Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  But aside from a few relics like the aburi mochi shops at Imamiya Shrine, wabi is no longer alive and well in Kyoto today. This is because the city of Kyoto is, unfortunately, quite ill. Go visit the headquarters of the various schools of flower-arranging and tea ceremony. The hereditary grand masters of these organizations are revered as the guardians of wabi and other sacred principles of Japanese art. But what do you find? Marble lobbies with gleaming chandeliers. If even the guardians of culture have forgotten their roots, then the sickness of Kyoto is far advanced.

  Kyoto hates Kyoto. It is probably the world’s only cultural center of which this is true. The Romans love Rome. Beijing suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution, but most of the damage was wreaked by outsiders, and the citizens of Beijing still love their city. But the people of Kyoto cannot bear the fact that Kyoto is not Tokyo. They are trying with all their might to catch up with Tokyo, but they will never come close. This has been going on a long time. I first noticed the malaise shortly after moving to Kyoto. I asked a friend, ‘When did the unhappiness set in?’ and he answered, ‘Around 1600.’ In other words, the people of Kyoto never forgave Edo for usurping its place as capital. When the Emperor moved to Tokyo in 1868, that was the final blow to Kyoto’s self-esteem.

  While Nara and other cities have also been uglified, this was mostly the result of thoughtless city planning. In Kyoto, however, the destruction was deliberate. People coming to the city for the first time are shocked by the sight of the needle-shaped Kyoto Tower standing by Kyoto Station. This tower was built in 1964, at the urging of the city government, expressly to break the line of old tiled roofs, which were thought to look old-fashioned. The city was trying to tell visitors, ‘We are modern, we have nothing to do with all this old stuff around us.’ Despite the fact that tens of thousands of people signed a petition opposing the building of the tower, the city pushed it through.

  It was the symbolic stake through the heart. The construction of Kyoto Tower was followed by the rapid destruction of most of the old town, leaving only temples and shrines untouched. Each step of the way was marked with open attacks on the city’s heritage by the municipal administration. The most dramatic attack came quite recently with the rebuilding of Kyoto Station. A competition was held, to which both foreign and Japanese architects submitted a number of plans, some of them incorporating traditional features such as sloping tiled roofs. There was a super-modern design by the architect Tadao Ando in the shape of a great gate, reminiscent of the gates that used to stand on the edge of the city. But the selection committee rejected them all and chose the one plan that denied Kyoto’s history in every way. Designed by the leading architect at Kyoto University, it is a huge box faced with glass which looks rather like an airport lobby. There could be no greater proof of Kyoto’s hatred of Kyoto.

  As the city has degenerated, the monks in their temples, living in a world divorced from the life around them, have also lost track of what they are preserving. I used to always take guests to Entsu-ji, a quiet temple far to the north of Kyoto, which has a sublime example of ‘borrowed scenery’. You enter from a narrow corridor, and suddenly the scenery opens out before you. The garden beyond the verandah is a carpet of moss in which are placed long flat stones. You raise your eyes, to be met with a long hedge at the far side of the garden. Look higher and you can see a grove of bamboo appearing from behind the hedge, and beyond that is Mt Hiei, rising between two trees like a painting framed in pine. The scenery of the inner garden and the outer world are in marvelous harmony. I have visited Entsu-ji many times, sat on the verandah and spent light-hearted hours looking out at that scene. However, when I brought a friend there recently, I realized that even Entsu-ji has been infected with the Kyoto malaise. The view was as beautiful as ever, but the ‘quiet’ verandah was not so quiet. A taped explanation of the garden by the head priest was being noisily broadcast over a public-address system. My friend felt ill at ease, and we left quickly.

  I always recommend three travel items to friends who visit Japan: slip-on shoes to go easily in and out of Japanese buildings; loose pants or dresses so as to be able to sit comfortably on the floor; and earplugs to block out the noise at Zen temples. Ryoan-ji, site of the famous rock garden, was notorious for its taped announcements, although it has cut them back recently due to frequent complaints from foreign tourists. On the back of the admission ticket to Ryoan-ji is written: ‘Quietly open your inner mind, and converse within the self’. Clearly, the people in charge of the temple have forgotten what this means.

  The garden at the Daisen-in temple in the grounds of Daitoku-ji is one of Zen’s great masterpieces. It begins with a landscape of jagged rocks from which a river of sand flows – reminiscent of Ni Tsan’s mountain wildernesses. As you walk along the verandah, you come across a stone in the shape of a boat in the river of sand. You can feel your point of view being drawn closer. Then you round the corner, and the river of sand opens wide, with just two mounds of sand in it. You are now so close you are looking at the ripples themselves. And finally, there is only flat sand, the world of mu, or ‘nothingness’, which is at the core of Zen. But what do you see at that point? A large metal sign with red lettering saying ‘Daisen-in. Cultural Property. HITACHI’.

  At last count, Daisen-in features four signs saying ‘HITACHI’, and you will find them in front of most other historical monuments. Why the Cultural Ministry decided to make Hitachi advertisements a part of Japan’s cultural heritage is a mystery. In Paris, you don’t find a sign saying ‘Notre Dame. RENAULT’, or in Bangkok, ‘The Emerald Buddha. THAI CEMENT’. In fact, at such cultural sights, you don’t see advertisements at all.

  The end result of decades of purposeful destruction is that today Kyoto consists of very well-preserved temples and shrines, situated in an urban conglomeration of electric wires, metal and plastic. The monks fill their gardens with signs and loudspeakers; the centers of traditional art fill their headquarters with polished granite. In the modern city there is no place for kimono, screens, scrolls and most of the other traditional crafts, all of which are in terminal decline. For students of history, this is fine. They will push their way through the urban jungle to the Gold Pavilion, and be pleased that it is Muromachi period; and then they will go to the Hall of the Thousand and One Buddhas, where they can learn about Kamakura-period sculpture. But for everyone else, for people who simply want to take a stroll and enjoy the atmosphere of a place, Kyoto no longer satisfies. So it is being replaced by a totally new type of cultural attraction: European theme parks. There are several of these in Japan, the largest being Shima Spain Village, in Mie Prefecture, and Huis ten Bosch, the Dutch town near Nagasaki. Already, the total number of visitors to these places is approaching the number who come to Kyoto, and within a few years will outstrip it. In particular, travelers from Southeast Asia are flocking to Huis ten Bosch.

  When I first heard about Huis ten Bosch I was baffled. What interest could a reconstruction of a Dutch town possibly have, when in Kyoto and Nara, Japan had its own traditional cities? I went to visit Huis ten Bosch on behalf of a Japanese magazine, intending to write an exposé of this cultural travesty. But what I found there took me completely aback. It is perhaps the single most beautiful place I have seen in Japan in ten years. There are no signs, no wires, no plastic, no loudspeakers and no HITACHI. All the buildings are faced with rough-surfaced bricks and natural materials; the interiors, as well, are decorated with the most sensitive attention to color and lighting. Even the embankments along the sea are made of piled-up rocks, instead of concrete, in order to preserve the ecosystem of the shore. In my modern hotel in Huis ten Bosch, I sat on a wooden deck built out over a canal, and listened to the birds chirp while I ate my breakfast. In Kyoto, something like this might be possible in one of the remaining old inns, but it is completely out of the question in any of Kyoto’s dreary modern hotels. Huis ten Bosch was everything the new Kyoto is not – namely, peaceful and beautiful. To my great embarrassment as a lover of Jap
anese art, I could hardly bear to leave the place.

  The future of Japan, and possibly of all East Asia, is going to be theme parks. As living cities like Kyoto decay, they will be replaced by copies. For example, even as the Chinese are leveling vast stretches of the old city of Beijing, there are plans to build a new ‘old Chinese city’ of thousands of homes just outside town. In Japan, the most popular copies at the moment are of European cities, but the time is not far off when the Japanese will begin copying themselves. In the town of Ise, for example, a large tourist village built in pseudo-traditional style has been developed near the gates of the Grand Shrine of Ise.

  Tamasaburo said recently, ‘Kyoto is beyond preservation. The next step will be re-creation.’ In some ways this will be a good thing, especially if it results in buildings such as the first machiya that Kawase took us to. But if it is just a matter of the look of things, then Kyoto will probably never do it as well as a well-planned theme park. The sad thing is that copying the past is not necessary. There are many ways of bringing wabi into the modern world. For example, buildings made of untreated cement slabs, pioneered by Japanese architects, are an attempt to use rough, simple materials in a sophisticated way – contemporary wabi. There are some rare modern masterpieces in the city, such as Ando Tadao’s Times Building, where Ando incorporated the Takase River into the overall design. Architecture like this takes the spirit of Kyoto’s tradition and translates it into modern media. Ando’s building points the way to a middle road between the use of wood and paper, and the use of shiny marble and plastic. That road, rather than simply endlessly guarding the past, would have been the most exciting one for Kyoto. But it was the path not taken.

  Kyoto’s great treasure did not lie in its temples and shrines, nor in the outward look of its streets. It lay in the intricately complex customs and elegant life of its citizens. They were proud people who felt they were above common pleasures like the yomise stalls which everyone else enjoys in summer. Over the centuries, they spun for themselves a gorgeous web of wabi, with all its artifice, snobbery and artistic refinement. This still survives, but barely. When it goes, I will move to Huis ten Bosch.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Road to Nara

  Follies

  I am often asked to show guests around Kyoto and Nara. Typically, we start with Kyoto, but after a few days or so there comes a moment when I can see my guest beginning to grow weary. The intense refinement and detailed conventions of Kyoto life become oppressive. Of course, no one ever goes so far as to voice the word; most people are not even conscious of the feeling, but its presence shows clearly in the glazed look of their eyes. This is when we leave Kyoto for Nara.

  Japan’s first capitals in the sixth and seventh centuries were situated on the Yamato plain, southwest of Nara. The capital moved frequently, gradually working its way up to present-day Nara in 720, and then northwest to Kyoto in 794. The moving capital left temples, shrines, palaces and tombs in its wake, scattered over a huge area on the plains and in the mountains surrounding Nara – Yamato, Asuka, Yoshino, Koya and Uji. Later rulers piously continued to support these relics, and so the building and rebuilding of Nara went on long after power had moved elsewhere. ‘Nara’ is thus much larger than simply the city of Nara or the period when Nara was capital. It encompasses the entire region between Kyoto and Wakayama, built up over a thousand years between the sixth and sixteenth centuries.

  Until the sixth century, Japan’s history is cloudy: only archaeological digs indicate what life before that time was like. But in the sixth to eighth centuries, Japan adopted Chinese writing, architecture and Buddhism, and the basic framework of Japanese culture emerged from the mist. Ancient Shinto, Imperial power, esoteric Buddhism, the role of the court nobles, early poetry and arts of wood and stone took primal shape. These were the rough timbers which Kyoto culture was later to refine into polished and squared wood.

  Kyoto culture stops at around Kyoto Station: in my view, everything south and east of the train station belongs more to Nara than to Kyoto. So my guests and I start out from the station, driving south along the foothills of Kyoto’s eastern mountains. Here stand Sennyu-ji, Tofuku-ji and other temples, nestled in enormous tree-filled grounds along the hillsides. There are very few tourists, and the atmosphere is expansive and relaxed. Inside Tofuku-ji, there is a small deck jutting out from the main temple, above a ravine overhung with maple trees. Standing on that deck, looking out over leaves rustling in the wind and a small wooden bridge far below, one feels deep in the hills, although the temple is only ten minutes south of Kyoto Station.

  Much has been written about the way Japanese buildings harmonize with nature, but there is another side to this: the strong tendency to bind and restrict nature. The gardens of Kyoto developed from this tendency, with every tree carefully pruned and set amongst discreet rectangles spread with white sand. Once I was seated on the verandah of a Zen temple in Kyoto and I praised the shape of a particularly well-formed pine branch. ‘Well, it’s not quite right,’ apologized the abbot. ‘It’s taken about one hundred and fifty years to get it to this point, but I’d say another seventy, no, eighty years, and it will be perfect.’

  I personally appreciate the desire to bring order to a garden, having spent years fighting the weeds and vines at Tenmangu and Chiiori; if you turn your back for a minute, all is immediately overgrown with unruly greenery. So when the early Japanese built a temple or a palace, the first thing they did was to make a clearing in the woods and spread it with gravel. This was called the saniwa, or ‘sand garden’, and important acts of government took place there: criminals were judged, and shrine maidens went into a trance and delivered the oracle of the gods. In later times, under the influence of Zen and martial discipline, the saniwa became the basis of the Zen rock gardens that exist in Kyoto today.

  The rock garden of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto is known worldwide, and much ink has been spilled describing the layout of its rocks, the raking of the sand and even the surface texture of the surrounding wall. But nobody ever talks about the shady trees behind the wall. This is like talking about fish while ignoring the sea. The garden at Ryoan-ji lives because of the surrounding trees. Problems arise when the roots of a tradition like the saniwa are forgotten, and it expands beyond its native environment. Golf, as practiced on the rounded grassy slopes of Scotland, was a benign sport, combining the pursuit of leisure with enjoyment of the outdoors. But the courses being built all over the world today, which require drastic alterations to deserts, forests and mountains, have wreaked untold environmental damage. Likewise, the sand gardens of Kyoto worked because they existed within the surroundings of the rich, native forest. As the forests disappear, or are replaced with stands of industrial pine, there is less and less need for sand gardens. Applied indiscriminately to modern urban surroundings, the tradition of raked sand creates only sterility. Sometimes I think the aim of Japan’s ruling bureaucracies is to turn the entire nation into a saniwa, in which patches of greenery exist only as slight variations in a sea of white concrete. This is the modern context for the deck at Tofuku-ji, where the maple branches spread out unrestrained and the little bridge in the ravine is the only sign of human presence.

  Just south of Tofuku-ji is Fushimi-inari Grand Shrine, also built along the eastern hillside. It is the main shrine of the Inari cult, dedicated to the god of rice (and therefore money and prosperity), and the god’s messengers, foxes. There are numerous Inari shrines in Japan, but this is the largest and oldest of them. The Japanese rarely bring foreign visitors here because the shrine has little in the way of architecture or gardens of historical importance. Also, the hundreds of small shrines in its precincts devoted to fox spirits and magical stones smack of animism and superstition.

  The gardens of Kyoto, in addition to being highly controlled, usually have fixed spots such as verandahs from which to view them. There is a strong sense that these gardens are ‘art’, with particular points of view from which they must be seen. But Fushimi-inari is not
one site to be viewed from one angle; it is an experience that you must pass through, like dreaming. At the entrance is an enormous cinnabar-red torii gate, and beyond that, an outdoor stage and main hall. Before the main hall are two large fox statues: one with its mouth open, the other holding a key in its teeth. (Foxes are considered to be magical creatures, with the ability to bewitch human beings.) Above the entrance is a banner with another symbol of Inari, a flaming jewel, which also represents occult power. Behind the main hall is a procession of several hundred red torii, lined up so close together that they make a tunnel. Most visitors walk through this row of gates, then return home feeling a little disappointed. But they have turned back at the entrance to the dreamworld.

  If you continue walking up the hill beyond the first row of torii, you find another row of red gates, much larger than the first ones, and another row beyond that; in fact, a procession of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of torii wind ever deeper into the mountains. Each torii bears the name of the business that donated it. Many businesses in Japan have a red Inari torii somewhere, either on their premises in a small altar or in the grounds of an Inari shrine.

  Few people venture up into this quiet vermilion world. You climb up over knolls and into dells, gradually making your way deeper into the hillside, but looking back or looking ahead you see nothing but rows of red torii encased in a green forest. Vermilion is the color of magic. It was the color of Chinese Taoism, and since the Shang dynasty thousands of years ago it has been revered as being sacred to the gods. In the Analects, vermilion signifies noble qualities. Confucius said, ‘How regrettable when purple usurps the place of vermilion’ – meaning, ‘when the vulgar usurps the place of the noble’.