Lost Japan (22 page)

I was once invited to an old estate in England, and while taking a walk around the grounds, I came across a garden surrounded by high hedges. In the middle of the garden was a tiny round temple straight out of Greek myth. On asking the owner of the estate what this building was for, she told me it wasn't for anything; it was simply a ‘folly'. Follies exist all over England, but they are hard to find in Japan. The most luxurious buildings and gardens, such as the Katsura Detached Palace, were all created with distinct functions in mind. The ultimate luxury – complete functionlessness – is absent. Zen, in particular, is a serious affair:
mu
(nothingness) is a virtue, but
muyo
(functionlessness) is a sin. Zen gardens are designed with a specific aim in mind, to serve as aids in meditation or as guideposts on the way to enlightenment. In other words, gazing at a Zen garden does not come free: there is a spiritual bill to be paid for the pleasure. In contrast, Byodo-in is a perfect folly, born from the caprice of the Heian aristocracy. Gazing at it, you feel a sense of lightness, a desire to fly up into the heavens together with the phoenix. In post-Heian Japan, strictly ruled by military overlords, such caprice was almost unthinkable. Byodo-in is one of the few places in Japan that breathes the air of freedom.

After Byodo-in, I take my friends to the city of Nara. Just before we enter Nara Park, where the most famous temples are preserved, we stop at Hannya-ji Temple. Rarely visited by tourists, it is dedicated to Monju, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. Its gate is another bird-like construction, with wide eaves flung upwards into the sky. Inside is a garden of the type found only in Nara: a tangle of wildflowers, mostly cosmos, growing in profusion
alongside the paths and on the base of the temple's tall stone pagoda.

In Kyoto, and most other places in Japan, such wildness would never be tolerated. I recently visited the site of the reconstruction of a large Zen temple in Takaoka on the Sea of Japan coast, and was astonished to hear the supervisor, a senior official of the Cultural Ministry, say with pride, ‘The central courtyard of this temple used to be filled with
keaki
and pine trees hundreds of years old. So we cut all these unsightly trees down, and now we will be able to spread the entire courtyard, a full one thousand
tsubo
, with raked white sand.' Such is the vision of Japan's Cultural Ministry! But at Hannya-ji, wildflowers still grow untamed. Inside the temple, a charming statue of Monju, seated on his lion, gazes out over the sea of cosmos flowers and contemplates the flow of the centuries undisturbed.

From Hannya-ji, my guests and I descend into Nara Park, our destination being Nandaimon, the Great Southern Gate of Todai-ji Temple. For most visitors, the main attractions of the park are Todai-ji's Hall of the Great Buddha and Kasuga Shrine, with its walkway lined with hundreds of stone lanterns. Nandaimon is seen as no more than something you have to walk under to get to Todai-ji. However, for me, Nandaimon is the one perfect structure in the park. Built during the thirteenth century, when timber was plentiful, its huge pillars soar almost twenty-one meters into the air. The towering figures of two wrathful temple guardians are Kamakura originals, with furious faces and immense power in their bulging muscles. But most breathtaking of all is the massive roof, with eaves flung outwards and upwards like a bird taking flight.

The bird analogy recalls Byodo-in and Hannya-ji, and this is because all three buildings were built under the influence of Song and Yuan China. During this period, the Chinese experimented with architecture as fantasy, piling up multiple pavilions decorated with curling eaves. Almost every one of these buildings has
perished in China, and only a very few remain in Japan, most of them in the area surrounding Nara. Ancient Chinese roofs from the old heartland in the north were originally straight A-frames. But gradually, a new influence began creeping up into China from Southeast Asia. As can still be seen today, the eaves of Thai and Burmese buildings transform into flame shapes as they extend downwards, then swoop back up into the sky. By Sung and Yuan times, the Chinese were experimenting with rising eaves, and this style was transmitted to Japan.

Japan was on the receiving end of influences from all over Asia and the Pacific, and, as a result, it had a wonderful variety of roofs. In addition to Sung and Yuan flaring eaves, there were palm-thatched stilt-houses from the south, with the upper half of the roof expanding outwards, Polynesian style. Another type of roof can be seen in the pit dwellings of the Yayoi period – holes cut into the earth, with a round, tent-like roof dropping almost to the ground. Indigenous Japanese roof styles mingled with those imported from the mainland and the islands of the South Seas to create the widest range of styles found in any nation in East Asia. As a result, Japan's old cities, particularly Kyoto and Nara, had truly spectacular roof lines.

Rising eaves create a feeling of uplift and release, which can hardly be explained away as just a trend in architecture. The Taoist scholar John Blofeld once said to me, ‘In ancient Southeast Asia, the very raising of a building was considered taboo. Sinking pillars into the ground and setting a roof above them was believed to be a sin against Mother Earth. So they took the eaves that pointed down towards the earth and turned them back up towards the heavens. By doing this, they were absolved of having broken the taboo.'

The upswept roof became a part of Japanese architecture, and even in the thatched roofs of Iya, extra rice straw was added under the eaves to give them a little lift. However, the extreme upsweeping of eaves as in Nandaimon, or the gate of Hannya-ji
Temple, is rare in Japan. In the Edo period, there was even a movement away from rising eaves when tea masters designed their pavilions to be very low, with straight roofs of many angles mixed in a jumble. It was a return to the ‘zigzag' approach to life visible at Fushimi-inari, and it developed as part of a playful type of architecture known as
suki
.

Suki
was the final destination of the
wabi
of Kyoto. Typically, art movements go through three phases: ‘early', characterized by strength and simplicity; ‘classical', when all elements reach harmonious maturity; and ‘baroque', distorted and elaborate.
Wabi
followed a similar pattern. In its early period, it could not have been simpler, the purest
wabi
composition being Murata Juko's tea garden (circa 1500) in the temple of Shinju-an in Kyoto: a little strip of moss running along a temple verandah, with three rocks, five rocks, seven rocks. That is all. Later, when tea ceremony came into its own in the seventeenth century,
wabi
entered a classical period, resulting in dramatic creations like the Katsura Detached Palace, where villas and tea pavilions stretch over acres of artificial hills and ponds. The scale is large and the designs are complex – alternating squares of blue and white paper pasted onto sliding doors, rock pathways inset with a mixture of long rectangles and small squares.

In the eighteenth century, the decorative conceits of Katsura went one step further, resulting in
suki
: proof that in the hands of architects and designers even the simplest art can become baroque. It was an architecture focused on details: a window here, a verandah there. The emphasis was still on natural materials, but now they were combined in fanciful and elaborate ways, with curved pillars in the
tokonoma
, lattices of unusual woods, and antique roof tiles and the bases of old columns placed for effect in moss gardens. In roofs, it produced a mix of thatch, tile, bark and copper, with eaves projecting every which way.

In East Asia the roof is everything – whether flared or projecting. Stand in front of the massive Higashi Hongan-ji Temple in
Kyoto, and you realize that fully three-quarters of the total height of the building is roof. Think about the Forbidden City in Beijing, or the Royal Palace of Bangkok, and you will find that you are thinking almost exclusively of roofs. Thus, when the administrators of Kyoto and Nara set about destroying these cities, they began with the roofs. In the case of Kyoto, they built Kyoto Tower and dealt a mortal blow to the city's roof line. In Nara, the jutting concrete ridges of Nara Prefectural Office had the same effect. Ever since its completion in 1965, generations of tourists have had to screen its unsightly concrete spears out of their photographs. It was as strong an attack on the roof line of Nandaimon and its neighbors as could be imagined. Luckily, however, Nara does not suffer from the self-hatred which afflicts Kyoto, so subsequent developments in the park are more promising. A large civic building, recently completed, has sweeping tiled roofs very much in the spirit of Nara architecture.

The traditional roof styles of East Asia face a mixed future. In Japan, most cities have already been turned into a jungle of concrete blocks, and the process is far advanced in Bangkok and Beijing as well. Swooping, curving and flaring roofs have turned out to be one of the most difficult cultural traditions to integrate with modernism. There was a period in prewar Japan, and in 1950s China, when large modern structures were capped by wide tiled roofs. But no self-respecting modern architect would be caught dead doing this today.

While extravagant roof lines are dying out in Japan's city centers, they live on in the suburbs and countryside, and newly built houses in these areas commonly feature the complex joints and ridges of
suki-
style roofs. In general, however, Japanese architects have almost completely failed to integrate their own traditions into contemporary urban life. The only reason why interesting roofs survive in the suburbs is because residential architecture is considered a secondary area in Japan and has been ignored.

In the West, postmodern architects awoke from half a century
of relentless modernism and rediscovered the traditions of the arch, the dome and the column, and they succeeded in incorporating these into a new modern idiom. Thailand, because of its thriving tourist industry, has seen imaginative experimentation with traditional-style roofs in modern architecture. Hotels such as the Amanpuri in Phuket or the Sukhothai in Bangkok are particularly successful examples. In Japan, however, the elite architects concentrate on building square office towers; sometimes, the more daring of them will incorporate arches and columns in the Western postmodernist manner.

The modernism which swept the West in the 1950s and '60s is still clung to with almost religious fervor in Japan. In this, one can see Japan's conservative habit of clinging to outside influences long after they have been discarded in their country of origin. For example, high-school students in Japan still wear black military uniforms with high collars and brass buttons, a style imported from Prussia in the nineteenth century.

A taste of Japan's resistance to change and fear of departing from Western models was provided by the 1995 Venice Biennale. The government decided to entrust Japan's exhibition to an art expert named Ito Junji, who proposed organizing the entry around modern
suki
design. Although still minor in influence,
suki
has undergone a renaissance recently, inspiring a group of younger contemporary artists and architects. There was a huge outcry from the ‘traditionalists'; that is, the old-style modernists. A leading photographer dropped out in protest against this unwarranted intrusion of ‘Japaneseness'. Ito was raked over the coals by art critics who warned that ‘Japanese artists will no longer be able to eat at the main table of contemporary art'.

The old-fashioned ‘modern' architecture jamming Japanese cities is in touch with neither Japan's cultural roots nor the new standards of environmental harmony and human comfort that have developed recently elsewhere. Unfortunately, the traditionalists for whom Ito's proposal came as such a threat include most
of the bureaucrats whose building requirements ultimately determine trends in urban architectural design. In their view, cubes with elevator shafts and air-conditioning boxes on the roof are satisfyingly ‘modern', and therefore preferable to the fantasy of Byodo-in, the soaring wings of Nandaimon or the playfulness of
suki
houses. I cannot help but think, ‘How regrettable when purple usurps the place of vermilion.'

A friend of mine studied the art of
bonkei
: she learned how to place curiously shaped rocks and bonsai plants on a tray spread with sand to create a miniature landscape. But as she slowly worked her way up the hierarchy of
bonkei
technique, the final secret eluded her: no matter what she did, her sand never held together in the perfect waves and ripples of the master's precisely arranged grains. Finally, after many years and payment of a high fee to obtain her license as a
bonkei
professional, she was to be told the answer. She bowed at the feet of the master, and he spoke. ‘Use glue,' he said.

Japan is fascinated by secrets. They are the defining feature of the way traditional arts are taught and preserved. They cause problems for government and business, since different departments of the same organization tend to guard their knowledge jealously and not speak to one another. In museums, the finer an artwork, the less it will be shown to the public – which is why you
will often find that the National Treasure you traveled so far to view is actually just a copy. The real piece stays in storage, and is shown only to a chosen few curators.

This tradition goes back to ancient Shinto, when the objects inside shrines, typically a stone or a mirror, became invested with mystical secrecy. At Izumo, Japan's oldest Shinto shrine, the object has been hidden from view for so long that its identity has been forgotten; it is referred to merely as ‘the Object'. At the Grand Shrine of Ise, the object is known to be a mirror, but no one has laid eyes on it for at least a thousand years. When asked about Ise, the nineteenth-century Japanologist Chamberlain replied, ‘There is nothing to see, and they won't let you see it.'

In Esoteric Buddhism, secrecy manifested itself in mandalas (diagrams of spiritual truth). A mandala can be a painting made up of squares and circles with Buddhas at strategic corners; equally, it can be an arrangement of statues, the layout of a building or a temple circuit followed by pilgrims. The largest mandala of all covers the whole island of Shikoku, which is made sacred by a ring of eighty-eight temples founded by the monk Kukai. Iya Valley, as it happens, lies right at the heart of this great mandala – appropriately, since the heart of a mandala should be inaccessible and secret. Buddha statues with great power became
hibutsu
(hidden Buddhas), and were displayed only once or twice a year. Important
hibutsu
could be seen only once every few decades, and there are some that have stayed in hiding for centuries at a stretch.

The ultimate cauldron of secrecy was the area around Nara, where ancient Shinto grew up and Esoteric Buddhism flourished. Over time, the mountains ringing Nara evolved into one vast mandala, made up of overlapping sub-mandalas, and every peak and valley was imbued with romantic and esoteric overtones.

A good example is Mt Yoshino, which lies south of Nara and is famed for its cherry blossoms. Going to view cherry blossoms at Yoshino would, on the surface, appear to be no different from
making a similar excursion to anywhere else in Japan during spring. But for people familiar with Kabuki, the cherry trees here are the backdrop for
Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura
, a famous play which centers around the ill-fated warrior Yoshitsune's exile in Yoshino, his beautiful wife, Shizuka Gozen, and a magical fox which has disguised itself as one of his retainers. Yoshino is also celebrated as the center of the Southern Court, a group of exiles who fought a guerrilla war here in support of the legitimate Imperial line against the Shogunate for much of the fourteenth century. So for the historically minded, the cherry trees stir thoughts of this brave band of loyalists and a long sequence of Imperial visits to view the blossoms. And from a religious perspective, Yoshino is important because it was the headquarters of the Yamabushi sect of mountain mystics. To someone familiar with Esoteric Buddhism, the cherry trees lining the ridge at Yoshino mark the border between two huge sub-mandalas covering the mountains to the east and west.

The interest of a place like Yoshino is therefore not something you can see easily with the naked eye: it is veiled by heavy overlays of history, literature and religion. As a result, although they are only an hour or two's easy drive from Osaka or Kyoto, the outer mountains of Nara are among those least accessible to the public, and are more distant psychologically than even the so-called ‘Three Hidden Regions'. Other than during cherry-blossom season, the public by and large ignores this area; but over the years, these mountains became my playground.

Mt Koya lies between Osaka, Nara and Ise at the core of one of the area's mandalas. Founded in the ninth century by Kukai, it is a complex of temples and monasteries built on a plateau in the mountains of Wakayama, southwest of the city of Nara. It is the sacred ground of Esoteric Buddhism. For a long time I hadn't had a chance to visit it, but at last I was invited to join some friends on a pilgrimage to the mountain.

A Tibetan lama once gave me the following instructions about
how to explore a mandala: never rush headlong to the center. The proper way to contemplate a mandala is to first train your thoughts on the Buddhas guarding the gates along the periphery. Having entered, you gradually work your way into the interior, going round and round in ever tighter circles until you arrive at the center. Taking this advice to heart, we spent three days driving around southern Nara and the Yoshino range before approaching Mt Koya. As we finally neared the peak, the mountains grew higher around us, and the winding road to the summit was nothing short of spectacular. I could well imagine the feelings of pilgrims to this sacred place, far from the ‘dust of the world'. Our excitement built as we speculated on what esoteric wonders unknown to Nara and Kyoto lay at the heart of the mandala. But on arriving at the summit, our hoped-for realm of wonder was nowhere to be found. The temples of Koya make up a small town; this in itself was no surprise, but it was the sort of town you see everywhere in Japan. The ‘dust' had penetrated even here.

Koya turned out to be a series of such letdowns, for the interest lay entirely in the approach and never in the central object. For instance, the forest path leading to the grave of Kukai is lined with stone stupas marking the burial places of famous historical families. Walking along the dim, tree-shaded path, the flavor of history grew stronger as our eyes passed over one great legendary name after another carved in mossy stone. But when we arrived at Kukai's grave, we found that it had been obscured by a shiny, steel-reinforced Hall of Lanterns, which jarred against the backdrop of moss, stones and ancient conifers.

As we made our dutiful round of the temples in this disappointing town, I reassured myself that we had only just entered the mandala. There was much more to explore before we reached the center: the Konpon Daito (‘Fundamental Great Tower'). A round tower with a square roof, the Konpon Daito symbolizes the center of the universe. In Esoteric Buddhist temples throughout
Japan, one finds a square table before the high altar, its sides marked off with string, and flowers, bells, vases, cups and dishes geometrically arranged on its surface. This array, called a
goma
, is a three-dimensional mandala made up of ritual utensils. The word ‘
goma
' comes originally from India, and the mandala represents a map of the heavenly capital. At the center is sacred Mt Sumeru, identified as Mt Kailash in Tibet, which is said to be the great Shiva lingam of the universe. The concept of the ‘heavenly capital' spread throughout East Asia, and can be seen in the layout of Angkor Wat and in Thai palace architecture. In the case of the Japanese
goma
, one often sees a small tower at the center of the table of implements. This tower, the symbol of Mt Sumeru, is the Konpon Daito, modeled after the large tower at Mt Koya.

When I was translating for the Oomoto traditional arts seminar, one of the modern masters of Zen, Abbot Daiki of Daitoku-ji Temple in Kyoto, paid a visit. A student asked the abbot, ‘What is Zen?', and Daiki Roshi replied, ‘Zen is the Konpon Daito of the universe.' As a fledgling interpreter I was completely at a loss. Not knowing all the symbolism involved, I couldn't figure out why a Zen monk was referring to a building at Mt Koya.

At long last we approached the Konpon Daito, and I could see this mysterious tower with my own eyes. However, it turned out to be not the least bit mysterious! The original building had burned down, and the present tower was a Meiji-period reconstruction with no magic about it at all. In
goma
arrangements, the Konpon Daito is set apart by string and flowers, but at Mt Koya, the Konpon Daito just sits alone in the midst of an empty space.

With that, I gave up on Mt Koya. That evening, we stayed at Kongo Sanmai-in, one of the sub-temples that offer rooms to pilgrims and travelers. We arrived at our lodgings at around half past four. One of the monks asked us if we would like to see the
Buddha in the main hall, but we were all exhausted. After an early supper, I went to my room to read a book and relax for a while. That night, on my way to the bath, I passed a monk in the hall. ‘Good evening,' he said pleasantly. ‘How fortunate for you to have come here today. You were able to see our great Buddha of divine power.'

‘Well, actually we were planning to see it tomorrow,' I said. The monk shook his head. ‘I'm afraid that won't be possible. Sanmai-in's Buddha is a
hibutsu
. Mt Koya's other statues are sometimes put on display, or even lent to other temples and museums. But this one has never left the mountain. This is the first time it has ever been shown to the general public. It's called a “five-hundred-year
hibutsu
”. The doors closed at five o'clock today, and you'll have to wait another five hundred years if you want to see it.'

This was my greatest failure ever as a travel guide. I was so embarrassed that I could not bring myself to confess to my friends, and to this day I don't believe they realize that they missed seeing a five-hundred-year
hibutsu
by only thirty minutes.

Faubion Bowers, my friend and mentor in Kabuki, once told me this story about Greta Garbo. One day he was walking with her in New York, when a fan approached the actress for her autograph. The fan begged with tears in her eyes, but Garbo coldly turned her down. When the woman had left, Faubion turned to Garbo and said, ‘That's a cruel way to treat your fans! What would it have been to you to give your signature to that woman? She would have treasured it all her life.' Garbo retorted, ‘If I'd given her my autograph, she would've grown bored and put it aside in a week or two. But because I refused, she'll treasure my autograph until the day she dies.'

Thinking back on it now, I realize that had I actually seen the five-hundred-year
hibutsu
, I might not have been all that moved. It could well have been as uninspiring as ‘Use glue'. But thanks to the
hibutsu
I never saw, Mt Koya was transformed into a mystical
realm, and among Japan's countless Buddhas, the secret Buddha of Sanmai-in remains for me without peer. My joy lay in the discovery that behind the desolate Konpon Daito and the harsh steel Hall of Lanterns, Mt Koya still has places that are dark and hidden. In a sense, Mt Koya is a model of all Japan: there are still mysteries hidden within.

In Nara, unless you have done considerable historical research, the names of the gods, even the reasons why the temples exist, are a closed book. The name of the god of Omiwa Shrine, Yamato no Omononushi Kushimikatama no Mikoto, is an arcane rush of syllables which are completely meaningless to Japanese ears today. Ancient Shinto and Esoteric Buddhism are populated with unseen gods and spirits, not meant to be understood by the average person. In this lies the fundamental distinction between Kyoto and Nara: Kyoto, for all the philosophy underlying Zen,
wabi, suki
and so forth, is a city of art; Nara, however, is a realm of religion.

Even within tourist-clogged Nara Park there are places that possess this religious appeal. Entering the Sangatsu-do Hall, next door to the Hall of the Great Buddha, you find a quiet room far removed from the flurry of people in the park. In this dim space, there towers a magnificent gilt statue of the Fukukensaku Kannon Buddha, surrounded by a mandala arrangement of statues of guardians, the Sun and the Moon, and other bodhisattvas. From the halo behind the Buddha's head project gilded rays, gleaming in the darkness. Tourists come into Sangatsu-do talking and laughing, but they soon fall silent in the presence of Fukukensaku Kannon's fearsome light. None of them, including myself, has the slightest idea what the significance of Fukukensaku Kannon is. It doesn't matter – those beams of light are enough.

But Sangatsu-do aside, for me the real Nara lies outside Nara Park; so when I take friends to Nara, after a quick circuit of the park, we head out of the city. Our goal is the southern and
eastern mountains, via the temples and relics scattered over the surrounding plain.