Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [33]
People feel that beauty in their surroundings is doomed and that they are powerless to stop it. The landscape artist Harada Taiji, interviewed in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper, said, «Whenever I find a small village I rush to it on my bad legs. It's not quite that the scenery is running away from me, but I feel, 'I've got to capture this quickly or it will disappear. When I find a wonderful place, I worry that someone will come and take it away from me.' »
The decline of domestic travel in Japan and an explosive growth of foreign travel in recent years indicate a large measure of national malaise. I believe it is possible that most Japanese know, somewhere deep in their hearts, that they are despoiling their own country, but what they know in their hearts they find difficult to think about consciously, given the array of government ideology and misinformation pitted against them. Other factors, too, make it unlikely that environmental destruction will become a mainstream political issue. One is the deep-rooted Japanese concentration on the instant or small detail, as in a haiku poem. This is beautifully expressed in the paintings on the sliding doors at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto: a few parrots, their feathers brightly painted in red and green, sit on gray branches in a landscape drawn in stark shades of black ink on white paper. The Zen message of the painting is that the parrots are the focus of our attention-hence we see them in color, while the background black-and-white trees are nearly invisible to the mind's eye. The architect Takeyama Sei says that it is this ability to «narrow their focus» that leads the Japanese people to ignore the ugliness in their environment. You can admire a mountainside and not see the gigantic power lines marching over it, or take pleasure in a rice paddy without being disturbed by the aluminum-clad factory looming over it.
While human beings may color in what we want to see and leave the rest in black and white, this is not an easy task for a camera. Photographers and moviemakers in Japan must carefully calculate how to frame each shot to preserve the illusion of natural beauty. The Japanese are surrounded by books and posters that feature precisely trimmed shots of nature – mostly close-ups of such details as the walkway into an old temple grounds or a leaf swirling in a mountain pool – with accompanying slogans praising the Japanese love of nature, the seasons, and so forth. Often the very agencies whose work is to resculpt the landscape have produced and paid for such advertisements.
Well-selected words and photos remind the Japanese daily that they live in a beautiful country. They also impress upon foreigners who buy books on gardens, flowers, architecture, and Kyoto that Japan is blessed above all nations in the world with its exquisite «love of the four seasons.» No country in the world has so rich a heritage of symbols and literature extolling nature. Signs for restaurants and bars read «Maple Leaf,» «Firefly,» «Autumn Grasses»; a major bank, formerly Kobe Taiyo Mitsui Ginko (Kobe Sun Mitsui Bank), even changed its name to Sakura Ginko (Cherry Blossom Bank). Myriad ceremonies such as Mizutori, the Bringing of Spring Water, at the Nigatsu-do Temple in Nara, survive from traditional culture, and people perform such rituals in private homes and at temples or watch them broadcast in some form or another almost daily on television. From the emperor's ceremonial planting of spring rice on the palace grounds in Tokyo to moon-viewing parties in autumn, millions of people celebrate the passing of the seasons. Shopping arcades hang branches of plastic cherry blossoms in the spring and plastic maple leaves in the fall. But this wealth of seasonal reminders obscures the devastation taking place throughout Japan.