Conversion of Japanese Modernity and Zen Aesthetics
Some thoughts on Tokyo Story by Yasujirō Ozu
Note: To understand any of this, you will have to watch the film and maybe know some philosophy.
Zen monasteries have a famous tradition, during the summer months, where they call young children into the temple grounds. They are asked to gather around a goldfish pond, given some paper and pencils, and asked to draw what they see. When the drawing is completed, they are asked to sit still, then redraw the same scene. This process is repeated several times. The hope is that some of the students would realize that there is an infinite number of perspectives and representations of a single subject (Carter, 2013).
Many film scholars have compared the narratives of Ozu’s films to Zen Buddhism in the hopes of uncovering what is so ‘Japanese’ about his cinema. Here, I argue that Ozu’s films are not about Zen Buddhism, his filmmaking is. Ozu’s films are about the everyday experience (Joo, 2018). He investigates the lives of Japanese families as they adjust to a new and modern world at a peculiar period in history. The central tension of most of Ozu’s films, including Tokyo Story, is that the corporation is now replacing the feudal family as the identity of a person. Zen Buddhism never comes into the narrative, it is not a topic of concern in the film. It is involved in Ozu’s construction of the film. It is not about what he is representing, but about how he is representing. Ozu’s focus on the family, of redrawing the same scenes again and again, consciously or unconsciously, comes from the practice of Zen Buddhism.
Pure Experience
The work of Nishida Kitaro finds its roots in the idea of Pure Experience. Pure experience describes the notion that all empiricism is ought to be based on experience. Rational thoughts and judgments were mere abstracted ideas taken from experience, and cannot compare to the actual experience. The experience is pure in the sense that it cannot be articulated conceptually or linguistically. Thinking about experience distorts the experience because it selects and emphasizes certain parts of the whole. In this sense, intellectual understanding is an adulterated version of pure experience (Carter, 2013). Therefore, Zen training is to attempt to remove or strip oneself of meaning and judgment, so that one is capable of just experiencing.
To provide an example of pure experience, Nishida asks the reader to look at a colour or hear a sound. The moment before one interprets the colour as belonging to a certain category or associating the sound with that of an object is a moment of pure experience. At this moment, the observer is able to see the world as a whole, including themselves as part of the whole, and thereby restructuring the dynamic of the observer and the observed (Krummel, 2015). They melt into one.
Carter (2013) offers a Basho haiku as an example of this pure experience:
The old pond
A frog jumps in —
The sound of the water.
Here the reader is not provided with what the sound of water is, it is a nothingness that is left for the reader’s imagination. There is a moment before the sound filled in by the reader is associated with that of water. This moment is a pure experience, devoid of meaning and judgment. The haiku here is not a representation of an experience but is a constructed one. Any representation of an experience would by its own nature be a selection of a limited view of the experience. Therefore, the pure experience cannot be represented. Yet, when the reader experiences the poem, they can have a pure experience. The centre of the poem is this sound, everything else is set up. The centre of the haiku is not present in the haiku.
Pure Experience in Ozu’s Cinema
A similar presence and absence can be found sprinkled throughout Ozu’s films. This idea of the construction of a pure experience, I argue, lies at the heart of understanding the filmmaking of Ozu. Sometimes his camera shows the viewer empty spaces, sometimes he lingers onto a shot after the subject has moved past, sometimes he chooses not to show what is being discussed, and sometimes he does not discuss what is being shown. Through these techniques, he captures the viewer’s attention, calling the viewer in to notice what is being shown. By disassociating what is being shown, from what was shown before, a certain sense of confusion is created — of not knowing the meaning of what is shown. This nothingness is a pure experience. For a moment, the experience of just viewing surmounts the meaning, the signification, and the narrative. It is a moment, like that from the haiku, of pure experience.
Let’s take an example from Tokyo Story to illustrate the point. The film, written by Koga Noda, is about the Hirayams family. The grandparents, who are from Onomichi, travel to Tokyo to visit their children. After the Meiji restoration, capital and power had shifted from Kyoto to Tokyo. After the bombing during WWII, the city had been quickly rebuilt, replacing much of the traditional architecture with modern high rises. The city had become the centre of all economic activity and a symbol of pride for the nation. The skyline of Tokyo was arguably one of the grander symbols of modernity in Japan. A film called Tokyo Story, with modernity as a central theme, would be expected to show some exploration of the city. Yet the viewer does not see much of the city at all.
The scene in question occurs when Nariko, their widowed daughter-in-law, volunteers to show the grandparents around the city. The trio stop at the stairwell, to rest and appreciate the Tokyo skyline. Ozu frames the shot from the bottom of the stairwell, such that we can see all three of the characters, but are unable to see what they see. The older pair have never visited the city before and are amazed by the scale of the city. The grandmother remarks, “if we got lost, we’d never find each other again”. But the film does not cut to a shot of the Tokyo skyline. Instead, the camera remains still, as the trio appreciates what we cannot even see. Yet we can share the wonder and astonishment. The skyline is left to the viewer's imagination. Through such a construction of shots, Ozu has created a moment of experiencing without witnessing. Through stillness, a moment of pure experience is constructed.
Dialectics: Tradition and the Modern State
The Education Oder of 1872 and the Land Tax Reform Law of 1873 fundamentally changed the life of the Japanese population. A feudal society, which was governed by distributed shoguns, was nationalized under the emperor.
The education order made elementary school compulsory for all. The order was based on the Iwakura mission, where Japanese men were sent abroad to understand and learn from the Western education system. After their return, through the order, they implemented ideas of local school boards and teacher autonomy. In 1870 the Japanese government established the Ministry of Education which was responsible for establishing and regulating educational standards throughout japan. The school enrollment during this period climbed from thirty percent to more than ninety percent.
The land tax reform act changed the entire financial system of the country. Previously, taxes were collected as a percentage yield of rice or other crops grown by farmers. The yield would be determined through an annual survey and was sometimes acquired as an entire village’s collective yield. The new taxation system installed as part of the Meiji restoration efforts established a system of private land ownership. The farmer would now pay their taxes in cash, rather than a crop at a uniform tax rate of three percent, which was a great reduction from the previous system. Through these reformations, the government establish a stable tax revenue, private ownership of land, suffrage rights for landowners, and enabled a new system of commerce through currency circulation.
The population living during this era was part of an era of transition. While these laws were established in the late 19th century, it was during the twentieth century when the long-term consequences of these laws started to change Japanese society. Early twentieth-century Japan was a period of great instability, a constant push and pull between the historical feudal state and the modern Western ideals were accompanied by a constant threat of war. This period was the largest generational gap between the ideology and outlook of the Japanese population. Some completely transitioned to modern society, some rejected it altogether, but most sought to find a middle ground between the two; vernacular modernity that accepted the Western modern society, but only through the lens of Japanese traditional ideals. In this period, the Japanese capital moved from Kyoto to Tokyo, a city that became the symbol of Japanese modernity. It was marked with heavy industrialization, where the salaried man chose to identify himself through his occupation over his family name.
As stated before, this central tension is the focus of most of Ozu’s work. I argue again that, although this tension is the center of the text, the representation of this tension comes from a philosophy of Zen Buddhism. Since ancestral worship is an integral part of the religion, the household is considered to be the fundamental unit of Buddhist society. In opposition, Western society acclimates the individual as the atomic unit of society (Carter, 2013). In Tokyo Story, Onomichi, the residence of the grandparents, becomes a metaphor for traditional values; it is also the traditional ‘seat’ of the family. Tokyo is then the metaphor of modernity, where the grandparent’s children have move away from the family unit and given up on religious practices (Desser, 2003).
Tokyo Story is an allegory for the Japanese experience of modernity where the grandparents, visit the symbol of modernity - Tokyo. Within the narrative, the grandparents then become the subjects that are studying the object which is life in the modern city. To understand the opposition of these two ideas in the story, I look at Nishi’as dialectic philosophy of Basho.
Nishida sees the world as self-reflexive. While the consciousness is separate from the world, since it is the observer observing the world, it is also a part of the world, since the conscious mind resides within the world it observes (Nishida & Haver, 2012). Here, Nishida rejects the Kantian epistemology which separates knowledge to be separate from the world, where knowledge was “the subject’s form-ruled construction of an objective world” (Maraldo, 2019, November 18). For Nishida, the enlightened seers were willing to accept the circular logic of subject and object, where both arise from the exitance of the other and are therefore part of a larger unity or even nothingness. Therefore Nishida’s soku hi or his dialectic logic claims “the simultaneous acceptance of both is and is not as pertaining to the same thing” (Carter, 2013, p. 45). Thus, Nishida rejects the logic of a binary that leads to synthesis. For him, the separation of the subject and object does not lead to a synthesis, but to a balance between the two, since both come from a single unity (Krummel, 2015). For example, when a person sees a mountain, they identify the mountain as the object and themselves as the subject. At the same time, they identify the unity between the mountain and themselves since both originated from a singular unity, which is the world. They recognize that it is the rational, abstractive mind that attempts to find the essence of an object to classify it as a particular type of object, thereby stripping it off its original richness. Through this realization, they can see the mountains anew.
In Tokyo Story, the grandparents are the subjects, the visit to Tokyo is the object. When they visit Tokyo, they see modern life as separate from themselves, thereby creating the binary. But this binary does not end with a synthesis, where the grandparents accept modernity or modernity accepts the grandparents. When the grandmother dies, the grandfather chooses to leave the room and stare outside and observe the dawn. He declines to comment on or even shows his sorrow on his wife’s passing. Instead, he chooses to comment on the beauty of dawn, he accepts the underlying unity of the world. During their visit to Tokyo, the grandparents saw the modern world as separate from themselves, a world they observed but did not identify with. After the death, the grandfather comes to see both as part of the same world; therefore he can now observe modernity in a new light. For the generation from the transition era, society was always in flux. The grandparents were born in the period when the reforms of the Meiji restoration were just starting to take effect on the culture. They were the first generation to grow up under the new education system and operate in the commercial world created by the tax reforms. Their kids, on the other hand, only knew modern society. The narrative of Tokyo Story then, underlines both the separation of the family and the individual, while simultaneously underlying the unity and continuous flow of it all.
References
Carter, R. E., & Kasulis, T. P. (2013). The Kyoto school: An introduction. State University of New York Press.
Desser, D. M. (2003). Ozu's Tokyo Story. Cambridge University Press.
Hashimoto, T. (1982). Meiji restoration: A case of revolution from above.
Joo, W. (2017). The cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the everyday. Edinburgh University Press.
Joo, W. (2018). The cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the everyday. Edinburgh University Press.
Krummel, J. W. (2015). Nishida Kitarō's chiasmatic chorology: Place of dialectic, dialectic of place. Indiana University Press.
Maraldo, J. C. (2019, November 18). Nishida Kitarō. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/#AbsNot
Nishida, K., & Haver, W. (2012). Ontology of production 3 essays. Duke Univ. Press.