Japanese Gardens/Chapter 12
NAMI KAWA SAN’S WATER GARDEN
KYOTO
CHAPTER XII
MINIATURE GARDENS
“Oh! Master Workman, labouring cunningly,
Which proves thy genius more,
Thy big works or thy small?
The temple Pine, that towers straight and tall,
Or fragile-fashioned seaweed strewn upon the shore?
I am content with Fuji, formed of rose and snow.
But are the curves less perfect that this shell doth show?”
If the laws of landscape gardening, in big and extensive grounds, are as rigorous and inflexible as those of Nature, they are no less so in the miniature gardens which are small enough to set on a tea-tray. The makers call them Hachi Niwa, or ‘Dish Gardens.’
The Japanese artist never scamps his work. His detail is the most perfect in the world. Plodding, infinitely patient China cannot surpass him, or even equal him. The Nippon carvings have a finesse added to the original upburst of inspiration, that comes only from loving labour. The Chinaman works because he has always worked, not from second nature, but from centuries of nature. His subconscious mind alone is employed, and the upper fields of consciousness (if he has any, and I doubt it, in the case of these workpeople—artisans, not artists) are off somewhere else. For him is not the vision; the patient, painstaking toil is for pay; small as the object in ivory which he is carving. The Japanese, on the other hand, works joyously; the tiny figure throbs with arrested movement. No Noah’s Ark models for him, but sinuous, sleek bodies, rough, hairy monsters, microscopically perfect; not for him China’s fat, licentious gods, mandarins of nodding heads with human hair inserted for beards; but his Buddhas are mysterious in repose, his animals seem to snarl with life, his old men to stagger under their loads, his wrestlers to tussle with bone and sinew beneath the flesh, his rats to crawl, and his snakes to coil shudderingly. Now I must not be understood as admiring all this, because the most perfect ivory and porcelain figures seldom appeal to me; a carved netsuké used by a Japanese as a knob, as he intends it, not as a senseless ornament on a shelf in a cabinet, does.
In painting, this exquisiteness of detail is, as one might say, only in spots, to give the necessary relief to the freedom and boldness of the body of the design. But this restraint from the ‘touch too much’ is, to my mind, the greatest art of all. Then comes the appeal to the imagination, which carries the thoughtful observer far beyond the point to which the most adept fingers can reach.
This again is the secret of the charm of Japanese poetry. In three lines, or in five, a beautiful image can be evoked, a haunting, elusive idea can be expressed which leaves one with thoughts for a whole day, and which, in double the space, cannot be adequately translated. Finesse is saved always from preciousness by suggestion.
In other arts it is the same. China fails in inspiration, although she inspired Japan. Her own artists, in the days of the Ming Dynasty, exhausted it. Where the designs and the shapes, the colours and the decorations of porcelains, bronzes, and sounding brass (for how truly rings the metal of those days!) are not imitated, the work is feeble, stiff, and uninspired. And naturally in imitation the original impulse is lacking, and the craft itself is of an inferior kind. Japan, on the contrary,—where she is not warped and spoilt in her artistic feelings by the influence of Western nations,—turns out, every day, and in every part of her land, works not to be despised by the prophets of art, not unworthy to be placed beside the classic models. Her modern ceramics compare, in all that is good, with those of the early makers. Her brocades and embroideries (when manufactured for her own people, not for the cheap and barbarian tastes of foreign tourists) vie, in richness and splendour, with those made in the sumptuous days of the Ashikawa Regents. Aniline dyes and ‘Maypole Soaps’ are not for the Japanese, and even in these days the depth and delicacy of vegetable pigments for colouring silks and crêpes have not yet depreciated to that level.
But most of all in colour printing, in pictorial art, Japan has maintained the high excellence of her past standards. I am aware that most people will dispute this statement, and I am a little frightened when I make it, remembering the tons of meretricious pictures sold to my country people and others in the Treaty Ports, and abound to testify to the contrary. Oh, the glaring Fujis, the awful moonlight scenes, the crude and—happily—impossible sunsets behind inky-edged sail-boats, the dreadful, grinning geishas, which are sold by the thousand, to prove Japan’s poverty of purse and the wandering foreigners’ of taste! I quail when I look back on my former statement. But again, when I recollect the shops, obscure and small, in Tokio and Kyoto, where one can buy nothing else but beautiful colour prints—so happy, so inspired in design, that a handful picked up at random would mean half a dozen real treasures, to be examined at leisure later, I am reassured. For a few sen each one can buy little prints that no artist would scorn to own to-day, and that no layman would dare to scorn to-morrow.
All this is a preamble to the statement that, except where the debasing art standards of the West has affected them (for it is the poor and pernicious, not the best foreign works that they see), the landscape artists have continued in the fair, firm paths of the past, and Hachi Niwa are good reproductions on a small scale of the best gardens.
The idea of these miniature models of scenery came, of course, from China. I could not but be struck, only the other day, when I saw into what degenerate lines the art had fallen, in Chinese hands, compared with the examples I had known in Japan. The makers, in this case, were native watch-keepers at the lighthouses which Himself had asked me to go with him to inspect. The Trinity House man in charge, an unusually clever and intelligent Englishman, encouraged his native staff to fads of the sort, to keep them out of mischief when they were off duty. There were, perhaps, half a dozen of these toy models of mountainous scenery shown me, and some were still in course of construction, while yet others had been shipped home. Big lumps of coral rock, worn by the action of the sea into natural hills, valleys, and caves formed the basis of them, and, after a promising piece had been chosen, a jack-knife helped on the good work, until a mountain, cleft by a ravine arched with bridges, appeared. Then the little heights were crowned with porcelain models of pagodas, shrines, and tiny houses, securely cemented in, while porcelain people wandered everywhere, in defiance of all Chinese laws, in the neighbourhood of toy tigers. It seemed as if the gallant artists would prove that there, at any rate, their people were brave and valorous. Sometimes, my informant said, they planted grass and little ferns and sprigs of trees about, and brought up a microscopic rill of water to form a cascade or a lake, but the models I saw had no such fancy touches, and, except for the gay colours of the porcelain accessories, all was of the hue of putty—the natural shade of the coral rock.
From this primitive type which has not advanced in China the Japanese have evolved their exquisite art.
The Japanese Hachi Niwa, even of the commonest sort, which may be sold for a sum smaller than itself at a fair, is, however, a far better specimen of landscape gardening in a tea-plate than this. Others are veritable gems of art of their kind, and are expensive out of all proportion to their size. Some of these are most artistic, though I confess I have never had the passion for them which many foreigners evince, and I cannot understand how dignified statesmen and men of letters in Japan can take such an interest in them. It is said that the great artist Hiroshige so loved this diminutive art that he went to the trouble of designing a book of his famous fifty-three views of the Tokkaido (the road from Kyoto to Yedo), in which the stages of the journey are arranged to serve as models of Hachi Niwa. I have never seen this book, but am the happy possessor of one of the rare old copies of the original colour prints, and can easily understand that these could act as ground-plans for the miniature scenes, as they have for the decoration of dessert plates and after-dinner coffee cups and saucers.
Little as one might think it, the laws are adamant that go to the making of these pretty ornaments. Indeed, to understand thoroughly all the principles of Hachi Niwa would imply a fair education as a landscape artist. The inevitable and never-to-be-transgressed rule of just proportion is the foundation, and the very dish itself must correspond to the dimensions of the scene it contains; or perhaps one should say, the design must conform to the size of the shallow mottled-blue high-edged plate in which it is to be set. There are many shapes and sizes of these, some oval, some round, some square or square-cornered, and some oblong, but generally they are of the last shape, and usually from twelve to eighteen inches long by eight to twelve inches wide. But the designs are by no means bound to these dimensions; some are literally only big enough to go into a tea-plate, and are none the less beautifully made, in spite of it.
There are even more scenes suitable to depict in miniature, in these dishes, than there is variety in the dishes themselves, for the artist can choose from the whole field of Nature. Land and sea, hill and woodland, rocky isles and grassy slopes he can reconstruct in little, or he can represent historic temples, spots famous in history or mythology, or scenes celebrated in poetry and literature.
They are not merely toys for children, but their construction is considered a real art, and rightly; for is not the baldest labour, if sincerely and lovingly performed, raised to the status of an art?
Competitions of Hachi Niwa are yearly held in Kyoto and occasionally in Tokio, and are attended by the highest nobles and statesmen and connoisseurs of art in the land. Foreigners laugh at this, as another example of the puerility of the Japanese mind. It strikes me as suggesting exactly the opposite. Did hot baths in the winter camps in Manchuria imply effeminacy, or lack of courage and strategic ability, in the Japanese soldier? Did the sailors who sent home Tanka (‘short poems’), written in leisure moments during the blockade of Port Arthur, go down in their ships any the less courageously, gloriously, because they were poets at heart?
Years ago, on my first visit to Japan, in a little fishing village where in great contentment we were spending the summer, Young America, aged two and a half, whom nothing escaped, called my attention to a shop where an old man sold tiny porcelain images. I say sold, but, in the small boy’s case, it must have been rather given away, for the short supply of coppers he was possessed of could not possibly have been enough to buy all the temples, torii, junks, coolies, priests, Fuji-sans, and bridges the little rascal had in his possession. However, a Japanese gift is a gift, and may not be paid for, except by the presentation of another gift; so, in getting the matter properly arranged, we became great friends with the wrinkled old pair who kept the shop, and later, through them, with a young man, a son I think, who made Hachi Niwa. I do not remember that these were for sale; I imagine they cannot have been, for I never owned one, and the child’s was a present; but many a pleasant hour did we spend watching their manufacture, and marvelling at the silent youth’s delicacy and dexterity of hand.
A whole little set of tools he had, and models of many of them he gave the small boy with which to learn to make miniature gardens on his own account. The baby brooms (a few inches long they were), and a little trowel, also a toy, were the only things that lasted long, but the gardener himself had others—a squirting watering-pot for keeping damp the moss (which simulated grass); a funny little flat-iron for smoothing sand, and a sieve for sifting it. There were also the inevitable chop-sticks, to be used as tweezers or for picking up things, a dear little rake, like bird’s claws of bamboo, for marking the sand in patterns, as well as many scraps of the same material to be used as props and architectural aids.
It was like seeing the real making of a garden, to watch the evolution of this miniature thing from a pile of earth and little stones and various coloured sands; from moss, and the tiniest of dwarf trees (so small that it seemed like kittens having kittens to see them covered with flowers and fruit), into veritable little landscape gardens.
First the mountains would be built up; and they, as well as their little houses, were founded on a rock—indeed, on many rocks. Then, half-way through this task, the stones for the cascade would be inset, carefully, firmly, so that no shaking, no torrents of sand could dislodge them; and then more earth, hard-packed, unyielding as in Nature, before the trees, the houses, temples, bridges, or the mossy grass were put in place. It was all so deftly, yet so securely, welded together, that one felt a Lilliputian, and not afraid to climb the hills and to venture on the sandy lake, or to explore the beach, the caves, and the rocky, Pine-clad islands.
A CLASSICAL GARDEN DESIGN
KYOTO
Then, last of all, with great shouts of glee from Young America, the little porcelain models from his warm, chubby hands would be put into the picture. His own coolie, with a carrying pole and basket, would be crossing a larger image of his own bridge, and his own little red torii would be set up, to indicate the path to the Shinto temple on the hill. At that point the swarms of Japanese children who were helping us look on, and blocking out the light from the narrow street, would caper and shout too. It was serious business with the serious young man, but we were all thrilled children together.
A grown-up friend, a highly educated Japanese, told me afterwards that there were all kinds of delicacies of the art which this primitive workman knew not of; that to know the different sorts of sand to use, alone, was a science in itself, and required a thorough knowledge of the geography of Japan, and probably of China as well. For the different shades of colour are all indicated: a slaty grey for deep water, chips of granite for rapids, ‘sallow sands’ for beaches, lightish grey sands for shallow water, deep bluish sands for seas, and pure white sands for coaming breakers. Then there are the proper kinds of gravel and cobbles for river-beds and river beaches, and the right sort of rocks for islands and for seaside stones, as well as for ‘Guardian Stones,’ ‘Cascade Stones,’ and ‘ Stepping Stones.’ From all over Japan the accredited varieties are gathered, and shipped to the makers of these little landscapes, and he commits an artistic crime who does not use the proper kinds in his composition. Then only careful and laborious cultivation and repression can grow the dwarf trees to plant in these gardens. It may take sixty years to attain the small Cherry trees that grace the temple scene, or thirty for the stunted Pines which adorn the rocky islet. No trouble is too great for the modeller in making these microscopic gardens as perfect as a full-sized one should be. Good artists plan them, and good artists make them, and good artists—the nation at large—criticize, admire, and love them when they are finished, and, what is more, take care of them, tend them, and value them as treasures for years afterwards.
So, even if I did not feel the same pleasure in these toy models of gardens that I did in the originals, I could not but admire and respect the careful and faithful work put into them, the labour that made the little as perfect in one way as the greater was in another, the fidelity to detail, the inspiration and breadth, the sincere and sound intention which turned a toy into a text-book, a pastime into a scientific pursuit.