Tradition was judged by the same rule. If it could be turned into the pragmatically useful it remained. This usually meant becoming a new product. Kimono and geta had all but disappeared, yet some remained as new signifiers: a girl in a kimono meant Traditional Type, going about her ikebana or her koto lesson; a boy in geta meant either Traditional Tradesman or Traditional Student Rightist, probably going to Takushoku University. And the despised Hanako was revived as the trendy and self-mocking title for a new magazine, which told all the young people what to buy.
The kimono itself was subsumed in the wrappings of Issey Miyake; the architectural tradition turned into the eclectic Japanesque of Arata Isozaki; Edo-mura became a local tourist draw; and the Japan Travel Bureau began urging a trip to Kyoto as time travel to the picturesque Orient, while I sat and watched my traditional Japan turn into Japanland.
“Trad but mod” said a slogan of the 1980s, and it said this about the new. (“Established in 1988” one read, carved in stone, in 1989.) From abroad poured in the products Japan thought Japan wanted as the traditional was being sliced into bite-sized pieces.
I felt I was living in a museum that was now being swiftly destroyed. The wreckers were at work and—oh, there goes a room I thought never would; oh, there goes a whole wing of what I thought was the permanent display.
And there I was in the shambles without a map, minus even a model, because eventually my two-cylinder paradigm could not begin to cope with change this great.
*
Then I remembered something that fine scholar and good friend Edward Seidensticker had once written: “The relationship between tradition and change in Japan has always been complicated by the fact that change is itself a tradition.”
I had, of course, long been aware of Japanese consciousness of change. For example, the fuss made about the seasons. Japan has four separate and distinct seasons, I was forever being told. Well, so does Ohio, I was tempted to answer, and then I remembered that there we only mentioned the seasons to complain about them, that we rarely celebrated them for their own transient sakes.
Yet even now in contemporary Japan with its vast hydroponic farms and its enormous distribution circuits, flowers and food in season were still made something of, and this seemed so because it gave some excuse for celebrating transience. Certainly the annual cherry-viewing orgies all over the country were such. Particularly, I was told, evanescence is celebrated when the petals are floating to the ground and change was at its most palpable—the death of the blossom. There was even an exclamation for appreciation of natural change: ah, aware.
And I remembered my classical readings. For example the famous opening line of Kamo no Chomei’s Record of the Ten-Foot-Square Hut (here given in Burton Watson’s translation): “The river flows unceasingly on, but the water is never the same water as before.”
I had thought that in looking at the stream Kamo was affirming the reassuring fact that the body of water was, after all, permanent. But now I saw that what he was indicating was, instead, the fact that the water itself changed, was always different.
I remembered the shrine at Ise. This single wooden edifice is replaced every twenty years. It is torn down and an identical replica is constructed. This has been going on for centuries. And it had seemed to me obvious that this exemplary structure celebrated tradition. It was the core holding.
But now I was not so certain. Ise surely satisfied the claims of eternity and the hopes of immortality—though in a way quite different from that of, say, the Pyramids. But at the same time it celebrated transience. It accepted change and incorporated it. It did so by accommodating it, by building evanescence into the structure of the Ise shrine itself.
Every culture copes with change but how many, I wondered, had made it a moving part? Lots of nostalgia for the good old days to be sure, lots of bad-mouthing the new bad ones, just like everywhere else, but in addition to this, an accommodation to the evanescent, an acceptance of this fact of life. Shikata ga nai (It can’t be helped), that bleat which so irritates the foreign resident, could now be seen as a graceful acquiescence to the great principle of change itself. After all, that there is nothing one can do about it really means, Let us rather get on with life.
Change is in Japan put to use in the most pragmatic of manners. It alone is permanent and hence a steady source of power. It is perpetual motion, the dream of the physicists come true. And I saw that during all my decades in the country Japan had not changed in its attitude toward change. It was always hands-on and still is. Any respect for the integrity of any original becomes beside the point when it is change itself that is being accommodated.
For example, the traditional landscape gardener moved this rock over a couple of feet, shifted that bamboo grove back a yard or two, and swiped the view of the mountain in the process. The result was the natural garden, a product of change. Ikebana, classical flower arrangement, changes venue and placement, and only then calls itself “living flowers” though they are of course no longer quite that, being cut.
The difference that I thought I had noticed in Japan’s attitude toward nature was then but one of degree. When the daimyo built himself a landscape garden his need was aesthetic because such labor-intensive work as this would otherwise not have been so ostentatiously indicative of his social standing. When it is money itself, rather than aesthetics and art appreciation, that satisfies the demands of social standing, however, then forests are cut down for golf courses and ancestral tombs are trashed for hotels. But the difference is only in degree—now, famously, money must make more money. The demand is no longer aesthetic—it is economic. Yet the mechanism is the same. Everything changes. Though there may be amber-like blocks of permanence within this moving magma they remain only because they are for the time being useful. Like now, for example.
The irresistible force has met what has seemed an immovable object. We have in Japan the System, the way things are done, the bloated bureaucracy, the Bank of Japan, the Ministry of Finance, those organizations concerned only with their own propagation. Yet they are now structurally irrelevant. As the pressure for change grows, they will slowly give way. They have already—lifetime employment, the effortless escalator to the top, the golden parachute jump into cushy retirement—all of this is now of the past. And more, much more, will change.
What is important, and what is eventually defining, I decided, is this genius for the harnessing of change. Having decided this I looked at my new, small, metaphor of the country—it lies here in my palm, a whirling gyroscope.
This dynamo might become a model elsewhere, I thought. Not as a slogan (“Japan as Number One” had misled practically everyone)—but as a paradigm. As a system of thought that welcomes and celebrates that very change that so transforms us and our world, that accepts death and taxes as well. If there is no mortality there is no life, let alone aesthetics.
And over the hum of my gyroscope I heard the words of the priest Kenko who now nearly seven hundred years ago wrote: “What if man lingered on . . . how things would then fail to move us. The finest thing in life is its uncertainty.”
—1994
The Nourishing Void
In Tokyo for the first time, Roland Barthes looked toward the empty Imperial plaza, the invisible palace, and the woodlands beyond, and wrote in The Empire of Signs that while Tokyo does possess a center, this center is empty.
This was stated with an air of surprise. Where he came from, centers were never empty. But he could see why Tokyo’s was, and he could understand its consequent function. This empty center was an evaporated nation, subsisting here not in order to radiate power, but to give to the entire urban movement the support of its central emptiness.
The idea of emptiness supporting something is not commonly encountered in the West. But it has long been familiar in Asia. Once remarked upon, it is seen everywhere—both in old scroll paintings and in the modern advertisement. What is all that empty space doing there? Why isn’t it filled in?
It is not filled in because it is already filled in with itself. It is a structural support. The emptiness of the scroll