Local traditions of belief attained new meaning through this contrast: the ancient worship of nature spirits called kami - a belief system that eventually came to be called Shinto - was conducted in far simpler, undecorated shrines. It came to Japan in the form of grandly decorated temples and highly ornamental ritual artifacts. Again, most westerners have an extremely inaccurate grasp of this religion’s historical material culture. The Shōsō-in treasury, assembled in 752 and still substantially intact today, is a time capsule of this taste, with numerous imported luxuries from China and further afield, brought along the maritime and land routes of the Silk Road.Īlong with these objects came another, more consequential import: Buddhism. Already in the Nara period (the 8th century), the Japanese elite was modeling its architecture, literature, and art on Chinese precedent. Japan has long been a culture shaped in response to its nearby and far more powerful neighbor, China. The reasons for this are not far to seek.
If Japan does have a special relation to reductive aesthetics, it’s not so much in the culture’s mastery of minimalism itself, but its purposeful pairing with the maximal. “It’s rather more an ideal enacted aesthetically,” Volk says, “than in the reality of lived experience.” If there were, then there’d be no Marie Kondo” - since her asset-stripping approach only makes sense in a domestic interior that is already overcrowded. Think, too, of the spectacular neon signage of Shinjuku in Tokyo - and have you ever seen this climactic scene in the 1988 anime classic Akira?Īlicia Volk, professor of Japanese art history at the University of Maryland, put it to me like this: “There is no real Japanese minimalism. Historically, Zen paintings have been greatly outnumbered by kachōga (“flower and bird pictures”), rendered in elaborate detail with precious mineral pigments on silk, and popular ukiyo-e prints, rammed with pictorial incident. These various associations all feed into a stereotype of Japan as a “less-is-more” kind of country. This article is part of Sunday Edition: “ Minimalisms”. Banjin Dōtan, Calligraphy (Zen Master’s Staff), mid-18th century, in the collection of LACMA (image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
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