A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  Kyoto gave me very different feelings. It is true that when I was there I witnessed live on television, as I sat idly in my hotel lounge, the assassination of the Japanese politician Inejiro Asanuma, but I apparently thought the experience irrelevant to this essay.

  Kyoto means Capital City. For a thousand years this famous place, encouched in mountains upon the Kamo River, was the capital of Japan and the emblem of Japanese civilization, and even today it remains to the Japanese something special among their cities, far more than just an elderly provincial metropolis in the central hills. It reigns still as the supreme repository of their ancient traditions, their culture and their custom, their religion and their high-flown patriotism, their golden heritage and their resilient pride. To ninety million Japanese it is the very soul and melody of Nippon.

  To the foreigner, though, bouncing in by bus from Osaka, it seems at first sight something less than lovely: for though its setting is magnificent and its pose perennially imperial, yet the face it shows to the world is sadly coarsened. The frenzy of the new Japan has fallen upon Kyoto, cramming its streets with wild-driven traffic, tainting its old wisdom with doubt and disillusion. Kyoto was spared the worst tragedies of war, but it shares with the rest of Japan a sense of causes lost and ideals soured, of warped emotions and passions suppressed. The shape of this town was decreed by the Emperor Kammu eleven centuries ago, but Kyoto has long since lost its symmetry and pattern, and seems to lie there, as your bus lurches through the faceless streets, floundering and inelegant, a city of lost style.

  Both views are right: the impassioned Japanese, the disappointed alien. Kyoto as a whole is a plain place, shabby and shanty-like, but like other of the world’s great cities it is a place of reticent enchantment, a private place, a place behind walls, a place whose beauties you must search out, and whose meanings, like the exquisite subtleties of the Japanese tea ceremony, lie hidden beneath layers of innuendo. Kyoto is the most conservative of Japanese cities, still half living in its gilded heyday, when its monarchs and shoguns luxuriated in cultivated splendour, and the four great sects of Japanese Buddhism settled beneath its hills in ritual and meditation. The patricians of Kyoto are aloof and lofty still. The ultimate treasures of the place are jealously guarded. The tourists may click their shutters, the traffic may rage, the radios deafen: but away beyond the tawdry façade, even beyond the temples and the incomparable gardens, the spirit of this deep city lies unruffled, like a carp in a sacred pool.

  Temporal consequence abandoned Kyoto a century ago, when the emperors left it, yet for all its faded majesty it feels unmistakably a great city still, a city of lingering power and paramountcy, and sometimes even of menace. All that is most deep-rooted in the Japanese character persists in this introvert community: some of it enchanting, some of it hideous, some of it alarming, some of it delicate and fastidious beyond compare, some of it (to Western minds) perfectly inexplicable. In Kyoto you may observe, still extant and vigorous, an advanced and elaborate form of society that has no real contact with the ways of the West. It has its department stores and its television studios, of course, its airline offices and its air-conditioned hotels, yet it remains at heart among the most oriental of cities, looking at the world like some heavy-lidded potentate peering across the fun-fairs from a high window of his castle.

  A myriad shrines, temples and mansions powerfully fortify this sense of hidden strength and exclusivity. They are scattered across the city like gems in mud, unexpectedly at the ends of culs-de-sac, magnificently among pine groves on hillocks, splendidly in flamboyant courtyards. In Kyoto there are nearly two thousand Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines and palaces of importance, giving to every corner of the metropolis oblique suggestions of sanctity, delicacy and wisdom. Some are vast and portentous, their steep cypress-bark roofs (fuzzy with moss) rising high in grandeur above the houses, their ceremonial gongs gigantic beneath their wooden shelters, their spotless passages meandering interminably through gilded screens, painted ante-rooms, gardens of infinite sophistication, tea-houses of faultless proportion. Some are no bigger than garden chalets, flickering small shrines of contemplation, reclining in rotting silence beneath high garden walls, or balanced beside rushing rivulets. Some are the empty palaces of the emperors and the shoguns, soaked in grandeur and symbolism: their wonderful gardens representative of the ocean, or the Inland Sea, or peace, or Paradise, or a fleet of treasure-ships, or the cosmos, their chambers rich with painted tigers, bamboo groves, sea-birds, turtles. Some are the great prayer-houses of monks and holy men, mysterious with candles and slow movement, the tinkle of bells, the fluttering of sacred papers, the fragrance of incense, the murmured incantations that will bring the Jodo brethren, in their after-life, infallibly to the Western Paradise. Some are the storehouses of mighty treasures, like the thousand images of the goddess Kannon in the Temple of Sanju-sangendo – a fabulous phalanx of glistening golden figures, silent, many-armed, sad-eyed, accusatory, each one stuffed with Buddhist scripts, rank upon rank, eye upon eye, attended by the Gods of Thunder and Wind, the Spirit of Merciful Maternity, the Spirit of Devotion, the Spirit of Exorcism. Some are airy gems of lucidity, like the little golden pavilion called Kinkakuji, which was once burnt down by a mad monk, but now stands again featherweight above its lake, with one room reserved for poetry-reading and incense parties, and a rustle of conifers all around. Some are shrines of awful solemnity, poised upon high places, approached by tall breathtaking steps, with pagodas lonely among the larches and mountain streams rushing by below. The great buildings of Kyoto are inexhaustible and inescapable. It would take weeks only to glimpse them all, and because they are distributed through every ward and every suburb, they give the city dignity in depth, and clamp its drab sprawling fabric powerfully together.

  The quiddities and idiosyncrasies of the Japanese tradition, surviving here more potently than anywhere else, contribute no less to the intensity of Kyoto. This is a knobbly, enigmatic kind of entity, a city for initiates, streaked with eccentricity, rich in grace-notes. Jammed beneath the eaves of one great temple you may see an old umbrella, dropped there aeons ago by a divine personage, and preserved there for ever as a sign of holy favour. In another you may admire a painting of Fujiyama whose perspective falls into accuracy only if you kneel before the canvas. In a third you may hear the floor-boards, squeaking beneath your tread, ‘emitting a sound’ (as the guide-book says) ‘resembling the song of a Japanese bush warbler’. You may walk the soft paths of a garden clothed entirely in moss, a padded shadowy retreat for contemplatives; you may hear the hollow rhythmic clatter of a deer-scarer, a hinged wooden tube animated by the passing water of a stream; or you may wonder at the great chains hanging down the rooftops of the Imperial Palace – placed there for the convenience of fire-fighters, but ‘also forming’, says the guide hopefully, ‘a kind of ornament’. If you are specially privileged you may even catch sight of the slightly improper medieval picture which, wrapped in innumerable silks and stored in impenetrable caskets, is regarded as so precious a possession that only twenty people are allowed to view it each year.

  The rice-paper windows of the Kyoto palaces are often pierced by children’s fingers or the beaks of inquisitive birds, but they are mended characteristically: over each hole a small piece of paper is meticulously glued, cut by eager fingers into entrancing flower patterns, every petal of perfect symmetry.

  *

  Everyday life in Kyoto is patched with similar fastidious grace. Of all the big Japanese cities, this remains nearest to the water-colour Japan, the Japan of the print-makers and the flower-makers. The main streets are dreadfully banal, but beyond them are alleys of seduction. Here the butterfly kimono, the white stocking, the cloven boot and the flowered kerchief may be seen down any back street, and the fringes of the city are full of brawny country folk, brown as goblins and wreathed in grins. Often you will hear, as you pass beneath some towering wall, the shrill whistling of strange flutes, or the pad of a Japanese drum. Possibly you will
encounter, on the grassy sunlit verge of the river, a wandering monk in a grey robe and a bulbous basket-work hat, begging his way to immortality. All around the city, on the high mountain skyline, the pine trees stand in willow-pattern silhouette, and sometimes you may catch the local students, in their peaked caps and drab serge uniforms, entreating a Shinto shrine for good marks in their examinations.

  Kyoto is also par excellence the home of the geishas, where those talented performers (part artists, part courtesans) are trained to an apogee of perfection, to perform their elaborate dances deliciously in many a lacquered salon, and bring contentment to many a paunchy protector. Half close your eyes one evening among the narrow streets of the geisha quarter, and you might almost be back in feudal Kyoto, before the razzle-dazzle West arrived. The lanes are gay with tea-houses and restaurants, dainty screens masking their entrances, soft slippers paraded invitingly at their doors. Hundreds of globular lanterns light the district, bathing it in orange radiance, and high above your head there floats an advertiser’s balloon, flaunting illuminated letters on its tail. Now and then between the houses you may glimpse the Kamo River, wide and gurgling, with a glitter of lights and gaiety on the opposite bank, and the dim moonlit hump of the hills beyond. Two or three young men go rolling noisily pleasure-bound; and suddenly there emerges from some unexpected alley a vision of the legendary Japan – a geisha in all her plastered glory, moving fast and purposeful towards an assignation. Immensely tall is her mound of hair, jet black and shiny; her face is vivid with white and scarlet; her costume is gorgeous with silks, sashes, the gaudiest of clashing colours and the floridest of patterns; and as she hastens awkwardly down the street, embellished from head to foot with paint and brocade, she seems less like a living woman than some fabulous toy, some last masterpiece by Fabergé, enamelled like a queenly trinket, animated by the ultimate refinements of clockwork.

  For Kyoto is still a capital, despite the rebuffs of history: within these old walls, behind these dainty shutters, up these temple stairs, hidden in these perfumed gardens, along these green river boulevards, in the silence of these tea-houses and honoured libraries, high on the mountains or lost among the moss, infused into the very texture of Kyoto is the essence, the fragrance, the pith of Japan.

  *

  All this is true, and it is the continuity of Kyoto life that gives this place its sense of power. No less real, though, are those corroded aspects of modern Kyoto that affront the foreign visitor like a juke box in an abbey; and it is the harsh juxtaposition of the near-sublime and the almost unbearable that gives the city its sting, and its bitter after-taste.

  Kyoto does not leave every visitor soothed or elevated: there is something disturbing to its quality, some hint of the morbid or the unhealthy. In some ways it is a dead city, rotting among its mementoes, but in others it is, like the rest of Japan, pulsing and proliferating with hybrid life, part ordered familiar past, part groping present. It is not serene, no longer Heian-kyo, the City of Peace. Hardly anywhere in Kyoto is ever empty, except the cloistered family gardens or the remoter forest glades. Down every street the citizenry pulses with a babel of horns and a gallimaufry of styles, from the immaculate obi to the jeans and sweaters of rip-roaring adolescence. Through every brooding temple the Japanese tourists noisily pour – schoolchildren by the multitude, festooned in satchels and luncheon bags, honeymooners ceaselessly photographing each other, businessmen gravely bowing one another out of the sight-seeing bus. At every holy portal the souvenir-sellers raucously greet you, brandishing their postcards or dangling their toy birds, and the mendicant ex-soldiers, in parade-ground travesty, salute you with a hook hand or stand their wooden legs to attention. The trains, those unavoidable essentials of the Japanese scene, rumble through the night beside the river, and the taxis career maniacally among the rattling trams. Sometimes you may see a bride in kimono, but just as often you will see her in a hired Paris copy, with her bridegroom pin-striped and wing-collared, and her father displaying the unmistakable satisfaction of a man who is going to charge it all on his expense account. They play baseball in the shadow of Kyoto’s shrines. They practise athletics around the wall of the Imperial Palace. In Kyoto today you can never be quite sure whether some picturesque bauble is an object of Shinto veneration or an advertising notion. It is a two-faced city: one head a phoenix, one a jackdaw.

  Is it a ferocious city, too? Do there linger yet, among these symbols and sanctities, some old savageries of the Japanese spirit? Does a sword glint sometimes, up on the hill? Perhaps. Kyoto, for all its enclaves of perfection, feels a troubled place. Even the most fulsome of tourists may sometimes sense, as they pass from temple calm to highway frenzy, some buried malaise in the flavour of this great city. Kyoto is the soul of Japan, a microcosm of the inner nation. You may taste all the fascination of this astonishing country as you wander among Kyoto’s marvels – the Sparrow Chamber or the Wild Geese Chamber, the Silver Pavilion or the Hall of a Thousand Mats, the paintings of the Thirty-Six Famous Poets, the Veranda of the Archery Contest, the immortal garden of Ryuanji: but you may feel obscurely ill at ease in the Hall of the Imperial Visits, and all too likely the blare of a loudspeaker or the vicious hooting of a taxi horn will drown the sound resembling the song of a Japanese bush warbler.

  Hong Kong

  I had never been to Hong Kong before. It was still a British Crown Colony then, but I was struck less by its Britishness than by its Chineseness, which inspired me into some wildly imaginative statistics.

  More people live in Hong Kong than in all the rest of the world put together, and they make more noise than a million electric drills, and they work like automation, and their babies are beyond computation, and their machinery chitter-chatters away for twenty-five hours every day, and in their markets they sell every fish that was ever caught, and every shrimp that ever wriggled, and every crab that ever pinched, and their excellent shirts cost fourpence-ha’penny apiece, and there are five million Chinese for every European in the city, each one of them more energetic than a power station: and all these unbelievable paradoxes of prolixity and profusion are a lesson in the impermanence of power and the mutability of history.

  *

  Just over a hundred years ago the British seized Hong Kong from an addled China, and were conceded sovereignty over it ‘in perpetuity’. The island was almost uninhabited, but they made of it a tremendous port and a gunboat station supreme, where British merchants could command the China trade beneath the guns of the Royal Navy. Hong Kong became one of the greatest of free ports and entrepôts, and a brilliant symbol of European superiority. Here the techniques of the Western world were applied to the corrupt and ramshackle structure of China. The merchant princes lived in splendour on the eminence of the Peak, while across the hills in China the impotent Asians squabbled and cheated each other and carved the ivory ornaments that would one day look so pretty upon the mantelpiece in Epsom.

  Today the British are still in Hong Kong, and the rich merchants roll down from the Peak each morning in their big black ponderous limousines. The great banks and merchant houses are still magnificently bustling, the company flags fly bravely beside the Union Jack. But you cannot spend a day in Hong Kong without realizing that it lives by the courtesy, and at the mercy, of the new China. Times have changed with an imperial vengeance. The long grey warships that still lie in the harbour (successors to Aphis and Mantis and the elegant old river gunboats) no longer fool anybody, least of all the hard-headed British. Hong Kong is indefensible, militarily and economically, and it lives half on trust and half on cynicism.

  Consider its geographical situation. If you stand on a high place on Hong Kong Island you can see virtually the whole of the Colony. Below you is Hong Kong itself, for ever England, and beyond it is the glorious sweep of the harbour, crammed with the steamers and junks and ferryboats and launches of free enterprise, never silent, never motionless, one of the great mercantile waterways of the world. But in the middle distance are the mountains of China
proper, and most of the land in between – the New Territories, the essential hinterland of Hong Kong – does not belong to Britain, but is only held on a lease that expires towards the end of this century (if international leases have any meaning by then). Not only is China ominously close. In its own back yard British Hong Kong has only the precarious rights of tenancy.

  Or move, for another view, to an economic vantage point. At West Point on Hong Kong Island there is a wharf where the junks arrive from Pearl River and Canton, in communist China. It makes no bones about its affiliations. In the tumble-down eating-house, where the labourers stoically consume their rice and villainous fish, a huge poster proclaims the industrial potential of communist China, and the tugboat outside carries on its superstructure a series of slogans about people’s rights and imperialist aggression and that kind of thing. Somewhere in an attic above your head a lonely but determined flautist plays a communist propaganda melody, and the ducks that are offloaded in their thousands from the rickety junks, crammed in huge wicker baskets and carried by relays of cheerful and courteous coolies – even the ducks are brain-washed Khaki Campbells. Without this traffic from China, without its ducks and hens and vegetables, Hong Kong probably could not long survive. The communists know that when the lease of that hinterland expires in 1997, Hong Kong will be theirs for the plucking: but they also know that if need be they could squeeze it into submission long before then. All the cards are theirs. They can take the place by force, if they are willing to risk a world war. They can starve it out. Or they can simply wait for another few decades, a mere flicker of time among the Chinese centuries.

  The British are not doing badly in Hong Kong, and are performing some good for the world, too, but the moral of this colony’s situation is a daunting one. The communist Chinese tolerate its independence partly because they have bigger things to think about, and partly because they don’t want to arouse new issues needlessly; partly because they need bargaining counters, and partly because they themselves find the economic services of Hong Kong useful. The capitalists of Hong Kong thrive because they do not believe the communists will move before 1998, at the earliest, thus leaving them time to make a quick new fortune or embellish an old one. The simple people get what benefit they can from good government and economic opportunity, and try not to think about the future.