Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

In asking ourselves at the deepest level what happened to Japan, it helps, oddly enough, to look again at ikebana flower arrangement. One day in the fall of 1999,1 broached a question to the flower master Kawase Toshiro. It was something that had long been troubling me: What is the real difference between old-style ikebana and the monstrosities that pass under that name these days? One can regret the use of wire and vinyl cutouts, the way flowers and leaves are stapled and folded together, the way manuals diagram arrangements in terms of exact angles at such-and-such degree – but all of these things, however distorted, do have roots in the tradition. What is the crucial difference? Kawase's answer was that modern flowers lack jitsu – that is, «reality.» Traditional flowers had a purpose, whether it was religious or ritual; people in those days had a mystical respect for the wonders of nature and used their arrangements as a way of seeking and responding to the creative breath of the cosmos. Nowadays, all this is lost. There is no purpose except decoration for its own sake, no inquiring after the nature of plants and flowers themselves. Instead, the flowers are just «material,» not much different from any other material such as vinyl and wire, used any which way to serve the whimsical needs of the arrangers. In short, there is no jitsu, no spiritual purpose, nothing that connects with the inherent forces of nature – just empty design. Kawase's comment was a profound one, for lack of jitsu carries over into every field in Japan today, and can be said to be at the very root of the country's present cultural malaise. The construction frenzy (building without purpose), architecture (design without context), education (facts without independent thought), new cities (destroying the old), the stock market (paying no dividends), real estate (making no returns), universities (irrelevant to education), internationalization (keeping out the world), bureaucracy (spending without regard to real needs), finance ("virtual yen"), cinema (aimed mostly at children, not at adults), company balance sheets ("cosmetic accounting"), the Environment Agency (unconcerned with the environment), medicine (copycat drugs improperly tested), information (fuzzy facts, secrets, and lies), airports (bad for people, good for radishes) – the whole edifice is lacking in jitsu. The gap between Japan's way of doing things and the realities of modern life, both international and domestic, is extreme – there is no other way to put it. It is this that leads me to call Japan a case of failed modernization.