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This month's museum pick...
Tokyo National Museum's Calligraphy Collection
By Patrick Totty
Glimpses into the Soul of Japan’s Past
When the Japanese adapted Chinese ideographic characters for their written language, they also inherited the Chinese appreciation for the aesthetics of calligraphy. The Japanese quickly learned that the appearance and flow of characters were as important in many ways as their content.
This gives Japanese scholars double insight into earlier periods on their nation’s history. Documents that may be written routinely to record certain events or court functions nevertheless reveal the character of the writers themselves. Unlike monks in Europe who strove to banish individuality from their attempts to achieve uniform-looking manuscript letters, the scribes of Japan could not help putting a part of themselves on paper each time they dipped their brushes in ink.
Japan preserves many splendid examples of its early calligraphy in the Tokyo National Museum (TNM), rotating specimens from its extensive collection every two months. The pieces cover an amazing range of topics, from the quotidian to the sublime. There are letters, poems, prose, treatises on medicine and politics, Buddhist sacred writings, poetry contest records, albums of calligraphic masterpieces, and even a 12th-century account of the legendary trip to India by the Chinese Buddhist priest, Xuan Zhuang, in the 7th century.
Many of the pieces date back to the 8th or 9th century. They give tantalizing glimpses into the country’s earliest history by capturing writers’ concerns and level of culture at the time Japan formally adopted Chinese writing Although Japan’s stories about its origins say that the country can trace itself back 2,600 years (via the lineage of the imperial family), there just isn’t that much archaeological evidence from pre-literate Japan to give scholars the same clear picture that these old calligraphic works do.
TNM, well served by subway lines, lies at the edge of Ueno Park, a hub of cultural treasures. Besides TNM itself, the immediate area is the location of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the National Science Museum, the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, the Royal Ueno Museum and the Ueno Zoological Gardens.