I think this qualification already suggests that when we talk about fûkei or keshiki, our attention is not necessarily directed to the visual aspect of the scenery. As to landscape as sansui, our dictionary adds the qualification that this is landscape with “the emphasis laid on its visual aspect 3 ”. Sansui is a word borrowed from Chinese, and apart from its use in Chinese literature 2, was used rarely and with a restricted sense: it meant either a landscape drawing, the landscape such a drawing would represent, or the kind of Sino-Japanese garden that imitated sansui-ga. 3 By “our dictionary” I mean the Nihon Kokugo Dai-jiten, 20 vols., Shôgakkann Publisher, 1973-76, u (.)Ĥ To designate landscape, we don’t use the word sansui (mountains and water), but fûkei or keshiki.2 In the Japan of olden times, official documents, including letters, were written in Chinese (whic (.).But we need not rush to such a conclusion. This might further suggest a basic difference between the West and Japan in the way landscape is actually experienced. This difference in style might suggest a difference in the aesthetic experience of natural scenery between the West and Japan: while the Western eye wishes to scan the whole image, the Japanese or East-Asiatic eye wishes to look through the image. While Western landscape paints in all the details and leaves no blank space on the canvas (the horror vacui peculiar to the Western eye), sansui-ga was in fact a style of drawing in which the lines served to make the blank spaces signify (cf. In accordance with this typical scenery, traditional Japanese landscape painting was called sansui-ga, literally “painting of mountains and water”.ģ It would be difficult to identify sansui-ga with Western landscape painting, even where the latter does represent mountains and water the respective styles are too different. While Western landscape is realistic and takes as its subject any interesting scenery, the traditional Japanese landscape was a stylistic category and its subject matter was limited to certain objects. for the purpose of distinguishing Western landscape paintings from traditional Japanese ones, which are based on the quite different Chinese style of landscape. But this is a word invented in the second half of the 19th Century, probably under the influence of the newly arrived Western culture, i.e. Today we have the word fûkei-ga as an equivalent to “landscape painting” (in fact drawing: we don’t differentiate the two): fûkei corresponding to “landscape” and -ga to painting/drawing. I wonder, however, if this is really the way we experience landscape.Ģ My skepticism in this matter is strengthened by the fact that landscape and landscape painting traditionally go by different names in Japanese. Most people would agree with this understanding. In this sense, landscape is what a landscape painting would take as its subject. The fact that “a landscape” can also signify a landscape painting would seem to indicate that landscape is generally understood as principally a visual phenomenon. I don’t, however, find the matter so straightforward. For most people, the nature of this experience may be so transparent that its analysis is superfluous. ![]() The word “landscape” is to be understood in what follows in the aesthetic sense: I wish to clarify what we experience in landscape as a typical scene of natural beauty 1. But, such new words as “townscap (.)ġ My subject here is the nature of landscape. 1 Some English-speaking people call any outdoor scenery “landscape”.
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