Museum*

10 April 2010
Today we took a train to Kurashiki – we’re certainly getting as much travel as we can from our JR Passes – a place about 25km west of Okayama across a fertile plain with numerous small vegetable gardens. They all had onions, garlic, varieties of broccoli, peas and broad beans growing (it was a slow train so we were able to have a good look)and it made us think of our allotments back home and hope that all our crops of those vegetables are doing well after such a terrible winter. There are also numerous citrus trees in the area, at the moment all covered with fruit including huge grapefruit and a vast variety of oranges which reminded us of the sad news we had earlier that our lemon tree didn’t survive the winter.
Kurashiki has a small enclave of old black and white houses clustered around a willow (and cherry blossom) lined canal where carp, swans and herons live. The houses and buildings were originally built as merchants’ homes and storehouses from when the town was an important centre for rice and the reeds used to thatch roofs. A very pleasant and relaxing place with numerous ceramics galleries selling the locally produced Bizen-yaki pottery and once again the pieces we really liked were beyond our price range.

But none of this was the reason for our going to Kurashiki – we had come to visit the Ohara Museum Of Art. This galley was founded by textile tycoon Ohara Magosauro to house his collection of western art – he had asked his friend Kojima Taorajiro to tour Europe in the 1920s and buy paintings for him; other paintings were added later. Walking around the galleries was rather like a whizz through the history of art with each painter being represented by one, sometimes two, not very memorable painting or sculpture, so there are works by Cézanne, El Greco, Gauguin, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Matisse, Miro, Monet, Ben Nicholson, Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Rodin and Warhol, as well as many other, less famous, western artists. All very enjoyable but, once again not our real reason for visiting – this came next in the Craft Art Gallery.
This is housed in attractive quadrangle of converted storehouses and contains works by four potters who were prime movers in the revival of mingei folk crafts in Japan. The collection is stunning; the four potters are Hamada Shoji, Bernard Leach, Kawai Kanjiro and Tomimoto Kenkichi. Each potter is represented by between 60 and 100 pieces, each housed in their own room and most of them are masterpieces. This visit to a small, fairly unknown museum in a small, fairly unknown town in Japan will go down as one of the highlights of our r-t-w journey which is now rapidly drawing to a close.

Japan In A Dishpan*

April 2010
Everywhere we have been in Japan has spotless streets, apart from the odd cherry blossom petal or two that by the end of this week is starting to fall. Despite there being a number of smokers the streets are devoid of cigarette ends.

This is partly because smoking is frequently forbidden on many streets (and the Japanese would never break such rules) and smokers are confined to smoking areas, but even in such areas there are no cigarette ends. Littering is forbidden (and the Japanese would never break such a rule) and smokers will put out their cigarettes and either pick up the butts and put them into a receptacle provided or use their own portable ash trays! These ashtrays are quite common and, evidently, are given away free at tobacconists.
Nor are there any ‘blobs’ of chewing gum on the pavements and in a society where everything is wrapped in reams and reams of unnecessary packaging and what must amount to millions of disposable chopsticks it is strange to see hardly any litter on the streets (apart from the occasional McDonalds package). All of this may have something to do with the swinging penalties that can be imposed – 10,000Yen (about £73) for dropping litter or smoking in a no-smoking zone (which can cover very large areas of cities) and 50,000Yen for any graffiti.
On the outside it certainly seems to be a conformist society – there is a Japanese national proverb “The nail that sticks up must be hammered down"- so conformity is almost enforced. With one of the lowest crime rates in the world and where the police seem to spend much of their time helping tourists, it all seems an ideal place to live. However all of this seems to mask an undercurrent of something very nasty; from reading English language version of Japanese newspapers it would seem that sex crimes go unreported because, generally, women have a low status; school girls sell sexual favours in return for designer label goods; organised crime seems to be prevalent (the much feared ‘Yakusa’) and the police have a reputation for forcing confessions from people and holding suspects for weeks without access to a lawyer.

Stairway To Heaven*

9 April 2010
When we were planning this r-t-w trip and we bought a guide book for Japan there was in it a photograph of an art installation by Japanese artist Kusama Yayoi. It was of a beautiful pumpkin, about 2.5 metres high sitting on a beach. It was so idiosyncratic and because of our love of pumpkins (well winter squash actually) we knew that we had to visit the island where it was.

At that point we had never even heard of Kusama Yayoi and the suddenly in one of those synchronistic moments we opened the Guardian Magazine one Saturday and found an article about her and a forthcoming exhibition she was having at the Hayward Gallery. The article told how Kusama Yayoi celebrated her 80th birthday last year and that she is a sculptor, painter, writer, installation artist and performance artist. As a child, when she started to experience the hallucinations from which she has since suffered all her life, her response was to paint polka dots. This motif has remained a central feature of her work, and expresses her feeling of revolving 'in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space’, and her view of herself as 'a dot lost among a million other dots.'
To get to the island from Okayama, which is where we have based ourselves, would mean taking two trains, a ferry and a local minibus in an area where very few people speak English. We thought this might stretch our travelling capabilities but we were willing to give it a go (despite C’s dream that the ferries went on strike and we got stranded there). We got there and back without any problems and had another great day.
The island we visited is called Nao-Shima and is one of numerous islands in the Seto Inland Sea – crossing on the sea on the ferry revealed one island after another, some rising abruptly from the calm waters as extinct volcanoes other far more low lying and always in the distance a dim outline of more. Up until a few years ago Nao-Shima was an island community in decline but in the 1990s the Benesse Corporation (a large Japanese publishing company) employed the Japanese architect, Ando Tadao to build a modern art gallery – Benesse House, which is in a prime location overlooking the Inland Sea. The galleries are built in site-cast concrete and are very spacious and include some stunning works by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Richard Long with a huge neon light installation ‘100 Live and Die’ by Bruce Nauman’ which sits in a large concrete cylinder at the entrance – we sat entranced by it. Outside on the hillside and the beach are 17 installations including the aforementioned pumpkin (we were not disappointed by seeing it in real life) as well as some of Niki de Saint Phalle’s whimsical sculptures whose work we love (we have visited her Giardino dei Tarocchi in Italy a couple of times) plus work by several other installation artists.

After that we climbed up the hill to Chichu Art Museum – another gallery designed by Ando Tadao but this time with no profile above ground level yet still flooded with natural light. Actually it’s not a gallery it’s an “Art Space” and houses very few pieces. It was built primarily to house five of Monet’s Water Lily series and beautiful though they are they almost pale into insignificance compared with those in the Orangery in Paris. The art space is huge but houses only three or four other pieces, visitors are expected to remove their shoes and don Japanese-type slippers (none to fit G’s feet of course) to enter the galleries, cameras have to be put away, mobile phones turned off and all the staff wear white and look like they have just been beamed in from the Clinique counter at Harrods – except they were all wearing unmistakeable Comme Des Garcons perfume – sublime. It was an extraordinary experience but we have to say it is probably the most pretentious place we have ever visited! Visitors walk through corridors of polished concrete and first of all enter a huge cathedral-like space which contains a vast polished granite sphere at the top of a flight of stairs with 27 gilded wooden sculptures arranged around the walls – all looking like huge sets of cricket stumps. The next gallery contains three light sculptures by James Turrell – one of which visitors are allowed to enter eight at a time, climb a vast granite staircase and enter a glowing lightbox where there is no sense of dimension – a weird experience. And finally, the gallery containing the Monet paintings.
On the other side of the island is the fishing village of Honmura which is the base for the ‘Art House Project’. Several of the old wooden houses in the village have been turned into venues for works of modern art. The first one we visited was ‘Minamidera – the darkside of the moon’ – a collaboration between the aforementioned Ando Tadao and James Turrell. Ando designed the building using charred wooden walls that are typical of the village. We were led into a totally black space along with fourteen others and left for about ten minutes during which time our eyes got used to the darkness and we became aware of an enigmatic blue void gradually appearing firstly almost like a Zen brushwork landscape and then filling the whole space in front of us; at this point we were invited to walk forward and ‘touch’ the light. What had originally been an unnerving experience was now great fun. Turrell has a couple of light sculptures in the UK – we shall try and get to see them having experienced his work here. Among the other Art House Projects are ‘Kadoya’ by Miyajima Tatsuo – one of the installations ‘Sea Of Time’ consists of a huge tank of water containing coloured electronic numbers which all change at different speeds and in different colours. Another is ’Haisha’ by Otake Shinro where a house has been patched using a whole variety of found objects and inside is a small version of the Statue of Liberty filling one of the rooms; ‘Gokaisho’ by Suda Yoshihiro displays incredibly realistic wooden sculptures of camellias in tatami rooms; another building with tatami rooms houses incredibly beautiful and minimalist modern screen paintings by Senju Hiroshi.

To visit the last of the projects we had to climb numerous large steps on the side of a steep hill to the shrine of Go-Jinja which has been renovated so that beneath the shrine, deep in the hillside is a chamber which contains a glass staircase; above ground this staircase emerges into the daylight and rises through the shrine to a small altar housed in a building above ground thus unifying the underworld with the earth and the sky into one place. It somehow seemed appropriate that we were ending this holiday in a similar way to how we began it way back in December last year by climbing steps up and down temples.
* unfortunately never recorded by The Smashing Pumpkins

Toilet Humour

We have been continually amused by toilets and toilet signs throughout Japan. This is just a small sample of what you can see.

Hiroshima Mon Amour*

8 April 2010
“I saw, or rather felt, an enormous bluish white flash of light, as when a photographer lights a dish of magnesium. Off to my right, the sky split open over the city of Hiroshima”
From “Letters From The End Of The World”
On 6 August 1945 the population of Hiroshima saw “the sun fall to earth” when the first atomic bomb used in aggression exploded 600m above the city unleashing the equivalent destructive power of 15,000 tonnes of chemical explosive. In that one second the heat reached 3000 – 4000 degrees centigrade and all that remained of some victims was their shadows imprinted on the rubble. Immediately some 70,000 buildings and 80,000 people were destroyed. The final death toll is unknown; the Hiroshima Peace Memorial offers the figure as “140,000 plus or minus 10,000”.
Today we went to Hiroshima along with many others from all over the world to pay our respects at the Peace Park and see at first hand the stupidity of human beings in developing and using such weapons of devastation. We are not ashamed to say that we wept and as I type this now my eyes are, once again filled with tears. These are exactly the same emotions we felt when we went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC some years ago – man’s inhumanity to his fellow man can be unbelievable. It is heart-rending.
We began our visit beside the twisted shell of the “A Bomb Dome” which had been the “industrial Promotions Hall” and was almost at the hypocentre of the explosion and was one of the few buildings in the surrounding 3km diameter that remained standing. Since then it has been preserved in its distressed state as a historical witness to the suffering and packed a very powerful punch as we emerged from the big, bold, bright, modern city of rebuilt Hiroshima. Like us, people stood about in silence, remembering and paying their respects in our own personal way. The place could quite easily be one of hatred and revenge but instead there is a real atmosphere of peace, hope and reconciliation amid the tears.

There is also the Memorial Cenotaph with the Flame of Peace that will not be put out until the last nuclear weapon on earth has been destroyed. The Peace Memorial is a quiet place entered by a ramp the slowly spirals down to an underground chamber where all the names, and many of the photographs, of all the known direct and indirect victims of the A bomb are displayed.
One of the most moving monuments is the Children’s Peace Monument which has the statue of a young girl standing on top holding aloft a giant origami crane – the symbol of health and longevity and now a symbol of the hope for peace in the world. The monument is festooned with garlands of multicoloured origami paper cranes made by people from all over the world. This tradition started with radiation victim Sadako Sasaki who when she became ill believed the old Japanese adage that folding a thousand paper cranes would make a wish come true. She tried steadfastly to recover from her illness and folded more and more paper cranes. Her hope was in vain and she never made the thousand cranes before she died in 1955. Her class mates continued after her death and went on to build this monument.

The Peace Memorial museum presents a very balanced picture of why the atrocity took place, as well as the harrowing effects and certainly does not portray Japan as an innocent victim but acknowledges that they pursued a military road perpetrated many acts of aggression but no one can leave that place without thinking the use of such a terrible weapon can ever be justified. There is lots of strong stuff which shirks none of the horrors of the bomb’s aftermath, including how, after the war the victims were not allowed to relate what had happened and how the Hiroshima Peace Movement was suppressed.
Amongst all the displays was one that was a real eye-opener and something we had never been aware of before and that is Winston Churchill, (who, as anyone will know who has read his letters and memoirs was a supreme warmonger) not only knew of the plan to drop the A bomb on Japan, but approved of it, provided British equipment to facilitate it and was opposed to the views of scientists who had developed the bomb that the Japanese should be told well in advance of the devastating effects upon them if the bomb was used.
Outside the sun was shining brilliantly and it was a clear, warm day (just like 6 August 1945) but we were too exhausted to go on to see the Art Museums.

Bullet Train To Osaka*

7 April 2010
Actually we caught a bullet train to Okayama which stopped at Osaka on the way and being as G doesn’t know any songs with Okayama in the title we have used this for today’s blog entry. Here we are then on the last leg of our r-t-w journey and the last stay of any length in Japan. Okayama is a fairly large industrial city where men and women in business suites seem to rush around constantly and young people ride bicycles up and down the pavements. So why are we here? It is a very good transport hub to a number of other places that we are hoping to visit over the next few days and if we get there we shall blog about them.
Okayama does have a couple of things of note. One is the Korakuen Garden, which is, allegedly one of the finest three gardens in the whole of Japan. We went along there this afternoon and although the sun was shining intermittently the wind was blowing a gale through the place, so much so that the cherry blossom was being strewn everywhere making a carpet of pink on the ground – and yes people were still sitting beneath the trees, wrapped in blankets, having their picnics. The garden is overlooked by a large castle - not a castle as we know it, Jim, but Japanese one with black wooden cladding and glistening roofs edged with gold. The castle was founded in 1573 by Lord Ukita Hidere and the gardens were built beneath the castle by Lord Ikeda Tsunasmasa in 1686. The gardens are unusual in that they have wide expanses of lawns, other than that all the traditional elements are there including teahouses, lakes with islands, streams with bridges and stepping stones, fish and of course rocks. Two unusual features are rows of tea bushes which produce tea that is available to buy in the shop and a small, flooded, rice field.

The wind was so keen and so cold we didn’t stay long. Instead we visited a couple of commercial galleries, one exhibiting the locally produced Bizen pottery and the other with an exhibition of shino-oribe work by a potter named Higuchi Masayuki, much of which was quite beautiful – we may go back again. The gallery owner was delighted that we enjoyed the exhibition and was very proud to tell us her next exhibition is work by a British potter named Christopher Ravenhill, whose name sounded familiar but then again, perhaps not.

Vessels*

6 April 2010
Today was to have been the day we visited galleries and museums, primarily to view ceramics but also some of the great Japanese art treasures housed in Kyoto. With the whole of the National Museum closed for refurbishment, not just part of it we had to opt for second and third best. Our first stop was the Museum of Contemporary Art which houses a collection of ceramics – but not this month. The whole gallery has been taken over by an exhibition called “My Favourite Things” and as far as we could gather from reading the blurb the only ceramic piece in the exhibition was Marcel Duchamp’s urinal! The second place we tried was the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art – the only pottery they could direct us to was in the museum’s coffee shop. Undeterred we continued to the Kyoto Museum of Traditional Crafts; the museum provides an excellent introduction to the whole range of Kyoto crafts, from roof tiles and metal work, through bamboo work, fans and ceramics (hooray) to textiles, kimonos, confectionary and ornamental hairpins. All very interesting in an anoraky sort of way but not what we wanted, especially as the ceramics were of the highly decorated variety and not really to our taste but we could appreciate the fine craftsman ship. This was shaping up to be a bit of a disappointing day and of course it was now much earlier in the day than we had planned. Our next stop was the Kyoto Pottery Hall which, allegedly, had an exhibition of the works of local potters and a shop selling their work. However as this was some distance further on and there were a couple of gardens in between we thought we would meander on in. The first was Shoren-in or Awata Palace as it is sometimes called; outside its main gate are two absolutely huge camphor trees. The house started life in ninth century as lodgings for Tendai-sect priests and later served as residence for members of the imperial family (this is, of course a euphemism for Royal-Hangers-On, we have a lot of them in England and they live in minor palaces like Kensington, Clarence House etc.)

The house is quite spartan with rooms containing little more than tatami mats and exquisitely painted screens from the 16th and 17th centuries. Inevitably there is a shrine attached which has so much ‘stuff’ in it, it resembles a junk shop. Outside there is a beautiful stroll garden designed to include the hillside with the usual, rocks, moss, water, stone lanterns etc. There were also the usual waterfalls but this garden had one right outside the tea house which sounded like a horse having a pee – enough to put you off your cuppa.
We then made our way on to Chion-in, a big busy complex where everything is built on a monumental scale – it houses the biggest bell in Japan, a monster weighing 67-tonnes which, at New Year, takes seventeen priests (of the jodo Pure Land sect of Buddhism) to ring. As we arrived so did about fourteen coach loads of school youths (all of them about 17 or 18, all smartly dressed, all amazingly well behaved) who made their way up the hundreds of steps to the large main hall, which we, of course avoided and visited the gardens. These are on two levels – the lower gardens being mainly ponds with bridges and islands with the upper gardens being on a series of levels and containing, once again, the usual ingredients but this time with sub-shrines and tea houses, one of which contains a screen with ‘the cat that looks in every direction’ – quit uncanny in that wherever one stands the eyes seem to be looking at you. We were reminded of that review of the Rolf Harris painting of the Queen – “wherever you go in the room her teeth are following you.” The cat was supposed to be some sort of sermon; the moral of which is while cats may look in any direction, humans must keep their eyes fixed upon eternity, please pass the bucket.

The upper garden just kept going up and up until we had a view over the whole of Kyoto, then we passed through a gate and found ourselves in the cemetery – or perhaps more correctly the cinerary – the dead get all the beat views in this town. Several photographs later we made our way back down on, through the park full of picnickers and cherry blossom (does no one work in this town?) and on to the Pottery Hall which (and we’re sure you knew this was coming) was closed. Ah well the whole area is where all the kilns of Kyoto have traditionally been based so we thought we would just wander around the numerous ceramics shops there. This we did and saw mostly highly decorated vessels of the sort we rather uncharitably say have been made by “hobby potters”. In fairness we did see a few very fine pieces but these were well outside our price range being a few hundred thousand yen. This was turning into quite a disappointing day – there was only one place left to visit and that was Kawai Kanjiro’s House.

Kawai Kanjiro was an innovative potter who lived from 1890 to 1966 and helped revive the mingei (folk crafts) tradition in the 1930s which so influenced Bernard Leach. This made our day – the house was as he left it (but unlike National Trust properties you could sit on the furniture and touch the wooden sculptures but understandably not the pottery). The house contains ceramics and sculptures from his long career and out in the garden the kilns where many of his pieces were made.


A technical note follows: one kiln is a small wood-fired biscuit kiln but the monster he used for his main firings is a fascinating wood-fired nobori-gamma – a seven chambered stepped kiln. To see all of this entailed taking off our shoes and putting on slippers to walk around the house (G found a pair that almost fitted), taking off the slippers to walk on the tatami mats, changing the slippers to outside slippers to go and see the stepped kiln and changing them again to toilet slippers to go for a pee (toilet slippers were pink for ladies and blue for gents). Never mind all that, just seeing all these beautiful things made what might have been a disappointing day into one that, like so many we have experienced, was special and unforgettable.
Just down the road was a shop selling ceramics new and old – much of it sublime, most of it, again outside of our price bracket and/or so heavy (many of the pieces being in sets of five) that we would exceed our luggage allowance. However we did discover in the ‘antique’ section two Japanese tea cups that we loved and we could afford (they no longer had their original wooden boxes) and (you know what’s coming) we purchased. These like the teapots we bought in Hong Kong are carefully wrapped for travelling but when we return home will be unwrapped and photographed. These pictures will then appear on the blog just in case anyone is interested.

We walked back through the Gion District which was the largest pleasure district in ancient times. Now, despite the looming modern buildings and congested traffic it still has an historic beauty as well as some modern ones in the form of Geisha who, given a couple of roof tiles, would have been walking museums of traditional craft – they pass wearing kimono, obo, flower hairpins, wooden shoes and traditional make up.
For dinner we made some rules – no noodles, no tofu, no wasabi, no Japanese pickled vegetables, no taking off shoes to enter, no kneeling on the floor to eat and no we didn’t end up at McDonalds we went to the Kerala Indian Restaurant and very good it was too; although we did find it strange to see Japanese people eating their curries with chopsticks and that the Kingfisher beer was made under license in the UK by Shepherd Neame. We began to appreciate why all those Japanese were queuing up outside Crispy Creme Doughnuts the other day!