A Lateral View. Donald Richie
of soaring Gothic architecture) is something more than human. Dissatisfied with the common state, the Westerner attempts to deny it. (As do official cities in the East—Beijing is solid as the Pyramids; in the Chinese countryside, however, peasants continue to build in mortal clay.) This denial is responsible for some architectural wonders. It is also responsible for Los Angeles.
Asians—and particularly the Japanese—have not (or have not until recently) shared such assumptions. Indeed, the assumptions have been just the opposite. Impermanence is our natural state and transience is the prime quality of life. There is merely constant sameness within constant change, and it is this quality which creates what small permanence the Japanese can observe.
The great shrine at Ise is torn down once every twenty years. The wooden building demolished, its replica—identical in all respects—is constructed adjacent. Two decades later, when the new building is now old and weathered, it too is destroyed and a structure precisely similar is erected on the land the older building formerly occupied. This has been going on for centuries and indicates Japan’s accommodating answer to the demands of immortality.
In its way the Japanese city follows this same pattern. The idea of continually pulling down and putting up is very strong. Tokyo for this reason always seems under construction and, indeed, will never be finally finished. The “logic” of the Japanese city lies just in this temporal consideration. Its assumption (so unlike that of the Western city which can be seen to live entirely in its past) is that the “now” is important but the importance of this “now” lies well within the framework of the accepted permanence within continual change. Tokyo buildings are consequently always new and yet, in this sense, always the same.
Which kind of city best suits human beings is a question which must be individually answered. Certainly Tokyo, with its villages and towns inside the central city, its convenience, fits a society where the family and the other social units remain important. At the same time its systems of public transportation make traveling from one section of this enormous city to another both possible and convenient. It is one of the few major cities where one does not want to own a car. Tokyo would seem to lack, however, any of those architectural monuments which speak so eloquently of timelessness, of immortality—except, as we have seen, in the concept of timeless impermanence which the Japanese city has incorporated into itself.
The Western visitor is thus presented with an anomaly when he visits a city such as Tokyo. He finds a completely humanized city, in that the more-than-human is never stressed and the merely-human is always emphasized. At the same time he cannot understand the natural and organic form of the city precisely because structural logic has no place in such a form. Nor is Tokyo, despite all of its bustle and seeming contemporaneity, a city which makes modern (logical) assumptions. That one can never locate an address in the city without outside (policeman, postman, tobacco-stand woman) help would indicate that it is not in any Western sense an efficient urban complex. But then efficiency as a virtue is not a Japanese concept.
What the visitor discovers, if he stays long enough,. is a city which, despite its strangeness, is somehow familiar to him. He may then remember that its pattern is that of his own hometown—if he came from a hometown small enough.
—1979
The ‘Real’ Disneyland
LOOKING AT TOKYO one sometimes wonders why the Japanese went to all the trouble of franchising a Disneyland in the suburbs when the capital itself is so superior a version.
Disneyland, and the other lands it has spawned, is based upon the happy thought of geographical convenience: all the interesting localities on earth located at one spot. Thus, there are African rivers and Swiss mountains and Caribbean islands and American towns. One feels one is seeing the world in miniature and, indeed, “it’s a small world” is the slogan of one of the conceSSIOns.
Compare this now to Tokyo. There are hundreds of American fast-food stands with matching mock-Colonial architecture, there is a plaster Fontana di Trevi and a state guest house modeled after Versailles; there are dozens of red lacquered Chinese restaurants and equal numbers of white stuccoed Italian; there are thousands of boutiques with famous foreign names (Gucci, Dior, Yves St. Laurent, Arnold Palmer) printed all over them; there is an imitation Baker Street straight from London; the Museum of Western Art in Ueno has Rodin castings all over the front yard; and there is even an onion-domed Russian Orthodox cathedral. All of this, and much more, in a glorious architectural confusion of Corinthian columns and chromium pylons, dormer windows and curved escalators, half-timber, plain red brick, sheet steel, textured lucite.
In this architectural stew (something from every place on earth) even the authentically Japanese takes on the pleasant flavor of ersatz novelty. Thus the old Toshogu Shrine in Ueno or the Awashimado (1618) in Asakusa appear in Tokyo’s Disneyland context just as pleasingly synthetic as the new Japanese modernstyle restaurant gotten up almost right as a French bistro.
In the face of this massive transplantation of everywhere else right into the heart of the capital, the Disney enterprises would seem to face the stiffest of competition. Tokyo is a mammoth Disneyland with an area of nearly 2,500 sq. km., and a working staff of almost 12 million. Yet net only Tokyo but all of Japan seems always to have the time (and the money) for the little imported Disneyland perched on reclaimed land in the outskirts.
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