Introduction
Here’s a question. When you look at something in a shop and think, “oh, I like that”, what’s that actually based on? Who made it. How much it costs. What brand it’s from. Does the thing look the same to you before you know all that, and after?
A hundred years ago, in Japan, there was a man who gave a pretty extreme answer to that question. His name was Soetsu Yanagi. If you’re into Japanese aesthetics or craft, you might have come across his name before. He started the Mingei movement in the early twentieth century, and his whole argument was that real beauty is in ordinary, everyday things, made by craftsmen whose names don’t even survive.
And the thing I find interesting about him is this idea that objects shape the mind, and the mind shapes objects. Basically, the things around you are shaping your mind, bit by bit.
“Unbearable to Look At”
He wrote something about William Morris’s house. Morris was the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement in England. Yanagi wrote that things like the wallpaper pattern in that house were, in his words, unbearable to look at. That’s pretty blunt, isn’t it? And the reason he could say that is, fame didn’t get in his way. Morris was one of the most famous names in the whole movement, but that didn’t stop Yanagi from criticising the actual work.
I’m heading back to the UK next week, and I had some Arts and Crafts places on my list, so I’ve been reading a book about Yanagi before I go. So today I want to walk through what he said, and think through, together with you, how we actually look at the things around us.
A Philosopher Who Never Made Anything
Yanagi originally trained as a philosopher of religion. He didn’t make anything himself.
The story goes that it all started when someone visiting his house gave him a piece of Korean pottery, and he was just struck by how beautiful it was. That was the spark for the whole Mingei movement. He teamed up with Japanese potters and spent years travelling the country, looking for beauty in the everyday things around us that nobody in Japan had really paid attention to before. He wrote a lot of books. And actually, the word “mingei” itself is a word he invented. It’s short for minshūteki kōgei, crafts of ordinary people.
England in His Thinking
What’s interesting is that he was actually quite influenced by England. He’d studied religious philosophy, so he had a deep grounding in Christianity, and eventually in Buddhism too. But when he was young, he was completely absorbed in the English poet William Blake. And the line of Blake’s he apparently loved was, “the eye sees more than the heart knows.”
And here’s a name you might already know: Bernard Leach. He’s considered one of the pioneers of English studio pottery, and he actually built a kiln on Yanagi’s property in Japan and lived there. Leach wrote later that the two of them used to talk a lot about the craft movement happening in England at the time.
See First, Then Know
Late in his life, Yanagi wrote a small collection of short verses, and one of them was this: See first, and then know. Never know first, and then see. If you know before you look, the knowing clouds the seeing. Knowledge doesn’t help you see. It clouds it. He said, don’t judge by who made it, or the price, things like that. And with that, he set off across the country collecting work. Famous or not, it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was whether he genuinely thought it was beautiful. He believed the most beautiful work was made without ego, without artifice.
Knowledge and Seeing
A while ago on this channel I did a video about why we need an aesthetic sense. Has anyone seen it? And in it, I think what I said was that an aesthetic sense is something you can build through knowledge. So it might sound like what Yanagi’s saying and what I said there contradict each other. But that’s not really the case. Because Yanagi himself had a really deep knowledge of all sorts of fields. And what I actually think is that knowledge is the seed of curiosity.
So picking up knowledge in different areas, and looking at things through all those different lenses, I think that makes the world you see so much more colourful. Like drawing with a box of thirty crayons instead of twelve.
But I also see exactly what Yanagi’s saying. We go to a museum and end up reading the label first. And we’re not always asking ourselves whether the painting genuinely moves us. Looking at something with a completely empty mind, and knowing whether it actually moves you. I think that makes life so much richer. Not living on the surface, but actually living with what you love.
The Kingdom of Beauty
The world Yanagi was aiming for, he called the Kingdom of Beauty, and I really love this idea. A world where you’re surrounded by the things you find beautiful. I’m trying to build something like that myself, one day at a time, looking at things, learning things, a little bit every day.
Objects and the Mind
Now, this brings me back to something I said earlier. The mind shapes objects, and objects shape the mind. I wanted to come back to that and think about it again, because it’s a genuinely interesting idea. What surrounds us affects our state of mind, so how we arrange it isn’t something to take lightly. So the things we pick up from now on, the things we actually buy. If we can see them with a purer eye, as things that are meant to enrich our minds, that would be really good. Myself included.
And reading all this, it really struck me as close to Japanese animism. This idea that objects carry some kind of spirit has always run deep in Japan, and even now, as a Japanese person, I do feel there’s something spiritual there. Treasuring each object, keeping the things that actually resonate with you. I think that connects to something quite old in the Japanese sense of things. That’s just my own reading of it, though.
So if you’re someone who tends to buy things you don’t actually need, or you buy too much in general, maybe keep some of what Yanagi said in the back of your mind.
The English Pottery Yanagi Loved
And one last thing. I mentioned I’m heading back to the UK next week. By the time this goes out, I’ll probably already be there. There’s a kind of English pottery Yanagi was full of praise for, called slipware. Have you heard of it? Apparently it was just ordinary, everyday tableware in England. Shoji Hamada was the Japanese potter who went over to build a kiln for Bernard Leach. He brought some back to Japan, and when Yanagi saw it, he fell completely in love with it.
Yanagi saw beauty in it, and from what I’ve read, he saw it as something close to shibusa, a sober, restrained kind of Japanese beauty. He was basically saying there was a universal beauty there, and it had nothing to do with Japan or England or any country. I find that really interesting. So while I’m there, I’d love to go and see some of it myself. I’m very much looking forward to it.
Why I Make These Films
I’m going to be creating spaces from here on, and on this channel, this is basically what I do. I talk about where the inspiration for whatever I make next is actually coming from. So if you enjoyed today’s video, hitting subscribe would mean a lot. It genuinely helps push this project forward more than you’d think.
I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to post while I’m there, but I’d like to put up some Instagram stories too, so keep an eye out if you’re interested. And on Substack, I always write about the things I didn’t get to say in the video. You can also listen to it as a podcast, so I’d love it if you subscribed there too.
See you in the next one. Have a good day.
