The Dead and Gone

Museums have never interested me. No matter how grand or how humble, they have always been areas of empty scholastic pursuit for me: dry and lifeless. The Tokugawa Art Museum was, in the end, no different for me, but the process of walking through its halls and being utterly underwhelmed helped me realize just what it is about museums that utterly disinterests me.

It isn't the history aspect. All of the ancient shrines and temples that we visit enamor me; there's something so indescribable about those experiences. Perhaps it's because there is a beauty that is so astounding, so arresting, that it is almost otherworldly, or perhaps it's because there is always a heavy, deep feeling that comes simply from the age of these buildings, but in any case, those feelings wouldn't exist were it not for the history mounted on the walls and in the beams of these sites. In a very literal sense, they are history. When you walk through their doors, you walk into a different world, one that has otherwise long been forgotten.



Museums have a distinctly different aura. You aren't transported to another time -- you aren't even supposed to be transported; instead, everything is presented to you as a show, something that you yourself could never participate in. There is, in short, a very clear and ever-present wall between you and the object, and when the object is the history, it is impossible not to feel like a foreign identity, hovering and dissecting something that you could never truly understand. The distance removes the bridge.

And, even more than that, the objects themselves are dead. Not only has the viewer been removed from the culture and time of the objects, the objects have been completely displaced from their own time also. They have no context; they're lone survivors of places forever forgotten. You can't get an idea of life from them because they have none of their own, and that simple fact drains whatever wonder and beauty they may once have had.



Museums may have their place in the world, but it's a place too lifeless for me.

Elegant simplicity.

Throughout the course of Japanese art and aesthetics, specifically the two-dimensional works, we often observe how the works are dominated by large amounts of negative space. Even within this negative space we can still find vast amounts of detail. When I was visiting the Tokugawa art museum, several of the scrolls that they had on display depicted a celebration of the Tokugawa daimyo opening up a shrine within a major city. The paintings used vast amounts of negative space, very small subject matter and other artifacts within the painting. Even though the work may be dominated by negative space, within the smaller subject matter lies an incredible amount of elegant detail. The use of patterns gives the art perfect balance between simplism and elaborate detail.

As I’ve traveled through Japan I’ve noticed that many of their logos and emblems contain this same sort of simplicity. Many of the logos contain few words or numbers and are instead dominated by simple images. This tendency ranges from the cities’ symbols to restaurant signs and company logos and so forth. While these current designs lack the elaborate detail of the earlier Tokugawa works, they form a sort of elegance through their use of other western design concepts such as unification, symmetry, and other such ideas. And even though these newer designs lack the same attention to minute detail that their ancient and more formal predecessors possessed they still attain a certain elegance that we rarely see in the western world.

Ninjas are to Uenoshi, what the Cornhuskers are to Lincoln Nebraska.

From Kyoto to Kusatsu, and from Kusatsu to Tsuge, then from Tsuge to Iga-Ueno, and finally from Iga-ueno to Uenoshi. Roughly two hours to get to the city. On the train ride there I got the chance to see some of the most beautiful mountains I’d ever witnessed, with clouds literally rolling down them. We also got a view of the ocean and it was a little unsettling to be so close to both the ocean and the mountains. We could look out one window and see the ocean spread as far as the eye can see, then turn around and right outside the other window would be the foothills rising up to mountains that pierced through the clouds.

After getting off our final train it was just a short walk through the Iga Park grounds to get to the ninja museum. The scenery was once again absolutely beautiful and I could tell that the trip was already starting to pay off. We passed by the souvenir shop filled with allsorts of ninja related trinkets, none of which were actually very impressive.

Once in the museum we were taken on a tour of all the different kinds of secret passageways and hidden chambers the ninjas would use to escape from invading samurai. One of the more common ones was a simple wall panel that had a pole down the middle and could quickly rotate around. Our guide asked for volunteers and I happily obliged her. I attempted to whizz through the hidden passage, but as the top of the door frame only went up to my shoulders there was much more crashing and stumbling involved then what I would have liked.

After the tour of the ninja house we next got to travel around the actual ninja museum and try on some Mizugumo (special shoes used to cross the swampy moats of castles) as well as chain mail armor that they used for training up their muscles and jumping ability. The museum also held a large assortment of tools that the ninja would use. These ranged from the well known items like shuriken and the Ninjato, or ninja sword, to less well known ones such as a sort of bullet proof vest and special tools used to jam sliding doors so that they might prevent their targets from escaping. You could also learn some interesting facts that popular culture tends to smudge up, like how ninja’s actually wore dark navy blue instead of black so that even on nights where it wasn’t completely dark they could still blend in to the shadows.

When we finished the Museum we got to see a weapons demonstration where our two masters showed us how different tools and weapons were used by the ninja. This ranged from how well a Ninjato can cut through objects, to using the sheath and string attached as a sort of radar for finding people in the dark so that you can have the drop on them. We also got to see how a kurasagama and shuriken worked. The Shuriken were quite impressive. Especially since when looking at the matt he threw them at the shuriken seemed to magically appear imbedded within it.

After that we headed back through the souvenirs shop and had dinner at small bar with a ninja corgi on the sign. The food was good and the barkeep gave us a menu in English, which was appreciated. I was tired at this point and didn’t feel like working out the kanji. We caught the five o’clock bus back and got to enjoy the scenery once again, but this time with a sunset backdrop. It was even more gorgeous then when we head up. All in all it was a good day and well worth the trip.