SCRAPS FROM A READING JOURNAL

Carl Jung: Quoted in The Age newspaper 19/5/1990

"Are we our dreams, or are our dreams us? A Japanese poet once dreamt he was a butterfly, and ever after he wondered if he was a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamt he was a man?"

Saigyo

"The mind for truth
Begins, like a stream, shallow
At first, but then
Adds more and more depth
While growing greater clarity."

Mishima Yukio: The Golden Temple

"He did not try to assert his individuality by perceiving something that he and no-one else could see, but saw the object just as anyone else would see it." (p 246)

Natsume Soseki: Kokoro

"As a matter of fact, country people tend to be worse than city people. You said just now that there was no-one amongst your relatives that you would consider particularly bad. You seem to be under the impression that there is a special breed of bad humans. There is no such thing as a stereotype bad man in this world. Under normal circumstances, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. That is what is so frightening about men. One must always be on one's guard."

Natsume Soseki: The Three Cornered Hat

“Life is an inescapable rat-race in which you are constantly being spurred on my materialistic values to wrangle and squabble with your neighbour...The poet and the artist, however, come to know absolute purity by concerning themselves only with those things which constitute the innermost essence of this world of relativity. They dine on the summer haze, and drink the evening dew. They discuss purple, and weigh the merits of crimson, and when death comes they have no regrets. For them, pleasure does not lie in becoming attached to things, but, in becoming a part of them by a process of assimilation” (87)

Natsume Soseki: The Three Cornered Hat

“Anywhere that you can find railway train must be classed as the world of reality, for there is nothing more typical of twentieth-century civilization. It is an unsympathetic and heartless contraption which rumbles along carrying hundreds of people crammed together in one box. It takes them all at a uniform speed to the same station, and then proceeds to lavish the benefits of steam upon every one of them without exception. People are said to board and travel by train, but I call it being loaded and transported. Nothing shows a greater contempt for individuality than the train” (181)

Extracts from an overview of contemporary Japanese culture in The Age newspaper from the 1990s...

 

"There's a death wish operating through Japanese literature" says Masao Miyoshi, a Japanese literary scholar (Accomplices of Silence). "Writing in Japan is always something of an act of defiance. Silence not only invites and seduces all would be speakers and writers, it is in fact a powerful compulsion throughout the whole society... Yet there have been those writers who refuse to be seduced (Kobo Abe, Hirase Inoue, Shusaku Endo (Japanese Graham Greene), Shohei Ooka, Otohiko Kaga, Saburo Shinogawa). In addition says Tokyo professor Shoichi Saeki, "The Japanese literary scene is now showing a return to ancient times where women were engaged in creative writing. Today, women writers both young and old are very, very active.

 

Yuko Tsushima, (A Bed of Grass) examines the roots of family distress and fake nostalgia... Taeko Tamioka, 57, "is a poet turned novelist celebrated for her unflinching analyses of social despair. For these women, says anthropologist Yukiko Tanaka "writing is the anithesis of the selfless submission described by Japanese authors. Women writers have needed great courage to surmount the many obstacles to their attempts at such self assertion.

 

... The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice, Sando the Bailiff, Uegetsu, Tokyo Story, Yojimbo, Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Narayama... Part of the appeal of these films lay in their strangeness: Japan seemed not just another country but a different world full of mystery, elegance, violence, surprise."
 

Shushin - Dotoku

"Again the aim was to instruct youngsters in the importance of respect for the common good. In a sense, it is what makes the Japanese education system truly Japanese... Individuals are diverse, but academic achievement is a group endeavour. Everybody is expected ot learn and everybody does."

Murakami Haruki: Norwegian Wood

The guitar... "Still, I like the instrument. It's light, simple, straight forward, like a warm little room, nice and cosy."

George Ohsawa: Jack and  Mitie in the West

"Japanese, Chinese and Erewhonian are all similar languages. In them there is no thought of possession and certainly none of monopolization. Thus, there are no quarrels. Such distinctions are the beginnings of all arguments." (p 56)

"I love sensorial beauty, but I love ugliness much more; the weak, sick, and ignorant much more than the strong, healthy and wise. I love the ingrate, the thief, and the assassin. That's why I am so happy. There is nothing to hate, nothing to attack, nothing to destroy, I love everything." (p 152)

"Dualism is one of the most serious diseases of man, a partial blindness that allows him to see only the spiritual or only the materialistic. It is a form of schizophrenia that produces all kinds of evil and that finally destroys itself." (p 52) 

"Japanese films such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai etc are quite highly admired in the West. But in Japan they are considered to be second rate stories for the masses - those with sensory and sentimental levels of judgement." (p 90)

 

Fukuoka Masanobu: The natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy

 

"People in the small, humble villages of which Lao Tzu spoke were unaware that the Great Way of man lay in living independently and self sufficiently, yet they knew this in their hearts... there is no need for philosophy in the farming village. It is the urban intellectual who ponders human existance, who goes in search of truth and questiuons the purpose of life." (p 30)

 

Tanazaki Junichiro: Some Prefer Nettles

 

"Had she not been his wife he might have been able to look on her as a play thing, and the fact that she was his wife made it impossible for him to find her interesting." (p 101)

 

Humphrey McQueen: Tokyo World

 

On Murakami's Norweigan Wood: "I's quite erotic, comic in places, but depressing. Almost everyone dies, or goes mad or both. At its worst Norwegian Wood could be described as a Mills and Boon rewrite of The Magic Mountain." (p 285)

 

"Are Japanese atrocities in World War Two the vindication of a half century of White Australian policy, Australian nationalsim, Australian militarism? What went wrong? Were Japanese attitudes the result of deficiencies in Japanese character or the result of western racism?" (p 84) 

 

Jack Kerouac: Haiku

 

"The sound of silence

Is all the instruction

You'll get."

 

Oe Kenzaburo: Prize Stock

 

"Inside a sticky black bag my hot eyelids, my burning throat, my searing hand began to knit me and give me shape. But I could not pierce the sticky membrane and break free of the bag. Like a lamb prematurely born I was wrapped in a bag that stuck to my fingers." (p161)

 

Oe Kenzaburo: The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away

 

"The small childthat is himself has just noticed that his own hands are grotesque, alien, terrifying "things" and, unable to throw them away, stands paralyzed. Immediately he pales, his eyes recede into their sockets and roll upward, exposing the white, while the skin around his eyes beads with sweat like delicate milk. His beautiful mother in her early thirties, her manner unlike that of the people in the valley beacause she has grown up in China, holds out her own hands and tries to distract the child, "Look, mine are the same, the same human hands." (p 39)

 

Ian Buruma: A Japanese Mirror

 

"I myself have worked as a lowly assistant to as a photographer in Tokyo, whom in the traditional artisan style, we had to call Master. Neither the Master, nor his assistants would tell me what to do, let alone how to do it. One had to "learn with the body" as they called it. One acquires the kata (the paper form) by sharpening one's instinct, by making mistakes and being humiliated. "But you never told me..." is never an excuse in Japan." (p 56)

 

"Heroes are by definition reactionary, fighting with their backs against the walls of history." (p 162)

 

Edward Seidensticker: Low City, High City

 

"Kawabata used to say that, though he found abundant sadness in the culture of the Orient, he had never come upon the bleakness that he sensed in the West." (p 209-210)

 

"The literature known as modern... is obsessively, gnawingly intellectual. If a single theme runs through it, that theme is the quest for identity, an insistence upon what it is that establishes the individual as individual... The rebellion against the family and the casting of the authoritarian father into nether regions... (p 250)

 

"Modern literature is altogther more national and cosmopolitan than Edo literature... Modern literature calls to mind not specific places like Shibuya and Kanda but that great abstraction 'suburbia'" (250 - 251)

 

Katai Tayama: Quoted in Injurious to Public Morals by Jay Rubin

 

"Dopp generally looks upon women with contempt.  There has been a tendancy in Japan since the beginning of Meiji to admire women, but of late it seems the tide has been turning and we have begun looking down on her again. There seems to be signs of this new tide in Europe as well. As far as I am concerned, the Japanese have always known woman for shat she is and have always taken an extrremely natural and proper attitude towards her.The post-Restoration tendency to admire women was nothing but a brief attempt to imitate Europe. The Europeans have always over-valued woman and worshipped her quite indiscriminately, but I suspect that they, too, have begun to wake up too late. be that as it may, I for one wish to express my complete agreement with Doppo's view of women... I fully recognise that there is a beauty in women to which none can ever aspire. But we can never recognise her true beauty until we realise fully that she is a thing to be despised. This may seem irrational, but it is not in the least." (p 62)

 

"... it is precisely the writer who has the ability to convey a sense of inner vitality and curiousity through powerful images, who contributes to the liberalization of society. If Natsume Soseki has emerged as Japan's greatest modern novelist, it is not because of the speeches his characters deliver, and certainly not because of any doctrines or slogans they spout, but because of the indelible imagery with which he conveys his view of the world - in otjer words, what he shares with a sensualist like Tanazaki (the second most likely candidate for "greatest") rather than with a liberal theoretician like Yoshino Sakuya." ( p 183)  

 

Karel van Wolferen: The Enigma of Japanese Power

 

"A popular sub-category of nihonjinron theories concerns the Japanese language, which is widely thought by Japanese to be particularly difficult to learn, not because of its insanely complicated writing system, but because it possesses a "spirit" unlike any other language..." (p 347)

Hal Porter: The Actors; An Image of the New Japan 1968

"Aware of the power of the white man, the Japanese are never free of – and cannot ever hope to be entirely free of – an internal warfare between rage and admiration, arrogance and servility, contempt and jealousy, a jealousy resembling that a crystal necklace might have for a diamond one. The thought of a white man is so heavy to the Japanese that he seems more than real. To a Westerner, on the other hand, the quicksand Japanese seem less than real, with a directness and naivete appalling to them, makes no bones about saying so" (p 87-8).

Interview with Ueno Chizuko and sandra Buckley in Broken Silence

‘Our primary goal is to not to be like men but to value what it means to be a woman. This aspect of Japanese feminism is deeply rooted in the history of the women’s movement in Japan as well as the individual experience of women. The emphasis on mothering over the individualism of American feminism is a characteristic shared by East Asian and some European women’ (280).

Ueno Chizuko: Nationalism and Gender (2004)

First wave feminism in Japan was not an ‘imported ideology brought from the West. Translations as a means of introducing culture always includes a screening process. From when it was first established, Japanese feminism  held an affinity for Scandinavian maternalism and rejected Anglo-Saxon individualism and egalitarianism’ (27).

 

Murakami Haruki on junbungaku, quoted in Jay Rubin: Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2003)

 

‘In Japan, with its relatively homogenous population, different literary customs have evolved. The language used in literary works tends to be the kind that communicates to a small group of like-minded people. Once a piece of writing is given the seal of approval with the label junbungaku – “pure literature” – the assumption takes hold that it only needs to communicate to a few critics and a small segment of the population. There’s nothing wrong with writing like that, of course, but there’s nothing that says that all novels have to be written this way. Such an attitude can only lead to suffocation. But fiction is a living thing. It needs fresh air (202).

Totman: The Green Archipeligo (1998)

‘Foreigners, and some Japanese as well, often speak fondly of a special Japanese “love of nature” that can be credited with this early modern forest recovery. To so argue, however, invites the tart query: did they love nature so much less during the ancient and early modern predations? More seriously, to advance this “love of nature” as an explanation would be to misconstrue terms. The “nature” of this sensibility is an aesthetic abstraction that has little relationship to the real “nature” of a real ecosystem. The sensibility associated with raising bonsai, viewing cherry blossoms, nurturing disciplined ornamental gardens, treasuring painted landscapes, and admiring chrysanthemums is an entirely different order of things from the concerns and feelings involved in policing woodland and planting trees…. (178)