DAVID MURA
119
aristocracy . In this way the vestiges of feudal culture conceal the
furious pace of the economic miracle, the myriad dislocations in the
culture that have taken place in this postwar era.
But despite all this, the Japanese reverence for traditional cul–
tural artifacts is more than merely an attempt to erase historical dif–
ference, to erect a "museum" culture. It is intrinsically part of the
Japanese culture and character (the company as feudal society);
preservation is not an attempt at the impossible, a refusal to
recognize what is dying , but displays a mingling of past and present
peculiarly Japanese which will survive in the same way temples have
retained their structure , though not their material components, for
hundreds of years. The "almost" of the duplication in Japanese
aesthetics contains a conscious complexity that Diana Vreeland's
worship of eighteenth-century France does not; for Japanese aesthet–
ics does not place the value we do on the original, the primary
source, and the proclamation of the copy is at once the open an–
nouncement ofJapanese aesthetics and its hidden secret. This secret
can come out at times in a parody whose irony centers not only on a
particular target , but on the whole impossibility of exact imitation,
of a "true" copy ; examples of this would include "rough theater," a
sort of burlesque version of
Kabuki,
the avant-garde dance form,
Buto,
and the seemingly deliberately pathetic quality of Japanese
rock-and-roll. But whether seriously as in
Noh
or mockingly as in
the distorted, grotesque movements of
Buto
with their Noh-like
slowness, Japanese culture frequently seems to say: there is no orig–
inal, there is only the copy . Things do not decay, the structure is
preserved.
Such an attitude points to several crucial differences between
Japanese and Western culture. First, the structuralist nature of the
Japanese mind, which tends to break things down into combinable
units, can be seen in the structure of
Noh,
the Japanese factory,
and the use of prefabricated houses (there are no rehearsals in our
Western sense for
Noh
plays; instead all the participants perform ac–
cording to prearranged patterns, which fit together in performance :
as a result there is no need for a director, just as there is no need for
an architect in building a prefabricated house) . Obviously, this at–
tribute helps immensely in designing and implementing mass pro–
duction, particularly as the objects of production become more and
more abstract, as with electronics. Perhaps a culture which, unlike
ours, values structure over substance may be much better suited
mentally to a postindustrial age. Japan's past, compared with ours,
