“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.

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.

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”.

*http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2011/07/24/raw-chicken-and-other-stories/
http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2011/10/04/disgusting-things-for-dinner/

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.

When my friend Kenji first came to England in 1972 he was given just one pound in exchange for a 1,000 yen note. This year he exchanged 1,000 yen for £8. This eight-fold increase in the value of the yen is partly a reflection of the rise of Japan’s economy and partly due to the relative decline of ours. In 1972, Japan was just beginning to export its odd little cars to the UK. How we scoffed. Who would dream of buying a Japanese car with a funny name when you could buy something British called the Humber Super Snipe? But soon after this my mother fell for the sporty Toyota Celica and now my family own four Japanese cars and every camera and TV in our house is Japanese.

I’ll never forget the sense of awe which I felt when I first visited Hong Kong and saw its soaring skyscrapers. Arriving in Tokyo today revives that feeling. It’s not just the buildings – everything is modern and up to date – light years ahead of our own capital city. I feel privileged to be able to share in that wealth when I visit Japan. I’m full of admiration for what they’ve achieved, but I can’t help feeling that when you add together all the Japanese stuff we’ve bought over the years, I’ve paid for quite a bit of it.

furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto
an ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the splash of water
~Basho, 1686

When I asked Kazu Ishihara which were the ten best gardens in Japan (excluding gardens he had designed) his list included Kiyosumi in Tokyo (as well as, inevitably, a garden he had designed himself).  Kiyosumi has strong British connections because the tea house, which is now its focal point, was built as a guest house for Lord Kitchener and because the garden was originally built for a Tudor-style residence designed by the English architect Josiah Conder, the man who re-modelled Tokyo in the nineteenth century. Sadly, the house, together with nearly everything else he built, was destroyed in the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 (what the earthquake didn’t get, the American bombs did).  But there’s nothing at all English about the garden, which is a typical Japanese “strolling” garden, whose pathways wind around a large pond.  Even in mid-winter the garden is enchanting but it looks its best, I’m told, in May and June when spectacular displays of iris and azalea come into flower.  But there’s a problem with including this garden in Japan’s top ten.  It borrows its scenery from some of Tokyo’s ugliest architecture, which intrudes into every aspect.  In fact it’s impossible to take a photo of the garden which doesn’t include a chunk of brutal concrete. I’ll have to ask Kazu to reconsider.

Note: The Basho haiku is carved on a stone monument in the garden.

Alex Kerr tells the story of how he arrived late one afternoon at Kongo Sanmai-in, a temple that offers rooms to pilgrims and travellers and he was asked by one of the monks if he would like to see the Buddha in the main hall, but he said he was too tired. Later that evening, on the way to the bath, he passed a monk who remarked pleasantly how fortunate he had been to be able to see their Buddha of divine power. “Well, actually, we were planning to see it tomorrow”, he replied. The monk shook his head. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Sanmai-in’s Buddha is a hibutsu. Mt Koya’s other statues are sometimes put on display, or even lent to other temples, but this one has never left the mountain. This is the first time it has ever been shown to the general public. It’s called a five-hundred-year hibutsu. The doors closed at five o’clock today and you’ll have to wait another five hundred years if you want to see it.”

The “five-hundred year hibutsu” is good rule for travellers and today, finding myself in Tokyo on one of the very rare days that the Emperor opened the inner garden of the Imperial Palace to the public there was no way I was going to miss the chance to stroll in the Emperor’s garden. The word stroll implies a quiet contemplative walk, but what I hadn’t bargained for was the fact that the Emperor himself would be there with his family so I had to share the walk with 100,000 Japanese who didn’t want to miss the chance to see their Royal family. And so the fascination of the visit turned out not to be the Emperor’s garden (which didn’t amount to much after all) but the sight of his Palace, surprisingly made of concrete and steel, and the Emperor and his family waving at us from a balcony behind bullet proof glass and the enthusiasm of a multitude of Japanese, waving their national flag.

“Japanese people are compulsively, touchingly, almost painfully kind and welcoming to foreigners”
Richard Lloyd Parry ‘Japan: Three Cities’

Who wouldn’t be nervous going to a place where you can’t even begin to understand the language or read the signs and where the population has the reputation, gleaned from countless films, of being fearsome at worst, strange at best. The Japanese know this, which is why they go to extraordinary lengths to put you at your ease. Every visitor will have a story of the overwhelming kindness of strangers. If you’re in the middle of Tokyo and, needing to find your bearings, you open a map in the street, within 15 seconds someone will be at your side asking, in faltering English, if they can help. And when you tell them the place you’re looking for they won’t just point you in the right direction – they’ll take you to the door. I was once lost deep on the bowels of the Tokyo underground and asked someone the way and although he was waiting for a train he walked with me up onto the street and took me to my destination.

The sense of hospitality is present everywhere but not least where it matters most – in the hotels and restaurants. In England, hospitality suffers because English people have a dread of appearing servile and so don’t take naturally to waiting on tables. In America, hospitality is driven, very successfully, by the tipping system, but woe betide the customer who fails to give the expected 15%. In Japan, tipping doesn’t exist, in fact the offer of a tip will cause embarrassment, simply because they take pride in doing a job well. That pride, together with a strong work ethic, makes the level of hospitality in Japan second to none. You feel it as soon as you arrive, which is why I’m always itching to return.

The Japanese love Christmas and there are Santas everywhere – we saw 30 of them assembled on the river bank in Kyoto (goodness knows why) and Colonel Sanders dressed as Father Christmas outside KFC. But Christmas Day isn’t a public holiday in Japan and we took advantage of a normal train service to take the shinkansen to Hiroshima and visit the A-Bomb museum. I’m not sure that this would have been the first choice of my three teenage girls, and my middle daughter described it as the most depressing experience of her entire life. And then, as a change to good old turkey, our Japanese hosts in Fukuoka prepared a Christmas cake sushi, made from sculpted pieces of raw fish on a bed of sticky rice. I was beginning to wonder whether Christmas this year would live up to expectations when I looked out of the window and saw the snow begin to fall, in big fluffy flakes. It would be a perfect Christmas after all.

The monks may not be as unworldly as they seem. They’ve created a mystique around the moss garden which surrounds the Temple of Fragrance in Kyoto by making all visitors apply for a permit in writing at least a week in advance and then charging a fee (or ‘donation’ as they put it) of a whopping £25 (3,000 yen) a head. The going rate for a temple and garden in Kyoto is £4. I reckon they rake in a cool £4m a year.

But the monks temper their greed with a sense of fun for once they’ve extracted your chunk of cash they take you to a hall where they make you sit on the floor in front of a low desk together with about a hundred others, school room style. You are then treated to a 20 minute Shinto ceremony after which you’re instructed to write a prayer on a wooden tablet using a calligraphy brush and black ink. You then queue to kneel at a shrine on which you place your prayer, before you are allowed to look at the garden.

The garden is important because it’s nearly eight centuries old. It was designed by Muso Kokushi, a zen priest, as a place for meditation. The monks have done well in keeping the coach parties away because it retains its peacefulness. We were told that there are 120 types of moss in the garden, which, like the Eskimo’s 145 kinds of snow, doesn’t merit further enquiry. We were also told that the garden looks its best in June, in the rain, when the moss lies under a thick canopy of trees. Now, in December, when the trees have lost their leaves and the ground is dry, it doesn’t have that touch of magic. This may be the most expensive garden to see, but it’s definitely not the best.