The Mother and Japan

Mirra (later known as The Mother) and her husband Paul Richard lived in Japan during World War One. Little is known of her life in Japan besides her being deeply immersed in a very intense sadhana, but there are some indications. As a trained artist, Mirra was extremely sensitive to the Japanese artistic sensibility, and the study of Japanese arts temporarily modified her artistic style and determined her long-term aesthetic preference. Her ideas about beauty and Japanese arts resonated with that of the American scholar, Ernest Fenollosa, who lived and worked in Japan for a number of years, and who argued that Japanese people had interwoven art into their lives so perfectly that it had become natural to them, and hence universal.

Many of Mirra’s quotes have survived that capture her observations about art in Japan, such as: “For four years, from an artistic point of view, I lived from wonder to wonder,” “Beauty rules over Japan as an incontestable master,” “From the artistic point of view, the point of view of beauty, I don’t think there is a country as beautiful as that”, and Japanese art teaches “the unity of art with life”.

A vast collection of Japanese objects, ranging from artworks to ordinary objects, surrounded The Mother in her Pondicherry living quarters throughout her long and productive life, and reminded her of the refinement and superior aesthetic experience that she found in Japan. 

In Japan, Mirra also became involved in her elaborate exploration of flowers and their spiritual significances. According to her friend Nobuko Kobayashi, with whom she practiced ‘still-sitting’ meditation, Mirra started referring to herself as Fujiko (Wisteria). She was inspired by the wisteria flowers on the roof of an ancient Shinto shrine. Wisteria/Fuji is also a pun on “fuji” – “undead” or “immortal” and Fuji, the sacred mountain. Fuji/wisteria belongs to a canon of Japanese flowers that bear special cultural significance and symbolism. It is associated with nobility and is also understood to represent love, and within the Buddhist context, prayer. Mirra later called Wisteria, ‘poet’s ecstasy,’ with the comment: ‘Rare and charming is your presence!’

Another friend of the Richards, Shumei Okawa (1886-1957), said of Mirra:  “You know Mount Fuji . . . you can’t appreciate it in full when you are very near, when you are too close . . . some distance is needed. . . . from a distance, ah! it is grand, it is breath-taking, it is sublime! She was like Mount Fuji, Mirra was. . . .”

The Richards and Japanese media 

Shortly after her arrival in Japan, Mirra was approached by a journalist from the Fujoshinbun newspaper for an interview, but instead she sent the manuscript of Woman and the War, which was published on 7th July 1916. The article conveyed her ideas relating to feminism and women in society generally, highlighting issues she was passionate about, such as the natural equality of the sexes, the importance of collaboration and the need of inner spiritual growth. “Without inner progress there is no possible outer progress.” 

She also sent a self-portrait painting, which was published in the same newspaper two months later, together with a text written by a journalist entitled A Truly Dedicated Woman. This image of the Mother was forgotten about until recently. 

At some point in her stay, Mirra also gave a talk called To the Women of Japan. In this talk, notes her biographer Georges Van Vrekhem, “she emphasizes again the spiritual role of women. ‘True maternity begins with the conscious creation of a being, with the willed shaping of a soul come to develop and utilize a new body. The true domain of women is spiritual. We forget it but too often.’ 

“Then she expounds Sri Aurobindo’s and her view of the importance of the point in world history at which humanity has arrived: ‘We are living in an exceptional time at an exceptional turning point of the world’s history. Never before, perhaps, did mankind pass through such a dark period of hatred, bloodshed and confusion. And, at the same time, never has such a strong, such an ardent hope awakened in the hearts of the people...’”

Van Vrekhem notes that then she briefly sketches the evolution “that is expected to culminate in the descent of the Supramental.”

For the first year, the Richards lived and worked together in Tokyo with Shumei Okawa, a university professor, Zen practitioner and an active sympathiser with the Indian liberation movement, who was also described as ‘the leading spirit of the Pan-Asiatic movement in Japan”. Okawa soon involved Paul Richard in the political circle called the Black Dragon Society. Together with Okawa, Paul edited the society’s English journal, The Asian Review, and published several books on political science. His purpose was to analyze the contemporary world geopolitically, but it was heavily coloured by his idea of unifying the Asian peoples. They both sought to lessen British interests in Asia, particularly on the Indian subcontinent.

Paul Richard’s influential works during this period include Au Japon (To Japan, 1917) and To the Nations (1917). In Au Japon, which was translated into four languages, he wrote, “Liberate and unify Asia; for Asia is thy domain.  Asia is thy field of action and, if needed, thy field of war; thou knowest it well...  Thine own share is the whole of Asia...  Thou hast but to set her free...”  

It is unclear how much Mirra was involved in her husband’s political activities. Mother translated Au Japon from the original French into English, and Gilles Guigan points out that the liberation of Asia was one of Sri Aurobindo’s ‘dreams’ and “As Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s aims have always been the same, it is very likely that Mother shared the aims of Okawa and Paul Richard – without necessarily sharing the means to be used in order to achieve this aim.”

Paul Richard’s work quickly proliferated among the Japanese intelligentsia, and placed the Richards on the cultural map of the Japanese capital. 

Mirra’s stay in Japan was also extremely important from the point of view of her inner work. Some of her remarkable spiritual experiences were noted in her ‘spiritual diaries’, like her identification with the soul of the cherry tree. However, Van Vrekhem points out that her inner life there was very far from placid,  for she had identified Paul as an emanation of one of the four great Asuras, or anti-divine forces, and had vowed to convert her husband and, through him, the essence of his person, the Lord of Falsehood. Consequently, “her stay in Japan,” explains Van Vreckem, was ‘a perpetual battle with the adverse forces’ – not a battle on the human scale, but a battle of superhuman, divine and anti-divine forces.”

But Mirra also had other battles to fight. In January 1919 she contracted the ‘Spanish Flu’. She refused all medicine because she wanted to discover what lay behind it. ‘At the end of the second day, as I was lying all alone, I clearly saw a being with a part of the head cut off, in a military uniform – or what remained of a military uniform – approaching me and suddenly flinging himself upon my chest, with that half head, to suck my force. I took a good look, then realized that I was about to die... Then I called on my occult power, I fought a big fight and I succeeded in pushing him off so that he could not stay any longer.”

She explained this was a being who had been killed violently during the First World War, and who was now ‘vampirising’ living beings to suck out their life force. After Mirra had drawn on all her occult power to put matters straight, the epidemic subsided:  in two or three days there was not a single case of flu in the city. 

But the ‘hellish’ years of tension and struggle in Japan had left their marks. Later, in Pondicherry, she wrote, ‘When I came here [from Japan] I was not worth much,’ wrote the Mother, ‘and I did not give myself many months to live.’ 

The Theosophy connection 

In Japan, the Richards also knew the founding figure of the Theosophy Society, the Irish writer, editor and educator James Henry Cousins (1873 – 1956). At this time, interest in esotericism and in nationalist struggles were closely related. Through the Richards, the ideas of Sri Aurobindo also became very influential in spiritual/nationalist circles in Japan, while Cousins and Paul Richard were strongly bound together as advisers for the Black Dragon Society’s journal The Asian Review. 

The connections between the Richards and the Theosophical Society were quite loose, and became a footnote in their own spiritual project, although evidence suggests that Mirra frequented Theosophical Society events in Paris and that she stayed in the Adyar headquarters in Madras before leaving for France in 1915.

The first Theosophical Society lodge in Tokyo was established in 1924, and for a few months it was led by Philippe Barbier St. Hilaire. Later that year, St. Hilaire went to Mongolia to learn from Tibetan lamas, and then, via Theosophy circles, to Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram in Pondicherry, where he was known as Pavitra and became Mother’s secretary. (They had not met in Japan as he arrived there just after Mirra had left.) 

St. Hilaire was employed in Tokyo by Hajime Hoshi, the head of a growing pharmaceutical empire. Hoshi also commissioned a young architect, Antonín Raymond, to design the campus of his business. The monumental, concrete auditorium was greatly admired and still stands in Tokyo to this day.

The Pondicherry connection: Golconde

Mirra knew Antonin and his wife, Noémi, and they shared an immense admiration for Japanese art as well as a common interest in esotericism. 

Pavitra had also come to know the Raymonds well in Japan, and the connection continued after he moved to Pondicherry.  In particular, he had an extensive correspondence with Noémi Raymond between 1927 and 1966. Unlike Pavitra, Noémi continued exploring Theosophy, but not exclusively, and she addressed questions to Sri Aurobindo, which Pavitra communicated and posted the answers back to her in Japan.

Until 1933, the architectural practice of the Raymonds featured only sporadically in these letters. The first significant mention dealt with a remarkable project, the Raymonds’ new summer house in Karuizawa, a project that garnered international interest.  

Noémi also shared with Pavitra the ideological programme or philosophy of the Raymonds’ atelier, where it described the return to simplicity and the innovative usage of traditional Japanese building principles as inspirations for their work. 

In September 1934, Pavitra asked for more examples of the Raymonds’ work so that he could show them to The Mother. Noémi was delighted to oblige. In 1935 Pavitra sent the Raymonds plans made by a Bombay engineer (under Mother’s guidance) for a new building for sadhaks in Pondicherry and asked Antonin for his comments. Antonin was happy to help and subsequently took over the overall design responsibility. 

The construction of Golconde began in 1937 and the Raymonds visited Pondicherry for some months in 1938 to supervise the construction process. According to their testimonies, they found in the Ashram a partner in their spiritual study, as well as in their ambition to design a new modernist structure that would be rooted in Eastern tradition, or rather that could overcome the duality between East and West and bridge them in a new, universal style. 

Golconde was the first modernist building in India. In 1935, Antonin wrote to Mother, “I would not like you to be shocked by the appearance. We are laying the foundation of a new kind of architecture.”  It is, however, very influenced by Japanese simplicity and perfection in detail (much of the supervising work was done by George Nakashima, the famous American woodworker, who had trained under Antonin in Japan). Mother was very enthusiastic.  In a letter of November, 1943, after visiting the building for the first time, she wrote to the Raymonds:

My dear friends,

I have seen Golconde – It is beautiful. Already from the entrance one is struck by majesty simple and grand. It gives a feeling of nobility and immensity. From each corner one would just have to copy to make a painting. Everything lies in the way lines join, without anything unnecessary. 

I regretted that you weren’t here – you would be happy – and seeing this brought back to me some projects – great projects for after the war – after the war.... all these things that will have to be done!

In the meantime Antonin, I thank you from all my heart for the beautiful thing you have created.

With my most affectionate remembrance to both of you and my greetings for the NewYear.

Our blessings

This architectural success has received praise from an international specialist audience, yet its unconventional design cannot be assigned exclusively to the genius of its designers, but also to the contemporary intrinsic connections within transnational artistic and spiritual networks.