Rodin and the Little Japanese Dancer by Lesley Downer

‘It was impossible to hold this look for such a long time. I couldn’t help moving a little bit, and M. Rodin said, “Not so much Hanako, not so much.”’

Hanako

In 1906 Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was 67 and hugely famous. He had brought sculpture into the modern age with his powerfully muscular, uncompromising works like The Kiss and The Thinker. But his great years seemed to be behind him. Nearly a decade had passed since 1898, when he’d laboured over Balzac, but his masterwork had been rejected. In disappointment, Rodin transformed himself into an official artist, churning out busts of famous, well-paying personalities. He seemed to have lost his spark, his edge, the anger which had driven his creativity.

But he was still obsessed with capturing the body in motion. That year he went to Marseilles to the Colonial Exposition to sketch the Cambodian dancers. There he happened to pass a small hut temporarily erected in the woods with banners in front proclaiming the name of the troupe in white on a red background. Inside a small Japanese dancer was performing a death scene. Rodin stepped inside and was transfixed. He later said that there was ‘a flame which illuminated her from within.’

‘A tiny Japanese gifted with graceful form, lively eyes, a rebellious nose, feline movements.’
Hanako was a tough, resilient, sparky little woman - very little; at 38 she was only 4 foot 6 inches tall (1 meter 37 cm), so tiny and girlish that westerners assumed she was much younger.

Hanako 4 April 1908,Vienna, Austria,
courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Born Ohta Hisa in 1868 in Aichi, Central Japan, she was the oldest of eight children. Her family trained their daughters to have a profession, to be entertainers, i.e. geisha. From the age of five she learned Japanese classical dance and the yakumo koto, a zither-like instrument.

When she was ten her family fell into debt. She married a man twenty years older than her and endured ten years of marriage, then decided to get a divorce. She was at her wits’ end and broke when in 1902 she heard that a Japanese impresario was looking for dancers for an exposition in Copenhagen. The impresario arranged her passage from Yokohama to Marseilles and overland to Copenhagen. After the Expo ended she formed a troupe of Japanese players and toured Germany, performing plays with titles like Bushido and Hara-kiri, playing to western preconceptions of Japan as a land of samurai.

Then they toured England. Hanako was performing at London’s Savoy Theatre when she was spotted by the American dancer and impresario Loie Fuller.

In her memoir, Fuller described her first glimpse of Hanako on stage: ‘She was suddenly able to transform herself with little movements which froze all the anguish of terror into her features. She was pretty, delicate, strange, and stood out even among her fellow countrymen.’ As for her death scene, ‘She was devastating.’

Painting by Ben Ali Haggin: Mme Hanako. 1910.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Fuller became her manageress. She didn’t think Hanako’s plays were powerful enough so she wrote some ‘Japanese’ plays herself. Each play ended in hara-kiri - not women’s suicide, cutting one’s throat, but cutting open the belly. It was completely inauthentic but westerners didn’t know or care.

Fuller took Hanako off to Paris, where she performed The Martyr and other plays, all from Fuller’s prolific pen. She was a huge success. Every play ended with the heroine’s suicide. Hanako cut open her belly with a sword so enthusiastically that the audience in the front rows were sprayed with fake blood.

A reviewer in L’Illustration, November 3 1906, wrote, ‘Hanako is a tiny Japanese gifted with graceful form, lively eyes, a rebellious nose, feline movements.’ Her death is ‘almost too realistic.’

‘An expression of cold terrible rage.’
Back in Paris after that fateful meeting in Marseilles, Rodin invited Hanako to lunch at his atelier, where he asked her to sit for him. He was burning to make a mask of her anguish as she was ‘dying’, to capture the intense expressivity of her face.

Head of Death showing nirami

After that Fuller drove Hanako to Rodin’s atelier every day for half an hour before the afternoon performance. Hanako didn’t speak French or English and Rodin didn’t speak Japanese. Hanako remembered that he followed her obsessively, demanding that she hold her face still without moving a muscle.

‘When I even moved my eyes,’ she remembered, ‘he shouted, “Stop, don’t move your eyes!” He tried to create my head of death with that cross-eyed look I made on the stage. It was difficult to hold the same expression every day. People warned me that my eyes were getting funny.’

Judith Cladel, Rodin’s biographer, writes, ‘Hanako did not pose like other people. Her features were contracted in an expression of cold terrible rage. She had the look of a tiger, an expression completely foreign to our Occidental countenances. With the force of will which the Japanese display in the face of death, Hanako was enabled to hold this look for hours.’

In later years Hanako told her family that it took a tremendous effort to maintain this pose, which was completely opposite to her normally cheerful disposition. ‘Afterwards,’ she said, ‘I was in a good mood for days.’

Head of Death
with nirami

Far from being evidence of a peculiarly Japanese ‘force of will’, Hanako’s expression of ‘cold terrible anger’ was actually a standard kabuki pose called nirami, where one eye turns inward while the other stares straight ahead. A kabuki actor can hold nirami for 20 - 30 seconds. Hanako said she could stay cross-eyed for 3 to 5 minutes. But Rodin forced her to hold this expression for half an hour. No wonder her eyes were going funny!

 
It took 67 attempts before Rodin was satisfied that he had her eyes right. He finished the first Head of Death in September 1906 and went on to create many more.

That summer, during the theatre off season, Hanako stayed at Rodin’s home in the Paris suburbs. She was relaxing in the garden when he ran out shouting, ‘Don’t move, don’t move.’ He grabbed his pencil and declared he was going to make a mask of A Meditating Woman.

‘After that he spent every morning making Head of Death and every afternoon making Meditating Woman,’ she remembered. For him it was a new lease of life.

Meditating Woman

For the next twelve years she stayed at Rodin’s every summer for 3 months, living like a member of the family. His dog slept in her room. If he ‘found her purse thin’ he gave her money. In Paris his acolytes and admirers introduced her to artists, socialites and politicians. She mixed in glamorous circles and was invited to many parties. ‘I was fascinated by the flowery social life of Paris,’ she wrote, ‘and every day was a dream.’

There were rumours that she was his lover, because they were seen on walks together. But there’s no evidence for that, added to which Hanako was also close to Madame Rodin. The old man must have appreciated the company of this bright, lively, cheerful young woman.

Hanako continued to tour. She performed all over Europe, including Sweden and Russia, and went twice to the United States. She wrote letter after letter to Rodin and sent him photographs of herself. And she always came back to Paris and resumed modelling for him.

Hanako’s last meeting with Rodin and Mme Rodin was in 1915, at the start of World War 1, when they were staying outside London and came to see her perform. Rodin died in 1917. Hanako - who must have been 50 by then - visited his tomb the next year at Meudon and wept when his dog wagged its tail when it saw her.

Photograph signed
‘To Monsieur Rodin
With lots of love from Hanako.'

She had never charged Rodin for all the modelling she did for him. The one thing he promised was that he would give her two masks - a Head of Death and a Meditating Woman. But World War I intervened and he died without doing so.

After the war she wrote again and again to his secretary and even to members of the French government and finally received the two busts.

Back in Japan, she lived in a geisha house in Gifu run by one of her younger sisters, where she was rather celebrated. Many famous artists came to visit and admire her masks. She adopted her nephew, Ohta Hideo, who married and had a child, Masako. She spent her last years doting on this granddaughter of hers, who remembers that Hanako was so tiny she had to have clogs specially made for her little feet.

Hanako died on April 2 1945, at the age of 77 - the same age that Rodin had been when he died.


Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books on Japan, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death, out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

The Rodin exhibition at the Tate Modern in London continues until November 21 2021.

The pictures as indicated are courtesy of Wiki Commons. The other photographs are mine.

Great Cathedrals in Time and Space by Emma Darwin

If you dropped in at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern recently, you might have seen Tacita Dean's work, Film, which was the twelfth in the Unilever series. I was lucky enough to be asked by my cinematographer friend Sam Garwood to a private view for the film industry: the sponsors were companies like Kodak (sharp intake of breath), the BSC, and Arri. I assumed it would be the kind of event that I once described to my offspring as "just a stand-up and shout": long on polite shop-talk and short on cake and bouncy castles. The only difference from the book-industry equivalent would be the gender balance and the fact that I wouldn't know anyone. And, it being February in the dear old/new Turbine Hall, it would be cold: even the invitations had suggested that guests might like to Wrap Up Warm.

Yes, it was all those things but it was more significant than that. Thanks to the ease and speed of digital - and undeniably the particular advantages it offers, while analogue has other advantages - the industry for analogue film is dying. The big, commercial studios are convinced that the future is digital, and without their money flowing in, the facilities to deal with film from shooting to projecting are shutting up shop. Kodak have filed for protection against their creditors, and something like twenty-eight out of the thirty film processing companies in London have closed down in the last two years. And because there's no one to handle your film, film itself is going the way of... well, can you think of any other creative medium that has ever just ceased to be available? Evolved, shrunk, got more expensive, fallen out of favour, yes. But just, plain, vanished? So there's a campaign, of which Dean and the likes of Martin Scorsese are only the most visible parts, to get photographic film named a UNESCO World Heritage... um, Thing. That would open the door to all sorts of help and funding for those who want or need to use and support it, just as in our own industry National Short Story Week is the umbrella under which all sorts of good initiatives can then huddle, confer, publicise themselves, and make grant applications.

Tacita Dean says that she "needs film as an artist needs paint." So, unexpectedly, a routine standup-and-shout turned out to be something more important, though what that was, perhaps, was according to how you saw it. A call to arms? The mustering of an army? A battle-charge? The last rites? A wake? Or a re-birth of the medium into a new life in a rather different world, where it's no longer taken for granted as the medium of transmitting stories, but defined by and used for its particular, essential, physical and aesthetic qualities?

There are parallels with other industries, of course, although they all need to be prefixed by mutatis mutandis, because our eyes don't work in the same way as our ears, so the shift from cinefilm to digital moviemaking is not the same as the shift from wax cylinders to digital tape to mp3 files. And different again is the shift from manuscript to printed book, to e-book: the medium in which our words are transmitted is secondary to the message it carries, and the printed book is a near-perfect, and astonishingly cheap, technology when you compare it to the paraphernalia of even the most guerillerish of film makers or sound artists.

But still... Maybe it was the walk along the South Bank, through Borough Market, past Southwark Cathedral (which I blogged about recently) and the Golden Hinde, on a damp, mild-scented February evening, with the lights of London glittering and shifting on the water... Maybe it was the fact that I'd had a good day working on the novel, so that what Rose Tremain calls "the anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the novelist's mind" was wide awake in me... Maybe it was the wine, which was nicer than book industry bashes usually supply... Who knows?

The Turbine Hall is a cathedral of the early twentieth century, the era of big, grubby powerstations in the middle of big, grubby cities, the electrical age. You enter by the west door, and the party was on the upper deck, which spans the middle of it: we stood in the soft dark to watch the colours and forms in Film that flowed and flowered where the east window is. There's a west window, too: it gets a starring moment in Film, so there's a metaphysical but also physical link that runs the full length of the nave. Then we turned aside, to where the speakers were spotlit on the platform on one of the long sides of the hall, and heard each of them make a call to arms. 

And suddenly I saw us all as the ordinary folk of a Reformation world - the world of Galileo and Columbus, Newton and Harvey - the world that could turn the space inside a great, Gothic cathedrals on its axis, so that the people gathered round a pulpit to hear an argument rather than before an altar to witness an event. I heard what was said as something akin to Luther's and Bucer's argument: that we should return to the plain, unmediated origins of our experience, and keep hold of the raw, analogue, temporal business of being human creatures who exist in space and time and community, so that we can take it with us as we also grasp the new opportunities of the new age, for art and understanding.

I've no idea what the story is, in this moment - story in the novelist's sense, that is, not the journalist's. Those people in the Grote Kerk of 1673, above, were the first who could go home and read what we'd recognise as a novel: Tacita Dean's form and medium are a product of the electrical age as mine are of that humanist age:  But if ever there was a moment when the past was present to me and yet by being so present, filled me with the knowledge of how immeasurably distant it is, it was that evening in the Turbine Hall. Dean makes her art by running the film through the camera again and again, masking different layers, layering different colours and lights, stacking up images or leaving them alone. Historical novels get written in rather the same way.