WABI SABI, the sad beauty

(italian text and photos published in the Witness Journal, #5, 2007: Giappone)

There are various ways to travel, and various ways to tell travel stories : from the climbing together with Claude Lévi-Strauss along impervious tracks through a thick forest, in the pursuit of a vanishing culture, to a travel around his own bedchamber by Xavier De Maistre, in an introspective and merciless pursuit of our inner daemons. And, inbetween those two extremes, the bottled and cable-driven travel of the consumer tourists in their organized trips, who tell in blunt photo images the repetitious emotions of those once inaccessible places, today packed in last-minute, all-inclusive catalogs. As far as I am concerned, in a travel I try to find a leitmotiv, that invisible trace that makes any travel, even the most banal and daily transfer, a path. Without any hesitation, between the academic pomp of a Lévi-Strauss, and the "slowness of sight" of a De Maistre, I choose the second one.


When I traveled to Japan for the first time it was because of business. I had to spend a few days in Tsukuba for a scientific conference, therefore I seized the occasion to make an ample detour of about two weeks to Kyoto and Tokyo. Trying to avoid the family-style postcard photos, that are the unavoidable result of clumsy attempts to imitate the "National Geographic" style by people like me, who do not have the necessary technical skills, it was instead a very clear decision to drive my personal, visual and photographic, exploration of a territory already largely explored, narrated, described, painted, photographed, translated into any language of the world. I had started, more or less consciously, the search for that slippery and hard to define, however absolutely evident feature, of the traditional japanese aestethics, the wabi-sabi.

The concept exposed by the two juxtaposed words, wabi and sabi, is not easy to translate. In fact, it draws part of its fascination from the capability of evoking a pluralism of meanings. The very peculiar japanese aesthetics described by those two words is grounded on the acceptation of the transient nature of the world and of all things, as expressed in an imperfect beauty, non-permanent, and incomplete. Wabi connotes a modest and tamed elegance, a rustic simplicity painted of silence and chillness, wabi is the strangeness, the deformation, the defect which adds uniqueness and elegance to an object. Sabi is all the beauty and the serenity of the old age, the patina and wear of the years, the trace of rust, a patch made visible so as not to leave doubts about the fragility of life and things. Wabi-sabi is the sad beauty.

A hagi-ware tea cup, with its only apparently gross and graceless shape, draw its true beauty from the asymmetry, from the rustic style, from the scant and unpaired colours. But upon a closer look, one discovers the careful delicacy of the shape, the absolute perfection of the shining glaze, whose colour changes in time and with the usage. The effect is that of a precious diamond modestly hiding in a raw rock. The imperfection deliberatedly left by the craftsman on the rim is wabi, the darkening and rusting of the glaze produced by the tea is sabi.

Wabi-sabi is not a style, there are no written rules, it is impossible to build a wabi-sabi home, or life. To find the right way is a recipe as simple, as elusive and unattainable : « The perfect Way is without difficulty, Save that it avoids picking and choosing. Only when you stop liking and disliking, Will all be clearly understood. » (Hsin-hsin Ming, by the chinese monk Seng-Tsan, VI century). Rooted in the Zen buddhism, and in principles that remind of the vast and indifferent emptiness of the universe, of the absence of sacred, of an austere life in communion with the nature, of the concentration on the small things and on daily life as a path to the enlightenment, wabigokoro means 'to reach a wabi mind and heart' : live in modesty, learn to be satisfied of your own life by dropping all the unnecessary, live in the moment by removing the obsession for the future. A difficult task under any latitude and culture, one which is almost inacceptable in our western world, slave of the consumer logic, of the sales, of the maximum rentability. We, subjugated to the perfomance anxiety that makes us waste money to have the whitest teeth and to buy the best wines in a supermarket. An ancient text by Sen-no Rikyu, the Nanporoku, says : « It is already enough if your home does not let in the cold, and if your food keeps the hunger away. »

Wabi is also a criticism against the vulgar ostentation of the ruling class. When the wabisuki ("taste for being wabi") did spread in the XVIth century Japan, the word defined the rustic though careful lifestyle of the samurai, who lived their life of warriors devoid of any comfort, but in which there was always the place for a tea ceremony, or for an ikebana floral decoration. Before then, wabi defined something or someone sad, solitary and desolated. In the modern japanese language there is still trace of this negative connotation, when the word wabi is used, e.g., to describe the feeling of helplessness while waiting for a lover who is late at a meeting.

Often, the wabi-sabi is found in the confrontation between the microworld and the daily, macroscopic world. In that wide span of space between the wisdom of the cricket and the unattainable distance of the stars, between a scratch in the paper and the crack in the mountain. For this reason, the photos in this work are presented in couples, trying to evoke the juxtaposition between microscopic and macroscopic, useful and useless, perfect and imperfect, sacred and ordinary. « When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created. When people see things as good, evil is created. Being and non-being produce each other. Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short define each other. High and low oppose each other. Fore and aft follow each other. Therefore the Master can act without doing anything and teach without saying a word. » (Tao te-ching, II).
A man carefully rakes the golden leaves of a gingko, in the gardens of the Kinkaku-ji temple in Kyoto, he appreciates all the beauty and the little, golden perfection of his doing, while the precious and fragile millenary building in wood and gold-leaf behind him reflects on the still, icy waters of an autumn morning.
The candid white hands of a girl wrapping rice pancakes, swift as butterflies waving in the clear air of the afternoon, remind of a haiku of rare beauty. Rakka eda ni, kaeru to mireba, kotefu kana. (« A leaf returnign to its branch ? It was just a butterfly. » Moritake Arakida, 1472-1549)

A few old men happily smoking in front of a cart selling fried fish, besides the image of buddhist followers inspiring incense at the entrance of a temple. The double presence is enough to evoke another haiku by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), Ka ibushi no makkaza shimo ni hotoke kana, « Downwind from the smudge pot, smokes a Buddha ». Sacred and ordinary, daily and immortal, real and transcendent, fused in resonances and counterpoints, depurated of any possible ethical judgement and moralistic prejudice.


Of course, by looking at modern Japan one may ask whether the traditional wabi-sabi still inspires this people, apparently so fully westernized, and totally devoted to follow and surpass the occidental models. The book by Karl Taro Greenfeld, Speed Tribes, days and nights with Japan’s next generation (Harper Perennial, 1995) tells about a modern Japan whose sons know everything about the Guns n’Roses but nothing about ikebana, and prefer to wrap a joint instead of an origami. « In 1868, Ueno Park staged the last battle opposing the ancient warlords to the restored Meji emperor. After defeating his adversaries, the emperor declared the whole site of Ueno a national preserve, in order to protect the ancient shinto and buddhist temples, and to insure that some free space remained available to people under the impending modernization of the city of Tokyo. Obviously, he could not imagine that the great stairs at the south entrance of the park, next to the statue of the mythical samurai Saigo Takamori, would have turned into the most flourishing drug market of the whole Tokyo. »
To a closer inspection, the problem of westernization against defense of the tradition in japanese culture is anything but a recent issue. Already at the beginning of the XXth century, the writer Tanizaki Jun’ichiro hid behind the light and ironic talk of In’ei rasan ("In praise of shadows", 1933) his sincere regret for the westernization and the inexorable dilution of japanese aesthetic canons. Tanizaki defends, from his point of view, a kind of superiority of the oriental sensibility (the "world of shadows") over the occidental one (the "world of lights"), by reviewing a list of daily objects and tools. He compares the customs of western people to the usage of the same objects by the japanese, and what the same objects could have been if the japanese had not passively accepted the version proposed by the western world.

When you will travel to Japan, sleep on the futon laid on the floor of a traditional ryokan. Take a walk during the fall season along the lanes of a park in Kyoto, among the maples covered by red and yellow leaves. Stop in front of a moss-covered stone lantern. Kneel for a moment in front of the statue of a Jizo buddha decorated with the red bib by an expecting mother. Look at the traditional furniture in a home or a restaurant. Try the touch of the rough and random surface of a raku pottery. In all these actions, it will be unavoidable to perceive that timeless and unspeakable "japanese style".

But we should not exclude a priori that the wabi-sabi taste for the "sad beauty" of the aging things, which reminds us, not without tenderness, of our human condition, could have parallels in some western sensibility. For example, furniture in western homes is more and more inclined towards a minimalism of the shapes and decorations, in which the man and not the machine is being celebrated. Again, modern architecture, since Frank Lloyd Wright and on, has drawn continuous inspiration from the pure essentiality of the japanese shapes ; as the architect Franca Bossalino says, the ideal of the imperfection of matter and the mutability of the form could become an aesthetic objective per se, independently of the requirements of functionality and usefulness customarily at the basis of the design.
We too, the westerners, may grow a feeling for an old tool that reminds us of our origins, or for some useless tinplate toys, resurfacing straight from our infancy. Something like the saudade of the portuguese or the old-german sehnsucht, and even more than that. How many among us could say to have never experienced a feeling of affection, like your heart being full with nostalgia, while rambling through a flea market and holding in the hands an old can opener, still bearing the discouloured labels of some disappeared factory, or the wrecked and dusty cars of a toy freight-train ? Such a feeling is certainly close to the japanese sabi.

And even if, for us western people, it will be always difficult to understand the idea of spending three or four hours kneeling down, to take part in a ritual during which a silent master draws a few ancient and careful moves just to serve a few cups of tea, the spirit that lives behind that ceremony should be perfectly reachable. Because every meeting with a friend is a unique occasion. Because we never know what could happen tomorrow, or later tonight. Interrupting our activity, no matter how important, to greet a friend, to share a conversation, is a chance to find a moment of peace, harmony and love. It is in such moments that the wabi-sabi spirit surfaces. By following the cha no yu, the tea ceremony, one learns to handle every single tool, as simple as it can be, as if it were a precious object, with the same respect and care we would use for a rare antique.
The "sad beauty" teaches us to give back their value to the little, daily things. Maybe, thanks to the intermediation of a small crack in a teapot, or the contemplation of an old wooden table with its surface polished by the years, we could find within ourselves those much needed spaces of shadowy, quiet humanity.