Lost Japan (6 page)

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 future 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.

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: