Travel, art and the fine ritual of Itadakimasu

Tucked between routine movements was a gesture primal and secretive. One that I had neither seen before nor whose existence I had known of .

I remember well the sequence of actions.  My head was bent over the ceramic bowl of cloudy miso soup, wooden chopsticks dangling between the fingers of my right hand, plucking a few strands of Udon noodles, then raising them carefully to meet my lowered mouth.

It was at that moment that my eyes made temporary contact. There he sat, solitarily, a few tables away from me at the café of the Grand Prince Hotel Takanawa, Tokyo.

Had I looked a few seconds later, I could easily have missed his performance.  So nuanced was it; urgent yet mindful, bearing all the traces of a ritual.  He brought the palms of both hands together as if to pray, then bowed his head as if to supplicate, then directed his eyes towards his breakfast tray.

It was Grace all over again, the one my Roman Catholic parents had taught me years ago to recite. Except: there was no accompanying sign of the cross. He didn’t set aside a morsel to appease the spirits. Neither did he bless or venerate his food. He seemed, instead, to surrender to it.

Later our guide Noriko-san explained his gesture as a traditional Japanese incantation before any meal. “Itadakimasu” is what we utter, when we bow towards the food,” she said. I tucked it away in my Moleskine for further research.

That six-day trip to Japan was in early August. And since then, I have but one regret.

Had I comprehended the magnanimity of that gesture earlier, the cultural import of the word and the sheer poetry of its utterance,  I would have made it my own ritual. “Itadakimasu’, I would have murmured, to my first meal in Japan at the the Izakaya near Shinagawa station: king-oyster mushrooms delicately wok-tossed in a light, citrusy, buttery jus, whose simplicity and restraint had  left me overwhelmed and effervescent.

Literally translated, Itadakimasu means I ‘humbly receive” or, “I shall take the lives of others”.   Unimaginable, that there could possibly be a single word that bounds  the recipient of a meal not only to its maker but also to the entire ecosystem responsible for the foraging or production of every ingredient that sacrificed its life for the sake of nourishment and sensual pleasure.  The uttering of Itadakimasu defines the speaker as the final recipient of a circle of grace, a privileged beneficiary who completes a cycle of creation through the act of consumption,  transforming eating from a lowly habit to a ceremonious gesture enriched with cosmic currency.

“Itadakimasu” is a testament to the collective consciousness of the Japanese and their minimalist aesthetic sensibility and their obsessive engagement with the concept of transcendence by imbuing daily realities and everyday objects with an artfulness that makes them too exquisite to be mundane.

Even a material as humdrum as plastic is elevated to an art form; a fact evidenced by the ubiquitous restaurant displays of plastic equivalents of menu items. Called “sampuru,” derived from the English “sample,” these replicas are not mere illustrations.  Originally made from wax, fake food has been used connotatively in Japan since the 1920s and is now custom-made for restaurants and hand-painted by skilled artisans who specialize in the highly lucrative billion-yen industry.

The idea behind Sampuru is to connote the real as realistically as possible. More than visual demonstrations, they are promises. They allow your imagination a whiff of the texture and the taste of what is to come.  They reference the original and lure your appetite.

Inside eating houses too, arrangement and plating of traditional fare have been cultivated, over centuries, as a quasi-science; they are exacting and perfect, and complement the integral properties of each dish. The sampuru reflects all this and more while presenting us with the paradox of its nigh indestructibility, its nearly eternal nature, unlike the ephemeral sensual experience of eating itself.

How relevant, then, is Contemporary Art in such a superlatively aestheticized culture? How do the Japanese, with their centuries-old traditions, experience an artwork?  Can the principle of Itadakimasu be applied to visual arts, where the viewer, and not the artwork, is the final recipient of a specific cycle of creation? How does the contemporary Japanese Art world negotiate its relationship with the West and the rest of its Asian counterparts?

There were many questions on my mind as I made my way through the Yokohama Triennale and the Sapporo Arts Festival.

The fifth edition of the Yokohama Triennale, curated by Japanese artist Morimura Yasumasa, adopted as its theme the idea of oblivion and derived its creative chutzpah from Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451.  “Art Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the Sea of Oblivion” was the title of Morimura’s curatorial debut, a novelistic endeavor arranged as a series of 11 chapters and spread across two venues, the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Shinko Pier.

Bradbury’s sci-fi story is set in a near-futuristic society in which people are forbidden from reading books. A formidable army of “firemen” is entrusted with the task of burning found books, a total inversion of their traditional function of putting out fires. True lovers of literature have preferred self-exile to an insipid lifestyle. Calling themselves the “Book People,” their act of resistance consists of each of them memorizing a single book to the point where they “become” the book they have committed to memory before burning its physical copy so that they are now the embodiment of the book’s legacy, signifying a movement away from the written towards the oral narrative. By destroying the book, they place the onus of its continuity in their own hands, ensuring that the book is not just something placed on a mantle but a lived experience.

Morimura invoked this gesture of destruction with an artist project titled “Moe Nai Ko To Ba” (“The Only Book in the World”), conceived as homage to Bradbury.

The project anthologized eight texts and artworks rescued from oblivion: testaments to the survival and proliferation of ideas despite censorship.  Such as a poem by Anna Akhmatova which literally was handed down by word of mouth under the repressive Stalinist regime.

The “Moe Nai Ko To Ba” was destroyed, as planned, in an “Annihilation Performance” when the Triennale concluded on November 3, so as to return it to its source, the “sea of oblivion.”

Through the duration of the Triennale, excerpts from  “Moe Nai Ko To Ba” were read in a host of languages. It was a powerful backdrop to an eloquent theme that was further reinforced through Michael Landy’s monumentally sized Art Bin, which occupied center stage at the entrance to the Yokohama Art Museum and was a “monument to creative failure,” offering an environment in which catharsis could be ensured during the process of destruction. It cemented the Triennale’s overarching idea of the relationship between oblivion and obliteration.

“Chapter 11: Drifting in a Sea of Oblivion,” at the sea-side venue, Shinko Pier, had artist Yanagi Miwa’s gigantic art stage truck made in Taiwan, a mobile vehicle complete with gaudy décor referencing truck art, stage lights, and a disco ball. The truck’s journey to Yokohama foreshadowed its future destiny as a traveling stage that will be the proscenium for an upcoming theatrical adaptation of Nakagami Kenji’s novel, Wings of the Sun, about seven old pilgrimaging women.

The movement from the entrance of Shinko Pier towards the sea-glazed posterior had the viewer steadily slipping into the “sea of oblivion,” with Ana Mendieta’s early videos, including Soul, Silhoutte on Fire, and Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari’s Her + Him, chronicling the story behind found semi-clad photographs of  his grandmother that were shot by a Cairo-based photo studio director as an example of the social significance of photography in the Islamic world as well as a record of loss and the blurry in-between world that exists at the cusp between reality and fiction.

The city of Sapporo in Hokkaido, Northern Japan, hosted the Sapporo International Arts Festival, a 72-day affair curated by the New York-based Japanese artist Ryuichi Sakamoto who chose “City and Nature” as the overarching theme.

Since the aftermath of an earthquake, Sakamoto had begun working closely with trees. For his Forest Symphony in Moerenuma,  he installed a sensor device that could measure the bio-potential of trees and convert it to data that could be measured via a network. Select trees from different parts of Sapporo and the world were fitted with this device and their bioelectric data then converted to a musical symphony. “Trees convert sunlight to energy through photosynthesis, meaning they are a genius at capturing electromagnetic waves,” Sakamoto writes. “I want to turn that nature’s cycle into music.”

As I sat on a cold stone on that humid August day in the middle of a clearing in the  enormous forest-like campus of the Sapporo Art Museum, lured by the haunting melody of Susan Philipsz’s sculptural sound piece, The Cuckoo’s Nest, a tribute to the local cuckoos in the form of a Medieval English canon, I felt privileged to be able to hear the siren-like call.   It communicated the freshness of spring and the rejuvenation of life through new seed.

Yes, I had missed Japan’s cherry blossoms. But was honored to experience Japan’s reincarnation from various disasters that had threatened to obliterate its cosmic connection to its ecosystem.  The inner conflicts of the Japanese with the environment were being addressed through art: like the transcendental music of  Akira Ifukube, a Hokkaido native responsible for the haunting if eerie Godzilla soundtrack.

After my six-day odyssey through two triennales,  after my ravishing of the most sophisticated cuisine my tongue had ever encountered, after this brief but wondrous expedition through Japan’s  crowded streets and metro stations and sign boards urging commuters to “yield to each other,” through its shrines and painted shop shutters,  there was only two words to encapsulate the elation and privilege I felt at experiencing such unadulterated beauty : Gochisousama Deshita.

Said after a meal and translated, they simply mean : “You were a Feast.”