Traces of Japan’s
imperial mien can be hard to find.
Military fanaticism was all but completely discredited and with two
decade of economic stagnation and population contraction, there is almost a
twice-defeated return to the comforts of their beautiful home. Let’s just stay
here this year, and every year.
It’s not like home out there.
How different it must have been for Japan to have surged expansive,
sampling the sins of ascendency.
Walking yesterday I was among many physical manifestations of that
time. A meeting ends. The day’s meetings are done and someone
knows me well, and suggests we visit a near by Shinto shrine, the Hie Shrine,
which Tokogowa Iwase himself had moved here, closer to the imperial palace in
1604. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hie_Shrine
Up this way and then stop.
iPhones, Galaxies pulled from pockets one and all. This is a different type of cherry
tree. The blossoms on the road are
all at peak. Schools out and
hundreds of kids file out of what must only be a very elite school to be
located where it is, immediately beside government offices here in Akasaka. And now a truck with a phenomenal crane
riding over and out above the truck’s cabin. Surely that is going to knock over some of these tree
branches. But with the exacting
help of the uniformed guard the turn is made flawlessly through Scylla and
Charbydis, the truck rolls on without so much as a pink petal grazed.
At the wooded entrance to the shrine is a majestic tree that must be
at least four hundred years old, by the size of the trunk. I put my hand up to it and consider the Edo woodblock art of Ando Hiroshige (1797–1858). The time when Japan could be traditional, and pre industrialized, and
uncontaminated, left alone. That’s
when this tree with its enormous rope draped around it, made it upwards passed
the other shoots and the cutting and hacking that took down nearly anything of
substance in its immediate surrounding, allowing it alone to assume as size
that engendered sufficient respect to allow it to live. Perhaps Tokugawa Ieyasu himself had
ordered the tree planted here at the shrine's base.
The Meiji emperor undoubtedly walked passed this tree as did his
grandson Hirohito. This tree was
no doubt in great danger of being shaken to the ground or caught alight in a
conflagration during the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923. This tree was almost certainly in significantly more
danger when my country firebombed this city relentlessly for three days and
nights during Operation Meetinghouse.
And immediately after the war, when Japanese people had no food and no
fuel, how many freezing fathers considered hacking it down fore firewood for
the family, for the community. My
friend explains that the appropriately enormous rope represents the mighty
tree’s spirit as a deity.
We wash off our hands as told to in preparation, scoping water from
the well with wooden ladles.
We walk passed the painted statues of two monkeys on either side. In a Chinese context they can only look
like the monkey god Houge from “Journey to the West”, but it is actually an amalgamation of three different monkey gods.
My friend explains that monkey saru
is a homophone for “to send away” or “expel,” so that these monkey gods are in fact, demon killers: http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/monkey-koushin-p3.html The solemnity of the courtyard is
utterly compromised though, surrounded by towering temples to commerce and modern rule. The
courtyard opens out to a broad plane, which has two large urns with curling
feet lost to patination.
Shall we continue on for a bit?
Everyone agrees. There are
no more meetings and if we stride over the hill we’ll come upon the Diet
building. The grey deco pyramid
that bluntly forces its way up in concentric, shapes. We take guess at when it was built. I assume it is from approximately
1920. In fact it was the third
actual building, and a composite of designs from different Japanese architects, in many cases directly inspired by German designs, finished in 1936 just in time for the Marco Polo Bridge incident and the formal declaration of war against China, the following year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Diet_Building
To my eye the design is mournfully evocative of Nazi architecture it
is also reminiscent of something Indian.
I am reminded of the abandoned shell of an old Hindu temple in Lahore
that stood me in my tracks and made me think of the derivation from abandoned
temples of Angkor Watt, and in a flash realize that it was of course Angkor Watt
that was influenced by Hindu architecture and not the other way around.
We cannot go in from this side, explains a young lady who looks more
like she should work in a boutique cup cake shop than as a guard of the
nation’s Parliament. We head
north. Off to the right is a magnificent building. In the U.S. it is a white house and in South Korea it is a
blue house. This is vast glass
construction with warm, wooden beams illustrating the skeletal form, inside
rides out at an odd angle like some demanding buttress of Frank
Lloyd Wright. (Looking it up later
I am thrilled to find that my guess is absolutely spot-on, a source no more
authoritative than Wiki, says that the design was “highly influenced” by Wright.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister's_Official_Residence_(Japan) Well then, how do you do, Mr. Abe? You’re having a longer run at it this
time round.
Someone is banging a drum.
It’s doesn’t sound like the rightists. There are neat lines of police busses all around the north
side of the Diet at the ready.
A gent in his fifties with a dapper porkpie hat and a large folded sign
in Japanese, strides by. “Nuclear
Free Japan” explains my friend. I
warm instinctively, remembering my own marches in New York and in Washington
D.C. in the 1980s protesting Ronald Reagan’s arms build up. Across the street two monks are banging
a drum. The protest appears to
have concluded some time ago.
The Diet still looks like the Diet from the front. I think of all the buildings in South
Korea and in Northern China that the Japanese left behind when they obeyed
orders one last time and left. In
front of us, across a major thoroughfare and a moat lies the emperor’s
palace. Up to the right are two remarkably
Japanese looking communication towers that my chum explains is the place from
which the police can make emergency announcements and listen as well. Vintage telecommunications, they look
just like something Godzilla would kick over.
Off to Emperor Akihito, house.
It’s a perfect twilight sun set and everything looks increasingly
splendid as we approach. Joggers
and bikers work past on the path.
The traffic is orderly and though it is omnipresent, it isn’t oppressive. Who couldn’t but love the huge
perfectly rough-fit stonewalls that form the defensive ramparts of the
construction. You can end and
marvel and much, much more patination, everywhere. Everyone snaps and snaps and snaps every angle over and over
with their phones. The “classic”
view of the bridge and the palace as the sun sets behind, slows everyone to a
stop.
We head back across the park towards down town Tokyo and Hibiya
Park. Someone starts in about
“Conjunction Junction” and the primal television indoctrination, years running
about on the jungle floor of the 1970s comes flooding back. “And you know who that is, it’s don’t
you? It’s . . . “ I can discern almost immediately that
the name will not be forthcoming.
Later writing the familiar voice of Jack Sheldon singing “Soon” from
“Class Act” in 1998, came on a bop mix and I had my man.
Closer now, the enormous bank office towers lined in staggered rows,
awaiting instruction from the Chrysanthemum throne, prepared to bow when asked,
facing the august crane. Certainly
can only be the longest ruling family line among all the world’s royalty.
Up ahead there is a copper statue of the samurai Kusunoki Masashige, astride
a galloping mare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusunoki_Masashige
The moulted patina of the ribbed
breast armour seems to breath like the horse. The unbroken line was once rather fundamentally threatened at
the end of the Kamakura Shogunate, (1192 AD – 1333 AD) by schism. Splitters tried to form their own Avignon for the north of
Honshu. Masashige galloped in to save the emperor and protect the line. Chinese dynastic lines can hold the mandate for four hundred years or more and Korean dynasties longer,
but they as citizens can be 如释重负[1] from fealty to a line that looses the ‘mandate
of heaven.”
What a remarkable fundamental difference the unerring "mandate" in Japan. Confucian rule adapted to suit a particular Japanese temper and circumstances, protected
as they were by the sea and left to cultivate and destroy themselves. Masashige contribution is
rightly identified as defending something that would evolve as fundamentally
Japanese with a distinct view of the emperor and the irresolvable on they owed to him.
The sun is gone and we descend, down now, underground .
The sun is gone and we descend, down now, underground .
No comments:
Post a Comment