The Japanese artists work without perspective, shadows and reflections, and even when they apply them they do so in a purely decorative way. They rely entirely on design, on line and the juxtaposition of flat colour shapes. They do not care to produce an illusion, as if the frame afforded a view on a scene of actual life. They are satisfied with making a mere delineation, a suggestion of a beautiful gown or mountain view.
In literature, or even in such a simple matter as the naming of things, the Japanese invariably give play to the exercise of their imagination to bring out a suggestive effect. The same tendency extends into their fine arts. In treating objects of nature, however insignificant, the Japanese artist strives to suggest or indicate some sentiment beyond what is conveyed by the facts represented, just as the poet strives to store up a mine of thought in the thirty-one syllables of an ordinary verse, the Tanka, or in the still shorter Haikai of seventeen syllables. In short, the Japanese artist exerts himself to produce more than beauty of form or colour. This quality is less apparent in the coloured wood print so popular with Westerners. An Outomaro is really lacking suggestiveness. It runs too much into technical detail, and just for that reason perhaps we more readily understand the European artists.
Take for instant a simple representation of summer plants, merely a few stalks. The artist is not satisfied to show us the actual facts but endeavours to indicate something beyond what is actually represented, the delight of a flowery field in summer or the cool refreshing breeze under which the plants are bending and swaying.
The Western artists hitherto entertained a different ideal and though there were many schools, each advocating a different ideal, they all agreed on one point: that they had to create an illusion, with modelling, rotundity of form, light, shade and distance. Suggesting a fact is subtler than actually representing a fact. A sketch has something, a virility and freshness that a finished painting rarely has. We prefer Courbet to Ingres, Israels to Leighton. There must be something left to imagination, to our emotions and æsthetic consciousness. The Japanese leave most to imagination. Their method lacks strength but is capable of conveying finer poetic sentiments. Their vision is clearer, more rapid and less disturbed by intellectual preoccupations than ours. They are perhaps more perceptual than conceptual. Not that they lack deep poignant expression, but that they are deficient in intensity and depth of representation. The grandiose unity of effect of a Titian, Tintoretto or Rubens is beyond the kakemono and colour print. They succeeded in some instances in adumbrating in lines of conventional severity and precision strange and mystical intimations of spiritual existence. But we find it difficult to discern these qualities as we need more than suggestion to arrive at such conclusions.