Summer soundtrack

Summer has a soundtrack in Kyoto.  It's not the Beach Boys or Arthur Lyman or Bob Marley.  Just after the rice paddies are flooded for planting in late May the frogs appear and begin their dissonant nighttime serenade.  They sing through the rainy season until July.  As the frogs lose interest in performing, the cicada come along.

This is a large, ugly bug that looks like some kind of prehistoric moth ready for battle.  It inhabits the upper branches of, it would seem, most every tree in Japan during the peak of summer.  You know summer has arrived and scorching heat will follow when you hear the mating song of the male cicada.  The racket produced by these fellows is deafening, beginning sometime around dawn and often continuing right through to dusk with hardly a pause.  Apparently, the sound emanating from their vibrating abdomen can reach 120 decibels and can actually cause hearing damage in humans unlucky enough to have a cicada sing in their ears.  It is the stuff of science fiction, this noise, and when you first hear it you're sure an alien spacecraft has collided with a power line.

By the end of August the cicada have worn themselves out with their nonstop concert.  They are replaced by the soft, sweet song of the suzumushi (bell cricket) and you know autumn is just around the corner.

Before smart-phone apps, TV weathermen and even almanacs man looked to the natural world for indications of the changing seasons.  The animals, plants and insects of the earth have always been a dead-on gauge for what is to come.  You've only to stop and listen.

Daimonji (大文字)

The rain started around 7:15.  By the time I got to Katsura River it was pouring and I was soaked.  The mountains were invisible, completely shrouded in low-hanging rain clouds.  Even if it were clear I wasn't sure exactly in which direction I was supposed to be looking.

Daimonji or Gozan no Okuribi (roughly translated, "five mountain sending off fire") is an annual summer event in Kyoto celebrating the end of Obon which is a three-day Buddhist ceremony honoring the dead.  On August 16th five massive bonfires forming various symbols are set ablaze in the mountains surrounding the city.  These are meant to guide the visiting spirits back to heaven following their earthly sojourn.

Last year I missed it because I naively thought it was an all-night event (it is just 30 minutes, beginning promptly at 8:00), so I wasn't going to let the rain stop me.  There were a few others that braved the summer storm to commemorate the souls of their ancestors.  Of course, this being 2016, most were in the comfort of their cars where they could follow the progress of the other bonfires with smart-phone apps and live television coverage on their in-car video monitors.  A rather impassive homage.

As the rain fell and I waited a young woman approached me.  She asked (in Japanese) if I was there for Gozan no Okurubi.  "Hai, mitai desu," (Yes, I want to see it) I replied.  She explained, or anyway, this is what I understood, that it might be postponed because of the heavy rain.  I thought it unlikely that a ritual spanning more than five centuries would be abandoned because of inclement weather, but a glance at my watch and then at the dark mountains made it seem plausible.

Then, as I got up to leave, it appeared, the kanji character 大 ("dai" meaning big) glowing in the distance through the rain and clouds and darkness, like lava from a volcano.  While it certainly was a spectacle, it was not of the "ooh-aah" fireworks variety.  It lacked the sonic impact of a fireworks display,  It lacked the show-biz choreography.  It was noiseless.  There was no motion.  It inspired quiet reflection, not revelry.  But it had power.  Across some 9 kilometers you could feel it.  My thoughts drifted to my own ancestors.  I watched silently until the last flicker of red-orange disappeared from sight and the black night returned.

Before it was defiled and perverted into the sugar-coated freak show it is today Christians also had a three-day holiday honoring the dead: Halloween, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day.  The Japanese too now celebrate Halloween, but thankfully it has not replaced the ancient traditions of Obon and Daimonji. 

Japanese modern art: revisited

In October of 2013 I went to the National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto for the first time.  I was somewhat disappointed.  17 years of visiting MoMA in New York had shaped my idea of what "modern art" is.  There was nothing modern about what I saw on that first visit.

I have been back to MOMAK at least half a dozen times and have seen some amazing exhibitions.  But I never really saw what I was looking for - until now.  I read a rather terse and bland review in the Japan Times of the new exhibition, "A Feverish Era: Art Informel and the Expansion of Japanese Artistic Expression in the 1950s and '60s".  All that digging, all those broken shovels and picks.  Finally!  It was as if someone had been hiding this art from me: "No, he's not ready.  Not yet."

In 1956 French art curator/collector Michel Tapié organized an exhibition in Tokyo department store Takashimaya called Sekai Konnichi no Bijutsuten (Exposition Internationale de l'Art Actuel).  This show, featuring works by Jean Dubuffet,  Georges Mathieu, Willem DeKooning and Sam Francis among others, had an enormous impact on the Japanese avant-garde.  This current exhibition at MOMAK attempts to show what happened to art in Japan after that.

There are some blatant copy-cat pieces that now, in the 21st Century look a bit cliched.  But then who was influencing who, really?  When you look at a painting by Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline you can't help but think of shodo (Japanese calligraphy).  And there is some evidence, though often denied, that these artists were influenced by Japanese art.  It is often a case of the "chicken and the egg" when tracing artistic inspiration.  Regardless, the international exchange of ideas and artistic cross-pollination in the pre-internet days is fascinating to me. 

There are some truly outstanding pieces in the "Feverish" exhibition by artists like Yasukazu Tabuchi, Minoru Kawabata and Taro Ogi that had me completely transfixed.

There should be a dance with a good painting, the viewer moving in and out, left and right, up and down.  Your breath and heart beat should change, quicken or slow.  You should for at least a moment feel lost, feel small, feel joy or sadness or both, be slightly or completely perplexed.  The wonder should not be the same as for a magic trick: how-did-they-do-that.  It should be the same as for an old tree, a new snow or the pounding surf.  That is when an artist has done his/her job.

I knew Japanese painting couldn't only be cherry trees, cranes and stoic Buddhist monks.  Alas, my supposition has been confirmed.  Feverish indeed!