Speaker: Takeshi Nakagawa Professor Nakagawa had this to say about his reason for penning The Japanese House. "The location of the Japanese archipelago, not far off the east coast of the Eurasian continent, has been a key factor in the history, culture, and institutions of the nation of Japan. From ancient times, there has been an influx of people, goods, and ideas. They did not pass on to other places via Japan - once something entered the country, it tended to take root and mature on Japanese soil. Although a few have been repelled, most of these innovations, while they have been greatly altered as successive waves have reached Japan's shores, have eventually merged with what already existed here, blending in so well that they might always have been part of the national scenery. The arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's "black ships" in 1853 was a shocking event that heralded one of those great waves. Backed by the American gunboats, the demand that the Tokugawa sho- Japan's defeat in World War II (1945) was another watershed event in the nation's modern history. Many Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki foremost among them, wer reduced to ashes. Sixty years later, modernization has permeated the entire country, the major cities have become high-density metropolises, and, with some exceptions, the scenery that had moved E.S. Morse and his contemporaries to speak of "the heart of Japan" has all but been erased. Now a revival of the traditional has brought a quiet boom of Japanese styles of clothing, food, and housing. Similarly the films of Ozu Yasujiro have been attracting renewed interest, with their under- What do these recent developments mean? Perhaps it was only after the calm atmosphere of the old towns and villages and the harmony between the houses and the terrain had been lost, along with the rich culture of local festivals and events that were part of people's lives, that we realized their true worth. Reviving the styles of the past in areas of personal taste and the arts in a nostalgic bid to recapture lost values is hardly a new phenomenon, nor is it unique to Japan. I hope that The Japanese House will convey, to readers interested in Japanese domestic architecture and culture, more than just this kind of nostalgic regret for the lost beauty of tradition. For the things that I write about were, in fact, quite ordinary sites in the traditional commercial districts (shitamachi) and suburban agricultural communities of large cities until about 1960. The almost total disappearance of Japan's traditional scenery is a result not of the Meiji government's program of Westernization, nor of World War II, but of the high economic growth and pursuit of rapid modernization that began in the early 1960s. Domestic life, dwellings, and living environments are among the most conservative elements of any society, closely bound to nature. In premodern times, they changed all but imperceptibly, particularly in Japan. Largely for that reason, houses were richly imbued with folk wisdom. Before we knew it, however, we lost something irreplaceable. In The Japanese House, I take a good look at what we have lost, in the hope that we can somehow carry the things we love and value over into houses of the future." Your ticket for admission to Takeshi Nakagawa's BOOKNOTES presentation, "The Japanese House in Space, Memory, and Language," will be a copy of The Japanese House bought from Good Day Books. Paperback copies of this book may be purchased at Good Day Books for two thousand yen („2000) each, tax included. |
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