Wabi Sabi, the aesthetic of decay

Globalisation and industrialisation can be understood to unfold in two diametrically opposite ways (as with any politic)--their proponents view them as ways to produce things more "efficiently" and bridge cultures, while opponents view them as mechanisms of ecological and cultural homogenisation, mechanisms of disregard for people and place. What cannot be denied, though, is that mass production of anything leads to a uniformity of outcome. Assembly lines strive to make the same exact car, and forks and spoons and jeans and computers are all made to be the same. On the other hand, you have the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi Sabi, so wonderfully described by John Flowers, a philosophy graduate student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, at the Building Bridges conference on philosophy and waste. Just as I did yesterday, I would like to quote some passages from John's paper first.

Whereas the western potter would see the cracked, imperfect pot as a wasted effort, a Japanese potter, enmeshed in the aesthetic of wabi would have little qualms with the display of this vase as an epitome of his aesthetic craft. That is, wabi, as an aesthetic, seeks to find and represent the beautiful in those things that are imperfect, withered, or even damaged by the passing of time. Wabi then seeks the beautiful not in the perfect symmetry prized by western ideals of beauty, but in the asymmetry and irregular structure evidenced in the natural world that surrounds us: it is an ideal that elevates imperfection, as representative of impermanence, or mujou in the Zen Buddhist lexicon, to the highest levels of beauty and thus finds the beauty in those things whose form has long since deteriorated.

Thus, wabi, as an aesthetic, takes objects ravaged by time or imperfect in their creation, and finds within them a conspicuous beauty that surpasses the material. More than that, wabi takes objects which, under other aesthetics, would be discarded for their worn or irreparably damaged appearance and elevates them to a position of high art: it re-values decay and forces the connoisseur of art to re-evaluate their perspective on beauty itself...In the modern sense, wabi is often paired with sabi, which is a qualitative principle of feeling that refers to the specific quality of the emotions of the artist or the perceiver that arise in response to imagery.

...in the Shinto conception, those things which most accurately reflect the natural order, that is constant flux, are the most valued. In this sense, a cracked and faded porcelain vase, an iron kettle rusted from use or a sword whose chipped edge shows its age are considered the highest forms of art. It is through the contemplation of these objects, that the appreciator of sabi art begins to sense the ebb and flow of nature...

...under wabi, beauty can never fade: it only grow deeper with the passing of time and the accretion of subtle qualities of impermanence that serve to deepen the beauty of the object by reminding us, through the feeling of sabi, of the evanescence of all life, that we should savor each moment as it comes, rather than longing for it to last forever.

Therefore the "imperfect" tea cup, the changing landscape of a garden, and the sculptures constantly affected by weather are all wabi art. Their beauty is in their ever-changing uniqueness. (Images taken from Kevin Taylor's commentary on John Flower's paper.)

I find these thoughts to be extremely fascinating, for several reasons. I have written many times about the appreciation of place and time that is so essential if we are to make any meaningful attempts at sustainability and combating ecological degradation. I believe that the arguments for an such an appreciation of art and object can easily be translated to our surroundings, our most mundane possessions. If we appreciate what we have, we will not want more. If we do not want more, we refuse to tolerate harm being done to the Earth and its people in the name of production, industrialisation, and materialism.

 

(Nick, Farid, Cara, David and I made our own wabi sabi art. =))

A life of its own

I just arrived here at the Fishbowl after listening to a talk by Dr. Condoleeza Rice. Yes, the Dr. Condoleeza Rice. (A wonderful way to get you riled up! Try it for yourself!) She mentioned how Japan will not be able to "grow [economically] unfortunately" for a little bit, because of the earthquake and tsunami. Along the same lines, I was reading an article from The New Yorker, Aftershocks, by Evan Osnos, in which he describes how the Japanese have dealt with the recent natural events that have impacted their country. He wrote at length about his interactions with Yukio Okamoto, a former diplomat and high-ranking adviser to Prime Ministers of Japan, who now runs a political and economic consultancy called Okamoto Associates. Osnos asked Okamoto how he thought the events would alter Japan's sense of self. Okamoto replied,

“We were not humble enough to Mother Nature. We were building reactors on the basis of the most hideous earthquake in the Edo period, which was magnitude 8.5. Many experts expected a large earthquake would come, but not 9.0. Nobody said 9.0. Japan was in a euphoric slumber for two decades. Our life has been so comfortable, we became introverted. We forgot the need for struggle, during which time many top positions were taken over by Chinese and Korean companies. It’s too soon to say, with us still facing the threat of nuclear reactors, but perhaps, eventually, this sense of crisis will be the push to the back of many Japanese, and we will regain the strength of the sixties and seventies, when we had a concrete goal. So no doubt our economy will slip down, but then we may bounce back.” (emphases added)

I found it incredibly fascinating how Dr. Rice almost exactly shared Okamoto's viewpoint - that the Japanese are defined by their economy. Well, it may not be shocking that in fact most people and countries of the world are defined by their economies, and their abilities to "compete" in this "globalised world." Our identities as individuals have been tied to large, ecologically destructive social constructs such as economy.

There seems to be a tendency to let our lives slip beyond our control. Of course most of us are a part of society, and we are in a way bound by our emotional and physical relationships to people and places. In a sense, the defined social norms and the constraints put upon society by external factors (like weather, for example) are thrust upon us as individuals, and we are obliged to partake in collective effort, particularly if we want to be accepted. At the same time, society has created constructs, such as economy, that have allowed different sorts of interactions among individuals and smaller groups of people in society. We have somehow been taught or told that it is a duty to participate in the economy, that shopping is the only way we can make change, and that we "vote by our dollar." It is telling how we have let a completely man-made construct take on a life of its own, such that it is this vague, ill-defined, and irrational construct that defines who we are as individuals and collections of individuals. (Many people have placed immense faith in concepts such as economy, and have been let down, not surprisingly. What has happened over the past few years, especially with "bubbles," is now being better understood by terrific journalists and investigators.)

I believe it is important to realise that it is not me, or you, or us, that are defined by such constructs. At an even larger scale, the value of the environment and our relationships to it are not defined by such constructs. Our value in this world, and the value of the world, is not set by people at the Federal Reserve or some government agency. Rather it is you, me, and us that lend legitimacy and credence to these constructs, and it is you, me, and us that define these social constructs, and the bounds of operability and validity of these constructs. It is not surprising then that something like the economy is only a small part of our society, and that it cannot be placed at the same level as society, the environment, or as us, as individuals. Japan is more than its economy, and its ability to make cars. It is a land with a culture, with a history, with nature and trees and flowers.

Trash in Japan

After reading John's comment on trash in Japan, I thought of looking at the trash problem as a function of place, geography, culture and time. I have written a few posts that fall under this mindset, including about Tuvalu, Western waste in Africa, Michigan (here and here), Chicago, New York City and India (here, here and here). But what I might try to do now is compare and contrast how trash is dealt with specifically in different parts of the world. Japan seems like an apt place to start - an Eastern consumerist society with an old cultural and philosophical heritage.

John (which John?! I don't know who this is, but I really want to know!) said, "Japan has some of the most stringent policies on product end-of-life that I know of, due to their high population, small land area, and lack of places to put trash. So it seems, on some level, they are starting to face their reality. And yet! if you buy a few items in a store, they will often wrap each one in tissue paper before putting them all into a bag."

Japan incinerates 80% of its garbage (with 1,400 incinerators), whereas America sends 80% of its garbage to landfills. Japan is the size of California, and has vending machines for almost everything, including underwear! Check out this photo!

You can probably guess that there is consequently a lot of material that is used and trashed in Japan (for some statistics, you can go here). What John said is at some level correct - local governments in Japan have their citizens hyper-sort their garbage, just like how TerraCycle wants its citizen suppliers to do. Here's what a New York Times article from May, 2005, says (with italics and bold emphases added by me...definitely check out the audio slide show on the left of the page),

"YOKOHAMA, Japan - When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to 10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights included detailed instructions on 518 items.

Lipstick goes into burnables; lipstick tubes, "after the contents have been used up," into "small metals" or plastics. Take out your tape measure before tossing a kettle: under 12 inches, it goes into small metals, but over that it goes into bulky refuse.

Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair goes into used cloth, though only if the socks "are not torn, and the left and right sock match." Throw neckties into used cloth, but only after they have been "washed and dried."

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Indeed, Yokohama, with 3.5 million people, appears slack compared with Kamikatsu, a town of 2,200 in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands. Not content with the 34 trash categories it defined four years ago as part of a major push to reduce waste, Kamikatsu has gradually raised the number to 44.

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The environmentally friendlier process of sorting and recycling may be more expensive than dumping, experts say, but it is comparable in cost to incineration.

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For Yokohama, the goal is to reduce incinerated garbage by 30 percent over the next five years. But Kamikatsu's goal is even more ambitious: eliminating garbage by 2020.

In the last four years, Kamikatsu has halved the amount of incinerator-bound garbage and raised its recycled waste to 80 percent, town officials said. Each household now has a subsidized garbage disposal unit that recycles raw garbage into compost.

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At the single Garbage Station where residents must take their trash, 44 bins collect everything from tofu containers to egg cartons, plastic bottle caps to disposable chopsticks, fluorescent tubes to futons.

On a recent morning, Masaharu Tokimoto, 76, drove his pick-up truck to the station and expertly put brown bottles in their proper bin, clear bottles in theirs. He looked at the labels on cans to determine whether they were aluminum or steel. Flummoxed about one item, he stood paralyzed for a minute before mumbling to himself, "This must be inside." Some 15 minutes later, Mr. Tokimoto was done. 

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...enter the garbage guardians, the army of hawk-eyed volunteers across Japan who comb offending bags for, say, a telltale gas bill, then nudge the owner onto the right path.

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One of the most tenacious around here is Mitsuharu Taniyama, 60, the owner of a small insurance business who drives around his ward every morning and evening, looking for missorted trash. He leaves notices at collection sites: "Mr. So-and-so, your practice of sorting out garbage is wrong. Please correct it."

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He stopped in front of one messy location where five bags were scattered about, and crows had picked out orange peels from one. 

"This is a typical example of bad garbage," Mr. Taniyama said, with disgust. "The problem at this location is that there is no community leader. If there is no strong leader, there is chaos."

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Ms. Miyano said she now had 90 percent compliance, adding that, to her surprise, those resisting tended to be "intellectuals," like a certain university professor or an official at Japan Airlines up the block.

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One young couple consistently failed to properly sort their trash. "Sorry! We'll be careful!" they would say each time Mr. Kawai knocked on their door holding evidence of their transgressions.

At last, even Mr. Kawai - a small 77-year-old man with wispy white hair, an easy smile and a demeanor that can only be described as grandfatherly - could take no more.

"They were renting the apartment, so I asked the owner, 'Well, would it be possible to have them move?' " Mr. Kawai said, recalling, with undisguised satisfaction, that the couple was evicted two months ago"

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Here is a first-hand account of a Navy wife's experiences in Japan; I found it on her blog! A fun read. Gomi is Japanese for trash...here are some excerpts...

"We were issued a large gomi packet upon signing our lease, containing 120 bright yellow peel-and-stick trash labels, and an instruction booklet (a large instruction booklet!) in English and Japanese detailing what to do. Each family is issued these stickers for free at the beginning of the year--60 stickers per family member.

You may not leave the bags out the night before. You must leave them between 5:00 and 8:00am. If you leave them out too early, dogs or cats will tear them apart and strew the trash...and our neighbors will KNOW it's our trash all over the street, especially if it has stuff with English labels!

They won't take trash without the right labels, or in the wrong bags, or in the wrong place. If you run out of labels before the end of the year, you have to PURCHASE more--and the purchased ones are very vivid green or purple, so everyone in the neighborhood knows YOU were a wasteful person and a bad citizen. 

 

Recyclable trash is picked up twice a month, and can go in any transparent bag...no stickers required. However, it has to be separated into one of 12 (yes, that's twelve, as in a ten and a two) different categories. I won't go into the extreme details, but I'll give a few examples. Drink cartons must be cut open, rinsed, laid flat, and tied into a bundle. Yard waste must be cut into lengths of no more than 80cm, and of a diameter of 10cm or less, and must be tied into 80 x 30cm bundles of no more than 10kg each. You are requested to brush all dirt from fallen leaves before bagging them in transparent bags (I am not making this up!!) You may put out no more than two bundles of sticks or two bags of leaves at a time. Dry cell batteries go in a special pail at the gomi collection point. Even cloth is recycled! And soiled or "dirtied" paper, like pizza boxes, are supposed to go with combustible trash, not recyclables (there's a whole list of specific kinds of paper that should not be recycled.)

 

(I love this part) It's all pretty bewildering, and we've had several people (including several of my American teachers during the Intercultural Relations class) tell us "Oh, don't worry about all that stuff. Just bring your garbage to the dumpsters on base. We do!" But if our neighbors can all sort their trash properly, so can we. We'll be better stewards of the earth...and our Japanese neighbors will be less likely to see Americans as selfish pigs! Besides, I bet we'll meet some people when making our treks to the gomi station!

 

I also never realized how much trash one or two people can generate. It's really a revelation, and embarrassing, too! New goal...to produce less waste.