Just to throw my $.02 in. I haven't read the book, although
I'm considering buying
it. In terms of theorigins of bonsai, I'm interested in this
too, in particular
the philosophical or religious factors in the art's origin.
Having said that, I'm
open to the possibility that the first people to take naturally
dwarfed trees and
put them in pots may have simply done so because they like
them, and nothing more
than that.


Undoubtedly. Let's face it, usually we only see the
"significance" in what we do well after the fact; we invent it
after the fact, actually. Still, you had to have a specific
mindset to carefully dig up a tree and plant it in a pot, so it
was likely the intellectuals (literati??) who first took the
step. (Assuming af course, that the "roots" of bonsai don't come
from plants kept in pots for medicinal purposes -- again by the
thinking class of people who may have noticed that the rosemary
they kept for a poultice actually looked nice in a pot).

snip


Something that has occurred to me too in terms of bonsai is
that it seems that the
art in it's more refined state actually came after the
re-connection of Japan with
the rest of the world, in fact in the last century. So,
although we may think of
bonsai as originating in the misty past, could we not say that
the art as presently
practiced both in the West and Japan is really an amalgam of
Eastern and Western
elements?

As I write this, NPR's Talk of the Nation is talking about the
Samurai class in Japan.

But no. I don't think there was much "western" in the refinement
of bonsai in Japan. Just before and during the arrival of
Perry's ships in Tokyo Bay, there suddenly developed both a
leisure class and a mercantile class in Japan. Between them,
they had leisure time for the arts -- of various kinds, including
bonsai. This was the period that bonsai had its first flowering
in Japan. Before this it was almost exclusively a hobby of the
Diamyo class (dukes and barons, in European terms).

Perhaps in the 20th Century, the west has started to influence
Japanese bonsai, but I'm not even sure about that.

Where's Peter?

Jim Lewis - - Tallahassee, FL - Only to the
white man was nature a wilderness -- Luther Standing Bear
(Ogallala Sioux Chief)

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