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Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives. Pamela J. Asquith and Ame Kalland, eds. Richmond Surrey, UK: Curzon, 1997. 290 pp.
It is a commonplace to say that Japanese culture is rooted in a deep appreciation of nature. Yet what "nature" precisely means, or has meant to various Japanese at various moments in time, is by no means a simple matter. The aim of this valuable volume is to both explicate and problematize conceptions of nature that are enmeshed in a host of Japanese practices ranging from art, poetry, and gardening to advertising, vending machines, and debates over brain death. Guiding many of the entries is the recognition that what is considered "natural" in Japan is viewed as confusing or contradictory to those raised with different worldviews. The editors note, for example, that in the Judeo-Christian tradition of Euro-America, there is a tendency to conceptualize nature as different from and outside the self, and a force that humans try to master and control. In contrast, Japanese are taught to be in harmony with nature and that humans are only part rather than the center of a universe in which everything (trees and rocks as much as venerable priests and imperfect humans) shares the status of kami (spirit/god). Despite cultural values placed on respecting and associating with nature, however, Japanese have also manifested behaviors that appear to trouble these very principles. The two that the contributors to this volume keep returning to are Japan's poor track record on environmental issues and a propensity to rework nature with human artifice-signs of what would appear to be a more human-centric, human-chauvinistic view of nature than one encapsulated by mere "harmony."
Emerging from a Japan Anthropology Workshop held in 1993 in Banff, Canada, on the theme of nature in Japanese culture, the volume is a collection of 14 essays including a tightly integrative introduction by coeditors Pamela Asquith and Arne Kalland. In each, the strategy adopted is similar: to take a specific practice or site and unravel its grammar of nature. One of the richest entries is Pilar Cabanas's on the genre of art called bijinga-the art of drawing or painting women to be beautiful. In contrast to a Western...