shogun painted culture

This is an original, fascinating, hard-to-classify book, full of hints and portents about present-day troubles—Japan’s, and therefore the rest of the world’s. Screech states his aim clearly enough in the opening pages: ‘This book is about building a boundary to construct a centre’. It is a study of ‘the invention, formalization and fixing of a “Japan” supported by its nodal city and canopied by a presence that was to be defined as tangible “Japanese culture”.’ A symbiosis, then, of art and politics, subjects not always considered together. Yet artworks, rightly read, may bear witness to the times in which they were created as much, and sometimes more honestly, than written testimony; particularly in cultures—Japan’s is a good contemporary example—in which the interpretation of the past is a weapon in the hands of the present, and the ideal of objective history, dubious everywhere, has yet to establish itself.

But Screech’s book is also an illustrated biography of a powerful noble and minister of state, Matsudaira Sadanobu, who was, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, the effective ruler of Japan. The epitome of the neo-Confucian scholar-gentleman in its eclectic and all but vanished Japanese variant, Sadanobu was not just a politician but also a philosopher, poet, painter, educator and musician. Analogies are often deceptive in explaining East to West, or vice versa, but as rough equivalents we might think of Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII and one of the creators of the Tudor civil administration, or of Cardinal Richelieu, who did much the same for Louis XIII of France; systems which continue to this day. The most striking difference is in their cultural practice. Sadanobu was not simply a patron, or a dabbler in the arts. Screech reproduces two of his self-portraits. The first, dated 1787, a hanging scroll, colour on paper, shows a stern young intellectual prince with piercing eyes, aquiline nose, set mouth and strongly jutting jaw. It was Sadanobu’s leaving present to the retainers of his own domain as he departed for the shogun’s court, a watchful image, executed in browns and creams and black. The kneeling figure’s robes are utterly plain and conventional; all attention is focused on the face. The second self-portrait—colour on silk—shows Sadanobu at the age of 54. Again, the face is the centre of interest. With hairline brushstrokes, Sadanobu depicts his now straggly, greying eyebrows and thickening jowls; marks of resignation crease his cheeks. His gaze is less icily determined now: more far-seeing. It is an extraordinary image, both compelling and moving, of the concentrated fusion of political and intellectual power.

Sadanobu (his given name by which, in royal style, he is remembered) might well himself have become a shogun, or hereditary military dictator—one half of what Screech calls Japan’s ‘bicephalic monarchy’, the other being the emperor—rather than chief minister of the boy-shogun Ienari, in nominal power. Born in 1758, in Edo—now known as Tokyo: the ‘Eastern Capital’—into one of the collateral branches of the Tokugawa shogunal family, he was the grandson of Tokugawa Yoshimune, eighth of the line. Sadanobu’s education in the Confucian classics, calligraphy, the composition of Chinese and Japanese poetry and swordsmanship, among other subjects, was indeed that of a potential shogun. At sixteen, however, the hapless victim of a castle intrigue, he was ordered to be adopted by the Matsudaira family of Shirakawa, not under the direct control of the shogun; and at twenty-five succeeded his adoptive father as daimyo (‘great name’, or lord) of the domain.

Japan—or ‘the Japanese states’, as Screech calls the mosaic of feudal daimyates that then covered the archipelago—had just been plunged into the start of a five-year famine, result of the dismal Asian combination of poor rice harvests, weak distribution and the inflexible exaction of rents in kind from peasant farmers; possibly linked to the same El Niño effect that has been cited as a contributing factor to the French Revolution. The 1780s famine claimed uncounted millions of obscure lives; when it ended, all noted that not a single person in Sadanobu’s domain had starved to death—a brilliant and compassionate administrative feat. In 1787, Sadanobu was summoned to Edo as chief minister of shogun Ienari, replacing a predecessor both incompetent and corrupt.

Screech’s period is that of ‘the rise of the merchant’, now often read as a moment pulsating with democratic promise. ‘Scholars’, Screech writes, have been ‘wont to side with the forces of alterity and unrest’. But for Sadanobu and his contemporaries, as he points out, the age was one of disastrous decline: famines, fires, storms and shipwrecks accompanied the shift of wealth from an older to a newer elite. In the growing cities, enterprising merchants bribed corrupt officials; starving farmers rioted; the roads were dangerous. The shogunate seemed threatened with collapse. This is the ‘fear’ in Screech’s subtitle: Sadanobu’s management of ‘creativity’ was aimed at restoring shogunal authority through the reconstruction of a unifying cultural order. Screech himself is rather sympathetic to this: ‘Their elite aim was not just to shore up a “Venice preserv’d” but to avoid waste and warfare.’ The shogunate itself could not last forever—in fact, not beyond 1868. But the ‘Japanese culture’ that Sadanobu confected is, he argues, still with us to this day.

The Japanese states of Sadanobu’s day were not a nation, and had no idea of becoming one. There was neither a national treasury, army nor administration. The Tokugawa shoguns directly ruled only a third of the archipelago, including the major cities of Edo and Osaka. Some 280 daimyates occupied the rest, in a patchwork best (if imperfectly) compared to the fractious dukedoms and principalities of the Holy Roman Empire. Japan, however, had no Austria or Prussia, much less a France nearby. Since 1644, China had been under the secretive, non-Chinese Manchu or Qing dynasty, and offered no threat. The moribund kingdom of Korea, Japan’s traditional danger quarter, was now theoretically a tributary of both China and Japan, and the occasional Korean embassies carried banners reading ‘Foreign Envoys Bearing Tribute’. The cultural and political borders of ‘Japan’ were vague—a fuzzy frontier to the north, beyond which the hunter-gathering Ainu lived in the still largely undisturbed island of Yezo, called Hokkaido by its eventual Japanese occupiers (‘shogun’ translates as ‘great barbarian-conquering general’, meaning the inoffensive Ainu); and to the south, a porous cultural border in Nagasaki.

Foreign trade had been confined to this one city ever since the Edo shoguns seized power in the seventeenth century, and had long been restricted to the merchants of three nations: feeble Korea, Qing China, and the long-domesticated Dutch, who stuck strictly to business and made no attempt to spread subversive doctrines like Christianity—they had, in fact, curried favour by lending cannon to help the shogunate suppress an uprising by persecuted Japanese Christians at Shimabara, near Nagasaki, in 1637. From the 1770s, however, new and far more formidable barbarians began to knock at Japan’s indistinct doors, north and south. British ships were sighted off the Kyushu coast, looking for business openings; in 1792 the Russian Adam Laxman tried to establish official trade relations in the north.

As chief minister, Sadanobu’s response to these threats was to organize an inspection team of military men, artists and surveyors to study Japan’s newly exposed coastline; he marched with the expedition himself. He would propose and, in retirement, helped set up cannon to defend at least the seaward approaches to the shoguns’ capital, Edo—the first such batteries in Japan—from a feared Russian incursion. But for the most part, Screech argues, Sadanobu sought to defend the boundaries by constructing—‘restoring’—a stout inside. The chief artist to accompany the surveying expedition was selected for his pictorial realism. The paintings he produced were devoid of the expected historical and poetical tropes of the Japanese landscape tradition; instead Sadanobu was presented with bald representations of the land along the coast—albeit crowned by Mt. Fuji’s sacral presence.

By the stroke of luck that often helps clever people, the year after Sadanobu became chief minister the city then known as Keishi, residence of the emperors, burnt to the ground. The emperor’s office was essentially a religious one, whose only role had become the legitimization of the upstart shoguns—a relationship symbolized in Keishi by the modest residence allotted the emperor and the massive castle of the shogun, clearly indicating who was boss. Sadanobu, with a strong visual sense and a poet’s way with words, used the destruction of Keishi to initiate what Screech calls ‘Image Management for Royal Power’, a startlingly modern, not to say Blairite concept—and like all such operations, fundamentally fraudulent. First, he revived for Keishi its ancient name, Kyoto, which simply means ‘capital city’—and still looks boastful on Kyoto license-plates. The shoguns’ Kyoto castle was never rebuilt, but the emperor’s villa was enlarged to look more like a palace. The emperor himself was elevated from ecclesiastical obscurity to be the theoretical head of the kokutai, the ‘national body’; a term with strong racial overtones, rather like the German Volk.

All this was for show; the substance of power remained with the shoguns in their castle town, Edo. Here, Sadanobu applied the reverse principle: discreet concealment. Visitors to Tokyo, as Edo is now called, are sometimes puzzled to see that Edo Castle, the one-time shogunal fortress where the emperor now lives, is no castle at all. The moat and Cyclopean stone walls remain, but inside is a relatively modest, one-storey housing complex in the taste of a cultivated country gentleman. Edo Castle once had a donjon and keep more than three hundred feet high, frowning over an ant-heap of merchants and shogunal retainers outside the walls. This, too, had burned down; Sadanobu and his successors never rebuilt it. The result, a flamboyant emperor and a reclusive shogun, were designed by Sadanobu to make real power as inconspicuous and therefore as uncontentious as possible. In doing this he solved, but only for the moment, a problem in Oriental statecraft that haunts Japan to this day.

Sadanobu was all his life an exponent of the neo-Confucian doctrines of the Chinese thinker Zhu Xi, introduced into Japan by Zen Buddhist monks in ancient times. Neither Shinto nor Buddhism have much to teach socially, so neo-Confucianism, which does, continues to guide Japanese taste and behaviour to this day. Seeking heavenly sanction for the existing order, the neo-Confucians taught that social harmony was upheld by reciprocal relationships of justice between superiors, who were urged to be virtuous and benevolent, and subordinates, who were expected to be obedient and to observe the proprieties. Any superior, especially if hereditary, could lose his virtue, and such backsliding was widely believed to lie behind the social turmoil that Sadanobu inherited from his predecessors. By Chinese ideas, such a ruler had lost the Mandate of Heaven, which would be inherited by the rebel who could overturn him. The right of rebellion was integral to the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties, a story well known to educated Japanese like Sadanobu; but rebellion was the last thing he wanted to see justified.

The claim of blood descent, however, makes no requirement of virtue, even today. Japan’s emperors supposedly descend in an unbroken line from ‘time immemorial’—a dynasty in fact sustained by concubinage, adoption and similar devices, but owing its longevity precisely to the fact that it was divorced from the perils of real power. Sadanobu had thus arrived at something like the Western idea of constitutional monarchy, the separation of the dignified from the efficient aspects of government—but nevertheless containing the same hidden danger: a figurehead emperor could be retained to disguise the seizure of power by a top-down revolution; exactly what happened to Japan in 1868, and again in the early twentieth century when a military regime took over.

With the emperor powerless and the shogun hidden behind his castle walls, who was to govern Sadanobu’s Japan-in-the-making? The shoguns began as military adventurers, and their administration, such as it was, fell naturally to their subordinate commanders, the class of hereditary men-at-arms: the samurai. These men were accustomed to swaggering around Edo with arrogant retinues attired in expensive mock equipment, the military fashion statements still to be admired in museum displays of Japanese artefacts. Merchants, in fear of the swords the samurai class were alone allowed to carry and use, were only too glad to lend them money; brothel-owners to entertain them against promises of payment in the distant future. These drunken and licentious soldiery-turned-civil-servants were the next target of Sadanobu’s reforming zeal.

His first step was a set of sumptuary laws, bitterly resented by his subjects. Out went the fancy-dress armour, whose steel plates, originally fastened with soldierly hemp, were by now held together with flashy silk cords. In came the dark colours, inconspicuous clan crests (these days, company buttonhole badges) and sober manners that can still be seen on any Tokyo subway carrying bureaucrats and businessmen to their offices—although the tradition of drunken licentiousness off-duty has not entirely disappeared. Next was the inculcation of a consistent bureaucratic ideology, a compound of Japanese native values and well-digested elements from China, Korea and even India, enforced by compulsory examinations which blended military discipline with the intellectual polish of the most unmilitary Chinese mandarinate—and gave Japan the seeds of an accomplished public-spirited and dedicated middle management whose ethos, while fading, still has no equivalent in Asia, and few in the rest of the world. Sadanobu himself wrote a treatise on administrative terms, providing the standardized vocabulary without which no bureaucracy can function.

Sadanobu next addressed the musical and pictorial tastes of the Japanese merchant cities—signs, to a stern neo-Confucianist, of imminent moral collapse. This was a time when erotic woodblock prints of the pleasure quarters (well described in Screech’s previous book, Sex and the Floating World) were, in the neo-Confucianist view, taking the place of ‘real’ (that is, officially sanctioned) paintings in samurai households. The music of ‘theatre and brothel’ (worlds closely identified) such as that of the lute-like shamisen, was supplanting that of the classical sho, a fifteen-pipe mouth organ whose screeching reportedly sent Edo cats berserk.

For the first time, archivists and artists were sent throughout the Japanese lands, far beyond the shogun’s own domain, to catalogue and copy rare manuscripts, temple screens and paintings. Rather than ransacking the ancient shrines to stuff his personal collection, as was the habit of most noble lords, Sadanobu had copies made, including a scale model of an eleventh-century temple which did not differ from the original by ‘even so much as a drop of dew’. He himself picked up his brush and copied out, stroke for stroke, the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, eight times over in as many years, in his attempts to establish a classic. ‘He mostly wished’, wrote an admiring courtier, ‘to hand on the physical appearance of things so as to assist ministers in times to come.’ The ‘Japanese culture’ Sadanobu was creating had to be projected back onto the distant past; but if it was to have real authority in such troubled times, it also had to carry a modern charge.

The template favoured for this new, unified Japanese aesthetic stressed ‘pictures of the present’ and an accurate style of representation, disdaining what Sadanobu saw as the prettifying and eroticizing art of the Floating World. Authenticity was important: he and his followers objected to boats with ‘a few token waves’ drawn around them, to plants ‘just hanging in mid-air’, to birds landing on trees whose branches were too spindly to support them—‘lunatic anomalies’, claimed Sadanobu’s favourite artist Okyo, which undermined the painters’ impeccably accurate brushwork. Screech provides splendid examples of thematically conservative compositions charged with the new realism: Kishi Ganku’s 1790 Cranes in the Snow, for instance, where the weight of the two birds is precisely calculated to determine how deep in the snow their feet should sink.

To set an example, Sadanobu built a waterside house—the Turret of a Thousand Autumns, surrounded by the Garden of Bathing in Obligation—on the site where the Tokyo Fish Market now does raucous business. Here the shamisen was barred, and the sho and other classical instruments—the harp-like koto and the hichiriki reed-pipe—were played, rather in the manner of the musical evenings of a minor German court of the same period. At his School of Difficult Questions, he essentially founded a new discipline—Japanese Studies—at a time when a politically unified nation still seemed remote. Partly by refurbishing half-forgotten items, partly by passing off new inventions as products of an authentic past—not unlike the nineteenth-century invention of the British public school—Sadanobu shaped a still recognizable, standard Japanese culture, centred, as it still is, on the living museum city of Kyoto; far from real power.

In 1793 Sadanobu was dismissed from his shogunal posts by Ienari, newly come of age, after a minor tiff over a title he refused to confer on the father of the reigning emperor—again showing, as between Kyoto and Edo, who was the real boss. In retirement Sadanobu continued, and in the Japanese manner even increased, his influence over politics. Screech is careful to make clear that Sadanobu did not bring about all these changes single-handed, or that he followed anything like a conscious blueprint. Instead he writes of the ‘Sadanobu process’, the work of many hands, to which the chief minister’s writings, artistic interests and personal example made an essential contribution. Deeply unpopular in his own time—members of the Dutch East India Company spoke of his ‘hated and strict’ governance, which seemed more likely to precipitate the end of the Tokugawa regime than to save it—Sadanobu actually left the shogunate in far better shape than he found it, restored its finances as far as was possible, cancelled debts that were clogging trade, and kept its rule afloat for another seventy years.

Like a good historian Screech sticks to his period, but it is tempting to add that his hero’s influence lasted long after his death in 1829. The shoguns’ new-style adminstration carried on unfazed through the spurious ‘restoration’ (to the power no emperor had exercised in a millennium) of the Emperor Meiji in 1868, and the foundation of the half-modern, semi-unified Japanese state—itself a prime example of the Sadanobu process of innovation passed off as the revival of a selectively re-invented past. The same bureaucracy survived for another century and a half, with the tenacity of a service recruited on talent, and only recently has it fallen from the awe in which the Japanese unquestioningly held it. What has been new about Japanese politics in the ‘lost’ decade of the 1990s is not the corruption of the Liberal Democratic Party, an old story, but the revelations of bribery, embezzlement and incompetence in the real government: Sadanobu’s heirs, Japan’s civil service elite.

As in his day, the public finances are near collapse, organized crime prospers, the educational system has lost its way and there are widespread calls for reform. Today’s cultural medium, however, is not the poetry, painting and philosophy Sadanobu promoted but the domestic dictator, TV, with its superficiality and flea-sized attention span. Traditionally, Japanese politicians have been terrible on television—robotic and embarrassed, uttering lines like: ‘The future lies ahead’. Japan has now at last found its own TV politicians in Prime Minister Koizumi and Foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko. With his collar-length permed hair, loud neckties and sprinting soundbites, Koizumi is visibly pitching against the sober-suited, tongue-tied bureaucracy itself—on behalf of a party that has been the bureaucrats’ errand boy and supplicant for half a century. What is neo-Sadanobuian about Koizumi, whose policies are platitudes, is that he is running entirely on image. Ms Tanaka has more to her as far as real policy goes—she follows her father, Japan’s prime minister in the 1970s, in being more openly insubordinate to the Americans, for instance, whereas Koizumi’s political pedigree is from the anti-communist Right—but her big appeal, my neighbours say, is to women voters, who see her on the news standing up to men, Japanese and American, as they would like to do. Television may seem a million miles from Sadanobu’s project of restoring cultural confidence in the ruling elite; but read in terms of Screech’s suggestive image-analysis, maybe not.