Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  Tearing ourselves away from the ‘Age of the Gods’, we drive further south. As part of the spirit of Nara’s secrecy, lovers of this region frequent hideaways unknown or preferably not open to the general public; the writer Yukio Mishima’s occasional visits to the aristocratic abbess of Ensho-ji Nunnery were rooted in this cult of secrets. I too have a secret temple, situated in the mountains to the east of Yoshino and Mt Koya. My temple is called Seisen-an. The drive there is very pleasant, and the road winds past famous temples such as Hase-dera and Muro-ji. Deep in the mountains between these temples lies the town of Ouda. There’s nothing special to see in this region, so travelers are scarce. Around 1978, Abbot Daiki of Daitoku-ji found and remodeled an old village headman’s estate near Ouda. He slowly built up a complex of sub-temples and worship halls, one of which is Seisen-an – a farmhouse from deeper in the hills that was dismantled, moved to Ouda and restored.

  The abbot of Seisen-an is an American disciple of Daiki Roshi named John Toler. In 1973 while I was staying at David Kidd’s house, a man with a completely shaved head came to visit. This man was John Toler. He had been working as a writer for the Dentsu advertising agency, but had quit to become a Zen monk. I sat listening to John until late at night, as he explained all about Zen catechism and life as a monk in Daitoku-ji, including the misunderstandings that arose between him and his family in Lubbock, Texas. His mother once came to visit, and after a few days of touring the Zen gardens of Kyoto, she turned to John and said, ‘I’m sorry, John, I’m a little confused. Would you please explain again? You say you worship these gardens?’

  John spent four years in meditation at Daitoku-ji as a layman, and then entered its special practice hall for four more years as a monk. In 1980, his master, Abbot Daiki, sent him to Ouda. I recently discovered that John had first shaved his head only the day before I met him! As a result, I missed seeing him with hair by just one day. The five-hundred-year hibutsu missed by thirty minutes, John’s hair by a single day – I seem to have bad karma with Buddhism. Perhaps it is punishment for the years I have spent working for Oomoto, a Shinto sect.

  When I take friends to Seisen-an, John comes out to greet us dressed in monk’s robes. He shows us around the meditation hall, and then when dusk falls we sit around the living room talking to the other guests. Seisen-an, while remote, is a gathering place for artists, dancers, writers and other monks, so you are always bound to meet somebody interesting there. Just like when I first met John twenty years ago, we talk of Zen, art and life until late at night. Once I got John very drunk and tried to wheedle out of him the answer to the first Zen koan: ‘You know the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand?’ John refused to tell me, saying that the answer was not worth knowing, and the whole value of the koan lay in the process of figuring it out. But I insisted, plying him with more cups of saké. And finally he told me. The answer was clear as a thunderclap, before which all other reasoning is useless. But John was right: just knowing the answer did me no good whatsoever. It would seem that the entire point of secrets lies in not knowing them. At Seisen-an I sleep at the foot of a folding screen on which is written Su Tung-p’o’s ‘Red Cliff Ode’. My favorite line is right by my pillow: ‘I gaze at my loved one in a corner of the sky’. It seems the perfect theme for the mountains of Nara, filled with distant and unobtainable things.

  The best time at Seisen-an is morning. Generally, I am a night person and mornings are hard to face, but at Seisen-an I always get up early. The other residents are up at the crack of dawn ringing the temple bell or reciting sutras, so I feel guilty to be the only one sleeping in. I sit in a rattan chair on the temple verandah, and look out at the garden while drinking a cup of coffee. The neatly raked gravel stretches before me like a sheet of pure white paper. Around the gravel are trees, and beyond them, blue mountains trail off into the distance, range after range. There is no sign reading, ‘Seisen-an HITACHI’, nor any taped explanation. Just me, alone, with time to think.

  While staying at Seisen-an, I enjoy taking drives to the surrounding mountains. Japan’s ancient faiths sprang from the mountains. A well-known example of this is Omiwa Shrine, a few kilometers south of the tomb of Emperor Sujin. Here, there is nothing hidden inside the shrine as the object of worship – the mountain behind the shrine is the sacred object. The hills behind many shrines and temples are sacred, and so special sanctuaries, called oku no in (inner sanctuary), were built on the slopes behind the main halls. A particular favorite of mine is the inner sanctuary at Muro-ji, and if there is time I always try to take friends there. I was once talking to the curator of a museum in Nara, who said, ‘Muro-ji is a litmus test. If you ask someone, “What are your favorite spots in Nara?” and they answer “Yoshino” or “The Yamanobe Road”, that is fine. But if they say “Muro-ji’, then you can tell they truly know Nara.’

  While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Muro-ji is a litmus test of familiarity with Nara, it certainly is a singular place. Located in the mountains to the east of Ouda, Muro-ji is not far from the border with Mie Prefecture, on the very outer edge of the Nara region. Until the 1880s Mt Koya was completely closed to women, but Muro-ji welcomed them. It became known as ‘Mt Koya of Women’, and is the center of its own mandala, balancing Koya’s yang with Muro-ji’s yin.

  As you follow the road to Muro-ji along the edge of a gorge, a fifteen-meter-high stone Buddha carved into the cliff face springs into view. This is a magai-butsu (cliff Buddha), a common sight in China but rare in Japan. The magai-butsu near Muro-ji is of Bodhisattva Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, and was carved in the thirteenth century by a sculptor from China. But why a Maitreya Buddha out here in the middle of nowhere? There must have been some symbolic necessity for carving it. Maybe a Maitreya was required to fill this position in the larger mandala of the region; or perhaps the carver sensed geomantic power in this particular cliff face. In any case, the retired Emperor Go-Toba came all the way from Kyoto to attend the ceremony of opening the Buddha’s eyes, from which we can see that the carving of this Buddha was a national undertaking.

  Muro-ji’s grounds form a natural mandala. First, you enter the temple precincts by a bridge over a river. This is a pattern often seen in ancient shrines and temples, but the bridge to Muro-ji is particularly effective in conveying the message: from here on is sacred ground. A sign saying ‘Mt Koya of Women’ reminds you that this experience will be one of yin rather than yang. Then, passing through the gate, you climb the Armor Slope, so-called because from below you can only see wide rows of steps capped by the roof of the main hall above, looking like a helmet over a ribbed suit of armor. This stairway leads you upwards through the woods to halls of increasing mystical importance, culminating in the main hall, where you visit the Buddha of the Future enshrined within. Then you stroll over to the charming five-tiered pagoda, so small it seems almost doll-like. This tower, which is very feminine in atmosphere, is Muro-ji’s Konpon Daito. Finally, you climb up a narrow stairway of four hundred stone steps, rising through clumps of ferns and thousand-year-old cedar trees. When you clamber up the last step and see the inner sanctuary ahead of you, it is with the sense that you have arrived at the very end of the earth.

  Here, you stop. Looking around at the thousand-year-old cedar forest, you drink deeply of mountain air. You are standing at the heart of a mandala.

  CHAPTER 12

  Osaka

  Bumpers and Runners

  Like many countries, Japan is bipolar. In China, power has swung periodically over the millennia between the north, the center of government, and the south, source of the nation’s wealth. In the USA, the clear divide between the East Coast and the West Coast is so strong that at the Oomoto seminar, the biggest culture shock is not when Americans encounter Japanese, but when Californians meet New Yorkers. In Japan, the two poles are the Tokyo area (known as Kanto) in the east, and the four cities of Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto-Nara (called Kansai) in the west.

  While Tokyo, as capital, draws the choicest i
nternational events, it is considered politically important to give Kansai its due. So, after the 1964 Olympics, when Japan announced to the world that it had recovered from World War II and intended to become a global industrial power, it hosted an international event in Osaka: Expo 70, held the summer I hitchhiked around Japan and discovered Iya Valley.

  The Expo fairgrounds outside Osaka were centered around sculptor Taro Okamoto’s ‘Tower of the Sun’. The tower took Japan by storm, and its image on posters and on TV followed me everywhere that summer. It was a concrete and metal construction, with a cone-shaped base, two outstretched flipper-like arms and a round Picasso-esque head; it looked like a giant creature from outer space put together in a kindergarten art class. The statue can still be seen as you drive along the Meishin Expressway between Kyoto and Osaka. Once as I was driving past it with David Kidd, he remarked, ‘There is the ugliest thing ever made by the hands of man.’

  Welcome to Osaka. Few major cities of the developed world could match Osaka for the overall unattractiveness of its cityscape, which consists mostly of a jumble of cube-like buildings and a web of expressways and cement-walled canals. There are few skyscrapers, even fewer museums and, other than Osaka Castle, almost no historical sites. Yet Osaka is my favorite city in Japan. Osaka is where the fun is: it has the best entertainment districts in Japan, the most lively youth neighborhood, the most charismatic geisha madams and the most colorful gangsters. It also has a monopoly on humor, to the extent that in order to succeed as a popular comedian it is almost obligatory to study in Osaka and speak the Osaka dialect.

  Osaka people are impatient and love to disobey rules; in that spirit, the best way to approach the city is to dispense with preliminaries and go straight to the heart of the mandala, which in Osaka’s case is Tsutenkaku (the ‘Tower Reaching to Heaven’). Tsutenkaku is another of the towers which, like Tokyo Tower and Kyoto Tower, were built in every major city after World War II. Wartime bombing had almost completely obliterated Osaka’s old downtown area, so the city redrew the streets in a huge burnt-out district, and built Tsutenkaku in the middle of it. The tower stands in the center of a rectangle covering about twenty square blocks called Shinsekai (‘New World’), which is filled with restaurants, shops and theaters. Roads radiate from the arches under the tower like the avenues emanating from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. However, all resemblance to Paris, or even the amusement districts of other Japanese cities, ends here. Once the mecca of laborers, such as the farmers of Iya who flooded the cities in the decades after the war, Shinsekai has become a slum. In clean, organized and law-abiding modern Japan, this is an exceptional phenomenon.

  Most people visiting Shinsekai enter via Janjan Yokocho, an arcade stretching from Imamiya Station into the district’s interior. The minute you get out of the train station, you realize that you are in another country: drunks and homeless people stagger by, and young men are more likely to be wearing wide laborer pants and boots than the latest fashions from Tokyo’s trendy Harajuku area. You pass a street market where you can buy second-hand underwear or a single shoe. Janjan Yokocho is dark and dingy – you see the occasional rat scurrying across from one building to another – but it is crowded with people. They are coming to eat at the kushikatsu restaurants lining the street, which feature cheap meals of pork, chicken, onions and eggs, deep-fried on wooden skewers and washed down with plenty of beer and shochu (vodka made from rice). Interspersed among the kushikatsu restaurants are shogi halls, where people sit in pairs playing Japanese chess, watched through open latticed windows by knots of people gathered on the street outside.

  When I visit Shinsekai, I go to the barber before heading off for dinner. He offers a haircut for 500 yen, about one-fifth of the going rate elsewhere, and uses buzz shears, which are considered unfashionable in Japan nowadays. This was very convenient when my cousins Edan and Trevor were staying with me. They were very particular about their hair: Trevor liked his shaved up the sides, with a long Mohican strip at the top, and the fancy barbers in Kameoka and Kyoto never seemed to get it right. When I asked the barber in Janjan Yokocho if he thought he could handle hair like this, he replied, in English, ‘Okeydokey. I cut the hair of the American soldiers after the war. I know exactly what to do.’ He whipped out the buzz shears, and the work was over in a minute. The effect was exactly what the boys were looking for. The theme of Shinsekai is Cheap and Easy; in other words, this is not Japan.

  Not far from Tsutenkaku is a small theater with a sign outside saying ‘Japan’s Cheapest Theater!’ It’s also one of the best. Entrance is 200 yen (50 yen extra for a cushion), and traveling troupes of popular Kabuki perform here. These troupes, centered around one or two families, are the remnants of the hundreds of troupes that roamed the country before World War II. After the war, most of the smaller troupes went out of business, and the better known performers were consolidated into the Grand Kabuki we see today in Tokyo. But a handful of these families survived by adapting Kabuki to modern tastes. They dance not to samisen and shoulder drum, but to enka (modern pop songs). Their kimonos are made of pink gauze and gold lamé, and their wigs may be red, purple or silver.

  First, there is a love-and-loyalty play, and then some dances. The audience show their appreciation by placing cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes on the stage or stuffing five-or ten thousand-yen notes into the sashes of the performers. Then there will be an announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we introduce the sexy, curvaceous Baby Hanako!’ And with a roll of drums, a little girl of about four steps up to the microphone and belts out a song at ear-splitting volume. The children of these troupes start singing and dancing before they can read or write. My favorite at the moment is a boy of eleven named Bakudan Yuki (Yuki the Bomb), who can sing and dance better than any of the coddled children of the families of Grand Kabuki. In Grand Kabuki it is no longer necessary to appeal to the hearts of the public, but Yuki the Bomb immediately knows the effect he is creating by the amount of money stuffed into his sash. At the end of the performance, the troupe gathers outside on the street and waves good-bye to the audience.

  A few blocks away from Shinsekai is Tobita, Japan’s last kuruwa. In Edo days, prostitution was strictly regulated, and the courtesans lived in small walled towns within the cities, which had gates and closing times. These cities-within-the-city were known as kuruwa (enclosures). In Kyoto, the old gate to the kuruwa of Shimabara still stands, although Shimabara itself is defunct. The largest kuruwa was Yoshiwara, near Uguisudani Station in Tokyo. Within the walls of Yoshiwara, there was a lattice of streets lined with pleasure houses, a scene familiar in the Kabuki theater, where such streets form the backdrop of many love plays. The entrance to each pleasure house featured a banner with the name of the house on it; inside, women wearing gorgeous kimonos were on display. Today, Yoshiwara is still in business, but the boundaries, the street grid, the houses and the banners have been replaced by a jumble of streets sprinkled with love hotels and saunas, with the result that it looks not much different from most of the other places in Tokyo. If you can’t read the signs, you might not realize the nature of the neighborhood. Tobita, however, survives almost completely intact. There are no walls, but there is a precise gridwork of streets lined with low tile-roofed houses. In front of each house is a banner, and inside the entrance a young woman and the madam sit side by side next to a brazier. This is as close to Kabuki in the modern age as you can get.

  A word of caution: it is best not to stroll around Shinsekai or Tobita without a Japanese friend if you are a foreigner, as you might be accosted by a gangster or an unfriendly drunk. I usually go there in the company of an Osaka friend, Satoshi; he looks so tough that once, when he was on his way to a wedding dressed in a black suit and sunglasses, the police picked him up on suspicion of being a gangster. Many Japanese are afraid to enter the downtown neighborhoods of Osaka. There is one area in particular that taxi drivers will not go into at all because of the atariya (‘bumpers’), who make a living from bumping into your car a
nd then screaming that you have run over them. The whole neighborhood rushes out to support the atariya, threatening to act as witnesses in a lawsuit against you until you pay up. Even so, this pales in comparison to what can happen in New York and many of Europe’s large cities. The gangsters of Osaka and Kobe, known as Japan’s most vicious, keep largely out of sight, and in general, violent crime is rare. One of Japan’s greatest achievements is its relative lack of crime, and this is one of the invisible factors that makes life here very comfortable. The low crime rate is the result of those smoothly running social systems, and is the envy of many a nation – this is the good side of having trained the population to be bland and obedient. The difference in Osaka is only one of degree; the streets are still basically safe. What you see in Shinsekai is more a form of ‘misbehavior’, rather than serious crime. People do not act decorously: they shout, cry, scream and jostle one another; in well-behaved modern Japan, this is shocking.

  Osaka does not merely preserve old styles of entertainment, it constantly dreams up new ones. For example, Osaka premiered the ‘no-panties coffee shops’ with pantyless waitresses, that later swept Japan. In other places, the boom remained limited to coffee shops, but in Osaka they now have ‘no-panties okonomiyaki’ (do-it-yourself pizza) and ‘no-panties gyudon’ (beef-and-rice bowls). The latest, I hear, is ‘breast-rub coffee’, where a topless waitress, on delivering coffee to the table, rubs her customer’s face in the way the name would suggest.

  The entertainment is by no means limited to the sex business. Osaka pioneered a new type of drive-in public bath at Goshikiyu, near the Toyonaka interchange on the expressway. In general, public baths are slowly dying out in Japan, as the number of homes with their own bath and shower increases. However, an Osaka bathhouse proprietor of an entrepreneurial bent promoted the idea that an evening out at the public bath was the perfect family entertainment. He built a multistoried bathhouse with a large parking lot to service Japan’s new car-centered lifestyle. Inside, he installed restaurants, saunas and several floors of baths with every type of tub: hot, cold or tepid; with jacuzzi, shower or waterfall. On a Saturday night you can hardly get into Goshikiyu’s parking lot; the place is jammed with families with small children.