Why did the inhabitants of Honshû, the main island of Japan, colonise Hokkaido (an Eastern island of the Japanese archipelago) after the middle of the XIXth century? It is “because the Japanese were no more inclined to emigrate to Hokkaido than to the rest of the world”, Augustin Berque replies (Vivre l’espace au Japon – Experiencing space in Japan, 1982). Why were the Japanese not “inclined that way”? Katô Shûichi (1919-2008), quoted by A. Berque, explains it in his latest book1.
The Isle of Hokkaido, Katô remarks, “has remained “quasi-deserted” from the middle of the IXth century to the middle of the XIXth century, i.e. sheltered from the whole Honshû which had been ruled by the central government since the launch of its colonisation policy”. Still at the end of the XVth century, the resistance of the Aïnus, the first occupiers, was practically broken. Before the XIXth century, similarly, the agricultural techniques in cold countries were known.
Finally, the family clan of the Matsumae, implanted in the South of Hokkaido and in control of the Northern commerce, would not have had the military means to curb the population settlements from Honshû. Indeed, Katô hastens to say, the Japanese were not living in “open” spaces, unlike other countries, cultures or civilisations which promoted that “inclination” for emigration by “planting into [people’s] heads to get rich or enlarge their territories”.
At country scale, indeed, the Japanese have inhabited a “closed” space since the last embassy was sent to China at the end of the IXth century. Renewed in the XIVth, XVth and XVIth centuries, the contacts with the foreign cultures have never measured up to those established by the Mings with the Annam, Turkistan or still the East coast of Africa, and could not be compared either to those set up by Islamic or Christian countries. And in the 1630s, edicts officially “closed” the country, to inflows as well as to outflows. At local scale, similarly, the inhabitants of Japan have not occupied a so-called “open” space since the first villages engaged in irrigated rice culture at the IIIth before Christian Era. Relations between village communities did exist, but in most cases did not go beyond the immediately neighbouring settlement. As regards "housing" (« ie »), in a similar fashion, the Japanese lived in a “closed” space, which has encompassed, from the end of the XVIth century, the “closed” sub-space of the famous tea pavilion…
In this view, one could say that the inhabitants of Japan were “closed” to the inside as well as to the outside world.
Thus, the Japanese have always considered, on the one hand, that any space, regardless how small, ought to be self-sufficient: the single room of a building, the first and last verse of a poem…; on the other hand, that what was furthermost from any item leading to the outside (the entrance of the house, the beginning of the sentence, etc.), was the most important or sacred: the verb in the Japanese sentence, and in particular the tense of this verb; the cubicle containing the painted roll of the « tokonoma » in a room; possibly the spouse, since one of its designations in Japanese is the “person at the back” - « oku-san ».
This idea can be seen in the space of the tea pavilion, “which, Katô likes to say, has often been turned into the condensed expression of the “Japanese specificity”: the house, which might have been a single room originally, to which other rooms could be adjoined, “opened up to the garden”, where the tea pavilion was located (with two to four tatami and a half maximum), “but not to the outside”. Katô, similarly, explains that the Western cathedrals, which “made the believers look up towards the ribs and the heavens”, could not have been built in Japan. Indeed, the archipelago has long borrowed the style of higher buildings from neighbouring China, but “flattened” them. Suffice it to glance at the Chinese pagodas which, once transposed into the archipelago, have lost a few floors as well as their sloping canopies. Another sign if the world-famous imperial villa of Katsura, whose asymmetry, characteristic of the whole Japanese architecture, does not mar the horizontality of its general aspect. Other example: the « emaki-mono »; these illustrated rolls where the image before our eyes has to be wound so as to unwind and view the next one, consist of a series of illustrations which can only be seen separately from one another. As regards the “brush stroke” (« hissei ») which was every painter’s goal in painting or calligraphy, Katô writes: “it reflected the priority granted to the expression of inner feelings or volition rather than the observation, the reproduction and the understanding of a model external to oneself (…)”
The stone garden, Kyoto
Picture: J.-F. Sabouret
Katô develops analog remarks as regards the notion of time in Japan. The Japanese, he points out, have shared three conceptions of time, “the historical linear time without beginning nor end, the cyclic-daily life time over a circumference without beginning nor end and the universal time of life including a beginning and an end. And each of these three times tends to insist on the “now” life.”
The vast majority of the inhabitants of Japan have thus lived in the “closed” time of the “present”, since the introduction of the culture of rice in irrigated soils which requires quasi-daily attention. Similarly, the “present” of the “house" or of the family name, where there was one, got the upper hand on the individual and its inescapable death.
The merchants and craftsmen of Edo (which then became Tokyo), for the same reasons, eventually turned into hedonists and indulged in “here and now” pleasures. They have acclaimed the new kabuki theatre and its “poses” or « mie » in particular, true acmes of a play where the actor with the leading part freezes, stares at the audience and thus surrenders to the judgement of educated spectators. They adored the Japanese horseradish, the wasabi, which accompanies raw fish and causes an intense but brief sensation of inflammation in the mouth and the nose.
The “present”, following the same logic as for the “here”, has become a part in its own right of the way of thinking and of doing in Japan. The “present” tense, generally speaking, has been both the condition and the stake of the “pondering process”, for oneself and the others. The stake: to secure the “present” feeling of a past or future, actual or imaginary fact and for oneself. The condition: any author, to signify his maximum interest in a topic, regardless whether very old or situated in the future, dared use the present tense, in defiance of the tense agreement to be observed in Japanese!
Exemplarily, first of all, the primacy of the “present”, of the “now” in “self-centred thoughts” has somehow been expressed in the short poetic form of the seventeen-syllable haiku: “In the old pond. A frog is leaping. Plip plop in water. » Then, Katô designates, this primacy, in the exchange between a speaker and his counterpart, was most blatant in the dreamt nô, the first of both major categories of this dramatic art born at the end of the XIIIth century: “The stage of the nô shows that an instant experience of a confined space may be expanded infinitely, solely delineated by its refined expression. The spectators do not gather there out of pure historical interest, but do gather to see a contemporary play, i.e. a play which belongs to them. To see a play which belongs to them is to define oneself the culture of the “here and now”.”
Since its defeat in Baekgang in 663, inflicted by the Korean kingdom of Silla, Japan has hence not been “bent on enriching or enlarging its territory”. The colonisation policy of Korea or China, initiated by both ill-fated expeditions of Hideyoshi in 1592 and 1598, was not pursued by his successor Ieyasu and the Tokugawa shoguns. Similarly, the « village » (« mura ») confined itself to its traditional perimeter. The numerous disputes between neighbouring villages had nothing to do, Katô comments, with competition about new territories, but concerned survival stakes: the usage of water, indispensable to rice culture in irrigated soils, and the fuel in the form of logs collected in the forest.
Similarly, no “house”, if only to preserve itself, has ever excluded another household in case of fire or of death: the recalcitrants or other people who had been banished previously, were temporarily reintegrated in the village, on both these occasions only.
The villages have hence been the first “closed” units in Japan, after the introduction of the rice-culture towards the IIIth century B.C. The country was closed in, properly speaking, at a later stage, a first time in the VIIth century when retracting from the Korean peninsula, a second time at the end of the IXth century when no more embassies were sent to China. After the latter date, there still had been exchanges with the outside. Opening periods, such as that of Muromachi (beginning of the XIVth – end of the XVIth century), existed. But they affected the elites, with very few effects on the “closed” and little competitive daily life of the farming majority of the population. This situation lasted to the middle of the XIXth century.
From then on, how come that the Japanese colonised Hokkaido after that date? Katô, without specifying whether they had been imported from the outside or they had been born locally, answers: “Violent competition was introduced by capitalism and the market principle, with a truly distinct winner and loser.”
The colonisation of Hokkaido was followed by that of the southern islands of Okinawa. Then came the turn of Taiwan, before Korea and finally Manchuria, with the loss of everything in 1945. Since then Japan has not colonised new territories and time and space have been experienced in the present tense in comparison with other societies.
However, for some ten years, the economic crisis hitting the archipelago and resulting in the legitimisation of the “competition” mentioned by Katô, has torn apart the idea of a “one-and-all Japan” which went along with the reconstruction of the country after the war, then underpinned its formidable rise to the rank of second world power behind the United-States. The process called the “normalisation” of Japan, i.e. the fact that the archipelago is becoming a country like the others, or rather that it accepts giving up the illusion that all its members are on a par, is on its way!
Symbolisation of Fuji mountain, silver pavilion, Kyoto
Picture: J.-F. Sabouret
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1 The book was first published under the title Katô, Shûichi, Nihon bunka ni okeru jikan to kûkan, Tôkyô, Iwanami Shoten, 2007, 264 p., then in France in a French translation: Katô Shûichi, Time and space in the Japanese culture, translated and annotated by C. Sabouret, CNRS Editions, 2009, 291 p. Other translations into Korean, Chinese and Spanish are planned.
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30/12/14
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