“If I want to imagine a fictive nation . . .” With those words, Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, his study of Japan and its available reality, begins. Going on to infuse the elements of Japanese existence—everything from haiku to monolids—with his singular manner of interrogation, the Japan that Barthes illustrates is one that exemplifies the mental journeys that arise in correspondence with physical ones. Now, fifty years after its publication, Xiao Yue Shan takes contemporary Tokyo as a point of origin to discuss the Japan that corresponds to the Barthian instinct for examination, and how his fascination with this country’s collection of signs is a direct result of the city’s peculiar composition.
The urban environment is a contract between humans and their machines, between conscious and unconscious topographies, between vessels and inhabitants. It is a haven of both creativity and consumption, a spatial and experiential experiment. Of its understanding there comes a need for the discretions of a knowingly discontinuous cognizance; it is impossible to know the city wholly, and there is also no need for such knowledge.
In Tokyo there is a discreet strangeness in the negotiation between the city and its inhabitants—movements are organized covertly around narratives and histories. All that is built requires a reverence for what was there before. The past is hidden and present, the city is whole and in parts. When Roland Barthes arrived here in 1966, he recognized the enormous task that it assigned to him, that “Japan has afforded him a situation of writing.” The resulting 1970 text, Empire of Signs, is a luxury of the imagination, in which a mind perforates the scene with both an intent to investigate and an egoism that affords one the comfort to discern and judge. Japan was an amalgam of facts and fictions, to be navigated with all the directions of thinking.
Foreigners assign themselves to the subject of Tokyo with a fascination first. To achieve the perfect balance between knowledge and impressions, of experiences both living and mythical. In his assignment Barthes accomplished a passion of translation, which is to fearlessly integrate the insights of the foreigner with the extant, accumulated comprehensions of the local. Where someone who was born and lived the entirety of her life in Tokyo may have accumulated a wealth of notes in the slow, linear fashion of smallness to bigness—from the room to the home, from the home to the neighbourhood, from the neighbourhood to its vicinity, and from thereon the entirety—the foreigner comes to involve herself with the city via a series of shocks, of enthrallment with “ordinary” things, of curiosity that encourages in turns awe and despair, and of constant referral to her lack of knowing. Inevitably one sees what the other cannot, and inevitably in this interchange an enormously valuable body of knowledge arises.
Empire of Signs is a monumental work on the remarkable riches of difference, the natural inclination for reference when we contact the not-yet known, the human urge for equivalence—the ability to place oneself within a new context. Michel de Certeau certified the city as “the most immoderate of human texts,” and we may detect in Barthes’ exacting steps his reading of this text; his journey is a psycho-navigation, he comes to know Japan not for her certain qualities, but for what she inspires within him about the art of living. It is, by such definitions, a book of poetry.
The precise placeness of Tokyo has become confused within the continual profusion of urban growth and multiplicity. As a result of the assimilation of many villages while being in indispensable cooperation with formalized nature, the particularities of this city are at once various and rigorous, with intention and accident occasionally inseparable. It is therefore impossible to achieve an intimacy simply through an accumulation of facts, but only by the additional embrace of the legends of geomancy, irrational phenomena, and the independent logic of symbolism. In Fumihiko Maki’s essay, “Observing the City,” he draws a contrast between the West and Japan in their considerations of cities, in which, “in the West, importance has always been attached to the relationship between the parts and the whole. The parts were conceived to be subordinate to the whole. . .” whereas, “the Japanese have long seen small spaces as autonomous microcosms and thus developed the perception that a part was in fact also a whole.” This anti-hierarchical perception of urban components allows for the independent developments of narratives, the proliferation of what Barthes favoured as the discrete notions of Nature and History.
When I walk Tokyo, it is this complex sense of difference and indifference, the great and reflective interchange between extracts, that transform the objects of sight into subjects of deep beauty and profundity. Whited-out curtained windows with the private things of laundry displayed on lines, the writhing highway by which wire-thin alleyways exchange, glancing immediately into the secret depths of a bedroom from the claustrophobic chambers of a train car. The awe-inducing discrepancies that take the pedestrian from blaring intersections to silent ones in scarcely five minutes, the narrow array of steps that lead up to a hidden temple barely ten metres down from a gaping supermarket. There is such wonder that ensues from the lack of a sensible cartography, the demand that one comes to know the city not from its two-dimensional presence upon a map, but from the physical, bodily sensation of cultivating a personal sense for way-finding. The remarkable lack of straightforward routes from origin to destination forcibly reorients the obsession with getting somewhere as quickly as possible; Tokyo’s urban morphology was invested not with purpose but of cultural context, enforcing the notion that in every story that has at its centre a journey, there is a point in which one gets lost.
Barthes was able to immerse himself within such an experience of heterotopia in Japan for the same reasons that most of us find ourselves captivated with a city as disorienting and unlikely as Tokyo. It is the precision of its disharmony, the organization of its discrepancies, and the clustering of functions that serve as the perfect conduit for one’s own superimposition of harmony, aesthetic preferences, and mysticism. Tokyo’s design does not capitalize on the nostalgic beauty of long lanes imbued with the dark wood and paper windows of Ozu films, or the concentric levels of activity and stimuli characteristic of other urban metropolises, but on the small, microscopic elements that one must be determined to find—the moments of irregular beauty amidst a typical hour that may take the form of a single street, a tiny and oddly shaped park, or a lavishly coloured garden that is not rooted in the ground, but composed of potted plants and flora that spill out onto the walkway.
“What can be addressed, in the consideration of the Orient, are not other symbols, another metaphysics, another wisdom . . . it is the possibility of a difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems.” The alternative possibilities of an entirely separate and distinct rationale is one of the liberties that all imagining writings take—whether it is fiction that invests its language into a different world, philosophy that twists the arms of existing ideology, or poetry that seeks the eternal within the temporal. For Barthes, Japan was a territory in which a spectacle unfolded, where the sign did not shield off its meaning jealously and shamefully, but instead, inhabited its designation with all the knowledge of limitless potentialities.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet and editor, born in Dongying, China and living in Tokyo, Japan. Her poetry chapbook, How Often I Have Chosen Love, was the 2018 winner of the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Prize. She currently works with Spittoon Literary Magazine, Tokyo Poetry Journal, and Asymptote. Her website is shellyshan.com.
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