I use here the concept of Mimêsis (representation 模写 (mosha), depiction 描写 (byôsha); Ancient Greek: μίμησις (mimēsis) to analyze the special characteristics of Japanese visual arts tradition, both social and aesthetic. In my other chapter in this volume I am linking Japanese art, environment and politics ant trying to analyse them in a rhizomatically composed whole. However, in this chapter I am taking a closer look at the arts themselves and using the old Greek ideas related to the concept of Mimêsis to understand the long tradition of Japanese visual arts. Mimêsis suits the purpose as the human beings are mimetic beings and feeling an urge to create texts and art that reflect and represent reality. The Japanese visual art does much more than just creating copies of the reality: it represents the reality and perfections it and by accomplishing these acts Japanese art remains dynamic and provides a means for artists in Japan to express themselves and the society around them.
Aristotle in his ‘Poetics’ focuses on mimēsis claiming that the human beings are mimetic beings, feeling an urge to create texts and art that reflect and represent reality. He is the one who defined mimêsis as the perfection and imitation of nature (Aristotle 1996). However, art for him was never only imitation but it also searches for the perfect and the timeless. In other words, the original concept is far from the idea of meekly copying the reality and I use it to find out what the Japanese tradition of visual arts tells about Japanese society and its position in the world. Unfortunately in many languages the translation mimēsis is based on ideas of other Greek philosophers, especially Plato, whose ideas about artistic expression and creativity were rather pessimistic and who simply did not value art work in the same manner as Aristotle did. The real damage was done by narrow-minded people who much later projected their ideas of art to Greek art and used the narrow/ twisted concept of mimêsis to legitimise their own idea about art. After all, the present ideas of classical Greek art are largely a product of 18th and 19th century Western European scholarship, that was rather constricted when it came to understanding possibilities of artistic expression. In short, mimêsis should not be understood as simply as ‘copying’ but there simply is much more to the picture. In this chapter I use the concept of mimêsis to analyse Japanese visual arts to understand better the concept of mimêsis as well as the Japanese visual arts.
Visual representation and verbal representation surely influence each other but visual arts have an ability to cross many borders of language and culture far more easily than modes of representation that use natural languages. Furthermore, interpreting visual arts is a very special case of ‘textual interpretation’ as the text here contains, first of all, visual clues to other works of visual arts. In addition, visual arts contain references to everything that the observer sees in them and, at least I see a lot when I observe Japanese art and place in the context of world art, history and politics. However, writing about visual arts brings back the issue of using written language to convey ideas of visual representation to a chosen group of people in a chosen language (this book chapter being in English). The vast array of possible interpretations obviously has turned away many researchers from using visual arts to analyze social reality or when art is used it has been given the subsidiary role of illustrating the author’s message rather than being the message itself.