Japanese Counterculture Without the Word

A "culture" born from a language that possesses a subject moves naturally toward objectifying its various cultural forms, a tendency deeply rooted in the fact that its linguistic structure holds a subject. Japanese, by contrast, lacks a subject altogether, and so the impulse to set culture up as an object rarely arises of its own accord. There is, for instance, no Japanese word equivalent to "counterculture." This shows that within the space of the Japanese language, culture is not objectified.

Here, I think, lies one reason why "culture"—or counterculture—rarely arises in Japan; and yet at the same time, bunka conforming to the structure of the Japanese language has been created in great abundance.

It was only around the 1960s that the subjective intention of a creator began to be acutely felt in Japan, emerging as a new current in reaction against artists who had unthinkingly gone along with the wartime regime. As this makes clear, the problem of the subject in Japan is exceedingly new.

Yet the Edo period was also an age in which commoners came vibrantly into their own. Against this aristocratic culture of matcha, the first shoots of a counterculture suddenly sprang up to give ordinary people a chance to enjoy tea.

That counterculture was sencha (煎茶), steeped leaf tea.

Though the Way of Tea itself had been born in Sakai, it was in Kyoto that it had flourished. Against a matcha culture closed off within the world of the highborn, Baisao answered with a culture of sencha open to all, regardless of high or low birth.

At sixty-one, he opened a pavilion called Tsusen-tei along the banks of the Kamo River in Kyoto, creating a free space for sencha where formal etiquette did not matter. Expounding the independent Zen thought he had cultivated on his own, he lectured to the people who gathered there day after day. Before long, drawn by his words, crowds began to assemble—and in fact, this was the beginning of the very first café in Japan.

Sencha is not merely one method of preparing tea; it was an open rebellion against a culture of matcha locked inside social rank. When you drink a cup of sencha with this vantage point in mind, you can feel that old defiance alive within it, opening the way to a Zen experience deeper than any other.

I cannot understand why Japan ties Osugi to an ideological anarchist who demands the dismantling of government. My guess is that intellectuals could not grasp the base on which Western anarchism, supported by Japan's historical thought, mingled complexly and matured. Anarchism itself did come from the West after Meiji. But even earlier, in the Edo period, there already existed an original thought that can be called Japanese anarchism. Without understanding it, we cannot understand why Osugi took anarchism as a thoroughly individual matter, not a social movement or a national one.

The best reference here is the flow of the counterculture in America in the late 1960s. We should recall again the history of the hippie culture that passed through the Beats, and how its people later split into two great directions. One road was cyberculture, which on the premise of liberating access to information redefined the computer from a weapon and an instrument of control into a tool for extending the individual mind. The other was back-to-the-land, which tried to leave industrial society by abandoning the cities and forming communes in the countryside. The two were not strictly divided and they crossed, but, as Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog shows, the idea that a tool linked the two, even as the great current was beginning to branch, is of the utmost importance. Nor should we forget that non-separation had already been realized within them, at the crossing where tools linked the two roads, and in the realm of mind, the source from which the thought sprang. The substance of the counterculture was the recovery of non-separation against separation, and the recovery of that non-separate realm was the psychedelic. At its source stood the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and Timothy Leary with his "Turn on, tune in, drop out," and the current of the Summer of Love still lives in this world.