Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  Alex Kerr

  * * *

  LOST JAPAN

  Last Glimpse of Beautiful Japan

  Translated by Alex Kerr and Bodhi Fishman

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1 Looking for a Castle

  Chapter 2 Iya Valley

  Chapter 3 Kabuki

  Chapter 4 Art Collecting

  Chapter 5 Japan Versus China

  Chapter 6 Calligraphy

  Chapter 7 Tenmangu

  Chapter 8 Trammell Crow

  Chapter 9 Kyoto

  Chapter 10 The Road to Nara

  Chapter 11 Outer Nara

  Chapter 12 Osaka

  Chapter 13 The Literati

  Chapter 14 Last Glimpse

  Afterword: About Alex

  Glossary

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LOST JAPAN

  Alex Kerr was born in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, in 1952. He first came to Japan when his father, a naval officer, was posted to Yokohama from 1964 to 1966. He has lived in Kameoka, near Kyoto, since 1977. Alex holds degrees in Japanese Studies from Yale University and Chinese Studies from Oxford University, and is a passionate and knowledgeable collector of East Asian art.

  In the years after purchasing the house Chiiori that appears in Lost Japan, Alex went on to restore dozens of old houses in Kyoto and across Japan in an effort to revive beautiful but declining rural regions. The non-profit organization he founded, Chiiori Trust, today manages restored houses in Iya and in several other prefectures.

  Alex writes and lectures in Japanese, and is author of many books, including Dogs and Demons (2000), outlining the impact of public works on Japan’s landscape; Living in Japan (2006), introducing old and contemporary houses; and Bangkok Found (2010), describing the city as Alex experienced it since first visiting Thailand in the 1970s.

  The original edition of Lost Japan, written in Japanese, won the 1994 Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize for the best work of non-fiction published in Japan. Alex is the first foreigner to win this prestigious award. After publication in English based on a translation by Bodhi Fishman, the book won the Asia-Pacific Publishers Award, Gold Prize for Best Translation of 1996.

  Japanese Historical Periods

  Jomon 10,000–300 BC

  Yayoi 300 BC–300 AD

  Kofun 300–710

  Nara 710–794

  Heian 794–1185

  Kamakura 1185–1333

  Muromachi 1333–1576

  Momoyama 1576–1600

  Edo 1600–1867

  Meiji 1868–1912

  Taisho 1912–1926

  Showa 1926–1989

  Heisei 1989–

  Chinese Dynasties

  Zhou 1100–221 BC

  Qin 221–206 BC

  Han 206 BC–220 AD

  Three Kingdoms 220–280

  Jin 265–420

  Southern dynasties 420–589

  Northern dynasties 386–581

  Sui 589–618

  Tang 618–907

  Later Liang 907–923

  Later Tang 923–936

  Later Jin 936–946

  Later Han 947–950

  Later Zhou 951–960

  Liao 916–1125

  Song 960–1279

  Western Xia 1038–1227

  Jin 1115–1234

  Yuan (Mongol) 1271–1368

  Ming 1368–1644

  Qing (Manchu) 1644–1911

  Preface

  It has been twenty-four years since I sat down in January of 1991 to write the first of the articles that were later to become the book Lost Japan. I would like to say that since then I’ve learned and seen much, and now have a new perspective on it all. And yet, looking back, nothing has changed!

  Twenty-four years later, I’m still just where I was when, hiking in the hills of Iya Valley in 1973, I pushed open the door of the house Chiiori and saw the dusty black floors and huge old beams sweeping overhead. But I’ve got the math wrong. That was forty-two years ago.

  I found Chiiori just in time. During the ensuing years, I was to witness the gradual disappearance of Japan’s delicate natural landscape and old towns of wood, tile, bamboo, and thatch. If anything, the pace of change increased in scale and speed in the 2000s, leaving Iya Valley and Chiiori as remnants of a vanished world. I still own Chiiori, and after all these years, on entering that old room and smelling the smoky irori floor hearth, my heart leaps up as it always did. In the intervening years, I’ve seen dozens, hundreds, of old houses, and never found anything else like Chiiori.

  Lost Japan itself has lived on. It’s still in publication in the original 1993 Japanese version (titled Last Glimpse of Beautiful Japan), and with the exception of this last year as it transited between publishers, the English version never fell out of print. For the translation, I’m indebted to Bodhi Fishman. Starting in 1994 I set out to do an English translation myself, but found that not even one paragraph would go into English acceptably. When I wrote the original articles, I was thinking exclusively of a Japanese audience. For readers outside Japan, the text would have to be radically revised. It was a sobering experience for someone who had spent decades blithely translating other people. Baffled by my inability to translate myself, I let the book sit for almost two years. Finally, in 1996 Bodhi came to my aid with a translation that captured the mood of the original. I revised this, cutting some chapters and expanding others; Bodhi edited the revision; and that’s how Lost Japan came to be.

  The book has brought thousands of visitors to Iya, and many friends into my life. Two decades and several books later, the world described in Lost Japan is still my starting point.

  If anything has changed, it is that in recent years I’ve had the chance to put into practice what I had merely dreamed of and spoken about in the 90s. This was made possible by the business experience gained when Trammell Crow dragged me into helping with his real estate investment ventures in the Bubble Era of the late 80s. That bit of time I spent working in the real world allowed me to build, eventually, the ‘balance’ that Tamasaburo describes in his Afterword.

  Starting in 2004 I began restoring old machiya town houses in Kyoto, not as historical showpieces, but fitted out with modern amenities – heating, cooling, nice baths and toilets and so forth, so that people today could enjoy them in comfort. We rented these out for visitors to stay in when they visited Kyoto. After that I went on to restore houses in rural areas around Japan, and finally Chiiori itself in 2012.

  Chiiori today looks exactly as it did back in 1973. When we did the restoration, we picked up the ancient black floorboards, numbered them, and after shoring up the foundations, and installing plumbing, gas, electric lines, insulation, and underfloor heating, we put the boards right back in their original position. Meanwhile, the corridor behind the house features bathrooms with all the latest in Japanese toilet technology and a lovely cedar bath of the sort we never imagined possible in Iya. Today a freshly thatched – and thoroughly modernized – Chiiori welcomes a new generation of visitors as it enters its fourth century.

  In 2004, we established a non-profit organization centered on the house, called Chiiori Trust. It’s staffed by young people coming from Tokyo and other big cities who would like to do something for Iya, which continues to age and depopulate. My old neighbour and friend Omo passed away in 2012. Today our challenge is how to bring a new community into the valley.

  The other worlds described in Lost Japan – Kabuki, calligraphy, Kyoto, Nara, Tenmangu, art collecting – these continue more or less as before. I still live in the grounds of Tenmangu Shrine in Kameoka, outside Kyoto, and the little emerald-like frogs still hop around in June. I still write calligraphies, some of which appear as chapter headings in the book.

&n
bsp; As for art collecting, prices for Japanese art plummeted after 2000. Behind this change in the market was China’s rise and the passing of the last generation in Japan who knew what these old things were. Just when I thought I could put an end to my compulsive collecting, a whole new opportunity came my way. How could I refuse a pair of screens by an important eighteenth-century calligrapher that had found no buyer at auction and was now selling for a song? So I’m still buying, because I must.

  Kabuki onnagata Tamasaburo, now in his sixties, has been designated a Living National Treasure, but in some sort of miracle of nature, remains as meltingly beautiful as he was when I first saw him so many years ago. But slowly he is cutting down the more energetic pieces in his repertoire and no longer dances the Heron Maiden.

  Tamasaburo and I once promised each other that in our old age we would not turn into our crabby old mentors. For me that was American drama critic and ‘saviour of the Kabuki’ Faubion Bowers, and for Tamasaburo it was the celebrated older onnagata Nakamura Utaemon VI. Faubion and Utaemon spent their later years grumbling bitterly about the new generation.

  But I at least couldn’t live up to that promise. First with the book Dogs and Demons published in 2000, and then with later publications (some only in Japanese) I continue to write and speak about the destruction of precious places and things I see going on around me. For consolation I think back to the words of ‘the last of the literati’, Shirasu Masako, when I asked her why she had taken her fists to the artist Rosanjin over his bad kimono design. ‘If you really love something,’ she admonished me, ‘then you should get angry about it.’

  Lost Japan concludes with a metaphor from Kabuki, in which I keep getting pulled back to Japan in the same way as the protagonist of the play Kasane finds himself dragged back onstage by the long bony fingers of dead Kasane’s ghost.

  These days I have a new metaphor. Again, it’s from a play that I once saw Tamasaburo perform in, called Yashagaike (Demon Pond). A young ethnologist travels to a remote village where there’s a legend that if the temple bell is not rung every evening at sunset, a dragon princess who lives in the pond will rise up and flood the village. The young scholar moves in with the old bell keeper and stays, eventually marrying the bell keeper’s daughter. One day the bell keeper falls dead. It’s late afternoon. Soon someone must ring the bell. Although he’s a city boy who doesn’t believe in old superstitions, the scholar does so. He has become the bell keeper.

  There is one big thing that did in fact change since I wrote Lost Japan. Time passed, and with it the people who understood and transmitted the lore of old Japan – aesthete David Kidd, Naohi the Mother Goddess of Oomoto, Faubion Bowers, Kabuki onnagata Jakuemon, Shirasu Masako, Omo, art collector Hosomi Minoru, screen and scroll mounter Kusaka – they’re all gone now. That leaves me – a foreigner, and like the scholar in Yashagaike, not really a part of the tradition – stuck with the job of ringing that old bell.

  I think the one thing that you want to do when you’ve really loved something is to pass the memory on to others. That’s why Lost Japan is still so important to me. I’m delighted that Penguin is reissuing the book, with a new cover and fresh calligraphies at the head of each chapter – but with no other substantive changes. It brings me joy to think that a new generation of readers can experience the mists of Iya, the moment of walking into Chiiori, the first view of a young Tamasaburo on stage, the wit of David Kidd, ‘the moment before glory’.

  Alex Kerr, 2015

  CHAPTER 1

  Looking for a Castle

  The Egg in the Dungeon

  When I was six, I wanted to live in a castle. I suppose many children dream of living in a castle, but as they grow older the dream is forgotten. However, in my case this desire lingered on until adulthood. My father was a legal officer with the United States Navy, and we lived for a time in Naples, Italy. There was a castle on an island in the harbor called the Castel dell’Ovo (Castle of the Egg). Legend has it that Virgil had presented an egg to the castle, and had prophesied that if the egg ever broke, the castle would be destroyed. But after hundreds of years the egg was still intact in the dungeon, the Castel dell’Ovo still stood, and I wanted to live there.

  Practically every day, when my father returned home from work, I would follow him about, repeating, ‘I want to live in a castle.’ I was extremely persistent, so one day my father grew exasperated and told me, ‘A great landlord called Mr Nussbaum owns all the castles in the world, so when you grow up you can rent one from him.’ From that time on, I waited expectantly for the day when I could meet Mr Nussbaum.

  A typical Navy family, we moved constantly. From Naples, my father was transferred to Hawaii, where we lived by the beach on the windward side of Oahu. Sometimes, large green glass balls encrusted with barnacles floated in on the tide. My father told me that the fishermen in Japan used them to keep their nets afloat. Torn from the nets by storms, the balls floated all the way across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii. This was my first experience of ‘Japan’.

  When I was nine, we moved to Washington, DC. I entered a private school there, which taught Latin and Chinese to elementary school students. The school was at once hopelessly behind and ahead of the times. Stern Mrs Wang, our teacher, made sure that we copied our Chinese characters correctly, hundreds to a page. For most of the other students it was drudgery, but I loved the look and feel of the characters. Mrs Wang showed us pictures of Beijing, of temples perched on mountain precipices, and in the process memories of Italy faded and my daydreams began to focus on China.

  After three years at the Pentagon, my father was transferred to Japan, and in 1964 we went to live at the US naval base in Yokohama; I was then twelve years old. This was the year Japan hosted the Olympics. In retrospect, 1964 was a great turning point for Japan. The previous twenty years had been spent rebuilding a nation that had been devastated by World War II. The next thirty years were to see an economic boom unprecedented in history, as Japan transformed itself into the richest country in the world.

  Although the American Occupation had ended in 1952, signs of the US military presence were everywhere in Yokohama, from the special currency we were issued to foil the black market (printed with the faces of movie stars instead of presidents) to the ubiquitous military police. Outside the military base, the few foreigners living in Yokohama made up a small group of longtime expatriates, many of whom had been living there for decades. The yen was 360 to the US dollar, four times the rate today, and the foreigners lived well. My mother’s childhood friend Linda Beech was living in Tokyo and had gained great notoriety as a teacher of English on TV. She would appear underwater in scuba gear and shout, ‘I’m drowning! That’s d-R-(not L)-o-w-n-i-n-g!’ Linda was the first of the ‘TV foreigners’ who now populate Japan’s airwaves in great numbers. Today, foreigners in Tokyo eke out a living in cramped apartments; in contrast, Linda and a group of expat families owned villas at Misaki, on the coast.

  I was excited to find that the Chinese characters I had learned in Washington were also used in Japan. Within a few weeks I had taught myself hiragana and katakana (the two Japanese alphabets), and once I could read train and bus signs, I started exploring Yokohama and Tokyo on my own. When the weekend came, Tsuru-san, our maid, packed a boxed lunch for me, and I traveled the train lines south to Odawara Castle, and north to Nikko. People were always friendly to an American boy asking directions in Japanese. Slowly, my interest in China shifted to an interest in Japan.

  Although the country was poised on the verge of a huge economic boom, the old Japan was still visible. All around Yokohama, even in the heart of the city, there were green hills, and many traditional old neighborhood streets remained. I was particularly captivated by the sea of tiled roofs. On the streetcars, most women over forty wore kimono in fall and winter. Western-style shoes were still something of an innovation, and I used to enjoy studying the footwear of streetcar passengers, which consisted of a mixture of sandals, geta (wooden clogs) and some truly amazing purple
plastic slippers. After dusk fell, you could often hear the clopping sound of geta echoing through the streets.

  My favorite things were the Japanese houses. At that time there were still many magnificent old Japanese houses in Yokohama and Tokyo. Linda Beech had introduced my mother to a women’s group called the Nadeshiko-Kai (Society of Pinks), so-named because Japanese women are supposed to be as lovely as nadeshiko flowers (pinks). In those days consorting with foreigners was still something special, and the Nadeshiko-Kai drew its Japanese membership from the elite. Once a month, the ladies would visit each other’s homes, so there were many opportunities for me to view great houses, as I was able to go along as well.

  Among the houses I visited was a large estate at Hayama, a resort town near Misaki, about an hour south of Yokohama. I recall being told that the house belonged to the Imperial Family, but it seems inconceivable today that the Imperial villa would have been made available to US military personnel, even in those twilight post-Occupation years. The estate must have been merely in the neighborhood of the Imperial villa. At the Hayama villa, I saw neat tatami mats for the first time. From the sunny rooms on the second floor, Mt Fuji could be seen floating in the distance.

  Another great house was the mansion of former prime minister Shigeru Yoshida in Tokyo, featuring an enormous living room with dozens of tatami mats under a huge coffered ceiling. My favorite place was the little complex of Japanese-style country houses belonging to Linda Beech and her friends on the Misaki coast. I can still vividly recall the rows of pine trees atop the cliffs at Misaki, blowing in the ocean breeze.

  The grand old Japanese houses were not just houses. Each house was a ‘program’ – designed to unfold and reveal itself in stages, like unrolling a handscroll. I remember my first visit to the house of one of the ladies of the Nadeshiko-Kai. Outside, high walls gave no indication of the interior. We entered through a gate, passed through a garden, and continuing on, met another gate, another garden, and only then the genkan, or entranceway (literally, ‘hidden barrier’).