THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE JAPANESE

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 4

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE JAPANESE

The Kimono Mind. By Bernard Rudofsky. Gollancz. 276 pp. Portrait of Japan. By Hakon Mielche. Herbert Jenkins. 239 pp.

Of all the world’s peoples the Japanese are probably the most puzzling to Western minds. Even their language offers a greater barrier to outsiders for by their own admission exactness of expression is purposely avoided and the supreme medium of communication is silence.

Mr Rudofsky, a New York architect who has lived for two years in Japan, offers in “The Kimono Mind” a close and sympathetic appreciation of the Japanese but readily admits that his main theme must be the continued incomprehensibility of much that he found in Japan. His book might be called “the private life of the Japanese” for it primarily describes what happens when the people leave their offices and factories, shed their veneer of Westernisation, and in their homes continue the old Japanese traditions and way of life almost unchanged. With grace and wit Mr Rudofsky ventures on a description of etiquette and manners, the family code and the status of women, and the rituals which accompany sleeping, dressing, eating and bathing. Japanese gardens and houses; discussed as works of art, also appear as places eminently suitable for living. Our own designers could well consider the Japanese desire for a bath with a view which includes more than frosted glass and porcelain. Many of the customs he describes seem charming but a little absurd. Mr Rudofsky, refusing to be solemn, can also see the funny side of a family ritually bathing in strict order of pre-

cedence —but equally he can see through Japanese eyes the funny side of Western customs and techniques. Thus he writes that: “To the Japanese there is an operating theatre look in our dinner settings. The shrouded table, the asceptic look of the dinner ware, the variety of surgical instruments . . .” When the need arises the Japanese takes to Western customs,® even what he regards as repulsive ones, but at the bottom he despises them. So the Western bed was first imported for brothels, and the Western bouquet is regarded as a brutal murdering of flowers. When he is discussing the complexities of Japanese language and thought the author is at his best. “Almost all information offered to travellers in Japan turns out to be inexact. . . . The Japanese have always considered thinking unreliable, lucidity vulgar, and they are traditionally hostile towards the most impudent of brain exercises, logical thinking.”

In delightful harmony with the text “The Kimono Mind” is illustrated by numerous woodcuts, 1 drawings and prints reproduced from Japanese books dating from the 17th century to the present day. As well as reproductions of prints by such masters as Horonobu and Utamaro there are pages from books on cooking and etiquette, on garden design and even on how to walk in Western high-heeled shoes, a difficult task for Japanese women accustomed to traditional footwear.

By comparison, “Portrait of Japan” is a much less successful book. Hakon Mielche, a Dane with a long series of travel books to his credit, has produced a readable enough description of the tourists’ Japan. There is a potted history of Western penetration, quite useful accounts of where to go and what to see, and some rather arch and

tasteless suggestions of how to leave the tourist path and find the “real” night-life of Tokyo. For illustrations Mr Mielche has used more than 30 coloured photographs of Japan as he found it. Compared with the charm of the Japanese illustrations in “The Kimono . Mind” these photographs, like Mr Mielche’s text, only emphasise the crude lack of subtlety which the Japanese must surely feel when confronted by Westerners trying to “understand” them.