Japan: Modernity and Tradition

I mentioned recently that connections between Mexico and Japan go back to the late 16^th century. A visitor familiar with Mexico is struck by certain superficial similarities between the two cultures in terms of the formal politeness of daily life and the forms of deference to people of higher social status (which automatically includes foreigners). In Japan the behaviours and forms of address are multiple and difficult for foreigners to understand in full. They clearly reflect ancient traditions and systems of status and power. This set me thinking about the theme of tradition and modernity in Japan.

Our plane reading was Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (the master of the short story) and, in Jan’s case, Natsume Sōseki, an early 20^th century novelist whose writing career lasted only eleven years, but won him enduring popularity. His first novel, I Am a Cat, was an instant success. We visited the Sōseki museum, built on the site of his home, and only a few yards from our son’s apartment. He published more than 20 novels, a book about the theory of literature and translations of works from English and French. Much of his literary production was for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The Japanese government sent Sōseki to London for two years (he recalled them as the two most awful years of his life) to study English literature. His home was of traditional wooden construction and design, with a garden dominated by a Japanese banana tree. His study, recreated in the museum, contained a large library, a low Japanese writing desk and implements. Sōseki’s interest in foreign literature and languages marked him out as modern. Perhaps still more remarkable was his taste for bread and sandwiches. 

Sōseki’s study

Akutagawa was an admirer of Sōseki and attended his weekly salons in his home. Like his mentor, Akutagawa drew on Japanese tradition and western modernity. He re-worked medieval Japanese stories in modern language of great power and concision. Two such stories, Rashōmon and In a Bamboo Grove, deal with good and evil and the slippery nature of truth. Akira Kurosawa combined the two quite different tales into a brilliant film, Rashōmon. On the other hand, Akutagawa was an avid reader of western literature. In Spinning Wheels, he refers to himself as a modern Monsieur Bovary and writes of his admiration for Strindberg and Dostoyevsky. In Death Register he draws on his own experiences, informing us that his mother was a madwoman. Like Sōseki, he wrote to deadlines for a newspaper. And like his master his career was brief: only thirteen years.

Akutagawa

It is hard to escape modernity in contemporary Tokyo’s neon-signed avenues, its skyscrapers, the boutiques of self-consciously fashionable districts such as Daikanyama and Naka-Meguro, or the obsession with gadgetry on show in Akihabara Electric Town. Yet, the drive for modernity is little more than century and a half old. The man credited with dragging Japan into the modern, international, era is emperor Meiji (reigned 1867-1912). The need to modernize Japan had been made clear in 1853 when Commodore Perry’s American naval squadron sailed into Tokyo Bay to give the Japanese a message: they were to open their economy on American terms or else. The humiliated and impotent Japanese had no choice but to agree.

Meiji’s remedy was to import skills of all kinds from overseas. European artists were hired to teach western style oil painting with linear perspective (known as yōga) as opposed to Japanese painting using traditional materials and techniques (nihonga). Graphic designers taught drafting skills, useful for designing postage stamps, but also for blueprints of war ships and armaments. Architects were brought to Japan to design western-style buildings. The success of Meiji’s programme was demonstrated by triumph in the Sino-Japanese war (1894-1895) and the Russo-Japanese war ten years later, in which the Japanese navy destroyed the Russian fleet.

The father of modern Japanese architecture is said to be Josiah Conder, a Briton hired by the government in 1877. Conder designed the Naval Ministry, the Ueno Imperial Museum, churches and university buildings, and villas for wealthy Japanese eager to adopt western tastes. One such was designed for Baron Furukawa Toranosuke, an owner of copper mines. The baron also had a garden designed by a Japanese, Ogawa Jihei. The garden combines a formal rose garden with a Japanese landscape garden. We visited the garden, accompanied by vast crowds of Japanese rose enthusiasts.

Conder’s Furakawa villa, brick clad in stone

Conder also trained a number of eminent Japanese architects. However, the modernization process was not entirely completed, at least in architectural terms, by the time of Meiji’s death in 1912. We joined a tour of the Japanese Diet building, the seat of the House of Representatives (roughly MPs) and the House of Councillors (roughly senators), designed by Japanese architects, after designs by German and American architects had failed to receive approval. The building was constructed in the 1930s using Japanese materials, but exceptions had to be made for technologies that the Japanese had not mastered. These included stained glass (from Britain), mail chutes and a system of door locks with a master key (both American).

The Diet Building

While Baron Furukawa opted for an entirely western-style building, the mansions of other wealthy Japanese combined traditional style with imported modern features. One such was built in 1919 for Kyu-Asakura, Chairman of the Tokyo City Government, who married into an aristocratic family of landowners. The family added to their fortune through rice milling in the 19^th century. Asakura adopted his wife’s last name, which no doubt helped his political career. The residential and business areas of the house are of traditional wood construction, with a tiled roof. Screens, some exquisitely painted with motifs of flowers, birds, fans and other designs, divide the rooms. The flooring of the rooms is traditional tatami mats. Rooms are measured in terms of tatami (a small room might be four tatami, a large room twelve or more). In some rooms the cedar wood, obtained at great expense, was cut to display the grain. However, there are innovations. The external screen doors, traditionally of light wood and paper moving on a wooden sill, here are glazed with glass and move on rollers because of the weight. There are western-style toilet fittings. The reception room is wood-panelled, carpeted and has decidedly un-traditional sash windows. In terms of materials the storehouse is a radical departure: it is of concrete construction. The exterior walls have rows of hooks from which mats of wet straw were hung as a measure against fire – fire was a frequent cause of destruction in a city constructed mostly of wood. Asakura also had a garage – and therefore a car at a very early date – constructed, again, of modern materials: concrete blocks and corrugated iron. It would not be out of place in a modest British home, but in 1919 Tokyo signalled wealth.

Asakura house

Asakura house garden

The Kyu-Asakura house is a rare survival (only about three homes of that period survive) on account of the Great Kanto Earthquake, and following fires, of 1923, and the fire-bombing of World War II. This accounts for the architectural modernity of Tokyo, much of it on a scale of ordinary to awful, but a surprising amount truly striking. On a stroll through Harajuku, a district popular with teenagers, some in school uniform, others in outlandish attire, we saw a small spectacular cantilevered office building designed by Klein Dytham. The same partnership designed the Tsutsaya bookshop and other buildings under the train tracks at nearby Naka-Meguro, close to the cafés and boutiques along the Meguro river.

Klein Dytham office building

Tsutsuya bookshop

Despite the neon and the skyscrapers, it is not hard to find ancient temples and shrines in Tokyo – ancient that is in terms of foundation rather than construction, since few survived fire and earthquake. The columns that sustain Senso-Ji temple at Asakusa, for example, are of steel and the roof of titanium. Legend tells us that in 628 two fishermen caught a statue of the bodhisattva Kannon in the Sumida River. They took it to the ruler of their village, who converted his home into a temple to house it. Today, Senso-ji is a vast temple approached along an avenue of shops (religion and trade go well together in Japan). In contrast, we were pleased to find at Shibamata in the eastern suburbs of Tokyo, the Taishakuten Daikyo Buddhist temple, founded in 1629. Unlike Senso-ji, this temple is an entirely wooden structure that has survived earthquakes and wars. It is dedicated to Taishakuten, originally a Hindu god of thunder, adopted by Buddhism as a subduer of evil.

Taishakuten Daikyo Temple

The glory of this temple is the high relief carvings on the exterior, but especially in the interior, of scenes of worship, travelling monks and animals.

Taishakuten Daikyo wood carving

Aspects of the theme of tradition came up in conversations with friends. One told us that when she was young it was usual for girls to be taught ikebana (flower arranging) and tea ceremony as a preparation for marriage, but that few young women now devote much time to them. Over dinner in Kanazawa we commented that we had seen many young women in kimonos in the famous Kenroku-en garden. Our friends disabused us of the impression that tradition was stronger in Kanazawa than in Tokyo: the girls hire the kimonos, and are dressed by shop staff, since many do not know how to put on the kimono. In short, here tradition is a tourist experience.

We had eaten lunch that day opposite a wedding planning business and watched young couples being sold expensive packages. We asked our Kanazawa friends about their wedding forty years ago. They were married in a Shinto shrine, which was conveniently located within a wedding chapel. Their son had been married in a shrine, but his parents explained that the choice between shrine and wedding chapel (these are ubiquitous in Japan) does not usually express any deeply held faith.

When I travelled to Japan for business in the 1990s I met a Buddhist monk, dressed in yellow robes, at a private view in an art gallery in fashionable Omotesandō. He was drinking beer and told me that he was married to the artist. I asked him how he spent his time. He responded that he walked in mountains, bathed in streams and relied on donations for his meals. Drinking beer, wandering in mountains while enjoying beer and art world society in central Tokyo seemed an agreeable lifestyle. The Japanese are generally eclectic and practical. They choose elements of tradition that hold society together and help to make it work, and see no contradiction with simultaneously pursuing modernity in its many guises, superficial or profound.