We like texture

My trip to Japan has lived up to very high expectations that I have had since early childhood. However, much of my time in Tokyo was spent in conference rooms and department stores, rather than staples of traditional culture like museums and great buildings.



I have spent one day in Kyoto and it has shown me a more traditional Japan; one just as valuable as the world-leading Tokyo metropolis.



With an (authentic) Japanese family, we toured three of the more renowned Buddhist temples of Kyoto. Buddhism here is intertwined with the beliefs of Shinto, which dictates that there are spirits in almost all earthly things. The Japanese, appropriately, have a very utalitarian view of religion. It is said that they are Shinto at birth, Christian at marriage, and Buddhist at death, reflecting their preference in ceremony at those important stages of life.



What makes these temples special is that they show how architecture and landscaping can be created in the service of simple but powerful ideas.



The rock garden at Ryoanji Temple is an enlightening example. It is comprised of four islands of clustered rocks, laid out on a clean lawn of raked white gravel, in the Zen-style. There are fifteen rocks in total, a number that is considered ‘complete’ in Buddhist thinking. In this rock garden, however, it is impossible to see all fifteen rocks at the same time. If you shift your perpspective to reveal the missing rock, another will disappear from view. Only from above, that is to say in ‘heaven’, is all revealed.



The lesson, of course, is that in our mortal state the full set of facts is never availed to us. We can only know or understand so much of our crises and opportunities. It is a humbling realisation, and one that may console you to your past, or prepare you for the future.



Great Western architecture is often informed by powerful ideas or highly conceptual aesthetics. But the link between idea and structure can be very tenuous. Without falling into the trap of mystifying everything that comes from the East, I would welcome the construction of more of these brick and mortar parables in our part of the world to illustrate certain wisdoms in an unassuming way. It has been really well done in Japan.



If there are such examples in the West, by the way, I would really like to hear about them.




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