Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  Above is the massive weight of decades of regulation by bureaucrats; below is rising desperation on the part of a generation that has some knowledge of the outside world and realizes that Japan is falling behind. The situation is a prelude to revolution. There is a small possibility that the volcano will erupt, and that true revolutionary change will come.

  Revolutions have occurred twice in Japan over the last one hundred and fifty years. The first was the so-called Meiji Restoration of 1868, sparked by Commodore Perry’s opening of Japan. Overnight, Japan discarded a millennium of rule by shoguns and feudal lords, and established a modern nationalist state. The second revolution, led by the US Occupation after World War II, was the basis for the postwar rebuilding of Japan. Military dictatorship, Emperor worship, dominance by agrarian landlords – the entire edifice of the Meiji state was in turn discarded in favor of a bureaucratic industrial complex: ‘Japan Incorporated’.

  Japan’s third revolution, if there is one, will have to be led from within. No one is seriously trying to open Japan’s markets anymore. No one outside of Japan cares that Shochiku and Toho don’t make good movies. Nor will they object if the Construction Ministry covers the whole country with concrete. There will be no Perry or MacArthur: the Japanese will have to do it themselves.

  Trammell once told me, ‘Success comes when you realize that no one is going to help you.’ But Japan has trained its citizens for fifty years to be obedient and docile, to quietly await the bureaucrats’ bidding. The revolution will not come easily.

  CHAPTER 9

  Kyoto

  Kyoto Hates Kyoto

  It was only after I had lived on the outskirts of Kyoto for eighteen years that I managed to enter the home of one its great old families. Kyoto is that kind of city. Restaurants and geisha houses routinely refuse entrance to the ichigen (‘first look’); that is, a customer who has not been introduced. A foreign acquaintance once made the mistake of trying to make a booking at Doi, a lavish restaurant in the eastern hills. When he called, the owner asked, ‘Do you know anyone who eats here?’ ‘No.’ ‘In that case,’ she murmured in her soft Kyoto dialect, ‘I must respectfully advise you to …’ and here she slipped into English, ‘forget it!’

  Kyoto is unfriendly, and it is unfriendly for a reason: it is an endangered species. A way of life was built up in Kyoto which has miraculously survived all the changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make it into our time. It had relatively little to do with the city’s famous monuments, such as the Gold Pavilion, the Silver Pavilion, Nijo Castle and the Hall of the Thousand and One Buddhas, crowded though they are with tourists. The monuments stand unchanged from the past, but the Kyoto way of life is nearing its last gasp as modern development sweeps over it, and so the guardians of Kyoto culture are nervous. Their way of life is fragile, like a dying person who mustn’t be allowed too many visitors lest he becomes overexcited. Only the few who really loved him can understand the world of significance in each feeble gesture and whisper.

  The day I first visited that great house was in summer, during Gion Matsuri – a festival which takes place in the old neighborhoods in the heart of the city, bounded by Gojo, Oike, Kawaramachi and Karasuma streets. Over the course of the year, prominent houses in this district store wooden frameworks and decorations that are brought out into the streets for the festival and assembled into floats. The decorations, some of which are centuries old, include metalwork, lacquer, woodcarving, brocades and rugs. During the week of Gion Matsuri, hundreds of thousands of people, many dressed in summer kimono, mill through the streets, looking into the open windows of shops and houses decorated with folding screens and artworks. In the evening, children striking chimes sit in the upper balconies of the floats, beating out the slow hypnotic rhythm of the Gion music. On the final day, the floats parade through the city.

  My guide was flower master Kawase Toshiro, who grew up next door to Rokkakud-o, the temple where ikebana was born, and is a Kyotoite down to his fingertips. Kawase is mostly active in Tokyo these days, so he was seeing the Gion festival for the first time in a few years; I had not attended in maybe ten years. How the city had changed! Where there were once rows of wooden houses, each hung with lanterns, most had been replaced with shopfronts of glass and aluminum. The narrow backstreets were impossibly crowded because little yomise (stalls) selling food, souvenirs and goldfish for children stood in front of most of the buildings. ‘Yomise are fun enough, I suppose,’ said Kawase. ‘They are what you see everywhere throughout Japan during the summer. But this is Kyoto! When I was a child, the main attraction was looking at the neighbors’ artworks, and then playing in the streets with fireworks. We didn’t need yomise!’

  Kawase took me and a couple of friends to two houses. The first was an old Kyoto machiya (town house). Taxes used to be levied according to frontage, so the old houses of Kyoto tend to have narrow street entrances, and stretch far back into the interior of the block. The building’s paper-and-wood sliding doors had been removed for summer, and replaced with doors made of reeds, sudare (bamboo blinds) and gauze hangings – all more or less transparent. As we walked through the house, the blinds and hangings revealed ever-changing vistas, with room after room, separated by gardens, disappearing into the distance. On the floor were blue Nabeshima rugs, each the size of one tatami mat.

  Tradition in Japan demands a sweep of empty tatami mats, against a row of stark pillars made of white wood, and that is mostly what we see in modern versions of old architecture. But the residents of Kyoto overlaid the mats with coverings of blue and brown, and hung the pillars with bamboo blinds and gauze. Of course, being Kyoto, where only the suggestion of a decoration counts as true decoration, they did these things in moderation. They did not cover the whole floor with rugs; instead, they put Nabeshima on only a few mats where guests would sit. Most of the blinds and hangings were rolled up, allowing freedom to move around, and giving just the impression of blinds and hangings.

  As we filed through the house, Kawase said, ‘This house is old, of course, but it has been largely redone in the last few years. They Japanized it. They did an excellent job, and I’m glad it’s here. But now let me show you the real thing.’ We pushed our way through the crowds again, at last arriving at a complex of buildings and kura, surrounded by a long wall extending back a full block. This house, Kawase told us, was the last great house of inner Kyoto. The owners had almost lost the land a few years ago, and there was a plan to tear the house down and turn it into an apartment block. But a group of Kyotoites joined forces with the owner and saved it.

  It was one of the houses that store the Gion float decorations, and the gateway was thronged with people coming to view the metalwork and brocades on display inside. Just beyond the gateway was a walkway, with a bamboo barrier at one end. Kawase pushed the barrier aside and motioned for us to step into the entranceway. The elder daughter of the house, dressed in a yellow kimono, bowed at the edge of the steps, and invited us in.

  The din of the crowds outside faded away. Ahead of us was the foyer, decorated with long leaves of susuki grass in a vase. The sudare blinds were rolled up and secured with dangling ribbons of purple silk. Beyond the foyer was a small room looking out onto a garden of moss, one of the Kyoto tsubo-niwa (‘gardens in a bottle’), encased by a high wall. You could see bits and pieces of the garden through oddly placed Mondrianesque openings – a square window at ground level covered with bamboo lattice, or an open wall hung with shina-sudare (bamboo blinds from China covered with pictures of birds and flowers, created by winding silk threads over each thin slat of bamboo).

  From there, we entered another room, and then another, each separated by different types of doors or gauze hangings. There were a variety of floor coverings: blue and pale-orange Nabeshima, or a three-mat expanse of shiny brown paper dyed with persimmon juice, giving the room a crisp, cool feeling. I noticed a stone at the entrance to one of the inner gardens, with two straw sandals set neatly beside it. Beyond the stone was an
inviting path leading through the moss to another part of the complex. As I was about to step into the sandals, Kawase stopped me. ‘The sandals are arranged to the side of the stone, not on top of it. That means, “Don’t go here”.’ He was alerting me to the subtle sign language of Kyoto life.

  After centuries of political intrigue and relentless scrutiny by tea masters, the people of Kyoto have developed the technique of never saying anything. In conversation, the true Kyotoite waits patiently for the other person to figure out the answer for himself. Once, when I was staying overnight at a temple, I tried to ask the abbot how much it was going to cost. Guests stayed there all the time, and I knew there was a standard fee. ‘Oh, you pay what you like,’ the abbot began. My heart sank, and sure enough, it took almost two hours of tea drinking to drag the answer out of him. In fact, he never did tell me. He just kept giving me hints until I provided the answer myself.

  Kyoto is full of little danger signs that the uninitiated can easily miss. Everyone in Japan has heard the legendary story of bubuzuke (‘tea on rice’). ‘Won’t you stay and have some bubuzuke?’ asks your Kyoto host, and this means that it is time to go. When you become attuned to Kyoto, a comment like this sets off an alarm system. On the surface, you are smiling, but inside your brain, red lights start flashing, horns blare Aaooga, aaooga! and people dash for cover. The old Mother Goddess of Oomoto, Naohi Deguchi, once described how you should accept tea in Kyoto. ‘Do not drink the whole cup, ‘she said. ‘After you leave, your hosts will say, “They practically drank us out of house and home!” But, don’t leave it undrunk, either. Then they will say, “How unfriendly not to drink our tea!” Drink just half a cup.’

  The four of us sat down on rugs laid out by the tokonoma, while the two daughters of the house brought out tea, saké and, to my surprise, a small dinner. (This had involved yet more subtlety. ‘I thought there might be food served,’ said Kawase, ‘when they asked me how many would be coming in my party.’) ‘Dinner’ is not quite the right word. It was just a few small peeled potatoes, some slices of beef and some beans – providing the feeling of dinner rather than dinner itself. It was what they call in Kyoto ‘one bite and a half’. Each serving was arranged in a bowl or tray of unpretentious white pottery or orange lacquerware. Every detail was lovingly attended to, down to beads of dew on the green chopsticks made of freshly cut bamboo, which had been set in the freezer to chill. I could see in this ‘feeling of a meal’ the origins of kaiseki, the formal Japanese cuisine found in expensive restaurants. The difference is that kaiseki tends to be a heavy-handed, elaborate affair, with dozens of dishes and lots of little decorative devices. This meal, while elegant, was as simple as it could be. ‘The food served in a Kyoto house,’ remarked Kawase, ‘should stop just short of being the kind of dinner you feel you should write a thank-you letter for. Any more than that would be ostentatious.’

  Evening began to fall. ‘The Gion music will soon begin,’ said the elder daughter. ‘I can’t imagine living any place where I would be out of earshot of the Gion music in summer.’ That rules out the rest of the world, and even most of Kyoto, other than a few square blocks. As she sat there in her yellow kimono, one hand resting in her lap like the hand of a Buddha, the other lying with fingers bent backwards on the tatami, it struck me that we were talking to a princess. Keeping a precise distance from us, seated at just the right angle on the tatami, she chatted politely but with an occasional flash direct to the heart. I could see the origin of tea ceremony: the combination of politeness and the appeal to the heart. But so often in tea ceremonies the politeness is suffocating; here, it was like fresh air.

  The room grew dark. The two sisters brought Japanese candles on tall bronze stands from behind sudare hangings, and set them out in a row before a wall lined with folding screens. We sat entranced, watching the silhouettes of the two women flickering in the candlelight. Tea was served, and I thought, ‘It was all leading up to this. I’ll just sit here for a moment, relax and enjoy this while it lasts.’ But it was not to be. ‘Tea,’ whispered Kawase, nudging me, ‘that means it’s time to go.’

  Such was the life inside the houses of old Kyoto. However, for all their refinement, the people of Kyoto were not aristocrats (with the exception of a handful of kuge nobles living around the palace), nor did they run big enterprises like the merchants of Osaka. Kyoto was and is a city of shopkeepers. Power moved from Kyoto to Tokyo (then called Edo) at the beginning of the 1600s, and Edo boasted feudal mansions ten times larger than the Kyoto machiya. Removed from real power and big money, Kyoto became a backwater, the center of crafts such as silk weaving and dyeing, woodwork and lacquerware. It was the interlinked world of thousands of craftsmen that defined the city.

  My favorite craftsman is my mounter, Kusaka, who was my guide to the Kyoto antique auctions. His studio is in another old area of the city, not far from the geisha district of Gion. As you approach Kusaka’s studio, you pass a store selling beans. It is typical of the intense specialization of old Kyoto: in front of the shop are four trays, displaying black, white, red and purple beans. That is all. On arriving at Kusaka’s studio, the first thing you notice is the display window. On a red lacquer stand is a gourd-shaped vase, and from its neck there gracefully stretches a single flower. By its side hangs a scroll with a whimsical painting of a sparrow. This window is old Kusaka’s playground: he seeks out flowers, selects just the right scroll to match them, and arranges a display to please the passing townspeople.

  Inside the shop, Kusaka sits surrounded by a mountain of folding screens and hanging scrolls. I have brought a calligraphy scroll with me to be mounted. So far, I’ve found no one who can decipher it, but Kusaka reads the archaic forms without hesitation. ‘It is one of the “Eight Scenes of Omi Province”,’ he informs me. Then the talk turns to its mounting. ‘This calligraphy was made for tea ceremony, so the cloth strips at the top and bottom should be made of Takeyamachi silk,’ he says, and brings down from a shelf a piece of Takeyamachi fabric he bought twenty-five years ago. It is white silk gauze, interwoven with flowers made of gold paper threads. The conversation broadens, moving on to the other types of material which will frame the piece, the shape and lacquering of the roller ends, and so on. Along the way, Kusaka tells me about the ‘Eight Scenes of Omi Province’, which turns out to be the Japanese version of the Chinese ‘Eight Scenes of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers’. Kusaka, now in his nineties, is a true scholar.

  Master that he is, Kusaka is only one of Kyoto’s many expert artisans. Observing the process by which a folding screen is made illustrates the way the Kyoto craft world works. First, Kusaka has a wooden framework made to order at the carpenter’s. On this he glues paper from Mino, with glue made by the glue-maker near Nijo Station. With a wide brush bought from the brush-maker on Teramachi Street, Kusaka smooths and flattens the paintings, and backs them with more glue and paper. He stretches them on drying boards coated with persimmon juice purchased from the persimmon-juice brewery near the Kyoto Hotel. About a month later, he uses a bamboo spatula carved by the bambooware-maker to peel the paintings from the drying boards. He takes the paintings to the restorer, who uses gold leaf from the gold and silver shop on Oike Street, and ground mineral pigments from the paint store behind the Tawaraya Inn. Next, Kusaka glues the paintings onto the screen, and frames them with mounting brocades ordered from the weaver, which he has dyed with colors from the dye-maker. Lastly, Kusaka has the lacquer specialist paint the edges of the outer frame, and adds metal fittings supplied by the bronze-ware shop. If this were a hanging scroll, then he would still need to have a box-maker craft a paulownia-wood box for it, and to then request a tea master to do the calligraphy on the box.

  I include the tea master among the ‘artisans’ here because it is a fact that all of Kyoto’s arts are unified by tea. Folding screens and hanging scrolls are made to the dictates of tea masters, to harmonize with their gardens and flowers. Kusaka’s store window, at first glance, seems to convey nothing much to do with mountin
g. Yet because it reveals a tea aesthetic, it is a true window to the artisan’s world.

  In its prime, Kyoto was a city that had mastered the art of relaxation. Many traces of this remain, notably the outdoor restaurants set up on high pilings over the river in summer. People sit in the night air fanning themselves, a rare sight in Japan, which has very little in the way of street cafés or outdoor restaurants. In the winter, I sometimes go with a friend to Imamiya Shrine, to the north of the city, where two old aburimochi (grilled rice cake) shops stand facing each other. The shops are rather out of the way so tourists rarely venture there. The rice cakes are put on bamboo skewers, covered with sweet miso sauce and then grilled over charcoal. Entering one of the rickety old shops, we sit in a tatami room and leisurely eat our sweet rice cakes while talking of this or that. Outside is the cold Kyoto winter; inside, the atmosphere is warm and cheery.

  The rice-cake restaurants are hardly the most glamorous of spots. The tatami are old and tattered, the gardens are not neatly kept, and the overall air is shabby, even ‘poor’. They are in striking contrast to today’s Japan, where the smell of money everywhere is overwhelming, and everything has been polished and made perfectly neat and sterile. But beauty is not limited to brand new tatami and pure white wood: somewhere deep in people’s hearts ‘poor’ brings with it a sense of relaxation and ease.

  Another word for ‘poor’ would be wabi – the rallying cry of tea ceremony. It means ‘worn’ or ‘humble’, and refers to the use of rough, simple objects and a lack of ostentation. Not only did wabi transform tea ceremony, but it was perfectly adapted to the city of Kyoto, whose residents could not afford the luxuries of Edo or Osaka. Poverty-stricken kuge nobles and middle-class shopkeepers used wabi as a weapon to establish their cultural superiority. It was a form of deceit, carried to the level of art. A crudely fashioned brown tea bowl was held up as superior to the most elaborately decorated Imari platter, and nobody ever dared ask why. Bamboo blinds disguised small rooms and shiny paper covered worn tatami. Wabi was Kyoto’s unique achievement: a rug, a bamboo hanging, a meal of ‘one bite and a half’ – all were manipulated to create an effect superior to the gold-leafed halls of feudal lords.