4 - Out of Landscape

Summary

Japan as the Sublime: The Acculturation of Japanese Nature

Religious philosopher Yuasa Yasuo (1925-2005) put it succinctly when he wrote that ‘history and nature, like man's mind and body, are in an inseparable relationship’. Without doubt, a distinct engagement with nature was a salient component of the creation of a nation-state following the Meiji era, and nature itself played an integral part in defining the Japanese people and the kokutai discourse, so much so that the symbiotic relationship created meant that one was fundamental to the other. In other words, Japan as the physical and Japan as history were intertwined, so that for soldiers like Tamura, displacement to the harsh and unfamiliar landscape of New Guinea was experienced not only as a physical rupturing but also as a severance from the emotional ties of collective memory and shared past experience. This interweaving of a country's nature and its history is not unique to Japanese thinking under the kokutai. We see that writers during the Third Reich in Germany such as anthropologist and psychologist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (1892-1974) wrote about landscape under the dubious theme of ‘racial psychology’:

The manner in which the soul reaches out into its world fashions the geographical area of this world into a ‘landscape’. A landscape is not something that the soul alights upon, as it were, something ready-made. Rather, it is something that it fashions by virtue of its species-determined way of viewing its environment. It cannot, of course, arbitrarily fashion any landscape out of any kind of geographical area. The area is the matter, so to speak, into which the soul projects its style and thus transforms it into a landscape. […] The area offers the soul possibilities for shaping it in accordance with the soul's unique manner of perceiving it.

The reinstitution of the Emperor as a divine and inviolable sovereign in the Meiji era was accompanied by the elevation of Shintō to the status of state religion. This led to the unification of rites and government [saisei itchi], perceptively labelled as ‘governance-as-worship’. The most important aspect of Shintō for the Meiji rulers was the creation myth of the Emperor Jimmu as a descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, which revealed the origin of the Emperor.