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Japan Calligraphy
Calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing, had long
been highly
esteemed, intensively studied, and avidly collected. The
writing of
Chinese ideograms (kanji) in a wide variety of
styles was
inherited from the Chinese scholarly tradition, which at
one
extreme became the nearly indecipherable grass-style
writing and at
the other geometric abstractions. There are famous
exponents of all
these styles in contemporary Japan who have spent a
lifetime
perfecting their skills. The most widely used mode is
called
kana, referring to the Japanese syllabary, which
provides an
opportunity to depict both ideograms and Japanese phonetic
sounds
in set phrases. This kind of writing may be done in many
ways: with
fine, delicate strokes or bold, splashy ones, carefully
controlled
or in uninhibited freedom, and on a scale ranging from
large to
minuscule. Traditional Japanese poetry is usually
classified in the
kana group, while modern poetry is placed in a
group by
itself. Zen Buddhism promoted a spontaneous style of
writing in its
koan, which includes some pictorial additions.
Because calligraphy lends itself so well to modern
abstract
painting, some artists have used it in this form; the
Bokusho
abstract school has developed some outstanding masters.
Calligraphers are greatly revered not only for their skill
and
scholarship but also for their attainment of a high
spiritual
level, which produces the meditative calm considered
necessary for
truly creative brushwork. Calligraphy is widely collected
at
enormous prices, and writing by well-known persons in
various
fields, such as politics or the military, is also
treasured even by
those who cannot read the script, which is not uncommon
because
some is nearly abstract.
Data as of January 1994
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