“In this ever changing world where mountains crumble, rivers change their course, roads are deserted, rocks are buried, and old trees yield to young shoots, it was something short of a miracle that this monument alone had survived the battering of a thousand years.”
Matsuo Basho- The Narrow Road to the Deep North, 1689
“A battering of a thousand years” is a good description of the tsunami of March 2011 and it was nothing short of a miracle that Matsushima, which Basho had described as “the most beautiful spot in the whole of Japan” should have survived intact, although it was at the heart of the storm. Matsushima is a bay filled with tiny islands, each an outcrop of rock from which ancient pine trees seem to grow directly from the stone.
To a hotelier there’s nothing more painful than to see a hotel with no guests. This has been the sad fate of the Matsushima Century Hotel, which has a ringside seat for one of the best views in Japan. This photo shows the view from the balcony of my room at dawn. The guide books say that the serenity of the bay is undercut by the throng of the crowds which visit it. Today is the start of Golden Week, the holiday period when the crowds should be at their densest. But I’ve got the place to myself, which is eery and slightly disconcerting. I’m seeing Matsushima as Basho would have done more than three centuries ago, but my heart goes out to the people at the Matsushima Century Hotel
It was five years ago, following a research programme which took me to Kobe in Japan, that I started on the road to producing England’s first herd of Wagyu cattle. The Japanese government won’t allow the export of their native cattle, but it’s possible to get frozen embryos of pedigree Wagyus via Holland, and I arranged for some to be inserted into my own pedigree Belted Galloways at my farm on the Duddon Estuary. The embryos all had unpronounceable Japanese names except one, which was called Yoko Ono, and I remember the look of alarm on the face of the reporter from Cumbria Radio when he heard me say, in a live broadcast at breakfast time, that as a lifelong Beatles fan nothing gave me greater pleasure than seeing Yoko Ono being inserted up the rear end of a cow.
The first embryo programme produced three bulls which I named John, Paul and George. Paul died, mysteriously, a year later but gradually the herd increased to 12. Then came the sale of the farm, but I held onto my Wagyus in the hope that one of these days I could start farming properly again.
Unbeknown to me, at the same time as I was planning my Wagyu herd, a retired businessman, Andrew Deacon, was doing the same thing in Suffolk, after travelling to Australia to see how they do things there. He set about the establishment of a Wagyu herd in a much more businesslike way than me and soon had enough to be able to sign an exclusive deal to supply Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir au Quat Saisons. Andrew saw my Wagyus on Countryfile, came to see them and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’m saddened by the end of my dream but there’s something special about the thought that my little pieces of Cumbria will eventually find themselves being served in a place as great as Le Manoir.
This chair is gorgeous. It’s by Tokidoki and is covered in a faux-suede fabric with a typically Japanese print which manages to be cute, sexy and grotesque all at the same time.
I love the expression Okey-dokey. It’s used in Scotland more than here and conveys the warmth and friendliness that you find north of the border; it’s so much nicer than O.K. This is why I like the name Tokidoki, although I’m told that it’s pronounced with a short “o” and that it means “sometimes”. But to me it’s Tokidoki, to rhyme with Okey-dokey.
I’d love to own the chair, but I’m not sure that it would be okey-dokey to do so. There’s the famous Punch cartoon where the introduction of a single cushion which didn’t quite match led to the gradual redecoration of the entire room. I can just about afford the chair, but I’m not sure that I want the rest of my house to look cute, sexy and grotesque as well.
“From the age of five I have had a mania for sketching the forms of things. From about the age of fifty I produced a number of designs, yet of all I drew prior to the age of seventy-three there is truly nothing of great note. At the age of seventy-two I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, fish and of the vital nature of grasses and trees. Therefore at eighty I shall have made progress, at ninety I shall have penetrated even further the deeper meaning of things, at one hundred I shall have become truly marvellous, and at one hundred and ten, each dot, each line shall truly possess a life of its own. I only beg that gentlemen of sufficiently long life take care to note the truth of my words”.
Hokusai, Aged 72
The Hokusai exhibition at the Oriental Museum in Durham is on at the same time as Hockney’s retrospective (See Hockney’s Retrospective) He’s best known, of course, for ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ (shown below), which has been reproduced so often in our newspapers following the tsunami of last March. But the fascination of the exhibition is how, just like Hockney, who is now 74, this great artist continually developed and reinvented his art. Hokusai didn’t reach the venerable age referred to in the quotation above (he died aged 89) but he didn’t let old age diminish his talent or inventiveness.
In an earlier posting (See Max, aged 5, catches a fish and eats it raw) I warned of the dangers of eating live octopus, as the tentacles can attach themselves to the inside of your mouth. In this drawing, from the Hokusai Shunga (or Spring Pictures) collection an octopus is seen enjoying an altogether different feast.
The team at Ten Stories High achieved an astonishing £630,000 worth of coverage in the English language press of the Gardening World Cup in 2011, much of it centred around interest in Mr McGregor’s Garden. But our little slice of the Lake District was also a big hit with the media in Japan, the highlight of which was a feature on Japanese TV. Most of the filming, including all of the aerial shots, took place before the artefacts which were held up in customs, such as the antique pump and the stone trough, were placed in the garden, but the planting was all in place and the cameras captured it beautifully. As the Japanese would say – “Kawaii”.
The Kusama show at the Tate Modern is the perfect place to take the kids on a wet afternoon. This may seem an odd recommendation when everyone knows that Kusama is sex-obsessed and one of the exhibits is a room filled with phallus-sprouting furniture, but the children present when I was there were having a whale of a time. And Kusama’s story is as good an introduction to modern art as anyone’s. In part this is because the weird and wonderful shapes created by the artist aren’t just a grown-up being silly; they’re the work of someone who is genuinely insane.
Kusama became an artist when she was a child. She relates how, at the age of 10, she was looking at the pattern of red flowers on a tablecloth when she became one of them. The flowers started to pursue her and as they chased her upstairs she fell, spraining her ankle. Her life as an artist has been her attempt to recreate her hallucinations. For the last 35 years she’s done so from a mental asylum in Japan. This has given a certain veracity to her work, which is now fetching prices higher than any other female artist. The Tate exhibition covers her career over a time-span of more than 60 years, but the most stunning exhibit, called, “Infinity Mirrored Room- Filled with the Brilliance of Life” and leaves everyone, even the cynical 5 year olds, gasping with astonishment.
“Tell me, gentle flowers, teardrops of the stars, standing in the garden, nodding your head to the bees as they sing of the dews and the sunbeams, are you aware of the fearful doom that awaits you?”
Okakura Kakuso “The Book of Tea”
When Alex Kerr wrote, in “Lost Japan” (link to – http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2012/01/11/the-slow-life-in-japan/) about the changes which had taken place during the 20 years he had lived in his adopted country he told the story with love and affection. Ten years later, in “Dogs and Demons”, his love has turned to hatred, his affection to scorn. His book contains as much bile and bitterness as the angriest divorce petition. His anger is directed at a corrupt bureaucracy which wastes countless millions on absurd construction projects; on a supine population who take no interest in the environment and allow these projects to take place; on an innate conservatism which won’t allow other nationalities to immigrate or integrate; and an educational system which brainwashes its youth into never questioning authority.
Alex Kerr’s analysis is accurate, but his conclusions are wrong. When he says that the bureaucracy is powerful and intent on extending its power he’s describing bureaucrats everywhere; whether in Japan or elsewhere they’ll get pleasure from standing at a drain and pouring other people’s money down it. In Japan the money is wasted on construction projects, in England on sink estates.
And his pleas for Japan to become more like the United States, with all sorts of bossy pressure groups, open borders and an educational system where anything goes would result in Japan losing that specialness which appealed to him in the first place. Perhaps he just grew tired of being in a place where things got done and you never had to worry about your wallet being stolen.
My home town of Grange-over-Sands is the archetypal slow town. Its citizens, most of them being elderly, move slowly; for them the 30 mph sign isn’t a speed limit it’s an unattainable dream. Grange is almost unique in the modern world in having an abundance of independent food shops so that you can do your weekly shop without visiting a supermarket – which is handy as there isn’t one. It’s an ideal candidate for becoming a “Slow Town” under a scheme promoted by the Slow Food movement and last year, with the backing of Slow Food, I proposed this to the Town Council. Unfortunately my proposal was rejected, not on the grounds of cost (because I’d anticipated that by agreeing to underwrite the costs) but with the unassailable logic of their inherent slowness, or to put it another way, they were so slow witted and lethargic that they couldn’t be bothered.
If the idea had been proposed in Japan, I’ve no doubt it would have been welcomed enthusiastically. The barrenness of being busy, as Carla Carlisle puts it, is something well known to the Japanese, whose working hours are punishingly long. “Slow” is big in Japan, so much so that whole cities have become “Slow Cities”*, and the Slow Food movement has more members in Japan than any country except Italy.
The extraordinary thing is that whilst most Japanese opt for the city life with no access to a garden or an allotment, the possibility of living the good life is greater there than in any other developed country. This video tells the story of a young couple, Sean and Misa, who were given a farm in Shikoku rent-free on the sole condition that they cultivated the land to prevent it from being reclaimed by the forest. There are dozens of abandoned farmhouses in the same community and all over Japan, and so the opportunity taken up by Sean and Misa is available to many more.
*Here’s the ‘Slow Life’ Declaration of the Japanese city of Kakegawa, which I think is rather lovely and should be read, ever so slowly, to the Town Councillors of Grange:
The practice of the “Slow Life” involves the following eight themes:
SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.
SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.
As I lay groaning in the hotel bedroom in Taipei, certain I was going to die, the thought occurred to me that no-one knew where I was. I’d checked into a cheap hotel and, in the days when you thought twice before picking up the phone to make an international call, I hadn’t told anyone where I was staying. In my delirium I convinced myself that when the maid found my dead body the hotel owners would avoid any annoying questions by throwing me and my belongings into the river.
Taiwan isn’t the only place I’ve succumbed to ‘Delhi belly’ (as a matter of fact I’ve had it in Delhi) but I’ve never suffered in Japan, even though I’ve experimented with some of the world’s strangest food there*. There’s an irony here because if you were to choose any bathroom in the world in which to spend an excessive amount of time, it would have to be Japan. Their toilets are wonderful. They are there to pamper you, with heated seats and a button which operates a spray of warm water to clean your bottom. There’s a separate button, as a diagram helpfully explains, for washing a lady’s front bottom – gentlemen are advised not to press this button by mistake. Some models will play music or the sound of running water to hide any embarrassing sounds, and the more advanced models will automatically close the toilet lid after use. This last feature would explain why the divorce rate in Japan is so much lower than it is in England – they don’t have arguments about leaving the toilet seat up.
These space-age toilets (known as washlets) are universally popular with Western visitors who often ask why they aren’t used back home. This is a mystery – one of the strangest statistics I’ve been given is that Toto, the largest manufacturer, sold 1m of these toilets in Japan over the course of a year and only 4 in the whole of Europe. One of the reasons for their lack of popularity here may be our reluctance to broach the subject. I’m reminded of the Texan visiting a posh country house who, when asked if he wanted to wash his hands, replied: “No thanks Ma’am, I washed them on the rose bed on my way in”.
Every Japanese business has an English name and there’s something very endearing about the fact that they never quite get it right. The best boutique hotel in Fukuoka is called “With the Style”; the largest second-hand book shop is “Book-off” (there’s a branch of the same business, which sells second hand computers with the wonderful name of “Hard-off”). I was browsing through Book-off when I can across a book by Alex Kerr called “Lost Japan.” What a find it turned out to be. Although Alex Kerr is an American, the book was originally written in Japanese and in 1994 it won the Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize for the best work of non-fiction published in Japan, the first time a foreigner had won the award. The book tells us what it’s like to live in Japan and how Japanese society works.
When the author first came to Japan in the 1970’s, he noticed that when people left the countryside to live in a town, which they were doing by the thousands, they wouldn’t bother to sell their house in the country, they’d just abandon it, sometimes without removing anything – they’d leave the furniture, the bedding, even utensils. He went searching for the house of his dreams in Shikoku and fell in love with an abandoned wooden house with a thatched roof, which he bought for $1,300, and set about restoring. He called it Chiiori, “the house of the flute”, and what he did was so unusual that it’s now become a tourist attraction.
Alex Kerr laments the loss of the Japan which he first encountered when he arrived in the seventies. But in one respect the Japan which he loved is still there. Strangely, although property prices in the cities are amongst the highest in the world, no-one wants to live in the countryside, which is still littered with abandoned houses, which can be acquired for a song. The irony is that millions in the cities hanker after the Slow Life. If they cared to look they’d find that it’s there, right under their noses.
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials Thoreau
The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food and extend them to life in general. Here in the Lake District where I live with my wife and three daughters, we have a garden where we grow our own food. We know full well that this is an inefficient and expensive way of organising our lives but we do it because we enjoy it and because it forces us to eat healthily and in season. It is slow, because gardening is all about patience.
The principles of Slow Food are "good, clean and fair" - 'good' means that the food should be of good quality, 'clean' means that it should be free of pesticides or harmful chemicals, 'fair' means that when you buy from a farmer, you pay him a decent price. Supermarkets and the large chain stores routinely break all these principles, which is why we, as a family, don't use them. Slow food means also taking the time and trouble to cook the food yourself and to take pleasure in eating it with your family and friends. I like the idea of extending the principles of Slow Food to life in general with the aim of achieving a good work/life balance.
This blog of my Slow Life is mainly about my garden in the Lake District, but also about my hotels, where I earn my living, and about the occasional forays, which my Slow Life allows, into the worlds of design, music and local affairs.
There's also quite a lot in this blog about Japan and the Japanese. This is because I admire their way of life and the fact that the Japanese, more than any other nation, are trying to embrace the Slow Life, even to the extent of having Slow Cities.
