by Alex Kerr
From Taoism, vermilion entered Buddhism, becoming the color of temples and, later, palaces. Most of the ancient structures of Kyoto and Nara were once brilliant red, but the color faded as the temples aged. Meanwhile, Kyoto developed its culture of wabi, in which all color was watered down and muted. In the process, ‘art’ took over and ‘magic’ faded along with the vermilion. But at Fushimi-inari, the color is still alive, evoking ancient Taoism.
After walking for a while, you come upon groups of small altars, known as tsuka (mounds). Here, repeated in miniature, are the Inari themes first seen at the main shrine: each altar features a pair of animals, a stone stand and a magical stone behind the stand. There may be banners or carvings with the flaming jewel on them. On the stone stands you will find offerings of five or six grains of rice, one-yen coins, rows of tiny red torii and mini-bottles of saké, of the sort sold in vending machines. You will also find Japanese-style candles burning on the altars, with twisting fire rising from their wicks, echoing the motif of the flaming jewels. The atmosphere is more akin to Hinduism than to anything usually associated with Japan.
Some tsuka are higher than head height, others lower than one’s knees. They stand alone or in knots of tens. Foxes predominate, but there are also horses, snakes, squirrels, dogs, cats and even crocodiles. You are looking at Shinto’s animist and occult roots. The repetition, large and small, of a few basic themes – the flaming jewel, the red torii, the foxes – creates a hallucinatory atmosphere. I think this inevitably happens in places where a set of forms is endlessly repeated, such as in Venice (canals, bridges, lions, Gothic windows).
You can wander for hours under the torii and through the collections of stone altars, and as you do so, it’s easy to become completely disoriented. I once went walking with Diane along Fushimi-inari’s upper paths, and we lost our way. It began to grow dark, and the flickering candles made the scene utterly fantastical. We caught sight of someone coming towards us, but when we drew near, we found that he had become a stone fox. In the end we practically ran down the mountain, terrified of losing our wits amongst the foxes.
It is interesting to compare Fushimi with the Grand Shrine of Ise; with its pale wood and simple angular designs, Ise is often held up as Shinto at its purest. Unpainted and unadorned, the brute strength of its buildings conjures up a sense of awe, as if you are in the presence of a great divine power. There is nothing at Fushimi to even approach this. However, as for ‘Shinto at its purest’, I believe that Ise has strayed a bit from the true origins of Shinto. The fences enclosing the grounds and buildings are neatly laid out with perfect symmetry, their concentric rings demarcating inner precincts of increasing sacredness. In this arrangement can be seen the influence of Chinese palace architecture. But pure Japanese style in art and architecture has always involved the staggered, even higgledy-piggledy, placement of things. Apart from Kyoto and Nara, which were modeled after Chinese capitals, no Japanese city shows an ordered plan; Edo, the Shogun’s capital, was the most haphazard of them all. In China, the ruler’s palace was square or rectangular, with a central avenue leading up to it, and gates located north and south. The palace precinct in Edo, however, was an amorphous blob, surrounded by a zigzag of moats and ramparts, with no grand avenue, and no order to the gates or interior buildings.
Chinese axial symmetry has great power, but Japan’s zigzag arrangement of things can also be very pleasing, as a walk along the rear of the palace moat in Tokyo still proves. The zigzag approach led to the complicated crisscross of spatial arrangements found in tea ceremony, as well as the slashing diagonals found in paintings on folding screens, and the design of woodblock prints – almost everything traditional or modern which looks ‘Japanese’. The origins of this style can be seen in the chaotic layout of the tsuka at Fushimi-inari.
From Fushimi, I take my guests south to Byodo-in, the Phoenix Pavilion, which is known to everyone in Japan because its image is on the back of the ten-yen coin. It was built at the height of the Heian period by a Fujiwara prime minister, and is one of only a handful of surviving Heian-period temples in Japan. Its design is unique: there is a central hall, on either side of which are two outspread wings with raised eaves, facing a lake. The building looks like a phoenix alighting on the lake; hence the name. Byodo-in belongs neither to the Kyoto that was built after military rule began in the twelfth century, nor to religiously devout early Nara. It is an air pocket, a survivor from a realm we know little about today: the world of the idle Heian aristocrats.
Byodo-in is simultaneously a temple and not a temple. Only the central hall, which enshrines Amida, Buddha of the Western Paradise, is a temple; the rest of the building appears to be almost entirely useless. For instance, from the rear of the main hall projects a building that corresponds to the tail of the phoenix; other than simply representing a tail, it has no apparent function. Then, looking at the wings springing from either side of the main hall, you notice that the first floor is nothing but a high colonnade. The upper level is also open to the air, with neither walls nor sliding doors. The lintels are lower than human height, making it difficult for people to even enter. It is hard to imagine what the upper level was ever used for, although one guess is that orchestras sat and played music there, while the aristocrats boated on the lake.
I was once invited to an old estate in England, and while taking a walk around the grounds, I came across a garden surrounded by high hedges. In the middle of the garden was a tiny round temple straight out of Greek myth. On asking the owner of the estate what this building was for, she told me it wasn’t for anything; it was simply a ‘folly’. Follies exist all over England, but they are hard to find in Japan. The most luxurious buildings and gardens, such as the Katsura Detached Palace, were all created with distinct functions in mind. The ultimate luxury – complete functionlessness – is absent. Zen, in particular, is a serious affair: mu (nothingness) is a virtue, but muyo (functionlessness) is a sin. Zen gardens are designed with a specific aim in mind, to serve as aids in meditation or as guideposts on the way to enlightenment. In other words, gazing at a Zen garden does not come free: there is a spiritual bill to be paid for the pleasure. In contrast, Byodo-in is a perfect folly, born from the caprice of the Heian aristocracy. Gazing at it, you feel a sense of lightness, a desire to fly up into the heavens together with the phoenix. In post-Heian Japan, strictly ruled by military overlords, such caprice was almost unthinkable. Byodo-in is one of the few places in Japan that breathes the air of freedom.
After Byodo-in, I take my friends to the city of Nara. Just before we enter Nara Park, where the most famous temples are preserved, we stop at Hannya-ji Temple. Rarely visited by tourists, it is dedicated to Monju, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. Its gate is another bird-like construction, with wide eaves flung upwards into the sky. Inside is a garden of the type found only in Nara: a tangle of wildflowers, mostly cosmos, growing in profusion alongside the paths and on the base of the temple’s tall stone pagoda.
In Kyoto, and most other places in Japan, such wildness would never be tolerated. I recently visited the site of the reconstruction of a large Zen temple in Takaoka on the Sea of Japan coast, and was astonished to hear the supervisor, a senior official of the Cultural Ministry, say with pride, ‘The central courtyard of this temple used to be filled with keaki and pine trees hundreds of years old. So we cut all these unsightly trees down, and now we will be able to spread the entire courtyard, a full one thousand tsubo, with raked white sand.’ Such is the vision of Japan’s Cultural Ministry! But at Hannya-ji, wildflowers still grow untamed. Inside the temple, a charming statue of Monju, seated on his lion, gazes out over the sea of cosmos flowers and contemplates the flow of the centuries undisturbed.
From Hannya-ji, my guests and I descend into Nara Park, our destination being Nandaimon, the Great Southern Gate of Todai-ji Temple. For most visitors, the main attractions of the park are Todai-ji’s Hall of the Great Buddha and Kasuga Shrine, with its walkway lined with hundreds of stone lanterns. Nandaim
on is seen as no more than something you have to walk under to get to Todai-ji. However, for me, Nandaimon is the one perfect structure in the park. Built during the thirteenth century, when timber was plentiful, its huge pillars soar almost twenty-one meters into the air. The towering figures of two wrathful temple guardians are Kamakura originals, with furious faces and immense power in their bulging muscles. But most breathtaking of all is the massive roof, with eaves flung outwards and upwards like a bird taking flight.
The bird analogy recalls Byodo-in and Hannya-ji, and this is because all three buildings were built under the influence of Song and Yuan China. During this period, the Chinese experimented with architecture as fantasy, piling up multiple pavilions decorated with curling eaves. Almost every one of these buildings has perished in China, and only a very few remain in Japan, most of them in the area surrounding Nara. Ancient Chinese roofs from the old heartland in the north were originally straight A-frames. But gradually, a new influence began creeping up into China from Southeast Asia. As can still be seen today, the eaves of Thai and Burmese buildings transform into flame shapes as they extend downwards, then swoop back up into the sky. By Sung and Yuan times, the Chinese were experimenting with rising eaves, and this style was transmitted to Japan.
Japan was on the receiving end of influences from all over Asia and the Pacific, and, as a result, it had a wonderful variety of roofs. In addition to Sung and Yuan flaring eaves, there were palm-thatched stilt-houses from the south, with the upper half of the roof expanding outwards, Polynesian style. Another type of roof can be seen in the pit dwellings of the Yayoi period – holes cut into the earth, with a round, tent-like roof dropping almost to the ground. Indigenous Japanese roof styles mingled with those imported from the mainland and the islands of the South Seas to create the widest range of styles found in any nation in East Asia. As a result, Japan’s old cities, particularly Kyoto and Nara, had truly spectacular roof lines.
Rising eaves create a feeling of uplift and release, which can hardly be explained away as just a trend in architecture. The Taoist scholar John Blofeld once said to me, ‘In ancient Southeast Asia, the very raising of a building was considered taboo. Sinking pillars into the ground and setting a roof above them was believed to be a sin against Mother Earth. So they took the eaves that pointed down towards the earth and turned them back up towards the heavens. By doing this, they were absolved of having broken the taboo.’
The upswept roof became a part of Japanese architecture, and even in the thatched roofs of Iya, extra rice straw was added under the eaves to give them a little lift. However, the extreme upsweeping of eaves as in Nandaimon, or the gate of Hannya-ji Temple, is rare in Japan. In the Edo period, there was even a movement away from rising eaves when tea masters designed their pavilions to be very low, with straight roofs of many angles mixed in a jumble. It was a return to the ‘zigzag’ approach to life visible at Fushimi-inari, and it developed as part of a playful type of architecture known as suki.
Suki was the final destination of the wabi of Kyoto. Typically, art movements go through three phases: ‘early’, characterized by strength and simplicity; ‘classical’, when all elements reach harmonious maturity; and ‘baroque’, distorted and elaborate. Wabi followed a similar pattern. In its early period, it could not have been simpler, the purest wabi composition being Murata Juko’s tea garden (circa 1500) in the temple of Shinju-an in Kyoto: a little strip of moss running along a temple verandah, with three rocks, five rocks, seven rocks. That is all. Later, when tea ceremony came into its own in the seventeenth century, wabi entered a classical period, resulting in dramatic creations like the Katsura Detached Palace, where villas and tea pavilions stretch over acres of artificial hills and ponds. The scale is large and the designs are complex – alternating squares of blue and white paper pasted onto sliding doors, rock pathways inset with a mixture of long rectangles and small squares.
In the eighteenth century, the decorative conceits of Katsura went one step further, resulting in suki: proof that in the hands of architects and designers even the simplest art can become baroque. It was an architecture focused on details: a window here, a verandah there. The emphasis was still on natural materials, but now they were combined in fanciful and elaborate ways, with curved pillars in the tokonoma, lattices of unusual woods, and antique roof tiles and the bases of old columns placed for effect in moss gardens. In roofs, it produced a mix of thatch, tile, bark and copper, with eaves projecting every which way.
In East Asia the roof is everything – whether flared or projecting. Stand in front of the massive Higashi Hongan-ji Temple in Kyoto, and you realize that fully three-quarters of the total height of the building is roof. Think about the Forbidden City in Beijing, or the Royal Palace of Bangkok, and you will find that you are thinking almost exclusively of roofs. Thus, when the administrators of Kyoto and Nara set about destroying these cities, they began with the roofs. In the case of Kyoto, they built Kyoto Tower and dealt a mortal blow to the city’s roof line. In Nara, the jutting concrete ridges of Nara Prefectural Office had the same effect. Ever since its completion in 1965, generations of tourists have had to screen its unsightly concrete spears out of their photographs. It was as strong an attack on the roof line of Nandaimon and its neighbors as could be imagined. Luckily, however, Nara does not suffer from the self-hatred which afflicts Kyoto, so subsequent developments in the park are more promising. A large civic building, recently completed, has sweeping tiled roofs very much in the spirit of Nara architecture.
The traditional roof styles of East Asia face a mixed future. In Japan, most cities have already been turned into a jungle of concrete blocks, and the process is far advanced in Bangkok and Beijing as well. Swooping, curving and flaring roofs have turned out to be one of the most difficult cultural traditions to integrate with modernism. There was a period in prewar Japan, and in 1950s China, when large modern structures were capped by wide tiled roofs. But no self-respecting modern architect would be caught dead doing this today.
While extravagant roof lines are dying out in Japan’s city centers, they live on in the suburbs and countryside, and newly built houses in these areas commonly feature the complex joints and ridges of suki-style roofs. In general, however, Japanese architects have almost completely failed to integrate their own traditions into contemporary urban life. The only reason why interesting roofs survive in the suburbs is because residential architecture is considered a secondary area in Japan and has been ignored.
In the West, postmodern architects awoke from half a century of relentless modernism and rediscovered the traditions of the arch, the dome and the column, and they succeeded in incorporating these into a new modern idiom. Thailand, because of its thriving tourist industry, has seen imaginative experimentation with traditional-style roofs in modern architecture. Hotels such as the Amanpuri in Phuket or the Sukhothai in Bangkok are particularly successful examples. In Japan, however, the elite architects concentrate on building square office towers; sometimes, the more daring of them will incorporate arches and columns in the Western postmodernist manner.
The modernism which swept the West in the 1950s and ’60s is still clung to with almost religious fervor in Japan. In this, one can see Japan’s conservative habit of clinging to outside influences long after they have been discarded in their country of origin. For example, high-school students in Japan still wear black military uniforms with high collars and brass buttons, a style imported from Prussia in the nineteenth century.
A taste of Japan’s resistance to change and fear of departing from Western models was provided by the 1995 Venice Biennale. The government decided to entrust Japan’s exhibition to an art expert named Ito Junji, who proposed organizing the entry around modern suki design. Although still minor in influence, suki has undergone a renaissance recently, inspiring a group of younger contemporary artists and architects. There was a huge outcry from the ‘traditionalists’; that is, the old-style modernists. A leading photographer dropped out in
protest against this unwarranted intrusion of ‘Japaneseness’. Ito was raked over the coals by art critics who warned that ‘Japanese artists will no longer be able to eat at the main table of contemporary art’.
The old-fashioned ‘modern’ architecture jamming Japanese cities is in touch with neither Japan’s cultural roots nor the new standards of environmental harmony and human comfort that have developed recently elsewhere. Unfortunately, the traditionalists for whom Ito’s proposal came as such a threat include most of the bureaucrats whose building requirements ultimately determine trends in urban architectural design. In their view, cubes with elevator shafts and air-conditioning boxes on the roof are satisfyingly ‘modern’, and therefore preferable to the fantasy of Byodo-in, the soaring wings of Nandaimon or the playfulness of suki houses. I cannot help but think, ‘How regrettable when purple usurps the place of vermilion.’
CHAPTER 11
Outer Nara
Secret Buddhas
A friend of mine studied the art of bonkei: she learned how to place curiously shaped rocks and bonsai plants on a tray spread with sand to create a miniature landscape. But as she slowly worked her way up the hierarchy of bonkei technique, the final secret eluded her: no matter what she did, her sand never held together in the perfect waves and ripples of the master’s precisely arranged grains. Finally, after many years and payment of a high fee to obtain her license as a bonkei professional, she was to be told the answer. She bowed at the feet of the master, and he spoke. ‘Use glue,’ he said.
