Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  On arriving at the genkan, we were surprised to find that the lady of the house got down on her knees to greet us, her head touching the tatami. It was the sort of greeting royalty might receive; it made me feel that entering this house was a great occasion. Once inside, we passed along a hallway; this was followed by a small room and another hallway. Finally, we reached a spacious living room, absolutely empty except for some flowers in the tokonoma (alcove). It was summer, the doors to the hallways and living rooms had been removed, and a breeze from the garden swept through the whole house from one end to the other. However, only the surrounding passageways received light from the garden, so it was dark inside the large tatami room. A secret space removed from the outside world, it conjured up the feeling that I had been transported back to an ancient time, long before I was born. To me, that house had become my ‘castle’: I knew that Japan was where I wanted to live my life.

  In 1966 we moved back to Washington, DC. After graduating from high school in 1969, I entered the Japanese Studies program at Yale University. However, the course was not what I expected. Japanese Studies at the time revolved almost wholly around economic development, post-Meiji government, ‘theories of Japaneseness’ (known as Nihonjinron), and so on, and deep inside I began to wonder if Japan really was the country I wanted to live in. In order to put my doubts to rest, during the summer of 1971 I hitchhiked all around Japan, from the northern island of Hokkaido to the southern tip of Kyushu.

  This trip took two months, and during that time I was treated extraordinarily well. It was an easy time for foreigners. The Japanese have always tended to treat foreigners like creatures from another universe. As Japan has become more internationalized, the attitude towards foreigners has grown more, rather than less, complicated. But in those days, outside the big cities, there was only tremendous curiosity: I would be deluged with questions about the American school system, about my parents, my family, my clothing, everything. Old ladies would pinch the hair on my arms to see if it was real; the men of the families I met couldn’t wait to get me into a public bath to see if what they had heard about foreigners was true. In two months I only spent three nights in a hotel – the rest of the time, people I met on the road would invite me to stay in their homes.

  While I was deeply impressed by the kindness of the Japanese, I reaped another benefit from the trip as well. This was my discovery of Japan’s natural environment. In 1971 the onslaught of modernization was already encroaching upon the countryside, but compared to the cities, the rural areas still preserved much of their old appearance. Roads were few, and the mountains were heavily blanketed with old-growth forest. Mist boiled up out of the valleys as if by magic; the slender and delicate tree branches quivered like feathers in the wind, and in the gaps between them the sheer rock surface would show through, only to be hidden again.

  Geographically, Japan lies in a temperate zone, but its vegetation seems far more characteristic of a tropical rainforest. As anyone who has hiked through the mountain ranges of Shikoku and Kyushu will know, Japan’s mountains are a jungle of sorts. Wherever one looks, the humid, dense slopes are covered with ferns, moss and fallen leaves. Coming along the bend of an unpaved mountain road, I would suddenly have the illusion that I had traveled back hundreds of millions of years. It felt as though at any moment a pterodactyl might come flying out of the mist.

  When I think back on the natural beauty of Japan at that time it brings tears to my eyes. With its abundant ‘rainforest’ vegetation, volcanic mountains and the delicate leafage of its native flora, Japan was perhaps one of the most beautiful countries in the world. During the ensuing twenty-odd years, the country’s natural environment has changed completely. The old-growth forests have been logged and replanted with neat rows of cedar trees, and within these cedar groves it is deathly silent. They have become deserts in which the living, breathing presence of plants and animals cannot be sensed. Roads have been carved deep into the mountains, and the hillsides have been covered in erosion-control concrete, obscuring the beauty of the rocky slopes. Even the mist no longer rises from the gorges.

  Recently, there has been a worldwide boom in Japanese Studies, and many college students now visit Japan. They see the gardens of Kyoto and come away thinking that these creations of neatly raked sand and pruned hedges are ‘nature’. But nature, in Japan, used to be far more mysterious and fantastic, a sacred area that seemed surely inhabited by gods. In Shinto, there is a tradition of Kami no Yo, the ‘Age of the Gods’, when man was pure and the gods dwelled in hills and trees. Today, that tradition is the sort of thing you read about as historical commentary when you study ancient Japanese poetry, or in the brochure when you visit a Shinto shrine. Yet, as recently as 1971, the primeval forest still existed. You could feel the presence of the gods. This environment is now a thing of the past, but if I live to be eighty or a hundred, I doubt that the lost beauty of Japan’s mountains and forests will ever fade from my memory.

  Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan, is the least visited by tourists, and it was not originally on my summer itinerary. When I was a child in Yokohama, Tsuru-san used to sing a song to me about the Shinto shrine of Kompira in Shikoku, and by coincidence the very first person I hitched a ride with in Tokyo gave me a charm from the shrine. This gave me the idea that I was meant to make a pilgrimage to Kompira, so at the end of the summer I traveled to Shikoku. I spent some time with a group of friends at Kompira and the nearby Esoteric Buddhist temple of Zentsu-ji. On the final day of my visit, a friend I had met at the temple offered to take me to a place he said I would surely fall in love with.

  We got on his motorcycle and left Zentsu-ji for the heart of Shikoku. We headed towards Ikeda, a small town near the center of the island. From there, the road began to climb the banks of the Yoshino River. The valley walls on either side grew steeper and steeper, and just when I was beginning to wonder where on earth I was being taken, we arrived at the mouth of Iya Valley. I thought this was our destination, but my friend told me, ‘This is where we start.’ We began to climb up a narrow, winding mountain road.

  Situated on the border between the Tokushima and Kochi Prefectures, Iya Valley is the deepest gorge in Japan. The landscape I saw that day was the most fantastic in all of Japan’s countryside, bringing to mind the mountains of China that I had fallen in love with as a child. It looked exactly like a mountain scene from a Sung-dynasty ink painting.

  Due to the green shale peculiar to the Tokushima area, the rivers were tinged with emerald, and the towering cliff faces looked like carved jade. From a mountain across the valley, white cascades – what the Japanese call taki no shiraito (literally, ‘the white threads of the waterfall’) – fell straight down, as though drawn with a single brush stroke. Against this backdrop, the thatch-roofed houses scattered here and there deep in the mountains looked like the dwellings of sages.

  Every country, I believe, has its typical ‘pattern of landscape’. In England, the keynote is grass – in town squares, in meadows and in college quadrangles. In Japan, it is the village cluster. Usually, the houses of a Japanese village huddle together in a group on the flatlands, either in a valley or at the foot of a hill, surrounded by an expanse of rice paddies. People do not live up in the mountains, which in ancient times were the domain of gods and considered taboo. Even today, the mountains of Japan are almost completely uninhabited.

  Iya is different. Later, back at Yale, I researched Iya Valley for my senior thesis. I discovered that the pattern of its settlement is unique in Japan. In Iya, houses avoid the low-lying land by the river, and instead are built high up on the mountainsides. One reason is that the shaded areas around the riverbanks are inadequate for farming. Also, the many freshwater springs that gush forth on the hillsides make the elevated areas better suited for human habitation. Since Iya’s rocky terrain is unfit for rice cultivation, there are very few rice paddies, and therefore there is no need for people to live in a single village compound to tend them. The r
esult is independent households scattered throughout the mountains.

  The Yuan-dynasty painter Nizan drew mountains with an inimitable touch. The composition of his works is always the same. There never appears even a single human figure: just a solitary thatch-roofed cottage supported by four pillars, sitting in the midst of a vast mountain range. Deep in the mountains of Iya, I felt something akin to the human loneliness and corresponding grandeur of nature expressed in the paintings of Nizan.

  The whole trip that summer had been one large arrow leading me to Iya. My question as to whether Japan was the country I wished to live in had been answered. I spent the next year at Keio University in Tokyo as an exchange student; however, I skipped most of my classes, frequently journeying back to the mountains of Iya. During the course of these trips, I gradually began to learn something about the region and the people living there.

  Anyone who travels in China and Japan is bound to come across lists of threes and fives: the Five Famous Mountains, the Three Gardens, the Three Famous Views, etc. So, naturally, Japan has classified its Three Hidden Regions. They are Gokaso in Kyushu, Hida-Takayama in Gifu (famed for its high-ridged thatched houses) and Iya Valley. Since ancient times, Iya has been a hideaway, a place of refuge from the outside world. The oldest written record concerning the valley dates back to the Nara period: a description of how a group of shamans fleeing the capital disappeared into the neighboring mountains. Later, in the twelfth century, during the wars between the Heike and Genji clans, fugitives of the defeated Heike fled into Iya Valley. From that time on, Iya became known as an ochiudo buraku (a refugee village). The world was surprised in the 1970s when a Japanese soldier was found to have lived for almost thirty years in a Philippine jungle, still fighting World War II. Thirty years is nothing. The Heike in Iya kept up their struggle from 1190 right up until about 1920. Even now, in a village called Asa in the furthest reaches of Iya, the descendants of the leader of the Heike clan live in a thatch-roofed mansion, still preserving their twelfth-century crimson war banner.

  During the period of warfare in the mid-fourteenth century, when Japan was divided between the Northern and Southern courts, Iya became a stronghold of guerrillas fighting to restore the Southern Court. Even during the peaceful centuries of the Edo period, the valley people fought off integration with the rest of Japan. The villagers bitterly resisted incorporation into the Awa fiefdom of Lord Hachisuka of Tokushima, rising in numerous peasant revolts. As a result, prior to the twentieth century, Iya existed virtually as an independent country.

  The tunneling of the first public road into Iya began in the Taisho era in the 1920s, but the carving of this road through solid rock by manual labor took over twenty years to complete. Today, there are many roads throughout Iya, but when I first visited the valley there was nothing passable by car except for the original Taisho ‘highway’, which was for the most part a narrow dirt track. There were no guardrails, and one could look down over hundred-meter precipices to the river running below. One day, I came around a corner to find that the tire of the car in front of me had slipped from the shoulder of the road. I watched as the driver frantically jumped from the vehicle, which proceeded to plummet into the depths.

  I began to walk the mountain trails of Iya. Thinking back on it now, I was just in time. The old way of life still remained in Iya in 1972, but it was on the verge of fading out. The people working in the fields still wore the woven straw raincoats seen in samurai movies. Inside the houses, cooking was done over an open hearth sunk into the floor.

  New houses had been built alongside the Taisho road, which followed the course of the river. But in order to visit the older houses, it was not unusual to have to hike for an hour or two up from the roadside along narrow mountain paths. Consequently, there was very little contact with the outside world; some old women I met had not descended from their native hamlets for over ten years.

  To Iya residents, all outsiders are labeled shimo no hito (literally, ‘people from below’). Although, as a foreigner, I was an especially strange shimo no hito, Japanese from Tokyo or Osaka are lumped together into this group as well. Because of this, the attitude towards foreigners in Iya is relatively relaxed. However, the reality of my being a foreigner was an inescapable fact, much more so as I was quite possibly the first Westerner to have ever ventured into the heart of the region. One day, tired from a strenuous one-hour hike up a steep mountain path to one of Iya’s hamlets, I sat down to rest on the stone steps of a small shrine. After about ten minutes, an old lady toiled into view on the path below. As she approached the shrine, I stood up to ask her for directions. She took one look at my face, let out a shriek, and ran off down the path. Later, when I asked the villagers about it, they explained that the old lady had thought I was the god of the shrine, come out for a little air. It was a perfectly logical conclusion, since Shinto gods traditionally have long red hair. I recall this incident even now, when I see the gods in Noh and Kabuki performances come out with their flaming manes.

  In the Iya houses of twenty years ago mysterious shadows still abounded. The valley’s rocky slopes are completely unsuited to rice paddies, so traditional agriculture consisted of crops such as millet, buckwheat and mitsumata (the fibers of which are used to make 10,000-yen notes). But the main crop was tobacco, introduced by the Portuguese into Japan in the early 1600s. Until recently, when a courtesan in a Kabuki play put a long pipe to her lips and inserted a pinch of pipe tobacco, she used Iya tobacco.

  Because of the constantly swirling mists in the valley, the tobacco was dried inside, hung from the rafters over the smoking hearths. So Iya houses are ceilingless, and the roofs soar upwards like the vaults of a Gothic church. The first time I entered a traditional Iya dwelling, I was shocked to find that the interior of the house was pitch black. The floor, pillars and walls were all colored a deep ebony from years of smoke rising from the open hearth. The Japanese call this kurobikari (literally, ‘black glistening’). After a little while, my eyes adjusted and I could gradually make out the thatch on the underside of the roof. The thatch too was a shiny black color, almost as though it had been lacquered.

  Iya was always desperately poor, and its houses are small in comparison to those of most rural areas in Japan. The houses of Hida-Takayama are many times larger, rising five stories or more, but since each story has a ceiling, one feels little sense of spaciousness upon entering. Iya’s houses, on the other hand, feel extremely roomy inside due to the darkness and the lack of ceilings. Inside, the house is cavelike; outside is a world above the clouds.

  Even now, when I travel back to Iya, I feel as though I’ve left the world behind and entered a magical realm. This feeling is stronger now than ever, because whilst the towns and plains below have been completely modernized, Iya remains little changed. Near the entrance to the valley there stands an Edo-period stone monument inscribed at the command of the Lord of Awa, which reads: ‘Iya, Peach Spring of our land of Awa’. The ‘Peach Spring’ is the subject of an old Chinese poem about an otherworldly paradise. This monument is evidence that even hundreds of years ago, when all of Japan was beautiful, Iya was seen as something unique, as a Shangri-La.

  So far, I have only written of Iya’s beautiful side, but in truth there was already a snake in this Garden of Eden: kaso (depopulation). It began in 1964, when my family arrived in Yokohama. In that year, the imbalance between city and rural incomes passed a critical point, and farmers from all over Japan fled the countryside. Much poorer and with a more loosely organized society than the rice-growing communities of the plains, Iya was especially hard hit, as villagers moved down to Tokushima and Osaka. After 1970, the pace of kaso increased, and Iya was filled with abandoned houses. It occurred to me that I could own a house there.

  These days, all of rural Japan gives the impression of becoming one enormous senior citizens’ home. Back then, although the tide of depopulation in Iya was advancing, the villages were still alive. Even the abandoned houses were in beautiful condition. />
  Starting in the fall of 1972, I spent about six months ‘house hunting’. I traveled around looking at dozens of houses, not only in Iya but throughout Kagawa, Kochi and Tokushima Prefectures as well. I wound up visiting over a hundred houses in the end. I toured the countryside with friends in search of interesting abandoned houses, and when we found one, we would brazenly explore inside. It was just a matter of loosening the wooden shutters, which were usually not even locked. There were some unbelievably magnificent houses that had been left to rot. One indigo-dying mansion near Tokushima had a two-meter-wide verandah surrounding the entire house, of the sort you would only see today in Nijo Castle in Kyoto. The floorboards were over ten centimeters thick, all cut from precious keaki wood.

  Breaking into these abandoned houses, I experienced many things that could never have been learned from books. I was able to see with my own eyes the reality of Japan’s traditional ways of life. When a family decided to leave their house for the big city, they would take practically nothing away with them. What good were straw raincoats, bamboo baskets and utensils for handling firewood going to be in Osaka? Everything that had been a feature of life in Iya for a thousand years had become irrelevant overnight. On entering one of these houses, it looked as though the residents had simply disappeared. The detritus of their daily life lay undisturbed, like a snapshot frozen in time. Everything was in place: the open newspaper, remains of fried eggs in the pan, discarded clothing and bedding, even the toothbrushes in the sink. The influences of modernization were already visible here and there – ceilings had been tacked up against the rafters to protect against the winter cold, and aluminum door and window frames had been installed – but one could still see much of the original condition of the houses. However, only a few years later, artificial materials were everywhere, covering not only ceilings, but floors, walls and pillars. The interiors disappeared under a layer of plastic and plywood.