Japanese roots

I generally credit my childhood friend Hiroki Shimamura with introducing me to Japanese culture.  We met around 1980.

But before Hiroki there was Speed Racer (Mach GoGoGo in Japanese).  This debuted on American television in September of 1967 and ran for 52 episodes until March of 1968 - before I was born.  But its immense popularity meant that by the time I was of the cartoon-watching age it was still being aired in syndicated re-runs weekday afternoons.

The animated cartoons I was watching at the time were Looney Tunes, the Flintstones, Tom & Jerry, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You and the Pink Panther Show.  While all very different in terms of style and story, these were all American productions.  Speed Racer was something new, something unusual.  It was strange.  But it was cool.  It was this strange-but-cool factor that drew me in.

It didn't look or sound like anything else I was watching.  First of all, it wasn't funny.  A cartoon that wasn't funny.  That was peculiar.  There was an excitement and a danger in the stories more real than an anvil falling on a coyote's head.  

I don't think I knew it was a Japanese cartoon, but I did recognize the odd way the characters spoke, how the voices and the movement of their mouths didn't synch as they did in other cartoons.  Speed and his pals had a different look with their big, bright eyes and fierce determined expressions.  The animation was also curious - flat, jerky, more like a moving comic book than the fluid motion of a Warner Brothers cartoon.

And that theme song! "Go Speed Racer, Go Speed Racer, Go Speed Racer Go-o!"  This sounded like something on FM radio, not a theme song for a kids show.

Mach GoGoGo was the creation of Kyoto-born Tatsuo Yoshida.  He and his two brothers founded their comic/animation studio Tatsunoko Productions in 1962.  Following on the success of their early race car themed comic books like Pilot Ace and Hayabusa Q they launched the comic book version of Mach GoGoGo in 1966.  The animated series premiered on Fuji Television in Japan in April of 1967.

A couple of weeks ago I happened upon an original Hayabusa Q comic book at the Kyoto City Hall Flea Market.  The copy was a bit tatty but for ¥300 I couldn't resist.  The roots of Speed Racer and my Japanese experience were in this thin book. 

Mach GoGoGo

A dialogue with stone

"Art is a flower that blossoms in solitude."

- Yone Noguchi (1875 - 1947)
  poet and father of sculptor Isamu Noguchi

A walk into the hills and down a country road.  There is a bend created by a wall of rocks.  This is not an ordinary stone fence demarcating farms or the villas of aristocrats.  This wall is made up of discarded stone sculpture, thousands of practice pieces that literally didn't make the cut.  Nature and time have slowly overtaken these would-be works of art.

This is the approach to the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum.  

In the spring of 1969 Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi established his studio in Mure-cho in Kagawa Prefecture.  He spent about half of each year here working until his death in 1988.  The other 6 months were spent at his studio in Queens, New York.  Noguchi came to this region for the stone, but beyond this practical reason it is easy to see why he was inspired to work here, the wide open space, the beautiful rugged terrain, the Seto Inland Sea off in the distance.

His original studio is a dream - a large, wooden minka (farmhouse), earthen floors, light pouring in from the high gable windows.  The boundaries of inside and outside blurred by the giant sliding doors.  It just feels like art.  What else could happen within these walls?

It is always interesting for me to see the work space of an artist.  Noguchi's tools - hammers, chisels, hand-held power tools, wenches and enormous saws with blades like the sun - are all as he left them.  Decades of dust and rust cover them softly.  A sort of beautiful melancholy.  Wabi-sabi.

The sculpture garden is a place to contemplate Noguchi's work for hours, days, a life time.  I am disappointed by the imposed time constraint.  The Noguchi Museum in Queens is better suited for long conversations with his art.  This lovely, semi-rural location asks us to slow down and let the pieces speak.  To rush through is almost criminal.

There is something very welcoming and familiar about this place.  I don't want to leave.

Kyo-machiya

There is a range of colors associated with Kyoto - matcha green, saffron orange, indigo blue, sakura pink - but the weather-beaten, caramel brown of the machiya (the traditional wooden townhouses) is probably my favorite.

Soon after I arrived in Japan in 2013 I began a series of paintings using burnt sienna.  I had never worked in this hue before, and I wasn't sure exactly why I started then.  I realized later Kyo-machiya (as they are called here in Kyoto) were the inspiration.

Historic European architecture is made of stone and brick.  In the U.S. it is concrete and steel.  But in Japan it is wood.  I'm sure there is a practical socio-geographic reason for this (an abundance of trees and a dearth of stone?) but I don't know.

koshi

komayose

mushiko-mado

Kyo-machiya came about with the rise of the merchant class in the Edo period (1603 - 1868), though most surviving structures were built in the 19th and 20th Century.  These deep, narrow one or two-story structures made of wood and ookabe-sukuri (mud daub and plaster) served a dual purpose of shop and residence.  There are a number of unique characteristics that define the machiya from the outside: the koshi (window lattice) which allowed for some privacy, the inuyarai or komayose fence designed to keep animals like horses away, the ceramic kawara (roof tiles), and the mushiko-mado (insect cage) windows on the second floor.  But for me, it is the sunburnt and rain-stained cedar sasarako jitami (overlapping weather board) that say machiya.

The shadowy interior of a machiya is no less distinctively appointed.  There is the spacious zashiki (living room) used for dining and entertaining, the straw tatami mat flooring, the decorated fusuma (sliding doors) which serve to divide the room into smaller units, and the tokonoma (alcove) where you will find a kakejiku (hanging scroll) and ikebana (flower arrangement) displayed.

zashiki

tokonoma

tsuboniwa

Beyond the zashiki is the tsuboniwa (small courtyard garden).  This not only brings light and air into the house, but also connects it to nature providing the residents with a tranquil miniature landscape.  This connection to nature is an essential element of the machiya.  All the materials used to build a machiya are natural: wood, earth, straw, paper.  There is nothing artificial in their construction.  There is something wonderfully organic and human about the design and construction of these houses.

Sadly, the machiya are an endangered species.  The destruction of these traditional buildings began after the War in Kyoto's rush to modernize.  Whole neighborhoods were razed to make room for large apartment blocks, office buildings and parking lots.

Greedy real-estate developers have for decades manipulated a 1951 law designed to protect the city against fire hazard to their advantage.  A largely powerless and ineffectual preservation movement means the machiya continue to be destroyed at an alarming rate.  Today less than 45,000 machiya remain in Kyoto.

The housing market and banks have also had a hand in the obliteration of these old buildings.  Unlike in the West where the value of historic buildings increases over time, in Japan houses older than 30 years are generally deemed worthless.  The property has value, but not the house.  There is little incentive to renovate when banks will loan up to 10 times more for a tear-down than they will for a restoration.

In my own neighborhood, in the short time I've been here, I have seen half a dozen minka (traditional houses) destroyed, replaced by generic, pre-fab, plastic boxes completely void of any design aesthetic, character or charm.  And what's to become of this non-biodegradable material when these houses are torn down in 30 years time?

Kyoto is quick to boast of its many UNESCO World Heritage Sites, but seems oblivious to the fact that its living history, what makes Kyoto Kyoto is rapidly disappearing.  I do fear that one day Kyoto will look something like Osaka or the San Fernando Valley, and the machiya, what give Kyoto its lovely, warm color will be seen only in museum photographs.

Katsuragawa 桂川

The Great Sushi Debacle: Redemption

A couple weeks after arriving in Kyoto in 2013 I went for sushi in Gion.  This evening became known as the Great Sushi Debacle which was documented in an early post here.  Other than the local sushi joint in my old Uji neighborhood, and the occasional kaiten (conveyer-belt) sushi, I never really went out for sushi again.

A month ago the Japan Times ran an article about a restaurant in Kyoto where one could get good, seasonal sushi at a reasonable price.  The restaurant is called Tsukijisay, which is located in a subterranean space in a nondescript building behind Daimaru department store on Shijo-dori.

I happened to be in this neighborhood and decided to give proper sushi another try.  It was more than two years since my previous humiliation and the red in my face had long ago disappeared.

I was not greeted upon entering, as is the custom in most Japanese restaurants, which immediately gave me angst.  Oh no.  This is not good.  Leave.  Turn around and walk out the door.  Eventually a waitress acknowledged my presence and told me it would be about a 10-minute wait.

I was seated in the middle of the packed counter.  Other gaijin must occasionally dine here because they actually had an English menu.  The frustrating part about English menus in Japanese restaurants is that they are always very sparse.  They extend just to the limit of the owner's English writing ability, which is about 25% of the menu available to native speakers.  There was a seasonal special which was, after all, what I had come for, so I ordered that and a beer.

Once the menu disappears your point of reference is gone.  It is difficult or impossible to know if what you ordered is in fact the same thing that appears on your plate.  I've always found it best to just eat and enjoy what is served and not worry too much about whether it corresponds to my hazy memory of a laminated photo on a slapdash menu made for tourists.

The sushi was divine.  I'd almost forgotten how good fresh, made-to-order sushi can be.  I nimbly picked up each piece with my ohashi (chopsticks), dipped it in the soy sauce and popped it in my mouth.  It was as if I'd been born eating this cuisine.  All my apprehension vanished.  Each piece tasted better than the last.  I could feel the warm, belated glow of redemption.

Then something arrived on my sushi geta (tray) that immediately brought my anxiety back.  It was a kuruma ebi (imperial prawn) with its exoskeleton, legs, antennae and eyeballs all anatomically intact.  I stared at it for a while.  I ignored it and ate around it.  There were still several more approachable pieces of sushi to eat.

At last I asked the man next to me, "Sumimasen, doshite tabemasuka?"  (Excuse me, how do you eat this?)  The chef overheard my inquiry.  He made an air demonstration of  picking up the prawn with two hands and nibbling it like a small ear of corn.

We all chuckled at his performance.  Ha!  This time it was the sushi chef, not me, that looked silly.  Victory! 

Hanami haiku

Sakura

reluctant performers

too soon their show ends

they scatter

The mountain and the graveyard

Kyoto sits in a valley. So no matter where you go, whatever direction, you are invariably in the foothills of a mountain. I sometimes find myself on streets in these foothill communities that end (or begin) at a mountain trail. I’m not a hiker, but these paths always beckon me. There is something intriguing about a path to nowhere. In the States such trails would be inhabited by homeless perverts, tree-hugging delinquents and axe-murderers. In Japan it is just you and the natural world.

I generally start down (or more often up) such a trail with no idea where they go or how long they are. Every 30 or 40 yards my American brain tells me, okay, you should turn back, this will be your demise. But I’m always so curious to see where it leads, what lies around the next bend, over the next hill, that I keep going.

I was on a walk recently, Tetsugaku no michi (the Philosopher’s Path) in Northern Higashiyama. I came upon a shrine and beyond the shrine was this trail winding up a fairly steep mountain. There was a sign in English: "Grave of Joseph Hardy Neesima", and an arrow. Who was Joseph Hardy Neesima? Why was he buried here? And why did his grave merit a sign written in English?

The mystery was too enticing. (I learned later that he was a 19th Century Japanese missionary and founder of Doshisha University.)

It had rained heavily the night before and the path was a bit slippery with fallen leaves and mud. It probably wasn't such a good idea to climb this mountain, but I did anyway. The silence of the forest was eerily deafening.

As promised, at the top was a graveyard. What a crazy and amazing idea! A graveyard atop a mountain, so close to the heavens. The most quiet place you could find for an eternal resting place. It was delightfully spooky. Me, alive, with hundreds and hundreds of dead people from centuries past high above the city, sweat beading over my brow, moss climbing over their grave markers.

The grave of Mr. Neesima was not a giant monument covered in wilted flowers, spent candles and empty sake bottles. In fact it was so obscure I never found it. And I wasn't inclined to search around, possibly disturbing the slumber of less famous and more irritable diseased.

Beyond the graveyard the stones of the trail disappeared under mud. There was a large swathe of cut trees. Someone with an axe...or chainsaw. I stood for a long while in the clearing watching my breath hang in the moist air contemplating my advance or retreat. I don’t know if it was hunger or fear of meeting the woodsman that had cut down all the trees that finally turned me around down the mountain.