Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  A long white wall with a tiled roof borders the grounds of the shrine on the side towards the road, and in the center of the wall there is a high gate. Entering, you see directly before you a stone torii (the entrance gate to the shrine itself), and a small Tenmangu Shrine with an old plum tree standing beside it. To the right is the ‘shrine forest’, a stand of giant old cryptomeria cedars. To the left of the stone path is my domain. Water lilies float in large pots, and an assortment of vessels scattered here and there hold peonies, ferns, lotuses, Chinese lanterns and heron grass. After crossing six or seven stepping stones, you reach the entrance to my house.

  When you enter the living room, the back garden comes into view – although ‘jungle’ might be a more appropriate description. Just a few square meters have been cleared near the house, a stretch of grass and moss with some stepping stones in it. The edges of this plot are planted with azaleas and hagi (bush clover), which have been long unattended and are beginning to spread unruly twigs outwards and upwards, hiding a mossy stone lantern and some ceramic statues of badgers. Towards the back are a variety of trees: an ancient cherry tree (propped up with wooden supports), a maple, camellias and a gingko tree. Behind these trees, the garden drops away to a waterfall in the stream, and a heavily wooded mountain soars up from the far bank. When I arrive home on Friday night, I throw open the glass doors of the verandah, and the sound of the waterfall swells up into the house. In that instant, all thoughts of the week in Tokyo blow clean away, and I feel like I have returned to my true self.

  Finding this house was a piece of great good luck. At the end of the Oomoto seminar in 1976, the foundation suggested that I come to work there after going down from Oxford, and without thinking much about it, I agreed. Over the next year, when people asked me for whom I would be working, I had pleasure of telling them, ‘For the Mother Goddess of Oomoto.’ But I had neglected to discuss my salary. When I arrived in 1977 to take up my position in Oomoto’s International Department, I discovered that all those who worked at the foundation were considered to be ‘contributors of service’; in other words, the pay was nominal. I found to my horror that my monthly salary was to be 100,000 yen (about $400 a month). Art activities were all very fine, but how was I going to pay the rent?

  For the first two or three weeks I stayed in the Oomoto dormitory, but one day near the end of summer I had an inspiration. A friend from Thailand, Ping Amranand, was taking the seminar. I said to him, ‘Ping, let’s go look for a house!’ So we set out, walking away from the Oomoto grounds. Kameoka is a flat-bottomed bowl of rice paddies, and you cannot walk for long without running up against mountains. As we walked towards them, I noticed an unusual building. Through a gate in a white wall was a large garden, rank with weeds, and by it an empty house. Drawing on my wealth of experience in breaking into abandoned houses in Iya, we were inside the house in a matter of moments. It was dark and dusty inside, and spiderwebs clung to our hands and faces. Walking gingerly across the floor of the dim living room, which winced and threatened to collapse at every step, we came out onto the back verandah, which was sealed shut with a row of heavy wooden doors. I gave one of the doors a shove, and the entire rotten row collapsed and fell into the garden in a heap. In that instant, warm green light from the back garden flooded the living room. Ping and I looked at each other: in a single summer day, we had found my house.

  The old woman who lived next door told me that the caretaker of the house was the head priest of the nearby Kuwayama Shrine, so I paid him a visit. The priest explained the history of the house to me. It was very old, having been built around four hundred years before. It had originally been a Buddhist nunnery, but around the end of the Edo period it was dismantled and moved to its current site in the grounds of the Tenmangu Shrine. The gate, from another temple further into the mountains, was moved here at about the same time. The house then took on a second life as the shrine-keeper’s home, and also doubled as the village school. But after the 1930s there was no more shrine-keeper, so the house was rented out to local residents. In recent years, nobody had wanted to live in such an old and dirty house, so it lay vacant. Though at a loss to imagine why a foreigner would want to live in such a place, the priest decided then and there that I could rent it.

  Although the Tenmangu Shrine, which is tended by the villagers, is separate from the house, my friends and I have taken to calling the house ‘Tenmangu’ as well. Today, it looks considerably better than it did in 1977. Guests arrive and think, ‘Ah, a quaint country residence,’ but they can have no idea of the long years of toil it took to bring the house to its present state. At first there was not even running water; there was only a well, which dried up in the winter months. Although I don’t mind ‘run-down’, I do mind ‘dirty’. So I invited a group of friends from Oomoto over for a house-cleaning party. Carrying buckets of water from the well, we wiped the ceilings, pillars and tatami mats until they gleamed. Happily, the roof did not leak, so the tatami had not rotted and I did not face the horrific roofing problems which had colored my experience in Iya. Gradually, I brought in running water, repaired the doors and walls, and weeded the garden. The back garden which Ping and I had discovered that first day was an impenetrable mass of weeds and vines. A few months after moving in, I took sickle and machete to it, and saw for the first time the stepping stones, lanterns and azaleas that are typical of a Japanese garden.

  However, on a salary of only 100,000 yen a month, the repair of the house could not be done all at once. As a result, for the first three or four years, life in Tenmangu was very much like dwelling in a haunted house. Not long after I moved in, an eighteen-year-old friend named Diane Barraclough came to live with me. Diane was a blonde British-French girl who had been raised in Kobe and spoke a colorful form of Kobe dialect. Although her Japanese lacked delicacy, she was certainly fluent. She had also inherited French from her mother and an upper-class British accent from her father, doctor to the expatriates in Kobe. Diane was the sort of long-haired beauty who inhabits the comic books which are popular among young girls in Japan. She was pure Edgar Allan Poe, and completely happy in the dark and dilapidated atmosphere of Tenmangu.

  I was initially unable to replace the rotten verandah doors, so the entire eight-meter expanse of the verandah was left open facing the garden. On summer evenings, hordes of moths and mosquitoes would come flying in, so I went to one of the second-hand shops in Kyoto and bought a couple of old mosquito nets. These nets were among the most hauntingly beautiful objects in old Japanese life. They were like enormous square tents, each one the size of a whole room, and they hung from hooks high up on the ceiling. The body of the net was pale green linen, and the borders were of brilliant red silk. We laid our bedding inside the green tents and set out floor lamps. Dressed in a kimono, Diane would sit inside her tent to read, a silver kiseru pipe dangling from her lips. The view of her silhouette, filtered through the green netting, was pure romance, the sort of thing you might find in an Edo woodblock print. In fact, years later, when nets like these had become scarce, I lent one to the Kabuki actor Kunitaro for a performance of Yotsuya Kaidan in Kyoto. Yotsuya Kaidan is a ghost story, commonly performed in summer to give the audience a ‘chill’, and the ghostly green netting with blood-red borders is considered an indispensable backdrop.

  One night I brought a Japanese friend over to visit. When our taxi pulled up in front of Tenmangu, all the lights were off in the house, and there was just the sound of wind and waterfall. Diane was standing in the doorway dressed in a black kimono, her long blonde hair falling over her shoulders. In her outstretched hand she held a rusty old candle stand, over which spiders crawled. My friend took one look, shuddered, and hastily returned to the station in the same taxi we had come in.

  In the evening, Diane and I would light a candle and sit out on the verandah talking, while watching the spiders spin their webs. Diane had a talent for vivid bons mots, most of them as politically incorrect as they could possibly be. Some prey on my mind even now. ‘Te
a ceremony,’ she once said, ‘is aesthetics for unaesthetic people.’ What she meant was that tea ceremony tells you what to do about everything – where to put the flowers, which art objects should be displayed and how to use even the tiniest division of space. This is very comforting for people who have never thought about such things and have no idea what to do on their own.

  Another time, she said, ‘Zen is profundity for shallow people.’ That is the sort of comment which the old Zen master Ikkyu would have loved. What sticks in my mind most of all, however, is when Diane said, ‘You know, Westerners with their full-blown personalities are infinite in interest as human beings. But Western culture is so limited in depth. The Japanese, on the other hand, so restricted by their society, are limited as human beings. But their culture is infinitely deep.’

  In retrospect, the late 1970s in Kyoto were the turning point of an era. Diane, David Kidd, many of my other foreign friends and I were all living in a dream of ancient Japan, because in those days it was still possible to believe in the dream. Around Tenmangu was wilderness and rice paddies, and the streets of Kameoka were still lined with wooden houses and the big kura of saké-makers, lending it the feel of a feudal castle town. The mountains had yet to be covered with steel pylons, and the wave of concrete and plastic had yet to overtake the town. Our actions at the time may have been a bit eccentric, but they still had some air of reality. It was possible, as we sometimes did on summer nights during the seminar at Oomoto, to walk all the way through town back to Tenmangu wearing kimono and hakama (trousers). To do so today would be so divorced from modern Japanese surroundings as to seem wholly ridiculous.

  Time passed, and the early 1980s saw the renovation of Tenmangu advance steadily. I wired the house for electricity, swept away the cobwebs and installed glass doors along the verandah. With the exit of the spiders, Diane did not feel quite at home anymore and she moved out as well. I turned my attention to the doma, an earthen-floored room used as the kitchen, which took up about a third of the floor space in Tenmangu.

  First, the head priest of Kuwayama Shrine, my landlord, performed a Shinto purification ritual for the old earthen oven and the well – fire and water. Then my friends and I set about transforming the doma into a studio space by removing the oven and capping the well. I put in a long table where I could do calligraphy, and mount and back paintings. The other rooms of the house had ceilings, but the doma, in order to allow smoke from the oven to escape, was open all the way up to the rafters, like Chiiori. But the rafters were so crammed with lumber and old sliding doors that it was impossible to see them. We carried out the detritus, and swept down one hundred and fifty years of accumulated soot, enough to fill ten large garbage bags. In doing so, a wide expanse of rafters and crossbeams magically appeared. This airy room is now my workspace.

  Though the age of mosquito nets, candles and kimono has ended, a special world lives on at Tenmangu even now. This is a very simple thing: nature. When I return to Tenmangu after a trip to Tokyo or abroad, I always find that the cycle of the seasons has shifted a bit, and new natural phenomena await me. According to the old Chinese calendar, the year is divided into twenty-four mini-seasons, with names like ‘Clear and Bright’, ‘White Dew’, ‘Great Heat’, ‘Little Cold’ and ‘Squirming Insects’. Each has its own flavor.

  The god of Tenmangu was originally a tenth-century courtier named Michizane, famed for his love of plum blossoms; as a result, the thousands of Tenmangu shrines across the country invariably have a plum tree planted in the grounds. The mystique of plums is that they bloom at the end of winter, when snow is still on the ground. Soon spring comes, and the old cherry tree in the garden blooms, along with azaleas, peaches and wildflowers. But my favorite season comes later, around the end of May or the beginning of June, when the rainy season starts. The frogs in the surrounding paddies start croaking, and my friends calling from Tokyo are amazed to find that they can hear them even over the phone line. Little emerald gems, the frogs hop about and ornament the leaves and stepping stones. Then lotuses burst into bloom, and the heavy rain drums pleasantly on the roof of my bedroom. Sleeping during the rainy season is always a joy.

  Then one evening, a lone firefly appears in the garden. With a friend, I climb down behind the garden to the creek bed below, and we wait in silence in the darkness. After a while, from the thickets on either side of the ravine, glowing clouds of fireflies come floating out. In the summer, the village children come to swim in the pool below the waterfall. My cousin Edan, a little blonde imp, spent a whole summer playing under the waterfall. From my living room I can hear the children’s voices as they dive into the pool. The trees on the mountain slope beyond sway in the breeze, and a black kite lazily spreads its long wings high above. The end of the summer brings typhoons and autumn’s crimson maple leaves, yellow gingko, ruby nandina berries and, at the end, hanging onto the bare branches of winter, orange persimmon fruit. On winter days, frost descends on the garden, and each blade of grass sparkles like diamonds in the morning sun. Frog emeralds, frost diamonds, nandina rubies – these are Tenmangu’s jewel box.

  But these seasonal changes are being slowly erased from today’s Japan. For example, in most cities it is standard practice in autumn to cut off the branches of trees lining the streets, in order to prevent falling leaves. To modern Japanese, falling leaves are not a thing of beauty; they are messy and to be avoided. This accounts for the stunted appearance of the trees which one encounters in most public places in Japan. Recently, a friend here told me, ‘Just going to look at the mountain wilderness – what a bore! It is only when you have something to do that nature becomes interesting. You know, like golf or skiing.’ This may explain why people feel compelled to bulldoze so many golf courses and ski slopes into the mountainsides. My wilderness remains that of the Chinese poets, my nature that of Basho’s haiku. A frog jumps into an old pond; just that sound brings me joy. Nothing else is needed.

  When Diane was living at Tenmangu, the house had almost nothing inside of it. However, in time, Tenmangu became the setting for my growing art collection. Japanese gold screens, Chinese carpets, Tibetan mandalas, Korean vases, Thai Buddhas, Burmese lacquerware, Khmer sculpture – all things Asian were crammed into every inch of the house. ‘Crammed’ is not, I realize, the most aesthetically pleasing of expressions; it hardly conjures up images of elegant refinement. But the artworks of every country and every historical period of Asia made up a jungle of such luxuriance inside Tenmangu that the foliage outside was almost outclassed: it was a greenhouse of beauty. One friend called it ‘Aladdin’s Cave’. On arrival, visitors would see a dilapidated old house which looked not much different from the Tenmangu I found in 1977. Then they would enter the foyer, and – ‘open sesame!’ – colorful screen paintings, thick blue-and-yellow rugs, and the luster of polished quince and rosewood met the eye.

  In recent years, the novelty of owning all these things has worn off a bit and I have cleared out Tenmangu considerably. The rugs and the furniture are still there, but taking a hint from old households which used to store their possessions out of sight in the kura, I have loaned most of the screens, statues and paintings to museums. Now I keep just a few favorite things, and rotate them as the mood strikes me. I suppose I will keep removing more and more, until eventually the house will come full circle and there will be only a bare tatami room looking out onto an open garden.

  In the meantime, even with a much smaller number of objects on display, Tenmangu still has an Aladdin’s Cave feel about it. I think it has something to do with color, one of the things I learned about from David Kidd in the days of my apprenticeship. To digress slightly, I once read an account of life in Tibet before it was invaded by China, when Tibetan culture still flourished. One day, the author met a group of Tibet’s high-ranking statesmen traveling in a convoy across the steppe. They were a blaze of color: even the horses were draped in gorgeous silk and handwoven blankets. The statesmen wore garments of yellow brocade on which blue dragons, purpl
e clouds and green waves danced wildly, and in their hair they wore beads of turquoise and coral.

  In today’s world, people’s sense of color has faded considerably. Just think of the drab suits of modern politicians and you’ll see what I mean. This lack of color is especially true of Japan, where all lighting is fluorescent, and most household items are made from aluminum and synthetic materials. However, Tenmangu is alive with rich, deep hues. It is a striking contrast to the ash-gray color of life in Tokyo. First, there is gold, a color which, as Tanizaki pointed out in In Praise of Shadows, does not generally go well with a brightly lit room; this may be why gold is hardly seen in modern Japanese life. But in Tenmangu there is the gold leaf of screens, the gold of Buddhas, gold lacquer – many different kinds of gold. Within gold, there is green gold, red gold and alloyed gold, which tarnishes with time. In addition to gold, there are painting pigments, especially the vivid green seen in Tibetan mandalas. Then there is the deep red of lacquerware, the pale blue of Chinese celadon, and the somber and cloudy oranges and tea greens of Japanese brocade.

  As a calligrapher, living in Tenmangu could not be more propitious. I feel as though I receive direct inspiration from the deity of the shrine. Although I am not a Shinto convert, I have a secret belief in the god of Tenmangu, who has been worshipped since antiquity as the god of scholarship and calligraphy. Sometimes, I step out to the shrine, ring the bell and say a prayer. Actually, ‘prayer’ is too strong a word; it’s more like an informal greeting. When high-school and college-entrance exam season rolls around, students come to pray at the shrine before class, and their prayers probably have a little more urgency than mine. The early-morning ringing of the bell often wakes me up, serving as Tenmangu’s alarm clock.