Lost Japan (5 page)

The character
an
, meaning a thatch-roofed cottage, was perfect for the ‘house' part of the name, but it is used commonly for tea-ceremony houses, and so seemed too heavily ‘cultural'. But, thanks to the dictionary, we discovered that the same character also has the less common reading of
iori.
Combined with
chi
for flute, it gave us the name Chiiori, which had a playful ring to it. Shokichi wrote a poem about Chiiori, which was a big hit with the children, and Chiiori became the standard name for my house in the village. Years later, when I started making calligraphies and paintings, I used it as my artist's signature.

When I founded my art business I used the name again, calling my company Chiiori Ltd. It has been the source of endless trouble, since nobody has ever seen the archaic character
chi
, and nobody ever reads the character
an
as
iori.
Special seals had to be carved in order to file tax documents, and a font just for those characters had to be installed in my computer. Even so, I treasure the name. Although my work today keeps me in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, just looking at my company documents triggers memories of Iya.

In the process of restoring Chiiori I picked up certain skills, one of which was how to measure a house. In ancient China, the size of a building was defined by the number of pillars or ‘bays' lining the front and side of the structure. Japan inherited this arrangement, and standardized the width of one bay to be the same as the length of a tatami mat. It is from this system of bays and mats that Japan's modular architecture developed. Land is also measured in terms of tatami mats. The standard used even today, when all other measurements have gone metric, is the
tsubo
, defined as one square bay or two tatami mats (3.3 m
²
). The land my house sits on measures one hundred and twenty
tsubo.
In front, there is a narrow stretch of garden which drops off suddenly over a sheer stone wall. This wall is the boundary line of
the property. Standing on the wall is rather like standing on the battlements of a castle; one looks out over a cedar forest to mountain peaks ranging off into the distance. Immediately behind the house is a hillside overgrown with bamboo, through which a path leads to the nearest neighbors.

My house measures four bays by eight bays (approximately seven meters by fourteen meters). There is one large living room, three bays by three bays, fronted by a verandah, with a
tokonoma
and a Buddhist altar lining the back. This room, a stark expanse of black boards, is almost always empty. The middle room, two bays by two bays, centers on a sunken floor hearth. This is where most of the action in the house takes place: making the fire, cooking, eating, talking. Behind it are two small bedrooms, the only rooms in the house with ceilings over them (to protect sleepers from ash falling from the rafters). At the far end of the house is the kitchen and work area, which drops to an earthen-floored entrance.

The lower part of the house is constructed of squared and polished wood, with pillars lined up at regular intervals. But about one meter above head level, the structure suddenly changes. Linear becomes organic. Resting on the squared pillars are brute timbers, so massive as to seem wholly out of proportion to the size of the house. It is a very typical Japanese transition, also found in temple walls, where a sheet of perfectly smooth plaster drops to a base made from a jumble of rocks. Inside the house, all is flat surfaces and ninety-degree angles to a certain point; above are twisted and knotted timbers finished with adz cuts, huge tree trunks laid sideways, arching from one end of the house to the other.

I built shelves, closets and doors, and repaired the wooden verandahs. Carpentry is of course an unavoidable part of renovating a house, but in Japan what is most important is simply how one chooses to use the available space. This is a vital issue because traditional Japanese architecture is almost completely without walls. There are the pillars set at regular intervals that
support the roof – all the rest is extra. Sliding doors can be inserted or removed at will, allowing for a sense of openness and visual freedom. Japanese houses can be likened to open-air pavilions through which wind and light pass freely.

Old houses are remarkably spacious, but their inhabitants frequently divide them into small rooms and corridors with
shoji
or
fusuma
sliding paper doors, transforming the houses into cramped living spaces. In earlier times this was necessary to keep out the cold of winter and to protect the privacy of an extended family, but today there is much less need for such partitions. So the first thing to do when renovating a Japanese house is to remove the
shoji
and
fusuma.
The corridors and verandahs merge with the inner rooms, enlarging the space dramatically. When I moved into Chiiori, black wooden doors so heavy you could hardly move them blocked off the rooms. Taking them out banished to a large extent the oppressive darkness the young girl had complained of in her diary.

The use of space has everything to do with lighting. Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's book
In'ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows)
has become a modern classic. In it, Tanizaki makes the point that Japan's traditional art arose from the darkness in which people lived. For example, gold screens, which look garish in modern interiors, were designed to pick up the last struggling rays of light making their way into the dim interior of a Japanese house.

Tanizaki laments the fact that the beauty of shadows is no longer understood in modern Japan. Anyone who has lived in an old Japanese house will know how one always feels starved of light, as if one were swimming underwater. It was the constant pressure of this darkness that drove the Japanese to create cities of neon and fluorescent lights. Brightness is a fundamental desire in modern Japan, as can be seen in its uniformly lit hotel lobbies and flashing
pachinko
parlors.

In restoring an old house, it goes without saying that fluorescent lighting should be shunned, but this is not yet so obvious to
the Japanese. The older generation, who grew up in traditional gloom, wanted only to escape from all those shadows, so they greeted the advent of the fluorescent light with joy. The younger generation knows little else. In the West, people typically reserve fluorescent lights for kitchens, workspaces and offices, while the use of incandescent lamps, ceiling lights and spotlights for living and dining rooms is so standard as to be taken for granted. So visitors to Japan are unprepared for the complete and utter victory of fluorescent lighting, whose flat bluish glare has penetrated homes, museums, hotels, everywhere. Recently I spoke to a group of students of interior design and asked them how many had thought about illumination and done something to decrease the fluorescent lighting in their homes. Of forty students, there was only one.

Bando Tamasaburo, the Kabuki actor – who also performs in and directs movies – once said to me: ‘In Western movies there is a warmth and depth to the color. Not only are shadows abundant, but the shadows themselves have color. In Japanese films, there are few shadows, and the colors are flat and insipid. Living their lives under fluorescent lighting, the Japanese are losing their sense of color.'

The depopulation of Iya had made it a treasure trove of castaway objects of folk handicraft. I filled my house with a collection of old saws, baskets, buckets,
tansu
chests, carved bamboo implements, and so on, turning Chiiori into a handicraft museum. But no matter how magnificent these objects were, I found that the fewer I placed in the house, the more beautiful it became. I removed more and more, eventually leaving the thirty-six square meters of polished floorboards in the main room completely bare. With nothing except the ‘black glistening' of the open floor, the house took on the majesty of a Noh stage.

This openness reveals the Southeast Asian and Polynesian origins of the traditional Japanese lifestyle. The way the entire house rests on high supports (essentially poised on stilts) and the
A-frame construction of the roof beams are also from Southeast Asia. But most characteristic of all is the ethos of the ‘empty room'. Once I went on a sailing voyage with my father through the islands near Tahiti, and I noticed that the people sat in simple open rooms, with nothing but a TV. In my travels to Southeast Asia I have noticed that in old Thai and Burmese houses there is little other than a Buddhist altar.

Chinese, Korean and Tibetan houses are a completely different story. Even the house of a poor person in these countries is filled with stools and tables, and in the case of China, the placement of furniture developed into an art form in its own right. Japanese houses, however, were built for the lifestyle of the empty room. Tatami mats and polished wooden floors reject things. They want to be empty. One eventually has no choice but to give up all decoration and surrender to the serenity of the empty room.

With the interior of the house cleaned and restored, it was now time to attend to the leaky roof. Thus began my long ‘thatching saga'. Japanese roofing thatch is made of a high-growing grass with long, blade-like leaves and delicate seed fronds. Known as
susuki
, it appears in countless screens and scrolls as the ‘autumn grass' so beloved of poets and painters. Cut and bound to a farmhouse roof, it is called
kaya.
It is more durable than rice straw: roofs thatched with
kaya
can last for sixty or seventy years.

The way to thatch a roof is as follows: strip away the old
kaya
, revealing the timber construction of the roof; then mount a frame of split bamboo over the timbers, and on top of that lay fifty centimeters or more of thatch, lashed to the timbers with straw rope. It sounds straightforward enough, but I was wholly unprepared for the huge amount of thatch required. One day, as I was blithely planning the reroofing, Omo took me aside and calculated the volume of thatch Chiiori would need. Including the area under the eaves, the floor area of the house is about one hundred and twenty square meters. The area of the roof would
be three times that figure. For each square meter of roof, about four bundles of thatch would be needed, bringing the total required to fourteen hundred and forty bundles of thatch. A single bundle cost 2000 yen, bringing the cost of the thatch alone to 2,880,000 yen; in today's dollars, that comes to about $36,000!

For me, who took five years to repay a loan of 380,000 yen, repairing the entire roof with new thatch was out of the question. Instead, Omo helped me buy another abandoned house, about half an hour's walk away. I bought the building for 50,000 yen and, assisted by the villagers, Shokichi and a friend from Colorado, I dismantled it. Stripping the thatch from the roof, we strapped it to our backs, four bundles at a time, and carried it over the mountain paths to my house. As it was old thatch, the accumulated soot of decades of hearth fires puffed out with every step, and by the end of each day we all looked like coal miners.

In the summer of 1977 we used the thatch to repair the roof at the back of the house. Facing north, this section of roof was constantly in shade and so suffered from damp, and was in considerably worse shape than the thatch at the front. The local thatcher was busy rethatching the roof of the Asa mansion deeper in the valley, the enormous farmhouse where the descendants of the Heike leader lived. In festive spirit, the villagers, my friends and I rethatched the back of the roof ourselves. Omo warned me that the old thatch was already weak and would not last long, but for the time being Chiiori was saved.

The next few years in Iya were happy, dreamlike ones. Sometimes I would hike with friends and the village children to a swimming hole deep in the mountains, known as Kunze, which means ‘Smoky World'. Omo's mother wrote a poem about it, in which she used the name to suggest the smoky atmosphere inside Chiiori. There was no trail leading to this pool; only Eiji knew the way. For three hours we would scramble over boulders while Eiji hacked his way through brambles until we reached a
waterfall that cascaded into the pool. It was blue, cold and so deep that none of us were ever able to dive all the way to the bottom. The villagers believed it to be the abode of a dragon. We would take off our clothes, dive in and swim about, even though the villagers warned us that swimming in the nude at Kunze would not be taken well by the dragon. After spending an afternoon happily splashing around in the pool, we would start home, and then, invariably, it would begin to pour. The dragon, god of rain, was showing his wrath.

In the evenings we would go out into the garden to watch the shooting stars, so common that we often saw as many as seven or eight in an hour. Later we would go inside and tell ghost stories, and then crawl into a cave of green mosquito netting and sleep huddled together in the middle of the floor.

It is said that owning an old Japanese house is like bringing up a child. You have to constantly buy new clothing for it. You must replace the tatami mats, repaper the sliding doors, restore rotten timbers on the verandahs – you can never leave the house unattended. Chiiori was of course no exception, and the problem with the roof in particular eluded any quick and easy solution. By the early 1980s the second-hand thatch on the rear part of the roof was leaking again, and it became clear that I had no choice but to get the local thatcher to undertake a full-scale rethatching.

So I set out on my second quest for thatch. However, with the 1980s had come an even more serious wave of emigration from the valley, and the people left in Iya had cast away most elements of their traditional lifestyle. After a long search, I finally tracked down the valley's last surviving field of cultivated
susuki
grass. Over the next five years, I gathered fifteen hundred bundles of thatch. In the process, I saw how even in the peasant culture of Iya, the complex use of natural materials was far advanced. For example, there are several different varieties of thatch, one of which is called
shino
.
This thatch is cut in early spring, when all
the leaves have fallen from the dry stalks. Denser than ordinary thatch,
shino
is used only on the corners of the roof.