Lost Japan (21 page)

Kyoto's great treasure did not lie in its temples and shrines, nor in the outward look of its streets. It lay in the intricately complex customs and elegant life of its citizens. They were proud people who felt they were above common pleasures like the
yomise
stalls which everyone else enjoys in summer. Over the centuries, they spun for themselves a gorgeous web of
wabi
, with all its artifice, snobbery and artistic refinement. This still survives, but barely. When it goes, I will move to Huis ten Bosch.

I am often asked to show guests around Kyoto and Nara. Typically, we start with Kyoto, but after a few days or so there comes a moment when I can see my guest beginning to grow weary. The intense refinement and detailed conventions of Kyoto life become oppressive. Of course, no one ever goes so far as to voice the word; most people are not even conscious of the feeling, but its presence shows clearly in the glazed look of their eyes. This is when we leave Kyoto for Nara.

Japan's first capitals in the sixth and seventh centuries were situated on the Yamato plain, southwest of Nara. The capital moved frequently, gradually working its way up to present-day Nara in 720, and then northwest to Kyoto in 794. The moving capital left temples, shrines, palaces and tombs in its wake, scattered over a huge area on the plains and in the mountains surrounding Nara – Yamato, Asuka, Yoshino, Koya and Uji. Later rulers piously continued to support these relics, and so the
building and rebuilding of Nara went on long after power had moved elsewhere. ‘Nara' is thus much larger than simply the city of Nara or the period when Nara was capital. It encompasses the entire region between Kyoto and Wakayama, built up over a thousand years between the sixth and sixteenth centuries.

Until the sixth century, Japan's history is cloudy: only archaeological digs indicate what life before that time was like. But in the sixth to eighth centuries, Japan adopted Chinese writing, architecture and Buddhism, and the basic framework of Japanese culture emerged from the mist. Ancient Shinto, Imperial power, esoteric Buddhism, the role of the court nobles, early poetry and arts of wood and stone took primal shape. These were the rough timbers which Kyoto culture was later to refine into polished and squared wood.

Kyoto culture stops at around Kyoto Station: in my view, everything south and east of the train station belongs more to Nara than to Kyoto. So my guests and I start out from the station, driving south along the foothills of Kyoto's eastern mountains. Here stand Sennyu-ji, Tofuku-ji and other temples, nestled in enormous tree-filled grounds along the hillsides. There are very few tourists, and the atmosphere is expansive and relaxed. Inside Tofuku-ji, there is a small deck jutting out from the main temple, above a ravine overhung with maple trees. Standing on that deck, looking out over leaves rustling in the wind and a small wooden bridge far below, one feels deep in the hills, although the temple is only ten minutes south of Kyoto Station.

Much has been written about the way Japanese buildings harmonize with nature, but there is another side to this: the strong tendency to bind and restrict nature. The gardens of Kyoto developed from this tendency, with every tree carefully pruned and set amongst discreet rectangles spread with white sand. Once I was seated on the verandah of a Zen temple in Kyoto and I praised the shape of a particularly well-formed pine branch. ‘Well, it's not quite right,' apologized the abbot. ‘It's taken about
one hundred and fifty years to get it to this point, but I'd say another seventy, no, eighty years, and it will be perfect.'

I personally appreciate the desire to bring order to a garden, having spent years fighting the weeds and vines at Tenmangu and Chiiori; if you turn your back for a minute, all is immediately overgrown with unruly greenery. So when the early Japanese built a temple or a palace, the first thing they did was to make a clearing in the woods and spread it with gravel. This was called the
saniwa
, or ‘sand garden', and important acts of government took place there: criminals were judged, and shrine maidens went into a trance and delivered the oracle of the gods. In later times, under the influence of Zen and martial discipline, the
saniwa
became the basis of the Zen rock gardens that exist in Kyoto today.

The rock garden of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto is known worldwide, and much ink has been spilled describing the layout of its rocks, the raking of the sand and even the surface texture of the surrounding wall. But nobody ever talks about the shady trees behind the wall. This is like talking about fish while ignoring the sea. The garden at Ryoan-ji lives because of the surrounding trees. Problems arise when the roots of a tradition like the
saniwa
are forgotten, and it expands beyond its native environment. Golf, as practiced on the rounded grassy slopes of Scotland, was a benign sport, combining the pursuit of leisure with enjoyment of the outdoors. But the courses being built all over the world today, which require drastic alterations to deserts, forests and mountains, have wreaked untold environmental damage. Likewise, the sand gardens of Kyoto worked because they existed within the surroundings of the rich, native forest. As the forests disappear, or are replaced with stands of industrial pine, there is less and less need for sand gardens. Applied indiscriminately to modern urban surroundings, the tradition of raked sand creates only sterility. Sometimes I think the aim of Japan's ruling bureaucracies is to turn the entire nation into a
saniwa
, in which patches of greenery exist only as slight variations in a sea of white
concrete. This is the modern context for the deck at Tofuku-ji, where the maple branches spread out unrestrained and the little bridge in the ravine is the only sign of human presence.

Just south of Tofuku-ji is Fushimi-inari Grand Shrine, also built along the eastern hillside. It is the main shrine of the Inari cult, dedicated to the god of rice (and therefore money and prosperity), and the god's messengers, foxes. There are numerous Inari shrines in Japan, but this is the largest and oldest of them. The Japanese rarely bring foreign visitors here because the shrine has little in the way of architecture or gardens of historical importance. Also, the hundreds of small shrines in its precincts devoted to fox spirits and magical stones smack of animism and superstition.

The gardens of Kyoto, in addition to being highly controlled, usually have fixed spots such as verandahs from which to view them. There is a strong sense that these gardens are ‘art', with particular points of view from which they must be seen. But Fushimi-inari is not one site to be viewed from one angle; it is an experience that you must pass through, like dreaming. At the entrance is an enormous cinnabar-red
torii
gate, and beyond that, an outdoor stage and main hall. Before the main hall are two large fox statues: one with its mouth open, the other holding a key in its teeth. (Foxes are considered to be magical creatures, with the ability to bewitch human beings.) Above the entrance is a banner with another symbol of Inari, a flaming jewel, which also represents occult power. Behind the main hall is a procession of several hundred red
torii
, lined up so close together that they make a tunnel. Most visitors walk through this row of gates, then return home feeling a little disappointed. But they have turned back at the entrance to the dreamworld.

If you continue walking up the hill beyond the first row of
torii
, you find another row of red gates, much larger than the first ones, and another row beyond that; in fact, a procession of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of
torii
wind ever
deeper into the mountains. Each
torii
bears the name of the business that donated it. Many businesses in Japan have a red Inari
torii
somewhere, either on their premises in a small altar or in the grounds of an Inari shrine.

Few people venture up into this quiet vermilion world. You climb up over knolls and into dells, gradually making your way deeper into the hillside, but looking back or looking ahead you see nothing but rows of red
torii
encased in a green forest. Vermilion is the color of magic. It was the color of Chinese Taoism, and since the Shang dynasty thousands of years ago it has been revered as being sacred to the gods. In the
Analects
, vermilion signifies noble qualities. Confucius said, ‘How regrettable when purple usurps the place of vermilion' – meaning, ‘when the vulgar usurps the place of the noble'.

From Taoism, vermilion entered Buddhism, becoming the color of temples and, later, palaces. Most of the ancient structures of Kyoto and Nara were once brilliant red, but the color faded as the temples aged. Meanwhile, Kyoto developed its culture of
wabi
, in which all color was watered down and muted. In the process, ‘art' took over and ‘magic' faded along with the vermilion. But at Fushimi-inari, the color is still alive, evoking ancient Taoism.

After walking for a while, you come upon groups of small altars, known as
tsuka
(mounds). Here, repeated in miniature, are the Inari themes first seen at the main shrine: each altar features a pair of animals, a stone stand and a magical stone behind the stand. There may be banners or carvings with the flaming jewel on them. On the stone stands you will find offerings of five or six grains of rice, one-yen coins, rows of tiny red
torii
and mini-bottles of saké, of the sort sold in vending machines. You will also find Japanese-style candles burning on the altars, with twisting fire rising from their wicks, echoing the motif of the flaming jewels. The atmosphere is more akin to Hinduism than to anything usually associated with Japan.

Some
tsuka
are higher than head height, others lower than one's knees. They stand alone or in knots of tens. Foxes predominate, but there are also horses, snakes, squirrels, dogs, cats and even crocodiles. You are looking at Shinto's animist and occult roots. The repetition, large and small, of a few basic themes – the flaming jewel, the red
torii
, the foxes – creates a hallucinatory atmosphere. I think this inevitably happens in places where a set of forms is endlessly repeated, such as in Venice (canals, bridges, lions, Gothic windows).

You can wander for hours under the
torii
and through the collections of stone altars, and as you do so, it's easy to become completely disoriented. I once went walking with Diane along Fushimi-inari's upper paths, and we lost our way. It began to grow dark, and the flickering candles made the scene utterly fantastical. We caught sight of someone coming towards us, but when we drew near, we found that he had become a stone fox. In the end we practically ran down the mountain, terrified of losing our wits amongst the foxes.

It is interesting to compare Fushimi with the Grand Shrine of Ise; with its pale wood and simple angular designs, Ise is often held up as Shinto at its purest. Unpainted and unadorned, the brute strength of its buildings conjures up a sense of awe, as if you are in the presence of a great divine power. There is nothing at Fushimi to even approach this. However, as for ‘Shinto at its purest', I believe that Ise has strayed a bit from the true origins of Shinto. The fences enclosing the grounds and buildings are neatly laid out with perfect symmetry, their concentric rings demarcating inner precincts of increasing sacredness. In this arrangement can be seen the influence of Chinese palace architecture. But pure Japanese style in art and architecture has always involved the staggered, even higgledy-piggledy, placement of things. Apart from Kyoto and Nara, which were modeled after Chinese capitals, no Japanese city shows an ordered plan; Edo, the Shogun's capital, was the most haphazard of them all. In China, the
ruler's palace was square or rectangular, with a central avenue leading up to it, and gates located north and south. The palace precinct in Edo, however, was an amorphous blob, surrounded by a zigzag of moats and ramparts, with no grand avenue, and no order to the gates or interior buildings.

Chinese axial symmetry has great power, but Japan's zigzag arrangement of things can also be very pleasing, as a walk along the rear of the palace moat in Tokyo still proves. The zigzag approach led to the complicated crisscross of spatial arrangements found in tea ceremony, as well as the slashing diagonals found in paintings on folding screens, and the design of woodblock prints – almost everything traditional or modern which looks ‘Japanese'. The origins of this style can be seen in the chaotic layout of the
tsuka
at Fushimi-inari.

From Fushimi, I take my guests south to Byodo-in, the Phoenix Pavilion, which is known to everyone in Japan because its image is on the back of the ten-yen coin. It was built at the height of the Heian period by a Fujiwara prime minister, and is one of only a handful of surviving Heian-period temples in Japan. Its design is unique: there is a central hall, on either side of which are two outspread wings with raised eaves, facing a lake. The building looks like a phoenix alighting on the lake; hence the name. Byodo-in belongs neither to the Kyoto that was built after military rule began in the twelfth century, nor to religiously devout early Nara. It is an air pocket, a survivor from a realm we know little about today: the world of the idle Heian aristocrats.

Byodo-in is simultaneously a temple and not a temple. Only the central hall, which enshrines Amida, Buddha of the Western Paradise, is a temple; the rest of the building appears to be almost entirely useless. For instance, from the rear of the main hall projects a building that corresponds to the tail of the phoenix; other than simply representing a tail, it has no apparent function. Then, looking at the wings springing from either side of the main hall, you notice that the first floor is nothing but a high colonnade.
The upper level is also open to the air, with neither walls nor sliding doors. The lintels are lower than human height, making it difficult for people to even enter. It is hard to imagine what the upper level was ever used for, although one guess is that orchestras sat and played music there, while the aristocrats boated on the lake.