Between: japan

Showing posts with label japan. Show all posts

Saturday, 20 November 2021

Artlyst - Isamu Noguchi: Socially Engaged Art

My latest review for Artlyst is of Noguchi at Barbican Centre:

'Rarely exhibited archive materials and photographs offer illuminating insights into Noguchi’s life and highlight his humanist values. Less clearly articulated is the extent to which Noguchi engaged with spirituality in his practice. Embracing social, environmental, and spiritual consciousness, Noguchi thought art ‘comes from the awakening person’. Awakening is what we might call the spiritual or a linkage to something flowing very ‘rapidly through the air’. Artists are those who ‘come with less obstruction’ to this flow. To be open to flow, artists try to ‘overcome barriers’ such as ‘habit and convenience and fear and accommodation’ or ‘barriers of the self and what everyone thinks about art’. As such, Noguchi saw ‘no conflict between spirituality and modern art’ as art ‘opens another channel to our non-anthropomorphic deity’, the invocation still being to God. He did, however, view Zen as providing a more direct linkage [to art] than through other mystical forms’ with the spiritual being’ direct appreciation of the thing itself’. As a result, he believed ‘you can’t say whether art came from the spiritual or vice versa’.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Articles -

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Velvet Underground - Beginning to See the Light.

Monday, 2 January 2017

'Silence' - Endo, Scorsese, Fujimura, Yancey & Kraus

“My personal encounter in the late 1980s with fumi-e displayed at the Tokyo National Museum led me to read Endō’s masterpiece, Silence,” writes Makoto Fujimura in his new book Silence and Beauty. “As I write this, the novel is being made into a major motion picture by the master filmmaker Martin Scorsese. A good friend of mine introduced me to Scorsese, and my conversation with him compelled me to write this book."

"Only Mako Fujimura could have written this book," Philip Yancey writes in the foreword to the book:

"Bicultural in upbringing and sensibility, he understands the nuances of Japan, and his knowledge of the language sheds light on Endō’s original source material. At the same time, Mako’s years of living in New York have given him a contemporary, global perspective ... Informed by both East and West, Mako guides the reader on excursions into Japanese art, samurai rituals, the tea ceremony and Asian theology, even while relying on Western mentors such as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, J. S. Bach, Vincent van Gogh and J. R. R. Tolkien."

Yancey continues:

"Shūsaku Endō described Japan as a swampland for Christianity, and missionaries who have served there tend to agree. Other Asian countries have seen explosive growth—the megachurches of the Philippines and South Korea, the massive unregistered church in China—while in Japan, the average church numbers less than thirty. A nation that copies nearly everything Western, from management practices to McDonald’s, baseball and pop music, curiously avoids religion. Most puzzling, as Mako mentions, is that so many values in the culture already reflect the way of the New Testament. Why, then, do so few Japanese convert?

That question troubled Shūsaku Endō too, who ultimately concluded that the failure stemmed from the Western emphasis on God’s fatherhood. Mother love tends to be unconditional, accepting the child no matter what, regardless of behavior. Father love tends to be more provisional, bestowing approval as the child measures up to certain standards of behavior. According to Endō, Japan, a nation of authoritarian fathers, has understood the father love of God but not the mother love ...

For Christianity to have any appeal to the Japanese, Endō suggests, it must stress instead the mother love of God, the love that forgives wrongs and binds wounds and draws, rather than forces, others to itself. (“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing!”) “In ‘maternal religion’ Christ comes to prostitutes, worthless people, misshapen people and forgives them,” says Endō. As he sees it, Jesus brought the message of mother love to balance the father love of the Old Testament.

This insight helps answer a common question about Silence: Why did Endō express his own deeply felt faith through a story of betrayal? ...

Endō explains that he centers his work on the experiences of failure and shame because these leave the most lasting impact on a person’s life ... The entire Bible can be seen, in fact, as a story of betrayal, beginning with Adam and proceeding through the history of the Israelites, culminating in the cross ... Our only hope is the forgiving gaze of the betrayed Savior, the still point of Endō’s novel."

In sessions that I led in the past at North Thames Ministerial Training Course we explored many of these same issues involved in cross-cultural communication of the meaning of the Atonement by looking at examples of missionary work in Japan through the writings of Endō and the approach of C. Norman Kraus as summarised in Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (Green & Baker, 2000).

Endō's writings depict both the anguish of faith and the mercy of God. A central theme of his writings has been the clash between Japanese culture and a very Western mode of religion. Novels like Silence and The Samurai suggest that Christianity must adapt itself radically if it is to take root in the “swamp” of Japan.

In assessing Christ’s atoning work, Kraus suggests that a Japanese “shame” culture is a less distorting lens through which to read the New Testament than a Western “guilt” culture. The “atonement theory” which emerges from Kraus’s reading centers more on “solidarity” than on “substitution.”

Among the questions we explored in these sessions were:

What are the cultural factors that Ferreira in Silence thinks have prevented the Christian message from taking root in Japan?
What other factors in the success or failure of this mission to Japan can be identified in Silence?
Ferreira says that “the God whom those Japanese believed in was not the God of Christian teaching”. Assuming for the moment that he was right, do you think this matters and why?
What are the cultural factors in Japan that Kraus takes into account in developing a theology of the atonement for Japan?
How do these factors influence the theology of the atonement that he develops?
In your view, is Kraus’ theology of the atonement consistent with the Biblical concepts and images of the atonement?
In what ways does your discussion of The Samurai link to Kraus’ atonement theology for Japan? Are there cultural issues that are common to both? Are there understandings of the atonement that are common to both?
Does Kraus’ theology answer the issues raised by Ferreira in Silence?
From your understandings of Japanese culture, which of the Biblical concepts or images of atonement would you emphasise in mission to Japan, and why?
What factors do you think need to be taken into account when communicating the god news of the atonement in a culture that is not your own (whether this is the culture of another country or a sub-culture within your own culture)?

In one such session we identified the following:

Issues for cross-cultural communication of the Atonement

Unholy alliances of politics, economics and religion and no consultation with the indigenous peoples
Our religion is embedded in our culture - difficulties of disentangling the two (can we do this?)
Perceived conflict between different religions i.e. Western Catholicism and Japanese Buddhism
May be exporting our denominational, and other, divisions
Need for understanding of social structures i.e. hierarchies
Need for understanding of cultural norms i.e. shame
Suspicious personal motives and suspicion of motives
Suspicion of ‘outsiders’
Shaming or threatening people through lack of cultural understanding
Causing threat through the undermining of cultural hierarchies
Concerns over Empires following on the heels of missionaries
Disruption of a ‘closed’ cultural system through ‘outside’ ideas
Violence accompanying ‘mission’
Lack of respect for the indigenous culture and religion
Discounting of indigenous cultures
Clash with indigenous religious understandings e.g. Velasco’s passion and the Buddhist sense of ‘not desiring’

Ideas for cross-cultural communication of the Atonement

Importance of outsider’s showing care
The giving of honour to all whatever their place within cultural hierarchies
The giving of help rather than the bringing of oppression
Exposure to Christian selflessness across cultural hierarchies
Recognising the examples of service seen in indigenous peoples e.g. Yozö’s example of dedicated service being an image of Christ
The experience of cultural rejection leading to identification with Christ
The stripping away of culture leaving people exposed to revelation
Identification with Christ through experience of sorrow
Tapping into a universal sense of longing
Seeing the universal in the particular
Drawing metaphors from within the culture
Salvation as being saved from the consequences of cultural norms and practices e.g. Christ above the “karma of man”, identification with Christ once shamed

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Bruce Cockburn - Tokyo.

Saturday, 3 October 2015

Endo & Scorsese: Approaching Silence

'Shusaku Endo is celebrated as one of Japan's great modern novelists, often described as "Japan's Graham Greene," and Silence is considered by many Japanese and Western literary critics to be his masterpiece.

Approaching Silence is both a celebration of this award-winning novel as well as a significant contribution to the growing body of work on literature and religion. It features eminent scholars writing from Christian, Buddhist, literary, and historical perspectives, taking up, for example, the uneasy alliance between faith and doubt; the complexities of discipleship and martyrdom; the face of Christ; and, the bodhisattva ideal as well as the nature of suffering. It also frames Silence through a wider lens, comparing it to Endo's other works as well as to the fiction of other authors.'

In his essay for Approaching Silence Martin Scorsese writes: 'Endo’s novel confronts the mystery of Christian faith, and by extension the mystery of faith itself. Rodrigues learns, one painful step at a time, that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that He leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that He is always present … even in His silence.'

'Adapting Silence ... has been a passion project percolating in Martin Scorsese’s mind for decades. For a while, it looked like the film would never get done. But with the release of a full cast, a first still, and a brand new essay and storyboard courtesy of The Film Stage, [Matthew Becklo says,] Scorsese’s Silence is well on its way to its scheduled 2016 release.

In an early forward for the novel, Scorsese wrote:

“How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? There have been many great twentieth century novelists drawn to the subject – Graham Greene, of course, and François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos… [Endo] understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture… That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe that they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.”

Similarly, as David Ehrenstein writes, Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, released in 1988 and adapted from Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the life of Christ, takes as its subject this same struggle between the spirit and the flesh - 'the “temptation” is simply that to be only human—to forgo divinity and martyrdom in exchange for a normal life':

'Kazantzakis’s novel had long fascinated Scorsese, who saw in it an opportunity to create a religious epic like no other, a “Passion project” if ever there was one. Written in 1951, The Last Temptation of Christ, according to its author, shows that the “part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand and love him and to pursue his passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives.” And so instead of dealing with Christ as a remote icon, Scorsese’s film would explore what it meant for him to be fully human as well as divine—as the Gospels say it was Jesus’ unique condition to be.'

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Peter Gabriel - The Feeling Begins.

Thursday, 12 April 2012

Trailing Pugin in Birmingham

Over the last couple of days I've been following part of the Pugin Trail around Birmingham, taking in other sites along the way. 2012 marks the bicentenary of Augustus Welby Pugin (1/3/1812 – 14/9/1852), arguably the greatest British architect, designer and writer of the nineteenth century. A specially designed trail, highlighting the connections of Pugin and his friend John Hardman with Birmingham, is available from Birmingham's tourist information offices, museums and libraries as well as other key venues including St Chad’s Cathedral.

The Cathedral and Bishop’s House (originally opposite), and their interiors, were designed by Pugin. The cathedral is an internationally significant building, being the first Catholic cathedral to be built in the UK since the Reformation. The cathedral was built by George Myers (‘Pugin’s Builder’) and the original internal decorations and fittings were made by craftsmen who re-introduced medieval techniques of production: William Warrington, the chancel windows, 1841; John Hardman junior, the plate and, after 1845, several splendid windows; Herbert Minton, the floor tiles. Pugin’s magnificent rood screen was removed in a re-ordering, in 1967. The vestments were made by Lucy Powell and colleagues, to Pugin’s designs, many surviving to this day. Pugin, a collector of antiquities, also provided the Cathedral with some fine original medieval furnishings, acquired on his continental journeys, including the 15th century German Canons’ stalls and the pulpit. Beneath the Cathedral is a spacious Romanesque-style crypt containing several chantry chapels.

A delightful print display and trail ‘Pugin, Dürer and The Gothic’ runs at the BarberInstitute of Fine Arts until 24 June. Exhibits are from the Barber’s own collection and include a late medieval Brussels wood carving of Joachim and Anna, once owned by John Bernard Hardman; an early Netherlandish triptych of the Deposition, once owned by Pugin; a collection of eight prints and one drawing by Dürer, widely recognised as the greatest German Renaissance artist and a prime inspiration to Pugin, and a Pugin octagonal table on loan from King Edward’s School.

In 1838, Pugin persuaded his friend, John Hardman (1811-1867), to turn his Birmingham button-making business to making metalwork and later stained glass for his new churches. The Museum of the Jewellery Quarter features a number Hardman pieces in its displays, and most of the techniques and processes demonstrated on the fascinating factory tour are exactly the same as used in the 19th Century by Hardman and similar metalworking firms. For the Pugin Bicentenary the museum is mounting a special exhibition on Pugin and Hardman which runs until January 2013.

Winterbourne House, also on the Pugin Trail is a rare surviving example of an early 20th century suburban villa and garden. The house was built in 1903 for John and Margaret Nettlefold, of Guest, Keen & Nettlefold. Designed as a small country estate the house boasted rustic outbuildings and large gardens. Both the house and garden follow the style of the Arts and Crafts movement with examples of local craftsmanship throughout.

I also visited the Ikon Gallery and was intrigued by Postcards From Japan - A Message From Tohoku Artists, a touring exhibition of A5 works by 22 artists from North East Japan marking the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit north east Japan on 11th March 2011. In the aftermath of the disaster, electronic means of communication largely failed, making the use of landlines, mobile phones and the Internet extremely difficult. The post office, however, was quickly up and running and in many cases the first opportunity to report news of survival to loved ones was by postcard. The exhibition is curated by Kate Thomson and Hironori Katagiri, who were working in Tohoku when the earthquake struck. Together the pair have voluntarily organised international exhibitions and projects to support recovery in Tohoku, encouraging local artists and their communities, and developing international cultural links. For more information visit http://www.postcardproject.org/.

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Bruce Cockburn - Tokyo.

Sunday, 1 January 2012

Humility, humanity and shame culture

I've been reading Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes and Shusaku Endo's A Life of Jesus, as well as watching Masahiro Shinoda's film of Endo's Silence, over the Christmas period.
De Waal is critical of Ruth Benedict's famous thesis, made in The Chrysanthmum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, "that the Japanese had a culture of shame rather than a culture of guilt." De Waal's criticisms - the simplicity of this polarity and Benedict's own lack of direct experience of Japan - are fairly standard current critiques of Benedict's thesis. What is interesting though is the continuing popularity of the book and it's influence on a Japanese writer like Endo.

Endo writes in his Preface to the American Edition of A Life of Christ that the "religious mentality of the Japanese ... has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them ... the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father." He then suggests that if his American readers "keep this point of view in mind as they move through A Life of Jesus, they will ... gain deeper insight into just where the religious psychology of the Japanese and other Orientals coincides with their own, and they will better appreciate those points at which the two psychologies perhaps diverge."

As Adrian Pinnington notes in his interesting paper on the issue Endo clearly accepts the shame culture versus guilt culture thesis and it may be that this reflects the influence of Western Catholicism on his thinking and writing. Doug Cummings, in his essay accompanying the film Silence, writes that "Catholic thought in postwar France was in the midst of intellectual revival and reform" during the period that Endo studied at the University of Lyon - "Philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier grappled with theology and modernity" while Endo "focused on writers he called the "grande écrivaines of French literature" ... François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green ... Catholic novelists who specialized in vivid descriptions of personal struggles, religious doubts, and dark nights of the soul."

Cummings notes a "deep bifurcation within Endo that would remain a part of him and his writing throughout his life: the Western-Christian side and the Eastern-Japanese side, both psychological hemispheres yearning for solidarity but refusing cohesion." As a result, the reigning motifs in his work become "philosophical rifts, religious fervour and weakness, suffering innocents, martyrs and apostates, and the clash of cultures."

Pinnington, however, argues that Endo's "initially negative picture of Japanese culture grows more positive" with "the lack of a strong self" coming to be seen as a "precious asset." This change in Endo mirrors the Japanese response to Benedict's thesis which was "initially accepted in a spirit of contrition after the war, but was later reversed into evidence for the greater humanity of Japanese society." Once this is understood, Pinnington suggests, Endo's early work can also be seen as less negative towards Japanese culture than has often been assumed. In Silence, for example, "Rodrigues, the priest who finally betrays the Church and apostasizes, actually first learns true humility through this action." It is only, Pinnington notes, "after he has abandoned the false absolutes of European culture that he can recognize the action of Christ in his own life, and begin to hear the voice of Christ."

On this basis, it would seem that, while Benedict's thesis cannot simply be accepted per se, its reception in Japan and the use made of it by Endo suggest that her thesis has much that can critique Western culture when understood through Japanese eyes.

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Toru Takemitsu - Rain Spell.

Sunday, 28 March 2010

Palm Sunday Procession

Starting out from St John's

Passing the United Free Church

Riding Isaac the donkey

At Westwood Recreation Ground

Blessing our Palm Crosses

Reading the Gospel

Our joint congregations at Westwood Recreation Ground

Completing our service at St Paul's Goodmayes

Fr. Ben leading at St Paul's Goodmayes

The new tryptich at St Paul's Goodmayes

Last year, for the first time, Palm Sunday in Seven Kings saw a congregation of 130 process from St Pauls Goodmayes to St Johns Seven Kings accompanied by a donkey and children dressed as disciples. The procession was jointly organised by the two churches and is intended to become an annual community event.

Today we reversed the procession beginning at St John's and ending at St Paul's, stopping midway at Westwood Recreation Ground to bless palm crosses and read the Gospel. This year our donkey was called Isaac and, as last year, our children loved the opportunity to have a ride. Also as last year, the congregation of the United Free Church came out to greet us as we passed by at the beginning of the procession.

As we went we handed out a leaflet explaining what we were doing and why:

The original Palm Sunday featured a joyful procession as Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on a colt and the people praised God and spread cloaks and palms on the ground (see Matthew 21): “They brought the donkey and the colt, placed their cloaks on them, and Jesus sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted, "Hosanna to the Son of David!" "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" "Hosanna in the highest!" When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, "Who is this?" The crowds answered, "This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee."

Rev. Jonathan Evens, Vicar of St John’s, says, “This service and procession are a joyful celebration for us and, we hope, a visible act of witness to our community.” Fr. Benjamin Rutt-Field, parish priest of St Paul's Goodmayes, has said that the procession reminds him of his three month sabbatical in Japan, "where the indigenous faiths of Shinto and Buddhism celebrate their festivals with joyful and colourful processions, conveying to the whole multi-faith community, something of what they personally believe in and why it is important to them."

We are grateful to the Metropolitan Police and the London Borough of Redbridge for their permission and help in enabling this procession to take place.

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Kirk Franklin - Hosanna.

Friday, 24 April 2009

Blogs & papers

Here's a link to the Church Times piece about the Palm Sunday service and procession that St John's shared with St Paul's Goodmayes. In a piece about the service and procession in the Ilford Recorder, Fr. Ben Rutt-Field said it reminded him of of festival processions that he had seen while on sabbatical in Japan.

I commented recently on Nick Baines' blog about the value of these kinds of stories in the local press saying:

"My experience, in a short spell of ordained ministry, is that if you give the local press stories regularly they will be used and won’t be significantly changed in the telling.

This means, at a local level, that it is possible to tell good news stories about Christianity that therefore challenge the more negative impressions that people pick up more generally from the national media.

Taking the time to do this (and it doesn’t involve a great deal of time) is, I think, something that Christian leaders should be encouraged and trained to do. This is, of course, dependent on an issue that you raised in an earlier blog; the extent to which local newspapers can survive the recession."

Philip Ritchie's blog got a mention this week in the Church of England Newspaper with a factual listing of his most frequent topics each beginning with the letter 'f'.

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Neal Morse - Lifeline.