A Japanese weekend

Architect Tadao Ando, photographed at Punta della Dogana,
the Venetian customs house he retrofitted for collector
Francois Pinault, June 2009. Photo: Sean O'Toole

The bus station outside is a purposeful swirl of activity, despite the early morning hour. The man next to me yawns and rubs his sleepy eyes. He works in a bank. He told me this the night before, as the bus from Tokyo to Tokushima City crawled west through Japan’s muggy summer dark. He is visiting his wife. She is a teacher, bureaucratically assigned to Tokushima, a non-descript provincial town on Japan’s western island of Shikoku. She is pregnant; he is visiting for the long weekend. So am I.

Exiting the bus I spot Misako. She waves. Deep-set dimples hint at the intensity of her smile. A former work colleague, I notice that her neat, shoulder-length crop of hair has hints of grey. We shake hands, awkwardly embrace. Bag in hand I follow Misako to her car. It has been four years since I last visited this vaguely melancholic landscape. I am eager to explore it again.

Oddly enough, it is a South African writer who has most helped me make sense of Japan, my experience on that lonely archipelago at the rising of the morning sun. He is William Plomer. In October 1926, Plomer accompanied his friend Laurens van der Post aboard the steamer Canada Maru for a fortnight tour of Japan. The tour was a thank you of sorts, sponsored by an Osaka-based shipping company, allegedly in gratitude for assistance Van der Post had given two Japanese journalists subjected to racist insults in Pretoria.

When the Canada Maru eventually returned for Durban, 25-year-old Plomer was not aboard. In his autobiography, Yet Being Someone Other (1982), Van der Post would later recall that Plomer, standing forlornly on the Kobe quayside, looked “disturbingly” like a “Dickensian… orphan seeking food and asylum in the slums of a great city”. Plomer went on to find sustenance in Japan: by the time he left the country, in March 1929, Plomer had completed his first collection of short stories, Paper Houses (1929), and his second novel, Sado (1931), both set in Japan.

I first read Plomer’s writings on Japan while on a bus journey to Tokushima, many years before the current one. I was returning from a weekend in Osaka, Japan’s ribald capital of comedy, to Tokushima, where I had been assigned to teach English. Tokushima is a small port town on the east of Shikoku, an island renowned for little more than its astringent limes, strenuous thousand-year-old Buddhist pilgrimage, and odd collection of famous writers, Kenzaburo Oe included. Mostly, though, Shikoku is known for its crumbling rusticity, Japanese-style.

Once you exit the freeway, the main road into Tokushima City, Route 55, is lined with used car dealerships, beauty salons, bookstores, even the odd MacDonalds. Journeying through this landscape again, first on the bus, then again in the Misako’s car headed for her home, I was again compelled by how strikingly prosaic it all is. Ordinary.

Occidentals, South Africans included, have long been participants in the construction of a fantastical Japan that has little bearing on reality. Plomer’s collection, Paper Houses, runs counter this narrative, offering a “rather ramshackle collection of Japanese stories and impressions,” to quote one reviewer. Such honesty, though, is not always appreciated.

“[Plomer] makes the mistake of not writing as a Westerner interpreting the East”, remarked the Saturday Review of Literature (November 9, 1929), adding that he “resolutely excludes not only all glamour, but all sense of exoticism and novelty as well.” In other words, to denude Japan of its apparent exoticism is to expose the west’s craving for the fictional succor of an east that barely exists.

One small part of this lingering fiction defines the Japanese as inveterate Spartans and innately aesthetic. Misako’s pre-fabricated modern home defies all sense of this. Like the irregular urban planning and messy clutter of overhead electrical wiring that outwardly characterises domestic Japan, Misako’s stock-standard house is a chaotic mix of imported styles and old world inheritances.

A large western-style leather sofa sits inelegantly on the tatami, tightly bound rectangular reed mats that over time have become units of measure in house building. In modern Japan, however, tradition is no longer inviolate. Misako’s tokonoma, that small, symbolically significant alcove built into the living room of most Japanese homes, and typically used for ornate flower displays and traditional calligraphy, is decorated with an jumble of telephone directories and school sweaters.

Misako is married. Similar to the man who sat next to me on the bus, Misako understands the word family to mean love in a dispersed form. Two years ago her husband, Hiroshi, a policeman, was transferred into the mountains that rise steeply from the outskirts of Tokushima City. Traditionally, Misako and her youngest, school-going daughter would have accompanied him. The old ways are, however, no longer inviolate. Misako still lives in town, alone.

Driving into the mountains to visit Hiroshi, Misako tells me how the education ministry has incrementally scaled-down what used to be a luxurious twice-yearly bonus. Fifteen years of persistent recession is affecting all aspects of daily life in Japan, she sighs. In Tokyo, this has manifested itself in the increasing number of homeless, their cardboard and blue tarpaulin homes colonising quiet backstreets and inner city parks. On Shikoku, along the winding mountain road that leads to Hiroshi’s village, Japan’s economic malaise is defined slightly differently.

Alongside absorbing rustic charms – bamboo groves, rice terraces and single-lane tracks – Shikoku also offers the visitor views of concrete rivers, each patterned in a manner resembling Zen gardens, and mountains made static with strikingly visual symmetrical retainer walls. “The Utopia Song,” penned for the Ministry of Construction’s Road Bureau, sums up the character of this visual assault: “asphalt blanketing the mountains and the valleys… a splendid utopia”.

Remarking on this rather troubling aspect of modern-day Japan, journalist Patrick Smith, in his informative history, Japan: A Reinterpretation (1998), observes: “Throughout Japan today there are countless highways to nowhere special, useless bridges, unneeded sea breaks, ruthless land reclamation projects, half-built resort schemes, and deserted ‘technopolis’ centres intended to make rustics familiar with high technology devices.”

Adds Smith writes: “These projects have done little for the decentralization of Japan but everything for Japanese contractors – the frenzy for building has had little to do with the Japanese need to improve their lives, or how they want to live. The building has continued, needed or not, to keep the postwar machine in motion.” Their is a shorthand for all this: pork barrel politics. It has been a defining feature of Japan’s post-boom economy.

A simple tabulation of facts bears this out. Japan’s total production of cement in 1970, in what is generally considered a boom period, was 57,190,000 metric tons. Production in 1994, early into during the ruinous “lost decade,” reached 91,620,000 tons, far exceeding total US production in the same year (77,900,000 tons). In 1996, 311,210 public construction projects used a total of 94,490,000 tons of cement.

All of this has helped create a bizarre dependency among inefficient corporations and moribund economic sectors, much of it centred on construction. “Japan never built up a huge public welfare system, but it has instituted safety nets and subsidies to create a welfare state for companies and towns and declining industries,” summarised Nicholas Kristof in a 1999 New York Times article. While pervasive, this sort of “welfare dependency” has its opponents. In 1999, Tokushima Prefecture’s conservative residents controversially upset the status quo when they vetoed the proposed construction of an unnecessary flood control dam. Their vote made national news.

Arriving in Wajiki, where Hiroshi is second in command, Japan’s troubled economic system is notionally a distant thing. The rural farming hamlet is, at face value, still attuned to the rhythm of an older Japan. Hiroshi suggests we visit a bathhouse, that genial place of repose and amiable chatter.

In the afternoon, we visit nearby Kakurinji, the Crane Forest Temple; it is hidden high on a mountaintop, and accessible only by foot or cable car. The temple forms part of Shikoku’s famous 88-temple pilgrimage route. Established in 807 by Kukai (774-835), a student of Esoteric Buddhism in ninth century China, the route links remote mountain and seaside temples across Shikoku. Originally monks faithful to Kukai (also known as Kobo Daishi) followed the route; commoners only embarked on the 1500-kilometre journey during the late Edo period (1603-1867). It is now equally popular with pensioners and students looking for an alternative summer break.

I completed the pilgrimage for teh first time in 2000, again in 2006, this time by bicycle. It is somewhat unusual activity in that the pilgrimage has no definitive destination, nor does it have any real goal. Unlike the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, for example, or the Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Shikoku pilgrimage posits no holy endpoint; the circular passage of the route is its essence, the circle assuming both a literal and figurative importance – no beginning, no end.

The sober grandeur and religiosity of Wajiki’s temple, with its 800-year-old cedars, proves to be a stark counterpoint to the bawdy fun of the fireworks festival held later in the valley bellow. Old men get drunk. Teenage girls dressed in summer kimonos coquettishly engage with flirtatious boys wearing oversized hip hop clothing. A man wearing a white helmet, blue overall and red flashing stick guides the traffic.

Fireworks done with, their fragrant aftermath long blown down the valley, we retire to Hiroshi’s dilapidated two-bedroom apartment, an outwardly grubby structure that is the complete antithesis to the venue of our next day’s travels, architect Tadao Ando’s sublime Hompukuji, otherwise known as the Lotus Temple.

Located on Awaji Island, between Shikoku and neighbouring Honshu, this temple utterly unlike any other of Japan’s numerous religious buildings. Situated in a typical fishing village, on an elevated position overlooking Osaka Bay, one enters the temple through a freestanding concrete wall with a doorway cut through it. (Non-loadbearing walls are a common feature in Ando's repertoire.) The Lotus Temple’s chief feature, however, is a staircase that pierces through a lotus pond, the ash-grey concrete stairs leading to a hall of worship beneath.

Commissioned on the strength of a powerful congregation member who championed Ando’s austere work, the smoothly textured finish and sleek concrete grain are, ironically perhaps, a testament to Japan’s masterly tradition of wood carpentry. The wooden forms into which Ando’s concrete is poured are reputed to be less prone to leaking, the watertight shuttering producing perfectly formed concrete structures.

Commenting on the temple, architectural critic Cheryl Kent writes: “Few of Ando’s projects better represent the challenges and comforts this architect offers to Japanese culture than [the Lotus Temple]… Less a building than a series of shaped sensual experiences, the Lotus Temple is a radical challenge to centuries-old conventions governing temple design in Japan”.

There is no refuting this insight, although Ando’s structure also stands as the apotheosis of a culture that now worships concrete, not wood, the material over the insubstantial. More prosaically, its show-off quality is also a tad dangerous.

Bored and in need of smoke, Hiroshi tramples across the temple’s pebbled landscape to a small verge. The white stones introduced to the site to compliment its aesthetics give way under the gauche policeman’s feet – he slips and lies spreadeagled on his back. Laughing, Misako and I run up to him. Hiroshi grumbles disconsolately as he stands up, then nonchalantly pats his polyester pants and back.

Later, in a ramshackle little restaurant near the Lotus Temple, while brooding over a beer and snacking on a starter of takoyaki, a fried octopus dish particular to the Kansai region, Hiroshi indulges in the Japanese cultural inclination to speak epigrammatically. During this clipped exchange Misako reminds him of the time, five years before, when he sulkily sat in the car, refusing to visit Kyoto’s famed Ginkakuji, or Silver Pavilion. Hiroshi frowns, becomes even more sullen.

“These buildings don’t mean anything to me,” I distinctly remember him saying back then.

Was he just being morose? I couldn’t quite figure him out at the time, still can’t as he sits quietly opposite me munching on his okonomiyaka, pausing only to take a sip of beer. Most likely yes, but I also like to think that in his sullen defiance Hiroshi was staking a claim to a Japan that has little to do with exotic buildings and far-flung places. Objects and habitats that evoke a Japan ever out of reach.

(This article originally appeared in the Mail & Guardian's monthly Leisure supplement, sometime late in 2004.)