The Walking Museums
Japan’s “Living National Treasures”

By Patrick Totty 

In 1961 the West Virginia legislature passed a resolution revising the state’s official resource list. A new item was to be added to the coal, timber and hydroelectric power that the state so proudly boasted. The new resource’s name was Jerry West, an all-pro guard (and future Hall of Famer) on the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team.

West, a.k.a. “Zeke from Cabin Creek,” was so highly regarded among West Virginians that they just couldn’t resist naming him as one of their top exports. In doing so, they unknowingly mirrored a very charming Japanese innovation introduced in 1954, the designation of certain arts as “Important Intangible Cultural Properties.”

At the time, the Japanese, who were beginning to enjoy the very first fruits of their later prodigious affluence, worried that many of their ancient arts and crafts would soon be forgotten or extinct, replaced by industrial products and ignored by younger artists intent on pursuing more modern or novel forms of art.

The Japanese realized that unless they could find a way to preserve and pass on these arts, a great national patrimony would be lost, perhaps forever. Their solution was brilliant: they identified and approached the greatest practitioners of various arts – in the beginning it was potters – and offered to subsidize their work if they would agree to teach apprentices in their particular art. Most of the artists approached jubilantly agreed: the idea of being financially assisted while teaching their beloved arts to a new generation was irresistible.

The concept of “Important Intangible Cultural Properties” (IICP) at first referred strictly to arts and crafts techniques in danger of being lost. These included aspects of pottery, puppetry, papermaking, sword making, Kabuki acting, music, doll making, weaving and metal casting.

But over time the concept became anthropomorphized: the endangered arts and crafts in question became secondary to their actual practitioners. “Important Intangible Cultural Properties” gradually became “Living National Treasures.”  The equivalent in America would have been setting out to preserve the behind-the-back point guard assist in basketball, but winding up paying more attention to its best practitioners, such as Jerry West.

Aoyama Wahei, a Japanese writer, recently criticized this shift in emphasis, attacking the concept of “Living National Treasures” and complaining that it has led to a system of praise, rather than protection. “The cultural property being preserved is not the man, but the technique of style of pottery he creates,” explains Wahei, censuring what he sees as the Japanese government and public’s tendency to fawn over particular artists while losing sight of the law’s original intent. This invites cronyism and sentimentalism as the government uses IICP to reward compliant artists who have great public appeal. In the meantime, the technique that the artist has mastered and is being recognized for may or may not be in danger.

Some people have said that the U.S. should adopt something like IICP to protect craft techniques that may soon be lost. It’s a charming idea, and several things come to mind that would be worthy of inclusion in an American list of IICPs: the blues; blacksmithing; defense in professional basketball; human beings answering business phones.

But IICP probably just wouldn’t work here. For one thing, Americans lack the 1,000 and 2,000-year traditions of homogenous Japanese society. We so routinely alter, reform and add on to things that it’s hard to know just what the originals were. Does anybody remember the basic taco after Taco Bell morphed it into a double-tortilla-ed, cheese-encrusted, three-meat-bearing doorstopper? Nobody does, and nobody cares.

Besides, it seems to be a very American quality that individuals spontaneously pick up remnant arts and restore them to life without the need for government commissions and swarms of mavens. Bluegrass music seemed almost done for after country, R&B and rock ‘n’ roll swept all before them. But there’s been a resurgence in the music, thanks to the awesomely sweet voice of talents like Alison Krause, and the genre is safe again from worries about extinction.

Old-fashioned fruits, such as apples and peaches that our great-grandfathers produced, are making a comeback. People are tired of genetically manipulated fruit that’s been designed with only one thing in mind. That is, to be tough enough to survive a 2,000-mile rail journey.

Where we are like the Japanese is that we’d make the leap from IICP to Living Cultural Treasures in a heartbeat. What Americans ever cared as much about rock ‘n’ roll as a cultural abstraction as they did about Elvis Presley when he was alive? Presley was so much bigger than life – and his musical genre – that no amount of teaching on his part could have preserved his “Presley-ness” or passed it on. In America, artists often make the art, not the other way around.