"Inishie-gokoro" and "Mono no Aware" | Ikuo Kaneko (Dean, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
2007.11.15
Miwataseba / hana mo momiji mo nakarikeri / ura no tomaya no aki no yugure
This is a poem by Fujiwara no Teika. Looking around the bay, there are neither blossoms nor autumn leaves... By stating what is "not there," a host of feelings and thoughts are, in fact, evoked. I learned this poem from Seigow Matsuoka, my "shisho" (mentor) in matters of culture and history. My "spiritual home" lies somewhere in this realm. However, it took me quite a long time to realize this.
I graduated from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at Keio University, but at the time, I was fed up with the "ambiguity" of Japanese society and left the country. I studied at Stanford University for three years, earned my Ph.D., and then taught at the University of Wisconsin for nine years. My fields of expertise were mathematics and computer science, but after returning to Japan in my late thirties, my interest shifted to more ambiguous relationships, such as human connections and volunteer work. Gradually, I found myself wanting to learn about "Japanese culture."
So, along with two friends who also wanted to learn about Japanese culture—Yasuki Kurosawa of Cisco Systems and Masaaki Shintaku of Oracle, both presidents of the Japanese branches of their respective global IT companies—the three of us asked Seigow Matsuoka to give us a series of lectures on Japanese culture. The main theme of this lecture series, which we named "Ren-Juku," was that a network-like method of information editing, which could be called "the Japan method," is latent within Japanese culture. It was in this context that I also learned about Teika's poem mentioned at the beginning.
Although this is something I've merely repeated as a student of Ren-Juku, I believe that this "Japan method" of "seeing what is not there" is a manifestation of what Motoori Norinaga, the founder of Kokugaku (National Learning), called "inishie-gokoro" (the ancient spirit)—in contrast to "kara-gokoro" (the Chinese spirit)—and "mono no aware" (the pathos of things). This also has something in common with the volunteer work I became interested in after returning to Japan. If that is the case, then what is Japanese is, in fact, connected to what is universal. I would like to talk about that on another occasion.
(Date of publication: 2007/11/15)