Morris Berman - Neurotic Beauty: An Outsider Looks at Japan

Neurotic Beauty:

An Outsider Looks at Japan

Morris Berman

Praise for Neurotic Beauty

In Neurotic Beauty , Morris Berman points out a number of significant motifs in the long relationship between America and Japan (beginning in 1853) that go well beyond mere bilateralism. With his customary acumen, Professor Berman shows how that relationship has managed to acquire a world-historical momentum. However, it is not only in the historical arena that modernity is brought to bear on pre-modernity, but also in the cultural sphere, where American hyper-individualism serves to throw Japanese collectivism into sharp relief, and vice versa. Above all, the most important contribution of this book is the contrast the author makes at the civilizational level: the possibility that the capitalist myth of salvation through growth may finally be superseded by the hope of a post-capitalist world. If American civilization is the last outpost of the expansionist myth, then its fateful encounter with Japan, as described by Professor Berman, suggests to us a picture of its final transformation. A vivid and provocative study.

Yasunari Takada, Professor of Transcultural Studies, University of Tokyo

Morris Bermans Outsider, looking at Japan carefully and from several perspectives, has seen more deeply than many recent observers, and he recounts the results of his subsequent reflections with intelligence and panache. Hes especially good on Japanese crafts and fine arts and their relation to the Zen tradition, and offers keen insights into the many intersections between past and present, East Asia and the West, that he encounters in his travels and conversations. Much is to be learned from his judicious account of the fraught relations between Japan and the United States over the past century, and the last chapter, on Japan as a Post-Capitalist Model, should be required reading for any thoughtful person whos interested in where our deranged world might be heading in the decades to come.

Graham Parkes, University College Cork, Ireland

The history of Japan deserves our attention, since we had so much to do with it after the fateful morning in 1853 when Commodore Perrys black ships sailed into Tokyo Bay. Japan was thrust into modernity by us overnight, and suffered greatly as a result. They may be the first nation to opt out of it as the techno-industrial era winds down. Morris Berman does more than anyone to illuminate the arc of this story and the attendant mysteries of Japanese culture, with all its artistry, resilience, and periodic craziness.

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency

Reading [Japans] DNA and patiently explaining to impatient Americans what it is that the Japanese know, is the aimand achievementof Neurotic Beauty .

George Scialabba

Also by Morris Berman

Social Change and Scientific Organization

Trilogy on human consciousness:

The Reenchantment of the World

Coming to Our Senses

Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality

Trilogy on the American empire:

The Twilight of American Culture

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline

A Question of Values (essays)

Destiny (fiction)

Counting Blessings (poetry)

Spinning Straw Into Gold (memoir)

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Note to the Reader

For the Japanese names that require it, I have inserted macrons when that is part of the English spelling, except in the case of names that are very familiar, such as Tokyo or Aikido. Names of persons in Japanese put the family name first, but I have reversed that for a Western audience for the sake of greater familiarity. Hence Yukio Mishima, Kitar Nishida, and so on. In the case of transliterations from the Chinese, I used the Pinyin system (Nanjing rather than Nanking, etc.). Finally, in most cases, in the text itself, I changed the names of Japanese friends and people I interviewed, to preserve their anonymity.

Introduction: Thinking Otherwise

It is not a question of Eastern culture negating Western culture or vice-versa, nor of subsuming one into the other. It is a probing deeper than we have gone so far until both are bathed in a new light.

Kitar Nishida

My love of Japan goes back more than fifty years, to when I was sixteen years old. I dont recall the exact context, or why a high school English teacher would be talking to his class about Japanese sword making, but he did, and I never forgot it. The artisan, he explained, would fast and pray for three days before beginning the work. Then, in a very clear and focused state of mind, he would forge and temper the steel, repeatedly folding it over into a many-layered sandwich that was finally thin as a sheet. The result was a blade that was so hard, and so sharp, it could cut through a medium-size tree trunk as though it were butter.

I was transfixed by this; it spoke of an alien world, and yet one that I found oddly familiar. The truth was that for various reasons, I never fit into whiz-bang technological America, not even as a child. Intuitively, I regarded its notion of progress as a mistake, and from age seven or so felt like the proverbial stranger in a strange land. Craft, writes Glenn Adamson of the Victoria and Albert Museum, affords an opportunity to think otherwise. The experience of craft, he goes on to say, is always a revelation.1 So it was for me. I was not impressed by the ton of frozen foods and tail fins being cranked out by corporate America; not at all. But fasting and praying for three entire days so that you might produce a sword of exquisite beauty and perfectionthat, I definitely found impressive. It was evidence of a whole other way of life, one rooted in care and attention. Even at an early age, I understood that there had to be a relationship between the quality of the blade, and the quality of the mind that brought it into being. I knew, on some level, that in a general sense this was what I wanted to be doing with my life.

These sensibilities, as already indicated, antedated the epiphany of my English class. As a pre-teen, I watched the destruction of my hometown with bewilderment and dismay. First there was the ripping out of the trolley tracks to make way for the ugly Interstate Highway System. Shortly after came the paving over of our red-brick street so that cars could tear through it without having to slow down. Step by step, anything that had craft or character attached to it got dismantled and replaced, until the town became just one more boring, homogeneous American city. Everything was rush, rush, to no human purpose. They made a wasteland and called it progress, to paraphrase Tacitus.

Japan, in any case, stayed in my mind. I was hardly the first American to find, in a romanticized version of the country, a quality of life that was lacking in my own. Years laterin my twenties nowthere was a popular magazine advertisement (for aftershave? I cant quite remember) that showed an elegantly dressed gentleman sitting at a table surrounded by classic Japanese wood-and-paper screens shji ), on which a Go set had been placed. (Go is a Japanese board game in which players alternately put black and white stones down on a grid.) The caption said something like, He is at home in worlds most people dont even know exist. And I remember, as a young adult, identifying with that man, wanting to be like him, and enter those beautiful other-worldly worlds. A few years later, I did take up the game of Goand found it so complex (despite its apparent simplicity) that I realized I would have to decide between being a writer and becoming a professional Go player; that it was impossible to do both.