Well over a hundred years ago Lafcadio Hearn showed a number of pictures of Western young women to some Japanese acquaintances. Always interested in perceptions of beauty, he wanted to see how such exoticisms as yellow hair, white skin and blue eyes appeared to them. Their reactions… were uniform. ‘The faces are nice’, said the Japanese, ‘all except the eyes. The eyes are too big, the eyes are monstrous (1)’.
Big eyes are now seen as an object of desire in Japan, to the extent that women wanting the big eyed Western look are willing to undergo surgery to remove the epicanthic folds from their eyelids. Those not willing to go this far use cosmetics to achieve the illusion of largeness and in the ever present Manga images the characters stare at all they survey with impossibly round, ever surprised Western eyes. It seems that in this age of globalisation the Western eye has become a thing of beauty in Japan.
The sociologist Sato Kenji has argued that this is the result of ‘the ethnic self denial that has suffused Japanese society since the Meiji era, and especially since the end of the Second World War (2)’. However, it may be more accurate to say that many young people in Japan have become Hihonjin-banare (de-Japanized). This, Donald Richie explains, is an ‘emotionally neutral term meaning one who looks and acts more like a Westerner (particularly a Caucasian) than an average Japanese3’ . It would be a mistake, however, to see this simply as the result of Western cultural imperialism. Instead it must be understood more as an act of appropriation on the part of the Japanese than an imposition from outside. In this case the Western look has been taken on because it means something in Japanese culture, not because it is an attempt to become Western as such.
When viewing Japan from the West, the eye is the central metonym of difference. In the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice an element of the plot depends upon Bond, in the shape of Sean Connery, being disguised as Japanese. This is effected by a change of clothes and the simple application of prosthetic eye pieces. Through this utterly unconvincing piece of artifice we are expected to believe that the resolutely Occidental features of Connery have been transformed into that of a Japanese man. The message is simple: change the eye, change the identity. This is not necessarily the case in Japan. Though the Western eye is adopted as an image it does not mean that it signifies a wish to be Western or even actually look Western. Rather the adoption of the Western eye demonstrates a cultural confidence on the part of the Japanese, whereby even the most overt signifier of difference can be absorbed and assimilated.
Perhaps one reason why, in viewing Japan from the West, we may cling onto the large eye (or the fashion for blonde hair or even padded buttocks) as symbols of a Japanese need to look like us, is the quality of difference that is experienced in contact with Japanese culture. For the Westerner experiencing the Japanese way of being it seems that other than those elements that have been appropriated all signifiers appear radically opaque, all the rules appear to be coded in indecipherable ways.
Since the late nineteenth-century Japan has existed as a trope of otherness for the Western world. In recent years Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation reiterated the essential foreignness that Japan represents for Westerners. Here is a world where, like the language inscribed in incomprehensible ideographs, the inner world of the subjects encountered seems to be rendered in a form that is entirely alien; not just un-understandable but impossible to even begin to consider.
Is it then inevitable that any account of a culture that is profoundly different from our own must founder and be reduced to cliché by our sense of the exotic and the essential otherness of what we see? Can we, in short, suspend our committed eye and see beyond our cultural conditioning and developed pre-conceptions to perceive an essence of a way of being that we necessarily cannot experience in the way that its natives do? The alternative must be to render it as ultimately exotic, utterly and absolutely un-understandable as anything other than a highly specialised element of our own culture, a manifestation of our own belief. To do so would be to retreat from the encounter and slip into comfortable preconceptions and ingrained systems of apprehension.
It is, of course, not the eye that sees but the mind in conjunction with the optical machinery of the eye. Therefore how we see is necessarily culturally specific. As Leppert has observed ‘what is ‘there’ for me to see involves me: my own knowledge, beliefs, investments, interests, desires and pleasures (4).’ Therefore it is never possible to experience another culture in a state of innocence, without prejudgement and expectation. However, the challenge for the artist in such a position is to find a strategy that at once allows for contact to be made and encounters reported at the same time as ensuring that these are not reduced to pastiche or the rehearsal of ingrained assumptions.
In their essay Artists in the Field: Between Art and Anthropology, Calzdilla and Marcus seek to identify a subject that can ‘journey between subjects and objects, between sameness and difference’ and ask ‘is the subject capable of inhabiting the betweeness of images and contexts (5)?’ That is to say, for the artist who cannot help but find themselves to some degree in the role of ethnographer, is it possible to respond to a culture without merely reproducing one’s acculturation? For them the response to this problem was methodological, in that they proposed ‘the othering of the self’, that is to say the ‘putting-in’ of the self to the scene represented (6). This then allows the inevitable distance and dislocation inherent in such encounters to be clearly demonstrated. By appearing in his or her own account the artist emphasises their own role as interested voyeur.
Such an approach emphasises the looking that is inherent in the process of seeing. The photographer Miyako Ishiuchi has said that ‘The consciousness of wanting to see is itself an awakening that is inextricably bound to something.’ This she compares to the early stages of falling in love when ‘wanting to communicate with another through a one-directional look laden with a desire for acceptance, surpasses ordinary experience(7).’ Therefore the look of the artist becomes part of the art and, as has been established, looking is never neutral. It is always active; it is always part of the performance. To look at something is to change it through the act of observation. As Ishiuchi suggests ‘the energy of the act of looking is projected bit by bit, slowly violating the other person’s territory (8)’ and this is as true of places and events as it is of individuals.
Japan appears to the West as an incomparably imagistic culture. From Manga to noodle packaging, street signs to video games it seems that nowhere else on Earth has the primacy of the image been more readily accepted than in The Land of the Rising Sun. If one of the central conditions of modernity is to substitute a concern for images for a concern for things, then it seems that it is in Japan that this process has reached its apotheosis. Yet, though it is impossible to deny that this is a culture that reveres the image, to some extent the West invents Japan as the Land of the Image in an attempt to ‘other’ this manifestation of our relationship to technology. We may goggle at young women who earn a living from dressing as Manga characters, but is this so different from the Lara Croft clones that sell fizzy drinks or adorn trade stalls?
In these pages Stella Whalley not only renders her impressions of spending time in Japan; she also presents herself experiencing Japan. Through her open and engaging account of being there we are invited to share the experience with her. Not simply as spectators delivered of a finished image, but as fellow travellers who share the sense of wonder of one who seeks to understand what is apprehended as an object of vision. In this way the complexity of what is before us is retained without it being collapsed into exoticism.
The danger for any individual experiencing another culture is that the exotic eye through which they see will have a tendency to flatten out the most radical differences and contradictions, thus allowing the viewer to retain a certain worldview. For the artist who wishes to somehow enter into the scene and report back, the problem is then double-fold. This is because in the apprehension of art we tend to forget the effect of the viewer in any given situation – that to be in an environment is to change it; to be the viewer is often to be there to be seen. Through the mechanism of becoming a series of characters in her own account (the narrating visitor; the male escort; the wide eyed observer) we are brought into the act of looking and seeing. We are given eyes through which to see and a presence that can be seen.
In Tokyo Tales rather than visioning Japan as an exotic and alien culture we experience the artist experiencing the exotic; we are with the observer as they observe. Through this process it becomes possible for us to inhabit ‘the betweeness’; it allows us to look and it challenges us to catch ourselves in the act of looking. In this way we enter the reciprocity of vision without forgetting the lure of the exotic eye.
Looking and being looked at can easily be flipped around. Always the looker is bound by something other than first expected, as though the mere act of looking has its consequences; a strength of gaze is necessary to meet that look.
Miyako Ishiuchi (9).
1 Richie, D. The Image Factory: Fads & Fashions in Japan Reaktion Books (London, 2003) p. 151
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid p. 165
4 Leppert, R. Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery Westview (Oxford, 1996) p. 6
5 Calzadia, F. & Marcus, G. Artists in the Field: Between Art and Anthropology in Schnieder, A. & Wright, C (Eds) Contemporary Art and Anthropology Berg (Oxford, 2006) p. 103
6 Ibid.
7 Ishiuchi, M. A Connection Called Looking in Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers. Aperture (New York, 2006) p. 160
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid p. 161.
© Damon Taylor 2007