BEAUTY: THE TRADITION OF IMPERMANENCE
“SEE THE TREE there? It’s turning red, right?” I looked to see what Kotaro Nishibori, the last manufacturer of paper umbrellas in Kyoto, was pointing at. On our left was a line of cherry trees, their leaves oxblood on that sunny November morning. On our right was Nijo Castle, where, Nishibori informed me, the Meiji Restoration began. It was here, in 1868, that the last shogun, Yoshinobu Tokugawa, returned political power to Emperor Meiji, ending the nearly 700-year shogunate. Overnight, it seemed, Japan was open to the world and, as the curtain fell on its medieval past, the country entered a period of transformational change.
“It looks like it will die,” Nishibori said of the cherry tree, “but it’s not going to die. The next spring, there will be another flower blooming on that same tree.” Then, drawing a line between nature, men and history, he gestured to the castle and said, “All the power fading and passing to the next generation.”
The notion of impermanence has long held a special place in Japanese thought, ranging from religion and philosophy to aesthetics and architecture. That essential belief in the transience of all physical things is Buddhist in origin and has generated a vast vocabulary of words surrounding its philosophical implications. Mujo is one term for impermanence, but so is mono no aware, which has been translated variously as “the pathos of things” or “the beauty of transience” but is simply an awareness of mujo. Buddhist teaching would have us live in proximity to this knowledge — that everything we love and become attached to must pass from the earth in its material form — allowing it to impart grace and humility to our lives, even as we forgo those things such as ego and hubris that advance the illusion that death will not come for us all.
To live in the nearness of death is not a recipe for inaction or even fatalism. Yet it does require us to hold seemingly contradictory ideas. One of the ways in which Japan enshrines the subtle meaning of these concepts is through the realm of art. Beauty in old Japan, as everywhere in the premodern world, was a vessel of knowledge. Nothing, not in Asia nor in pre-Renaissance Europe, was ever beautiful for beauty’s sake; it was beautiful because it lighted the way to truth.
The Japanese found myriad ways to crystallize and savor impermanence. One example, famously, is wabi (an obscured or hidden beauty) coupled with sabi (a coarse, unpolished exterior), in which patinas and signs of age, whether they appear on a textile, a piece of wood or ceramic, are not to be despised but regarded as an essential part of what makes something beautiful. Another is the pleasure that the Japanese take in autumn leaves and cherry blossoms. On my arrival in the country, the national broadcaster was advertising a park north of Tokyo where one could see the two together. That some of this may seem clichéd even in the West, where a high-end housewares store on New York’s Canal Street held an exhibition by a Japanese ceramist this past winter titled “Impermanence,” is simply the occupational hazard of a powerful idea. “The great truths,” as W. Somerset Maugham tells us, “are too important to be new.”
At his workshop on a quiet gridded street in downtown Kyoto, Nishibori told me that, up until the 20th century, there were some 200 paper umbrella workshops in the city; the umbrella was of Chinese origin and corresponded to the rise of Buddhism in the eighth century, but it went through many transitions, starting out as a sacred object and ending up an essential accessory of Edo high fashion. As he showed me how the umbrellas were made, with their cotton threads and intricate spindles, he added yet another word to my growing lexicon of terms for impermanence. “Watching the light come through the umbrella’s structure,” he said, his long hair tied in a ponytail, “I simply feel it’s quite beautiful.” The fugitive beauty found in everyday objects, which Nishibori likened to mujo, was an example of yonobi. As with wabi-sabi, it was an aesthetic reverberation of the philosophical discovery that nothing that is matter can endure.
WOOD: THE IMPERMANENCE OF MATERIAL
ON A DAMP Friday morning, I sought out Toshiki Hirano, a professor of architecture at the University of Tokyo. The campus buildings were dressed in squarish tiles in browns, reds and beiges. Tourists were photographing an avenue of giant yellowing ginkgos. Hirano works at the experimental lab of the celebrated architect Kengo Kuma, who completed the Japan National Stadium in 2019 and is known for reviving the use of traditional materials such as wood, as well as for seeking a greater harmony between his structures and the places they inhabit. Buildings, whether religious or public (the Parthenon, say), tell us in concrete ways how a society assigns value. I wanted to ask Hirano about Ise Jingu, often referred to as “the soul of Japan.” It is a 2,000-year-old Shinto shrine in Ise Bay, some 90 miles southeast of Kyoto, that for over 13 centuries has been dismantled and rebuilt every 20 years regardless of its condition — the supreme metaphor for Japan’s relationship to the material world. All discussion about impermanence begins and ends with Ise Jingu.
We met at a Starbucks near the architecture department. Hirano, in his late 30s, wore a bright-colored T-shirt beneath his jacket. The shirt’s design, he later told me, was the product of having fed a line of Surrealist poetry — Comte de Lautréamont’s “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella” — into an artificial intelligence program. We walked across the sodden grass and entered a lab of blond wood. It’s often claimed that traditional Japanese buildings, as testament to their ethereality, were built without nails. But this was not in fact true. There did exist such a thing as the Japanese nail — it was long, hard-angled, with a triangular head — and Hirano and his team had decided to make it the subject of a study. Showing me four clear plastic tubes held together by four Japanese nails, Hirano said playfully, “What we wanted to do was cast a spotlight on the hidden protagonist of the structure.”
Japan, Hirano explained, had a “dominant culture of wood,” which was different from the Greco-Roman relationship to stone. The previous summer, as part of a workshop with Greek and Japanese students, he had spent time with master carpenters at Horyuji, a temple founded in the seventh century in the ancient capital of Nara. One of them had spoken of the need to “listen to the wood,” saying that if he was to use a piece of wood in a column, he would make sure that its orientation matched that of how it had grown in the forest. Otherwise, Hirano said, “you would have an undesired deformation over time.” This, in the architect’s view, spoke of a direct link to Japan’s animist past. The material was treated as “a living entity,” Hirano said, which means that “it’s not immortal, and it’s quite natural to think that that material will change its state over time, decay and, yes, eventually decompose.”
The West fetishizes old stones, and I wondered if that fundamental difference in the relationship to material was at the heart of Japan’s ideas of impermanence. In his 1986 essay “The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past,” the Belgian Australian scholar Pierre Ryckmans (writing under the pen name Simon Leys) conjectured that China’s unwillingness to entrust its history to anything physical was the source of its “vital strength,” “creativity” and “seemingly unlimited capacity for metamorphosis.” Because it never allowed what it valued most to be “trapped into set forms, static objects and things,” it never ran “the risk of paralysis and death.” I asked Hirano if something similar was at play in Japan, citing the dismantling and rebuilding of Ise Jingu, which records show first began in the seventh century under Empress Jito. Hirano said that nobody is sure why the tradition began, but one pragmatic rationale for the practice is that it preserves architectural techniques by passing them down from craftsperson to craftsperson. To this practical reason Hirano added a detail of riveting metaphorical power. When Ise Jingu is taken apart, he said, the “disassembled components are handed over to different temples and shrines throughout the nation and reused for something else.”
It was such a beautiful idea — this redistribution of the sacred. It spoke to a relationship with materiality that was regenerative and creative, like the spolia from the religious buildings of one civilization used to adorn another. All material was by necessity subject to collapse, but if you could set up a system whereby the sacred was constantly being consumed and reused, then it was possible to create a cycle of permanence within impermanence — a river of constancy in an ever-changing world.
Walking through Tokyo afterward, I began to see the city differently. In my first few days, I had been surprised by the almost self-wounding ugliness of its buildings, whose drab colors, smallness and extreme functionality exuded a kind of fungibility, as if they had been put up in the knowledge that they would soon be torn down. Here, of all places, the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier’s ideal of the building as “a machine for living in” had been realized. The utilitarian quality of the cityscape was at odds with a country that, in every other aspect of its cultural life, brought beauty and utility together. I had (as one does in London) attributed it to the destruction wrought by the war, and the need to rebuild hastily afterward. The firebombing of Tokyo by the Americans destroyed roughly half the city, some 16 square miles. Certain important structures such as the 17th-century Asakusa Shrine, a Shinto complex of pagodas and deep-eaved tiled roofs, picked out in vermilion, survived, but great swaths of the city were reduced to ash. Now I began to wonder if this replaceability spoke to an older experience of working with wood and paper. This thought came on the back of another contradictory one: Modern Japan, which lives under the perpetual threat of earthquakes, has been uniquely successful in engineering structures designed to withstand seismic volatility, to endure; yet even observers of its contemporary architecture have commented on how quickly its buildings were constructed and demolished when compared with those in other countries. “The idea of continually pulling down and putting up is very strong,” writes the American-born author Donald Richie in “A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan” (1987), one of the many books he published about his adopted homeland. It’s hard not to feel that the ghost of working in wood and paper has lived on in concrete and steel.
Hirano had been matter-of-fact in describing how the postwar building code of Japan actively discouraged traditional materials. “Easy to burn,” he said wryly. In the period after World War II, Japan, out of a need for self-preservation, shunned the materials that had made it so vulnerable to its enemies. I felt it affected the scale of Tokyo, which struck me as a town where a dozen Times Squares had been set down in a low-lying city of neighborhoods, akin to what I grew up with in New Delhi. From the moment I arrived, I sensed city and village breathing next to each other. Hirano had spoken of the hubris of the 1980s that had resulted in a kind of gigantism, not unlike what one sees in places like Shanghai and Dubai. He felt that audacity belonged to an earlier stage of capitalism, which had proved ephemeral in its own right. No one was trying to make Japan great again, he said. The society was rife with fatigue. The young had little faith in the future and lived in an irreversibly aging society. When I asked Hirano what architecture in Japan today told him about the state of the country, he laughed and said, “Happy nihilism.”
EARTH: THE SOIL OF IMPERMANENCE
IMPERMANENCE MAY HAVE been a Buddhist idea — Buddhism, like so much else in this island nation, was a cultural import from India, via China, in the sixth century — yet one had to ask whether there was something in that soil that made Japan especially receptive to such an idea. The writer Haruki Murakami has suggested there was. In a 2011 speech given just a few months after an earthquake and tsunami led to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Murakami said that to be Japanese “means, in a certain sense, to live alongside a variety of natural catastrophes. … The Japanese archipelago finds itself situated in a corner to the East of the Asian continent, riding atop four enormous tectonic plates. The location is precarious. We pass our days, as it were, atop a nest of earthquakes.”
Eleven years after the calamity in Fukushima, the writer Hiroko Yoda, who was working on a book about Japanese spirituality, traveled with a Shinto priest to the depopulated hot zones. Soon after the accident, men in hazmat suits had suddenly arrived at the priest’s village in Fukushima, testing for radiation exposure. His neighbors rushed out of their homes, leaving half-eaten lunches on their kitchen tables. When Yoda returned with the priest to the village more than a decade later, the paddy had grown wild. Whole precincts, still deemed contaminated, had been abandoned, their former inhabitants living as internal refugees within the country.
The irony of an earthquake that caused a nuclear meltdown in the only nation ever to have an atomic bomb dropped on it was not lost on anyone. Yoda’s American husband, Matt Alt, who is also a writer and who has lived in Japan for 24 years, was still enraged by the fact that there had been stones, so-called tsunami stones, up and down the coastline carved with warnings not to build by the sea, some dating back to 1896. “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis,” one stone reads. “Do not build your homes below this point.” It was counsel that the Tokyo Electric Power Company disregarded as mere superstition. And well it might, for here, too, was another wrinkle in Japan’s relationship to impermanence. Even while adhering to centuries-old Buddhist notions of transience, Japan was a society at the pinnacle of a Western-style capitalism where one lived as if death did not exist. As such, the belief in impermanence continued on in the muscle tissue beneath the overlay of an alien modernity where every thought of mortality was banished from the public sphere.
I had been especially intrigued by one sentence in Alt’s book “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World” (2020): “In Japan …, the line between original and replica has long been blurred.” To me, this spoke to one of the most radical outcomes of Japan’s enshrinement of impermanence, no less than to its relationship to materiality. The West was deeply invested in the notion of the original. It went into raptures over original objects, paintings and buildings, whereas “the idea of a copy,” as Alt told me, “is a lesser thing.” This was not the case in Japan, where woodblock prints and mass-produced toys had been collected for generations and were not considered less for being reproductions. “Are the tulips that come up in the spring copies of the tulips that came up last year?” Alt asked.
THE PAST: THE IMPERMANENCE OF CIVILIZATION
There was a kind of impermanence I was unprepared for in Japan, and that was the impermanence of the story a culture tells itself (and the world) about who and what it is, has been and may yet be. When I was growing up in postcolonial India surrounded by the tensions of the Cold War, no civilizational narrative struck us as grander than that of Japan. Here was an island country that, when first confronted by the threat from the West, had turned inward in the early 17th century, expressing a cultural need to go to ground that we understood only too well. But then, in one of history’s great surprises, there was the mythical tale of the U.S. naval officer Commodore Matthew C. Perry, with his fleet of black ships, sailing into Tokyo Bay in 1853, forcing Japan to rejoin the world. Yet, lo, the country, like an unfinished picture behind a curtain, had been developing all the while. The Meiji Restoration ensued and Japan, in a historical parable that served as a lesson to all of us in Asia, entered a period of tremendous growth. It was (and remains) the only non-Western, nonwhite country to create a highly industrialized society alongside decades of stable democracy. It was an awesome achievement. The country, never colonized itself, was living proof that all the things that our colonial masters professed to have given us — the railways, a civil service, institutions of higher learning and the scientific temper — were attainments we might have arrived at ourselves, simply because Japan had. And having done so, it allowed us to see that these things were merely being used by our rulers to justify their rule.
Then came Japan’s inevitable confrontation with the West: The 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor would be the only attack of its kind by a foreign enemy on U.S. soil until 9/11. Here, again, Japan provided an enticing counternarrative because it was never more powerful than in the postwar era, when, without the distraction of militarism, its cultural, economic and intellectual might was there for all to see. From its cars and electronics to the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa and the fashion of Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake to writers such as Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe and artists including Yayoi Kusama, Japan was the model for what an Asian power could look like — a country that, even disarmed, struck terror into the hearts of the United States until the 1980s.
But now, 30 years after the economic bubble had burst, many people I met in Japan spoke of a version of that happy nihilism, of managed decline and a damaged faith in the future. The country with the greatest story to tell about its rise, its fall and its rise again felt like a place with no more story to tell. It was ironic that I, who had come to write about impermanence, found myself confronted by the impermanence of cultural narrative itself, by the wearing down of the big story. Once I had picked up on that underlying sadness, I saw it everywhere: in young people burdened by the strain of living among the old. In the quiet desperation of middle-aged men buying their meals at the 7-Eleven at night. In solitary figures, framed against twilit skies, nests of electrical cables overhead and the crushing silence of daily life in Japan. When 29-year-old Masaki Ando, who works for Kotaro Nishibori’s umbrella factory, told me about the loneliness of his father’s retirement, spent in the company of a Chihuahua, and his own feelings of suffocation in a society where the virtual nature of the Covid period had provided a welcome release from the pressures of Japanese manners simply by freeing the young from the daily deference they had to pay to their superiors, I felt he was telling me what I already knew.
For all its talent and genius, the country seemed uniquely stuck. The rigidity, the homogeneity — the tired old island that had seen it all was now stranded on the edge of Asia, a continent to which, despite the bonds of history, it had a tenuous connection. Its fate lay with the Group of 7 nations, among whom it had somehow aged prematurely, representing a chilling late stage of capitalism. At a time when so much of Western leadership seemed debased and depleted, how much one wanted Japan, with all its historical wisdom, to step forward. But perhaps that wisdom was inseparable from a loss of faith in grand narrative itself.
BEGINNING AND END: THE ENDURANCE OF IMPERMANENCE
NISHIBORI HAD TOLD me religion here was syncretic (that the Japanese visited Shinto shrines on New Year’s Day, got married in churches and approached Buddhist priests when confronted by death), and I imagined that its syncretism, as it is in most places, was an unconsidered jumble. It took me by surprise, then, to visit the early 20th-century house outside of Kyoto built by the pioneering architect Koji Fujii. There a guide popped open a jib door of coppery paper to reveal an alcove for a Buddhist deity, then slid open another to show me the Shinto one. Here, quite literally, were two separate compartments, and I was not yet sure how the division of divine labor worked.
Fujii wrote and published a manifesto to go with the house in which, speaking of the convulsion of the Meiji years, he wrote, “Particularly violent have been the changes that have come over [Japanese architecture] in the past 60 years.” He decried the thoughtlessness of an older generation who, in their youth, became “intoxicated with Western civilization and slavishly adopted” alien ways. But he was writing in the 1920s. He had no idea of the violence that was yet to come.
My puzzlement about Japan’s neatly compartmentalized syncretism resurfaced a few days later in a conversation with members of the Suzuka family, hereditary priests and caretakers of Yoshida Shrine, a major center of Shinto worship in Kyoto. The older men sitting across the floor from me on tatami mats conceded that belief in Japan was an amalgam but not, they said, making the translator splice his fingers together, a hodgepodge. When I asked the Suzukas what metaphysical rewards Shintoism offered its adherents, the men looked at me incredulously, perhaps wondering how much else I must not know if I did not know this. “Nothing,” one of them said, “nothing material. Shinto is focused on how to survive in this life.”
Early the next day, Ando picked me up at my hotel in Kyoto to take me to the temple town of Koyasan, 75 or so miles away up in the mountains. Unprompted, he revealed his own pleasure at speaking in English. He said that he felt stifled by Japanese culture, which privileged the group over the individual and depended heavily on deflection, inference and leaving important things unsaid. “I’m not very good at reading between the lines,” he said. “My face gives me away. In English, I feel free.”
About halfway there, we hit morning traffic on an elevated highway, with Ando’s hometown, Osaka, sprawled below us, visible through transparent noise barriers. I asked him about what the Suzukas had said the day before about Shintoism offering no metaphysical solace. “The way I see it,” Ando said, “is that Shinto is a religion for the present, for the day to day, and that Buddhism is a religion of the afterlife.” I was astounded. Could Japan alone have made so clean a separation of its syncretism, rendering unto Shintoism all the physical world, unto Buddhism all that was metaphysical? “All nations are bundles of contradictions,” writes the Hungarian-born author and journalist Arthur Koestler about traveling in Japan and India for his 1960 book “The Lotus and the Robot,” “but nowhere except in Japan are the conflicting strands so neatly sorted out, and arranged on two mutually exclusive levels which alternate in taking control.” Shinto had given Japan everything it ever wanted, but it had no metaphysics and so, with a surgeon’s precision, the Japanese turned to Buddhism for the ultimate source of impermanence — the idea of an afterlife.
Outside Osaka, we veered off the highway and entered a mountainous landscape. Tunnel after deep tunnel delivered us into cedar forests. Buried in furrowed canopies, feathered with bamboo forests, were fires of red maple and golden ginkgo. Once we were in Wakayama Prefecture, where Koyasan is, the road began to climb higher still, and those sweeping vistas of dark, sunlit hills, like one sees in Japanese painting from the Edo period, began to appear. The air got thinner. There were signs warning of deer. On one side were boulders covered in moss, on the other a forest so dense we could not see through it. At last, at some 2,600 feet, we broke out into the town of Koyasan (or Koya). It had been founded in the ninth century by Kukai, a monk known as Kobo Daishi, who played a key role in the introduction of an esoteric strain of Buddhism (Shingon) to Japan from the Chinese city of Chang’an (modern Xi’an), then the biggest metropolis in the world. As we entered central Koyasan and I saw the tourist buses and the careful designations — one for a monument for a local naval air group, another for a temple selling talismans, or omamori, for good health, driving or education — my heart sank. I began to fear that Japan had organized and pacified religion to such an extent that it had hollowed out the mystical element altogether. I had seen ideas of impermanence at work in architecture, art and culture in Japan, but a part of me wondered if, in so desacralized a landscape, it was possible to experience the older origin of those ideas within Buddhism — and whether, without those intimations of deeper impermanence, I was only looking at the traveling light of a star that had itself died.
When Ando mentioned the Jukai sermon, a 25-century-old ceremony of seeking refuge in the Buddha, I thought nothing of it. Wandering through Koyasan, we saw many beautiful things but, religiously speaking, it was inert. At Kongobuji, with its rock garden (the largest in Japan), I wasn’t even sure if the temple was living or dead, so all pervasive was the air of a museum. We walked through sectioned-off rooms with tatami mats and painted screens of cherry blossoms. A sign read, “The deep realization taught by Buddhism can be glimpsed in the contrast between vast deep roots of the tree and the transient petals of the flowers.” Here was impermanence but, in looking out at those islands of rock amid a sea of immaculately raked gravel, I felt that the real transience was that of the old world of belief itself.
Nothing prepared me for the theater about to unfold. At 2 p.m., a fine-featured young monk in black silk robes, a stole of purple and silver hanging loosely around his hips, appeared to lead us (and two other visitors) out of the waiting room, along an open passageway into a hall of tatami mats. We sat on our knees. He slid shut the large door behind us, reducing the room to near darkness. Ahead was an altar with a painting of Kukai in a red lacquer chair, black slippers at his feet. There were two candles with steady flames on either side and sprigs of black pine. The monk began to chant and ring a bell, calling out to an older preceptor to assume his place under a silk awning.
“Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo.” The words rang out into the vault of silence around us: “I always return to Kukai, Kobo Daishi,” Ando translated.
Another door on the altar side of the room slid open and the preceptor appeared, like a shadow, taking his seat without a word. There were two bells now and the chanting began in tandem. The older priest, who was never more than a voice in the dark, handed down the articles of the sermon in Pali, much of which was dimly familiar to me. It was an arresting scene. The nonphysicality of the preceptor, the words whispered as if into your heart. The preceptor then called us to the altar to receive the physical sermon, written out in red ink on smooth white paper, hard proof of our presence in an environment of pure transience.
Switching to Japanese, he said that of course it was difficult in our modern world to adhere to all the commandments that had been outlined. We ate meat and thus committed daily violence against our fellow creatures. We spoke ill of one another. But every time we faltered, and our self-control got away from us, we could return to the memory of this sermon and these words, which had been uttered to us as if in secret. Twenty minutes later, it was over. The preceptor vanished as furtively as he had appeared. The doors slid open and daylight poured in from outside.
IT WAS FITTING, given my thoughts of cultural death in Japan, that my last hours in Koyasan were spent in a vast necropolis. I was cold and had wanted to return to Kyoto, but Ando, polite yet firm, insisted I see this city of the dead on the edge of town that had filled him with fear as a child. We parked on the side of the road, slipped through a gap in a low wall and found ourselves in a forest of black pine where in every direction there were statues, gravestones and giant cairns covered in lichens and moss so thick it was like felt. It was a testament to the luminous continuities of Japanese life that everyone from 16th-century samurai to media barons had gravestones here.
“It’s only 4:30,” Ando said, as we found ourselves enveloped in half-light, “but you feel a dimness surrounding this whole area.” Stone pathways, lit by the pale yellow light of lanterns, led away on all sides to the graves of the famous and the obscure. There were Buddhas, goddesses and potbellied mounds in red woolen caps and bibs. These last were jizo bosatsu, or guardian deities who protect the souls of children and travelers. The road passed over a humpbacked bridge and a glassy stream full of autumn reflections, at the end of which was the mausoleum of Kukai himself. He was not dead but had entered into a state of eternal meditation. Kukai, in bringing Buddhism with him from China, had also brought the prospect of the hereafter to a country whose native animism had offered no comfort beyond the here and now. The Abrahamic view of the afterlife is defined by realms of reward or punishment; Buddhism is concerned with release — either from suffering when one is alive or that of the soul that yearns to be free of the cycle of birth and rebirth.
Crossing the stream into the sacred precincts, I felt almost as if I were crossing one of the rivers of Hades. Thousands of lamps hung from the eaves of a temple. Giant-leaved brass lotuses with wobbly stems straight out of wonderland had been planted in the garden surrounding the mausoleum. Past a torii (or gate), Kukai rested in a state of immaculate liminality — neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive. That feeling of in-betweenness, the discomfort of living in the knowledge that all steady states must collapse, was what Japan above all wanted you to grasp. That was the lesson.
“It’s as if they’re still going to live in the afterworld,” Ando said with wonder as we walked away. “We think, when we die, it’s over but, for them,” he added, casting his gaze over the garden of souls, “it’s not. Even if you die, the story goes on.”
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