ABSTRACT
Japan is a country where junior high school graduates become manual workers, high school graduates become clerks, and college graduates become managers and professionals—all three thus slotted for the rest of their lives by the school-leaving diploma. The landscape painting is the soul of Japanese art because the Japanese landscape has formed the soul of Japan. Japanese artists of the eighteenth century were highly individualistic, yet most considered themselves as belonging to a school—Nanga or Rimpa or Shijo, for instance. The tension between the pressure to belong and to conform and the stress on spontaneity, independence, and individuality is one, but only one, of the polarities that characterize Japanese art and Japanese culture. Almost any Japanese landscape painting could be used to demonstrate Japanese aesthetics. The Japanese aesthetics are a way to understand, or at least to perceive, a fundamental and central element: the very special relationship between Japan and the outside world.
