manga from the master

Science fiction author Roger Zelazny was a huge fan of the Japanese artist and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai -- so much so, that in between a plethora of classic sci-fi series, he also penned a Hugo-Award-winning short story "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai." The title refers to the Japanese master's greatest work, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (circa 1831), including his most famous creation, The Great Wave of Kanagawa. (It's one of my favorite artworks -- yeah, I know, how original...) Zelazny's protagonist tours the region surrounding Mt Fuji, stopping at each location painted by Hokusai -- or most of them, at least. The set includes 46 prints; ten more were added to later additions.

Why am I bringing up Hokusai? This past weekend, the Spousal Unit and I were in Santa Barbara for a joint speaking engagement, and decided to stay an extra day and wander around downtown for a bit. As we meandered down State Street, we happened upon an oriental antiques shop called Mingei (the shop has no Website, but it's at 736 State Street, for anyone who's interested), filled with tansu chests, antique netsuke (some dating back to the 1700s), Japanese teapots, calligraphy tools, and various objets d'art, and some lovely Hokusai prints, nicely framed.

Then we found a stack of bound paper books, pages uncut, filled with small sketched images dotted about at random. The proprietor, Michael Mundy, told us the books were reproductions of Hokusai's manga -- not manga as in the graphic novels we know today (with tie-ins to Japanese anime), but these collections of sketched figures, primarily used by master artists to train their students. We bought one of the bound volumes, and frankly, the only reason we could afford it is because they weren't the original master sketches, but printed reproductions, unearthed by a local resident, who didn't know what to do with them and wound up bringing them to Mundy. ("They literally just walked in the door," he chuckled, still delighted at the serendipity of his find.)

The original sketchbooks (or manga) constituted some 15 bound volumes, containing thousands of largely unconnected images. The first volume appeared n 1814, when Hokusai was 55, and the last three were published after his death, although the final volume is controversial. Apparently some of the images in it aren't really the artist's, but were drawn by his students. Art historians really hate that. Anyway, copies of the sketchbooks have been circulating throughout the Western World since the 1850s or so.

When I say "published," I'm talking not about modern printing methods, of course, but of traditional Chinese woodblock printing as it existed in Hokusai's day. The earliest method for reproducing texts in human history was to just copy them out by hand, except this tended to lead to accumulated errors over time. Copying is a tedious, thankless task, after all, and even the most dedicated scribe is bound to let his attention wander now and then. Around 175 AD, the Chinese emperor Ts'ai Yung got fed up with all the errors. He had authorized versions of six classic Chinese tests carved into stone outside the gates of the state academy. People could make exact copies by placing a sheet of paper over the carved inscription and rubbing it with ink. (It's also a useful archaeological tool in a pinch. Movie fans may recall that Indiana Jones makes a rubbing of the engraving of a knight's tomb in The Last Crusade.)

Woodblock printing first made its appearance in China sometime between the fourth and seventh centuries AD, possibly deriving from the ancient Babylonian seals used to stamp impressions into wax or clay as authenticating marks. By the end of the ninth century, printed books are quite common all over China, at a time when most of Western Europe was stuck in the comparatively illiterate Dark Ages, waiting for Johannes Gutenberg to get around to inventing the printing press in 1455.

You might be surprised to hear that Gutenberg did have a predecessor in China: an alchemist who lived in the mid-11th century named Pi-Sheng, who invented his own form of moveable type. He fashioned small blocks from an amalgam of clay and glue, and carved a Chinese character in relief on each, then baked the blocks to harden them. He could then glue each individual piece of type onto an iron plate, coat it with a mix of resin, wax and paper ash, then hat and cool the plate to set the type. It was then a simple matter to detach the type when done by reheating the plate. Pi-Sheng's invention might even have caught on, if there weren't some 30,000 individual ideograms required to make a complete font.

Creating individual woodblock prints was only slightly less labor-intensive, just enough for the method to flourish well into the 18th and early 19th centuries, particularly for works of art. Hokusai's greatest work, for instance, was part of the Ukiyo-e tradition: a genre of woodblock prints mainly created for townspeople who couldn't afford to purchase original art. Since the Ukiyo-e could be mass-produced, such prints were thus affordable.

First, the artist created a master drawing in ink. Then an assistant (hikko) would create a tracing (hanshita), for reasons which will become obvious momentarily. Craftsmen then glued the tracing face-down onto a block of wood, and cut away the areas where the paper was white (i.e., unpainted). When they were done, all that was left was the drawing in relief (and in reverse). Unfortunately, this process destroyed the tracing -- which is why originals were never used. But near-exact copies could then be made by inking the block pressing it to paper. The artist would request a test copy (kyogo-zuri) before approving an actual "print run." It was even possible to make multi-colored block prints by inking the blocks with different colors. By inking the sheets more than once, it was even possible to vary the depth of the colors.

Even with the advent of modern moveable type printing methods, there was still a need for fast, cheap and highly efficient copying techniques of printed pages. A physicist turned patent clerk named Chester Carlson came to the rescue. Carlson earned a degree in physics from Caltech just as the Great Depression hit, and found himself unable to find work. He finally landed a job in the patent department of an electronics firm in New York, and quickly tired of the tedium of making sufficient copies of patent documents for inter-office distribution. He could send the patents out to be photographed, or type each copy individually. Neither option sounds very appealing, does it?

Carlson didn't think so, either.  There was a device called the hectograph in the 1870s that used a gelatin pad to absorb ink form an original. Blank sheets could then be pressed against the pad to produce impressions, like a modern stamp pad (although it's similar in concept to woodblock printing, too). Thomas Edison tried his hand at it in 1887, introducing the mimeograph. A waxed stencil was wrapped around an inked drum, which could be rotated to transfer an image to the paper. Finally there was the "spirit duplicator," introduced in the 1920s, a precursor to the old-school "ditto" machines used in many schools through the mid-1980s or so. Create a master sheet with the desired text or images, wrap it around a drum shaped like a cylinder, and coat the master with duplicating fluid as the drum turns. Then you just have to press paper against the drum to make the copies.

It was a pretty decent device, actually, capable of making as many as 500 copies before the print became too faint to read. Too bad it was such a messy process. Also a smelly one. I have dim memories of various teachers throughout my early education handing out freshly printed dittos with ink-stained fingers, the purple ink on the pages reeking to high heaven and sometimes bleeding onto one's crisp white blouse. Carlson wanted a dry, versus a "wet" duplicating process, and who could blame him? He found the answer in something called photoconductivity.

Although each precursor mentioned above played a part in subsequently technological developments, we owe modern Xerox machines to both Carlson and a Hungarian physicist named Paul Selenyi. The latter discovered that certain materials, like sulfur, conduct electricity in light, but act as insulators in the dark. Basically, the electrons don't move until the light hits them; the energy from the photons makes the  layer of sulfur (or other such material) conduct. So if you projected an original document onto a photoconductive surface, current would flow only in those areas that had been exposed to light, while anywhere there was print would remain dark. Voila! A copy of the original!

Carlson then spent many years figuring out how to get dry particles to stick to a charged plate in the pattern of the original image. He conducted experiments in his own kitchen until his wife became fed up and kicked him out, and continued his work in a rented room in Astoria, Queens, assisted by a young German physicist named Otto Kornei. They finally succeeded in making the first Xerox copy on October 22, 1938, using a sulfur-coated zinc plate, a glass microscopic slide printed with India ink, and common fingerprint powder (their equivalent of toner).

The story doesn't end there; initially nobody wanted the machine. It took another decade before Carlson sold his invention to a small company called Haloid -- today, it's known as the Xerox Corporation -- and frankly, that first machine had some problems (you needed 11 separate steps and a good 45 seconds after that to make a single copy, for starters). But each subsequent version improved on its predecessors, and today we can walk into any Kinko's and get several thousand copies of just about any printed matter in an hour or so. Thank you, Chester Carlson. We're happy to report that after all his travails, he ended up being a very rich man. (You can read all the gory details about how a modern Xerox machine works here, for the technologically curious. Laser printers work much the same way, except a laser beam replaces the reflected light used in an ordinary copier.)

Today's modern machines are huge, with loads of advanced complicated features that most of us will never need. As such, until one learns the ropes, they can be a little daunting to even a brilliant mind: I once walked into the copy room of the old American Physical Society headquarters in New York City and found three Nobel laureates standing around the machine, stroking their beards (those who had beards) and conferring about how best to go about this little task: "So... should we press START?" They figured it out pretty quickly, actually -- not surprising, given the collective brain power in that little room -- but it was a charming, very humanizing moment, nonetheless.

Even a hundred thousand perfect Xerox copies are only as good as the original, Hokusai would no doubt say. As an artist, he cared deeply about the quality of his original sketches. In fact, he was quite the perfectionist, insisting, in his postscript to a second landscape series, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (he had a thing for Mount Fuji), that while he had been sketching nature since he was six, it wasn't until he was 73 that

"... I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am 86, so that by 90 I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At 100, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."

He was trying to make the most perfect copy of Nature itself: so much so, that the images were "alive." For me, Hokusai's art already seems alive, metaphorically speaking: each line, every brushstroke, is so exquisitely precise, rendering the figures with the least possible number of strokes need to capture their essence. It's artistic minimalism at its finest. (Interesting side note: several years ago, a researcher named Richard Voss analyzed numerous ancient Chinese landscape paintings from various historical periods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He determined the dimension of brushstrokes in each painting -- a tricky task! -- and found that those considered superior by art historians -- i.e., the earlier landscapes -- had fractal dimensions comparable to those of typical coastlines: 1.25 and 1.33. The significance of this, if any, is still being debated: can you really give a number to aesthetic value judgments? But it might say something about the kinds of patterns we humans prefer.)

Like all geniuses, the artist himself was never 100% satisfied, and wanted to live long enough to reach unprecedented levels of mastery of his art. Indeed, he never stopped painting, completing Ducks in a Stream at age 87. But human mortality wins out every time, and Hokusai died on April 18, 1849, at 89 years of age. Legend has it that even on his deathbed, he exclaimed, "If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."  Heaven, alas, had other plans for one of Japan's most gifted artists. His work is what lives on.

Comments

[Charles Boyer]

Actually, this film had a profound affect on my life, as well a friend of mine -- a guy who just happens to be blind.

When we saw the film together -- and yes, blind folks go to movies -- we got some good ideas. Thanks to Sullivan's story, my friend Brian got to drive a car, play golf, and skydive. He'd never done these things before, but we were inspired and we did all of these things.

I lost track of Brian after he moved from NC to Los Angeles, and I wonder if he's dropped his handicap and bought a car. I wouldn't be surprised by either.

[Jo in okc]

Strangely, the Mathematical Painting blog featured The Great Wave off Kanagawa this past weekend.
http://mathpaint.blogspot.com/2008/06/fractal-waves.html

[Fred Cunningham]

Back in 2000 the History Channel did a show on the top 100 persons of the past thousand years. I felt that they should have included Chester Carlson. As I recall they had Princess Di on the list, and Gutenberg was number 1.

[Alex]

"Woodblock printing first made its appearance in China sometime between the fourth and seventh centuries AD, possibly deriving from the ancient Babylonian seals"

Do you have a reference for that? I'm curious about the connection, having a degree in Near Eastern studies and a recent interest in East Asian art, and would like to read more. Thanks! :)

[dogheaven]

One of the best things about walking around Santa Barbara is how it messes with your sense of direction. Go to the downtown beach and look for sunset, ts upsetting. I loved the way you took the time to find inspiration in your artistic inclinations to teach about printing and copying. I love to follow your wanderings.

[Nim]

"Woodblock printing first made its appearance in China sometime between the fourth and seventh centuries AD, possibly deriving from the ancient Babylonian seals."

The seal stamp (and its close relative the printing press) has been invented many times. China's greatest contribution was probably the invention of paper: something for a printing press to print on. A stamp is prohibitively expensive to carve out, and rather pointless to have, if you could only use it a few times before you ran out of media to print on, such as sheepskin or papyrus. Easier to hire a scribe to make the few necessary copies by hand.

Paper was mass manufactured -- possibly the first mass manufactured item in history. Thanks to its cheapness, you could finally run off thousands of copies without bankrupting your country. So the printing press finally caught on, somewhere in China.

We owe China a lot. The invention of paper was possibly the most crucial event of the last 5000 years.

[Hotels in Edinburgh]

Great post!
I did a search for Hokusai on Google and interestingly enough a few erotic japanese paintings came up on Google images. I checked the wikipedia article for Hokusai and it makes no mention of this "hentai". I would have thought a highly respected artist in Japan wouldn't have gotten away with these drawings back in the day.

[Christopher Kovacs]

"The title refers to the Japanese master's greatest work, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (circa 1831), including his most famous creation, The Great Wave of Kanagawa. (It's one of my favorite artworks -- yeah, I know, how original...) Zelazny's protagonist tours the region surrounding Mt Fuji, stopping at each location painted by Hokusai -- or most of them, at least."

Not quite correct. Zelazny wasn't referring to the Thirty-Six Views. Instead, he meant the book he owned entitled Hokusai's Views of Mt. Fuji, published by Charles Tuttle in 1965. This book contains precisely 24 prints and in the exact order that Zelazny refers to them in the story. The character also remarks in the story "My little book of Hokusai’s prints – a small cloth-bound volume by the Charles E. Tuttle Company – had been a present from Kit." It is an illuminating experience to re-read that story with a copy of that book in hand and see what the character was referring to about the details in the artwork.