Learning to See with Masako Shirasu 白洲正子

After more than twenty years of traveling Japan, I have grown tired of places that prioritize social exposure above all else. My inflection point was at the packed Tsukiji market which now remains a shell of its former self as a working wholesale center. Everyone around me held up phones for an IG-able moment and the shops looked staged with scantly a local in sight. It forces me to ask what I really want to experience. Rather than taking the bait of virality, I now crave for places that have a non-dramatic, lived-in atmosphere. For example, going deep into a mountain village that is plagued by depopulation, or paying a visit to a traditional sake brewery that only sells locally. These ordinary places are plenty along commuter train route that never made it onto the influencer feeds.

I first came across Masako Shirasu through a Waraku magazine special on her life and influence on postwar Japanese aesthetics. Her experiences as Noh performer, antique connoisseur, critic, and essayist was exactly the sort of multifaceted guide I needed. Her writing was witty and sharp, and she spared no patience for those reducing everyday objects to performers or relics in museums. For her, beauty manifested in their actual usage.

The Shirasu Lens

Even though Masako Shirasu was born into a noble family and received elite education in both Japan and the US, she was a late bloomer in the sense that she only started travelling and writing in her late 30s.

Her wartime decision to leave Tokyo for a thatched farmhouse in suburb Machida gave her a steady space to grow her network. At Buaisō, she and her husband Jirō collected ceramics, textiles, lacquer, and Buddhist sculpture and actively used them. “If you use beautiful things every day,” she wrote, “you will naturally cultivate an eye for beautiful things without giving it a second thought.” They also held cultural saloons where she met her mentors Hideo Kobayashi and Jirō Aoyama. When the war ended, she started trekking to remote villages to see and handle the real things before sitting down with a pen. She opened the small Ginza shop Kōgei so weavers and dyers could reach a public audience, and she kept traveling alone into her seventies and eighties to places that had not yet been geared up for visitors.

The Former Shirasu Residence “Buaisō” – A Short Film

Kakurezato — Hidden Villages

Kakurezato (かくれ里 / Hidden Villages, 1969) is the book that best guides my travels. When the period of high economic growth and the enthusiasm for the Olympics were filling up well-known scenic areas, Shirasu shunned the crowd and instead headed into the older roads of Yoshino, Katsuragi, Iga, Echizen, Ōmi, Nara, Shiga, and Mie. She spent time in villages and shrines to witness agricultural rituals that were intrinsic to a community’s identity, as well as collect verbal histories passed down from the last century, verses that remained obscure outside a hamlet village, and crafts that directly fed into local economics.

Scenes in Kakurezato. Photo credit: 長浜観光協会

Shirasu also didn’t think objects should be revered as museum displays. Rather, they should be breathing things finding purpose in our hands. In the villages of Ōmi or the mountains of Yoshino, history lived on through masks, statues, and utensils from hundreds years ago that were still in use. The landscape, rituals and crafts all formed a holistic system to serve the local gods and the people who lived there.

The book is both travelogue and cultural critique. Shirasu insisted that once a place becomes a tourist destination, its spirit is usually completely transformed. The villages she recorded were geographically or culturally overlooked, just off the major throughfares that were put up in a frantic buildout period (maybe similar to the way Route 66 became obsolete). She thought obscurity and continuity sustain authenticity.

In the last decade, the difference between actual daily lives and staged display has become more visible to me. I first watched the shift clearly in my hometown of Macau. Rather than serving local needs, traditional food and crafts are now driven more by visitor expectation. The same pattern shows up in most places in Japan, with skills being fine-tuned for cameras and gamed for SEO. For example, in Tsukiji (which I mentioned in the intro), there are shops catering to foreigners who can pay USD30 for a kebob of wagyu+uni (a very weird combo that appeals to foreigners who want to “taste the best from Japan” in just 1 bite). Or an alarming design trend in Japanese lodging or dining spaces as described in the book Filterworld, where every spot is remade into a Japandi, minimalist IG-able space by removing any local “roughness” so they appeal to a lowest (or universal) common denominator. The FOMO effect, in which everyone flocks to the same topspot of their IG or Tiktok feeds to broadcast that they’ve finally arrived, magnifies this trend.

The book is demanding to read as it presumes that the reader has broad knowledge in folk culture, geography, history, and the performing arts. Her narratives also move freely between these areas. It reminds me of a ceramic seller I once heard talk about certain antique magazines: the difficulty is intentional. The editor intends for you to work your way up in understanding the domain. My own ambition is to read all of her work in Japanese and use her as a guide to accessing more profound aspects of the culture.

Significance and Legacy

Shirasu’s lasting contribution is to show how we can live tastefully among the ordinary rather than turning everything into spectacles. Designers such as Issey Miyake visited her Ginza shop as a young man and absorbed her standards for fabric and cut. An old Fujin Gahō piece highlighted how far the influence reached. When immunologist Tada Tomio fell sick, he picked up Noh drama from her work and wrote a tribute to honor her. The memorial performance was carried out by the grandson of her teacher Umewaka Minoru. The flower arranger Kawase Toshiro, who greatly respected her, contributed the arrangements. From teacher to student, writer to reader, one art form to another, it shows that people of similar temperament attracts each another. The links of inspiration and respect continue after the person is long gone.

Buaisō is now open to the public as a memorial museum, with her living space and collections intact. Exhibitions and occasional Noh performances (e.g., the large retrospective at the Miho Museum in 2000, the centenary show at the Setagaya Art Museum in 2011) continue to showcase the Buddhist images, ceramics, and textiles she cherished. She continues to be featured in lifestyle magazines, often being referred to as a “kakkoi” figure even though she no longer dwells in this world. Books such as Kakurezato, the volumes on Noh masks, the mountains and rivers of Ōmi, and the pilgrimage of the Eleven-Headed Kannon are still reprinted to point new generations of cultural lovers to places she held highly.

Exhibitions posters:

How her eye travels with me

Shirasu once said that the journey over a lifetime is more appealing than the destination. I have always kept that sentence’s metaphoric meaning in mind. In numerous trips, I’ve found that detours forced by weather or schedule change resulted in the biggest discoveries. Whether I rent a car to traverse the back roads in Noto and Alps villages where people still live outside the radar, or simply go to a suburb shopping street or library to observe how the locals actually live, buy and play, I find a much bigger sense of satisfaction by observing how people conduct their lives when no one is watching. Making a choice based on this is more poignant at a time where motivation is solely driven by the attention economy.

And together with Zeami’s classic treatises, her writing on Noh has initiated me into this highly spiritual drama form. I learnt to savor the tension between the movements, the way facial expressions change based on how light falls on a mask, and how restrained emotion can be expressed without any lyrics.

Buaisō 20th Anniversary Noh performance

Another guide I found is Miyamoto Tsuneichi’s work on pre-war folk customs and regional life in Shikoku, Echizen, and Kii. The material that he provided gives a more detailed cultural background which Shirasu’s essays usually assumed. Together, both of them continue to show the way for discovering the vernicular side of Japan outside algorithms.

One day I will go to Buaisō and spend some time in the rooms where Masako Shirasu wrote and lived, with the things that she had selected. Until then, her books are my trusty guides.