Tokyo Wow!

Tokyo is huge!  Essentially a merged group of cities, it is the largest metropolitan area of the world, with over 8 million people in Tokyo proper and 13 million in the metropolitan area.  It has extensive, overlapping train and subway systems that are well-signed and efficient, making it easy to get around.  For example, at Shinjuku station, as many as 10 train and subway lines stop, disgorging people from all over the metropolitan area to the agglomeration of office and commercial buildings nearby.

The city feels alive, with people constantly in motion, things happening, the young people in all kinds of dress -- the variety of shoes I’ve seen is amazing!  It’s quieter and more orderly than New York – people queue to get on a subway train and walk at a moderate pace rather than jostle and race – but it still has an energy and a vitality all its own.

Tokyo Now.  One of the first things that struck me is Tokyo’s diversity.  Not in its people, for Japan is relatively homogenous ethnically, but I noticed sharply contrasting buildings and neighborhoods seemingly on top of each other, yet coexisting quite nicely.  One reason for the diversity is Japan’s lack of zoning regulations.  In Shinagawa, near me, there is a gigantic modern planned community complex of office and residential buildings (think Tysons Corner in the Washington area writ large).  On one of the rivers running through the complex, there are old houseboats that people have lived in for decades.  On the other side of the river, there’s a recently modernized narrow shopping and residential street of 3-4 story buildings.  And you can find the last cluster of four or five old, wooden two-story traditional Japanese houses.

Shinjuku is another good example of the incredible diversity of activities, buildings, and neighborhoods, densely packed in a small space.  You can literally turn a corner and switch from huge modern skyscrapers on a broad avenue to a narrow street crowded with parked bicycles and lined with tiny shops, signs, and salesmen hawking their wares.

I took these pictures in Shinjuku, using a favorite building of mine, Paul Tange’s Cocoon Tower, as the center point, partly because it’s the only curved building in a sea of cubes.  It’s a few blocks from the Shinjuku station and is visible from the two 45-story metropolitan government buildings and several commercial offices in a recently developed area.  Turn a corner back towards the station and you are in the midst of large department stores.  Turn another corner and you’ll find yourself in narrow alleys with small shops and eateries.  Walk another few blocks, turn around, and you can see the buildings cheek by jowl next to each other.  And if you get farther away and it’s a clear day, you can see all of this and Mt. Fuji!

Tokyo Then.  Despite Tokyo's modernity – with the 1923 earthquake and firebombing of World War II, much of it has been and continues to be rebuilt – Tokyo  is quite old.  Tokyo was the de facto capital of Japan since the early 1600’s under the Tokugawa shogunate, and became the imperial capital in 1868 after the Meiji Restoration.  I really got a sense of how much Tokyo – and Japan – has changed in the last 150 years when I went to see the Meiji Shrine, built to honor the Emperor Meiji, the 122^nd emperor of Japan.  To commemorate the 100 years since the emperor’s death, there was a row of panels explaining his legacy and reminding me of Japan’s very long history.

It’s hard now to realize that Japan was only opened to the west in the 1860’s and then only very reluctantly.  But with pressure from the west to open its doors wider for trade, a weakening feudal Tokugawa shogunate, and the opportunity presented by a newly installed, 14-year-old emperor, the younger generation of leaders were able to topple the old government and restore the emperor to power (before then the shogun only allowed the emperor to study the arts and write poetry). 

During the 44 years of Emperor Meiji ’s reign, Japan shifted from being an isolated, feudal state to being a more modern, powerful nation.  To signal real change, the imperial capital was moved from Kyoto, which had been the emperor’s home for over 1,000 years, to Tokyo.  The emperor visited all parts of the country, something former emperors never did.  A constitutional form of government and a prefectural administrative system replaced the old feudal governmental structure.  Scores of people were sent all over the world to renegotiate Japan’s treaties and learn from the west so the country could industrialize. The education system was reformed to provide greater access and produce future leaders. That’s a lot of change in less than half a century, and some would say the next 100 years brought even greater change.

The shrine itself, though, is built like others have been centuries before it.  It is quite simple, built of cedar using no nails, with simple carvings and little paint.  It sits in a large park in a wooded area, thanks to 100,000 trees that were donated from all over Japan when the shrine was built.  Much of the garden’s trees and undergrowth have been left to grow naturally, unusual to me given the manicured gardens I’ve seen, but still lovely, with a long, large winding swath of iris about to bloom.   Like virtually every shrine I have seen, it is a place of quiet contemplation and beauty, reminding me of Japan’s long past, values, and enduring spirit.

But this is modern Tokyo, and as I walked down the path to leave the shrine, I saw a photograph, reproduced here, of the shrine as it is today, not that far from the Cocoon Tower I had seen earlier.  Tokyo then and now, living happily together.

Tadao Ando's Church of the Light

I fell in love with the architect Tadao Ando when I was last in Japan and my friend Kit and I went to Naoshima.  Ando designed the museum buildings there and they are a stunning integration of light, building and art.  Since then, I have gone to see other Ando buildings, most notably the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, which sits lightly on a pool of water.  Lest you worry, I am not a fanatic Ando fan:  some of his buildings here are rather ordinary.  But the Church of the Light is definitely not one of them.  It seduces you into it, inviting you to savor the beauty of light, concrete, and wood, to rest and restore your soul.

The classic Church of the Light photograph is the one you see above:  a cross cut in the concrete wall letting in the sunlight.  Ando’s use of light is one of his trademarks, and this building is certainly a good example of it.  But the picture doesn’t do justice to the church’s mission or to Ando’s architecture, for there is much more to it than that.

Ando uses simple geometric forms in his buildings to subtle and complex effect.  Here, the church is a rectangle with a freestanding wall that slices through one of the long walls and out the back.  The wall doesn’t really touch the rectangle's walls or ceiling, for there is glass between, letting in light from different angles, surrounding the congregation with light and shadows.  The intersection along the long wall becomes the church entryway.  It’s designed so that you don’t see the cross of light until you turn and walk through an opening in the intersecting slab.  That view of the cross is quite powerful and reminded me of what I felt when I suddenly came upon a Shikoku temple as we climbed the last steps up to it.

The church is small and intimate, with simple wood pews sitting on a wood floor that steps down to the altar.  I had heard that Ando had to work on a tight budget – the congregation is small and had limited funds – but I learned later that the church cost only $250,000 to build in 1989.  I suspect the budget forced Ando to make something very simple, and that’s what contributes to its success.  Costs were kept down in many ways:  the wood employed in building the forms for the concrete walls was dyed black and used for the church’s floor and pews.  It’s amazing what you can do with limited resources, a creative architect, and a lot of willpower!

Ten years later, the church asked Ando to design a second, smaller building, called the Sunday School.  Ando used the church plan and rotated it to create an integrated whole.  The Sunday School has warm, linden floors, chairs and cross.  With the light streaming in, it has a comfortable, inviting air, while the church is darker and more contemplative.  Connecting the two buildings is a curved portico, and the curve is used again as a bench in a little nook in the back.

I must have walked around and in both buildings for over an hour, drinking in the atmosphere they conveyed, trying to figure out what Ando did to achieve such a spiritual and spirited space.  Here was this building that looks quite undistinguished from the outside, but inside is this sanctuary, an oasis from the outside urban world, a place for regeneration and renewal.  And he did it with two rectangles, a couple of lines and curves, and by letting in the light.  Isn’t it amazing!

Kyoto Festival

I had a fabulous time this week going to see Kyoto’s Aoi Matsuri, one of the city’s three big festivals.   It is a huge event for the Japanese, with people coming from all over the country to see the stately parade of horses, floats, and marchers.

Long years ago, in the seventh century, a series of disastrous storms and epidemics raged throughout Japan, ruining the crops and killing many people.  The Emperor Kinmei divined that the Kamo gods were angry, so he sent his messenger to pay homage at their shrines in Kyoto, then Japan’s capital.  The gods were pacified, the storms died down, and the people were happy.  Ever since then, each year the ritual of paying homage to the Kamo gods has continued in what is now the Aoi Matsuri.

Festival day was glorious – sunny, nicely warm, a soft breeze, low humidity.  The parade had actually been postponed a day because of rain, which shows its importance.  Years ago when Kit and I were here, we watched the Festival of the Ages in a heavy October rain.  People flocked to the parade, bought a ticket to get a seat in the viewing stands within the shrines’ grounds, and stopped at a vendor to get something to eat.  They came with cameras ranging from disposables to big SLRs with long lenses and tripods.

The parade was colorful and stately.  The paraders were dressed in 7^th century garb, simple robes in blue, green, a bright orange, and white, wearing hats of varying shapes. Everyone had a big sprig of hollyhock, the symbol of the parade (“Kamoaoi”, the more formal name of the festival, means “hollyhock”).  There were men on horseback, often with a sheaf of arrows or a sword, accompanied by their retinue on foot.  There were also women wearing traditional wigs and an unmarried Kyoto woman, sitting on a float, personifying the shrine’s high priestess.   There were a couple of huge, flower draped wagons pulled by an ox, and several men carrying umbrella-like “floats” with big bouquets of paper flowers atop.  There were no drums or music, and the onlookers watched in silence, cameras clicking. 

Then I got to see a horse race!  After the parade, people streamed forward to the shrine or off to the side.  I went to the side, since I didn’t think I would possibly be able to see anything at the shrine itself.  And that’s where I found people lining up to see the horses run.  This was not like a western horse race, with a dozen or so horses running around a large oval.  This was a long 300-325 meter track down a roped off “alley” in the woods, with people safely well behind the alleyway.  One by one, each horse, with its rider dressed in white, raced down the track past the group of judges.  After the horse was safely away from the end of the track, an older, blue-robed gentleman would stand up at the side of the track and raise a red fan to signal the way was clear for the next rider.  There were five or six riders, and three rounds of the race. 

Again, the crowd was silent, though sometimes there would be an “ooh” as a particularly flamboyant rider passed by with white coat flapping furiously.  They were also taking pictures, though I could never figure out how they would get anything more than a blur of the racing horse.  I slowly realized this was not a race about speed alone; otherwise the horses would race together.  A Japanese woman agreed in halting English:  like all the other traditional arts and activities I had seen, this was about both content and form:  the race was about how well horse and rider rode as one.

After the race, I turned to go back downtown.  I walked by a group of people clustered around a man, all taking pictures.  I looked, and there was a large 3-4” black butterfly on his arm.  Suddenly it flew up and away, then turned and landed on my outstretched arm!  For a few minutes I, too, was the object of the cameras as people snapped away.  One of the onlookers graciously took my camera and took some shots for me so I would have the memory of this beautiful creature.

But that wasn’t the end of my adventures for the day.  As I walked downtown, I picked up some lunch at a convenience store, including an ice cream sandwich, and then walked over to sit in the park next to a river.  I sat on a bench, eating the ice cream sandwich while reading a book on Kyoto.  Out of the blue, I was roughly nudged in the shoulder.  My ice cream sandwich fell to the ground, and then it was gone.  Rising above me was a large brown raven-like bird, joining its colleagues, my sandwich in its claw.  I was amused and amazed – I’d never seen such audacity! 

Afterwards, a young Frenchman came toward me and explained that these birds were quite adept at getting food from unsuspecting picnickers.  It turned out he was studying Zen Buddhism and was staying at a nearby temple for two months.  He was trying to decide whether to stay for a year and go to the Zen monastery if his “sensei” (teacher) recommended it.  It would be a very difficult year, including an arduous rite of passage.  We had a lovely talk, and then I picked up my the rest of my lunch and went under a tree, sitting near someone else, in hopes the ravens would leave me in peace.

Shikoku Part 2: Oh, the People we Met and the Adventures we Had!

The 88 Temple Walk -- “Hachijuhakkasho” – was a marvelous experience, an amazing combination of nature and spirituality.  But that was only half of it:  what made our walk truly memorable were the people we met and the adventures we had. Many of our experiences revolved around the sea and food:  Since we were on the coast, we were treated to all kinds of the freshest fish imaginable.   And we experienced a kind and giving spirit unlike anything I’ve ever seen.  Let’s just say this would never happen in New York!

"Milk Bottle" temple

Just as we sometimes labeled a temple (“Milk Bottle” because of its red and white bottle-like pagoda) or road (a crowded “Boston Post Road”), we identified people.  For example, “Gabriella’s boyfriend” was an 82-year old man who had done the pilgrimage 5 times and told people he was our guide.  “Tokyo lady” was a seemingly unfriendly woman from Tokyo, traveling alone, who blushed and giggled when we gave her a Kleenex pack in a cloth case as an o-settai.

Minshuku Lady.  One night we stayed at a minshuku, ostensibly a guesthouse but I think really the home of a widow who was letting out rooms.  We were the only guests and had the top floor to ourselves.  The minshuku was a bit tired looking but it was spacious with a lovely view of the sea.  It also had one of the more interesting toilets we’d seen, sort of a cross between an airplane toilet and a garden hose; but that is another story. 

Minshuku dinner with asari

We spent lots of time with the woman we dubbed “Minshuku Lady”, who spoke in a rough accent that Gabriella had trouble understanding.  In her mid 70’s, the woman swam in the sea every day as she had for decades.  She was a chatterbox, we think because she didn’t have many visitors and her son lived in another town and didn’t visit much.  She also was very motherly, hovering over us as we ate a huge home-cooked meal.  The meal included some small crab and a pile of fresh, raw, snail-like shellfish called “asari”.  On our way into the village, we had seen people who digging for some kind of shellfish; what we ate couldn’t have been out of the water more than an hour or two.  They were delicious!

Sea Urchin Madam.  One sunny morning as we strolled in a little fishing village, we ran into an older woman by the shore.  In easily understandable Japanese, we learned that she had a daughter, a medical research doctor, who had just moved to New York from Hong Kong.  We had a lovely conversation with this kind woman, then thanked her and turned to go on. 

A few steps later she called us back:  she had seen a sea urchin in the water below her dock, and wanted to show us this expensive delicacy.  As we watched, she took a long pole with three prongs on the end, stooped down, took aim, and stabbed at the sea urchin until she caught it.  Slowly she raised it and put it on the dock in front of us.  She told us this was the first sea urchin she had caught by herself, since usually her husband was the hunter.  Next she went into her house, got a pair of large, somewhat rusty clippers, and took off some of the spikes and cut into the flesh.  Then she got chopsticks, carefully picked out the sea urchin’s flesh, and put it on a plate with a bit of soy sauce.  We thought – or feared – she would have us eat it, but instead she said it needed to be cleaned first.  It may be she wanted the delicacy herself, as fresh and tasty as can be.

The people living on Shikoku eat very well and inexpensively just from the fish they catch in the sea.  We saw – and ate – a lot of different and unusual fish, mostly raw, and they were all wonderful.

Nokyo-cho Monk.  The monks or hired people who sealed and signed our temple books didn’t have a very exciting job, at least to us.  They would sit from morning to night, signing books, scrolls, and sometimes cloth banners.  Some pilgrims, like us, had only one book, while others might have two or three.  When a henro bus group came, the nokyo-cho ka was faced with 40 or 50 books to sign in 10-15 minutes.  As a result, they varied a good deal in temperament, from somewhat dour to quite kind, calling a cab for us if asked, smiling, or even talking a bit.

Well-done calligr

Not so good calligraphy

Early in the morning after spending the night at a temple, we went to the nokyo-cho.  No one else was around, and the monk, roughly in his late 30’s/early 40’s, was kind and happy to talk with us.   Somehow the topic turned to kanji, the Chinese characters the Japanese adopted as the basis for their written language.  While we both love kanji, most Japanese hate it because of the repetitive way they are taught it in school.  The monk spoke eloquently about the beauty of kanji and writing it.  He said that Kanji is about balance:  each character’s components have basic geometric forms.  They are put together in certain ways so that the entire character looks balanced within the square space that each kanji is written in.  He talked about other types of balance in kanji – of black and white, filled and empty space, thin and thick lines, curved and angular shapes, meaning and picture.  His comments reminded me of my friend Shigeko’s discussion of the aesthetic of tanka – of the balance and beauty one strives to achieve in 31 syllables.   The Japanese aesthetic is so pervasive!

The Noble Scallop.   One morning as we walked, a woman ran out from her shop carrying mikan oranges to give us as an o-settai (gift to pilgrims).  We thanked her for the wonderful fruit, chatted a bit and went on.  Several yards later, we heard her running after us, calling out.  She had brought us a 2-pound bag of barnacle-like shellfish. “Eat them today,” she said in Japanese.  “They won’t be any good tomorrow.”  Laden down and thankful, we trod on. 

At lunch we stopped at a little henro shelter where two male henro were eating.  First we shared some fresh sugar snap beans we had bought.  They were surprised we were eating them raw, so we showed them how to string the bean and they found the vegetable was actually quite good.  Next we shared the fish o-settai the woman had given us.  She had shown us how to eat them:  break off the shell from the softer end, pull out the fish, and pop it into your mouth.  They were fabulous, fresh as the sea itself and tasty.  We all ate what we could, then gave the rest to the proprietor of the shop next to the shelter.  Since he came from the area, he knew what we was getting and was delighted.  He told us the name and we looked it up in our little electronic dictionary:  it was a “noble scallop”.

The Best Adventure of All.   Along the coast southwest of Kochi is a lovely hot springs called Kuroshio Honjin, which is also known for its food.  Gabriella and I decided to go there for lunch and a bath on a warm and sunny day. 

View from Kuroshio Honjin

First we had lunch in the restaurant overlooking the sea.  We had “hatsue no tataki”, seared, almost raw bonito that tastes like steak and melts like butter in your mouth.  It’s a specialty of the area.  We’d had it a couple of times at the shukubo (temple lodgings) where we’d stayed, and I especially liked it.  This time it was fantastic.  It had been lightly smoked, and you could actually smell the smoke (a gentle odor) and almost feel it swirling around in your mouth as you ate the fish.  

Gabriella, Mie-san, and me

Next, we went to the bath.  When we entered, a woman was already washing herself and shortly after stepped outdoors into the rock-sided hot bath looking out onto the Pacific.  Gabriella went in, too, and when I followed she was already in conversation with the woman, named Mie-san.  As we got out and dressed, Mie-san asked us to wait upstairs with her until her husband came out from his bath.  I thought she had said they would drive us back to town, which meant we didn’t have to walk back through the hot tunnel with traffic coming at us, but I misunderstood.

Turtle at Konkofukuji Temple

Konfukuji Temple gro

It turned out that Mie-san and her husband, whose name we didn’t catch, wanted to drive us two hours down the coast to their favorite temple, Kongofukuji (#38) at the tip of Shikoku on the Ashizurimisaki Cape. I had wanted to go down the cape, but we had reluctantly decided the distance was too great, even by train.  Instead, we planned to go to the temple near the hot springs and had reservations there to stay overnight.  “Cancel them!” said the husband.  “Can we do that?” we asked.  “Isn’t it improper?”  No, they assured us firmly, and off we went.  First we went to the temple – briefly, it wasn’t very interesting – and Mie-san and her husband explained to the surprised matron that we were cancelling our reservation.  Then we took off, Mie-san’s husband, an excellent driver, negotiating the winding road south.  We were both stunned and delighted by their generosity.

Mie-san's husband looking at the Pacific

We arrived shortly before 5, when the temple would close.  We hurried to get our books stamped, and spent a few minutes walking around the lovely grounds, patting the lovely stone turtle that is a symbol of long life and fertility.  Then we walked to the cape – a beautiful, windy promontory from which you could see the Pacific extend forever to the horizon and beyond.  We were thrilled.

 

Supermarket fish

And then we drove back, for Mie-san had insisted that we come to their house for dinner and stay the night.  We stopped at a supermarket to pick up fixings for dinner.  The market was huge to us, but Mie-san’s husband said this was actually small.  There was a seemingly infinite variety of fish, all with fresh clear eyes and glistening skin.  We picked some up and headed home.  There Mie-san prepared a lovely dinner of make your own sashimi.  We took a small sheet of nori (seaweed), spread some rice on top, added some fish or vegetables, rolled it up like a taco, dipped it in soy sauce with wasabi, and ate.  It was wonderful and much fun. 

It was clear that Mie and her husband had a great relationship.  They chatted easily and comfortably between themselves, laughed, figured out how they were going to do things.  As we talked, we learned that they liked to pick up strangers and bring them home to dinner.  They enjoyed meeting new people and were exceedingly generous.

Gabriella and me at Shikoku's southern tip

Their house was relatively new and a lovely combination of Japanese and Western. It was built somewhat like a compound, with a teahouse at the entry way and the house in back.  The living room, dining room and kitchen were western, with table, chairs and sofa, while the bedrooms at the other end of the house had tatami mats and futons.  Mie-san’s husband explained that this was not his family’s home, though he had been born and raised in the town (something we discovered was fairly typical).  As the third son he had to make his own way – he owned a motorbike shop and loved to cycle and his wife worked part-time with him – while the first-born son would have the family house.

The next day, we got up and had a simple breakfast, and after watching the daily morning 20-minute soap opera drama, Mie-san’s husband left for work.  Mie-san then drove us the few miles to the next temple we had planned to see, which turned out to be only a few minutes from their house.   They had persuaded us to cancel that reservation as well, and now I understood why.  Then we bid a fond good by and were on our way.