Tokyo: Red Carpets, Jetlag, and Beautiful Murders

The crowd is going wild. The air – filled with waving rectangles of red, white and blue, patterned in American, New Zealand, Taiwanese and British ways. The walls – adorned with other, more exotic and colorful flags – the flags of the various colleges of the day’s celebrities. The ground – occupied by two empires of students separated by a river of red – a real, real red carpet. The screen proudly proclaims “Japan Tour” – and now! – now the names and photos of the first group of professors float onto it. The tutors step onto the carpet, cheered on by the crowd. And after a while – Ewa Bigaj, Pembroke College, Oxford. She walks onto the carpet with two other student-celebrities. The Technos students closest to the carpet wave and grab her by the hands. She is handed a slender rose, and her photo is on a big, big screen, probably for the only time in her life.

This is how we were welcomed to Japan Tour. I was told by the students who came to Technos last year that there was a red carpet and a large screen involved – but nothing could have prepared me for this hour of stardom.

After the welcome ceremony, we were treated to an all-you-can-eat buffet of Japanese delicacies. Over lunch, conversations with the students and obligatory photo shots ensued.

One particular exchange repeated itself over and over throughout my visit.

Technos student: “What’s your major?”

Me: “Math and philosophy.”

“Oh my God! Math? Really? I’ve always hated math! And how long is your course?”

“Four years.”

“Four years of math?! How could you do this to yourself?!”

If I was less predisposed to try and find something interesting in everything under the sun, though, I probably would have exclaimed much the same upon hearing the majors of my Japanese interlocutors. Hotels and Hospitality, Tourism, Civil Aviation – though learning how to make different cocktails sounded like fun, I couldn’t imagine wanting to do this for two or three years – let alone saying, with perfect honesty, that it is one’s greatest dream to work as an airport clerk. But then they couldn’t imagine wanting to be a professor.

There was something slightly Huxleyesque about all these students so happy to do jobs which in the West would not be considered especially attractive, but on the whole I think it was more impressive than frightening. Japanese employees did seem to always do their jobs with an honest smile, and I think (tentatively) that their choices to do their particular jobs were no less their own than my choice to study math and philosophy.

The attraction for that evening was a visit to the kabuki theater. And an attraction indeed it was. The audio guide we were given (which, apart from a translation of most dialogues, gave an informative commentary to the plays) told us that kabuki is sometimes called “moving ukiyo-e” (woodblock prints) – and for an enthusiast of ukiyo-e like me, this meant internally squealing in excitement for half of the play. For the half that I didn’t nearly sleep through, I hurry to add... We were severely jetlagged, the whole group of visiting students and professors, and there comes a point when sleep is much more attractive than beauty...

Kabuki started out in the seventeenth century as a collection of dances performed by a Shinto priestess’s troupe of female dancers. The subsequent kabuki shows were deemed inappropriate and vulgar, and so in 1629 women were banned from the practice. And so originated kabuki as we know it today, with its onnagata – male actors specializing in female roles. But why are female roles still performed by men, even today? The audio guide claimed that women would not be able to play female roles the way onnagata do – a kabuki female cannot be too natural, and besides, the roles often require extremely heavy costumes. Whether this sounds convincing or not, the female-mimicking abilities of the onnagata we saw that day were highly impressive. I found myself thinking “what a beautiful woman!” an embarrassing number of times, and I saw nothing “unnatural” in the onnagata’s acting. I don’t know how they do it, but the audio guide also informed us that young boys could be played by old men in kabuki and it would look perfectly natural...

The series of plays we went to lasted a total of five hours (now you can forgive us our sleepiness, I think) – the first one was about a woman who had left her husband for his brother, and after a year ended up hiding from a snowstorm inside an abandoned hut – only to find the husband-brother seeking shelter in the very same hut. The storm raged outside with a flurry of delicate snowflakes harmonizing with the white make-up of the actors, and the scenes float in front of our eyes with the gracefulness of a winter sketch.

The repentant couple kneels in front of the husband, begging for forgiveness. They yell at him and at each other, he forgives them, blames them, blames himself, wants to kill them, wants to kill himself. The characters are a bit insane, their rapid changes of mind are a little unbelievable, but their gestures and mimicry are utterly sincere. Kabuki, we are assured by the audio guide, is all about the individual actor, his story and his facial expressions. Which are always beautiful, even when they are bizarre.

And when it comes to bizarreness, the second play far surpasses the first. The protagonist chases after his father-in-law with a sword – and he chases, and he chases, and he chases, and as his victim runs and fights back, he tries and tries to stab him. But, as ever, kabuki is beautiful, even in its dark insanity. The fight is not a fight, but a dance – the sword never touches its opponent, hands hit without hitting – and yet hit without any doubt, in the most hitting way possible. Every single movement of the figures, even as seen from under drooping eyelids, emanates fear for one’s life on the one side, and on uncontrollable anger instilled by years of injustice the other.

After long, exquisitely long minutes, the body of the father-in-law is thrown into the lake – it is obviously thrown in, though it walks into the water – which opens up for it, revealing stairs – on its own.

The last play is sheer perfection. Not in the storyline – a man kills his lover’s father, then when she learns the truth he kills her – but in the movement of the actors. It is more a dance than a play – a slow, elegant dance. I had never seen anything like it, and am at a loss for comparisons.

But throughout our evening at the kabuki theater, a comparison sprung to mind every minute. The theater was not as alien as I had expected it to be – the storylines, though bizarre, were not dissimilar to the ones I had seen in Western plays. Love and death and even the more traditionally Japanese honor are intercultural, human themes. The artistry of the scenes and the emphasis on the actor were, up to a point, uniquely Japanese elements – and ones that the West could learn from! But only up to a point. Is kabuki theater unique? Certainly. Is it, with a little help from an audio guide, comprehensible and beautiful to Westerners? Without doubt.

Tokyo: Prelude, or How I Won a Free Trip to Japan Complete with 260 Pounds Allowance

When you look under the “Awards and Prizes” section of our college website, you find the following:

Technos International Event

This rewarding and prestigious event takes place each year in Weeks 7 and 8 of Trinity Term. Four second year undergraduate students and a member of the teaching faculty spend two weeks in Japan at the invitation of the Tanaka Ikueikai Educational Trust.

You can imagine the covetous sparkle in my eyes when I read this for the first time. As I went on to read the requirements a candidate for the event was to satisfy, though, I had to accept that my hunger for a tasty chunk of Tokyo would most likely go unfed. A genuine interest in Japan, its people, culture and history. I had to admit my knowledge of Japanese culture was rather slim, and I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about Japan. But then knowledge and interest are two different things, and enthusiasm can be developed. I described what happened in the 6 months after my hearing about the event in my application; here’s a fragment.

When I found out about Technos International Event, I was motivated to look at Japanese art, of which I had previously only known throughits influence on the French Impressionists, with a fresh eye. I discovered Hokusai’s masterworks and saw in them a strong resemblance to impressionistic art, a resemblance that runs deeper than the dissimilarity in contours. I was captivated by his series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”, with its unending variation of vantage points (predating the invention of photographic cameras and Degas’s pastel works) and atmospheric conditions (so reminiscent of Monet’s haystack and poplar series!).

As I delved deeper into Japanese culture, the parallels between it and impressionist art became more and more apparent. I found the impressionistic fascination with the fleeting moment to suffuse much of Japanese poetry, from Yamabe no Akahito’s 8^th century poems to Matsuo Baisho’s haikus. But, of course, Japanese art is not impressionism, and there are important disanalogies. The former is more restrained – the haiku is, after all, a highly codified form. Rather than the French impressionists, the one Western artist that Japanese art reminds me of most is James Abbott McNeill Whistler (who was, of course, strongly influenced by Japanese culture). His art is minimalistic in a meticulously thought-out way, which does not diminish its fresh, impressionistic quality, but only enhances it. I find the same characteristics throughout Japanese art. I was especially spellbound by Hasegawa Tohaku’s Pine Trees – here was a work of art embracing sophisticated simplicity, executed by a contemporary of Caravaggio! I believe that this appreciation of minimalism is something we can all learn from the Japanese, and I would give much to see Tohaku’s original work in Tokyo’s National Museum.

When I first heard about the Technos Event, my knowledge of Japanese culture was limited to a vague idea of its connections with impressionist art and a mass of stereotypes. After half a year, I found fascinating parallels between Japanese art and the Western painters I had long admired. If I was driven to learn so much by the mere dream of a stay in Japan, how much more would such a stay teach me?

But before I had even started on my application – though after my interest in Japan had been sufficiently developed – I encountered a difficulty which threatened to shatter all my hopes for an unforgettable two weeks. Last year’s event had taken place in weeks 7 and 8 of term – and I was to have exams in week 9. That would give me two weeks fewer for revision than everyone else got, and a day between returning from Tokyo and exams. My hunger overpowering all sense, I wanted to apply nonetheless, but I knew I had to seek approval from my tutors before I could do so.

I was severely disappointed when I got two more-or-less negative replies. One tutor was decidedly against it, the other said she’d support whatever decision I made, but urged me to consider the implications doing worse on my exams could have for my future.

After a day of sulky thoughts, I decided to ask the academic office whether it would be at all possible to – if I got in, that is – return from Japan a day or two early to be able to recover from jetlag. To my intense joy, the reply I received informed me that this year the event was to take place in weeks 6 and 7, rather than 7 and 8. I could now safely apply; I’d have plenty of time to revise in the break between terms, and then still have a week after returning from Tokyo to run through my notes.

You can imagine (you all have very good imaginations, I know) how I jumped up and down when I found out my application had been accepted. You can also imagine – after all, you went through it yourself – how shocked I was when I heard about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan this March. A week or so after the cataclysm, we were informed that Technos International Event had been cancelled. I was disappointed, of course – especially since our college only allows second-year students to apply to take part in the event, so I would have no chance of going the following year. Still, I had to admit that others had been affected by the disaster in incomparably worse ways. Also, not going to Japan meant I didn’t have to do as much revision during the break between terms – after all, I’d still have those two extra weeks.

Therefore when at the end of April I got an email announcing that Technos International Event had been brought back in the form of Japan Tour – a week – rather than two – in Tokyo for two of the four Pembroke students, I didn’t jump up and down anymore. I’d done very little work over the holidays, and I was sure that at least two of the other three students would be more interested in coming than I.

To my surprise, they were not. Two backed out immediately, as they had already made other plans for the week of the Tour. To my even greater surprise, the very same tutor who urged me to consider the implications of going to Japan was this time all for my going – more so than I myself! And so, believe it or not, I applied to go this time without much enthusiasm.

Like my enthusiasm for Japanese culture, though, this enthusiasm too grew with time. When I walked out the bus that drove me to the airport on the day of my departure, I was as impossibly excited as anyone who had just won an exclusive holiday in Tokyo could possibly be.

My excitement turned to worry as the self-checkout machine refused to let me through yet another time. “Your flight was overbooked. We’ll have to move you to a different one. Stand in that line there” – the member of airport staff I asked was less apologetic than she should have been, I thought.

It turned out it wasn’t so bad – I’d be moved to a flight that arrived in Tokyo only half an hour later. That did mean going to a different terminal with little time to spare before the gate closed, but it also meant a 260 pound refund. A free stay in Tokyo plus 260 pounds – life, I love you.

Sublime STate

The iridescent glow of burning darkness, burning worlds, burning canvas. My heart skips a beat, skips up and down with startled joy, jumps up to my throat. Too dramatic, too show-offish, too bright, too huge. Love it!

I take in the whole room. Paintings upon paintings, too huge, too dramatic, too many. I find myself moving backwards and forwards in front of each work, sometimes ending up with my back leaning against the opposite wall (and still I’m too close to see it all), sometimes almost touching the little details which give little hint of (or maybe: “a little hint to...”) the big picture.

Entitled “Sublime”, the room itself is such a sublime landscape, exaggeratingly impressive, huge, vulgarly awe-inspiring.

The burning darkness is fluorescently orange; I do wonder how one can squeeze such a color out of oil paints. Mountains scarred with painstaking detail roll and shudder and collapse, stand on edges at dizzyingly impossible angles and hover in a perpetual suggestion of movement. A hair-thin lightning bolt of infinitely white paint points the eye to the bottomless pit of eternal damnation, pitch black and falling out of the painting, somewhere below. The little people that fall with it are barely noticeable – this is more of a metaphorical abstraction of terror than a vision of real human suffering. A pleasurable terror – at least for the viewer – as a panel in the room describes the sublime. Apparently, though, this is all in accordance with the vision from the Apocalypse – where mountains were moved from their positions and humongous fires danced with orange too bright, too bright.

Such luminous silver! A drop of bloody sun drowns in the quietly roaring sea (for the night and the sea are quiet even in their roar; and a painting is quieter still, despite its eternal roar of light and shadow). Fog pours down from the sky in perpendicular torrents that slice the eerie moon in half. Like in The Great Day of His Wrath, the figures are only secondary to the scenery. But here they warrant a little more compassion on my part. The painting is entitled The Deluge, and the name refers to the biblical flood of Noah and the dove. Yes, Noah and the dove – such is the iconography I am used to. Childish animals lined up all in a row, pairs of giraffes and lions painted by people who had never seen any. Or rainbows, white wings and beaks of olive branches. What one forgets is that the flood allegedly killed all save Noah’s family. A story of hope and a compassionate God, indeed! Danby’s work, with all its pomp and glory, stays truer to the story.

Three-meter tall painted cliffs are slightly too much... Lost in the mist of light reflected off oil paint, hung another half a meter above your head, James Ward’s Gordale Scar will always be more impressive than beautiful. I like the geometric patterns of the painted rocks and the minuscule, twenty-centimeter cows you can actually come up to and comprehend.

Some of the works are of rather smaller format. Take John Brett’s Glacier of Rosenlaui. Just a landscape. No deluge, no last judgment, no battle. Not even much of a mountain range, only some snow and pebbles. But the little pebbles bore themselves into my insides with all the drama of the last judgment. Nothing is ever that realistic. Pebbles blur before your eyes, be it in fog or in bright sunlight; and if the pebbles don’t blur, the snow behind them does. But these pebbles, this snow – they just are. Oh yes, there is the sublime in the pre-Raphaelites’ hyperrealism – in the monumentality of a pebble and a blade of grass.

I bend my fingers in all directions and am truly afraid I shall break them. John Everett Millais’s Dew-Drenched Furze manages to be misty and clear at once, red and green, calming and finger-breaking.

I had never really appreciated Dante Gabriel Rosetti that much. Millais was more to my taste, with his crisply cut flower buds and blades of grass, and Rosetti’s crayon-colored odes to Christianity seemed overrated by comparison. His Beata Beatrix was in my view no exception. Yes, a pretty woman, but not much more, really. That just goes to show that reproductions and originals are two different things – for this Beatrix was something much more than a pretty woman. Drenched in sunlight squeezed into a shimmering halo by an otherwise commonplace bridge behind her head, flanked by two figures of an intense mysteriousness, her face seemed to reflect just the sublime feelings I had been experiencing here. Which isn’t exactly a good thing, as the sublime vision she was experiencing was the vision of her own imminent death.

Yes, it’s all cheap pomp and meaningless drama. No, wait, it isn’t. It’s the sublime beauty of a mountain range, a storm at sea, a sunset. The beauty’s there, no matter how kitsch repetition has made it. And how glad I am to be child enough to be moved by it!

Triptych

From Sunday's excursion to London.

The marbles in Westminster cathedral form a dizzyingly dazzling quilt of inter-hue relations. Pink, green, blue and gold, its Byzantine extravagance is a far cry from the typical English Gothic, and how it stuns! Westminster is the largest catholic church in London, but it’s not its size that impresses. The nave – the widest in any place of worship in England – seems more like the waiting room in a train station than a monument to God. This may be due to its unfinished state – above a certain height, the marbles give way to a dark, crude stone. As if the message of the church were that paradise is on Earth, not above our heads and tombstones. A very convincing message, if not for the ray of light that, right before our exit, embraces the rough materialness of the stone suspended somewhere up there, above our heads.

But it’s not Westminster cathedral we came to London for. It’s for the National Gallery, for a journey through the history of beauty.

The thirteenth to fifteenth century paintings are exquisite. It’s that period that’s so very often underestimated – as if art had emerged completely formed with Leonardo and Raphael. I’ve only really discovered it through the pre-Raphaelites, and to be honest this discovery slightly undermines my love of this nineteenth century style. For it seems that the pre-Raphaelites did not add much to what people had painted like in the fifteenth century – they just revived and slightly modernized it. And the fact that it can be so easily modernized makes fifteenth century art astonishing.

Nonetheless, one does get tired. If I closed my eyes at the end of this section, I’d probably see rows of hyper-realistic Virgins clad in pointlessly, dizzyingly bright gowns, holding pudgy, naked baby sons who stare out into space vacantly...

The Madonna with the Iris – workshop of Albrecht Dürer

This one strikes you from the moment you set eyes on it. The intense crimson of the gown, along with the hyper-realism of the surroundings – of course that’s what draws your attention to it. But there’s more to it – the Virgin’s face, roundish and unholy, crowned in piggish-blonde hair, seems to be exclaiming, with the air of a lady of high standing: “Oh look, it’s a child, how cute!”. She might soon return to her partying and give the child back to its nanny. But the sparkles of gold upon her hair!...

They force me to reconsider my hasty conclusion. “Oh look, it’s a child” – is not her expression the one of someone who just looked at a loved one as if they had just seen something completely new, to whom it seems for a moment that they understand, they know? The expression of someone who loves. In the unholy, vain way that is the only way we can truly love. “Look, this is my child.”

As for the child itself – at first, he strikes me as impossibly stiff and unnatural, in that curled-up way of his. But then look at the way he’s clutching his mother’s arm with his feet, the way he’s holding her wrist with the palm of his tiny hand. His whole body is tense, yes – it is tense because he is completely taken up with his sucking, he is one great gulp of milk and life.

Then there’s the hyper-realism of the surroundings. Each blade of grass makes your insides somersault. And the simplicity of the background view, the one line of the horizon cutting the air and sea with a sharp calmness. And the color, the subtlety of the color!

Unnatural at first, impossibly natural second, finally as unnatural as only life can be – yes, there’s always room in the world for another well-done Madonna.

Unfaithfulness – Paolo Veronese

The diagonal of her back juts out of the painting and into your face. She’s showing us her backside, and I can’t help but laugh.

It’s the nicest of the four “allegories of love” exhibited in this room (unfaithfulness? the nicest?) – but they’re all extremely nice. A lot of it undoubtedly has to do with the color, the same subtlety as in “The Madonna with the Iris”. Indeed, our unfaithful Venus is uncannily similar to the Madonna – she’s even got the same hue of hair. Perhaps this is the “partying” for which she leaves her child to her nanny?

She’s handing a love letter to a pink-clad and rather characterless dandy, while her lovestruck husband (?), dressed in pretty orange, looks on with sad – and intelligent – puppy eyes. He is softly holding one of her hands as the dandy gluttonously snatches the letter from the other one. The husband seems calm (perhaps resigned, perhaps still naively trustful, maybe gently reproachful), but for the odd perspective from which we see his foot; it seems to jerk in pain involuntarily, as if to kick the hated rival. The cupids stare on in disgust.

A Woman Bathing in a Stream – Rembrandt

White, coarse, thick – the paint thrown onto the canvas with a frenzied palette knife, the gown, the gown! The nearby darkness billows vaporously with abstract golds, there’s a momentousness somewhere in the air. There she stands, soft and blurry under the coarse cloth, completely preoccupied with the cold water she has just entered. A film paused for a second, there is an immense stillness in the way she is about to lift the gown over her thighs. There is such intimacy here, such quiet and simplicity. “The picture appears unfinished (...), but it was clearly finished to Rembrandt's satisfaction since he signed and dated it,” reads the information plate below the painting. Unfinished? But “finishing” would have beat all the beauty out of this masterpiece! There is nothing more or less in the painting than what needs to be there.

After hundreds upon hundreds of gaily colored gowns, carefully outlined hyper-realism, and overpopulated heroic dramatisms, Rembrandt quietly puts a coarse, wet cloth over your eyes and filters gentle sunlight through it.

Yes, if paradise is anywhere, it is on Earth. But it is not in the marbles of our earthly walls, it is in the rough stones of our ceilings and the stripes of light that slice through them.

Whoa, that was a swiping generalization. Hurray to Rubens and Vivaldi, obviously you guys are just as wonderful as Rembrandt and Bach.