Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan (Asia Perspectives)

Rating:
Summary: Keene brings a chapter of Kyoto's history to life.
Review: This is a brilliant, concise gem of a book that brings certain sights of Kyoto to life unlike any travel guide. When I visited many of the places described here, I'd no idea that any of this remarkable history had occurred.

I think this book is an essential addition to any serious Japan library, and as it is a slim text - I think it'd be a welcome and portable companion on a reader's visit to Kyoto.

Keene's study of Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who many historians call the worst shogun in Japanese history, is remarkable for its central theme: that this man was actually one of the greatest Japanese persons ever.

Keene does a decent job of recounting the historical context of Yoshimasa's life: it was an era of unending war and brutality when famine and sickness ravaged the peasantry and rich aristocrats vied for power in the most brutal fashion - beheadings, suicide and betrayal were commonplace. These same aristocrats also lead lives of dissipation - spending their lives drinking and "sporting" while the masses suffered and Kyoto was razed time after time.

But where Keene shows his brilliance is in his interpretation of the life of this failed shogun who embraced religion and the arts as an escape for the 'impure world' and in the process invented many Japanese cultural forms.

When Yoshimasa fumbles the choosing of his successor and a civil war is unleashed, he decides then and there to leave his shogun's life behind and build a mountain retreat - the so called 'silver pavilion' - where he spent his days contemplating the arts.

It is clear that an aesthete such as Yoshimasa was incapable of leading the Japanese nation in war. But Keene shows in this book that Yoshimasa's peculiar taste in art - simple unadorned wood, sliding screen doors, rustic tea utensils, and gardens filled with rare trees and stones, poetry, Chinese calligraphy, flower arrangements, No theatre and so on - served as the template for future Japanese cultural expression.

Yoshimasa's silver pavilion was thus an incubator for 'the soul of Japan,' and a location where visitors can still see the building almost exactly as it looked a half millennium ago. Now I want to visit Kyoto again with newly aware eyes.

This book's only shortcoming is its lack of explanation as to how the culture born at the silver pavilion spread throughout Japan. Yet that might require a lengthy tome, and one of the nice aspects of this history is that it can be read leisurely in a couple of days. It also features some nice color photos. Highly recommended.