Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  Western visitors to Japan, appalled at the disregard for city heritage and the environment, always ask, ‘Why can’t the Japanese preserve what is valuable at the same time as they modernize?’ For Japan as a nation, the old world has become irrelevant; it all seems as useless as the straw raincoats and bamboo baskets abandoned by the Iya villagers. In the West, contemporary clothing, architecture and so on have developed naturally out of European culture, so there are fewer discrepancies between ‘modern culture’ and ‘ancient culture’. The industrial revolution in Europe advanced gradually, taking place during the course of hundreds of years. This is why it was possible for much of the countryside of England and France to be left relatively unspoiled, why numerous medieval towns still remain, and why the residents of these historical areas still treat them with care and respect.

  In contrast to Europe, however, change came to China, Japan and Southeast Asia in a truly precipitous fashion. What’s more, these changes were introduced from a completely alien culture. Consequently, modern clothing and architecture in China and Japan have nothing to do with traditional Asian culture. Although the Japanese may admire the ancient cities of Kyoto and Nara, and consider them beautiful, deep in their hearts they know that these places have no connection to their own modern lives. To put it bluntly, these places have become cities of illusion, historical theme parks. In East Asia, there are no equivalents of Paris or Rome – Kyoto, Beijing and Bangkok have been turned into concrete jungles. Meanwhile, the countryside has been filled to overflowing with billboards, power lines and aluminum houses. The egg in the dungeon has cracked.

  The municipal library where children study in the town of Kameoka, where I now live, is not so different from Oxford’s Merton College library, the world’s oldest working library. On my first visit to Merton, it struck me that while this library was built nearly seven hundred years ago, the books, shelves, chairs and even the very concept of a ‘library’ have remained virtually unchanged over the intervening centuries. The children of Kameoka could visit Merton library and feel at home there. But if they visited the sutra (Buddhist scripture) storage rooms of a Japanese temple, with shelves filled with folding albums wrapped in silk, or the studios of the literati, lined with hanging scrolls and handscrolls, they would have no idea what they were looking at. These things are so far removed from what the Japanese use today, that they could almost come from a different planet.

  The wholesale collapse of the natural environment and cultural tradition in East Asia will one day be seen as one of the major events of this century. Japan, with its vast wealth and thorough way of doing things, has a head start over the other nations of East Asia. But the changes are by no means limited to Japan alone, and viewed from a historical perspective they were probably unavoidable. It was fated for Asia to go this way.

  When the native culture of a country has been lost, a ‘new traditional culture’ is created. This develops as a mix of ancient forms and modern tastes, and ends up a cultural Frankenstein’s monster. The most shocking example of this is China. Attempts to repair Chinese temples cheaply have led to buildings and statues drastically different from the originals. The garish colors and grotesque compositions are a wholesale denial of the spirit of Chinese sculpture. Unfortunately, since this is all that tourists get to see, these tacky creations are now regarded as Chinese culture.

  While Japan’s case is not so extreme, its traditional culture is also being remade. This is especially true of its houses. The ‘new’ tradition has its myths, one of them being the case of tatami. Most people believe that Japanese interiors cannot exist without tatami, but this is not so. Until the Heian period, palace floors were made of wooden planks, as can be seen in old paintings and handscrolls. A nobleman would sit on a single tatami mat, upon a raised platform set in the middle of the floor. This arrangement can still be seen in certain Zen temples in Kyoto. In commoners’ houses, thin reed mats were used when it was necessary to cover the floor with something. In Iya, these mats were laid only around the open hearth, and the rest of the floor was left bare. It was customary to wipe this wooden floor with a wet cloth twice a day, in the morning and evening. As a result, the floors were burnished a shiny black, very much like the surface of a Noh stage.

  Noh stages, Shinto shrines, Zen temples and the houses of Iya all date from a pre-tatami age. The psychological difference between the wooden floors and tatami is great. The wooden floors can be traced back to the houses of Southeast Asia, which stood on stilts in forests from the ‘Age of the Gods’. Tatami, with their neat black borders, came into vogue in a later era of precise etiquette, tea ceremony and samurai ritual. With tatami, the floor plan becomes quite evident, and the room looks smaller, more manageable. With a floor of black wooden planks, which has no visual interruptions, one feels a sense of limitless space.

  So, despite the predominance of tatami today, there are really two types of Japanese interior, dating from different ages. Japan’s typical pattern of cultural change can be seen in these two types of flooring. Rather than replace the old with the new, Japan simply lays the new on top of the old.

  Back to Iya. The valley is divided into West Iya and East Iya. West Iya is comparatively accessible, and hundreds of thousands of tourists visit its famous Kazura-bashi each year. Kazura-bashi is a suspension bridge made of huge vines. Rehung periodically (these days reinforced with steel cables), the vine bridge dates back to the times when the Heike first fled into Iya, and has become one of Shikoku’s premier tourist landmarks. The tourists, however, rarely venture beyond Kazura-bashi to visit the less developed East Iya.

  Starting from East Iya’s most remote mountain, Kenzan, I hiked from hamlet to hamlet looking for abandoned houses. Such houses were quite numerous, but I could not seem to find one that was just right. Houses that had been inhabited until recently had had ceilings installed, or had been remodeled with concrete or aluminum. On the other hand, houses that had been abandoned for over ten years were run down, with listing floors and cracked pillars, beyond any hope of restoration.

  In January 1973 I visited a hamlet called Tsurui in East Iya. I came bearing an introductory letter to Mr Takemoto, a village assemblyman. I asked him if there were any abandoned houses nearby, and he promptly agreed to show me one. We soon arrived at a deserted house, and at that moment, I knew: ‘This is it.’ There before my eyes was the castle I had been seeking.

  CHAPTER 2

  Iya Valley

  In Praise of Shadows

  The villagers could not tell me the exact age of the house, but the last family to live there had occupied it for over seven generations – dating it back to at least the eighteenth century. It had been abandoned seventeen years earlier, but was basically in good condition. The floors of burnished black planks and the sunken hearths had survived the centuries unchanged. The roof, however, had not been thatched for fifty years, and was near the end of its useful life. Ferns and moss, even a few pine trees, grew rampant in the thatch, and there were numerous leaks when it rained. Nevertheless, I assumed I would be able to deal with it somehow. Little did I suspect the hardships I was to undergo because of that roof!

  I made the decision to buy the house the first day, but negotiations ended up taking over four months. This illustrates law number six of my Ten Laws of Japanese Life, namely, the Law of Palaver. Nothing can ever be accomplished without time-consuming discussion. The discussion may apparently have little to do with the matter at hand, but it is absolutely indispensable, and many an impatient foreign businessman has met his doom by disregarding this law.

  The reason the negotiations took so long in my case was not because of any particular problem with selling the house – it was mostly a problem of language. Knowing only standard Japanese, I found the dialect spoken in Iya incomprehensible. A neighbor would say, ‘Denwa zo narioru’ (‘the phone is ringing’): denwa (telephone) is twentieth century, narioru is Shikoku dialect and zo is an archaic particle dating from Heian court language. I had such a diffic
ult time understanding conversations in Iya that in the end I asked a friend from Tokyo to come and help me with the negotiations.

  We sat with the villagers until late in the evening, while Mr Takemoto officiated. Village etiquette required that I accept a cup of saké from every man in the room, not once but several times. Heated discussion about the house seemed to go on for an eternity, and my head was spinning. I was barely hanging on to the conversation, but I took comfort from the knowledge that my Tokyo friend would explain the nuances afterwards. At last the evening drew to an end, and we staggered outside and started off down the narrow mountain path in pitch darkness. My friend turned to me and exclaimed, ‘What on earth were they talking about?’

  In spite of the language difficulties, we finally reached an agreement in the spring of 1973: one hundred and twenty tsubo of land (about four hundred square meters) for 380,000 yen, with the house thrown in for free. With the exchange at about 300 yen to the dollar, 380,000 yen amounted to $1300. Still a college student, I did not have that much, but a family friend from the time when we lived in Yokohama in the 1960s agreed to lend me the money. For me it was an enormous sum; it took over five years to pay it back. In the meantime, Iya, remote from the booming urban centers, has seen its population drop by half, and its timber and farming industries collapse. While land everywhere else in Japan has skyrocketed in value, my plot in Iya, cheap though it was, is now worth less than half of what I paid for it.

  I welcomed the period of palaver, because it gave me an opportunity to get to know the village. The official introduction was made when Mr Takemoto invited me to attend the spring festival at the local shrine; it happened to be one of the last times this festival was held. Twenty or thirty villagers gathered in the shrine enclosure, under giant cryptomeria pines as large as California redwoods. Boys painted with white make-up beat drums, while young men carried a shrine out of the main building and rested it on a pile of stones. A priest chanted while villagers paraded in bright red, long-nosed masks.

  One of the boys in white make-up was Eiji Domai, aged thirteen, who was my first visitor after I bought the house and started to repair it. He was an active boy with a buzz cut who loved chopping things, running and swimming. Another visitor was Omo, my nearest neighbor. Omo – short, stocky and handy with everything – was the classic cheerful woodsman. He lived with his four daughters in a thatched house about a hundred meters away. Just below his house was a smaller thatch-roofed cottage, the ‘retirement house’ where his father and stepmother lived. Later, Omo became my teacher in the ways of Iya, helping with every aspect of my house, including the roof thatching when the time came.

  I moved in that June. I had asked Shokichi, a poet friend of mine, to help. Aside from being a poet, Shokichi was also half Korean, which made him a distinct outsider in Japanese society. Shokichi showed up with a small band of Tokyo artists and hippies, which combined with a foreigner like myself made us a decidedly odd group. But it seemed appropriate somehow for Iya, which had always been a retreat for outsiders.

  Mr Takemoto helped me pace the lot to determine exactly where the boundaries were. Then, with the help of Shokichi and his friends, we began cleaning and renovating to make the house livable again. First, we swept the floor. This was not as easy as it might sound, since it was completely covered with five centimeters of powdery black soot. This we gathered into a pile in the garden and burned. But as the smoke began to rise, we suddenly realized that the powder was not soot at all. It was tobacco! During the seventeen years that my house had been abandoned, the tobacco leaves hanging in the rafters had gradually disintegrated and settled on the floor as dust. Unwittingly, that day I burned several pounds of precious tobacco, more than enough to pay off the entire debt for the house.

  No antiques of any value came to light in cleaning the house, but the former occupants had left all the objects of their daily life undisturbed, and in these could be read much about the lives of Iya’s people. Most remarkable was the diary of a young woman who had lived in the house with her grandparents in the 1950s. In her diary, the poverty of Iya, the gloom and darkness inside the house, and the girl’s desperate yearning for city life were frankly and tearfully recorded. About the time she turned eighteen, the diary came to a sudden end. The villagers told me she ran away from home. Her grandparents wrote ‘The child does not return’ on a piece of paper and pasted it upside down on the door as a charm to bring her back. It failed, but the slip of paper remains on the door to this day.

  After finishing the cleaning, we had to install electricity and water and build a toilet. Eiji came by after school and helped to clear the land by hacking down the bamboo. There were no roads to Tsurui at the time, so all necessary materials had to be lugged up on our backs from the road below, about an hour away by foot. Later, we used the village cargo transport, a steel cable strung across the ravine from which hung a rickety wooden box like a ramshackle ski lift. Once or twice, after hauling up a load of lumber, I took a terrifying ride in the box back down to the road below.

  One day, Omo dropped by to watch me and my friends from Tokyo – ‘people from below’ – and out of pity offered to teach us how to use a traditional scythe to clear the grass. His father, a silent man with bold white eyebrows, would also come over to watch. He would sit on the verandah, open his tobacco pouch and puff on a kiseru, one of the long silver pipes you see in Kabuki theater. Omo’s stepmother, who came from near Kazura-bashi and prided herself on her Heike culture, wrote thirty-one-syllable waka poems for us to inscribe on the paper doors.

  Other villagers from Tsurui came one by one to look at the foreigner, and then pitched in to help with the renovation. A foreigner was rare enough, but a foreigner who was trying to repair an old thatch-roofed house was doubly bizarre. Old folk took an interest, and would come over with straw to teach me how to weave straw sandals. On awakening in the morning, I would often find that somebody had left a bunch of cucumbers or other produce for me on the porch outside. At times I would discover that someone had cut the grass in front of the house. In spite of, or maybe because of, the charm on the door, the local children came over to play daily. At night, Shokichi and his friends told ghost stories to them in the spooky light of the floor hearth.

  Confucius said, ‘Kind men love the mountains’, and I think it is possible that mountains breed a kinder sort of person than the plains. The fertile plains support a higher population density and require a collective social structure, especially in the case of rice growing, with its intensive irrigation. Much has been written about the complex human relations born from rice cultivation, and Marx even extrapolated from that to posit a uniquely Asian form of society which he called ‘Oriental despotism’. In contrast, the hunters and foresters of Iya, whose rocky slopes hardly supported a single rice paddy, were independent, free and easy people.

  In Japan, they represented the survival of an earlier stratum of culture related to Japan’s Southeast Asian roots. Centuries of feudal government, the militarism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the stifling influence of the modern education system have created a relatively rigid mindset among the modern Japanese. However, when reading literature from early periods, one gets the impression that the ancient Japanese had little in common with the cautious bureaucrats and obedient company employees one so often meets today. Early poetry, such as the eighth-century Manyoshu anthology, has all the rough-hewn vigor of the beams in the Iya house. Other remnants from this period are the ‘naked festivals’, when young men clad only in loincloths take part in frenzied fertility rituals at temples in late winter.

  Another custom with roots in the distant past is yobai, a folk tradition once prevalent all over Japan, which has died out everywhere except on a few remote islands and in hamlets like Iya. Yobai, or ‘night crawling’, was the way the young men of the village wooed their maidens. The boy would crawl into the girl’s room at night, and if she did not reject him, they would sleep together. By dawn he had to leave th
e house, and if matters went well, he would visit the girl regularly at night until they got married. Some villages also extended the privilege of yobai to travelers, which may have been a way of preventing too much inbreeding in remote areas.

  Today, many Japanese would hardly know what the word yobai means, and it was little short of miraculous that the custom still existed when I arrived in Iya. It was the subject of many a laughing conversation, and villagers slyly asked me now and then when I was going to start on my nocturnal adventures. At the time, yobai seemed to me just another local oddity, but later I discovered that there was more to it than I had thought.

  In the Heian period, the loves of the aristocrats immortalized in novels such as the Tale of Genji were modeled on the yobai pattern. Noblemen visited their loves only at night, and had to leave in the morning. A classic poem such as ‘Ariake no tsuki’ (‘The Moon at Dawn’) is essentially the lovers’ lament at parting. The aristocrats took the peasant custom of yobai, refined it and added elegant trappings like calligraphy, incense and multilayered robes. But at bottom it was still yobai, and the emphasis was on darkness. From this, commentators have spun many theories concerning Japanese concepts of eros and romance.

  As can be seen in the case of yobai, during the Heian period the primal Japanese roughness was tempered by a sensitivity to fine details of art and love. The marriage was made between simplicity and elegance, traces of which can still be seen in many Japanese arts. At the end of this period, in the late 1100s, a major change occurred, a sort of geologic rift cleaving Japanese history. After hundreds of years of rule by effete court nobles, the old system collapsed. The military took over, moving the capital from Kyoto to Kamakura and establishing the Shogunate which ruled Japan for the next six hundred years. One consequence of this military rule is the rigidity we see today. The ancestors of the Iya people fled into the valley just before military rule began.