Latest / It's All Japanese to Me / Ep. 3 — Mitate: seeing one thing as another

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Ep. 3 — Mitate: seeing one thing as another · It's All Japanese to Me

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Rikuto Murakami.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: So today's word is mitate.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is written with the character for seeing and the character for stand or setting up.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: In everyday Japanese, mitate can simply mean choosing something by looking at it.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: But in art and craft, it has a more specific meaning.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: The Omotesenke school of tea explains it like this.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Mitate is a way of seeing a thing,
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  SPEAKER_00: not as what it was originally meant to be, but as something else.
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  SPEAKER_00: They also say it was first a term for poetry.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was a technique used in Chinese style poems and in Waka, Japanese poems.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the tea ceremony, there is Sen Norikyu, a tea master of the 16th century.
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  SPEAKER_00: He used this way of singing to bring everyday things into the tea room.
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  SPEAKER_00: There are two well-known stories.
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  SPEAKER_00: In one, he took a gold that had been used as a water flask and used it as a flower vase.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in another story,
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  SPEAKER_00: the small entrance you crawl through to enter a tea room that is called Nijiriguchi.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was taken from the small entrance of a boat.
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  SPEAKER_00: There are told as like anecdotes, so I would treat them as stories rather than exact history.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the idea is very clear.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something made for one purpose is seen again and given a new role.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is mitate.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can actually find mitate in gardens, for example.
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  SPEAKER_00: An online dictionary of Japanese art and architecture,
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  SPEAKER_00: J-A-A-N-U-S, has an entry for a kind of stormwater basin.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: It is called mitatemono chozubachi.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is a basin made from a stone that used to have a different job,
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  SPEAKER_00: for example,
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  SPEAKER_00: a piece of an old stone pagoda,
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: a foundation stone from a temple, or parts of a stone bridge.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: This kind of mitate happens a lot at flea markets and antique markets as well.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: People look at objects and think about how they might be presented or used,
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: possibly in a different context from the one they were originally made for.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So mitate is less about the object itself, but more about the eye of the person looking at it.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: At least that's how I understand.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, that is it for today's episode about Mitate.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for listening and see you next time.