The view of the old cherry tree from Damian Flanagan’s window (Damian Flanagan)
By Damian Flanagan
Sometimes you hear concepts in foreign cultures that you can understand in a kind of vague, historical way. Take, for example, the concept of “wabi-sabi,” which is so important to Japanese aesthetics. The phrase literally means “abandoned and old,” and refers to an appreciation of a simple, austere aesthetic. It’s exemplified by the kind of simple, rustic-looking teahouses you find in traditional Japanese gardens.
If I were to try to explain my understanding of “wabi-sabi,” I would probably start with the opposite, pointing to the heavily Chinese-influenced architecture that the Japanese embraced with gusto during the Nara period of the 8th century. For a while, the Japanese seemingly delighted in imitating the monumental, bright red buildings of Tang China, but gradually the Tang dynasty declined and Japan retreated more into its own way of doing things, adopting a softer, more subtle, shadowy architectural style. As the minimalist influence of Zen fused with this native style, attuned to the intimacy of the Japanese landscape and seasons, the aesthetic of “wabi-sabi” was born.
That’s my art historical view, but sometimes you need a personal experience to understand the true meaning of a concept.
Last year I was pondering what to do with a beautiful, beautiful cherry tree in a garden in England. Every spring I would open the shutters of my office and the tall arched windows would be ablaze with a profusion of spectacular cherry blossoms. It was a life-affirming pleasure to enjoy this seasonal spectacle each year.
Adding decorations to the shimenawa rope around a sacred tree. (Mainichi)
But the cherry tree was getting old and seemed to be nearing the end of its life. Someone told me it was probably 80 years old. With each passing year, more and more branches lost their leaves. I wondered if some parts of it needed to be pruned back.
The gardener suggested I get a tree surgeon to look at it, and to my horror the tree surgeon suggested that it should be cut down completely. It was dying, he said, and had probably lost its strength and might fall over in a storm. As it was quite close to the building, this was a cause for concern.
But I was very reluctant to cut down such a beautiful tree. So I brought in a tree surgeon to make an assessment. He called first in the winter, tapped it and scribbled down some scientific data, but said that if he wanted to give a definitive opinion, he would have to come back in the summer. In the meantime, a large tree had indeed fallen in a storm on a neighboring property and landed on a car. When the tree surgeon came back, he agreed that the large cherry tree had to be cut down…
The gardener wanted to cut it down, the tree surgeon wanted to cut it down, the tree surgeon advised cutting it down… If something happened and the tree fell and caused major damage to the building or, worse, to a person, it would clearly have been my responsibility. And so, with a heavy heart, I signed the order to cut down the slightly aged cherry tree.
From the moment the tree surgeon and his assistants began to climb, rope themselves to the trunk and amputate the branches of this beautiful tree, I felt deep in my soul that I had made a resounding mistake. There was something deeply wrong with this process and that reducing this natural wonder to a mangled stump could still be Greek.
This loss felt traumatic, and when I next returned to Japan during cherry blossom season, I found myself more interested than usual in the streets and rivers lined with spectacular cherry trees. But what caught my attention — and what I had completely missed before — was how many of these trees were deeply distorted by age, and how the blossoms often stood side by side with completely dead, withered branches. If this were England, I thought, they would have been executed long ago and a new, budding tree would have been planted in their place.
In Japan, the process of aging, the fragility and decay, the cycle of life and death itself, are all part of a much-vaunted fragile beauty. In Japan, you will see large trees with shimenawa ropes around them to signify their sacredness — to indicate that they embody a divine spirit. But perhaps even more special, you will sometimes see the stumps of dead trees with these sacred ropes around them to commemorate the enduring presence of the tree’s spirit.
The Japanese care for trees in ways that would be unthinkable in the West. You often see mats (komo) wrapped around the trunks of trees in the winter to protect them from the cold, and many old trees have supports, like wooden battlefield crutches, to support their old branches. There is a kind of “care for the old” in Japanese tree culture that is completely absent in the West, where instead there is only an obsession with youthful virility in a “health and safety” mania culture where risk avoidance rules all thinking.
A cherry tree at Toji Temple in Kyoto, stabilized with multiple support poles and straw matting around the trunk. (Damian Flanagan)
I began to see that the true essence of “wabi-sabi” was this sublime acceptance of the process of gradual aging and decay. It was not to be met with disgust and a desire to remove it as quickly as possible, but rather with finding beauty in quiet, protected decay and death as much as in youth and growth. The realization that they are all part of a greater whole.
A famous example of the “wabi-sabi” aesthetic in Japan is the Temple of the Silver Pavilion (Ginkakuji) in northeastern Kyoto. The pavilion’s modest, gray, monotonous simplicity contrasts with the glittering mirage of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji) on the other side of town.
But for me, if you really want to understand what “wabi-sabi” is all about, wander through the garden of the Temple of the Silver Pavilion and look at the tree stumps. The garden has been carefully cultivated for the future, and the tree stumps are considered an integral part, not dug up but left to slowly decay.
Nothing is forced, nothing is rushed. Life is not presented as a flashy, curated spectacle, but accepted as something simple and beautiful and inevitable, something to be preserved as long as possible, and then, when it is finally over, the memory of life is allowed to dissolve back into the essence from which it came. That is “wabi-sabi.”
There is a parallel between the life of trees and the life of people. The brutal experience of my cherry tree being felled in England left me with a rather wistful feeling that in the West we have a kind of “Logan’s Run” approach to life, where an object reaches an age at which it is brutally replaced by a more youthful replacement. I felt that I should have ignored much of the “professional” advice around me and done more to prolong the aging, slowly dying beauty of my precious tree with supports for its branches until the last fading of its last cherry blossom glow.
Decay can be beautiful. Decay can make that last honest burst of radiated effervescence from a life form even more spectacular. These are the “wabi-sabi” aesthetics of gardening and architecture that I think many people in the West could better appreciate and absorb before they too crumble to dust.
The garden of Ginkakuji Temple in Kyoto, famous for its wabi-sabi aesthetic. (Damian Flanagan)
@DamianFlanagan
(This is part 54 of a series)
In this column, Japanese literature researcher Damian Flanagan muses on Japanese culture as he travels between Japan and Britain.
Profile:
Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Great Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while attending the University of Cambridge. He was involved in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 to 1999. After taking master’s and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he obtained a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of “Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature” (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).
