Lost Japan (3 page)

Situated on the border between the Tokushima and Kochi Prefectures, Iya Valley is the deepest gorge in Japan. The landscape I saw that day was the most fantastic in all of Japan's countryside, bringing to mind the mountains of China that I had fallen in love with as a child. It looked exactly like a mountain scene from a Sung-dynasty ink painting.

Due to the green shale peculiar to the Tokushima area, the rivers were tinged with emerald, and the towering cliff faces looked like carved jade. From a mountain across the valley, white cascades – what the Japanese call
taki no shiraito
(literally, ‘the white threads of the waterfall') – fell straight down, as though drawn with a single brush stroke. Against this backdrop, the thatch-roofed houses scattered here and there deep in the mountains looked like the dwellings of sages.

Every country, I believe, has its typical ‘pattern of landscape'. In England, the keynote is grass – in town squares, in meadows and in college quadrangles. In Japan, it is the village cluster. Usually, the houses of a Japanese village huddle together in a group on the flatlands, either in a valley or at the foot of a hill, surrounded by an expanse of rice paddies. People do not live up in the mountains, which in ancient times were the domain of gods and considered taboo. Even today, the mountains of Japan are almost completely uninhabited.

Iya is different. Later, back at Yale, I researched Iya Valley for my senior thesis. I discovered that the pattern of its settlement is unique in Japan. In Iya, houses avoid the low-lying land by the river, and instead are built high up on the mountainsides. One reason is that the shaded areas around the riverbanks are
inadequate for farming. Also, the many freshwater springs that gush forth on the hillsides make the elevated areas better suited for human habitation. Since Iya's rocky terrain is unfit for rice cultivation, there are very few rice paddies, and therefore there is no need for people to live in a single village compound to tend them. The result is independent households scattered throughout the mountains.

The Yuan-dynasty painter Nizan drew mountains with an inimitable touch. The composition of his works is always the same. There never appears even a single human figure: just a solitary thatch-roofed cottage supported by four pillars, sitting in the midst of a vast mountain range. Deep in the mountains of Iya, I felt something akin to the human loneliness and corresponding grandeur of nature expressed in the paintings of Nizan.

The whole trip that summer had been one large arrow leading me to Iya. My question as to whether Japan was the country I wished to live in had been answered. I spent the next year at Keio University in Tokyo as an exchange student; however, I skipped most of my classes, frequently journeying back to the mountains of Iya. During the course of these trips, I gradually began to learn something about the region and the people living there.

Anyone who travels in China and Japan is bound to come across lists of threes and fives: the Five Famous Mountains, the Three Gardens, the Three Famous Views, etc. So, naturally, Japan has classified its Three Hidden Regions. They are Gokaso in Kyushu, Hida-Takayama in Gifu (famed for its high-ridged thatched houses) and Iya Valley. Since ancient times, Iya has been a hideaway, a place of refuge from the outside world. The oldest written record concerning the valley dates back to the Nara period: a description of how a group of shamans fleeing the capital disappeared into the neighboring mountains. Later, in the twelfth century, during the wars between the Heike and Genji clans, fugitives of the defeated Heike fled into Iya Valley. From
that time on, Iya became known as an
ochiudo buraku
(a refugee village). The world was surprised in the 1970s when a Japanese soldier was found to have lived for almost thirty years in a Philippine jungle, still fighting World War II. Thirty years is nothing. The Heike in Iya kept up their struggle from 1190 right up until about 1920. Even now, in a village called Asa in the furthest reaches of Iya, the descendants of the leader of the Heike clan live in a thatch-roofed mansion, still preserving their twelfth-century crimson war banner.

During the period of warfare in the mid-fourteenth century, when Japan was divided between the Northern and Southern courts, Iya became a stronghold of guerrillas fighting to restore the Southern Court. Even during the peaceful centuries of the Edo period, the valley people fought off integration with the rest of Japan. The villagers bitterly resisted incorporation into the Awa fiefdom of Lord Hachisuka of Tokushima, rising in numerous peasant revolts. As a result, prior to the twentieth century, Iya existed virtually as an independent country.

The tunneling of the first public road into Iya began in the Taisho era in the 1920s, but the carving of this road through solid rock by manual labor took over twenty years to complete. Today, there are many roads throughout Iya, but when I first visited the valley there was nothing passable by car except for the original Taisho ‘highway', which was for the most part a narrow dirt track. There were no guardrails, and one could look down over hundred-meter precipices to the river running below. One day, I came around a corner to find that the tire of the car in front of me had slipped from the shoulder of the road. I watched as the driver frantically jumped from the vehicle, which proceeded to plummet into the depths.

I began to walk the mountain trails of Iya. Thinking back on it now, I was just in time. The old way of life still remained in Iya in 1972, but it was on the verge of fading out. The people working in the fields still wore the woven straw raincoats seen in samurai
movies. Inside the houses, cooking was done over an open hearth sunk into the floor.

New houses had been built alongside the Taisho road, which followed the course of the river. But in order to visit the older houses, it was not unusual to have to hike for an hour or two up from the roadside along narrow mountain paths. Consequently, there was very little contact with the outside world; some old women I met had not descended from their native hamlets for over ten years.

To Iya residents, all outsiders are labeled
shimo no hito
(literally, ‘people from below'). Although, as a foreigner, I was an especially strange
shimo no hito
, Japanese from Tokyo or Osaka are lumped together into this group as well. Because of this, the attitude towards foreigners in Iya is relatively relaxed. However, the reality of my being a foreigner was an inescapable fact, much more so as I was quite possibly the first Westerner to have ever ventured into the heart of the region. One day, tired from a strenuous one-hour hike up a steep mountain path to one of Iya's hamlets, I sat down to rest on the stone steps of a small shrine. After about ten minutes, an old lady toiled into view on the path below. As she approached the shrine, I stood up to ask her for directions. She took one look at my face, let out a shriek, and ran off down the path. Later, when I asked the villagers about it, they explained that the old lady had thought I was the god of the shrine, come out for a little air. It was a perfectly logical conclusion, since Shinto gods traditionally have long red hair. I recall this incident even now, when I see the gods in Noh and
Kabuki
performances come out with their flaming manes.

In the Iya houses of twenty years ago mysterious shadows still abounded. The valley's rocky slopes are completely unsuited to rice paddies, so traditional agriculture consisted of crops such as millet, buckwheat and
mitsumata
(the fibers of which are used to make 10,000-yen notes). But the main crop was tobacco, introduced by the Portuguese into Japan in the early 1600s. Until
recently, when a courtesan in a Kabuki play put a long pipe to her lips and inserted a pinch of pipe tobacco, she used Iya tobacco.

Because of the constantly swirling mists in the valley, the tobacco was dried inside, hung from the rafters over the smoking hearths. So Iya houses are ceilingless, and the roofs soar upwards like the vaults of a Gothic church. The first time I entered a traditional Iya dwelling, I was shocked to find that the interior of the house was pitch black. The floor, pillars and walls were all colored a deep ebony from years of smoke rising from the open hearth. The Japanese call this
kurobikari
(literally, ‘black glistening'). After a little while, my eyes adjusted and I could gradually make out the thatch on the underside of the roof. The thatch too was a shiny black color, almost as though it had been lacquered.

Iya was always desperately poor, and its houses are small in comparison to those of most rural areas in Japan. The houses of Hida-Takayama are many times larger, rising five stories or more, but since each story has a ceiling, one feels little sense of spaciousness upon entering. Iya's houses, on the other hand, feel extremely roomy inside due to the darkness and the lack of ceilings. Inside, the house is cavelike; outside is a world above the clouds.

Even now, when I travel back to Iya, I feel as though I've left the world behind and entered a magical realm. This feeling is stronger now than ever, because whilst the towns and plains below have been completely modernized, Iya remains little changed. Near the entrance to the valley there stands an Edo-period stone monument inscribed at the command of the Lord of Awa, which reads: ‘Iya, Peach Spring of our land of Awa'. The ‘Peach Spring' is the subject of an old Chinese poem about an otherworldly paradise. This monument is evidence that even hundreds of years ago, when all of Japan was beautiful, Iya was seen as something unique, as a Shangri-La.

So far, I have only written of Iya's beautiful side, but in truth there was already a snake in this Garden of Eden:
kaso
(depopulation). It began in 1964, when my family arrived in Yokohama. In that year, the imbalance between city and rural incomes passed a critical point, and farmers from all over Japan fled the countryside. Much poorer and with a more loosely organized society than the rice-growing communities of the plains, Iya was especially hard hit, as villagers moved down to Tokushima and Osaka. After 1970, the pace of
kaso
increased, and Iya was filled with abandoned houses. It occurred to me that I could own a house there.

These days, all of rural Japan gives the impression of becoming one enormous senior citizens' home. Back then, although the tide of depopulation in Iya was advancing, the villages were still alive. Even the abandoned houses were in beautiful condition.

Starting in the fall of 1972, I spent about six months ‘house hunting'. I traveled around looking at dozens of houses, not only in Iya but throughout Kagawa, Kochi and Tokushima Prefectures as well. I wound up visiting over a hundred houses in the end. I toured the countryside with friends in search of interesting abandoned houses, and when we found one, we would brazenly explore inside. It was just a matter of loosening the wooden shutters, which were usually not even locked. There were some unbelievably magnificent houses that had been left to rot. One indigo-dying mansion near Tokushima had a two-meter-wide verandah surrounding the entire house, of the sort you would only see today in Nijo Castle in Kyoto. The floorboards were over ten centimeters thick, all cut from precious
keaki
wood.

Breaking into these abandoned houses, I experienced many things that could never have been learned from books. I was able to see with my own eyes the reality of Japan's traditional ways of life. When a family decided to leave their house for the big city, they would take practically nothing away with them. What good were straw raincoats, bamboo baskets and utensils for handling firewood going to be in Osaka? Everything that had been a feature of life in Iya for a thousand years had become irrelevant
overnight. On entering one of these houses, it looked as though the residents had simply disappeared. The detritus of their daily life lay undisturbed, like a snapshot frozen in time. Everything was in place: the open newspaper, remains of fried eggs in the pan, discarded clothing and bedding, even the toothbrushes in the sink. The influences of modernization were already visible here and there – ceilings had been tacked up against the rafters to protect against the winter cold, and aluminum door and window frames had been installed – but one could still see much of the original condition of the houses. However, only a few years later, artificial materials were everywhere, covering not only ceilings, but floors, walls and pillars. The interiors disappeared under a layer of plastic and plywood.

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.