by Alex Kerr
The achievements of the military period are by no means all negative, since they include Zen, tea ceremony, Noh drama and Kabuki, almost all the arts which today we think of as being high points of Japanese culture. But there was a deeper stratum below this, one of mists and rocks and giant uncarved tree trunks, the ‘Age of the Gods’ from which was born the religion of Shinto. This is the world which moves me most of all, and I would hardly have known about it had I not met the people of Tsurui.
I started to think about naming my house. I wanted something which would mean ‘House of the Flute’, since I play the flute. One night, assisted by Shokichi and a group of Iya children, I set out to find a name. The standard words for flute – sho and teki – were rejected by the children as sounding too stiff. So we searched through an old Chinese dictionary and found the character chi, meaning ‘bamboo flute’. It was a beautiful character, written with ‘bamboo’ on the top, a flourish in the middle and ‘tiger’ at the bottom. No one had ever seen such a character before, but the children were all for it.
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 m2). 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, car
ved 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.
In addition to thatch, we needed several truckloads of rice straw. The thatcher inserts a layer of straw under the edges of the roof, thereby creating a slight upward curve at the eaves. We also needed six types of bamboo, each of which had different dimensions, came from a different part of Shikoku, and had to be cut at a certain time in order to prevent insect damage. Add to this three types of rope (rice straw in two weights, and palm fiber), a hundred cryptomeria pine logs to replace rotten roof timbers, and cedar planks for the eaves. Finally, there are arcane implements, like the meter-long iron needle used during the roofing process. The thatcher runs rope through the eye of the needle and jabs it through the thatch. Someone below ties the rope around a beam, runs the end of the rope through the eye again and the needle is yanked back out. The thatcher then ties the ends of the rope, thereby securing the thatch to the roof beams.
The cost of thatching Chiiori the second time proved a truly tremendous burden. Including travel and labor costs, it ran to twelve million yen. No bank was about to loan money to the owner of the only piece of real estate in Japan to have dropped in value. I had to pay it all in cash, relying on loans from friends and family.
The thatching was completed in 1988, and was a six-month project involving Omo, the rest of Tsurui village, and friends from America, Kobe, Kyoto and Tokyo. When it was over, the susuki field we had used was replanted with chestnut trees. The village’s aging thatcher had no successor, and in any case there was no further need for his services: apart from two houses designated by the government as national treasures, there were no plans to have a roof thatched in Iya. Some decades in the fu
ture the government will have to rethatch the houses in its care, but by then all the materials and workers will need to be brought in from outside. Chiiori was the last house ever to be roofed by the Iya thatcher using kaya grown in Iya.
From the cottages of rural England to the palm-frond-roofed dwellings of the South Pacific, houses covered with leaves instead of stone, metal or tiles have a unique appeal. I suppose it might be because the other materials are more or less artificial, while leaves are closer to nature. A thatch-roofed cottage does not seem to have been manufactured, but rather to have sprung from the earth like moss or mushrooms.
In Japan, the era of thatched roofs is at an end. The last examples may be seen in temples, teahouses, cultural landmarks protected by the government, and a few surviving farmhouses. By and large, roofs have been covered over with tin or aluminum. Driving through the countryside, you can easily spot houses that were originally thatched because of their distinctive high-pitched roofs; under the tin, the old roof beams and often even the thatch itself remains.
It is often argued that thatched roofs are difficult to maintain and expensive, which I can hardly deny, having personally suffered the dire financial consequences of thatching a roof. But there is an interesting lesson to be learned here with regard to the preservation of traditional industries. Thatch is not inherently expensive. Traditionally, every village had a thatch field, and the villagers harvested thatch in winter as a regular part of the agricultural cycle. They stored it along with the various types of bamboo, straw and lumber, and used these supplies communally whenever a house needed reroofing. The materials were plentiful and did not have to be specially ordered; the thatcher had work year-round, so he did not need to charge high rates. When demand for thatching dropped, however, a vicious circle set in: the price of humble materials like thatch and bamboo skyrocketed, and as it did so, fewer people wanted or were able to go to the expense. The irony is that thatching did not die out because it is expensive – it is expensive because thatching died out.