A Lateral View. Donald Richie
away. One way of arranging garden rocks in inland Kyoto was suhama (graveled seashore) and another was ariso (rocky beaches). Earlier yet, Japanese gardens were displaying the vision that later made Disneyland famous. Here in the first gardens what do we find? Why, things from far away indeed. The garden was a representation of Sukhavati, the Western Paradise of the Buddha Amitabha. And those rocks in the water were the three islands of the blessed—Horai, Hojo and Eishu. And that big rock in the middle—that is Mount Sumeru itself.
The date of this kind of garden is 1000. Just think—almost 1000 years ago Japanese vision and technique had in Sumeru made the first Space Mountain!
It is evident that the Japanese claim to prior Disneyfication is a very strong one. No other country has brought the principle of the microcosm—ikebana, bonsai, chanoyu, gardens—to such profuse perfection. No other has managed to turn so much into something else.
So, when one wonders why Japan, such a Disneyland itself, needed a real Disneyland, one must conclude that it found here something in which a true fellow-feeling was discovered. And also, perhaps, because in Disneyland it recognized as well one of its own enduring qualities.
This is a passion amounting to near genius for kitsch. If kitsch is defined as primarily something pretending to be something else—wood acting like marble, plastic acting like flowers, Anaheim, California, acting like the Mississippi—then Japan has a long history, a celebrated expertise and a strong claim to mastery in just this very thing. In fact, Japan often enough has been called “the home of kitsch.”
If this is true then, with understandable enthusiasm Japan embraced the biggest piece of kitsch in the West. Did so, then broke off a chunk and brought it home to add to its collection.
—1985
The City Home
THE JAPANESE appear to regard their homes in a manner somewhat different from we in the West. In the United States there is the tradition that a man’s home is his castle, much is made of the homemade meal, and it is agreed no other place is like home. In Japan, a man’s castle is usually his office, the simply homemade is often garnished with the more elegantly store-bought, and there are many places which are like home and are treated as such.
With so little attention being paid to home, it is not surprising that Japanese dwellings suffer by comparison. Foreign diplomats even call them rabbit hutches. This description is perhaps occasioned by the fact that Japanese homes are small and crowded and not, as it would first appear, that they are units used mainly for sleeping.
The living space is much less than that enjoyed by those of equal income in other countries. Whole families are crammed into one or two LDKs—the abbreviation for living room, dining room and kitchen squeezed into single or multiple units. The units themselves come in various sizes, none of them large. A san-jo is a three tatami-mat room, a hachi-jo is eight. Tatami mats used to be six by three feet in area, but the newer apartmentsized mats are much smaller. Thus a family of four living in a roku-jo (six-mat) LDK does enjoy a somewhat rabbit-like intimacy.
In the old days before Japan became affluent, four people could perhaps have coped with such restricted space. Bedding and clothing were put out of sight in closets and the tokonoma alcove would hold a space—suggesting flower arrangement. Now, however, the Japanese have become the world’s foremost consumers and buying begins at home. Thus into this room is stuffed the washing machine, the fridge and the freezer, the color TV set, the children’s bunk beds, the piano and anything else which the family has been induced to buy. A consequence is that space is much restricted and a somewhat hutch-like appearance results.
Another consequence is that space has become the greatest luxury to which a Japanese can aspire. It used to be time. Anyone well enough of T not to work on Sundays was considered a kind of temporal millionaire. Everyone else, the temporal poor, worked every day with just one day off a month. Now in the new age of affluence, none (except store employees, and they get a compensatory weekday off) work on Sundays and progressively fewer work on Saturdays as well. Affluence and leisure are now enjoyed by a majority, except that now if you stay at home there is no space in which to enjoy either.
I am, to be sure, describing city conditions. In the country, one might afford a larger apartment or perhaps a house or maybe even the greatest of contemporary luxuries, a garden. But now well over half of all Japanese live in cities and the kukan mondai or space problem affects a majority. Space in any quantity is not to be had except at the most extravagant of prices.
The cost of housing is mainly due, of course, to the postwar rush to the cities, but this has occurred in other countries as well, with results not so spectacularly cramped as those of Tokyo or Osaka. There would perhaps have been ways of using the available land so that more attractive if not more spacious living units could have been created. But the apartment block with its thousands of square little rooms was the design decided upon and some of the results in suburban danchi (housing developments) are more chicken coops than rabbit hutches.
Perhaps one of the reasons for this is the attitude which the Japanese have toward their dwellings. Far from being a castle, a Japanese man’s home often seems merely a place where the wife and kids are kept. It is a kind of base for the husband to operate from, a place where he stores his clothes and where he sleeps. Though consumer interests have tried to make something profitable out of the less proprietary My Car, My House (in that telling order, incidentally) even the use of the gregarious “my,” instead of the egotistical watakushi no (my own), has failed to reverberate except for a time among the very young and the newly married. Tradition, a certain kind of tradition, remains strong, and home is still merely father’s home base.
As a consequence, the Japanese male rarely complains about rabbit-hutchery. He is there only a third of a twenty-four-hour day and unconscious during most of that time, and he also has many alternate homes. The one who really suffers is the wife. She is stuck in her crowded roku-jo day in and day out and can rarely leave her claustrophobic danchi dwelling except to join the throngs at the supermarket. If she seldom complains, it is only because Japanese women seldom complain about anything.
The Japanese male attitude toward the home (and there are many telling exceptions to these generalizations I am strewing about) is that it is but one of the many stations in his busy day (and night). He spends much more waking time at the office than he does at home (which does not say, of course, that he does not also catnap at the office) and, since so much Japanese business consists of businessmen entertaining each other, he spends an unusually large amount of time in bars, night clubs, cabarets and the like.
The phenomenon of going out with the boys for an evening is also known in the West. There, it is greeted with some suspicion, if not cynicism. In Japan, however, it is known that there is no better way of cementing those all important inter/intra-office relations than not going home of an evening. Rather,a bit of night life is enjoyed together.
Back home the wife will already have made the supper (since the husband, traditionally at any rate, is far too busy to let her know whether he is coming home to eat it or not), and she and the kids will be consuming it.
It is here that one might remark upon a remarkable aspect of the attitude toward home: the Japanese male enjoys a plurality of homes. It is not only the roku-jo, it is also the office, the favorite bar, the favorite coffee shop. He tends to be “at home” in any of the many places he chooses to be.
This attitude, in turn, has created the thousands of bars within the cities and, one would think, the tens of thousands of coffee shops. These are places where business is discussed but they are also, for the time being, home itself. It is perhaps for this reason that the vast majority of bars are so-called “bottle-keep” establishments. That is, the known customer (and there are no unknown customers in the better Japanese bars) has a part of himself—his own private bottle, decorated with his name—in this alternate home. In the coffee shop he has his own favorite table, and the help had better realize this as soon as possible. He is, in other words, making his own a number of locations which the West does not regard as particularly homelike.
It is telling, I think, that the Japanese language does not have a word for “home,” or, at least, a word