TOKYO — Donald Keene, who delved into the origins of Japan’s traditional beauty while working on his book “Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan,” set to writing about a new figure in 2003. This was Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841), an artist and intellectual of the latter half of the Edo period. Kazan was also a samurai warrior, and became chief retainer of the Mikawa Tahara domain of central Japan. He was also influenced by Dutch thought and studies, as the Netherlands was Japan’s window to the West during the “sakoku” period (1639-1853), when the country cut off contact with most of the world.
In 1952, prior to his years of research in Kyoto, Keene wrote the book, “The Japanese Discovery of Europe,” which was themed on European influence on Japan during the sakoku period. About half a century later, in what may have been a follow-up to the book, Keene chose Kazan as the protagonist of his work. In the following passages, Keene describes his impressions of the Edo period figure.
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I decided that Kazan would be the central figure of my study, but as yet I knew little about him. I recalled two drawings by Kazan showing how harshly he was treated after being arrested for allegedly showing excessive partiality for the West. One sketch shows him squatting on the ground as he is trussed with ropes. The other sketch shows Kazan, his hands chained together, being interrogated by two sworded samurai. These sketches lingered in my memory even more than the accounts I had read of Kazan’s life.
I was attracted to Kazan especially as a thinker. But I knew that he was better known as a painter and therefore began my research by examining his paintings reproduced in art books and catalogues of exhibitions. Some paintings so closely resembled earlier Chinese or Japanese paintings that they did not interest me, but even when Kazan painted conventional subjects, he was a superior artist. His portraits impressed me most.
[Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan]
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From ancient times, Japanese paintings developed while being influenced by their Chinese counterparts. However, Keene says that many landscape paintings deemed masterpieces were imitations of Chinese classics, and since many portraits of monks and warriors were made after the subject’s death, they did not resemble the actual person. In other words, the works were not realistic, but Kazan’s were different, he said.
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Kazan felt dissatisfied with such portraits, just as he was dissatisfied with the landscape paintings of anonymous mountains. He wrote that when painting a mountain, the artist must make it unmistakably like a particular mountain; it should not be a generic mountain. This criticism was aimed especially at Japanese artists who painted scenes of “poetic” mountains in China they had never seen, mountains that existed only in their imagination.
Kazan created a new kind of portrait that was probably influenced by illustrations in Dutch books. As far as I know, no oil portraits had been imported into Japan, but other portraits, mainly etchings, were available. Most books, even treatises on scientific subjects, were likely to have for their frontispiece a portrait of the gentleman to whom the book was dedicated. Such etchings may have suggested to Kazan how to make his portraits more like the subjects than earlier Japanese examples had been. He came to believe that realism was a painting’s most essential quality, whether it was a landscape or a portrait.
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Kazan’s resolve to achieve accuracy in his portraits is evident from the eleven preliminary studies he made for his portrait of the Confucian scholar Sato Issai. All the studies are painted from the same angle and the expression varies little from one to the next, but in each successive study Kazan attempted to come closer to capturing the individuality of Issai’s face. He paid little attention to his clothes, as he was interested only in the man, and there is a vitality in Issai’s face without precedent in Japan. Indeed, as depicted in Kazan’s painting, Issai is not simply a learned Confucian philosopher but a particular individual as well.
Perhaps Kazan placed such importance on Issai’s individuality as a reaction to the confining restrictions imposed by the feudal regime on the aspirations of the individual. He praised the Dutch system of education, which fostered students’ inborn talents, unlike that of Japan in which students had to conform to the dicta of a Confucian education. As a samurai, Kazan was better off than commoners, but he was condemned to spend his days poring over domain records when all he wanted to do was to paint. He had studied Confucianism from boyhood and quoted Confucian texts repeatedly in his works, but unlike run-of-the-mill Confucian scholars, he was eager to learn from the West, both in order to improve his paintings and to have a better understanding of the world.
[Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan]
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Why did Keene choose Kazan as his central figure? In an essay collection, he wrote, “Some people say I’m similar to Kazan, since we both have inquisitive minds.” Kazan, who worked to convince others of the importance of incorporating Western thought into Japan during its seclusion, and Keene, who continued to spread Japanese culture to the world through his voluminous output, are contrasting figures, but also may be something like kindred spirits.
Their ill feelings toward Japan’s “sakoku” is one of them. In his final years, Keene, who disliked being treated as a “foreigner” often said, “I think Japanese people tend to view their country as special. It’s as if the sakoku period is still going on.” The English title of his book on Kazan is “Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841.” Kazan used the Japanese proverb “A frog in a well knows nothing of the sea” to describe Japanese people, who blindly followed the ways of Chinese civilization. This antagonism toward Japan in its closed-off state may be the largest point they have in common.
As he actively sought Western views, Kazan was blacklisted and put under house arrest. He eventually took his own life. Kazan’s frustration and regret may resonate with Keene’s discontent with the secluded nature of Japanese society, which has seemingly not changed greatly 150 years on.
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This series navigates the past century by following the life of the late scholar Donald Keene, who contributed to the elevation of Japanese culture and literature in the world. News from The Mainichi that made headlines in Keene’s time is introduced alongside Keene’s personal history. The series began in 2022, the 100th anniversary of Keene’s birth — also the centennial of The Mainichi.
(This is Part 56 of a series. The next “Donald Keene’s Japan” story will be published on May 7.)
(Japanese original by Tadahiko Mori, The Mainichi Staff Writer and Donald Keene Memorial Foundation director)
The original text of Donald Keene’s autobiographies is used with permission from the Donald Keene Memorial Foundation. The foundation’s website can be reached at: https://www.donaldkeene.org/
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Profile:
Donald Keene was born on June 18, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York. He was a Japanese literature scholar and professor emeritus at Columbia University. After earning postgraduate degrees at Columbia University and Cambridge University, he received a fellowship to study at Kyoto University in 1953. Keene developed friendships with prominent Japanese authors, including Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. Over the course of half a century, Keene traveled back and forth between the U.S. and Japan, and continued to study Japanese literature and culture, while conveying their charms to the world in English. His main works include a multivolume history of Japanese literature, “Travelers of a Hundred Ages,” and “Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912.” In 2008, Keene received the Order of Culture from the Japanese government. The scholar obtained Japanese citizenship in the year following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. He died on Feb. 24, 2019, at age 96.
