Japanese painters smile wearily when informed that foreigners consider their work to be flat, and at best merely decorative; that their pictures have no middle distance or perspective, and contain no shadows; in fact, that the art of painting in Japan is still in its infancy. In answer to all this suffice it to say that whatever a Japanese painting fails to contain has been purposely omitted. With Japanese artists it is a question of judgment and taste [pg 8] as to what shall be painted and what best left out. They never aim at photographic accuracy or distracting detail. They paint what they feel rather than what they see, but they first see very distinctly. It is the artistic impression (sha i) which they strive to perpetuate in their work. So far as perspective is concerned, in the great treatise of Chu Kaishu entitled, “The Poppy-Garden Art Conversations,” a work laying down the fundamental laws of landscape painting, artists are specially warned against disregarding the principle of perspective called en kin, meaning what is far and what is near. The frontispiece to the present volume illustrates how cleverly perspective is produced in Japanese art [(Plate I).]
Japanese artists are ardent lovers of nature; they closely observe her changing moods, and evolve every law of their art from such incessant, patient, and careful study.
These laws (in all there are seventy-two of them recognized as important) are a sealed book to the uninitiated. I once requested a learned Japanese to translate and explain some art terms in a work on Japanese painting. He frankly declared he could not do it, as he had never studied painting.
The Japanese are unconsciously an art-loving people. Their very education and surroundings tend to make them so. When the Japanese child of tender age first takes his little bowl of rice, a pair of tiny chop-sticks is put into his right hand. He grasps them as we would a dirk. His mother then shows him how he should manipulate them. [pg 9] He has taken a first lesson in the use of the brush. With practice he becomes skilful, and one of his earliest pastimes is using the chop-sticks to pick up single grains of rice and other minute objects, which is no easy thing to do. It requires great dexterity. He is insensibly learning how to handle the double brush (ni hon fude) with which an artist will, among other things, lay on color with one brush and dilute or shade off (kumadori) the color with another, both brushes being held at the same time in the same hand, but with different fingers.
At the age of six the child is sent to school and taught to write with a brush the phonetic signs Japanese (forty-seven in number) which constitute the Japanese syllabary. These signs represent the forty-seven pure sounds of the Japanese language and are used for writing. They are known as katakana and are simplified Chinese characters, consisting of two or three strokes each. With them any word in Japanese can be written. It takes a year for a child to learn all these signs and to write them from memory, but they are an excellent training for both the eye and the hand.
His next step in education is to learn to write these same sounds in a different script, called hiragana. These characters are cursive or rounded in form, while the katakana are more or less square. The hiragana are more graceful and can be written more rapidly, but they are more complicated.
From daily practice considerable training in the use of the brush and the free movement of the right arm and wrist is secured, and the eye is taught [pg 10] insensibly the many differences between the square and the cursive form. Before the child is eight years old he has become quite skilful in writing with the brush both kinds of kana.
He is next taught the easier Chinese characters,—Chinese kanji and ideographs. These are most ingeniously constructed and are of great importance in the further training of the eye and hand.
So greatly do these wonderfully conceived written forms appeal to the artistic sense that a taste for them thus early acquired leads many a Japanese scholar to devote his entire life to their study and cultivation. Such writers become professionals and are called shoka. Probably the most renowned in all China was Ogishi. Japan has produced many such famous men, but none greater than Iwaya Ichi Roku, who has left an immortal name.
From what has been said about writing with the brush, it will be understood how the youth who may determine to follow art as a career is already well prepared for rapid strides therein. His hand and arm have acquired great freedom of movement. His eye has been trained to observe the varying lines and intricacies of the strokes and characters, and his sentiments of balance, of proportion, of accent and of stroke order, have been insensibly developed according to subtle principles, all aiming at artistic results.