Japan's traditional culture sprang from a oneness with nature, but it is sterile industrial surfaces that define modern Japanese life. It's a stark contrast, but a real one. The gap between Japan's traditional image of itself and the modern reality has riven the nation's present-day culture. Artists must make a hard choice: try to re-create a vanished world of bamboo, thatched houses, and temples (but in a cultural context in which sterility rules and all these things have become irrelevant) or go with the times, giving in to dead, flat industrial surfaces. Cut off from the latest trends in Asia or the West, designers find it hard to conceive of natural materials used successfully in a modern way, or of modern designs that blend happily into a natural context. This unresolved cultural conflict is a secret subtext to art and architecture in Japan today.
It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and
In this respect, as in many others, Japan challenges our idea of what modernism consists of.
The cultural crisis might be easier to resolve if it were simply a matter of Japanese tradition versus Western technology. But the situation is made more complex-and also chronic and severe-by the fact that the roots of the problem lie in tradition itself. People who admire the Japanese traditional arts make much of the «love of nature» that inspired sand gardens, bonsai, ikebana flower arranging, and so forth, but they often fail to realize that the traditional Japanese approach is the opposite of a laissez- faire attitude toward nature. These arts were strongly influenced by the military caste that ruled Japan for many centuries, and they demand total control over every branch and twig.
Indeed, total control is one of Japan's exemplary traits, father of some of its greatest cultural marvels and of its high quality on the assembly line. The kind of sloppiness that is taken for granted in the West has no place in Japan. But a trait like total control is a double-edged sword, for it has cruel and deadly resuits when married to the powers of modern technology and then applied to the natural environment.
Writers on Japan commonly lament the contrast between the nation's contemporary ugliness and its traditional beauty. Discussion focuses on the conflict between modernity and traditional values, but this is to neglect one of the most thought-provoking elements of Japan's twentieth-century disasters: the problem is not that traditional values have died but that they have mutated. Maladapted to modernity, traditional values become Frankenstein's monsters, taking on terrifying new lives. As Donald Richie, the dean of Japanologists in Tokyo, points out, «What's the difference between torturing a bonsai and torturing the landscape?»
In 1995, the citizens of Kamakura woke one day to find that the municipality was felling more than a hundred of the city's famed cherry trees – Kamakura's official symbol – in order to build a concrete support barrier on a hillside. The reason? Some residents had complained of rocks rolling down the slopes, and officials had condemned the hill, which was within temple grounds, as an «earthquake hazard.» In modern Japan, it requires a surprisingly small threat from nature to elicit this «sledgehammer to a mosquito» reaction. Every bucket of sand that might wash away in a typhoon, every rock that might fall from a hilltop is a threat the government must deal with – using lots of concrete.
Quietly, almost invisibly, a strong ideology grew up during the past fifty years to support the idea that total control over every inch of hillside and seashore is necessary. This ideology holds that nature is Japan's special enemy, that nature is exceptionally harsh here, and that the Japanese suffer more from natural calamities than do other people. One can taste the flavor of this attitude in the following excerpt from a publication of the Construction Ministry's River Bureau:
Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and droughts have periodically wreaked havoc on Japan. For as long as Japanese history has been recorded, it has been a history of the fight against natural factors... Although Japan is famous for its earthquakes, it is perhaps water-related problems which have been the true bane of Japanese life. In the Japanese islands, where the seasons are punctuated by extremes, extremes which have required people to take vigilant precautions in order to assure survival, water is a constant issue.
The idea that the nation's history is one of a «fight against natural factors» goes back a thousand years, and the tradition is that the main work of government was
As a matter of historical fact, Japan has suffered far less from wars, famines, and floods than China, for example, where these disasters have resulted in the loss of millions of lives and the destruction of much of China's perishable physical heritage. Many more ancient wooden buildings and artworks on paper and silk remain in Japan than in China, despite China's far greater size. Italy, likewise, has endured volcanoes and earthquakes far more severe than Japan has ever experienced, yet «impermanence» is not the abiding theme of Italian or Chinese literature. That it so dominates Japanese thought may have something to do with the ancient desire for
One of the persistent myths about Japan held by many Japanese and accepted unthinkingly by Western observers is that in the golden age before Commodore Perry arrived, the Japanese dwelled innocently in harmony with nature and that only with the arrival of Westerners did they learn to attack and subdue the environment. The romantic in all of us would like to believe this. «It was only when Japan modernized (and therefore Westernized) that it learned the ambition of conquering nature,» writes Patrick Smith in
That is the myth. Now the reality. Where is the «animosity to nature» that is supposedly such an inbred feature of the West? Obviously, modern technology has led to environmental destruction all over the earth. Yet in the West this destruction has been tempered in local communities, where people have fought to preserve their villages, houses, and fields. Nothing remotely like what is happening in Japan has occurred in Europe or the United States. In England, France, Italy, and even industrial Germany, thousands of square miles of lovingly tended fields, picturesque thatched villages, un-dammed rivers and un-concreted seashore are preserved. Europe and the United States, not Japan, are in the forefront of environmental movements; in case after case – from the logging of rain forest in Malaysia and Indonesia to drift-net fishing – Japan fights these movements with every political and economic tool at its disposal. Where are the Westerners who are teaching Japan to destroy its landscape? From Lafcadio Hearn in the early 1900s to Donald Richie's
The key to the misunderstanding lies in the telltale words «modernized (and therefore Westernized).» If there is one important contribution that the so-called revisionist writers on Japan of the past fifteen years have made, it is in their recognition that Japan is modern but definitely not Western. Its financial world, its society, and its industry function on surprisingly resilient principles, with roots set deep in Japanese history.
When Japan opened up to the world in 1868, the slogan of Meiji-period modernizers was
The impulse to subdue natural forces arises in every traditional society, from the Egyptians and the building of the Pyramids to the Chinese and the construction of the Grand Canal. In China, legends teach that Yu, one of the mythical first emperors in 3000 B.C., gained the right to rule because he tamed the Great Flood. Japan, too, has a long history of restructuring the landscape. It began in the eighth century, when the capitals of Nara and Kyoto were laid down according to vast street grids, tens of square kilometers across, on what had been semiwild plains. Another spate of civil engineering took place at the end of the Muromachi period, in the late sixteenth century, when warlords mobilized hundreds of thousands of workers through the corvee to dig moats and build gigantic castles, the walls of which can still be seen today. Hideyoshi, one of the generals who unified Japan at this time, changed the course of the Kamo River in Kyoto, moving it somewhat to the east of its former channel. During the Edo period (1600-1868), cities poured so much landfill into their harbors that the livable area of ports like Hiroshima, Osaka, and Tokyo nearly tripled. Historians cite landfill as an example of a technology in which Japan had long experience before Perry arrived.
With the advent of modern technology, every society made mistakes. The United States, for example, embarked on enormous civil-engineering programs, such as the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Intended to address urgent needs for water and electric power, some of these programs were not wholly beneficial, although it had been claimed that they would be. After a certain point, however, Americans reconsidered these projects. In other East Asian nations, environmental destruction, serious as it is, slows down when it ceases to be profitable. Not so in Japan. It is tempting to blame this on an evil Western influence, but that does not explain Japan's rampant and escalating assault on its rivers, mountains, and coasts, which is so at variance with anything to be found in the West.
In this, Japan teaches us a lesson about a cultural problem that every modern state faces: how to rise above antiquated cultural attitudes that have dangerous consequences for modern life. Another case in point is the «frontier mentality» that still makes so many Americans cherish the right to possess firearms. The right to bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment made sense for poorly protected frontier communities, but in modern America it leads to the slaughter of thousands of people every year. No other advanced nation would tolerate this. Yet Americans still find it impossible to legislate gun control. From this we may see that Japan is very unlikely to rethink its environmental policies, for the very reason that channeling small streams into concrete chutes is something learned
In Kamo no Chomei's time, changes caused by nature seemed to be irrevocable acts of karma. There was simply no alternative but to submit to impermanence. With the help of modern technology, however, it seems possible to banish impermanence once and for all, and thus the concept of impermanence has mutated into a relentless war on nature. The self-pitying perception that Japan, punished viciously by the elements, is «a hard place to live in» features in the media and in school curricula, and
