Kansai Cool. Christal Whelan
order to mitigate the tendency to single out Japan as an exception within the world or even within the Asian sphere.
Though I do not deal specifically in this book with the efforts to preserve the traditional houses or machiya, counterparts to that situation exist elsewhere—Germany’s struggle to save the half-timbered houses of Quedinburg from oblivion or Bai Shiyuan’s decades-long crusade in China to save the merchant houses of Huizhou from demolition. My point in making such comparisons is not to trivialize the immediacy of the issue in Japan but rather to open up more space in which to consider the problem and also to prevent a revival of the nihonjinron or “Japanese uniqueness” theories popular intermittently from the 60s through the 1980s. Sometimes I also wish to show the multiple streams of influence, including the intersection between local and global, which have gone into making what we often consider as something distinctly “Japanese” in art or industry.
The more artists and artisans I came to know in Kyoto and Osaka convinced me that they approach their own work in ways that are never static. Yasushi Noguchi, for example, a master craftsman who produces the gold and silver threads used in brocaded obi weaving, spoke of the waning obi industry in the Nishijin district of Kyoto but not in the spirit of a lone dinosaur watching his world disappear around him. Hardly a Luddite, he spoke refreshingly and pragmatically about the situation with which he had wrestled constantly in order to come up with a creative solution.
While Western observers often lament the incursions of modernity into traditional spheres in Japan (and may well romanticize the past), this master craftsman who certainly has much more at stake did not appear to be in the grip of nostalgia. The resilience and flexibility his position represented is what I came to cherish most in the Kansai. I caught a glimpse of it when Noguchi showed me some of his abstract artwork using the same gold and silver leaf on canvas that he also used to roll around the threads for weaving the obi. Engaged with the times, Noguchi had diversified and remained superbly creative in two different spheres. There will probably always be a need to produce obi but not in the quantities of previous eras when the kimono was the daily wear of every Japanese. To preserve continuity amidst the demands of change requires openness and creative response.
This book owes much to The Daily Yomiuri (which reinvented itself as The Japan News in April 2013), an English-language national newspaper, for which I wrote a column “Kansai Cultur-escapes” between 2011-2012. My task was to choose a subject and write about Kansai through an “anthropological lens.” Since the column appeared monthly as a full page in the Sunday travel section, it was imperative that I move beyond commentary and introduce readers to actual places they could visit while showing them photos to further entice them to travel. Because many of the newspaper’s readers are expats who would be bored by places a first-time visitor might enjoy, I sought to introduce venues that would surprise even these old “Japan hands” well versed in the customs and peculiarities of Japan.
Fortunately, I happened to be living in the eastern hills of Kyoto then, just off the Philosopher’s Path, five minutes from one of the greatest temples in Japan—Ginkakuji (Silver Pavilion). The window to my second-floor dwelling faced a small lane up which tourists passed daily to reach several distinguished temples, shrines, and mausoleums further up the hill. As they trundled by in organized tours, motley bands of friends, or couples, I grew accustomed to overhearing snippets of their conversations in dozens of languages of the world, only some of which I understood. The comments were often as instructive as they were entertaining. “Oh no, not another temple!” I once heard a female voice whine below and peeked out my window to see a young woman facing her family while walking backwards in exasperation on a typical muggy summer day in Kyoto. I took the attitudes expressed in these and other conversations I overheard to heart and tried to understand what things people might really want to see and learn about. If that same young woman were to understand more precisely what life in a temple was like she might actually want to visit more of them.
I concluded generally that it was always useful to introduce people to uncommon places, or uncommon aspects of familiar ones often taken for granted and therefore easily neglected. Over the years, I occasionally joined tours in various parts of Kansai. From these experiences, I learned that official Japanese tour guides sometimes engaged in forms of cultural sanitation whereby certain behaviors might be glossed over by relegating them to the remote past. Especially if foreigners were present, the consequence might turn out to be a whitewashing of the present. On a visit to the Imperial Palace, for example, our guide told us that Shinto gates were painted vermilion because “in the olden times Japanese people used to believe in evil spirits” and the color kept the maleficent specters at bay. Yet at the end of the day, most of the Japanese I knew were afraid of jinxes and believed in spirits in one form or another. In their lives they took visible protective measures such as hanging up amulets at home or in the car, wearing Buddhist wrist-rosaries, and attending fire ceremonies to appease unidentified spirits or those of their known ancestors. For whose benefit was it then to present Japan in a secular light?
These essays fall into six broad categories—nature, industry, place, arts, youth culture, and religion. This division serves only as a convenient reference for the reader who might like to skip around the book rather than read from cover to cover. The chapters are meant to present a subject and introduce at the very least, one related place to explore. When I introduce shops, as in the case of the chapter on Issey Miyake, this is because aside from the fashion designer’s Tokyo museum—21_21 Design Sight—free-standing boutiques or those inside department stores are the only public places where it is possible to view his fashion collections. Or in the chapter on toilets, I would not expect everyone to be inspired to go on a religious retreat where toilet cleaning is the central spiritual practice. But just knowing about a utopian community that promotes this method as a means to diminish the ego helps sensitize the reader to the ways in which new spiritualities draw on tradition and certainly makes the next visit to the bathroom a lot more fun. It should also engender a greater appreciation of the fact that Japan simply has the most advanced toilet technology on the planet.
The chapter on Japanese cuisine raises an old question of native versus newcomer, an issue as relevant to people as to plants. At what point is an exotic cultivar or imported vegetable finally considered Japanese? Does it take thirty, a hundred, or perhaps two hundred years? In an age of intensifying globalization the flows of influence hardly ever move in one direction anymore. This is patently clear in the discussion about the father of Japanese animation—Tezuka Osamu—and the multiple cultural streams from which he drew. Cosplay represents another case of cultural interpenetration—an American export from the world of sci-fi conventions ricochets back to the U.S. after blossoming into a full-fledged subculture in Japan. Once re-imported here, cosplayers make every effort to preserve the distinctly Japanese orientation of the practice. Origins get lost and are perhaps meaningless in these cases.
New trends are always emerging and older ones morphing into new forms or disappearing altogether. Youth culture in particular is a huge shape-shifting category. Although I wrote about Lolita fashion, anime, and manga there is another trend gaining steady momentum that I reluctantly skipped over. The Yama Gaaru or Mountain Girl movement that has swept across the country has a lively and active group of young women in Kyoto. Into a single genre they combine outdoor sports such as trekking, climbing, and camping with fashion and spirituality. Mountain Girls dedicate themselves to learning outdoor survival skills that involve chainsaws and woodworking in order to build shelters in teams. These young women dress attractively in rustic-chic fashion of the sort found in upscale sports-stores such as Mont Bell. For treks they may use Nordic walking sticks, colorful and well-designed backpacks, and wear nearly weightless and quilted, knee-length wrap-around mountain-skirts. Their destinations are usually not the classic historical sites but instead one of the many designated power spots in the country.
The term “power spot” was first coined in the 1990s by psychic spoon-bending Kiyota Masuaki to refer to places where the earth is believed to emit a great spiritual healing energy. As the trend picked up books began to appear on the subject. Teruo Wakatsuki Yuu came up with seventy-nine such spots after traveling from Hokkaido to Okinawa. Power spot tourism has gained momentum in Japan especially among young people. Several of my female students liked to report on them. Three notable power spots included in many lists are: Mt. Fuji in the Kanto, Yakushima, an island off the southern tip