The Art of Japanese Life

In the beginning, there was nothing but a dark, primordial ocean...

but then two young gods, Izanagi and Izanami,

looked across the void and saw potential.

One day, they plunged a spear into the endless ocean and stirred.

When they removed the spear,

drops of water fell from its tip and formed a group of islands,

and together, these islands became the whole known world.

The gods called their creation Oyashima Kuni,

the land of the eight great islands.

Today its inhabitants call it Nihon, the Land of the Rising Sun -

but we know it by a different name.

Japan has fascinated me since I was a boy.

It's always seemed like a parallel universe,

a society so similar and yet so different from our own...

and in this series,

I finally have my chance to explore the Japanese imagination.

I'll seek out its greatest artworks, both old and new...

but this is also a journey into Japanese life.

I'll travel through its landscapes and its cities.

I'll enter its homes...

Wow!

Meet its craftspeople...

witness its rituals...

and even sample its food.

So, this little Bento box is like a work of art,

and it's almost too beautiful to eat.

Japan is a society in which so much is informed by aesthetics,

not just painting and sculpture, not just homes and gardens,

but the way you look at cherry blossom, the way you drink tea,

even the way you arrange your lunchbox.

And that's what I, as an art historian,

find so inspiring about this place.

In Japan, almost everything has the capacity to become art.

In this episode,

I'm going to explore Japanese attitudes to nature...

from great landscape paintings and Zen gardens...

to falling blossoms and soaring mountains.

The natural world is central to traditional Japanese aesthetics...

and yet in modern Japan, that old relationship is deeply uncertain...

but Japanese artists continue to work with nature, to revere it...

and to draw inspiration from the landscape that surrounds them.

Japan is one of the most densely populated places on Earth.

It is famous around the world

for its vast cities and advanced technology.

Most of its citizens live far away from nature,

amid never-ending urban landscapes...

and yet an astonishing 73% of Japan is uninhabited by humans.

Its mountains are so steep and its forests so dense

that people can barely penetrate them -

and, though beautiful, this country lives on a geological knife edge.

Japan contains 10% of the world's active volcanoes

and experiences a staggering 1,500 earthquakes a year.

In Japan, nature is ignored at one's peril.

These are the sacred Kii mountains in central southern Japan.

The Japanese have revered nature for millennia.

These beliefs are embodied in the country's native religion,

known today as Shinto...

but, in some ways, it isn't even a religion.

Shinto has no founder, no scriptures.

For centuries, it didn't even have a name -

but it did believe the world is inhabited by spirits known as kami,

and these kami are all around us.

They live in the sun and the wind...

in trees and animals...

and even in rocks and boulders.

For Shinto, the world is endlessly animated by the divine...

and here, deep in the forest, is a shrine.

There is a simple aesthetic.

Zigzags of paper hang from rope made of rice straw.

It's something you see all over Japan...

but, beyond these components, Shinto doesn't produce much art.

The focus is on nature itself...

although some natural phenomena get more attention than others.

This is Nachi Falls.

It's one of the tallest waterfalls in Japan,

and, of course, it boasts its very own kami.

Every morning, a Shinto priest makes an offering

to the spirit of the waterfall.

Sake and rice are placed on a table alongside a golden wand.

Ritual is at the heart of Shintoism.

Kami can be good and bad, just like humans,

and rituals are performed to maintain good relationships

between the human world and the kami world.

In so much of the world, religion is about gods and saints and prophets -

but here in Nachi, and in countless other parts of Japan,

nature itself is being venerated,

and as I look up at this waterfall, 133 metres high, I can see why.

But even though Shinto doesn't have a strong tradition

of religious imagery,

I believe its influence can be felt

right through the history of Japanese art -

even in the most unlikely places.

These are netsuke.

They were used as toggles on the end of purse strings

as part of traditional Japanese dress.

They depicted all sorts of things...

and though just accessories for clothing,

they are now revered as breathtaking miniature sculptures...

and this is a particularly special one.

So, this bizarre little masterpiece was made a few hundred years ago,

probably by an artist called Harumitsu, who was based in Ise,

one of the great Shinto centres of Japan,

and it depicts a pretty much life-size cicada

that's beautifully carved out of boxwood.

Every single detail is anatomically correct.

So we have the compound eyes

at the top,

the beautiful tracery of the veined wings,

and this, this is the thorax and abdomen.

Those contain the muscles that produce the famous cicada chirp -

and if I turned it over onto the other side,

which I'm really quite nervous about doing, because I'm extremely clumsy,

we will see there is even more detail on the underside.

And you can see that the cicada is even grasping a little branch.

Absolutely beautiful.

Cicadas have a really important place in Japanese culture.

They are seen as symbolic of the summer, when they come out,

and this object was probably worn during the summer months.

But they're also seen as strangely melancholy creatures.

There's that famous haiku.

"Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die" -

but it's not only cicadas.

Japanese literature is filled with references to all kinds of insects,

to caterpillars and beetles and fireflies and dragonflies,

and indeed, even today, many Japanese people

have insects as pets,

and it's even possible to visit beetle petting zoos.

Now, this all might sound rather odd,

but actually, it's deeply revealing,

because in Japan, nothing in nature is too small to be important.

Everything is deserving of our respect,

everything is deserving of our attention,

even an intensely irritating insect like this one -

and that, I'm sure, is partly down to Shinto.

But Shinto isn't the only religion in Japan

with a special relationship to nature.

In Japan, there are numerous different schools and sects

of Buddhism, but one kind particularly intrigues me,

because it helped produce

some of the world's most sophisticated landscape art forms.

It is known by the Japanese as Zen.

Zen doesn't rely on scriptures or dogma

but instead tries to promote an intuitive understanding of the world

through meditation and repeated practical exercises.

Zen monks used a number of methods

to discipline their minds and their bodies and to help with meditation,

and one of them, one of these methods, was painting.

Japanese monks started to make brush paintings

in black ink on paper and silk.

Now, this technique had been developed by the Chinese

centuries earlier,

but the Japanese were quick learners.

And perhaps the greatest of these Japanese ink wash painters

was a man called Sesshu Toyo.

Sesshu was born in western Japan in 1420.

At the age of 11, he enrolled in a Zen temple,

where he trained to be a priest -

but, according to one anecdote,

Sesshu showed little affinity for Zen discipline.

One day, Sesshu was so badly behaved

that his masters got hold of some rope

and tied him to a pole as a punishment.

Now, after several hours of this,

Sesshu became so distressed that he started to cry,

and his tears gradually formed a puddle at his feet -

but then something remarkable happened.

Using his toe as a brush,

Sesshu painted the outline of a rat into his tears,

and then the rat came to life,

gnawed through the rope and set Sesshu free.

In the late 1460s, Sesshu travelled to China,

and there he learned the art of ink wash painting

from its native masters.

He went on to become one of Japan's greatest painters,

and I've come to the Tokyo National Museum to see his masterpiece,

a painting I've wanted to see for many years...

and we are the first film crew to ever be granted access to it

when it's not on display.

This is the splashed ink landscape.

Sesshu painted it in 1495 when he was in his mid-70s,

and though it might only have taken a few minutes to make,

it is the result of a lifetime's experience and skill.

Now, I'll be honest with you. At first, it doesn't look like much.

It just looks like some spatters on a page -

but gradually, an image, a landscape, begins to appear.

In the foreground,

a craggy outcrop of rock covered by trees and bushes...

and in the background,

these towering mountains that are half hidden by mists

or perhaps an incoming rain shower...

but as you look at this picture longer, you begin to see yet more -

so, down there, that is a little wooden building.

You can see the triangular roof.

There's a fence around its perimeter -

and that, believe it or not, is a wine tavern,

and we know that because the wine tavern banner

is hanging out the front of it...

but there's more even than that, because below that wine tavern,

you can see two near-horizontal strokes,

and those represent the ripples on a lake...