Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0033/00331.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob00331}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Japan
Chapter 3C.   Graduate Schools and Research Institutes and the Arts}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Jane T. Griffin}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{arts
japanese
art
cultural
national
japan
artists
research
traditional
education
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1981}
$Log{See Daigoji Temple*0033102.scf
}
Title:       Japan
Book:        Japan, A Country Study
Author:      Jane T. Griffin
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1981

Chapter 3C.   Graduate Schools and Research Institutes and the Arts

     Because academic research is essential in order to advance knowledge,
particularly scientific technology, the expansion of graduate schools and
research institutes had become urgent by the 1970s. By 1978 more than half of
the public and private universities-240 in all-had graduate schools, among
which 155 offered doctoral-level studies. The national universities dominated
graduate studies and research, attracting about 32,000 of the 53,000 graduates
enrolled in 1979.

     In addition to the standard fields of study, a doctorate of
interdisciplinary research was created in 1976 to help cut across and enlarge
the older, narrow confines of research. The concept of specialized
universities for joint use by the higher educational community was made
concrete in Tsukuba University, the Science and Technology University, the new
Educational University, and the Library Information University. To meet
criticism that Japanese higher education was cutting itself off from the flow
of outside knowledge, the government promoted exchange of scholars with the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, the United States,
the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), Britain, China, and other
countries. The establishment in 1975 of United Nations University as a global
institution in Tokyo was a major step toward such internationalism. This
academic think-tank has concentrated on seeking solutions to various urgent
economic, cultural, and ecological problems facing mankind.

     Another instance of growing international exchange in the 1970s was the
presence of foreign students in Japan, among whom were 420 Chinese, who first
came in 1979 for two-year study periods. Of the 6,500 foreign students in
Japan in 1980, half were from Asia. Thirteen thousand Japanese students went
abroad to study in 1979.

     There has been a rise in the number of specialized institutions for
advanced research, sponsored both by the government and private nonprofit
groups. The majority (87 percent) of advanced research, however, is done at
institutes within the universities. The sophistication of Japan's advanced
research institutes could be gauged by the fact that by 1981 the country had
won six Nobel prizes-four in the sciences.

     The career of the Japanese intellectual progresses through the usual
route of publication, teaching, and participation in academic societies,
national and international. Academic societies flourish in Japan, and election
to membership in the top-ranking councils of a profession is the accolade. The
Japan Academy of Science, which included the humanities, has an elected
membership of 127; the Science Council of Japan had an open membership of some
225,000. In 1980 the academy elected its first woman member of the governing
board, a specialist in radioactivity.

Problems, Trends, and Goals

     According to one critic, "institutional uniformity is the fundamental
shared characteristic of all Japanese schools," a direct result of
government's determined policy to eliminate differences. The school system
from the compulsory through the higher levels followed the same laws and
standards. This was useful for a mobile population and ensured that national
exams were applicable to all, but it also created a conformist society.
Individualism and creativity were stifled in the overwhelmingly egalitarian
concept of "sameness." Serious questions have been asked about whether the
schools were failing their gifted students by confining them to uniform
classes or were in part responsible for the poorer students turning to
violence. Reforms of the 1970s stressed the need for flexibility, adding
advanced classes, and creating new vocational options. Such problems were seen
by many as the consequence of both the expansion rate and the inflexible
institutional uniformity of the school system. Furthermore the rush to higher
education had also pushed the colleges and universities into the production of
a mass-educated society for whom the traditional good job no longer existed. A
major shift in social values had occurred that placed college-educated people
into less prestigious positions. An orientation towards "life-long educational
programs" via the mass media had also been advocated.

     Nikkyoso, a leftist-oriented labor organization, has seen itself as
carrying on the class struggle against the conservative educational
bureaucracy of the Ministry of Education (see Interest Groups, ch. 6; Labor
Relations, ch. 4). The two adversaries have clashed over working hours,
salaries, promotions, and other issues; in the late 1950s strikes and
dismissals occurred over a four-year period, brought on by disputes about
teacher efficiency ratings. Nikkyoso and the ministry differed in their
conceptions of the teacher; the teachers saw themselves as "educational
workers" rather than as bureaucratic professionals, the mode in which the
ministry viewed them. Generally teachers opposed the authority of the ministry
on most questions, asserting that they should be responsible for matters
concerning the school and classroom. Textbook selection has been a
particularly abrasive issue. During the 1950s, after some teachers propagated
a dialectical world view framed in terms of class struggle, the ministry
assumed jurisdiction over curriculum and textbooks. The Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP) inserted an emphasis on traditional values into the curriculum by
making moral education a part of the study plan. In the early 1980s the LDP
called for textbook selection to be shifted from city- and county-level
administrators, where Nikkyoso influence was strong, to the prefectural level.
Nikkyoso countered by asserting that this forewarned a swing to the right and
was suggestive of "thought control."

     Another concern was whether education should develop a rich personality
in the child or promote only cognitive input. The conservatives wanted more
utilitarian training for the needs of the country, for example, in science and
technology. Again, when the conservatives tried to institute an upgraded track
for bright children, cries of elitism came from the uncompromisingly
egalitarian union members. In the 1970s a poll of teachers showed that 50
percent did not have a political preference nor did they think that teachers
should strike, while only 40 percent approved of political involvement by the
union. The majority, however, supported Nikkyoso stands on school and
classroom issues and efforts to raise salaries and expressed themselves in the
formulation of educational policy.

     The aim of education for the future will be toward a fusion of the many
elements fought for by the Ministry of Education and Nikkyoso so that the
needs of the individual as well as those of society are met. By restructuring
the educational system to allow greater flexibility of response to individual
or local needs, together with a greater diversified offering, the old problem
of meritocracy versus egalitarianism may be on the way toward some resolution.
In many ways the old hierarchies in education have changed to meet the needs
for internationalism, for broader outlooks cutting across disciplines, and
even individual schools. The new-concept universities, new research institutes
staffed with foreign faculty, and the exchange of students with many lands are
producing a more open-minded, less parochial intellectual class, which is at
home in the international modern world. The idea that the coming Japanese
generation in the twenty-first century should have such qualities as
"self-reliance, creativeness, social awareness, and a sense of identity, as
well as being open-minded rather than narrowly patriotic" was being espoused
in official statements on education in the 1980s.

The Arts

     Japan's aesthetic conceptions, deriving from the society's diverse
cultural traditions, have been formative in the production of unique art
forms. All of these are characterized by the overwhelming technical perfection
achieved by the artists. Over the centuries art motifs developed and were
refined, becoming imbued with symbolic significance. Like a pearl, they
acquired many layers of meaning and a high luster. Japanese aesthetics provide
a key to understanding artistic works that are perceivably different from
those coming from the Western artistic tradition. In order to learn how to
"read" the arts of Japan, some basic concepts should be considered. Within the
East Asian artistic tradition, China has been the acknowledged teacher and
Japan the devoted student, but Japanese arts developed their own style, which
is clearly not Chinese.

     The monumental, symmetrically balanced, rational approach of Chinese art
became miniaturized, irregular, and subtly suggestive in Japanese hands.
Miniature rock gardens, miniature plants (bonsai), and miniature flower
gardens (in flower arrangements) have been the province of cultured
aristocrats for 1,000 years and remain a part of the cultural life today. A
delight in decorating small objects enlivened miniature sculptures made into
belt toggles, consummately well-designed medicine cases, or sword decorations.
The diagonal rather than the triangle is the favored device whether in
painting, architectural and garden design, or in formulating dance steps or
musical notations. Odd numbers replace even ones in the regularity of the
Chinese master pattern, and a pull to one side allows a motif to turn the
corner of a three-dimensional object, thus giving continuity and motion that
is lacking in a static frontal design. Japanese painters used the devices of
the cutoff, close-up, and fade-out by the twelfth century, which may explain
why modern filmmaking has been such a natural and successful art form in
Japan. Suggestion is used rather than direct statement; oblique poetic hints,
allusive, inconclusive melodies or thoughts-all are frustrating to the
Westerner trying to penetrate the meanings in literature, music, painting, or
even everyday language.

     The Japanese began expressing their aesthetic concepts in a number of
evocative phrases by about the tenth or eleventh centuries. The courtly
refinements of the aristocratic Heian period evolved into the elegant
simplicity seen as the essence of good taste in the understated art that is
called shibui. Two terms originating from Zen Buddhist meditative practices
describe degrees of tranquility: one, the repose found in humble melancholy
(wabi), the other, the serenity accompanying the enjoyment of subdued beauty
(sabi). Another contribution of Zen is the combination of unexpected,
startling, or even spontaneous elements used to jolt one's consciousness
toward the goal of enlightenment. This led to the combinations of such
unlikely materials as lead inlaid in lacquer, clashing poetic imagery, or the
use of bizarre ghosts in theater. Unexpectedly humorous, sometimes grotesque
images or motifs also stem from this quality of the Zen conundrum (koan).
Although most art has been secular since the Tokugawa period, the traditional
aesthetics and training methods (stemming generally from religious sources)
continue to underlie artistic productions.

     In the Meiji period, Western art forms came into Japan and were studied
with intense interest by Japanese artists, who soon could imitate a variety of
European arts. By the early twentieth century a period of assimilation began
as techniques were mastered and the new forms in literature and the visual and
performing arts were adapted. Artists divided into two main camps, those
continuing in traditional Japanese style and those who went wholeheartedly
into a study of the new Western culture. In the late 1920s a generation of
Japanese artists emerged who were able to synthesize Western art forms with
Japanese artistic conceptions. Oil painters might use the calligraphic, black
lines of the Japanese tradition, or the Asian tonal system and musical
instruments to create a concerto, while the new theaters dealt with social
themes in the allusive, inconclusive manner of traditional literary style.

     Many artists following various standard Western forms were accused of
being imitators rather than innovators, but the age-old Asian tradition has
always entailed copying a master's style until it has been perfected, which
explains why so much "imitative" art was produced.

     A great many artists in the postwar period began working in art forms
that can only be described as international modern. They no longer belonged to
a local artistic development but had joined the mainstream of world art.
Within this broad spectrum there remained something of the traditional
Japanese artistic perception, such as the use of modular space in architecture
and the spacing of intervals in music and dance, together with a propensity
for certain color combinations or characteristic literary forms. The wide
variety of art forms available to the Japanese in the 1980s reflected the
vigorous state of the arts, widely supported by the Japanese people and
promoted by the government.

     Traditionally the artist was a vehicle for the arts and was reticent
personally, in keeping with his role as an artisan or entertainer of low
social status. The calligrapher-a member of the gentleman scholarly class, or
samurai-who participated in the arts did have higher status, and artists of
genius were often recognized by receiving a name from a feudal lord and thus
rising socially. Only the performing arts were devoid of social prestige, and
the immorality of actresses of the early Kabuki theater caused the Tokugawa
shogunate to bar women from the stage, so that female roles in Kabuki continue
to be played by men.

     By the early 1980s there were a number of good, specialized universities
for the arts, led by the national universities. The most important was the
prestigious Tokyo Arts University, said to be the most difficult of all
national universities to enter. Traditional training in the arts remained in
the hands of experts who taught from their homes or headed schools working
within a master-pupil (iemoto) relationship. A pupil did not experiment in his
own style until he reached the top level of training, was graduated, or became
the head of the school. Many young artists have criticized this system as
stifling creativity and individuality. Some iemoto lineages can still be
traced to the medieval period and perpetuate a master's style or theme,
subject, and technique. Japanese artists consider technical virtuosity as the
sine qua non of their various professions, a fact recognized by the rest of
the world to be one of the hallmarks of Japanese art.

     The government has provided active support for the arts through the
Agency for Cultural Affairs, set up in 1968 as a special body of the Ministry
of Education. The Cultural Affairs Division of the agency has disseminated
information about the arts within Japan as well as internationally; the
Cultural Properties Protection Division has protected the nation's cultural
heritage. Specifically the Cultural Affairs Division has been concerned with
arts promotion, arts copyrights, art festivals, improvements in the national
language, and religious affairs. It has also promoted traveling cultural
events in music, theater, dance, art exhibitions, and local art organizations.
Special prizes have been offered to encourage young artists, and a few have
won grants to train abroad each year. The national museums of modern art in
Tokyo and Kyoto and the Museum of Western Art in Tokyo have been funded by the
agency and have exhibited both international and Japanese shows. The division
has also administered the Japan Academy of Arts to honor eminent persons of
arts and letters, appointing them to its membership and offering some 3
million Yen in prize money. Awards were made in the presence of the emperor,
who bestowed the highest accolade personally. Other official honors were the
Award for Distinguished Cultural Services and the Order of Cultural Merit.

     The Cultural Properties Protection Division, originally established to
administer postwar repair, was responsible in 1981 for over 1,000 historic
sites, including entire ancient areas such as the former capitals of Asuka,
Heijo, and Fujiwara, 200 famous scenic places, and some 900 national
monuments, plus indigenous flora and fauna such as ibis and storks. As of 1978
some 1,000 buildings, paintings, sculpture, and other art forms had been
designated National Treasures. In addition more than 10,000 had the lesser
designation of Important Cultural Properties-sculpture taking the lion's
share, closely followed by calligraphy.

     During the 1970s many important prehistoric and historic sites were
investigated, and exciting new finds occurred. Among them were a sword bearing
the name of the Emperor Yuryaku of the fifth century; the tomb of Ono
Yasumaro, compiler of the Kojiki (712), the oldest of Japan's extant
histories; the first colored painting ever seen from the hand of Sharaku, the
famous eighteenth century wood-block print artist; and many hitherto unknown
works of art newly cataloged from temple storehouses. In 1975 an amendment to
the Cultural Properties Protection Act of 1897 enabled the agency to designate
traditional areas and buildings in urban centers as preservation zones. The
agency also has funded the making and repair of ancient musical (gagaku)
instruments, lacquer brush works, and in 1978 added the preservation of the
technique of carving ukiyo-e wood-block prints, which were facing extinction.

     One of the most interesting features of the Cultural Properties
Protection Division has been its role as protector of the traditional arts and
crafts in the form of their living exemplars. Individual artists or groups
(such as a dance troupe, a pottery village) have been designated as
"intangible cultural assets" (mukei bunkazai) of the nation in recognition of
their accomplishments. Major exponents of the traditional arts have been
designated as "living national treasures." Britain knights distinguished
artists thus elevating their social status; France elects them to the Academie
Francaise, confirming their intellectual values; but Japan honors its top
artists as a national resource, as "living National Treasures." In 1981 the
four masters so designated included a No performer of waki roles, a nagauta
singer, a gold-and-silver-leaf artist, and a Bizen-style swordmaker. Each was
provided a lifetime pension of 1.5 million Yen per year plus financial aid for
training disciples.

     The national museums of Japanese and Asian art in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara,
the Cultural Properties Research institutes at Tokyo and Nara, the National
Theater, the Ethnological Museum, and the National Storehouse for Fine Arts
come under the protection of the Cultural Properties Protection Division. In
1981 a new National Museum of History and Folk Culture opened, and new
cultural facilities under construction included the National No Theater, the
National Bunraku Theater, and a projected second National Theater.

     Japanese artists typically gather together in a large number of arts
associations. The Japan Artists' League, for example, was responsible for the
largest number of major exhibitions, including the prestigious Nitten. There
were several writers' and musicians' groups and more than 100 schools of
flower arrangement in an all-Japan association.

     Arts patronage and promotion has come from a number of public and private
institutions, the government-sponsored annual Arts Festival, and the
burgeoning field of arts prizes. All the major newspapers sponsored
exhibitions and gave yearly prizes in the arts; Japan Broadcasting Corporation
(Nippon Hoso Kyokai-NHK) sponsored foreign orchestras and opera companies; the
major book publishers and top intellectual magazines (Chuo koron and Bungei
shunju) offered literary prizes, as did private companies for arts and
sciences. The most important of the many literary prizes was the Akutagawa,
the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. The government played a major role by
funding the Japan Foundation, which provided both individual and institutional
grants, effected scholarly exchanges and annual prizes, supported publications
and exhibitions, and sent traditional Japanese arts groups abroad. The Arts
Festival, held for two months each fall, was sponsored by the Agency for
Cultural Affairs for all areas of the performing arts. Major cities provided
substantial support for the arts, and a number had built large centers for the
performing arts. There were also a number of new municipal museums, which
together with the many private museums blossoming in the 1970s reflected the
rise of popular interest in the arts.

[See Daigoji Temple: Daigoji Temple, Kyoto, a noted Buddhist temple, dating to
951 A.D. and a designated National Treasure Courtesy Embassy of Japan]