I returned to bed and slipped into jet-lagged dreams illuminated by fractured images of neon signs, moss gardens, bullet trains, kimonos and crustaceans.
Marine Catcher, Shinjuku, Tokyo
6.
Unfortunately, the next morning found Tokyo less disposed to indulge my desire for local colour. A practical mood had settled over the city, as twenty million people made their way to work. The streets of the business districts were jammed with cars and dark-suited commuters: I might have been anywhere. With their advertising hoardings unlit, the buildings appeared wilfully ordinary. Clusters of bland skyscrapers dominated the skyline, their pedestrian forms mutely mocking the twelve hours of cloud and snow over which I had flown to reach them. For architectural interest, I might as well have been in Frankfurt or Detroit.
Even in more residential quarters, the architecture was almost entirely lacking in ethnic roots or local flavour. Vast new developments were everywhere, each house assembled of generic materials and forms which would have been unsurprising in almost any part of the developed world. There seemed precious little that was Japanese in Japanese architecture.
The early Modernists would not have complained of this, for they had looked forward to a rational era when local styles would vanish entirely from their profession, as they had done from industrial and product design. There was, after all, no such thing as a local-looking modern bridge or umbrella. Adolf Loos had compared the absurdity of asking for a specifically Austrian kind of architecture to asking for a particularly Austrian-looking bicycle or telephone. If the truth was universal, why demand a local variety of architecture? Tokyo seemed to epitomise the Modernist dream of a place where one might never know from the buildings alone what country one had strayed into.
7.
There were, nevertheless, a few places to turn for aesthetic relief. A friend recommended that I spend a night in an old-fashioned ryokan, or inn, faithful in most details to the architecture and design of the Edo period (1615–1868).
skyscrapers, Shiodome, Tokyo
Kamagaya City, Chiba Prefecture, 1993
The ryokan was an hour’s train ride outside Tokyo, nestled among hills and shrouded in mist. Surrounded by pine trees and a moss garden, it was housed in a long wooden pavilion capped with a traditional kawarane yane (tiled roof). A receptionist wearing a kimono and tabi (split-toed socks) guided me to my room, which was lined with fusuma (sliding doors) and shoji (paper) screens decorated with calligraphy. The view was onto a river and a forested slope. Before sunset, I enjoyed an onsen (outdoor bath) in an adjacent natural spring, then drank an iced barley tea in an alcove in the garden. Dinner came in a set of immaculate boxes. I savoured the yose-nabe (Japanese chowder) and kounomono (pickles) – then fell asleep to the sound of water pursuing a path down the mountain side over smooth flat ancient volcanic stones.
But in the morning, my sadness returned at the prospect of having to go back to Tokyo. Disconsolate, I ate a bowl of dried seaweed and ruminated on the schism between the aesthetic perfection of historic Japan and the graceless tedium of its modern incarnation.
On the train journey back, speeding again through a ruined landscape of bland housing estates and apartment blocks, I even began to take exception with the world of the ryokan, annoyed at its inability to translate and adapt itself to modern realities, its failure to work out some way to carry over its old charms into a new idiom.
My frustration with the ryokan was similar to a feeling I had once experienced in England, on a visit to the traditionally styled village of Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester. Despite its qualified success in capturing the spirit of country life in the eighteenth century, the place was ultimately maddening for its disconnection from the psychological and practical demands of contemporary society. It resembled an ancient relative to whom one was very close as a child, but who lacked any understanding of the adult whom circumstances had in the interim formed, whether for better or worse.
An architecture that cannot accept who we have grown into:
Poundbury, Dorchester, 1994
8.
During my stay, I did see occasional signs that the Japanese were inclined to connect their new buildings with their country’s past. But for the most part such attempts seemed half-hearted, overly sentimental or even downright impatient.
In a crowded section of Kyoto, atop an innocuous office block, amidst air conditioners and aerials, a tiny traditional shrine looked as if it had been dropped from the air to answer to certain inner needs left unmet by modern architecture. Past and present made no move here towards integration; instead they were happy to coexist, while seeming positive that there was nothing they might do to imbibe each other’s strengths.
Elsewhere, apartments had miniature pruned cedar trees outside their entrances and moss gardens in tubs hanging off balconies. I saw calligraphy on shower curtains and shoji screens fixed to kitchen doors. I ate in restaurants offering ‘authentic ancient rooms’ to tourists unbothered by plastic re-creations. The roof of an insurance company or a post office would occasionally curve upwards gently at the edges in a nod to the Tokugawa style.
Shijo-dori, Kyoto
But the failure of such attempts to rise beyond the kitsch illustrates the difficulties of finding a modern form to embody traditional features of a culture. Paper screens will not necessarily make a house Japanese in spirit; nor will concrete and patinated copper guarantee that it won’t be. The true heirs of Tokugawa houses frequently bear no simple outward resemblance to their masters: the resemblance is more subtle, relying on proportions and relations – just as the finest translators of Lady Murasaki are often those who take extensive liberties with individual words, knowing that methodical transposition is rarely the way to stay true to original intentions.
9.
I’d first noted some of the difficulties of translation in a new development in one of London’s most famous Classical squares. The architects responsible for the office block which dominates the north-western side of Manchester Square correctly sensed that the handling of the windows was key to harmonising with the existing façades, and so gave their building white rectangular window frames.
Unfortunately, these architects failed to register that Classical frames are noteworthy not because of their colour or shape but because of their slenderness and its associated elegance – qualities which the architects grievously sacrificed by resorting to peculiar and massive frames formed of steel I-beams. Despite their sincere wish to respect the past, the architects had spectacularly bypassed the real reasons why the past might have been worth respecting in the first place. They would have been better off had they taken their guidance from another set of windows entirely, those on the façade of the Queen’s Building in Cambridge. Though these frames aren’t white but a silvery black, and horizontal rather than vertical, they appear more richly endowed with the true qualities of Classical architecture than any of their counterparts on the apparently more respectful London block. A true homage seldom looks exactly like one.