The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 3: Medieval Japan

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THE CULTURE OF TEA 489

wabicha,

although credit for the transformation is traditionally given

to Shuko (or Juko, d. 1502), a semilegendary person from the mer-

chant class of Nara. The setting for the wabicha was the shoin. This

room, which came into fashion during the Higashiyama epoch, had as

its principal features tatami floor matting, shqji sliding doors, the

tokonotna alcove, the shoin writing desk, and asymmetrical shelves

(chigaidana). It has remained to the present day the prototype of the

main room of a Japanese dwelling.

Shuko's preferred shoin was a four-and-a-half-mat (approximately

nine-foot-square) room. In its confines he created a microcosmic

world within which the host, in a precisely arranged aesthetic setting,

prepared and served tea to his guests. As the process of serving tea

evolved from Shuko's day, it became an act symbolizing the renuncia-

tion of the material and the celebration of the spiritual values of life.

These spiritual values had both religious and aesthetic origins and

were most commonly articulated by the late medieval Japanese in

terms of Zen Buddhism and the aesthetic of wabi.

One of the most difficult problems in the study of medieval culture

is to assess the influence on it of Zen Buddhism. The problem arises

primarily because of the tendency of many commentators in the centu-

ries since the medieval age to give excessive credit to Zen for molding

medieval tastes and sentiments. If there is a single point that stands

out most clearly in a survey of the culture of medieval Japan, it is that

aesthetics of the age evolved directly from earlier times. The criteria of

Zen in the arts - simplicity, suggestion, irregularity - coincided with

feelings that were also indigenously Japanese and had always governed

native tastes. Thus Zen (Ch'an) Buddhism, brought from China in the

late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, found a particularly congenial

environment in which to flourish culturally. But it was not until the

sixteenth century that Zen was truly extolled as a major influence on

the arts, especially on the culture of tea. We can see this, for example,

in a phrase that gained wide currency at the time, that "tea and Zen

have the same flavor" (cha-Zen ichimi).

Wabi derives from the verb wabu, whose original meaning was "to

decline into a sad and helpless state." An early use of wabu as a term of

aesthetic value appears in the noh play Matsukaze by Kan'ami (re-

worked by Zeami). In the play, an itinerant priest (the waki) visits

Suma, where he meets two sisters, Matsukaze and Murasame, who

60 I know of no single word in English that can serve as a translation for wabi, although

"austerity" is probably as good as any. Cha means tea.

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490 CULTURAL LIFE

had once received the affections of a courtier exiled to their lonely

coast and are now consigned to live as ghosts because of their ceaseless

yearning for him. The priest requests that the sisters put him up for

the night, but they at first refuse because their hut, "with its rough

pine pillars and bamboo fence," is too wretched to accommodate a

guest. But the priest persuades the sisters to let him in, by assuring

them that he is accustomed to poverty. He further observes that any

sensitive person would derive pleasure from living "humbly and in

solitude" in such a setting. Although the use of wabu in its adverbial

form as zvabite in this passage from Matsukaze is vague and could easily

be translated with words other than "humbly and in solitude," it

conveys much of the tone of the wabi aesthetic that later became

central to the culture of tea.

In a letter to one of his disciples, Shuko wrote:

In pursuing this way [cf

tea],

greatest attention should

given

harmonizing

Japanese and Chinese tastes. How absurd it is these days for those who are

inexperienced

covet with self-satisfaction such things

as Bizen

and Shigaraki

wares

on the grounds that they possess

tlie

quality of being "cold and withered"

(hiekareru).

From these remarks we can deduce that Shuko opposed outright rejec-

tion of the aesthetic values of the kaisho tea ceremony, based on the

connoisseurship of karamono, and disapproved of too impetuous an

espousal of the wabi range of tastes. Many commentators have inter-

preted the remarks to mean that Shuko, although he may have origi-

nated wabicha, still had one foot in the earlier world of karamono.

The historical role of perfecting wabicha as the classic tea ceremony

fell to two men of merchant stock from the city of Sakai, Takeno J66

(1502-55) and Sen no Rikyu (1522-91). Rikyu, the most celebrated

tea master in Japanese history, preferred as a setting for wabicha a

room of only two mats in size, which could accommodate no more

than two or three people. He dispensed with the customary tea stand

(daisu) and placed his utensils, including dark raku bowls and bamboo

whisks and ladles, directly on the floor. Rikyu also espoused a philoso-

phy of tea that came to be regarded as the very essence of wabicha. His

sentiments, as recorded by a disciple, were as follows:

Chanoyu

performed in a plain hut is above all an ascetic discipline, based on

the Buddhist law, that is aimed at achieving spiritual deliverance. To be

61 "Matzukaze," in Keene, ed.,

Twenty

Plays of the No

Theatre,

pp. 26-27.

62 "The Furuichi Letter," in Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ed., Kodai-chusei geijutsu ton (Tokyo:

Iwanami shoten, 1973), p. 448.

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THE AZUCHI-MOMOYAMA EPOCH 491

concerned about the quality of the dwelling in which you serve tea or the

flavor of the food served with it is to emphasize the mundane. It is enough if

the dwelling one uses does not leak water and the food served suffices to stave

off

hunger.

This is in accordance with the teachings of the Buddha and is the

essence of the

chanoyu.

First, we fetch water and gather firewood. Then we

boil the water and prepare tea. After offering some to the Buddha, we serve

our guests. Finally, we serve ourselves.

The achievements of J66 and Rikyu in the evolution of wabicha

signified the prominence of members of the rich merchant class in the

cities of Kyoto, Nara, and Sakai in late medieval art and culture. Joo's

wealth enabled him to study literature with Sanjonishi Sanetaka, the

great wagaku scholar of the early sixteenth century. Rikyu was one of

several tea masters of Sakai employed by Oda Nobunaga and

Toyotomi Hideyoshi as they led the way to the unification of Japan in

the second half of the sixteenth century.

Rikyu's greatest fame came in the service of Hideyoshi, when he not

only assumed the role of grand arbiter of taste in matters concerning

the culture of tea but also wielded substantial power as an intimate of

the hegemon. Rikyu's power was made possible by practices of the age

of unification that can collectively be called the "politics of tea" and

that gave rise to the use of a tea master in political negotiations as well

as in the ceremonies of rule.

THE AZUCHI-MOMOYAMA EPOCH

date must be selected to mark the end of the medieval age, the best

choice is probably 1568, for this was the year when Nobunaga entered

Kyoto and began the process of unification that was completed by his

successor, Hideyoshi, in 1590. The period of unification under

Nobunaga and Hideyoshi was a heroic time of growing self-confidence

and expansiveness of spirit. Warlords built great castles and decorated

them with painted screens and door panels suffused with brilliant

colors; new vistas to the outside world were opened by the arrival of

European traders and missionaries; and the establishment of order on

a national scale promised joys in this life that served to dispel the

gloom and other-worldliness of the medieval age.

It is fitting that this new age should be known in cultural history by

the name of Azuchi-Momoyama, a name taken from the location of

No-

bunaga's principal castle at Azuchi on Lake Biwa and of one of Hide-

63 Nambosokei, Namboroku, in Sen Soshitsu, ed., Sado koten zenshu, vol. 4 (Kyoto: Tankosha,

1956),

p. 3-

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492 CULTURAL LIFE

yoshi's strongholds at Momoyama to the south of Kyoto.

The castle

was the preeminent symbol of these exciting times and represented the

tangible glories of the chieftains who led the way to unification.

Despite their imposing appearances, the castles of the Azuchi-

Momyama epoch were not constructed only for defense. Daimyo

wished to develop commercially thriving towns around their fortresses

and therefore often selected castle sites more on the basis of economic

than military considerations. But above all, the typical Azuchi-

Momoyama daimyo conceived of the castle as a means to impress the

world with his grandeur and power. Thus, although castles of the time

were noteworthy because of their broad, deep moats and huge protec-

tive walls made of stone, their most distinctive features were multi-

storied donjons or keeps, which were of little use militarily but were

highly decorative and showy. Designed to dazzle the eye and give the

appearance of "reaching to heaven," the donjons were often painted a

glistening white or, as in the case of Nobunaga's Azuchi castle, were

rendered in colors. Luis Frois, a Jesuit missionary who spent many

years in Japan, gave the following description of the exterior appear-

ance of the donjon at Azuchi Castle:

Some of the stories are painted white with their windows varnished black

according to Japanese usage and they look extremely beautiful, others are

painted red, others blue, while the uppermost one is entirely gilded. This

tenshu

(donjon) and all the other houses are covered with bluish tiles which are

stronger and lovelier than any we use in Europe; the corners of the gables are

rounded and gilded, while the roofs have

fine

spouts of a very noble and clever

design. In a word the whole edifice is beautiful, excellent and brilliant.

The interiors of the donjons were also decorated for conspicuous

display. Indeed, donjon rooms and the rooms in other castle buildings

were among the most important settings for the visue.1 arts in the

Azuchi-Momoyama epoch and, in them, on the formats of folding

screens and sliding doors, could be found the work of the leading

artists of the day.

DECORATIVE SCREEN AND DOOR-PANEL PAINTING

The main kind of painting in the late medieval age was, as noticed,

landscape work in a monochrome ink style

(sumi-e)

that had developed

64 The dates most commonly used for the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch are 1568, when Nobunaga

began unification, and 1615, the year when Hideyoshi's heir was destroyed by Tokugawa

Ieyasu at the battle of Osaka Castle.

65 Michael Cooper, ed., They

Came

to Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California

Press,

1965), p. 134.

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DECORATIVE SCREENS AND DOOR-PANELS 493

in China during the Sung and Yuan dynasties. Landscapes by medi-

eval Japanese masters like Shubun and Sesshu were suffused with a

deeply religious feeling that emerged from the pervasive Buddhist

sentiment of impermanence and from the desire of painters, poets,

and other artists to discover some ultimate truth about life beyond this

transitory existence. Although certain paintings revealed the more

violent aspects of nature and the weather, for the most part the medi-

eval ink landscapes depicted tranquil, quietistic scenes.

The form of decorative screen and door-panel painting that evolved

in the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch differed from the preceding, main-

stream work of medieval artists, in several important respects: (1) Its

principal subject matter was "flowers and birds," which, along with

"landscapes" and "people," was a traditional category of Chinese art;

(2) it was rendered chiefly in brilliant colors, including a dazzling

gold leaf used for backgrounds; (3) it showed little if any of the

religiosity of medieval painting; (4) its artists frequently imbued their

works with a great dynamism, through such means as the posturing

of animals and the configuration of enormous trees, that was strik-

ingly different from the quietism of most medieval landscapes; (5) it

was decorative in the sense that objects were deliberately placed to

achieve balance (or a conscious imbalance) of design; and (6) it was a

monumental art because the artists often had to paint on huge for-

mats,

such as door panels (jusuma) that comprised entire walls of

castle rooms.

The spectacular return of color to art distinguished, perhaps more

dramatically than anything else, the aesthetic difference between the

medieval age and the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch. Yet even during the

flourishing of the monochrome ink landscape, color had not been

entirely absent from Japanese painting. Throughout the medieval age,

for example, artists of the ancient Yamato-e school, represented espe-

cially by the Tosa line of artists, had continued to paint in colors,

producing studies based on themes from classical Heian-court litera-

ture,

the lives of great religious leaders, and the histories of Buddhist

temples and Shinto shrines. In stylistic terms, the decorative screen

and door panel art of the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch was a blending of

the monochromatic Sung-Yuan Chinese school, which had produced

the great medieval landscapes (although artists of this school also

painted flowers and birds and people), and the color-oriented Yamato-e

tradition.

This blending was achieved chiefly by the Kano line of painters, of

whom Eitoku (1543-90) was the dominant figure in the first half of

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494 CULTURAL LIFE

the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch.

The most important event in

Eitoku's career was undoubtedly his selection by Nobunaga to deco-

rate the interiors of the rooms in the donjon of Azuchi

Castle.

Regretta-

bly, Azuchi Castle was destroyed shortly after Nobunaga's assassina-

tion in 1582, and none of the screen and door-panel paintings done by

Eitoku and his assistants survived. But we do have a rather detailed

catalogue of these paintings and can surmise what they looked like

from other contemporary works by Eitoku and the Kano line.

By far

the most numerous of the Azuchi paintings were those of "flowers and

birds,"

although there were also a number in the "people" category,

consisting primarily of pictures of famous hermits, sages, and immor-

tals of Chinese history and legend. Interestingly, there appears to have

been only one pure landscape in all of the Azuchi works.

One reason for the preference for flowers and birds in the new

decorative art of the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch was that this subject

lent itself particularly well to filling up large spaces, as Eitoku effec-

tively demonstrated in such famous paintings as the cypress tree

screen. This screen, consisting of eight panels, depicts the bottom

portion of a massive tree whose twisted trunk and limbs spread out

from the lower right side of the painting and reach nearly to the

opposite, left side. In a manner characteristic of Azuchi-Momoyama

decorative art, Eitoku's cypress tree is set against a brilliant back-

ground of gold-leaf clouds, a stream of dark blue water, and carefully

detailed rocks.

Eitoku's greatness lay in the fact that his art forcefully conveyed the

spirit of the age of unification. It was he who took the last major step

away from the restraint and quietude of medieval painting into the

realm of gorgeous colors and dynamic motifs rendered on monumental

screen and door-panel formats. Fittingly, Eitoku died in 1590, the

very year that Hideyoshi completed Japan's unification. His succes-

sors,

living in a new state of national peace (which was secured in 1600

by the founding of the Tokugawa bakufu), modified the raw energy of

Eitoku's style and produced a type of painting, subdued and refined

by the standards of decorative screen and door-panel art, that was

perhaps more suitable to the sentiment of their age of political and

social stability.

66 The Kano family line was begun by Masanobu (1434-1530), who in the late fifteenth century

was appointed by the Ashikaga bakufu as the official artist in the Chinese manner of painting.

67 The catalogue appears in Shinchoko ki (Public chronicle of Nobunaga). Its contents are

summarized by Tsugiyoshi Doi, Momoyama Decorative Painting (New York: Weatherhill-

Heibonsha, 1977), pp. 69-79.

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GENRE PAINTING 495

GENRE PAINTING AND AZUCHI-MOMOYAMA HUMANISM

A second major form of painting that evolved in the Azuchi-

Momoyama epoch was genre art, or the depiction of people in their

everyday activities of work and play. Genre scenes can be found in

earlier Japanese paintings, especially in the narrative scrolls of the

Yamato-e tradition. But it was not until the sixteenth century that such

scenes became a principal subject of painting.

One of the earliest types of genre painting was the rakuchu-rakugai

zu or "scenes inside and outside Kyoto."

These scenes, originally

done as distant panoramas, gradually became intimate views of the

city, its buildings, and the bustling activities of its inhabitants. Kano

Eitoku, using essentially the same style and colors as in his decorative

work, did an especially fine rakuchu-rakugai zu on a pair of six-panel

screens that contain some fifteen hundred people in an intricate mo-

saic of movement and behavior. These screens are a brilliant piece of

art and place Eitoku in the forefront of the genre as well as the decora-

tive painting of his day.

There is a theory that the first "scenes inside and outside Kyoto"

paintings were commissioned by wealthy merchants to celebrate their

role in the rebuilding of Kyoto after the Onin War. It is also generally

assumed that townsmen patrons and artists were prominent in the

production of genre paintings, as great emphasis is given in these

works to commercial and craft activities. Yet fully half of the genre

paintings extant from the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch are either signed

by or attributable to the Kano line of artists, who had been patronized

by the military aristocracy for more than a century. The fact that such

"aristocratic" artists and their samurai patrons should be keenly inter-

ested in the activities of all classes of society testifies to the new human-

ism that so distinguished Azuchi-Momoyama times culturally from

the preceding medieval age.

The humanism that emerged in the late sixteenth century and con-

tinued into the Tokugawa period (1600-1867) was not based on the

individualism - the idea of the inherent worth of the individual - that

was spawned in Renaissance Europe, and therefore it must not be

confused with what is usually regarded as humanism in the Western

tradition. Japanese humanism was, first, a secular movement that

rejected the other-worldly Buddhism that had dominated the medieval

centuries. Second, it was a kind of joyous rekindling of interest in the

68 The oldest extant rakuchu-rakugai zu dates from about 1525.

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496 CULTURAL LIFE

lives and doings of people - all people - in this world. The genre art

of the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch thus constituted the first portion of

what became a vast and fascinating pictorial record of the lives of the

early modern Japanese. This art reached its culmination in the "pic-

tures of the floating world"

(ukiyo-e)

of the middle and late Tokugawa

period.

Of all the many categories of genre art, the most interesting from

the standpoint of cultural history are those that deal with the activities

of people at leisure and play, including the depictions of festivals,

picnicking, flower viewing, horseracing, dancing, theatrical perfor-

mances, bathing, wrestling, and the promenading of women of the

pleasure quarters. These pictures attest to a great increase in leisure

time,

especially in the larger cities, which helped create the conditions

that gave rise to the flourishing of

bourgeoise culture in the Toku-

gawa centuries.

A special kind of genre art, unique in subject matter, is the

namban,

or "southern barbarian," screen paintings that portray the Portuguese

traders and Jesuit missionaries who first arrived in Japan during the

1540s. These paintings, which in style are purely Japanese (they are

similar to the other genre and the decorative work of the time), are of

two varieties: single-scene paintings and split-scene paintings. The

single-scene paintings show the Portuguese carrack arriving in

Nagasaki harbor and its passengers walking into town to be greeted by

the Japanese and the missionaries. The split-scene paintings depict, on

one side (e.g., on the left screen of a pair of six-panel screens), the

Portuguese in one of their overseas ports, presumably Goa or Macao,

either in some kind of genre setting - such as observing the training of

horses - or departing for Japan in their great ship and, on the other

side (e.g., the right screen), the ship's arrival in Nagasaki.

The detail with which the Europeans and their things are shown in

the

namban

screens tells of the lively interest that the Japanese of the

Azuchi-Momoyama epoch had in foreign people and exotic ways.

Intercourse and trade flourished in this age, not only with Europeans

but also with the people of other Asian countries, making Japan more

international and cosmopolitan than at any other time in its premodern

history. (Such "internationalism," it should be noted, also led to two

Japanese invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597.) The rest of

the

story of

European and other foreigners in Japan, of trade in the late sixteenth

and early seventeenth centuries, and of the Korean invasions must be

left for the next volume of this

History

of Japan. Let us simply note

here that the humanism that evolved in the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch

THE WORLD OF TEA 497

in Japan seems to have made the Japanese more curious and perhaps

more receptive than they might earlier have been to the intrusion of

outsiders and of new, alien ideas.

THE WORLD OF TEA

A topic in the cultural history of the age of unification that is especially

difficult to assess is the chanoyu, the tea ceremony. This is because it

was far more than just a ceremony. It was also a philosophy, an art, and

a unique style of social intercourse, and in the Azuchi-Momoyama

epoch it entered its finest phase.

As a philosophy, the chanoyu had come to be equated, as we have

seen, with Zen Buddhism. This aspect of the chanoyu was authenti-

cally medieval and underlay the concept and practice of wabicha. It is

ironic that wabicha was perfected in the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch

after the medieval age had ended. Yet this is what was achieved

through the efforts of the great master Sen no Rikyu, and it served to

accentuate the dualism that had long been characteristic of the

chanoyu. On the one hand, there was in the

chanoyu

an urge to ostenta-

tion, as when it was used in the early fifteenth century as a setting for

the display of

karamono.

On the other hand, there evolved that senti-

ment, from at least the late fifteenth century, that drew the chanoyu

more and more to Zen and the wabi realm of aesthetic taste.

Shuko, as noted, appears to have stood at the turning point between

the "ostentation" period of the chanoyu and its evolution toward

wabicha. But although the creation and perfection of wabicha became

the main line of development in the chanoyu during the sixteenth

century, the "urge to ostentation" was never lost and led in the

Azuchi-Momoyama epoch to a new outburst of display, especially by

the warlords, which was in keeping with the "display" character of the

epoch as a whole.

This tendency in the chanoyu was closely related to the treasuring

and collecting of tea articles, including paintings and scrolls of calligra-

phy as well as the actual tea utensils. Thus karamono, many of which

were colorful and showy and therefore antithetical to wabicha taste,

remained popular and much sought after throughout the medieval

age.

Because wabicha was based on a philosophy that rejected material-

ism, we might suppose that its practitioners disdained any attachment

to the physical articles of tea. But in fact, they were as covetous of

these as was everyone else in the chanoyu. The "famous articles" of

wabicha, along with the best of the karamono, came to be regarded as

498 CULTURAL LIFE

virtual national treasures, and their prices were driven up by demand

to astronomical levels.

Nobunaga reflected the national mania for tea articles when, shortly

after entering Kyoto with his army in 1568 and taking the first major

step toward unification, he launched a "hunt for famous tea articles"

(meibutsu-gari),

acquiring either by payment or, if

necessary,

by confis-

cation, many of the finest articles in the country. Nobunaga proudly

displayed these tea articles at banquets and other special gatherings,

and on occasion he bestowed one or another of them on a subordinate

for meritorious service. Thus, in 1577, he gave Hideyoshi a famous

kettle as a reward for his attack on and destruction of

castle.

The tea-article mania of the Azuchi-Momoyama epoch is perhaps

best illustrated by the story of Matsunaga Hisahide (1510-77), a

chief-

tain of the central region around Kyoto who made peace with

Nobunaga in 1568 by rendering to him a prized tea caddy. Eleven

years later, when Hisahide had joined a plot against Nobunaga and was

about to be killed, he deliberately smashed another coveted tea article,

a kettle, to prevent it from falling into Nobunaga's hands.

Hideyoshi, when he became hegemon, also avidly collected tea arti-

cles and displayed them with even more enthusiasm than did

Nobunaga. Very likely it was because of his desire to show off his tea

articles on a grand scale that Hideyoshi conceived the idea of

the

Great

Tea Party held at the Kitano Shrine in Kyoto in 1587, a spectacular

affair to which he invited everyone and promised to exhibit his collec-

tion of articles "without leaving any out."

Hideyoshi was indeed the

champion displayer of all, and his exhibitionist instincts reached a

pinnacle not only in the Great Kitano Tea Party but also in his con-

struction of

tea room covered entirely with gold, which was portable

and could be taken on military campaigns and other sojourns.

As a style of

social

intercourse, the

chanoyu

gave rise in the Azuchi-

Momoyama epoch to the politics of tea. Of course, the

chanoyu

was

used for political purposes when its articles were bestowed as rewards

on allies (or, conversely, given to seduce or appease an enemy) and

when the articles or

chanoyu

itself were conspicuously displayed in the

same way that castles, decorative screens, and other things were dis-

played to enhance the power and prestige of the warlords. But the

essence of the politics of tea was the exploitation of the special social

69 Nobunaga also made the holding of formal tea parties by his subordinates an exclusive right

that only he could authorize. Hideyoshi gained this right in 1578.

70 The party was scheduled to last for ten days, and guests were required only to bring a few

utensils and mats to sit on. In fact, the party was suspended after only one day.