Aesthetic terms

An early warning: Be very careful about working backwards from known English phrases. This is exactly what we are trying to avoid. If I say, for example, that makoto, in the Kojiki, includes a sense of sincerity and manliness, please take these as partial sketches of the idea. Don't extend like this way: "I think that manliness includes the ability to fight well, so the Kojiki's makoto men must be good fighters." We are trying to build new categories, not slap onto aesthetic terms set values that you already have. This is the heart and soul of J7A, trying alertly but cautiously to understand new and alien ways of thinking.

In J7A, I treat aesthetic terms as a way of thinking about values systems. They are key to developing a sense of ways of thinking that might seem partly or totally alien, or just new, to you. This helps in building a model, however flawed, of how the world might have looked to a premodern Japan at various times and of various backgrounds. In an aristocratic society that prized artistic appreciation and literary knowledge, one's mastery of aesthetic values was one way of showing one's education, good breeding and intelligence. My interest in teaching aesthetic terms is not primarily about the poetics of it. It isn't an attempt to refine your purely artistic sensibilities.

A thorough study of these terms would do that, and for the artists among my students I would suggest that this is far from a waste of your time—but the emphasis should be on "thorough". Most of these are subtle categories, linked closely to fine differences in turn of phrase within poetry and such in the original language.

I am keen on teaching these terms, despite the difficulty of doing so and the frustration (and/or boredom) many students feel when the topic is one of these terms, not because of their inherent artistic value but rather because some of these notions will be entirely new to you. They are not how Americans, of nearly any background, see or think about the world around them. The challenge of understanding them rather than converting them to something familiar, and so missing a chance at really expanding how you see the world, is my primary attraction to teaching them.

In addition, many of these concepts are how you—the reader, listener, viewer or otherwise appreciator of artistic performance—were expected to enter deeply into the work. Bashō's Narrow Road to the Deep North is a classic example. Reading it as a typical travel journal written by a poet will not get you anywhere close to the brilliance of this text. It is about stern, poetic, historical sensibility, about events that Bashō places on the long timeline of his country's poetic tradition. It is about shear poetic virtuosity accomplished with minimal movement. Without getting even a glimpse of this, his work will likely strike you as boring, or mostly empty, or somehow unfinished, not for you, whatever. So, basic understanding of aesthetic principles are keys used to get at what is worth getting at in many of these works.

Also, Japan's intellectual history was, for a very long time, deeply engaged in poetics. There are other intellectual streams, definitely, particularly among Buddhists and Confucianists. But many of the best minds of the day took up the discourse that was continuous over the centuries of what a poem should be, in content and form. So, skipping the results of these very high-level efforts gives the false impression that Japan was not as dynamic as some countries in terms of intellectual discourse.

Finally, the border between aesthetic sensibility and ethics is complex. The study of aesthetic principles in some way at some times becomes also a study in what was valued as cultured human behavior and, most particularly, cultured understanding of the human heart and mind.

So, despite their seemingly disembodied nature, aesthetic terms most definitely did not function only for the privileged few rather than about "real" life, They were ways that the Japan built their culture, their identity, their view of the world and the people in it, and so on. Many Japanese today feel they "own" their aesthetic terms, that they lie close to what is "Japanese" about them. In many cases they actually don't understand the content of the terms anymore but nevertheless do feel possessive about them. Aesthetic terms have frequently been how the Japanese distinguish themselves from other countries' cultures, embracing an implicit argument that the Japanese instinctively know these things. For anyone wanting to seem culturally fluent, knowledge beyond the basic 101 wiki of the terms will serve them well.

Some of the books I use for my comments in lecture

栗山理一『日本文学における美の構造』雄山閣、１９９２。

Hisamatsu, Sen'ichi. The Vocabulary of Japanese Aesthetics. 1963.

Huey, Robert N. The Making of the Shinkokinshū. Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.

Hume, Nancy G. Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader. SUNY, 1995.

About the below chart

➡　This is a schema of the aesthetic terms we discuss during the term. ➡　Chronologically speaking, the top rows are oldest (Nara period, 8th c.) and the bottom rows are the most recent (Genroku period, 18th c.) ➡　Three “streams” of aesthetic principles are used to make these categories. They are from Hisamatsu Sen’ichi’s The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics. ➡　We are working within “classical” norms for our discussion of aesthetics; that means that each of these developments in concepts takes seriously, and tends to embrace, what came before. This is especially important when trying to understand sabi and karumi a sense of what came before is essential, but it is very important for all the terms.

Literary texts often have components of all three of the main streams below. Being able to sense them all helps give the text its full texture and interest.