Ando Hiroshige

“ Hiroshige—two of whose pupils took his name—lived at the beginning of the downfall of Japanese colour printing. He was a prolific worker, and his wood cuts are delicate and seldom show strong contrasts. He is especially noted for landscapes, and did views of the Inland Sea, of snow scenes, and of mists and rains, in very delicate pastel colours. Eight famous views of Lake Biwa, as well as several sets of the Tokaido, were done by this artist. Heads by Sharaku with a silver background are very striking, and have lately become the rage in Paris. ”

“ The Japanese artist's conception of a garden, with its pine-trees, and stone lanterns, and azalea-bordered lakes, is usually extremely beautiful. Hiroshige, like so many Japanese artists, has painted a garden touched with snow; but in one of his pictures he portrays the snow as turning into a number of skulls, and has borrowed this fantastic conception from the Heike Monogatari.
It must not be thought that the Japanese artist, when portraying some supernatural being, or in depicting some scene from a legendary story, exclusively catches the grim and horrible. ”

“ The earliest reference to him is in the account given by an inhabitant of the Lu-chu islands of a visit to Japan; where a sketch of a procession drawn with great skill by Hiroshige at the age of ten years only is mentioned as one of the remarkable sights seen. At the age of fifteen he applied unsuccessfully to be admitted to the studio of the elder Toyokuni ”

“ He did not live to see the plates for his "Thirty-six Views of Fuji" completed. One of the collector's treasures is a striking memorial portrait by Kunisada that was issued shortly after Hiroshige's death. The old man is represented with a finely shaped head, powerful, quiet features, and eyes as piercing as an eagle's.
The number of Hiroshige's different designs runs into at least three or four thousand, not counting his illustrated books; and there must be in existence a hundred thousand prints by him. His work is almost as plentiful as that of all the other artists taken together. ”

“ Although Hiroshige is best known through his landscapes, he, like most Japanese painters, was too universal an artist to confine himself solely to one branch. He loved every phase of nature, and in one of his well-known prints, “The Eagle,” his skill in the delineation of birds is best shown. In the later impressions a pale yellowish tone takes the [Pg 64] place of the beautiful steel-blue background of the earlier prints, miracles of colour printing. ”

“ We did not know until recently what meant the words realism and idealism (should we thank the Western critics?) except this: "The artist, whatever he be, idealist or realist or what not, is good when he is true to his art. I mean that technique or method of expression is secondary; even the seeming realistic picture of Oriental art is, when it is splendid, always subjective." I have many reasons to call Hiroshige an idealist or subjective artist, now playing an arbitrary art of criticism after the Western fashion, as I only see his artistic wisdom, but nothing else in his being true to Nature ”

“ Hiroshige was the first designer of Japanese colour prints who devoted himself largely to landscapes with figures, and with Eastern ingenuity almost exhausted the subject. His "Hundred Views of Fusi-yama" contain the most startling designs and problems of composition that have ever been attempted, and they are treated with incomparable boldness, and solved with astounding skill. The rarest aspects of nature are treated with perfect balance. It is a play of curves and geometrical shapes that bewilders the Western mind that has been content with comparatively few formulæ. ”

“ Shortly after 1830 Hiroshige found occasion to travel from Yedo, the northern capital, to Kyoto, the southern capital, along the great post-road which he has immortalized—the Tokaido. There resulted his series of horizontal plates, "The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido," completed about 1834. This remains his best-known and unsurpassed work. Plate 53 is from this series. Each picture records with unfailing vividness and originality some famous scene along the crowded national highway. ”

“ Although I can enjoy and even criticise Hiroshige or Hokusai at any time and in any place, let me tell you that I cannot do so with Utamaro, because I must be first in the rightest mood (who says bodies have no mood?) as when I see the living woman; to properly appreciate his work of art I must have the fullness of my physical strength so that my criticism is disarmed. (Criticism ? Why, that is the art for people imperfect in health, thin and tired.) ”

“ There is a rich coal deposit near that waterfall."
"Ando! Ando!" groaned the old man, "you were once an artist! The foreigners are tainting us all."
"I love art still," said Ando, "but I make a better engineer. And—I beseech you to overlook my vulgarity—I am getting rich."
Kano groaned again. "Oh, this foreign influence! It is the curse of modern Japan! Love of money is starting a dry rot in the land of the gods. Success, material power, money,—all of them illusions, miasma of the soul, blinding men to reality! Surely my karma was evil that I needed to be reborn into this age of death!" ”

“ The principle he followed was opposed not only to all society, but was contrary to all religion, and contrary to the morals of all countries."
"The story is certainly immoral," said Orito. "What it relates is opposed to all our ideas of love and loyalty, and even seems to us contrary to nature. Loyalty is not a mere duty. It must be from the heart, or it is not loyally. It must be an inborn feeling. And it is in the nature of every Japanese."
"It is a horrible story," said Andō. "Philanthropy itself is only an expansion of fraternal love. ”

“ And it is my prayer to the Eight Million Deities that are told to guard over the shores of Japan, that the present work may speed on its way overseas, and, though seen through a filmy screen brought on its face of beauty in the process of recasting in a strange language, may meet with such reception as it merits in those countries where the people have shown themselves so ready with their sympathy in the cases of Hiroshige and Hokusai, of whom Tanizaki, different as the mode may be, chosen for the expression of his artistic soul, is certainly a disciple of no mean distinction. ”

“ Hiroshige, the versatile painter, lover of landscape and ethereal artist of snow and mist; Hokusai, the prophet, and regenerator of Ukiyo-ye. He was the artisan-artist, in the land which recognizes no inferior arts, and the Mang-wa, consisting of studies as spontaneously thrown off as those in the sketch-book Giorgione carried in his girdle, was published for the use of workmen. Living in simplicity and poverty he gave his life to the people, and the impression of his genius is stamped upon their work. ”

“ He got away before she could repeat her importunities; and the old dame returned to the kitchen, muttering anathemas against the mystic powers she had just attempted to invoke.
On the priest's return, Ando questioned him eagerly. He gained, almost with the first words, certainty of his own freedom. With Tatsu safely arrived, and the betrothal to Kano Umè-ko an outspoken affair, then had the time come for him—Ando Uchida—to reassume the pleasant rôle of friend and benefactor. ”

“ She thinks she cares only for her father and her art. When I die she will marry, and then how many pictures will she paint? Bah!"
"Poor child!" murmured Ando, under his breath.
"Poor child," mocked the artist, whose quick ears had caught the whisper. "Poor Nippon, rather, and poor old Kano, who has no better heir than this frail girl. Oh, Ando, I have clamored to the gods! I have made pilgrimages and given gifts,—but there is no one to inherit my name and the traditions of my race. Nowhere can I find a Dragon Painter!" ”

“ In examining the sets of impressions, illustrating the popular story, it is hard to give preference to any special artist: to choose [Pg 20] between the Utamaro-like violets and greens of Yeisen; the rich dark tints and fine backgrounds of Kunisada; the delicately massed detail of Toyokuni, unlike the usual boldness of his style, and the varied sword-play of the versatile Hiroshige, set in a frosted, snowy landscape. ”

“ His helmet lay in the grass at his feet. At the nearer approach of the party to the cliff top the watcher turned and melted into the forest at his back. He was Oda Yorimoto, descendant of a powerful daimio of the Ashikaga Dynasty of shoguns who had fled Japan with his faithful samurai nearly three hundred and fifty years before upon the overthrow of the Ashikaga Dynasty. ”

“ At Hiroshima, the military headquarters of Japan during the war, was the principal military hospital and the establishment of the Red Cross society, which to investigators were a remarkable revelation after all that had been said about Japanese inhumanity and indifference to suffering. As long ago as 1877, when the Satsuma clan raised the standard of rebellion, a benevolent society was founded to aid and care for the sick and wounded, enemies as well as friends, after the manner of the European Red Cross societies. ”

“ It is worth while to correct some of the other mistakes of Mr. Hearn, before giving the narrative of a recent visit to Hiro-mura, where we were the guests of the present head of the Hamaguchi family. These mistakes, indeed, do not at all detract from the nobility of the hero’s action, nor greatly mar the writer’s reputation for picturing graphically a certain aspect of the spiritual life and character of the Japanese. ”

“ In the days of Ashikaga the Shiogun, when Japan was vexed by a civil war, and prisoners of high rank were every day being put to shameful deaths, was instituted the ceremonious and honorable mode of suicide by disembowelling, known as Seppuku or Hara-kiri, an institution for which, as the old Japanese historian says, “ men in all truth should be very grateful. To put his enemy, against whom he has cause for enmity, to death, and then to disembowel himself, is the duty of every Samurai.” ”

“ In its most terrible form, the Hara-kiri is of course a Japanese evil; but suicide, alas! is not peculiar to any one country or people. In the manner in which they view it, nations differ, — the Hindoo, for instance, contemplates it with apathy the savage of the Congo with pride, the Japanese with a stern sense of a grave duty, the Englishman with horror and pity, — but the crime has its roots in all soils alike, and flourishes under all skies. ”

“ To this general rule Japanese mythology presents no exception. The son of Ninigi-no-Mikoto is said to have lived five hundred and eighty years at his palace of Takachiho; but that, remarks Hirata, "was a short life compared with the lives of those who lived before him." Thereafter men's bodies declined in force; life gradually became shorter and shorter; yet in spite of all degeneration the Japanese still show traces of their divine origin. After death they enter into a higher divine condition, without, however, abandoning this world .... Such were Hirata's views. ”

“ For, as far as I can judge, less fortitude is required when a hero, like Hirosé, blockades the entrance of Port Arthur, knowing that the batteries above will annihilate him, than to allow oneself to be buried alive in the darkness for forty or sixty years. ”

“ Most of the crew who worked in overalls, with bodies bared above the waist, black and grimy to the tousled hair now matted with sweat, laid carelessly about as in death from convulsions. In some cases they were in such a position that the fierce light from the cracks in the furnace doors gave their faces a weird, deathly appearance, and after noting this, I glanced at Hiram and saw that he, too, had succumbed, his head resting heavily against the supporting bulkhead. ”

“ It is related that Andō's answer was: "A soldier's wife must have a soldier's heart if she is to bear him children worthy of his name. All men knew that it has been my privilege to live a warrior's life, and if now, when fate has found me, I yielded to the foe, shame would be my lot. Yoshisada may have thought to put me to the proof, but his wife should not have helped him to insult me by such a proposal." Then, wrapping the letter round the hilt of his sword, he disembowelled himself, and his example was followed by all his soldiers. ”

“ Its experiences were calculated to strengthen the conclusions derived from all my other experiences during three different visits to Japan,—namely, [300] that no other nation is now, in comparison with its resources, giving the same care to the intellectual and ethical education of the common people. For Hiro-mura, the reader will remember, is an obscure village, not even mentioned in the guidebooks, some twenty-five miles from the nearest railway station, and never, according to the testimony of their leading citizen, visited by foreigners before. ”

“ And it is in this sentiment that the secret of much strange feeling in Japanese character must be sought. Far more foreign to our world of sentiment than the splendid courage with which death is faced, or the equanimity with which the most trying sacrifices are made, is the simple deep emotion of the boy who, in the presence of a Shinto shrine never seen before, suddenly feels the tears spring to his eyes. He is conscious in that moment of what we never emotionally recognize,—the prodigious debt of the present to the past, and the duty of love to the dead. ”