Japan, France, and Mori Arimasa
1
“Aah, the West”—what a sound of wonder that phrase holds.
—Nagai Kafū
With the coming of the Meiji period in 1868, Japan opened her doors to the West, and since that moment in time, Japanese writers, artists, and intellectuals have continued to visit Europe in ever increasing numbers, held back only during the years just before and during the Pacific War.
In the early years, unlike the politicians, engineers, and others who made their way to England, Germany, and France to learn specific Western methods and techniques, intellectuals and writers in particular were soon to begin seeking to grasp the import and significance of the cultures and civilizations of Europe that they were virtually encountering for the first time. Several of Japan’s greatest modern writers visited Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century, and their discoveries, disappointments, and self-discoveries helped reshape, expand, and define the nature of modern Japanese literature and thought.
In the early years, the concept of the “West” remained somewhat undifferentiated, with each nation in Europe seen as a sort of individual subset of the whole of Europe itself. English was the prominent choice of foreign languages in the Meiji period and after, so that even those writers discovering German and French thought and literature were in earlier phases of this continuum only able to acquaint themselves with those texts through English translations. Through the efforts of a series of highly gifted Japanese visitors, however, the outlines of the diverse cultures of Europe gradually became increasingly clear.
The earliest of these important writers and intellectuals was doubtless Mori Ōgai (1892–1922), who lived in Germany from 1884 to 1888 while studying Western medicine, and whose enthusiasm for German poetry and prose alike led him not only to introduce German and other European writers to Japanese readers through his own essays and translations but also to write several of his own trenchant stories concerning life in Germany, and, after his return, about both contemporary and historical Japan.
If Ōgai’s visit to Germany found him enthusiastic, another celebrated figure to visit Europe was Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), arguably Japan’s greatest modern novelist, whose time in London found him troubled with doubts and fears, which after his return began to be reflected in his increasingly darker novels. Like Mori Arimasa, half a century later, who before his departure for France, was already highly respected in Japan for his scholarly essays on Blaise Pascal and René Descartes, Sōseki was already well-known as a scholar, in this case of British literature. For both of them, their difficulties abroad, as each came to ruefully acknowledge, came from their struggles in making a transition from something they believed they had grasped intellectually while still living in Japan to the actual challenges of facing on a daily basis the realities of the foreign cultures they had heretofore been able to observe only in the abstract, and from afar.
Eventually it was to be France, more than any other European country, which was to attract significant numbers of gifted Japanese poets, writers, and painters. Two writers who in the early years doubtless made the most significant efforts to grasp the nature of French society and civilization were Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) and Shimazaki Tōson (1892–1943). Kafū had long admired aspects of French civilization, but his opportunity to work there briefly in 1906 opened him up to even wider influences, which in turn led him to develop his own talents as a writer. The novelist Shimazaki Tōson (1892–1943), who lived in self-imposed exile in France from 1913 to 1915, set out to examine the realities of daily life in Paris, writing accounts for Japanese newspapers and magazines, as well as essays and an important novel, all dealing in a thoughtful fashion with questions concerning the complexities and nuances of comparative cultures, identifying the issues that, several generations later, were to become as well the focus of many of Mori’s own speculations.
Tōson remained convinced that the most efficacious way to grasp the significance of European civilization was through the arts. “As a traveler in a foreign land,” he wrote in 1915, “I have come to realize again and again the supreme value of the arts. I am deeply convinced that if two disparate peoples wish to understand each other, really wish to grasp each other’s point of view, there is no straighter, no surer road than through the arts.”1 In the early postwar years, similar convictions would come to be articulated by a number of Japanese writers such as Mori, Endō Shūsaku, and many others.
In prewar Japan, the essays and novels of such writers, and those of many other literary travelers as well, helped create a whole climate for a new Japanese literature.
Their work and significance have been widely studied and written about by Japanese and Western scholars alike, who have pointed out how the aggregate of their fresh views and attitudes helped create a culture of curiosity and acceptance in Japan for a whole range of Western cultural values. By the 1930s, however, this enthusiasm was to be sharply curbed by the rise of militarism. The attempts to suppress Western cultural ideas and ideals would continue until the war ended in 1945.
In this shifting continuum, the early postwar period was, for Japan, a particularly troubling time. In the case of Mori, the Japan of his generation living in the early postwar period still remained, both in terms of economic hardship and its spiritual state, in a state of shock; Japan’s burgeoning attempts to again seek a secure and more positive footing with other nations, particularly with those who had been former adversaries, still appeared to remain a difficult and tiring road.
Among many intellectuals of this early postwar period there remained a conviction that it had been the failure by their countrymen to perceive the true nature and status of the West and Western culture that had contributed so much to those miscalculations that brought about the war in the first place. Now it seemed clear to them that a still deeper understanding was required. And there was also a conviction that to achieve this would be a far more difficult task than had been assumed by many of those who addressed these same questions in the prewar period. In the view of some early postwar intellectuals, those in the prewar generation who undertook to understand such matters had not made sufficient attempts to raise the level of their own self-consciousness as they had observed the significance and power of European culture.
2
Generally speaking, the intellectual is more sensitive than the average citizen to foreign culture and more readily influenced by it …. This is a phenomenon common whenever one country comes in contact with the culture of another more advanced country and is not peculiar to Japan.
—Katō Shūichi2
During the war years, Katō Shūichi (1916–2008), who would later become one of the most significant cultural critics of postwar Japan, was pursuing his medical studies in Tokyo when he first met Mori, then still a teaching assistant. “In those days,” Katō remembered, “Mori was living in a room at the Hongō YMCA where he buried himself among books, cigarette stubs, dust, and unlaundered underwear and socks.” At the time, Katō was highly impressed with Mori’s already advanced level of knowledge concerning European culture. “In between reading Pascal in French or Calvin in Latin and playing Bach’s organ pieces, he would converse eloquently.”3 It was at this time that Katō also met Mori’s friend Kinoshita Junji (1914–2008), who later became one of the most admired playwrights of the postwar period.4 By 1948, Mori was teaching at the University of Tokyo and would soon become a much-respected writer of academic works on Pascal and Descartes, among many other accomplishments. His life would change, however, when in 1950 he received a scholarship from the French government to study in France, where he would work, among others, with Jean Wahl, much admired for his writings on Hegel and Kierkegaard. Katō would follow Mori to Paris a year later. Both their lives were to alter substantially. Katō would return to Tokyo four years later, soon afterward giving up his medical career to become an important cultural critic. Mori remained in France.
Endō Shūsaku (1923–1996), the renowned novelist, later a close friend of Mori and perhaps the most famous Japanese Catholic intellectual in the postwar period, also made the decision to further his own studies of modern French literature in Lyon at roughly the same time that Mori went to Paris. Like Katō, Endō only remained in France for a few years.
In Endō’s trenchant novel Foreign Studies (Ryūgaku), published in 1965, he explicates with considerable poignancy, during the course of the three fictional accounts he provides, a range of problems he identifies that the Japanese have in learning how to grasp the genuine significance of the many layers of French civilization. His observations are presented in fictional form, but they are closely based on his own personal reactions to his attempts to make a life abroad.
In one striking incident in the third and longest narrative, Tanaka, the protagonist, newly arrived in Paris, is urgently warned by his new acquaintance, the aspiring architect Sakisaka, about some of the difficulties he will face.
as I told you once before, there are three types of Japanese who come to this country. There are those who ignore the weight of history embodied in these stones, those who cleverly seek to imitate the weight of that history, and those who, like me, lack that ability and end up going under.5
Later, the pair visits a museum of history in Paris, where Sakisaka continues his analysis.
Tanaka-san, we may be only foreign students, yet just by entering an insignificant little museum, we can stand in the great flow of European history spanning all those centuries… . I felt that, unless I as a Japanese could confront the actuality of that great flow, then my whole motivation for coming here would have been made meaningless. What are you going to do? Are you going to ignore the flow and return home unaffected by the experience?”6
Endō’s paradigm can serve as a useful way to frame for the reader of Mori some of that writer’s own concerns, as well as his attempts to come to terms with them.
Although there are obvious difficulties in comparing a memoir with a novel, there are a number of points in common shared by these two writers that can be easily identified. First of all, of course, is the fact that the two men were contemporaries. Both were in France at roughly the same time, observing the same situations at that moment in the evolution of French postwar intellectual and cultural life. Secondly, Mori and Endō shared many of the same convictions and later continued to maintain a certain level of contact, as evidenced by their friendly and thoughtful exchanges in a number of roundtable discussions dating from the 1970s and later, made available in the collection Entretiens published by Chikuma Shobō in 1982.
Both writers had strong connections with Christianity, Endō through his Catholic faith, and Mori through his experiences as the son of a Protestant pastor and his early education in a Catholic private academy. For both, these experiences led them to privilege in their own minds a search for the deeper significance of French and European civilization, which they both identified as arising from the stream of Christian history. Both were men of letters, yet in Foreign Studies and The Waters of Babylon, both concentrate many of their observations and comments on the visual arts—sculpture, painting, and architecture. Neither were trained as art historians; their respective comments seem rather to have been made in an attempt to seek out for themselves from visual evidence in broader terms the nature and significance of the civilization that had created them, rather than commenting on the details of the individual works they observed in the fashion that an art historian might have done. Endō’s references to art, while numerous, are brief, while Mori’s records his reactions more often, and in considerable detail. These are often highly personal, even idiosyncratic.
In that regard, a comparison may clarify the somewhat unusual nature and personal significance of Mori’s commentaries. Both Mori and Endō showed great enthusiasm in looking at actual works of art, since the museums in Japan at that time still contained very little in the way of important examples of European painting and sculpture. Mori was particularly anxious to see works of sculpture. In that regard, such trips to Europe were crucial for both men.
Anesaki Masaharu (1873–1949), a renowned Japanese scholar of comparative literature, still read and well-respected today for his 1930 A History of Japanese Religion, wrote an account of his trip to Italy in 1909, Hanatsumi nikki, now available in a felicitous translation as Flowers of Italy by Susanna Fessler. Both he and Mori visited a number of the same sites in Florence and elsewhere. The differences in the character of their particular responses are striking. Both visited the convent of San Marco to see the numerous works found there created by Fra Angelico (circa 1395–1455), the renowned Italian painter whom both much admired.
In summing his responses to his Resurrection of Christ and other of the artist’s works, Anesaki characterized his impressions as follows.
Angelico’s ability to express people’s personalities, their thoughts, and their feelings through one brush is truly shown … in a most satisfactory way. He is able not draw just a person’s countenance but also his entire body and thus his spirit. He concentrates on the attitude of the person and his expression (especially the look in his eyes), and is able to capture in his painting the inside of a person’s spirit through his outside appearance. This is an ability that has remained unmatched throughout time. There have been many masters to appear on the scene in recent times, but none of them has the power of Angelico.7
Anesaki’s comments seem apt and thoughtful, basically constituting an objective and historical response. He views each work of art with a calm sense of himself, observing each work of art he examines with knowledge and enthusiasm.
Half a century later, Mori pays the same visit to Florence, but the tonality of his remarks is quite different. Studying with great care Christ and Mary Magdalene, he writes:
what astonishes the viewer as well is the fact that the figure of Christ is that of a real man, and Mary Magdalene is represented as a real woman… . In the end, I am startled at this superb work of art, which shows the rise of a Renaissance spirit of paganism in the Renaissance art of Florence… . There are no traces whatsoever of any decadence in his work. And in this beautiful luminescence he witnessed the universal sway of God’s love. Standing before Christ and Mary Magdalene I found myself deeply moved. At the same time, I realized all too painfully that such a world of harmony does not belong to me. I examine myself with an uneasy glance [p. 29–31].
Here, Mori as spectator turns almost relentlessly subjective and inward. Throughout his travels, in his comments about works of art, Mori most often seems quite unafraid insert himself, to record his own personal and emotional responses, eschewing the kind of objective analysis that would be expected from an art historian. Mori’s responses move quickly to the interior. His strategies perhaps seem closest to those found in André Malraux’s 1951 Les voix du silence (The Voices of Silence), where a wide range of the author’s personal psychological responses to individual works of art he examines provide an important element in the French writer’s aesthetic.
The purposes of the two writers, in this light, can be seen as strikingly different. Anesaki, seemingly confident in his own cultural identity, remains a more typical foreign observer; Mori, however, is endlessly troubled and often uncertain.
Both writers stress the importance of religion and the arts that help explicate the centrality of Christianity in the development of European culture. In this effort, Anesaki is explicit when he writes that “the most visible and tangible product in which a religion manifests its actual influence upon human mind and civilization is art. The one thing which strikes most the mind of an Asiatic in Europe is the grandeur of religious architecture”.8 And although Mori seldom makes any such general statements, his focus on churches and cathedrals throughout his memoir makes clear a similar conviction.
Mori’s knowledge of modern French and European literature was wide and deep, yet in Babylon he mentions only a few writers, such as Alain, Paul Valéry, Samuel Beckett, and privileging in particular Rainer Maria Rilke. Indeed, one of Mori’s favorite texts, Rilke’s only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, reveals quite a similar inwardness and capacity for an almost morbid self-reflection. Elsewhere, Mori wrote on Jean-Paul Sartre and other postwar figures in French intellectual life, but their names seldom appear in Babylon. Of French modern art, and French music, past or present, there is virtually no mention at all.
Nor are there any references in Babylon to the complex political situation at the time. When Mori arrived, the costly war of the French in Indochina was just ending, and the war with Algeria was starting up, yet, other than a passing reference to Algerian workers in the early pages, these crucial events that were bringing such changes to French life go unremarked upon.
Mori’s focus on European and French culture is also virtually absolute. There are a few passing references to some classic Japanese literary texts, but little more concerning his own culture. Yet during his actual lengthy stay in Paris, Mori consistently turned back to his prior knowledge of his own country, sustaining himself through his teaching Japanese at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations and at the University of Paris, facts barely mentioned in Babylon. His translations of a selection of stories by the renowned modern Japanese author Akutagawa Ryūnoske, Rashōmon et autres contes (Rashōmon and Other Stories) was published by Gallimard in 1965.
In his commentary to the Japanese edition of Mori’s text that I made use of in preparing this translation, Ninomiya Masayuki, the highly respected scholar and translator, speaks of the “character” of boku (an informal term for I”) used by Mori in Babylon as the “narrator.” I was at first puzzled by the use of this particular characterization, as the text is written in the first person in an epistolary style (although none of the commentaries presently available to me indicate precisely to whom, if anyone, these letters may actually have been addressed). On the surface, the text is simply Mori expressing his thoughts and reflections. However, in reading through the various roundtable discussions contained in Entretiens and other secondary sources, it becomes exceedingly clear that Mori’s “narrator” in Babylon presents a presence considerably more restricted in his experiences than the one actually reflected in the life in Paris led by Mori himself. In these various recorded chats and interviews, Mori often discusses his daily life and mentions various people he has encountered, events attended, amusing incidents involved in living abroad, and so on. In sum, Mori can be observed as living a relatively busy and largely conventional life working and living both in Paris and elsewhere on his travels. The narrator of Babylon, however, is most often alone, sometimes harboring a certain level of distress, and a relentless self-probing. Indeed, his ruminations often move toward the realm of Kierkegaard’s “fear and trembling.” Mori’s narrator in Babylon, it would seem, is at least a partial literary construction, a projected persona suitable to serve as a conduit for the framing certain of the author’s particular and intimate emotional and intellectual responses to what he considered as the central intellectual and spiritual aspects of his life in France. His sense of unease and dislocation seems to subside only in the final pages of Babylon, where, staying in a friend’s home in Provence, and surrounded by books, he feels at peace.
In fact, there is a rhythm to the text that is closer to the spirit of poetry than to prose, a constant circular movement from Mori’s sharp and often poetic observations concerning the outside world he is observing, then moving toward his relentless self-exploration of his innermost thoughts and feelings, followed by a movement back to the world again.
Then too, the structure of the text might be described as the verbal equivalent of a musical theme and variations. In his case, there are two themes or motifs involved. These constitute his main concerns, which are expressed in the opening pages of the book. The first is his conviction that the deepest realities of one’s life are nascent from the very beginning, soon to be made manifest with personal growth and the passing of time. The second is that, within the human psyche, there is a constant movement from desolation to consolation and then back again, a fluctuation that constitutes the deepest rhythm of one’s inner life. These two themes are constantly at play, often in subtle variations, throughout the book.
Professor Ninomiya, in his commentary, defines Babylon as a “literature of exile,” stressing among other things the difficulties faced by Japanese intellectuals coming to terms with the realities of the early postwar period. And the title of the memoir itself reinforces the ideal of exile. But exile from what? One’s own culture? The period in which one lives? The slippage between one’s ideas and one’s emotions? It is well to bear in mind the final words of Mori’s epilogue to the text:
My title has been taken from a section in the Pensées of Pascal. The reader may attach any meaning to this that is deemed suitable.
3
There is a considerable amount of testimony that during those years of Mori’s long stay in France, Japanese younger writers and members of what might be termed the intelligentsia read with great enthusiasm his commentaries concerning his experiences there. For them, he provided a connection, living as they did during that period in what they took to be a still parochial Japan, with what they perceived to be a larger literary, philosophical, and artistic world of France and Europe. Yet Japan’s more superior status, which they implicitly hoped for, was not to arrive until well after Mori’s death in 1976.
Although the circumstances surrounding Japan’s standing in the world have certainly changed since Mori’s era, the bulk of his work remains well worth examining, fascinating to read and to ponder over.9 Of course, his thoughts and observations provide an important marker for his generation in terms of the history of thought in postwar Japan, and, read in that context, provide eloquent witness to the struggle of Mori’s generation to look both backward, in order to try to understand how Japan had failed, and forward, to see what strategies Japan might employ to reach a more positive potential.10
But beyond this historical context, Mori’s Babylon can be examined with the same interest that we find in reading travel memoirs of any historical period by any number of writers from many countries and backgrounds, since we can enjoy vicariously experiencing the way in which a writer’s sensibilities and convictions reveal themselves, often in surprising ways, when actually brought face to face with a culture other than their own. Mori’s encounters with the cultural and literary monuments of Europe, and his ardent desire to grasp their deeper significance, mirrors a long list of writers and artists in our own country and elsewhere who tried, and continue to try, to accomplish the same goal during their visits to Europe. As we read Mori’s comments, his discoveries, disappointments, and pleasures can become ours as well. And in fact, in Mori’s case, most of the monuments of art and architecture to which he responds so strongly still remain in place to be seen and wondered over by every subsequent generation, including our own. On one level, his quest is a pilgrimage we will always be making.
Notes
1.Shimazaki Tōson, Tōson zenshū, vol. 6, Paris dayori [News from Paris] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1967), 246.
2.Katō Shūichi, Form, Style, Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 20.
3.Katō Shūchi, A Sheep’s Song (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 173.
4.Mori was the first to introduce Kinoshita and his work to Western readers in an eloquent essay included in Les théâtres d’Asie (The Theatres of Asia), published by the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris in 1961.
5.Endō Shūsaku, Foreign Studies, trans. Mark Williams (London and Chester Springs, PA: Peter Owen, 1989), 114.
6.Endō, Foreign Studies, 119–20.
7.Masaharu Anesaki, Hanatsumi nikki: Flowers of Italy: A Japanese Intellectual’s Journey to Europe, trans. Susanna Fessler (Fukuoka: Kurodahan Press, 2009), 61.
8.Anesaki, Hanatsumi nikki, xxi-xxii.
9.For Mori’s Japanese readers, his works can be divided into several categories. Works such as Babylon, which shows such distinctive literary qualities, quickly found a wide readership, but his extensive work as a philosopher, as Professor Michiko Yusa has suggested in her essay, also helped to sustain his reputation. James Heisig has characterized Mori’s work as concentrating on “the distinctive quality of the Japanese language and its reflection of human relationships in Japanese social structures and modes of thought.” See James Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo, eds., Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 1047.
10.Concerning the significance of Mori’s work in this sphere, I would like to mention here the eloquent 2014 thesis from the University of Strasbourg by the gifted young French scholar Laurent Rauber, which I very much hope can be published in an English version. Professor Rauber, trained in the field of philosophy, undertakes here a meticulous analysis of Mori’s concepts and ideas, as well as his relationship to French thought in various periods. He and I have enjoyed a stimulating exchange of views on Mori and his significance. See Laurent Rauber, “Mori Arimasa: le Japon et l’Europe au travers de sa philosophie de l’ «experience»” [Mori Arimasa: Japan and Europe seen through his philosophy of “experience”], (PhD diss., Universitė de Strasbourg, École des Humanités, 2014).