Lost Japan (15 page)

As a result of
seiza
, the emphasis on arcane technique and the pyramidal societies, calligraphy these days has slipped from the mainstream. One gets the impression that most young people think of calligraphy as something that old people do in their retirement. Millions still practice it, but the elite of the art world tend to look down on calligraphy as a sort of hobby. Today, far from being ranked first among the arts, calligraphy is something of a lost child. It has for the most part failed to meet the challenge of modern art imported from the West, and its influence on contemporary art is therefore negligible.

Perhaps the prime factor for the decline of calligraphy is the fact that few people can read cursive script anymore. The Japanese language has changed drastically since 1945, and few people use the brush for daily correspondence. Since the advent of the computer, which automatically transfers words into
kanji
, people find it harder and harder to remember the characters. I myself suffer from this trouble: I recognize
kanji
when I read them, but having become dependent on my computer for writing, I often forget surprisingly simple words.

This loss of literacy was inevitable, but in my view it really does not make much difference. Kameda Bosai's earthworm squiggles were unintelligible, even to his friends at the time; there is a comic poem which says that the only writing of Bosai's which anyone could read was a letter asking for a loan. In the old days, being able to read the characters was of secondary importance to the quality of line and the ‘heart' of the author. Today, ironically, it is foreign collectors who have the least trouble with the fact that they can't read the characters. They look at calligraphy as abstract art, which, in the end, is what it is. But for the Japanese, not being able to read calligraphy is unsettling. I once had a Japanese assistant who told me that he hated calligraphy; Bosai's earthworm
kanji
especially bothered him. ‘Foreigners can appreciate it as abstract art, and that's fine for them, but for us calligraphy must have a meaning,' he said. His inability to understand the meaning was a source of great unease: it would seem that modern Japanese have a complex about being unable to read things.

Calligraphy as fine art –
shikishi, tanzaku
and hanging scrolls for tea ceremony – is slowly losing its place in the culture. But calligraphy as design is very active. Japan has always been a design country, perhaps because of its love for the surface of things. Even such simple things as
geta
(wooden clogs) exist in a huge variety of designs: standard double clogged, single clogged, tall for sushi chefs, extremely tall for courtesans, square toed, round toed, made of white wood, dark wood or lacquered. In the field of calligraphy, dozens of design styles grew up during the Edo period, far more than ever existed in China. There were separate styles for Kabuki, Noh drama and puppet theater; for sumo; for samurai documents; for men's letters and women's letters; for tea masters' signatures; for the writing of receipts; for coins and bills; for seals, and many other things.

With such a wealth of traditional styles to draw upon, graphic design using
kanji
is one of Japan's most vibrant modern
fields. From matchboxes to animated TV commercials,
kanji
are still alive and squirming as madly as anything Bosai ever wrote. This is why the signs of Ginza are so remarkable. There is nothing anywhere in the world, not even in China, to compare with them.

When I was caught up in Kabuki in the late 1970s and early 80s, I would go to Tokyo and stay at a friend's house for months on end, visiting the theater every day. Ten years later, while working for the Trammell Crow Company, I had an office and an apartment in Tokyo. I would spend Monday to Friday minding Trammell Crow's business, then commute to Kameoka on weekends. These days, although my work consists mostly of writing and public speaking, I still need to spend a considerable amount of time in Tokyo. It is the center of almost every form of dynamic cultural activity, and most of the artists I know live there.

When Friday evening rolls around after a busy week in Tokyo, I hail a cab for the Yaesu exit of Tokyo Station and take the bullet train back to Kyoto. When I first get on board, my mind is still abuzz with business matters, but as the train draws away from the city, these thoughts subside. I start thinking about my house in Kameoka. Are the water lilies in the pots in front of the house
blooming yet? I wonder how the repair work on the dragon painting I sent to the mounter is coming along … By the time the train pulls into Kyoto a few hours later, all work concerns are totally forgotten.

The first thing I notice in Kyoto is the difference in the air. As soon as I get off the train, it always strikes me that there's not enough oxygen in Tokyo! Drinking in the clean air after a week's absence, I get in the car and head for the mountains to the west. Finally, at about eleven o'clock at night, I arrive at my destination of Kameoka, a town about twenty-five kilometers outside Kyoto. My base for the last eighteen years has been here. My home is a traditional Japanese house in the grounds of a small Shinto shrine called Tenmangu, dedicated to the god of calligraphy. Like Chiiori, the house measures four bays by eight bays, but it is tiled rather than thatched. While the house is not large, it has considerable garden space because of its location in the grounds of a shrine. One side of the property fronts a small road, while the other side overlooks a mountain stream; the grounds sandwiched within cover about a thousand
tsubo
of land. The mountain rising up on the other side of the stream is also shrine property, so the ‘borrowed scenery' of the garden actually extends over several thousand
tsubo
.

A long white wall with a tiled roof borders the grounds of the shrine on the side towards the road, and in the center of the wall there is a high gate. Entering, you see directly before you a stone
torii
(the entrance gate to the shrine itself), and a small Tenmangu Shrine with an old plum tree standing beside it. To the right is the ‘shrine forest', a stand of giant old cryptomeria cedars. To the left of the stone path is my domain. Water lilies float in large pots, and an assortment of vessels scattered here and there hold peonies, ferns, lotuses, Chinese lanterns and heron grass. After crossing six or seven stepping stones, you reach the entrance to my house.

When you enter the living room, the back garden comes into
view – although ‘jungle' might be a more appropriate description. Just a few square meters have been cleared near the house, a stretch of grass and moss with some stepping stones in it. The edges of this plot are planted with azaleas and
hagi
(bush clover), which have been long unattended and are beginning to spread unruly twigs outwards and upwards, hiding a mossy stone lantern and some ceramic statues of badgers. Towards the back are a variety of trees: an ancient cherry tree (propped up with wooden supports), a maple, camellias and a gingko tree. Behind these trees, the garden drops away to a waterfall in the stream, and a heavily wooded mountain soars up from the far bank. When I arrive home on Friday night, I throw open the glass doors of the verandah, and the sound of the waterfall swells up into the house. In that instant, all thoughts of the week in Tokyo blow clean away, and I feel like I have returned to my true self.

Finding this house was a piece of great good luck. At the end of the Oomoto seminar in 1976, the foundation suggested that I come to work there after going down from Oxford, and without thinking much about it, I agreed. Over the next year, when people asked me for whom I would be working, I had pleasure of telling them, ‘For the Mother Goddess of Oomoto.' But I had neglected to discuss my salary. When I arrived in 1977 to take up my position in Oomoto's International Department, I discovered that all those who worked at the foundation were considered to be ‘contributors of service'; in other words, the pay was nominal. I found to my horror that my monthly salary was to be 100,000 yen (about $400 a month). Art activities were all very fine, but how was I going to pay the rent?

For the first two or three weeks I stayed in the Oomoto dormitory, but one day near the end of summer I had an inspiration. A friend from Thailand, Ping Amranand, was taking the seminar. I said to him, ‘Ping, let's go look for a house!' So we set out, walking away from the Oomoto grounds. Kameoka is a flat-bottomed bowl of rice paddies, and you cannot walk for long without
running up against mountains. As we walked towards them, I noticed an unusual building. Through a gate in a white wall was a large garden, rank with weeds, and by it an empty house. Drawing on my wealth of experience in breaking into abandoned houses in Iya, we were inside the house in a matter of moments. It was dark and dusty inside, and spiderwebs clung to our hands and faces. Walking gingerly across the floor of the dim living room, which winced and threatened to collapse at every step, we came out onto the back verandah, which was sealed shut with a row of heavy wooden doors. I gave one of the doors a shove, and the entire rotten row collapsed and fell into the garden in a heap. In that instant, warm green light from the back garden flooded the living room. Ping and I looked at each other: in a single summer day, we had found my house.

The old woman who lived next door told me that the caretaker of the house was the head priest of the nearby Kuwayama Shrine, so I paid him a visit. The priest explained the history of the house to me. It was very old, having been built around four hundred years before. It had originally been a Buddhist nunnery, but around the end of the Edo period it was dismantled and moved to its current site in the grounds of the Tenmangu Shrine. The gate, from another temple further into the mountains, was moved here at about the same time. The house then took on a second life as the shrine-keeper's home, and also doubled as the village school. But after the 1930s there was no more shrine-keeper, so the house was rented out to local residents. In recent years, nobody had wanted to live in such an old and dirty house, so it lay vacant. Though at a loss to imagine why a foreigner would want to live in such a place, the priest decided then and there that I could rent it.

Although the Tenmangu Shrine, which is tended by the villagers, is separate from the house, my friends and I have taken to calling the house ‘Tenmangu' as well. Today, it looks considerably better than it did in 1977. Guests arrive and think, ‘Ah, a
quaint country residence,' but they can have no idea of the long years of toil it took to bring the house to its present state. At first there was not even running water; there was only a well, which dried up in the winter months. Although I don't mind ‘run-down', I do mind ‘dirty'. So I invited a group of friends from Oomoto over for a house-cleaning party. Carrying buckets of water from the well, we wiped the ceilings, pillars and tatami mats until they gleamed. Happily, the roof did not leak, so the tatami had not rotted and I did not face the horrific roofing problems which had colored my experience in Iya. Gradually, I brought in running water, repaired the doors and walls, and weeded the garden. The back garden which Ping and I had discovered that first day was an impenetrable mass of weeds and vines. A few months after moving in, I took sickle and machete to it, and saw for the first time the stepping stones, lanterns and azaleas that are typical of a Japanese garden.

However, on a salary of only 100,000 yen a month, the repair of the house could not be done all at once. As a result, for the first three or four years, life in Tenmangu was very much like dwelling in a haunted house. Not long after I moved in, an eighteen-year-old friend named Diane Barraclough came to live with me. Diane was a blonde British-French girl who had been raised in Kobe and spoke a colorful form of Kobe dialect. Although her Japanese lacked delicacy, she was certainly fluent. She had also inherited French from her mother and an upper-class British accent from her father, doctor to the expatriates in Kobe. Diane was the sort of long-haired beauty who inhabits the comic books which are popular among young girls in Japan. She was pure Edgar Allan Poe, and completely happy in the dark and dilapidated atmosphere of Tenmangu.

I was initially unable to replace the rotten verandah doors, so the entire eight-meter expanse of the verandah was left open facing the garden. On summer evenings, hordes of moths and mosquitoes would come flying in, so I went to one of the
second-hand shops in Kyoto and bought a couple of old mosquito nets. These nets were among the most hauntingly beautiful objects in old Japanese life. They were like enormous square tents, each one the size of a whole room, and they hung from hooks high up on the ceiling. The body of the net was pale green linen, and the borders were of brilliant red silk. We laid our bedding inside the green tents and set out floor lamps. Dressed in a kimono, Diane would sit inside her tent to read, a silver
kiseru
pipe dangling from her lips. The view of her silhouette, filtered through the green netting, was pure romance, the sort of thing you might find in an Edo woodblock print. In fact, years later, when nets like these had become scarce, I lent one to the Kabuki actor Kunitaro for a performance of
Yotsuya Kaidan
in Kyoto
. Yotsuya Kaidan
is a ghost story, commonly performed in summer to give the audience a ‘chill', and the ghostly green netting with blood-red borders is considered an indispensable backdrop.

One night I brought a Japanese friend over to visit. When our taxi pulled up in front of Tenmangu, all the lights were off in the house, and there was just the sound of wind and waterfall. Diane was standing in the doorway dressed in a black kimono, her long blonde hair falling over her shoulders. In her outstretched hand she held a rusty old candle stand, over which spiders crawled. My friend took one look, shuddered, and hastily returned to the station in the same taxi we had come in.

In the evening, Diane and I would light a candle and sit out on the verandah talking, while watching the spiders spin their webs. Diane had a talent for vivid bons mots, most of them as politically incorrect as they could possibly be. Some prey on my mind even now. ‘Tea ceremony,' she once said, ‘is aesthetics for unaesthetic people.' What she meant was that tea ceremony tells you what to do about everything – where to put the flowers, which art objects should be displayed and how to use even the tiniest division of space. This is very comforting for people who have never thought about such things and have no idea what to do on their own.

Another time, she said, ‘Zen is profundity for shallow people.' That is the sort of comment which the old Zen master Ikkyu would have loved. What sticks in my mind most of all, however, is when Diane said, ‘You know, Westerners with their full-blown personalities are infinite in interest as human beings. But Western culture is so limited in depth. The Japanese, on the other hand, so restricted by their society, are limited as human beings. But their culture is infinitely deep.'

In retrospect, the late 1970s in Kyoto were the turning point of an era. Diane, David Kidd, many of my other foreign friends and I were all living in a dream of ancient Japan, because in those days it was still possible to believe in the dream. Around Tenmangu was wilderness and rice paddies, and the streets of Kameoka were still lined with wooden houses and the big
kura
of saké-makers, lending it the feel of a feudal castle town. The mountains had yet to be covered with steel pylons, and the wave of concrete and plastic had yet to overtake the town. Our actions at the time may have been a bit eccentric, but they still had some air of reality. It was possible, as we sometimes did on summer nights during the seminar at Oomoto, to walk all the way through town back to Tenmangu wearing kimono and
hakama
(trousers). To do so today would be so divorced from modern Japanese surroundings as to seem wholly ridiculous.

Time passed, and the early 1980s saw the renovation of Tenmangu advance steadily. I wired the house for electricity, swept away the cobwebs and installed glass doors along the verandah. With the exit of the spiders, Diane did not feel quite at home anymore and she moved out as well. I turned my attention to the
doma
, an earthen-floored room used as the kitchen, which took up about a third of the floor space in Tenmangu.

First, the head priest of Kuwayama Shrine, my landlord, performed a Shinto purification ritual for the old earthen oven and the well – fire and water. Then my friends and I set about transforming the
doma
into a studio space by removing the oven and
capping the well. I put in a long table where I could do calligraphy, and mount and back paintings. The other rooms of the house had ceilings, but the
doma
, in order to allow smoke from the oven to escape, was open all the way up to the rafters, like Chiiori. But the rafters were so crammed with lumber and old sliding doors that it was impossible to see them. We carried out the detritus, and swept down one hundred and fifty years of accumulated soot, enough to fill ten large garbage bags. In doing so, a wide expanse of rafters and crossbeams magically appeared. This airy room is now my workspace.