Palindrome Design

Design work

Child's Play

I've been reading John Dower's "Embracing Defeat" and there's a fascinating section on how Japanese children's games changed during the post-war period and were in many ways a mirror of adult society. There were certainly no toys to be had in such dismal economic times and playing war vanished in the wake of the defeat. Here are a few examples of the new types of games that came into play:

• Yamiichi-gokko: holding a mock black-market.
• Panppan asobi: prostitution play. Panpan was a euphemism for prostitutes catering specifically to GIs. Little boys created GI style hats out of newspaper and little girls pretended to be the panpans.
• Demo asobi: recreating left-wing political demonstrations. Children would run around waving red paper flags.
• Train games: children used the teacher's platform (still found in classrooms today) as their mock train. "Repatriate train" involved pretending be returning soldiers, trembling and afraid, on their way home. "Special train" - an allusion to the Occupation personnel-only train cars - allowed only "pretty people" to ride. In "ordinary train" children crammed together, pushing and shoving, barely fitting on teacher's platform. Eventually a conductor stopped the "train," saying it was broken down, and ordered everyone off.
• Other later inventions included runpen-gokko (pretending to be homeless vagrants), "catch a thief" and "pretending handcuffs" (mirroring the lawlessness of the times), lottery games reflecting the desire for material wealth, and kaidashi-gokko (pretending to leave home in search of food).

As Dower notes a good portion of their play seemed to find pleasure in being colonized, as well as "playing at utter confusion."

Lifestyle

I've been spending a lot of time looking over Bruce Mau's "Lifestyle" recently and have noticed a lot of references to Japan that I didn't necessarily notice 6 years ago when I first read it:

• In the opening spread of images there are 2 references to Japan - the "design-driven destination" of Tokyo's Ski Dome and the ubiquitous Colonel Sanders statues found at Japanese KFC franchises.
• There's at least one reference to Kurosawa, in relation to Chris Marker's homage to the Japanese director AK. Marker also made the film Sans Soleil, a fictional sort of documentary travelogue the deals heavily with memory and the Japan of a few decades past. Sans Soleil is not mentioned specifically but BMD's translation of Marker's La Jetee into book form is mentioned.
• In a spread from BMD's image essay ReMembering the Body there is the mention of an anonymous Mr. S, age 43, who died of a sudden heart abnormality while on the job. No mention of Japan is explicitly made - just the abstracted background image of a subway car and the single word karoshi - "death by overwork" in Japanese.
• In an unconventional 1999 job ad, BMD developed a quiz. Some of the questions included: What is the difference between nigiri and sashimi? Who designed the Asahi Beer Hall in Tokyo? What style of hat was a runaway success at the Nagano Winter Olympics?
• For an exhibtion dealing with "The Culture of Energy" this information is included regarding Japan ("a country without energy resources"):
• Because Japan must import 85% of all its energy, it has become one of the most energy-efficient countries in the world.
• A family in Japan uses one-third less the amount of energy than a family in Canada.
• Only 5 percent of Japanese homes have central heating; in the USA the figure is over 80 percent. Japanese use only 40 percent as much heat per unit of floor area. Only 55 percent of Japan's total domestic travel is by car. In the US this figure is closer to 85 percent. Japanese homes on average have only 27 square meters of space per person, vs. over 50 square meters per person in the US.
• Japan's manufacturing productivity increased 102% between 1970 and 1980, while that of Germany grew 59.9% and in the US only 28%. Yet Japan used 30% less energy per unit of manufacturing output than the US.
• An exhibit about Japan would be incomplete without a look at its traditional and popular cultures. This would include karaoke, the tea ceremony, pachinko parlours, Shonen Jump (a comic book which sells 4 million copies a week), sumo, flower arrangement, sexual pleasure, calligraphy, martial arts, university entrance exams, baseball tournaments, Mito Komon (a popular TV show), the Flower Festival and video games.

Every foreigner living in Japan bemoans the lack of central heating and the lack of insulation (an example of Japan's energy inefficiency). In the office I worked in for 2 years there was no A/C in the brutal summers and in the winter we used a gas space heater (gas leaks were a common occurance).

I wish I had had this book with me in Japan. In the summer of 2007 I had to put together a short presentation for a group of students going to study in Germany. Part of their time would be spent attending lectures on energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy. I was asked to give them my presentation on America's concerns with renewable energy sources before they left; I suppose to get them in the mood. This info from BMD would have come in handy, if anything it would have been interesting considering the exhibit was comissioned by German utility company EMR (ENERGIEKULTUR was the actual title of the exhibtion).

When the students returned from their trip I was handed a cassette tape containing a lecture on global energy policies from a German professor - in heavily accented English. It was my task to transcribe it, as his accent had proven indecipherable to even the keenest of Japanese ears. So I spent a week sitting out in the hallway with a pair of headphones, typing up a transcript - it was too loud in the office and the recording of the lecture not loud enough. I didn't mind though - it was much cooler in the hallway, as opposed to a tiny office full of computers and 13 people, with no A/C.

They ended up installing A/C in the office a couple weeks before I left the job.

Notes on Richard Lloyd Parry's "Smilingly Excluded"

Richard Lloyd Parry's critique of Donald Richie and the general dearth of lasting literary works produced by expatriates in Japan came up in conversation last week and I was prompted to re-read it. A great essay.

Foreign writers have been visiting Tokyo since the 1860s, but for such a vast, thrilling and important city it has proved barren as a place of literary exile. Among those who made Japan their home, as well as their subject, there are to be found only minor talents...

The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture...

When literary celebrities have alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous.

There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles.

Why then – outside Japan, at least – should [Donald Richie] be so little known?

Only his 1971 travelogue, The Inland Sea, and some of his film criticism, are read except by those with a specialist interest in Japan.

Wounded partisanship of this type leads one to suspect a straightforward explanation for his unsuccess: that Richie simply isn’t much of a writer. But is there more to it than this: a reflection of the times he has lived through; something inhospitable in the intellectual atmosphere of Tokyo itself?

There is another lucky side effect for many expatriates: personal alienation, the inescapable sense of being different from everyone else, is cancelled out, or at least rendered invisible, by the larger, universal alienation of being a gaijin.

To be blunter, Richie and a seemingly disproportionate number of his friends and contemporaries – the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual.

Richie’s Journals make explicit what is only suggested in his other writing: that, whatever the delights of Japan’s culture and the fascinating perspectives available to the writer in exile, it is sex – or Richie’s particular version of it – that has kept him tethered here for so long.

Only much later, when Japan had changed beyond recognition, did he begin to understand the political pulses which charge the relationship between the victor and the defeated.

Never once does he indulge in the favourite gaijin pastime: whingeing about Japan and the Japanese. ‘Why is it, I wonder, that when expatriates in Japan get together they always do this – find fault?’ he asks. ‘Do they do this in other countries? “Oh these Luxembourgians, these people!”’ Later, he is reproached by his old friend, the literary translator and scholar of Tokyo, Edward Seidensticker: ‘You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.’ He replies that Seidensticker ‘really hated himself, not these people, and that he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing’.

The Inland Sea, a learned, beautifully paced elegy for one of ‘the last places on earth where men rise with the sun and where streets are dark and silent by nine at night’, is the only full-length work of Richie’s that will be remembered a generation from now. His various collections of newspaper articles and magazine essays are patchy and poorly organised, and I couldn’t get through the long-out-of-print early novels, Where Are the Victors? (1956) and Companions of the Holiday (1968), well-meaning and empathetic attempts at social observation which, even as period pieces, hold scant interest today.

In a life of prolific underachievement, The Japan Journals are the masterpiece.

He escorted them, helped them to find boys and girls, then wrote acute little sketches of them, a chronicle of the naivety, arrogance and insensitivity which overcomes so many otherwise intelligent people in Japan.

These were tumultuous times, but despite Richie’s avant-garde leanings, the violent left-wing demonstrations make no appearance in the diaries. A ‘chronic non-joiner’, he actively resisted participation in anything that sniffed of politics, especially sexual politics.

A decade of Japanese recession later, it is easy to forget how ominous all this seemed at the time, and how many people in both countries came to regard the other as an enemy. ‘Japan is an unguided missile,’ Richie writes in a rare disquisition on current affairs.

The shock of this change is the realisation, which Richie is too honest not to register, that the gaijin’s special status is unearned, a simple function of economics. In the way of these things, though, money provides its own solution to his frustrations, or at least an alternative. The bubble attracts immigrant workers – Pakistanis, Koreans, Filipinos, Chinese and Iranians – drawn to Tokyo by the mighty yen. And among them, Richie finds erotic opportunities which the natives no longer provide. ‘You seem to have deserted Japan in favour of the Third World,’ a friend tells him. ‘It was not I that deserted Japan,’ he writes, ‘but Japan that deserted the Third World . . . It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the USA, the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator.’

By almost any other standard, the young in Japan today are exemplary: a little glazed and indifferent from the outside, but politer, calmer and more law abiding than their contemporaries anywhere in the world. Richie may find it harder to seduce them as he circumambulates the park, but he is not going to be beaten up, robbed or murdered by them either.

Greater Tokyo contains thirty million people; it is far and away the largest city that has ever existed. And yet to the Westerner with intellectual aspirations it is a small pond. The Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo compared Japan to a tropical mud swamp: when living flowers are transplanted from elsewhere they grow vigorously for a while, put out lurid blooms, but eventually wither in the strange minerals of the new soil. In 150 years, foreigners in Japan have produced important works of history, political science, anthropology and journalism, but no lasting work of literature. Perhaps Donald Richie shows us why.

Mystery Solved!

I've had this woodblock print for over a year now, since picking it up at a temple (Sugimotodera) in Kamakura, Japan, and its meaning has always been a bit of a mystery. This weekend however I finally figured it all out. I was helping Bruce Rutledge with the Chin Music Press table at the ENMA Aki Matsuri and it just so happened we were right next to a table manned by two monks from a local temple. I noticed a tenugui on their table that looked surprisingly familiar and quickly realized it contained the same exact imagery as my print. The only difference was their version had hiragana accompanying each image. I found out from one of the monks that its actually a pictographic representation of the Buddhist Heart Sutra - Maka Hannyaharamita Shingyō in Japanese. As it turns out, in Edo period Japan kanji was perhaps not as well understand by the average Joe (Taro?). Thus in order to disseminate knowledge of the Heart Sutra among "illiterate" farmers and such, there was this genius idea to create a pictograph version of the Heart Sutra, accompanied by hiragana (which my version lacks). Basically, the way it works is the farmer, tired and dirty from a day in the field comes home and wants to chant the Heart Sutra. So he looks at the pictographs, says out loud the name of each object (all of which would have been familiar to any Edo period farmer) in the order its shown (top to bottom, right to left) and when he's done he's chanted the Heart Sutra in its entirety! Pure genius!

For example, the first vertical column from the right uses six pictographs to indicate the title, which would be "Heart Sutra" or Maka Hannyaharamita Shingyō. The first picture is of a kettle which is kama in Japanese. This kettle, however, is upside down - a clever way to indicate it should be read backwards as maka. Second we have a well-known mask from Noh theater called a hannya. Third we have a man's belly, which is hara in Japanese. Followed by a winnow (farming implement?) - mi, a rice field - ta, and a Shinto mirror - shingyo. Put them all together and what do you have? Maka Hannyaharamita Shingyō or "Heart Sutra." The chant then proceeds from right to left. Its important to note that the choice of objects has nothing to do with the meaning of the sutra, simply as an aid to pronounce it.

Now that I knew what I was looking for I could find a little more info on the internet and its been suggested that these pictographs were created more as a playful novelty than as a real tool for spreading the good word to the illiterate masses.

Notes from Stuart Barnett's interview with Donald Richie

then what you could say is that the Japanese film is in the same sense about atmosphere, about the social extensions and physical extensions that define a person, the idea of an environment being responsible for the character and the action which is created, the idea of something social or natural, or something supra-human, which is shown on the film.

If the Japanese are ignored, it's probably for two reasons. One, the Americans have this been-there-done-that attitude.

That is what I meant. Japan tends to control everything. It controls nature and calls it a garden; it controls flower arrangement and calls it ikebana--"living flowers," even though they're already dead. Everything is controlled to a point that is noticeable to a culture that makes a fetish out of apparently leaving things to chance, or apparently letting everyone have his voice.

And all the Shinto ritual pollution came too late, because the kids know nothing about it.

Yet, traveling around Japan, it's easy to be shocked at the paving over of the countryside, the haphazard urban and suburban topography, the lack of any notion of zoning.

I think the attitude towards nature in Japan has been always the same, before and now. I think what has changed has been the agenda. For example, before the attitude toward nature was appropriation in a more benign way because they didn't have the tools to do anything else. So a daimyo, or a samurai, or a rich merchant could improve his social ambitions, or his image in the neighborhood, by doing a classical garden. By forming nature in some particular way that announced that it was his own. That's one agenda. Now we've got all sort of machines and lots more money than we ever did before. It's very easy for politicians and financiers to make their mark...aestheticism has not been included in the agenda. Efficiency has.

It gets highly complicated when prefectures have to spend budgets because otherwise they won't get that much next year. So you have many hungry construction companies backed by the yakuza that have to be satisfied and have to be assured that they'll make money. There is no more nature in Japan. All the picturesqueness you see on the way to Takayama is on mountainsides that are probably too difficult and expensive to get at. That's why it's still there.

But your idea--or anyone's idea--of what is Japanese isn't anything a Japanese would share...But I'm thinking more of the urban fabric--or the lack of any fabric. It all seems a jumble.

I think that's what the Japanese quite willingly accept as Japanese. It lacks order; it's very postmodern.

See, what we see of an ordered Japanese style is the product of a social class that doesn't exist any more. Official Japan--the people who gave us the tea ceremony, the Noh, Mizoguchi, Ozu--doesn't exist any more.

you have to point out that English as used in Japan is not a subdivision of English. It's a subdivision of Japanese. And it works perfectly well...It's there only for its ostensible purpose, which is to indicate that I am cool, I am smart, I know the ways of the world. All these submessages are subsumed into this English and that's its true function. Being grammatical is beside the point.

So English is a purely postmodern language in Japan? It's pure surface?

In Shibuya they would wear high, elevated sandals. They dye their hair or sun tan. They accentuate their eyes. These are fake foreigners. Not that they are wannabes. They are the avant-gardes of appropriation, which is working its way through everything. Everything has to be taken.

I'm fortunate in that I'm not an academic. I may be a scholar, but I'm not an academic. So I don't have to go through all the nonsense they have to. So I can have my freedom to be a dilettante and a flaneur. I can do all things I couldn't do if I were respectable.

In one sense, Japanese aesthetics points at the limitedness of Western aesthetics, which focuses for the most part on the autonomous work of art. The Japanese aesthetic seems more linked with movements like William Morris's arts and crafts movement or Bauhaus. Hence the emphasis on design and utility.

You hear Westerners say: this isn't the real me. In other words, it isn't the real me you've just been talking to. The Japanese don't believe in soul. They don't believe in God. There's no superstructure that can support the integrity of a work of art. So, with William Morris, you're right on. It’s all crafts. There wasn't any word for art until one was made up in 1858. The only term for it meant both art and craft.

With Japan it's very hands-on crafts. Nowadays they've learned that the West puts people's names on as labels and they do this too, but I don't think it means that much. I think everything is through group effort in the true medieval sense.

Indeed, the success of the iMac and the Chrysler PT Cruiser were triumphs of design. So these things that are filling our day-to-day lives are becoming sleeker and more elegant. RICHIE: Right. The Eames chairs turn out to have been a harbinger. Bauhaus turns out to have been a harbinger. Of course, Bauhaus comes from Japan. Here art does not exist except as commodification. It doesn't exist except as a way of making money.

I think over the years, Japan has gotten used to not having a God; they're so used to it, nobody remarks about this. If you've got a country where you dunk the kid in Shinto when he's born and you dunk him in Buddhism when he's dead, and you dabble with a Christian wedding in between, this doesn't argue for a strong feeling of religion. I think the only Japanese religion is being Japanese. This has the same amount of awe connected with it, the amount of the unspeakable. One of the strongest reprimands a Japanese can give another Japanese is "that's not like a Japanese." It's treated with a degree of respect and awe that we reserve for religious things.

Before Americans were frightened of the people making automobiles and now they're amusing us to death with Pokemon.

Just as religion has to have a devil in order to create a God--God doesn't know who he is unless he looks at the devil and says that's who I'm not--the Japanese need somebody else...But nevertheless the idea is that there's someone out there who's absolutely and utterly not us. And is used quite consciously to tell us who we are. This is racism. This is xenophobia. Xenophobia is always based upon this, I believe--the idea that you must always have somebody else to define.

But why are they so polite to the gaijin? That's what I don't get. RICHIE: They can afford to be. I think a lot of people quite understand this. BARNETT: It's a very gracious culture. RICHIE: Yes. As long as their Japaneseness is not threatened. On the other hand, you'll find many, many people who would happily give it up for a day or a month--or a year. They go abroad and do all sorts of things in very unJapanese ways. But you often find this parabola that drags them back to the country. This happened to Tanizaki; this happened to Mishima. Mishima went about as far as you can go and came back and did the most conventional thing you can think of. No, it's not like living with Texan rednecks. It's really not. But it's like living with extremely cultured, cultivated Texan rednecks.

We do not exist alone. No one has successfully adopted a true castaway, a Robinson Crusoe.

When they do occur, the Japanese have no idea what to do with them. They have no idea what to do with their atrocities in the war. They literally have no idea. They sweep them under the carpet.

But it makes the place endlessly fascinating. I think it's the most interesting place in the world. It's convoluted; it's complicated. Every day is a wonderful brain scramble. Coupled with an emotional nature, which I like very, very much.

BARNETT: Looking at Japanese pop culture, especially TV, I get the sense that there's almost an affective modernization going on. That a lot of these weird shows, which seem aimed at the youth, emphasize hysterical exuberance. Are the Japanese youth entering a different psychological, affective space than is traditionally Japanese? RICHIE: I don’t know. But you could say that the very fact that they are so extraordinarily hysterical indicates the degree of regimentation, which demands-- BARNETT: a Mardi Gras. RICHIE: Right. Exactly. Every day there's Saturnalia on the tube. But constraint at home. That's always been true. The same thing went on in eighteenth-century Edo. The eijanaika phenomenon at the end of the Tokugowa period. Sheer Dionysius erupting. I would consider that to be--maybe perhaps more extended now--but nonetheless one of the givens of Japanese history. Under the repression, there's the explosion. BARNETT: It's a safety valve. RICHIE: Indeed, it's a safety valve. Yet it's one thing to have an eijanaika and it's another to be on a talk show and pull your hair. The loss of quality has been considerable. In actuality, youth is so constrained now; they can barely talk to one another. They can only talk through the cell phone. You'll see a couple on a date, and they'll each be on the phone with someone else.

"The Japanese don't preserve old things. They preserve traditions and art forms, but not objects.

Surface things change fast, but deeper things like morals, ethics, and manners don't. For example, the Japanese are a law - abiding, very moral people, and this has remained unchanged for over 100 years. There has been corruption, of course, but basically it is a conventional, fundamentally conservative society despite all the tremendous surface change."

- Edward Seidenstecker

Notes on Alex Kerr's "Lost Japan"

Japanese Studies at the time revolved almost wholly around economic development, post-Meiji government, "theories of Japaneseness " (known as Nihonjinron), and so on...

The Japanese have always treated foreigners like creatures from another universe. As Japan has become more internationalized, the attitude toward foreigners has grown more, rather than less, complicated. But in those days, outside the big cities, there was only tremendous curiosity...

Roads were few, and the mountains were heavily blanketed with old-growth forest. Mist boiled up out of the valleys as if by magic...

With its abundant "rainforest" vegetation, volcanic mountains and the delicte leafage of its native flora, Japna was perhaps one of the most beautiful countries in the world. During the ensuing twenty-odd years, the country's natural environment has changed completely. The old-growth forests have been logged and replanted with neat rows of cedar trees, and within these cedar groves it is deathly silent...roads have been carved deep into the mountains, and the hillsides have been covered in erosion-control concrete...

But nature in Japan used to be far more mysterious and fantastic, a sacred area that seemed surely inhabited by gods. In Shinto, there is a tradition of Kami no Yo, the "age of the Gods," when man was pure and the gods dwelled in hills and trees.

Usually the housed 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.

These days, all of rural Japan gives the impression of becoming one enormous senior citizens' home.

Western visitors to Japan, appalled at the disregard for city heritage and the environment, always ask, "Why can't the Japanese preserve whaht is valuable at the same time as they modernize?" For Japan as a nation, the old world has become irrelevent...In the West, contemporary clothing, architecture and so on hahve 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...In contrast to Europe, however, change came to China, Japan, and Southeast Asia in a truly precipitous fashihon. What's more, these changes were introduced from a completely alien culture....modern clothing and architecture...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, hitorical 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.

These things are so far removed from what the Japanese use today, that they could almost come from a different planet.

Noh stages, Shinto shrines, Zen temples and the houses of Iya all date from a pre-tatami age. The psychological difference between the wooden floors and tatami is great. The wooden floors can be traced back to the houses of Southeast Asia, which stood on stilts in forests from the "Age of the Gods." Tatami, with their neat black borders, came into vogue in a later era of precise etiquette, tea ceremony, and samurai ritual....Rather than replace the old with the new, Japan simply lays the new on top of the old.

Nothing can ever be accomplished without time-consuming discussion. the discussion may apparently have little to do with the matter at hand, but it is absolutely indispensable, and many an impatient foreign businessman has met his doom by disregarding this Law.

The military took over, moving the capital from Kyoto to Kamakura and establishing the Shogunate which ruled Japan for the next 600 years. One consequence of this military rule is the rigidity we see today.

Tanizaki makes the point that Japan's traditional art arose from the darkness in which people lived. For example, gold screens, which look garish in modern interiors, were designed to pick up the last struggling rays of light making their way into the dim interior of a Japanese house.

It was the constant pressure of this darkness which drove the Japanese to create cities of neon and fluorescent lights. Brightness is a fundamental desire in modern Japan, as can be seen in its uniformly lit hotel lobbies and flashing pachinko parlors.

So visitors to Japan are unprepared for the complete and utter victory of fluorescent lighting, whose flat bluish glare has penetrated homes, museums, hotels, everywhere.

It is said that of Japan's 30,000 rivers and streams, only 3 remain undammed, and even these have had their streambeds and banks encased in concrete. Concrete blocks now account for over 30% of the several thousand kilometers of the country's coastline.

And then the electric wires! Japan is the only advanced nation in the world which 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.

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.

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.

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.

There had to be more than this zestless, ritualized Kyoto, with every tree pruned, every gesture a formula.

This sideways glance, called nagashime (literally "flowing eyes"), was a hallmark of beautiful women in old Japan, and is found in countless woodblock prints of courtesans and onnagata.

On the one hand, there is Japan's free-wheeling sexuality, out of which was born theh riotous ukiyo (floating world) of Edo: courtesans, colorful woodblock prints, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, "naked festivals," brilliantly decorated kimonos, etc. This is a remnant of ancient Southeast Asian influence...At the same time there is a tendency in Japan towards over-decoration, towards cheap sensuality too overt to be art. Recognizing this, the Japanese turn against the sensual. They polish, refine, slow down, trying to reduce art and life to its pure essentials. From this reaction were born the rituals of tea ceremony, Noh drama and Zen...In the late Muromachi period, gorgeous gold screen were in the ascendant; along came the tea masters, and suddenly the aesthetic was misshapen brown tea bowls. By late Edo the emphasis had swung back to courtesans and the pleasure quarters. Today, this war goes on. There are garish pachinko parlors and late-night pornographic TV, and there is a reaction against all that, which I call the "process of sterilization": the tendency to fill every garden with raked sand and every modern structure with flat concrete and granite.

At the risk of oversimplification, I would say it was because Japan is a country where the exterior is more often valued over the interior. One may see the negative effects of this in many aspects of modern Japanese life. For instance, the fruits and vegetables in a Japanese supermarket are all flawless in color and shape as if made from wax, but they are flavorless. The importance of the exterior may be seen in the conflict between tatemae and honne...

...the overall design of a building and its aesthetic relation to street and skyline are ignored; the result is careless, disjointed, ugly. The sorry state of the highway system is also the result of renga thinking: there is no master plan, just a stringing together of annual budgets to build highways piecemeal.

For anyone expecting dramatic unity, Kabuki seems weak. My friends who value logic invariably dislike Kabuki.

There is hardly a single object on the Kabuki stage recognizable to young people today.

True friendship is not easy here. Long-term foreign residents complain that after ten or twenty years in the country they are lucky to know one Japanese they consider to be a true friend. Yet the problem goes deeper than the culture gap between foreigners and Japanese. The Japanese often tell me that they can't make friends with each other; they say, "There are the people you knew in high school who remain bosom buddies for life. Everyone you meet after that cannot be trusted."

Traditionally, most houses in Japan of any size or wealth had a kura built alongside. These storehouses were necessary because of the "empty room" ethos. Furniture, paintings, screens, trays and tables appeared in a Japanese house only when needed, and varied by season and by occassion.

As Japan is an island country, rules could be imposed with a thoroughness impossible in a large continental nation like China. As a result, Japan's pyramidal structures, which you can find everywhere from companies to tea ceremony, really do determine patterns of behavior. In my experience, a Japanese is much less likely to say or do the unexpected than a Chinese; whatever he may think, he is more likely to do what the rules tell him to do.

Surely no other country in the world has such an extensive literature in praise of itself.

But once they get into college, the pressure suddenly relaxes and the next four years are spent almost completely at play. Companies place little stress on what new employees know before they are hired; the real education begins on the job.

In Oxford, however, old objects surround you, living on as a normal part of everyday life.

However, as is evident from China's very name - Chung Kuo (the Middle Kingdom) - the Chinese are firmly convinced that their country lies at the center of the earth. Until very recently, China bestowed its culture on neighbors such as Vietnam, Korea, and Japan...the only thing which ever went from Japan to China was the folding fan.

Japan, in contrast, was always on the receiving end of cultural imports from other countries, and deep in their hearts, the Japanese are haunted by a sense of insecurity about their cultural identity. What can you call truly "Japanese" when almost everything worthwhile, from Zen to the writing system, came from China or Korea?

Naturally, Japan must stand at the top of the pyramid, and this is what has given birth to the aggressive theories of Japaneseness.

Lovers of China are thinkers; lovers of Japan, sensuous. People drawn to China are restless, adventurous types, with critical minds. They have to be, because Chinese society is capricious, changing from one instant ot the next...China will never allow you to sit back and thihnk, "All is perfect." Japan, on the other hand, with its social patterns designed to cocoon everyone and everything from harsh reality, is a much more comfortable country to live in. Well-established rhythms and politenesses shield you from most unpleasantness. Japan can be a kind of "lotus land" where on floats blissfully away on the placid surface of things.

Since WWII, Japan has had fifty years of uninterrupted peace, during which time the concrete of its social systems has set hard and fast. It has become the land of social stasis, and the foreigners drawn to Japan tend to be those who find comfort in this. Japan's peaceful and secure society is one of its major achievements.

At the same time, the serious social problems that do exist, such as discrimination against the burakumin and Koreans, are carefully hidden. Speaking out against the system is discouraged, with the result that advocacy groups for women, the ecology, legal issues or consumers are pitifully weak.

The curious sense of isolation from the rest of the world which you get when living in Japan has its roots in the harmonious social systems which make Japan seem even more peaceful than it really is....From here, these things look like other people's problems, and foreigners living in this lotus land can easily get caught up in the minutiae of office life, or the aesthetics of tea ceremony, and forget that there are larger issues.

People think they need to approach Japan with a worshipful attitude in order to gain access to its society and culture...Somtimes I think "Japanese Studies" would be more accurately described as "Japan Worship."

But at present, China's traditional culture is still weak, just staggering to its feet after receiving a massive blow to the head. As a result, scholars from abroad tend to look on traditional Chinese culture not as a living force, but as a dead relic.

One can scour the history of Japan, however, without finding much in the way of articulated philosophy; to put if strongly, Japan is not a country of thinkers. As a result, before coming to Oomoto, both David and I had felt far greater respect for China than for Japan. But at the seminar I discovered that Japan does have its own philosphy, every bit as complex and profound as China's. Rather than beign expressed in words, it flows within the traditional arts - although Japan had no Confucius, Mencius or Chu Hsi, it did have the poet Teika, Zeami, the creator of Noh drama, and the founder of tea, Sen no Rikyu. They were Japan's philosophers.

It has often been pointed out that the Japanese educational system aims to produce a high average level of achievement for all, rather than excellence for a few. Students in school are not encouraged to stand out or ask questions, with the result that the Japanese become conditioned to a life of the average. Being average and boring here is the very essence of society, the factor which keeps the wheel of all those rigid social systems turning so smoothly....but in Japan people are conditioned to be satisfied with the average, so they can't fail but be happy with their lots.

As an island off the Asian mainland, it was able to absorb cultural influences from China and Southeast Asia while at the same time preserving near total isolation as a society. It became a sort of cultural pressure cooker into which many ingredients went, but form which none came out.

Japan has always been a design country, perhaps because of its love for the surface of things.

"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 restricte dby their society, are limited as human beings. But their culture is infinitely deep."

It was possible...to walk all the way through town back to Tenmangu wearing kiomono and hakama. To do so today would be so divorced from modern Japanese surroundings as to seem wholly ridiculous.

According to the old Chinese calendar, theh yuear is divided into 24 mini-seasons, with names like "Clear and Bright," "White Dew," "Great Heat," "Little Cold," and "Squirming Insects." Each has its own flavor.

For example, in most cities it is standard practice in autumn to cut off the branches of trees lining the streets, in order to prevent falling leaves. To modern Japanese, falling leaves are not a thing of beauty; they are messy and to be avoided.

This lack of color is especially true of Japan, where all lighting is fluorescent, and most household items are made from aluminum and synthetic materials...It is a striking constrast to the ash-gray color of life in Tokyo.

...but I am only following the typical Japanese religious pattern: not wanting to be bound to a single religion, I subscribe to them all...

There are very few places in Japan where you can escape from the constraints of this society. It is nearly impossible to drop out and live a hippie life in the countryside: the stranglehold of complex rules and relations is at its most severe in the rice-growing countryside. On the other hand, in the big cities life is so expensive that it is all one can do to just pay the rent.

In the eyes of city administration, rows of old wooden houses look "poor," they are an embarassment, and should be removed quickly.

Sumitomo had precise criteria for establishing mortgage rates or determining collateral for loans, but they had absolutely no method of evaluating the aggregate merit of a new real-estate venture. They had never needed one. For forty years since the war, land and rents in Japan had risen uninterruptedly. If one just had enough money to acquire land, everything else would go smoothly. Large banks like Sumitomo Trust, protected and coddled by a financial system which stifled both domestic and foreign competition, had had a particularly easy time of it.

The fact that the bank did not understand IRR should have been a danger sign to us; from that alone we could perhaps have predicted the impending crash.

There was euphoria in the air, and the Japanese were convinced that they were about to take over the world; words like "a billion dollars" and "ten billion dollars" rolled off people's tongues, and Japanese investment in US real estate appeared to be growing without limit.

This was my introduction to Japan's controlled press. In every field, whether it is business or crime, Japan's reporters belong to "press clubs," where they depend on news handouts from government bureaucrats or the Police Agency. As a result of these cozy relationships, newspapers like the Nikkei verge on being a kind of government propaganda organ.

The universal attitude was..."This is Japan. Land and stock prices only go up."

Mrs. Chida and I racked our brains to figure out what it was that gave us that 'foreign look,' and we could think of only one possible reason: the lack of clutter. For some reason, Japanese businesses cannot get the hang of managing office space.

Anyone who has spent time in a Japanese home or office knows that they are usually flooded with objects. From the old farmhouses of Iya to the apartments of modern Tokyo, living in a pile of unorganized things is a typical pattern of Japanese life. In my view, this is what led to the creation of the teahouse. In the Muromachi period, tea masters grew weary of a life crowded with junk, and created the tearoom: one pure space with absolutely nothing in it.

Cozy non-public bidding...cozy press clubs and other such systems are endemic in Japan....meanwhile rigidity set in: rocked in the cradle of its closed domestic systems, Japan failed to learn.

The only way to move forward is to dismantle these closed systems, but large businesses are too dependent on them, and so Japan is paralyzed.

The Council of Fashion Designers was not open to foreigners, nor to new faces in Japan, and certainly not to the up-and-coming Asian designers. It was too comfortable and predictable, so international fashion editors lost interest.

The movie industry is dominated by two giant production companies, Shochiku and Toho, which also own most of the movie theaters. This means that the films of smaller independent producers have very little chance of being seen.

One of modern Japan's great mysteries, which almost every foreign observer puzzles over, is how can the citizens of the world's riches country have such a poor lifestyle? The Japanese live in houses a quarter the size of the French or the English. (cheap flimsy building materials, little variety of produce, only 8 TV channels)

And through every possible means, the impact of the outside world was kept to a minimum: foreigners were not allowed to run companies here, to design of construct buildings here, to make movies here, etc. It worked all too well. Because of the high wall of regulation and the cozy systems which exclude them, foreign firms are now giving Japan a miss as they move into the rest of Asia.

Military dictatorship, Emperor worship, dominance by agrarian landlords - the entire edifice of the Meiji state was in turn discarded in favor of a bureaucratic industrial complex: "Japan Inc."

No one is seriously trying to open Japan's markets anymore. No one outside of Japan cares that Shochiku and Toho don't make good movies. Nor will they object if the Construction Ministry covers the whole country with concrete. There will be no Perry or MacArthur: the Japanese will have to do it themselves. Trammell once told me, "Success comes when you realize that no one is going to help you." But Japan has trained its citizens for fifty years to be obedient and docile, to quietly await the bureaucrats' bidding. The revolution will not come easily.

Taxes used to be levied according to frontage, so the old houses of Kyoto tend to have narrow street entrances, and stretch far back into the interior of the block.

Poverty-stricken kuge nobles and middle-class shopkeepers used wabi as a weapon to establish their cultural superiority. It was a form of deceit, carried to the level of art. A crudely fashioned brown tea bowl was held up as superior to the most elaborately decorated Imari platter, and nobody ever dared ask why.

Wabi was Kyoto's unique achievement: a rug, a bamboo hanging, a meal of "one bite and a half" - all were manipulated to create an effect superior to the gold-leafed halls of feudal lords.

But the people of Kyoto can not bear the fact that Kyoto is not Tokyo. They are trying with all their migh tto catch up with Tokyo, but they will never come close...the people of Kyoto never forgave Edo for usurping its place as capital. When the Emperor moved to Tokyo in 1868, that was teh final blow to Kyoto's self esteem.

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.

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.

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.

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 and ordered plan...

The palace precinct in Edo, however, was an amorphous blob, surrounded by a zig-zag of moats and ramparts, with no grand avenue, and no order to the gates or interior buildings.

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.

Byodoin is one of the few places in Japan that breathes the air of freedom.

Inside [Hannya-ji] 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.

The bird analogy recalls Byodoin and Hannyaji, and this is because all three buildings were built under the influence of Sung and Yuan China.

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.

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.

The modernism which swept the West in the 50s 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 19th century.

Japan is fascinated by secrets...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.

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.

...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."

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.

Our first stop is Akishino Temple. Its statue of Gigeiten (the god of art) is one of the finest masterpieces of Japanese sculpture.

I too have a secret temple...my temple is called Seisen-an. The drive there is very pleasant, and the road winds past famous temples such as Hase-dera and Muro-ji.

A particular favorite of mine is the inner sanctuary of Muro-ji, and if there is time I always try to take friends there.

If you ask someone, "What are you favorite spots in Nara?" and they answer "Yoshino" or "the Yamanobe Road," that is fine. But if they say "Muro-ji," then you can tell they truly know Nara.

Until the 1880s Mt. Koya was completely closed to women, but Muro-ji welcomed them. It became known as "Mt. Koya of Women," and is the center of its own mandala, balancing Koya's yang with Muro-ji's yin.

This is a magai-butsu (cliff Buddha) a common sight in China but rare in Japan.

One of Japan's greatest achievements is its relative lack of crime, and this is one of the invisible factors which makes life here very comfortable. The low crime rate is the result of those smoothly running social systems, and is the envy of many a nation - this is the good sid eof having trained the population to be bland and obedient. The difference in Osaka is only one of degree; the streets are basically safe. What you see in Shinsekai is more a form of misbehavior, rather than serious crime. People do not act decorously: they shout, cry, scream and jostle one another; in well-behaved modern Japan, this is shocking.

Tokyo is the home of trends...Kyoto people are afraid to do anything that might make them stand out...but Osaka is a riot of ill-matched color, tastless footwear and startling hairdos. Satoshi puts it this way: "In Tokyo people want to wear what everyone else is wearing. In Osaka, people want to shock."

Pachinko verges on sensory deprivation. It is the ultimate mental numbing, the final victory of the education system.

The samurai despised the merchants as belonging at the bottom of the social totem pole, but at the same time, the merchants had the freedom to enjoy themselves. The brilliant realm of the floating world - Kabuki, the pleasure quarters, colorful kimonos, woodblock prints, novels, dance - belonged to the old downtowns. But today, people from these neighborhoods are different from ordinary Japanese.

In Tokyo there was the shogun, in Kyoto there was the emperor; but in Osaka there was nobody on top, except a skeleton staff of the Shogun's officials holed up in Osaka castle, pitifully unprepared to join in the battle of wits with wily Osaka merchants. The ratio of samurai to population was so low that people could go their whole lives without meeting one. In Edo, the Shogunate built bridges; in Osaka, private businessman built them. In other words, in Osaka, the people ran their own lives.

...as a result, Tokyo's dominance is near total, and Kansai is slowly falling off the map. There could be no better indication of this than the incredibly slow response of the central government to the 1995 earthquake in Kobe.

...the recently completed Kansai Int'l. Airport is so expensive and over regulated that most international airlines shun it.

In like manner, Japan coats all culture from abroad, transforming it into a Japanese style pearl.

Guidebooks describe [Kobe's ijinkan] as an example of Kobe's internationalism, but the houses actually represent a failed community.

But even so, Manpukuji never abandoned its Chinese identity; it is the single most successful and long-lasting venture initiated by foreigners in Japanese history.

Literati are rarely great academics, because their curiosity leads them into odd byways that tend to disqualify them from serious scholarship. Likewise, they may not be the greatest of artists or writers, because they rarely have the ambition to build reputations in society or establish themselves commercially. In short they are amateurs, whom the Chinese called hogai (outside the system).

Soon there were hundreds and thousands of literati doing nothing the length and breadth of Japan. Doing nothing is only one step away from subversion.

"Showing something in its native state is not art. Artifice piled on artifice, giving you the illusion of the natural - that's art.

But in fact there is a purpose to these buildings, which is to assuage the conscience of civic administrators who feel they should be doing something, but don't know what to do. "Dogs and horses" - that is the quiet, invisible part of city planning - would be to establish zoning, regulate signs, bury telephone wires and restore the ecosystems of lakes and rivers. But instead, vast sums are squandered on "demons and fascinating things": museums and halls designed by famous architects for which there is no use, but which symbolize culture.

Nor do they have the same sort of freedom which Tamasaburo, Kawase, and Issey had, since the lives of young people today are so dominated by bureaucracies and systems which had not yet solidified in the 60s and 70s.