Landscape Perception in Japanese Aesthetics — Epoche C1
Karatani's thesis: the discovery of landscape Karatani Kōjin's Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1980) advanced one of the most influential claims in modern Japanese criticism: that 'landscape' ( fūkei ) — the perception of external scenery as an objective, unified view spread before a detached observer — was not always available to Japanese writers but was discovered , quite suddenly, in the third decade of the Meiji era, the 1890s. The Meiji era (1868–1912) was the period in which Japan, after two centuries of enforced seclusion, systematically imported Western institutions, technologies and forms of representation; Karatani's point is that among the imports was a way of seeing. His argument turns on what he calls an inversion ( tentō ). In Western painting since the Renaissance, the technique of linear perspective — the geometric method, codified by Alberti, of projecting a scene onto a picture plane from a single fixed viewpoint, so that parallel lines converge at a vanishing point — had made the visual field into a coherent object facing an implied solitary viewer. Landscape in Karatani's sense requires exactly this structure: a scene over there, a detached subject here. And the detached subject, he argues, is itself a modern invention: only a writer equipped with 'interiority' — a private inner self, made articulable in Japanese by the Meiji movement to unify written and spoken language ( genbun'itchi ) — could stand back far enough from the world for the world to congeal into scenery. His exhibit is the fiction of Kunikida Doppo, in whose 1898 sketches of the Musashino plain ordinary, unstoried woodland — not a famous site, just trees — becomes for the first time the object of loving description. Before this, Karatani insists, Japanese poetry and painting did not depict landscape at all: they deployed codified sites and conventional motifs, signs circulating among other signs. This account is widely accepted, and much in it deserves acceptance: the specific configuration Karatani describes — objective scenery constituted for a detached, interiorised observer — really is difficult to find before Meiji, and the correlation he draws between new prose styles and new description is textually demonstrable in the works he examines. The question this essay presses is different: whether the pre-modern material Karatani sets aside as 'mere convention' is adequately described by that dismissal. The suspicion to be developed is that classical Japanese poetry possessed a sophisticated mode of spatial perception that was neither objective landscape nor empty code, and that recovering it requires a conceptual instrument Karatani's framework lacks. A correction about sources An earlier version of this essay attributed that instrument to 'Kobayashi Yasuo's interpretation of mono no aware ' in a work cited as Basho no Genshōgaku ( Phenomenology of Place ) — basho being the ordinary Japanese word for 'place', and no relation to the poet Bashō. The attribution cannot stand as given, and it is better to say so than to let a shaky citation carry a sound idea: the book circulating in Japanese under the title Basho no genshōgaku is the translation of the Canadian geographer Edward Relph's Place and Placelessness (1976), and I have not been able to verify a work of that title, or that argument, by Kobayashi Yasuo. The idea itself, however — that the relation of Heian poets to their poetic sites is best understood through a phenomenology of place, as what one might call an 'ontology of place' — does not depend on the misattributed source. It can be assembled openly from three bodies of work that do exist: Relph's phenomenology of place, and the Japanese philosophical analyses of spatial existence in Watsuji Tetsurō and Nishida Kitarō. The reading of mono no aware that results is then offered as this essay's own construction, answerable to the poetic evidence presented below. Assembling the ontology of place Phenomenology is the philosophical method, descending from Husserl, that describes how things show up in experience before theories about them are applied. Applied to geography by Relph, it yields a distinction that does the first piece of work here: the difference between space — the neutral, measurable extension that can be surveyed from anywhere and belongs to no one — and place — a location thick with meanings, memories and involvements, experienced from within. Relph's central variable is what he calls insideness: the degree to which one experiences a location as a participant bound up with it rather than as a spectator before it. His crucial observation is that these are not primitive and advanced stages of one capacity but different intentional structures altogether: the deepest experience of place, 'existential insideness', is precisely the one in which the location is not an object of detached regard. Watsuji Tetsurō's Fūdo (1935), translated as Climate and Culture , radicalises the point. Against the picture of an environment standing outside human subjects who then react to it, Watsuji argued that human existence is constitutively spatial: the cold is not first measured and then felt as an external fact — we discover ourselves already out in the cold, and our institutions, house-forms and sensibilities are that self-discovery made durable. Milieu ( fūdo ) is not backdrop but a moment of human being itself. And Nishida Kitarō, in the essay 'Basho' ('Place', 1926), gave the thought its most abstract form: his 'logic of place' holds that subject and object are not self-standing items that subsequently enter relations; both arise within an encompassing field — a basho — that precedes their separation. One need not adopt Nishida's whole system to take the structural lesson: there is a coherent, rigorously worked-out alternative to the picture in which perception is a subject over here registering an object over there. Call the composite view the ontology of place: the position that, in a cert