Seek high and low; seize every day, every hour.
This article first appeared in Yuanhuo.
Editor’s note: This article was accepted for the Eve Festival of Scavenging Strategy—Rags Drum 2020, Lab on Roof’s annual call for essays.
So far, ZUN—the “Kannushi,” or Shinto priest, as fans call him—has made nine albums featuring the Secret Sealing Club duo. Apart from the charity release Michi no Hana, Michi no Tabi, each takes the two girls on a new adventure. In 2006, two years after the release of their second album, Changeability of Strange Dream, Bōyū Tōkaidō ~ Retrospective 53 minutes made its official debut at the third Hakurei Shrine Reitaisai. Where the previous album had filled in some personal details about Merry and Renko, this album’s booklet mainly fleshes out the world they inhabit. The story remains very oblique, but it gives us enough to glimpse their not-so-distant future. Its central concerns partly carry forward the previous booklet’s discussion of reality and illusion. Unlike the stories that precede and follow it, however, Merry and Renko do not use their abilities, and narration accounts for a much larger share of the text. The focus of the discussion also moves up a level, from individual worldviews to an understanding of culture. The reflections arising from this may have had a considerable influence on ZUN’s own approach to creation.
I. An Overview of the Story and a Discussion of Its Setting
The story of Bōyū Tōkaidō is really a series of fairly loosely connected conversations. In his afterword, ZUN says that this time it is as though someone sitting beside the girls has happened to overhear them talking; it has a distinctly romantic sense of travel. This establishes just the right atmosphere for the themes explored throughout the story.
Tokyo is described as a city “immature in spirit.” Not only does no one pay attention to gaps in the barriers, but the city still offers a great many “amusements for ordinary people,” including indoor theme parks and streets lined with restaurants. With the population declining and cars abandoned, even the roads are overgrown with red spider lilies at the time of the equinoctial Higan festival. Renko herself calls Tokyo “the countryside.” By contrast, although Kyoto is never described directly, we can still sense the imposing dignity of a metropolis, where even entertainment has been reduced to the “new tea ceremony.” The story in Changeability of Strange Dream tells us that Kyoto has a thousand-year history of research into psychic phenomena. Merry and Renko’s club is just one of the psychic clubs found everywhere, and Merry even studies “relative psychology” at university. We can thus see that Kyoto is conceived as a city with a profound body of research into the realms of mind and fantasy; perhaps this is what Renko sees as a sign of “maturity.” Yet the two have also said several times that theirs is actually a “delinquent club,” because its activities—investigating the barriers between different worlds—are forbidden. Although neither girl has been punished for these activities, this still makes a striking contrast with Tokyo’s laissez-faire attitude.
When Renko introduces Tokyo to Merry, she also mentions Shinjuku and Shibuya, calling them “places with a sense of history.” As everyone knows, Shinjuku and Shibuya are two of Japan’s busiest districts today, and rank among the most modernized in the world. In a country with so many historic sites and such well-preserved traditions, districts like these seem a long way from any notion of “a sense of history.” This also gives us an indirect indication that the Kyoto of this setting is no longer the ancient capital we know, but a new metropolis built entirely upon the most advanced civilization. In a setting like this, not only might we fail to find historic sites handed down over hundreds or thousands of years; we might not even find what we would now recognize as modern buildings. This Kyoto still calls itself a thousand-year capital, yet it has erased all the material memory that sustained that history. Add to this the fact that the “new tea ceremony” is its only remaining entertainment, and it is not hard to feel how oppressive the city is.
If we make the comparison, we find that the future Kyoto in this story has a great deal in common with the Lunar Capital: both have extraordinarily advanced civilizations and are very “mature” in spirit. In one respect, however, they differ greatly. The Lunar Capital is depicted as an extremely old city; even its highly advanced technology always finds expression in very traditional forms. Even Reimu, who lives surrounded by traditional things, finds it thoroughly “primitive.” Kaguya, originally a Lunarian herself, believes that once human technology becomes sufficiently advanced, people too will return to this kind of traditional life. Reimu disagrees. In fact, ZUN’s own vision of the future is already apparent in this album: human beings not only keep pursuing the latest experiences civilization has to offer, but also keep discarding traditional culture, unconsciously regarding it as a restraint. Traditional culture symbolizes inheritance and continuity. To the Lunarians, who seek eternity, this quality matters enormously; it might even be considered the core of the Lunar Capital’s culture. To Reimu, however, this “eternity” is almost unbearable for human beings, because whatever means we use to prolong our lives, death remains a part of life. For a human being, “if your heart has already rotted away, you probably wouldn’t want to keep living either.” Yet discarding everything on that account is equally unacceptable. In fact, ZUN rejects both the Lunar Capital, which strives to make tradition eternal by eliminating impurity as thoroughly as possible, and Kyoto, which has erased tradition altogether and retains only empty forms. “All that lives must perish; the way of Heaven turns in cycles” has always been a very important idea in Touhou. For human beings, then, neither the continuation nor the disappearance of tradition should proceed in only one direction. The key question is how to find, within a past that is continually slipping away, the core worth preserving.
This becomes even clearer in the descriptions of Mount Fuji and the Kaleido-screen, the train’s scenery display. In his supplementary music commentary for Imperishable Night,1 ZUN says: “The real reason Mount Fuji has not been selected as a World Heritage site is that it is a sacred peak that is not for human beings to judge in the first place.” Fuji’s status as a symbol of Japanese culture and the Japanese national spirit hardly needs elaboration. Even in the near future of Bōyū Tōkaidō, the Japanese government’s view that boring a tunnel beneath Fuji would be “a grave sacrilege” shows that people still revere the mountain. Yet Renko openly says she has barely paid attention to the actual Mount Fuji, and shows no particular reaction even when the train passes beneath it. Together with the account of how few people climb Fuji any more, this tells us how remote the mountain has become from ordinary life. Its designation as a World Heritage site at this point is an especially important symbol: Fuji, and the culture it represents, have died in any practical sense. Much as with the ancient Roman Colosseum, another World Heritage site, the shouting and fighting have been gone for millennia; all that remains is a shell and endless imaginings of former glory. Roman law, meanwhile, which laid foundations for human civilization and continues to exert a profound influence, will never enjoy this “honor.” Fuji’s transformation from “a sacred peak beyond human judgment” into an “ordinary” World Heritage site also signals the disappearance of a certain spiritual quality—or cultural meaning—that it once possessed. The scenery on the Kaleido-screen, repeatedly emphasized as “distinctly Japanese,” is likewise no more than a false landscape, and in Merry’s eyes even amounts to “boring visual stimulation.” This too tells us that the so-called “Japanese spirit” no longer exists in life, but has become merely an illusory imagining.
Fuji’s “death” is not frightening in itself. But the new spiritual symbol built by the people who abandoned it—the city of Kyoto—offers no sign of new hope. In the world Renko and Merry inhabit, natural food is already hard to come by; even drinks containing actual alcohol have become luxuries. Technological ways of thinking, too, constantly constrain how people see and understand the world. In other words, the new civilization and culture people have created after abandoning their cultural core (Fuji)—a “synthetic civilization”—cannot help them rise to a new level (coming to know the real world). Creating new cultures is therefore a means by which humanity survives, and the gradual forgetting of old cultures is not a frightening thing. But if the cultural core is abandoned, no new culture will possess genuine vitality.
II. Chōnin Culture
ZUN offers no clear answer to so vast a question as “what to keep and what to discard in traditional culture,” but the story still gives us plenty of clues.
In Renko’s account to Merry, Tokyo is full of young people in all manner of outlandish clothes. Though it can only count as “the countryside” beside “elegant,” exacting Kyoto, Tokyo also seems as rough-hewn and alluring as the West where so many adventures once unfolded. Gensokyo still retains the appearance of Japan before the Meiji Restoration, inevitably bringing to mind the Edo period, that strange and dazzling age led by the chōnin, or townspeople, yet full of budding hope.
“Chōnin” is a specific term in Japan, usually referring to the social group formed by wealthy merchants during the Edo shogunate. The word itself, however, appeared as early as the Heian period. Here, chō seems to refer not to an administrative unit but to a place within fixed boundaries, something like a shop.2 “Chōnin” then had no special meaning beyond “people within a chō.” But because the idea of a chō was often conflated with that of a shop, a subtle connection developed between chōnin and merchants.
After the Heian period, the decline of official commerce gave private merchants room to develop. Resident traders appeared at certain temples and ports, and areas such as temple towns took shape. It was during this period that the chōnin began to emerge as a distinct group on the historical stage.3 Large quantities of metal currency flowed into Japan from the continent, stimulating the commodity economy and encouraging towns to form around centers of frequent exchange such as markets and ports.4 To strengthen their domains militarily and economically, the daimyō of the Warring States period built “castle towns” below their castles as political and economic bases. Not only did growing numbers of merchants and artisans concentrate in these towns, but previously dispersed craft production and supplies, distribution markets of various kinds, and goods in circulation also converged upon them. Castle towns gradually became the military, economic, and transport centers of their respective domains, giving rise to “castle-town chōnin.”5
Nurtured by these new developments, the chōnin finally took shape as a distinct group in the Edo period. Yet Christianity, that “uninvited guest,” played a subtle but important part in enabling these merchants eventually to develop a culture of their own. Christianity had begun spreading in Japan with the arrival of missionaries as early as the Muromachi period. To prevent instability in its rule, the shogunate began persecuting Christians, tightening its control over intellectual and spiritual life by building temples and shrines throughout the country, teaching Cheng–Zhu Neo-Confucianism to the warrior class, enforcing national seclusion, and censoring books and periodicals. Regardless of that intent, however, the spread of commoner education through temple schools, together with Western books and especially Western culture from the Netherlands, provided the support the chōnin needed to create their own culture.
These historical facts inevitably bring to mind the “outsiders” in Touhou’s stories. From the Moriya household in Mountain of Faith to Sumireko in Urban Legend in Limbo, and even the Secret Sealing Club duo themselves, they all bring new color, as “people from the outside world,” to the traditional spirit Gensokyo symbolizes. As characters from other worlds such as the Lunar Capital and Hell joined the cast, ZUN even made the “immigration problem” the subject of a special feature in Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia, with an air of great seriousness. Yet we have to acknowledge that the addition of these characters and the cultures they symbolize has not cost Touhou its aesthetic core of “fantasy and retro style.” Instead, it has allowed Touhou to develop in a form that people find more readily acceptable. “Why is it so clear? Because fresh water flows from its source.” Perhaps “Gensokyo can make room for everything” is ZUN’s first answer to the question of how tradition can be reborn.
As noted above, Edo-period Japan had sharply defined ranks, with each class performing its assigned function. Without an imperial civil-service examination system, there was very little social mobility. The samurai all had their own fiefs and lived chiefly on the rice stipends they received from them. Japanese society at this point, however, had already become considerably commercialized, so even the samurai class had to sell its stipend rice to merchants for money to spend. The Edo shogunate also instituted a system of daimyō attendance. Apart from the daimyō of Kantō, who had to attend the shogun once every six months, those from other regions had to alternate their residence between Edo and their own domains. This both secured the shogunate’s control over them and weakened them economically, forcing them to spend their wealth on travel as they continually changed residences. Merchants supplied the daimyō with consumer goods and all kinds of services along the way, further stimulating commerce.
The merchants sat on immense wealth, but could not turn it directly into political capital, and the shogunate also prohibited the buying and selling of land. Their only option was to spend it on consumption. Artisans, artists, and performers living in these places were happy to take the opportunity to make a living, and in the process all manner of cultural forms were created—kabuki, jōruri narrative performance, haiku, ukiyo-e—eventually constituting what we now call “chōnin culture.” Unlike Heian aristocratic culture or the warrior culture that had prevailed since the Kamakura shogunate, this was a genuinely commoner culture. Most of its participants came from among ordinary people, as did its consumers, and many art forms created by commoners, including rakugo storytelling and kabuki, began to flourish. These performances and works of art were thoroughly commercial, so their development also helped cities prosper further and society become more commercialized. The spread of woodblock carving and the associated printing techniques provided the necessary technical support. Previously, the difficulty of circulating works widely had meant that artists could survive and develop only by depending on powerful, high-ranking patrons such as samurai. This dependence constrained artists’ motives and thus the range of subjects their work could address. Once works could circulate among ordinary people through mass reproduction, the themes and imagery of urban commoner culture began appearing in them in large numbers. Creators could also escape the control of those in power and win themselves more room for artistic creation.6
The flourishing of chōnin culture challenged traditional ideas on many fronts. This social ethos founded on money and consumption made self-liberation and self-gratification part of people’s spiritual life. Although people of refined taste found such behavior “unbearably vulgar,” they could not stem the powerful attraction this way of life exerted. We can see it in the ukiyo-zōshi, or “floating-world tales,” and the literature of kōshoku, amorous desire, pioneered by The Life of an Amorous Man, as well as in the enormous number of erotic shunga works within ukiyo-e. The kōshoku inherent in the “floating world” does not mean mere indulgence in carnal desire: it advocates the pursuit of love as a supreme aim and the release of feelings suppressed within.7 The emergence and wide circulation of these works also reflect the public’s affirmation and celebration of what they contain: human desires, feelings, and even vitality itself. This stands in sharp contrast to the ideas in the Cheng–Zhu Neo-Confucianism championed by warrior culture—such as “preserve Heavenly Principle and eliminate human desires”—that suppress the free expression of desire. The sex trade centered on courtesans, the performing arts exemplified by kabuki, and the visual arts exemplified by ukiyo-e all used their rich array of subjects from commoner life to dissolve traditional warrior culture’s distinctions and judgments between the refined and the vulgar, the beautiful and the ugly. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, they established new moral values not grounded in power. In a society that insisted on the unshakable hierarchy of “warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants,” this was undoubtedly a revolutionary call for “equality” and “inclusiveness.”
If we revisit Touhou’s stories from this perspective, we find this street-level life, full of desire and the bustle of everyday living, scattered unobtrusively throughout the works. Although ZUN has never supplied explicit details about the currency or socioeconomic system of Touhou’s world, there is no doubt that money occupies an important place in its stories. Hakurei Shrine’s poverty is not only a very widely shared premise among fan creators; it also appears frequently in official works. The kappa have always been adept at business, too. Even in Hell, the shops along the Road of Liminality are an important source of income. Money and commerce in Touhou may signify more than they appear to on the surface: above all, they may express an acknowledgment of real life. Though the girls are not merchants by profession, from their never-ending festivals to their fierce competition over faith, they already have a good deal of the merchant about them.
The idea of money is always connected to consumption, and consumption is always driven by desire. Yet that desire ultimately seeks fuller enjoyment and development of body and mind together. When casting a vote for Mokou, ZUN once said that the most important thing about being human was “thinking of yourself as human.” Although Mokou can no longer be put on the same footing as ordinary human beings, her profound obsession with “death” still allows her to retain human desires. In sharp contrast stands ZUN’s rejection of the “purity” represented by Kyoto and the “eternity” represented by the Lunar Capital. Having thrown everything away, Kyoto can only add to its own “boring” troubles, however eagerly it seeks shadows of the past. If, instead, one clings to tradition, living a life from which all “impurity” has been excluded, endless time will wear every desire away: only a desireless being can reach true eternity. In Tōhō Bōgetsushō, even the Lunarians have to make the maintenance of a fulfilling inner life an important concern. Reimu may be called a “youkai shrine maiden,” but the strong air of everyday urban life about her still makes her fully human. Her title, “the shrine maiden of the five desires,” is further confirmation of this. Though the girls are attached to money, they are not bewitched by it, nor does a lack of money plunge them into material deprivation. This also keeps the darker side of a money-based society from eating away at them. In a sense, perhaps this too is ZUN’s kindly blessing for these “chōnin” girls.
The Tokyo Renko portrays in Bōyū Tōkaidō does not actually surpass Kyoto in material terms; rather, it holds fast to the “Japanese spirit.” Though they are far removed from traditional forms, the large shopping malls, freely available amusement facilities, and people in novel fashions make the lifeblood of Edo more palpable than the new tea ceremony, the sole remaining amusement, shut away in an “enclosed room.” In our own time and place, Kyoto has always been seen as the representative of Japan’s traditional spirit, while Tokyo symbolizes modern Japanese society with all its problems. If we regard Kyoto not as a city but as a symbol of that traditional spirit, the track “Retrospective Kyoto” becomes easy to understand. What the two girls are recalling is not “Kyoto” as a historical city, but the Tokyo they are about to visit, still tenaciously alive.
If we think about this at a more fundamental level, we find that the desire to enjoy life, the connections people make with one another through “consumption,” and the exploration of how to regard tradition in an ever-changing world all express a strong and unmistakable will to live. This will means more than living on without abandoning hope in hostile circumstances. Nor does it mean withdrawing from the mundane world and merely getting by within a private sphere. Rather, it is a process of actively creating and enjoying life because one is “alive.” This will is active and affirmative: it is precisely because we are dissatisfied that new things can come into being. The incidents stirred up by youkai, the fairies’ endless everyday pranks, and the struggles over the Human Village and Gensokyo itself are all like this. In these events, then, both the participants and those making the “trouble” are actually enjoying themselves quite a bit. The parties where everyone drinks freely together after an incident is resolved are further proof.
Another indispensable element in achieving this is “inclusiveness,” though it does not mean accepting everything without any limits. The culture created by the chōnin contains dazzling cultural treasures, but it also abounds in vulgar, shallow pleasures of the flesh. Yet these are two sides of the same coin, naturally joined and inseparable. Its creators accepted reality and reflected it in their works without evasion. Although they had their own values and attitudes, they did not divide that reality into “them” and “us”; this is why their works could use so many colors and styles to reflect reality in all its variety. Gensokyo’s ability to “make room for everything” is not confined to the acceptance of “outsiders” discussed above. Whatever kind of girl she may be, she can find a place for herself here. From ZUN’s perspective as creator, both the addition of new girls and the fan works made by enthusiasts continually give the girls new aspects of character and keep reshaping Gensokyo. This capacity to accommodate so much may be an important reason why Touhou has flourished so brilliantly. In the world of the Secret Sealing Club, by contrast, excluding “heresy” means closing oneself off. As Magical Astronomy says, this world no longer has any unsolved problems—just like Fuji, now an extinct volcano that, despite becoming a permanent cultural heritage site, can no longer create a new spirit.
III. Ukiyo-e, Utagawa Hiroshige, and Katsushika Hokusai
Another subject Merry and Renko discuss in Bōyū Tōkaidō is the Kaleido-screen that supplies their scenery. Presumably to emphasize its “Japanese spirit,” its makers chose ukiyo-e as their model. In that age, however, repackaged ukiyo-e no longer means what it did when it first appeared. In a sense, it really is, as Merry says, nothing but “boring visual stimulation.”
As the visual expression of chōnin culture, ukiyo-e gives us a more immediate sense of that colorful age than words can. As ukiyo, the “floating world” in its name—meaning “in the contemporary style” or “the present world”—suggests, the appearance of everyday urban life and the feelings and desires people reveal in living it are ukiyo-e’s unchanging center.
Early ukiyo-e emerged from Japan’s traditional yamato-e painting. As coloring techniques improved and woodblock printing moved beyond purely Buddhist uses, ukiyo-e finally became an independent art form. The outstanding painter in this process was Hishikawa Moronobu, whom later generations revered as the “father of ukiyo-e.”8 An accomplished illustrator, he gradually gave pictures a more prominent place than words in his works, and even produced standalone, single-sheet pictures of everyday life. These works, chiefly woodblock prints, announced the birth of “ukiyo-e” as a form. His many pictures of beautiful women, or bijin-ga, depicting courtesans also established an important subject for later ukiyo-e.
In the middle phase of ukiyo-e’s development, there were major advances in coloring, paper, and production techniques. Artists such as Okumura Masanobu and Utagawa Toyoharu incorporated perspective from Western painting into ukiyo-e, enriching the representation and texture of scenes. The azuma nishiki-e, or “Eastern brocade pictures,” pioneered by Suzuki Harunobu and others earned the accolade “brocade photographs” for their vivid, abundant colors. Haiku poets’ enthusiasm for exchanging illustrated calendars, together with the flourishing of kabuki, gave ukiyo-e a broad market. Economic development and the emergence of a specialized division of labor among artists who drew the block designs (hanshita-eshi), block carvers (horishi), and printers (surishi, written 刷師 or 摺師) made it possible to cut costs and increase output. The emergence and application of these new techniques set ukiyo-e on a path of rapid development.
Traditional bijin-ga also underwent major changes during this period. As artists grew more accomplished at depicting settings, the “beauties” in their pictures took on a more realistic character. Although many of the women depicted by Torii Kiyonaga, Kitao Shigemasa, and others were already married, their graceful figures and unadorned expressions of feeling still conveyed a healthy, natural beauty. The portraits of courtesans and kabuki actors created by Kitagawa Utamaro, Tōshūsai Sharaku, and others had an especially profound influence on later ukiyo-e artists.
Left: Torii Kiyonaga · Hamaya · Enjoying the Cool by the River · eighteenth century; right: Kitagawa Utamaro · Three Beauties of the Kansei Era · eighteenth century.
Later, ukiyo-e devoted solely to human figures gradually ceased to be the main genre leading the art’s stylistic development. Instead, meisho-e—pictures of famous places, depicting landscapes and scenes of urban commoner life—began to flourish. Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and Utagawa Hiroshige’s The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō even became cultural calling cards for Japan. These works were not entirely bound to realistic depiction, nor were their creators merely presenting beautiful scenery. Rather, they expressed their own feelings through the landscape—a way of creating through “impressions.” Both artists sought expressive richness in composition and color, rather than concentrating only on the pleasures of everyday life. This was what enabled their works to attain such artistic greatness. Their approach also became an important source of inspiration for Western Impressionism.
Left: Claude Monet · Le Bassin aux nymphéas (The Water-Lily Pond) · 1899; right: Utagawa Hiroshige · Inside Kameido Tenjin Shrine · 1856.
Left: Claude Monet · La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume) · nineteenth century; right: Hishikawa Moronobu · Beauty Looking Back · seventeenth century.
Monet’s imitation of ukiyo-e works.
With the arrival of the “Black Ships” and the progress of the Meiji Restoration, the drive for “civilization and enlightenment” and the popularity of Western photography gradually pushed ukiyo-e out of the mass market. Its subjects also shifted toward “news pictures” and “pictures of modernization” dealing with current events. Both output and artistic taste were in decline, and the works could not compare with those that had come before. After this, ukiyo-e as a distinct method of artistic creation departed the historical stage. Yet its creative elements, and its record of the “Japanese spirit,” continued to be passed down.
Though a product of a particular historical period, ukiyo-e became the finest record and reflection of Japan’s traditional spirit in the visual arts. Two of its most distinctive artistic features are “line” and “color.” Most ukiyo-e compositions do not strive for symmetry. While this gives the picture a sense of imbalance, it also heightens the sense of a moment caught in passing, lending it movement. Delineating people and objects with flowing lines rather than patches of color brings out their graceful forms while reinforcing that movement. To some extent, it also suggests that the artist does not stand outside the picture, but becomes one with the landscape within it.9
As for “color,” pure colors such as white, red, and blue are among those most frequently found in ukiyo-e. Their flat application both gives the picture a simple clarity and heightens the “impression” that scenery and figures make on artist and viewer alike. The widespread use of Prussian blue in particular gives these works greater emotional depth and more layers of feeling.10 This expression of feeling is permeated by the spirit of mono no aware articulated by Motoori Norinaga. It has something in common with the encouragement of emotional expression in the literature of kōshoku. Mono no aware refers more to the feelings stirred by changes in scenery and human affairs. It is not confined to reflections on life’s impermanence or sorrow at the fleeting nature of beauty: it also encompasses the joy of life beginning and a resonance with the power of crashing waves.11 This is why ukiyo-e can transcend the things it depicts and give aesthetic shape to traditional Japan.
If we look at Hokusai’s and Hiroshige’s pictures from this perspective, we find that both have a strongly Japanese character, though they approach it differently. Even in the booklet text of Bōyū Tōkaidō, the question of whose work should appear on the Kaleido-screen as representative of that “Japanese character” prompts a little discussion between Merry and Renko. People in the future choose Hiroshige because they can no longer accept Hokusai’s “madness.” Though Hokusai did indeed often call himself a “madman,” his work is not as unpalatable as today’s black metal music. Clearly, then, the meaning behind this choice is not so simple.
Born into a commoner family, Hokusai lived a life as full of dramatic turns as his pictures. In both life and art, he was continually beset by misfortune. As a young apprentice, he struggled to learn and led an unsettled, wandering life; in middle age, a great fire inflicted devastating losses on the sketches and materials he had accumulated over decades. Just when he hoped for a peaceful old age, his unworthy descendants squandered the family assets, forcing him to keep working to support himself. Even so, he never abandoned his passion for artistic creation or his pursuit of it. Late in life, he summed up his experience roughly as follows:
“To be honest, what I painted before seventy wasn’t much and isn’t worth mentioning. I think I still need to keep working, so that by a hundred I can paint something quite remarkable.”
Even in a life so full of hardship and regret, Hokusai’s pictures remained alive with energy and strength. In Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, he endowed both Fuji itself and the people living around it with abundant individuality and the breath of life. His pictures are full of movement. The greatness of this force lies not only in the wonder of nature’s power, but still more in Hokusai’s spiritual transcendence of life’s suffering. These most representative works were created precisely when his life was at its lowest ebb. Because he had hope, even at the end of his life Hokusai still wished for a little more time to become a “true painter.” His persistence in hope and the optimism with which he overcame suffering raised the artistic quality of his works to a still higher level.
Utagawa Hiroshige, by contrast, spent his life amid contradictions and inner conflicts. Born into a low-ranking samurai family, he occupied a somewhat awkward social position. Nominally, he belonged to the ruling class and stood in society’s upper ranks. In practice, however, the shogunate’s financial difficulties and his relatively weak position within the samurai class meant that he did not live in wealth and splendor, and he too had to supplement his household income by making ukiyo-e. Intellectually, he approved of the free and open lives of the chōnin, but as a member of the ruling class he faced many constraints on expressing that approval. His work was therefore always comparatively restrained and understated. Because he often depicted landscapes encountered on journeys, as in The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, evoking an involuntary longing for home, he was often called “Hiroshige of nostalgia.” His pictures frequently reveal a lingering attachment to nature and its beauties. Unlike the powerful force we feel in Hokusai’s work, Hiroshige’s pictures are always very quiet. Yet they give us a stronger sense of a spiritual connection between the people and things within them, something very much in keeping with Japan’s traditional “animism.” In One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, his many close foreground views give viewers a strong sense of being there, strengthening the pictures’ transmission of feeling.
In Renko and Merry’s age, people chose Hiroshige after all, just as Fuji finally became a World Heritage site. They made that choice because, in their age, people had become “mature” in spirit and would no longer move forward. Just as ever-enduring reinforced concrete had replaced the formerly changeable natural world and become the new “nature” in people’s memories, the ultimate questions of physics had been solved, and people no longer needed to explore how to solve problems whose answers they did not know. Even such metaphysical things as culture and traditional spirit had only one kind of value left to offer: remembrance and decoration. The vitality in Hokusai’s pictures would seem too much for people of that age to bear. Only the “nostalgia” and “remembrance” in Hiroshige’s work could still find a place in this stubborn attachment to “eternity.” Perhaps this is the second meaning of the track “Retrospective Kyoto.”
Whatever else we may say, such thinking is steeped in self-deception. Fuji did not truly die at the moment it became an extinct volcano, but at the moment it was designated a World Heritage site. And only a spirit that has ceased to exist in people’s daily lives needs to be remembered. However “Japanese” the scenery, then, it is merely “boring visual stimulation” in the eyes of Merry, an outside observer. The feeling in Hiroshige’s pictures comes from the artist’s and viewers’ genuine feelings toward that landscape—in other words, from the part mono no aware plays in creation and aesthetic appreciation. To promote the true “Japanese spirit” through a false landscape is a truly exquisite irony.
In his afterword, ZUN says that this story in fact carries forward the exploration of “reality and illusion” in Changeability of Strange Dream. When the album was released, many of these questions were still only fantasies. Today, with technologies such as VR and AR already in practical use, the scenes it depicts have become a very real matter. It is not just that new technologies have made the prospect of the virtual replacing reality a situation we can envisage. In literature and the visual arts, too, the “cyberpunk” worldview, defined above all by digital technology, has become enormously popular as a subject for creative work. In such a world, tall buildings and dazzling neon lights have absolute dominion over what people see. “Reality and illusion” here refers more to the fact that people living in this environment can no longer recover their capacity to perceive the original natural world. Although ZUN does not explicitly say in Bōyū Tōkaidō that the virtual here means a world constructed from all kinds of information, later albums such as Dr. Latency’s Freak Report explicitly raise the problem of information worship. In the future, overdependence on information and the worlds it constructs will be the chief cause of people becoming virtual. Take the spirit of mono no aware, discussed above as one of the core elements of the Japanese spirit. Only the heart’s resonance with real things can awaken genuine feeling. If people respond only to images, the feelings they experience are all carefully designed and directed. Especially in a society like this, saturated with marketing, nothing—from public feeling to public thought—escapes exploitation by those brilliant artists and propagandists. Are human beings really virtual in their essence? Perhaps this is merely a satire on a society overdependent on information. Of course, ZUN is not advocating a return to the past here. Human civilization has reached this point by continually creating information and using it to build systems that protect against risk. But, as the dangers of instrumental reason show, when the tool itself becomes the content of thought, the real and the illusory truly merge into one, because distinguishing between them no longer has any meaning.
How should such a problem be solved? ZUN offers no clear explanation in the story. For Merry and Renko, this is the reality they inhabit. Though this makes them feel the need to find another way out, the constraints of their thinking and perspective make that difficult. Should we, who stand outside the story, not think actively about this, so as to avoid a tragic future whose first signs are already appearing? However beautiful the scenery on display, it cannot replace the color of the real sky; however beautiful a fantasy may be, the sunlight of reality must shine into it. Human beings are real in their very essence. There is no need to substitute faith for that reality, or to fill it out with information. The key is to find eyes that discover reality and a heart that perceives it. As the discussion above suggests, ZUN hopes that a sustained, abundant vitality might emerge even in such a society. That vitality is the key to breaking the present impasse. For vitality symbolizes desire, and it also symbolizes hope. Only within such vitality can new possibilities be born. Once we become absorbed in a world constructed from information, life will never be able to take another step forward, and the whole world will sink into an eternal end.
After all, Touhou’s world is only one among countless virtual worlds. The sense of reality we find in this story may be no more than our own wishful thinking. Only by going beyond the forms in which these worlds exist can we truly find that beauty and longing. Perhaps the greatest consolation for ZUN would be for us to take the hope and strength we draw from Touhou’s stories into a genuine experience of this world, let our lives become one with it, and bring forth still more vitality.