Contemporary Japanese Architecture

Tracing the Next Generation

James Steele

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317377283
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Contemporary Japanese Architecture presents a clear and comprehensive overview of the historical and cultural framework that informs the work of all Japanese architects, as an introduction to an in-depth investigation of the challenges now occupying the contemporary designers who will be the leaders of the next generation. It separates out the young generation of Japanese architects from the crowded, distinguished, multi-generational field they seek to join, and investigates the topics that absorb them, and the critical issues they face within the new economic reality of Japan and a shifting global order. Salient points in the text are illustrated by beautiful, descriptive images provided by the architects and from the extensive collection of the author. By combining illustrations with timelines and graphics to explain complex ideas, the book is accessible to any student seeking to understand contemporary Japanese architecture.

PART I

An enduring cultural framework

CHAPTER 1

The land and its people

History is never far away in Japan, to an extent that is rare elsewhere in the world. A thousand years seem like yesterday and the past is always foremost in the national subconscious. This keen awareness of a unified memory is even more evident among each generation of its architects, who constantly refer to it, making at least a rudimentary understanding of the entirety of their cultural recollection an absolute necessity.

A belief in divine origins

An essential component of any cohesive cultural entity is a binding foundation myth, and it is difficult to surpass a belief in a divine origin as a collective claim to authority. As in other mythologies, such as the Hindu Ramayana, or the Theogony by Hesiod, which codified the Hellenic pantheon or the Prose and Poetic Edda and Icelandic sagas, which did the same for the Norse and Germanic cosmology, the deities described in the Japanese equivalent, The Kojiki or Record of Ancient Matters, have a tantalizing combination of super natural and distinctly human traits, making it seem almost possible that the stories are partially based on real people.

The collective narrative in the Kojiki begins with a God and a Goddess on a bridge (Ama-no-uki-hashi) who have descended from Takama-ga-hara or “the high plain of heaven.”¹ They are named Izanagi (he who invites) and Izanami, (she who invites) and after they dipped a lance into the primordial ocean below them, the droplets from the tip formed Onogoroshima, which they then inhabited and populated.

Kagu-tsuchi, the God of Fire, who was the last of their children, fatally burned Izanagi during childbirth. This and the subsequent journey of Izanami to the “Land of the Dead” mark a critical turning point in the Kojiki, from creation to destruction, similar to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in the Judeo-Christian tradition.²

The descent into Yomi

In passages that also echo similar motifs in other myths, Izanagi followed his wife to the underworld, to bring her back, but found she could not return because she had “eaten at the hearth of Yomi.” He begged the Gods to release her, but then, when he finally saw her horribly disfigured body he ran away.³ A chase ensued, first by Izanami’s female followers, then by the Goddess herself, but Izanagi reached the gateway of Yomi first, and rolled a boulder across it, sealing them inside. In washing away the stench of death, Izanagi gave birth to the Goddess of the Sun, Amaterasu Omikami (literally: “shining over heaven, great spirit”) the God of the Moon, Tsukiyomi-no-mikoto (Moon Counting, or Moonlit night), and the God of Summer Storms and the Sea, Susano-o-no-Mikoto (“his swift, impetuous, male-augustness”).

His father banished Susanoo-no-Mikoto from Takama-ga-hara for both his neglect of his duties and his bad behavior, but before leaving he asked to say good-bye to his sister Amaterasu. During their final meeting, Susano-o suggested that he prove the sincerity of his intentions by producing more male deities than she could, after each of them chose something belonging to the other. Susano-o took his sister’s jewelry, and after eating it, gave birth to five sons. Amaterasu, in turn, shattered and ate Susano-o’s sword, and produced three daughters. Amaterasu claimed the sons as her own, however, because they were born from her necklace, causing her brother to leave in anger. He returned later and as one renowned translator recounts, broke “a hole in the roof of the hall in Heaven where his sister is sitting at work with the celestial weaving-maidens,” and tossed in “a heavenly piebald horse, which he had flayed with a backward flaying.”⁴

Ama no Iwato: the rock cave of heaven

To escape this attack, Amaterasu retreated into Amano-Iwato, “the heavenly rock cave” casting the world into darkness and ushering in a time when evil freely roamed the earth. Then, according to the Nihon Shoki or “Chronicles of Japan,” which followed the Kojiki, the heavenly deities met and agreed upon a course of action, to dig up a Sakaki tree from Mt. Kagu, hang a string of Yasaka jewels on the upper branches, a mirror in the middle and blue and white colored offerings below, and then to recite a liturgy. These offerings, along with a highly erotic dance by Ame-no-Uzumemikoto (“Her Augustness Heavenly Alarming Female”), who was wearing only a moss belt and Sasaki-leaf headdress, finally enticed Amaterasu to roll away the rock door and step outside.⁵ Once she did this, a rope was placed across the mouth of the cave and Amaterasu was forbidden to re-enter. This rope is now recalled in the shimenawa marking the entrance to sacred Shinto shrines.

Susano-o on Earth

In exile in Izumo for causing this mayhem, Susano-o rescued the daughter of an elderly couple he encountered by slaying the dragon Yamata-no-orochi (“eight-forked serpent”). After slicing it open, he found the “Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven” inside. He presented this to Amaterasu as a peace offering, and she subsequently passed it, along with the necklace and mirror, to her son Ame no oshihomimi, who then bequeathed it to her grandson Ninigi. The legend continues to recount that Ninigi in turn brought them to earth, and they were subsequently passed to Jinmu Tenno, who was the first recorded Emperor of Japan.

Symbolism and significance

In 707, the Empress Genmei commissioned court poet Ōno Yasumaro to complete an existing compilation of stories, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, about imperial genealogy as well as other myths and legends begun by the Emperor Temmu, and his son Prince Toneri.⁶ Genmei and Yasumaro fastened on the theme of rice agriculture to clearly set Japan apart from China, and selectively chose myths and legends that would allow the Yamato regime to claim ownership of it. The Sun Goddess Amaterasu played a key role in this construct as both the symbol of fertility and originator of rice cultivation, and the progenitor of the Japanese Imperial line.

Taken together, these histories parallel other profoundly significant socio-theological and philosophical texts, such as the Quran, Torah, Bible, Bhagavad Gita, Analects, and the Tao Te Ching because they establish the foundation of Shinto, which is a singularly Japanese religion. Although generally described as animistic and translated as “the Way of the Gods,” from the Chinese shen dao, or “way of the spirits,” Shinto revolves around “kami” which are invisible spiritual essences, or “hidden sources.”⁷

The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki create a chronology that effectively binds the Shinto pantheon to Yamoto authority, describing how Ninigi no Mikoto, who was the grandson of Amaterasu, was sent to earth to teach people to cultivate the land. Ninigi’s great-grandchild Yamato Iwarehiko became the first Yamoto ruler and was re-named Jinmu. Rather than the inheritance of the “three treasures” of the sword, necklace and mirror, that are now the symbols of Imperial power in Japan, the most important legacy that Amaraterasu gave to Jinmu and the Yamoto people was both the physical sustenance and symbolic authority that came with the gift of rice.⁸

Ideology aside, both the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki also provide compelling insights into the socio-cultural mores of the time in which they were written. In the first of many stark contrasts between Eastern and Western belief systems that will subsequently be presented here, the description of the interactions between Izanagi and Izanami and Amaterasu and Susano-o not only reveal an overt male chauvinism, if not blatant misogyny, but also a marked suspension of moral judgment, in favor of more abstract, amoral, situational ethics.⁹

Two sacred Shinto shrines at Izumo and Ise

The spirits of Amaterasu and Susano-o still remain physically separated in the earthly realm, with his being evoked at Izumo Taisha in Shimane, and hers specifically enshrined at Ise-shi in Mie Prefecture. Although Izumo is officially dedicated to Susano-o’s son-in-law Ōkuninushi it radiates the presence of “his swift impetuous, Male-Augustness” because it is the oldest and largest shrine in Japan. In 2009, the oldest stone implements on the archipelago were found near here, pushing back the date of origin to about 120,000 years ago. Its initial construction is shrouded in mystery, but it is mentioned in the Nihon Shoki that the Empress Saimei ordered it to be repaired. It is known to have been periodically re-built every 60 years in its exact form until 1744, and only renovated whenever necessary since then.¹⁰ The Honden, or main hall, which is the most sacred part of the complex, and is considered to be where the spirit of the deity or kami resides, has a square plan with a pillar in the center. This recalls the passage in the Kojiki that describes the descent of Izanagi and Izanami to Onogoroshima, and flirtingly circling around a single column, the Ama-no-mihashira or “pillar of heaven,” before they united, had children and built a palace on top of it.¹¹

Recent archeological investigation has revealed that there were originally nine clusters of three tree trunks each, with each tree being one meter in diameter. In addition to the central pillar cluster, each of the walls of the square Honden had two equally spaced column clusters. The Honden was also once 48 meters high, elevated on a platform accessible only by a ramp.

The Shrine of Amaterasu at Ise has an equally quasi-mythological timeline, but an apocryphal history maintains that the Emperor Sujin relocated a Shrine to the Sun Goddess that already existed on the grounds of his Palace to Kasunui, close to Tawaramoto, in Nara Prefecture near where the Buddhist temple of Jinraku-ji is now located. The next, equally quasi-mythical Emperor Suinin, subsequently sent his daughter, Princess Yamatohime-no-mikoto, to find an even more suitable location for the Shrine, and after 20 years of searching, she had a vision, in which Amaterasu appeared to her and directed her to Ise. The Princess encircled the site she had selected with chimes, which is why the river that demarcates it is named “Isuzu” or “fifty bells.”¹²

In spite of this ancient fourth-century BC lineage, however, the first Shrine, or Naiku dedicated to Amaterasu, did not appear until the Asuka period, during the reign of the Emperor Tenmu, (672 to 686 AD). There must have been an earlier structure here however, even if only a sacred column, or shin-no-mihashira, (tree of heaven, or heart column) of cryptomeria or Sakaki wood because Geku, which is a second outer Shrine dedicated to Toyouke Omikami, the Goddess of Grain meant to serve Amaterasu, is thought to have been built by the Yamoto Emperor Yuryaku, between 456 and 479 AD (Figure 1.1).

In addition to the Honden, or Shoden, as it is referred to at Ise, which is thought to be inhabited by the kami, each of these Shr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the (dis)continuities of Japanese architecture
• Part I: An enduring cultural framework
• Part II: From modernity to Modernism: 1868–1940
• Part III: From re-birth to economic collapse
• Part IV: Transitional figures
• Part V: The next generation
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index