rated the 156 artists. His omissions are surprising; he included only one Japanese among the artists he discussed: Mokuan Reigen, a Zen priest who had studied in China and died there. Josetsu and Shūbun, both revered by Sesshū, were not mentioned, suggesting that during the Higashiyama era any Chinese painting was considered to be better than even the best painting by a Japanese.

One painting of this period stands out in particular, the portrait of the celebrated monk Ikkyū by his disciple Bokusai Shōtō (d. 1492). Unlike more typical paintings of the period, landscapes that are skillful and pleasantly evocative but convey little individuality, Bokusai’s portrait of Ikkyū is unforgettable. It is the face of an individual, as striking, strange, and unorthodox as Ikkyū’s own life and poetry. At first glance, the portrait may look like a mere sketch from life, its nervous vitality reminiscent of the captured moment of a snapshot, but it was a work of conscious artistry. Ikkyū’s growth of beard and unshaven skull, unseemly in a Zen priest, pointed to his great predecessors: Lin-chi (Rinzai), usually depicted unshaven, and in the end Daruma himself, always shown with a beard.¹³ The success of the portrait undoubtedly owed much to the subject. This is perhaps the first Japanese portrait that shows a man whose complex character can be read in his face.

Ikkyū, remembered today mainly from children’s stories that tell of the irrepressible wit of “Ikkyū-san,” was known in his own day for his merciless attacks on corrupt Zen priests. As we have seen, a few of his poems indirectly rebuked Yoshimasa for his extravagance at a time when people were suffering from hunger and the exhaustion brought on by war; but Ikkyū’s most savage denunciation was directed against those who (in his opinion) had betrayed the teachings of Zen.

By contrast, the well-known portrait of Yoshimasa, though attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu, an accomplished artist, is disappointing. The background shows a screen painting, suggesting Yoshimasa’s fondness for art, but the portrait otherwise tells us almost nothing about the man. The rather stolid face so little resembles the face of the statue of Yoshimasa in the Ginkaku-ji that it seems less a portrait than an effigy intended to convey the dignity of the shogun.

The effigy disappoints because it reveals so little of Yoshimasa’s character, whereas the portrait of Ikkyū is unforgettable because it brings out his humanity. Humanity is a quality not often achieved in Muromachi secular painting. In imitation of Chinese examples, human beings are most often no more than decorative elements, tiny figures who serve to bring out the vastness of nature. Such paintings can be highly satisfying, and I myself have sometimes sought refuge in them when exhausted by galleries of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century European depictions of people who all but obliterate the scenery. But how I wish that one of the great European portrait painters (or perhaps Bokusai) had preserved for us the features and character of a man of Yoshimasa’s complexity!