Lost Japan (20 page)

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 mounting. 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.

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 Japanese 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.