Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  In Europe the same forces were at work, and as thatching declined, prices rose, so that today, thatching is something of a luxury. However, in England and Denmark, thousands of thatched houses still exist, including entire thatched hamlets. Thatchers continue to have work, thatch continues to be cut, and the expense, while high, is not astronomical. As a result, thatched roofs have retained an important place in the rural landscape.

  Japan’s rejection of thatch was tragic because it had been a critically important part of the country’s cultural tradition. Many other countries used thatch, but it had remained the property of peasants. From China to Ireland, churches, palaces and the villas of the rich were universally roofed with tiles, stone or metal. But in Japan, since the Heian period, thatch was the preferred material of the elite. The Imperial Palace in Kyoto is thatched with cedar chips; the most important Shinto shrine, the Grand Shrine of Ise, is thatched with kaya; the most famous tea-ceremony houses are thatched with kaya or wood bark. In painting, poetry, religion and the arts, thatch was considered the very keynote of elegance. This ability to make sophisticated use of humble natural materials was one of the defining characteristics of Japan’s tradition. In that light, the loss of thatching is not just a quirk of modern rural development: it is a blow to the heart.

  This brings me to the dark side of the fairy tale of Iya Valley. When I first entered Iya twenty-five years ago, Japan’s systematic environmental destruction was already becoming visible, but there was virtually no popular resistance or dialogue regarding the matter. This destruction has continued at an ever-increasing rate, and now Japan has achieved a position as one of the world’s ugliest countries. My friends from abroad who come to visit are almost universally disappointed. Apart from showpieces such as Hakone Park, Japan’s countryside has been utterly defiled. When my friends ask me, ‘Where can you go to escape the billboards, electric wires and concrete?’, I am at a loss for an answer.

  It is said that of Japan’s thirty thousand rivers and streams, only three remain undammed, and even these have had their streambeds and banks encased in concrete. Concrete blocks now account for over 30 per cent of the several thousand kilometers of the country’s coastline. The government manages the national forests with complete disregard for ecological balance (there are no forest rangers in Japan). The thrust of hundreds of millions of dollars of government subsidies is devoted to establishing a forestry industry in these reserves, with owners of mountain land being encouraged to log virgin forest and replace it with uniform ranks of cryptomeria cedar. Thanks to this policy, when one goes to view autumn foliage, it is very difficult to find and widely scattered.

  And then the electric wires! Japan is the only advanced nation in the world that does not bury electric lines in its towns and cities, and this is a prime factor in the squalid visual impression of its urban areas. Out in the suburbs, the use of electric lines is even worse. I was once taken to see the new Yokohama residential district Kohoku New Town, and was amazed at the multitudes of enormous steel pylons and smaller utility poles clustered everywhere – a hellish web of power lines darkening the sky above one’s head. This in a site which is considered a model of urban development. Further out into the countryside, power companies have been free to erect steel utility pylons without the slightest restraint. The effect of these towers marching across hills and valleys is so overwhelming that one feels they were raised with the express intention of destroying the beauty of the landscape.

  The movie director Akira Kurosawa said in an interview a few years ago, ‘Because Japan’s wilderness has been despoiled in recent years, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make movies here.’ It has reached the point where a simple litmus test applies unfailingly to the landscape: whenever you see a sweeping wilderness scene on TV or on a poster, look for concrete or electric wires; if you can’t find any, the odds are overwhelming that the scene is a set, or it was filmed outside Japan.

  A poem by the Tang poet Tu Fu includes the famous line, ‘Though the nation is lost, the mountains and rivers remain’. In Japan, the opposite is true: the nation prospers, but the mountains and rivers are lost. The architect Sei Takeyama has pointed out that one reason for this state of affairs is the ability of the Japanese to narrow their focus. This is what led to the creation of a haiku in which the poet shuts out the entire universe to concentrate on just one frog jumping into a pond. Unfortunately, in the case of landscape, the same ability allows the Japanese to concentrate on a pretty green rice paddy without noticing the industrial estate surrounding it. I recently gave a talk to the Junior Chamber of Commerce in the town of Kameoka, where I live. When I remarked that looking out from the highway one could easily count over sixty giant utility pylons towering over the surrounding mountains, my audience was shocked. Not one of them had ever noticed these pylons.

  However, I do not believe that the Japanese have completely lost the delicate sensibility of the Heian era. Somewhere, deep in their hearts, they know that Japan is becoming an ugly country. Since I began speaking and writing about this issue, my mailbox has been filled with correspondence from Japanese who feel just as heartbroken as I do about the situation. I am convinced that this is one of the most important issues Japan will face in the coming century. For a long time, the destruction was dismissed, even by foreigners, with excuses like, ‘it’s more important to have electricity’ and ‘it was necessary to develop economically’. But surely such comments are condescending to a country which is one of the world’s most thriving economies. The Japanese are no longer poor peasants excited about their first experience of electricity. Other countries have developed ways of managing electric pylons. For example, Switzerland mandates the bundling together of electric lines to reduce the number of pylons as much as possible, painting pylons green and building them lower than ridge lines so as not to interfere with the line of sight. Germany has developed a technology of shoring riverbanks with stones and rough concrete in such a way as to nurture grasses and insects, thereby protecting the ecosystem. But Japan has completely overlooked such technologies.

  The effects on the domestic tourist industry are already beginning to show. Internal travel is declining, while foreign travel is at an all-time high, reflecting the millions of people who are traveling abroad to escape the domestic ugliness. Nevertheless, in spite of an increase in grass-roots awareness, Japan’s environmental destruction has accelerated. Sometimes when driving through the countryside I come across another mountain being bulldozed or a river being concreted over, and I can’t help but feel a sense of fear. Japan has become a huge and terrifying machine, a Moloch tearing apart its own land with teeth of steel, and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to stop it. It is enough to send a chill down one’s spine.

  Today, I rarely visit Chiiori. Luckily the mountains around the house still retain their beauty; however, the road to Iya, the Inland Sea, and Kagawa and Tokushima Prefectures have been drastically transformed, so the trip to Chiiori is becoming depressing. Inside Iya, the construction of a forest road recently filled even the remote Kunze pool with sludge and debris. Looking out from the stone wall at the edge of the garden, the mountainsides opposite are now dotted with concrete retaining walls, and steel pylons line the banks of the Iya River. It is only a matter of time before the mountain-eating machine comes to Tsurui, so it is impossible to view the scenery without a sense of unease.

  When I found my house in Iya, I fancied that I would live like a sage deep in the mountains, in a solitary thatch-roofed cottage perched atop a soaring emerald crag high above the clouds – just like a mysterious Nizan painting. However, it became increasingly evident that the mountain life I loved would be a short one. So I turned my eyes away from Iya, beginning the search for the world of dreams elsewhere. In 1978, I met the Kabuki actor Tamasaburo, and was invited into the world of the traditional arts. My dream of living in a castle shifted away from Iya: from a mountaintop castle to one of the stage.

  That year, I decided to come down
from the mountains and headed for the Kabuki theaters of Tokyo. Of course, I did not wholly give up on Iya. Over the ensuing years my friends and I have continued to have a variety of experiences there, including the saga of Chiiori’s rethatching. The Noh stage of the living room has seen numerous performances, including one where Eiji and Omo’s youngest daughter dressed up in old puppet costumes and performed a samurai story for the villagers. Another time, Shokichi’s wife, Setsuko, who is now one of Japan’s leading buto dance artists, performed an ecstatic dance which began on the black floorboards inside the house and ended outside in the snow. A photographer lived in Chiiori for six months and later produced a book of photographs capturing Tsurui life. A pair of British anthropologists spent a summer there. In this way, Iya has continued to be a refuge.

  And there are some bright signs for the region. Until recently, one problem has been that Iya men have had trouble finding wives in wealthy modern Japan; women from elsewhere do not want to move to a poverty-stricken mountain area like Iya. So, in the 1980s, Iya pioneered a novel scheme to bring in brides from the Philippines, which generated nationwide controversy. It was a success and has since been copied by other remote villages. Although depopulation is still severe, the scheme is bringing fresh blood to Iya, and restoring its ancient Southeast Asian roots. While many young men have left, Eiji, for instance, returned to the valley with his earnings from a decade spent working outside as a designer of tunnels; he lives with his Filipina wife and their young son in a house further up the hillside. Also, with Chiiori thatched and another house nearby designated an important cultural property, there is even talk of making Tsurui a ‘special cultural zone’. Perhaps some day it will happen.

  The winter of 1978 was bitterly cold. On the day of my descent from Tsurui, Omo’s mother composed a haiku for me:

  Powdered in snow

  The morning mountains

  Tug at my back.

  CHAPTER 3

  Kabuki

  Only the Salt Remains

  In the summer of 1977 my long college years ended, and I returned to Japan to work at a Shinto foundation called Oomoto, based in the small town of Kameoka, west of Kyoto. The founder of Oomoto had said, ‘Art is the mother of religion’, and in keeping with his philosophy, Oomoto sponsors a summer seminar in traditional Japanese arts (tea ceremony, Noh drama, etc.), which I had attended in 1976. My job at Oomoto was to help with arts-related international activities.

  However, my first months in Kameoka were extremely lonely. Although Oomoto provided the opportunity to study tea ceremony and Noh drama, their world of ritual failed to interest me. For a person of serious temperament, the quiet of the tearoom and the formality of Noh should be an inspiration. But with some feelings of guilt, I had to admit to myself that I did not have a serious temperament. I tried to distract myself by making the rounds of Kyoto’s temples, but soon reached my limit of raked sand. It was very frustrating. There had to be more than this zestless, ritualized Kyoto, with every tree pruned, every gesture a formula.

  That summer, the old Mother Goddess of Oomoto had a visit from an important guest – the Tibetan lama Domo Geshe Rinpoche, abbot of a monastery in Sikkim. He was famed for his psychic powers. At the end of the summer, we met one day in a beer garden in Kameoka. Knowing Domo Geshe’s reputation as a psychic, I came straight to the point and blurted out, ‘What should I do?’ He looked me over and said, ‘You must seek out another world. If not on this earth, then the moon. If not the moon, then somewhere else. Without fail you will find that world by the end of the year.’

  Domo Geshe went on to America, leaving his secretary, Gail, to take care of odds and ends in Kyoto. One day in December, Gail invited me to go and see a Kabuki play. I had been dragged to Kabuki as a child, but my only memory was of ugly old women with harsh croaking voices – the onnagata (male actors who play women’s roles). I was not very enthusiastic about the invitation, but having nothing better to do I accompanied Gail into Kyoto to see the play at the Minamiza Theater.

  It was Kyoto’s kaomise (literally, ‘face showing’), when leading Kabuki actors come down from Tokyo to act in the gala performance of the year. Geisha dressed in their finery sit in the boxes that line the theater, and the refined matrons of Kyoto throng the lobby exchanging cruel politenesses with each other. But we were too poor to be a part of all that. We bought the cheapest tickets available and climbed to our seats high in the rafters.

  As the dance ‘Fuji Musume’ (‘Wisteria Maiden’) began, I saw that the onnagata playing the maiden was not one of the ugly old women of my childhood memory, but was truly picture lovely. The flute and drums were fast-flowing; the sliding feet and impossible turns of the neck and wrists of the dancer were playful and sensuous – everything I had been missing. I was stagestruck.

  After the dance, Gail informed me to my surprise that the onnagata, whom I had thought to be about twenty-five years old, was the veteran actor Nakamura Jakuemon, aged sixty at the time. On leaving the theater, Gail took me to a nearby teahouse called Kaika. The master of the teahouse asked me what I had thought of kaomise, and I replied, ‘Jakuemon was amazing. His sixty-year-old body managed to be totally sensuous.’ The master gestured to the woman sitting next to me, and said, ‘She has an appointment with Jakuemon right now. Why don’t you go along?’ So before I knew it, I was backstage at the Minamiza Theater. One minute, Jakuemon was a vision dancing on a stage miles below me, someone I could only view from afar with no hope of ever meeting; the next, I was backstage talking to him.

  Jakuemon, still in make-up, looked fortyish, like a refined Kyoto matron. But he had a sly grin, and a coquettish sideways glance flashed from eyes lined with red and black. This sideways glance, called nagashime (literally, ‘flowing eyes’), was a hallmark of beautiful women in old Japan, and is found in countless woodblock prints of courtesans and onnagata. I was seeing it at close range. An attendant dressed in black brought out a small saucer, in which Jakuemon blended white face powder and crimson lipstick with a gentle hand. Dipping a brush in the resulting ‘onnagata pink’, he wrote the character hana (flower) for me on a square shikishi (calligraphic plaque). Then, with the removal of wig, robes and make-up, there emerged a tanned, short-haired man, who looked like a tough Osaka businessman. With a brusque ‘See ya’, spoken in a gravelly voice, he strolled out of the room in white suit and shades.

  In my case, the secret door to the world of Kabuki was the Kaika teahouse. Kaika, which means ‘transformation’, refers to the Bunmei Kaika (Transformation of Civilization) that took place in Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The master of Kaika was a former Kabuki onnagata, and the interior of the teashop was covered with Meiji- and Taisho-period theater decorations. As it was close to the Minamiza Theater, Kaika was a meeting place for actors and teachers of traditional Japanese music and dance.

  After my audience with Jakuemon, I was taken to see various other actors, among them Kawarazaki Kunitaro, a childhood friend of the Kaika master. Kunitaro, who was in his sixties, was a true child of the Meiji ‘transformation’, his father having founded Tokyo’s first coffee house on the Ginza at the turn of the century. As a young man, Kunitaro joined a group of leftist intellectuals who broke away from traditional Kabuki and cofounded a theater troupe called Zenshinza (Progressive Theater). Kunitaro was especially adept at akuba roles – sharp-tongued townswomen. Other actors would come to him to study his distinctive technique of sute-serifu – catty quips ‘tossed’ at the audience.

  I found it curious that the Progressive Theater featured something so retrograde as onnagata. Kabuki was founded by a troupe of women in the early 1600s, but during the Edo period, women were banned from the Kabuki stage because they were considered conducive to immoral behavior. The onnagata took their place. There was a brief attempt in early Meiji to replace onnagata with real women but the audience rejected them. By that point, Kabuki was so thoroughly imbued with the art of onnagata that real women did not play the roles properly. After Meiji, women fou
nd their place in modern theater. However, in certain unexpected pockets, such as Zenshinza and in Japanese dance, onnagata continue to exist even outside of Kabuki.

  I soon heard of a particular onnagata called Tamasaburo. Unlike the others, he had achieved fame outside of Kabuki as his face was everywhere – on TV, on posters, in advertisements. In 1967, at the age of seventeen, Tamasaburo had caught the eye of the public with his appearance in the play Sakurahime Azuma Bunsho (The Scarlet Princess of Edo). Yukio Mishima wrote a play for him; teenage girls besieged the theaters. For the first time in a century, a Kabuki onnagata had become a popular star.

  The February after the Minamiza kaomise, I saw Tamasaburo perform for the first time, at the Shinbashi Enbujo Theater in Tokyo, in the dance ‘Sagi Musume’ (‘Heron Maiden’) – Kabuki’s Swan Lake. In it, a young maiden dances as a white heron in the snow. Through successive costume changes, from white, to purple, to red, she passes through the stages of girlhood, young adulthood and first love. Then comes heartbreak: her wing (or sleeve) is wounded. She becomes deranged and whirls madly through the snow. At the end, mounting a red felt-covered platform, her face distorted with suffering and rage, she strikes a final pose.

  The beginning of the dance was quiet. Sagi Musume, dressed in a pure white kimono, a white hood over her head, turned slowly at the center of the stage, her movement so smooth and perfectly controlled that she seemed like a marble statue. Though Tamasaburo had yet to show his face, he had already conjured up a quiet, twilit, snow-covered world. The hood fell, revealing the pure face of an angel, radiantly white. The audience gasped; this was not the usual onnagata. Impossible to describe, the beauty of Tamasaburo is almost a natural phenomenon, like a rainbow or a waterfall. At the end, when, her long black hair disheveled, Sagi Musume mounted the red platform brandishing a magic staff, she was like a shaman of ancient times, evoking the wrath of heaven. The audience around me wept.