A Lateral View. Donald Richie

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      One of the reasons would be that Japan is the real home of all such concepts as Disneyland has come to exemplify. To go there is, in a way, to come home. It was in Japan, after all, that the concept of the microcosm has been most fully elaborated, from its beginnings right down to Walkman-type baby loudspeakers for the ears, the wrist-watch TV, and the smallest and fastest silicon chip yet.

      Japan, too, has also displayed a fondness for the geographical microcosm, the bringing together of famous places into a single locality. Look at the number of little towns in Japan that sport a Ginza, plainly a replica of what was once Tokyo’s most famous shopping street. And look at the number of gardens that have a little Mount Fuji, small but climbable, included among their attractions.

      Indeed, the classical Japanese garden gives ready indication of how dear the microcosmic impulse has long been to the Japanese heart, and how early the Japanese had perfected these small visitable worlds.

      Take, for example, the Korakuen in Tokyo—an Edo-period garden. One climbs a small hill which calls itself Mount Lusha in China, and finds oneself at a replica of the Togetsu bridge from Kyoto’s Arashiyama district. But the view is not the river but Hangzhou’s famous lake—we are back in China again. Not for long, however; climb another hill and here is Kyoto once more, the veranda platform of the Kiyomizu Temple, one of the famous sights of the city.

      Some Edo gardens are even more Disneyland-like. For example Tokyo’s Rikugien in Komagome. Here, in one place, arranged somewhat like a miniature golf course, are all of the 88 classical sites, all tiny, and all with noticeboards explaining the Chinese or Japanese association.

      Lest it be thought that all of this is just big-city Tokyo and late-Edo commercialism, Japan’s claim to early Disneyfication must be defended. Did you know that the garden of the elegant Katsura Villa is itself a miniaturization of famous scenic attractions from elsewhere—that there is the Sumiyoshi pine, and the Tsutsumi waterfall, and the Oigawa river, and the famous wooded spit on the other side of Japan, Ama no Hashidate? And that even the elegant moss-garden, that of Saiho-ji, contains—if one knows how to find them—scenes from ten famous places, reproductions often famous things (rocks, etc.), ten poetic references, and ten famous pine trees—all reproductions, fancied though they be, of something somewhere else?

      Even Ryoan-ji’s famous rock garden has its Disney attributes. Those rocks—what are they, besides being just rocks? Well, they are various things. They are manifestations of the infinite, or they are islands in the ocean, a section of the famous Inland Sea. Or (a very Disney touch, this) they are a mother tiger and her frolicking cubs.

      Even earlier, the avatar of Walt Disney was alive and well in Japan. He would have loved the Byodo-in, replica of a Chinese water pavilion, with imitation Chinese swan-boats (phoenixes, actually) being poled and pushed about. And he would have noted with pleasure that in gardens of the period everything was always something else—something from far away. One way of arranging garden rocks in inland Kyoto was suhama (graveled seashore) and another was ariso (rocky beaches). Earlier yet, Japanese gardens were displaying the vision that later made Disneyland famous. Here in the first gardens what do we find? Why, things from far away indeed. The garden was a representation of Sukhavati, the Western Paradise of the Buddha Amitabha. And those rocks in the water were the three islands of the blessed—Horai, Hojo and Eishu. And that big rock in the middle—that is Mount Sumeru itself.

      The date of this kind of garden is 1000. Just think—almost 1000 years ago Japanese vision and technique had in Sumeru made the first Space Mountain!

      It is evident that the Japanese claim to prior Disneyfication is a very strong one. No other country has brought the principle of the microcosm—ikebana, bonsai, chanoyu, gardens—to such profuse perfection. No other has managed to turn so much into something else.

      So, when one wonders why Japan, such a Disneyland itself, needed a real Disneyland, one must conclude that it found here something in which a true fellow-feeling was discovered. And also, perhaps, because in Disneyland it recognized as well one of its own enduring qualities.

      This is a passion amounting to near genius for kitsch. If kitsch is defined as primarily something pretending to be something else—wood acting like marble, plastic acting like flowers, Anaheim, California, acting like the Mississippi—then Japan has a long history, a celebrated expertise and a strong claim to mastery in just this very thing. In fact, Japan often enough has been called “the home of kitsch.”

      If this is true then, with understandable enthusiasm Japan embraced the biggest piece of kitsch in the West. Did so, then broke off a chunk and brought it home to add to its collection.

      —1985

      The City Home

      THE JAPANESE appear to regard their homes in a manner somewhat different from we in the West. In the United States there is the tradition that a man’s home is his castle, much is made of the homemade meal, and it is agreed no other place is like home. In Japan, a man’s castle is usually his office, the simply homemade is often garnished with the more elegantly store-bought, and there are many places which are like home and are treated as such.

      With so little attention being paid to home, it is not surprising that Japanese dwellings suffer by comparison. Foreign diplomats even call them rabbit hutches. This description is perhaps occasioned by the fact that Japanese homes are small and crowded and not, as it would first appear, that they are units used mainly for sleeping.

      The living space is much less than that enjoyed by those of equal income in other countries. Whole families are crammed into one or two LDKs—the abbreviation for living room, dining room and kitchen squeezed into single or multiple units. The units themselves come in various sizes, none of them large. A san-jo is a three tatami-mat room, a hachi-jo is eight. Tatami mats used to be six by three feet in area, but the newer apartmentsized mats are much smaller. Thus a family of four living in a roku-jo (six-mat) LDK does enjoy a somewhat rabbit-like intimacy.

      In the old days before Japan became affluent, four people could perhaps have coped with such restricted space. Bedding and clothing were put out of sight in closets and the tokonoma alcove would hold a space—suggesting flower arrangement. Now, however, the Japanese have become the world’s foremost consumers and buying begins at home. Thus into this room is stuffed the washing machine, the fridge and the freezer, the color TV set, the children’s bunk beds, the piano and anything else which the family has been induced to buy. A consequence is that space is much restricted and a somewhat hutch-like appearance results.

      Another consequence is that space has become the greatest luxury to which a Japanese can aspire. It used to be time. Anyone well enough of T not to work on Sundays was considered a kind of temporal millionaire. Everyone else, the temporal poor, worked every day with just one day off a month. Now in the new age of affluence, none (except store employees, and they get a compensatory weekday off) work on Sundays and progressively fewer work on Saturdays as well. Affluence and leisure are now enjoyed by a majority, except that now if you stay at home there is no space in which to enjoy either.

      I am, to be sure, describing city conditions. In the country, one might afford a larger apartment or perhaps a house or maybe even the greatest of contemporary luxuries, a garden. But now well over half of all Japanese live in cities and the kukan mondai or space problem affects a majority. Space in any quantity is not to be had except at the most extravagant of prices.

      The cost of housing is mainly due, of course, to the postwar rush to the cities, but this has occurred in other countries as well, with results not so spectacularly cramped as those of Tokyo or Osaka. There would perhaps have been ways of using the available land so that more attractive if not more spacious living units could СКАЧАТЬ