Japan through a Lens

The New York Review of Books blog has a fascinating article on the work of Hamaya Hiroshi, a famous Japanese photographer. The article is in honor of an exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (if anyone is fortunate enough to be in the region) and includes some really exemplary samples of of his work (which I won't share here, because I am not all that confident in my grasp of fair use). For the historian, however, the article holds an interest all its own as it explores the way art and artists can be instrumental in the construction of national identity and, consequently, complicit in some of the more atrocious features of a nation's military and cultural imperialism. This is not an indictment of Hayama, of course, but an invitation into the world behind the photographs and their continuing aesthetic appeal. The parallels in other cultures are obvious. The article offers a contemporary examples of Nazis plundering Polish art looking for their own Teutonic heritage. Norman Rockwell springs to mind as an artist who constructed as much as reflected American national, cultural identity. But the example of Hayama suggests that art can work in more subtle ways:

Hamaya was born in a plebeian district of Tokyo, and his early photographs of the 1930s are of its typical denizens: geisha, beggars, prostitutes, and burlesque dancers. Typical urban scenes, in other words. His rejection of this world for the primitive life of peasants in the Snow Country is an interesting example of how important art can emerge from questionable motives....

This was the time when, encouraged by a famous Japanese businessman with ethnographic interests, Hamaya first set off for the Snow Country. The idea was to document the true “Japanese spirit.” Living among the northeastern peasants, recording their dignity in the face of hardship, was for him a “return to Japan.”

I will let you see where it goes from there, but the article and the exhibit both strike me as worthwhile for more than just the stunning photographs included. It is unfortunate that one is so much easier to access than the other.

The Question of Extraterrestrial Life (less than) Definitively Settled

I am inclined to think that there is no life on other planets. I have heard repeatedly the statements about the sheer size of the universe and the correlative theoretical quantity of planets, among which it is as near a statistical certainty as possible that many can support life and consequently that one does. Yet precisely this mathematical certainly disinclines me to believe that there is life beyond Earth. I am not saying that there isn't or that it would bother me if there were; only that I am choose not to suppose that there is.

The reason is, therefore, clearly not rational. It is not, however, strictly speaking irrational, which would imply a failure to rationally derive an argument for a proposition. Instead, it is contrarational. Having divined and accepted the rational argument that there is life on other planets, I formulate my belief in conscious opposition to that. What justifies such a contrarational position? It is precisely that beauty, joy, sublimity (or some other vague and subjective term) exist in contrast to rationality.

Again, this is not to say that the rational cannot be beautiful or incite joy or embody the sublime. It merely acknowledges what has been a well recognized feature of art and literature and romance and life. The human spirit is enlivened more by the unpredictable, the unexplainable, and the impossible-but-actual than by the reasonable. Serendipity and providence. Mad, stupid, consumptive, doomed love. Fantasies and phantasmagoria and psychosis.

I believe in a beautiful God, one Who transcends and can therefore contradict reason. The notion that this foolish Deity could have created a world which by its very nature speaks to the mathematical certainty of life on other plants and then refuse to populate any planet but this one fills me with an inexplicable joy in the mere possibility of it. I will rejoice in a God who creates and saves the inhabitants of other worlds as well, but until I know otherwise I prefer to be seized by the sublime belief in a universe that must and a God who flouts such necessity.

The Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton (Excursus 3)

"The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose."

This insight has come to me before in a slightly different form. Recent reading I have done has made me wonder not so much at the beauty of the world (the fact of a nose, as Chesterton might put it) but in our ability to appreciate that beauty. It is just as easily conceivable to me that humanity should have no aesthetic at all, that we should look on the mountains or the stars or the face of a lovely woman and feel absolutely no sense of joy intrinsic in the beholding. That we have been given the ability to appreciate the mountains, to imbibe of their grandeur and experience delight simply by seeing them, is more beautiful to me than any particular beauty that may be enjoyed.

From there, I certainly agree with Chesterton that the very fact of the nose is more comical than the amusing nose. That we have legs is more fantastic than any place those legs may carry us. That we have hands is more spectacular than any monument those hands can build. But before that, the very fact that Chesterton can be heartbroken by the beauty of it is itself more beautiful still.