Japanese cities, periodically ravaged by earthquakes, and bombed to rubble at the end of the second world war, are not noted for their high aesthetic quality. The drab concrete jungles of Tokyo, Osaka or even Kyoto, enlivened after dusk by a feast of neon lights, are pictures of functional chaos, exciting, but not exactly beautiful. The aesthetic tradition of Japan lives on not in the grand scale of spectacular skylines or fine houses, but in the high quality of the objects people use in their daily lives: tea bowls, chopsticks, plates and so on. It lives on, too, in the way they are presented, always beautifully wrapped by shop assistants in well-designed paper. There is something almost ceremonial about buying an ordinary utensil in a Japanese shop. Good manners and fastidious presentation show a respect for daily wares that is remarkable in today's world of mass-produced banality.
An English teacup or dish can be a thing of beauty, too. It can even be a work of art, when made by artists such as Bernard Leach or Lucy Rie. But such works are much rarer than in Japan, where Leach learned his craft and went on to inspire Japanese potters with his love of their tradition. Any Japanese department store will have a large selection of beautifully made ceramics, lacquerware or kimono fabrics. Most are meant to be used. But some will be expensive works of art created by famous craftspeople who enjoy the same respect in Japan as great painters or sculptors.
There is no categorical distinction between a silk kimono with a superb chrysanthemum-petal design by Moriguchi Kako (born 1909) - on display in Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan, a new exhibition at the British Museum - and an abstract painting by a modern master. This kimono can be worn, of course, just as one can drink tea from Arakawa Toyozo's Shino-style tea bowl, but like 17th-century European coats of armour, these works were made for artistic enjoyment, to be displayed rather than used. That is why Moriguchi and Arakawa were officially designated living national treasures, an honour accorded since the second world war to the greatest practitioners of traditional Japanese arts. These living treasures can be kabuki actors, painters, potters, sculptors or basket weavers. At this level, the distinction between art and craft is meaningless. Almost every artist featured in the new show is a living national treasure.
Japan has a long tradition of artistic craftsmanship, stretching back at least as far as the sixth century, when the Japanese learned new techniques from Chinese and Koreans, some of whom worked in Japan. But looking at the modern pieces on display at the British Museum, two questions come to mind: how did the Japanese manage to hang on to this tradition, despite the huge changes that have transformed Japanese society since the late 19th century? And why is it that artists working in traditional crafts, such as pottery or textile design, have been more experimental and more original than most Japanese-style painters, say, or even western-style painters in Japan?
Traditionally, Japanese artists looked to the Chinese continent for inspiration. But the common Chinese prejudice that Japanese art is a form of inferior mimicry is wrong. Just as modern western models change into something different once they pass through Japanese hands (think of Japanese rock music, or the often bizarre use of the English language), Chinese influences led to new forms that were distinctly Japanese. Sometimes this was a matter of stylisation or further refinement. The Japanese kimono, for example, is a stripped-down version of Tang dynasty garments. Japanese adaptations of Chinese art could be merely decorative. But sometimes, whatever the Chinese might think, they were an improvement.
Consider the famous woodblock prints. The model was Chinese. There are many fine Chinese prints, to be sure, especially from the Ming dynasty. But there has been no one in China who got even close to the genius of such artists as Hokusai or Utamaro. Social circumstances have something to do with this. The Chinese drew a sharp distinction between folk art and the aristocratic art of the literati. The latter brought far greater prestige to an artist. Through talent, education and patronage, men from modest families could become literati and masters of the aristocratic styles. In Japan, social distinctions, especially after the 16th century, became more rigid: an artisan or merchant could not, except in rare cases, become a samurai. So even the greatest woodblock artists would not abandon their craft in favour of Chinese aristocratic styles, preferred by the Japanese warrior class.
Merchants, in the pre-modern Japanese caste system, ranked even lower than the artisans. But increasingly, from the 17th century onwards, they were more prosperous than the samurai, for whom there was little prospect of employment in extended periods of peace. And it was the merchants, as well as slumming samurai, who bought woodcuts, as well as other Japanese crafts that the literati might have disdained. Artistic flowering, not only in Japan, is often the consequence of emerging nouveaux riches (think of Brit Art today). That is when high taste gets mixed up with forms that were once considered to be vulgar - sometimes with excellent results.
In fact, even before urban traders shaped Japanese artistic fashions in the 17th and 18th centuries, another class of jumped-up people had already patronised craftspeople of various kinds. At the end of savage civil wars in the 16th century, a succession of warlords, some from distinctly humble backgrounds, united the country under a regime that was often oppressive, but at least guaranteed peace (hence the lack of opportunity for fighting men). The new samurai rulers were, on the whole, less interested in aristocratic Chinese refinement than in splashy demonstrations of their new status. Painters and craftspeople in the Japanese style were given commissions to decorate their castles and fine mansions with wall paintings and gold-lacquered screens. To cater to the newly powerful, potters and box-makers and swordsmiths flocked to the castle towns, many of them working in the styles of their native regions. The refined tastes of the old aristocracy began to make way for a more vibrant style, mixing high and low, art and craft, based on Chinese, Korean and especially local Japanese traditions.
A new ruling class often imitates the ways of the old regime. So it was with the new rich and powerful in Japan. Chinese influences did not disappear. But an interest in local crafts, thought to be more in tune with the native spirit, was often intended as a deliberate break with aristocratic Sinophilia, just as Englishmen at the time of Hogarth reacted against the Frenchified ways of the English upper crust.
Changes in the traditional tea ceremony, for which several objects in the British Museum exhibition were made, show this clearly. A custom imported from China by Buddhist scholars, the ceremonial drinking of tea had become a typical pastime of the nobility. While sipping choice teas, Japanese literati would recite Chinese poetry and admire Chinese treasures on display. This changed in the late 16th century, when a tea connoisseur from Osaka, named Sen no Rikyu, became tea master to the new shoguns. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, he cultivated a rustic style. As with Mahatma Gandhi's Indian peasant ways, a great deal of money and effort went into a cult of simplicity. Tea was taken in small, pseudo-poor huts. Tea bowls were no longer highly polished Chinese objects, but Japanese or Korean stoneware, pseudo-rough with deliberate imperfections. Playing poor with quasi-rustic, beautifully crafted utensils was a form of Zen dandyism, typical of the Edo period that lasted from 1603 until 1868, and the "rugged Hagi" style can still be seen in the tea bowl by Miwa Jusetsu at the British Museum.
Dandyism is often the art of redundancy, a cultivation of old-fashioned ways that no longer have a utilitarian purpose. The fabled way of the samurai - which was taken seriously in business management courses a few decades ago, when Japan seemed to be about to take over the world - was a form of dandyism from the beginning. Made up of elaborate rules of conduct for warriors living in a time of peace, it was really a piece of theatre. Just so, the Japanese Zen style of tea drinking was a ritualised version of the simple life of a rustic monk. This has a direct relation to the tradition of Japanese craftsmanship. If daily life in 17th-century Holland was celebrated in its paintings, life in 17th-century Japan was often ritualised as a theatrical performance. It is but a short step from there to making a teacup or a dish as a pure work of art.
This can lead to decadence, when the stylised performance hardens into a kind of aesthetic rigor mortis. This is what happened to some Japanese traditional arts after the country's painful confrontation with the west in the middle of the 19th century. One way to respond to the dominance of an alien power is to assert a militant native orthodoxy, such as we can see in the Middle East today. Instead, 19th-century Japanese chose a kind of protective mimicry. To counter the west, Japan decided to become like the west. The elite adopted European clothes, European cuisine, European laws, European army uniforms, European aristocratic titles, European arts, and so on. Japan also acquired a European-style empire, with Japanese administrators in white linen suits and solar topees lording it over the natives.
As a counterweight to this humiliating exercise in mimicry, the Japanese tried hard to protect certain traditions that were thought to exemplify their culture. Sharp distinctions were drawn in the arts between Japanese and western styles. Painting, for example, was divided into "Japanese painting" (nihonga) - traditional subjects painted on silk or Japanese paper in Chinese ink or watercolours - and "western painting" - landscapes and portraits in oil. The kabuki theatre, originally a popular entertainment for the merchant class, became an officially protected showcase of Japanese tradition. Modern theatre was western in style and political in content, propagating democracy and other innovations.
Official sponsorship of traditional arts in Japan has often been a mixture of chauvinism and a desire to impress the outside (usually western) world. In the late 19th century, the new Meiji government encouraged traditional crafts because they expressed the "Japanese spirit", but also because they were highly prized abroad. This was not for nothing. Craftspeople, as well as architects, were better able to mix European and Japanese styles with interesting results than were playwrights or painters.
To some extent, this is still true. The highly stylised pre-modern world of the kabuki theatre, or of nihonga paintings, is hard to update because it no longer exists. It is a representation of history, which cannot easily be modernised, let alone westernised.
And Japanese "western-style" (yoga) painters tended to flounder because they tried to work in the European manner, depicting European subjects (Paris was a popular destination), without finding their place in a European tradition. They would imitate famous impressionists, as though they were traditional Japanese or Chinese masters, with their own schools and time-honoured styles.
Photographers and film-makers, or indeed novelists, suffered much less from these confusions, and the same is true of craftspeople, designers and architects. They did not have to represent a lost world of samurai and courtesans, or depict a new world of Parisian rooftops and impressionist landscapes. Working with pure forms, craftspeople and designers were able to use traditional techniques to come up with fresh ideas. Since the applied arts continued to enjoy high status in Japan, the artistic quality of traditional craftsmanship did not suffer either from the helter-skelter modernisation of life that spelled aesthetic disaster in so many other respects.
The Japanese defeat in the second world war was an even greater shock in artistic terms than the arrival of western gunboats in the 19th century. As was true in postwar Germany, anything traditional was viewed for a time with deep suspicion. There was even talk of abolishing nihonga altogether. Pure modernism offered an escape from the ravages of the recent past. This is why foreigners, such as Bernard Leach and the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, played such an important role. They restored Japanese confidence in their own artistic traditions. Not that all Japanese needed foreigners for this. A large number of associations and committees were founded after the war to protect and promote traditional crafts or, as bureaucrats called them, intangible cultural properties.
Quite what should be promoted, what qualified as a worthy cultural property, and who should be helped, with money and living national treasure status, was exhaustively debated. In any case, the same old combination of chauvinism and wanting to impress the outside world was evident in these debates. In 1955, the director of the Japan Art Crafts Association, a nihonga artist named Nishizawa Tekiho, wrote: "Only a Japanese and no person from another country could make these many different kinds of craft work." He believed that "the fundamental aim should be to get the world to recognise the spiritual core of Japanese crafts".
I doubt that the artists featured in the British Museum exhibition pay much heed to such sentiments. Impressing the world with Japanese spiritual uniqueness is not usually the aim of a master craftsperson. His or her task is to see what can be done with clay, lacquer, metal or bamboo, adapting techniques that are centuries old to modern tastes and uses. Secure in their own traditions, the masters of modern Japanese crafts don't have to prove they can catch up with, or match, western models. And if there is a spiritual core to their work, it is not imprisoned by the forms of an irretrievable past. That is surely the main reason why these makers of tea bowls, flower baskets and water jars were able to produce such extraordinary works of art.
· Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan is at the British Museum, London WC1, until October 21. Details: www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
