David Herkt
Japan: An autobiography by Peter Shaw (Six Point Press, 2024), 167pp, $45
Peter Shaw’s Japan: An autobiography is a book whose physical aesthetic fits its subject. The pure pleasure of handling it and turning its pages is very much part of its message. As an object, its design by Inhouse (Arch and Jane MacDonnell) for their own imprint, Six Point Press, is nothing short of beautiful, particularly its bold vermillion cover—a colour theme that continues throughout, including the backgrounds of the image-containing facing pages. An oblong gateway window cut into the French-folded cover gives onto a photograph of green tree leaves and a darker pool of water with the flat bridge walkways of a Japanese garden underneath—an image that is intensely complementary in colour to the vermillion surround.
Many photographs are interspersed through the whole book, including both historic images and those taken by Shaw himself. These are placed on pages facing the text or spread across double pages. Any footnotes are printed in vermillion on the facing page, exactly where required for ease of reading. The superscript numbers in the opposite page of text are also of the same vermillion. In this design, the much-maligned footnote becomes a thing of delight and an easy and informative pleasure to read.
The aesthetics of Japan are much more than sixteen thousand years old. In more recent culture—and particularly in the context of Shaw’s book—it is worth recalling the author we know of as Sei Shōnagon who worked around 1000 AD. Her Makura no Sōshi or The Pillow Book was a great compilation of lists (‘Things That Make One Nervous’, ‘Things That Gain From Being Painted’), written accounts of views and ceremonial occasions, with precepts of manners like the requirements of ‘morning-after letters’, along with court gossip and waspish anecdotes that offered not only an insight into Heian Japan but created a genre of writing that would become a basis of later Japanese style.
In Sei Shōnagon’s work, the aesthetics of a nascent modern Japan can be seen as an already complex thing. Her book feels very contemporary. The vagrant stamp of individuality can be seen through many aspects, including choice. Shaw’s book too can be seen to belong squarely to this tradition of selection. It is a personal book—a seemingly casual collection—with its own unique perspectives, but it has grown out of encounters with a society that exists in its difference from the West and calls out for comprehension.
Shaw’s reader must also consider the Japanese travel diary, as exemplified by the Tosa Nikki and Murasaki Shikibu Nikki, and Bashō’s later Oku no Hosomichi, or The Narrow Road to the Deep North, as it is frequently titled in translation. These books present small sections of a journey between places and are both observant and personal. Historical information is given, frequently elliptically. The Japanese penchant for the miniature and the condensed is seen clearly. Reaching the warmth and steam of a bathhouse, for instance, can be emblematic of an entire day of travel. A single traveller on a beach shore of silver sand is the condensation of a place. Frequently, these books are interspersed with tanka or haiku, where the sights and experiences of travel are considered poetically but also extended further, establishing other connections.
Shaw also reproduces an early Japanese map of the entire world, as it once existed in Japanese consciousness: the four major islands of the country surrounded by boundless sea, with no other perceptible lands.
Japan: An autobiography begins with Shaw’s discovery of Japanese culture through an accidental two-day layover in Tokyo. Shaw’s hotel was located near the great wooden gate of the Zojo-ji temple, all that survives of a huge structure built in 1622 but mostly destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. He entered its grounds with their long lines of more than 1300 small mossy Jizo statues in red cloth scarves, unaware of their significance or their place in Japanese religion and society. ‘[A]lmost everything I saw in Tokyo on that first short trip presented a culture to which I had no access,’ Shaw writes. ‘The desire to unravel the mysteries was to become an obsession that has dominated my life ever since.’ His book is an account and consequence of that desire.
After this introduction, Shaw offers a brief history of early New Zealand travellers to Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Canterbury landowners Heaton and Jesse Rhodes honeymooned there in 1891, arriving at Nagasaki, travelling up through the Inland Sea to Kobe, Osaka and Kyoto to finish at Nikko. Jesse was carried by rickshaw or sedan chair while her husband walked beside her. They were early enthusiasts for Japonaiserie and they purchased pieces of furniture, cloisonne, brocade fabrics, a pair of bronze storks and many kimonos to ship back for the Blue Room in their home at Otehuna.
The great collector and surgeon Sir Thomas Hocken travelled to Japan in 1901 and again in 1904, taking his family—including his daughter Gladys, who kept a diary of the trip. They visited curio shops in Yokohama and Hocken purchased seeds to send back to New Zealand seed merchants. There were many other visitors in the same period: David Theomin acquired arms to display at his Olveston home and the De Beer family assembled a fine collection of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which now reside in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
George Chance followed in 1920. He was an optometrist but also a photographer and his images cover a broad range of Japanese society, ranging from pictorial views to images of working people and urban poverty, of which Shaw prints a selection.
He continues his account of the relationship of the two countries, detailing the New Zealand J-Force’s occupation of Japan after the surrender of the Japanese in 1945, and comments on how many members of J-Force continued to visit the country after their initial stay, comparing it to his own 28 trips. ‘Although the country has become increasingly familiar to me, I never feel as though I am finished with it.’
Japan: An autobiography is a familiar and even a familial book, where Shaw acts as a guide, sharing with the reader his experiences and the people he meets, who are just as keen to guide and share their experiences with him. In the Tokyo branch of Tower Records, for example, flicking through masses of classical CDs unobtainable in New Zealand, he discovers Yoshio who offers to help him with the Japanese titling. Yoshio speaks English well and sings in the Bach Collegium Chorus. Appalled to discover Shaw is sleeping in a cheap hotel, he invites Shaw to stay.
Yoshio’s house is a mess. ‘The main room was full of creeping pot-plants, many of them dead, and electronic equipment, much of it not in working order. When things broke he left them. He never ate at home; he either went to McDonald’s where he collected the coffee mugs or ate out at popular Japanese food outlets, Yoshinoya or Matsuya. But he was fun and keen to take me to interesting places.’
Yoshio is not alone. Japan: An autobiography is full of Japanese guides, who sometimes take Shaw through places faster than he would prefer but permit him to find and see things he would not otherwise have discovered. After Yoshio, Shaw visits Kyoto with Genji, a Japanese friend he had met in Auckland, and his family. There, he encounters a traditional machiya, an old three-storeyed wooden townhouse, tucked a few streets back from a main road. It features a timber facade, an interior garden and a post-and-beam construction. The open spatial flow can be modified by screens to suit the season, and the floors are covered with ‘soft, grassy, sweet-smelling’ tatami mats. In case Shaw’s words have not evoked the house enough, the photographs on facing pages are a vivid record.
This is one of the beauties of the book. Words are enlarged by illustration. Old volumes of classical Japanese travel frequently coupled text with woodcuts, such as those of Hokusai or Hiroshige, whose coloured prints were also sold in albums or collected singly. However, Shaw overlooks haiku and other poetic forms from Japanese literature that provide such a vivid stab at lifting a featured object or landscape out from the midst of the descriptive narrative that surrounds them—especially in the best books of the travel genre.
Although Shaw visits many of the significant historic and pictorial sites that provide the utamakura—rhetorical evocations of a place which carry a freight of tradition—of so much Japanese poetic travel literature, he never quotes from these works, which is a great pity. He does, however, use his own photographs or those from historic collections to perform a similar function. These images do not only evoke; they intersperse, inform and aerate the text, just like the haiku in Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi or The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In a sense, Shaw’s photographs become the utamakura. They provide a vivid counterpoint as well as continuing the explication of his themes. By depicting places, buildings and landscapes—along with discreet historic references—they enlarge Japan: An autobiography considerably.
In addition to his former role as arts editor at Metro, Shaw has worked as a curator of the Fletcher Trust Collection. His cultural knowledge is wide and he can easily establish links. Homes, gardens, menus, food, temples, sculptures, screens, shrines, walls, homes and vistas are all part of the fabric of Japan: An autobiography. Many religious centres are visited. His knowledge is precise. Shaw’s background in architecture also particularly enlightens his reader. He can compare Japanese architecture effectively with other Asian styles, including the buildings of Communist China, which has been another focus of his interest. His descriptions of interiors are a particular joy. But Shaw’s knowledge does not end there.
His appreciation of Japanese ceramics becomes a further elaboration of his themes. In Shaw’s hands, it is another story of influence. He begins casually, with an appreciation of ‘age’ via Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s book, In’ei Raisan or In Praise of Shadows, where lustre is superficial and gloom speaks to ‘the sheen of antiquity’. He introduces the works and philosophies of the late well-known New Zealand potter Bruce Martin who spent 20 years annually firing a large collection of his Japanese-style Anagama pieces, with their 12-day firing period and subsequent cooling at his kiln at Bridge Pa, just out of Hastings. Anagama is an art of the accident—vessels can fall over or ash can build up on the surfaces during the firing process. ‘The potter has little idea what to expect when he or she opens a kiln,’ Shaw writes. ‘The aesthetic is one of controlled randomness, or distress, of impermanence, of imperfection, of age.’
Japan: An autobiography belies its compact brevity. It provides an entrance into a culture and its manifestations. The book also displays Japan’s influence upon New Zealanders through their visits to the country over the last 130 years. Two peoples are revealed through their contact with each other. It is a narrative of mirrors. It is also open to accident. Immensely pocketable, the book could easily be used as a companionable guide or at the very least a journey planner. Both Shaw—as writer and photographer—and his publisher must be complimented on a unique, informative and mind-pleasing book.
DAVID HERKT is a poet, widely published journalist, book reviewer and writer of short fiction. He resided in Australia for twenty years and was educated at the University of Melbourne. Formerly working in television, his documentaries have received awards for ‘Best Factual Series’ and ‘Best Children’s Television’ at the New Zealand Film and Television Awards. He now lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
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