Читать книгу A Lateral View - Donald Richie - Страница 12

LOOKING AT TOKYO one sometimes wonders why the Japanese went to all the trouble of franchising a Disneyland in the suburbs when the capital itself is so superior a version.

Disneyland, and the other lands it has spawned, is based upon the happy thought of geographical convenience: all the interesting localities on earth located at one spot. Thus, there are African rivers and Swiss mountains and Caribbean islands and American towns. One feels one is seeing the world in miniature and, indeed, “it’s a small world” is the slogan of one of the conceSSIOns.

Compare this now to Tokyo. There are hundreds of American fast-food stands with matching mock-Colonial architecture, there is a plaster Fontana di Trevi and a state guest house modeled after Versailles; there are dozens of red lacquered Chinese restaurants and equal numbers of white stuccoed Italian; there are thousands of boutiques with famous foreign names (Gucci, Dior, Yves St. Laurent, Arnold Palmer) printed all over them; there is an imitation Baker Street straight from London; the Museum of Western Art in Ueno has Rodin castings all over the front yard; and there is even an onion-domed Russian Orthodox cathedral. All of this, and much more, in a glorious architectural confusion of Corinthian columns and chromium pylons, dormer windows and curved escalators, half-timber, plain red brick, sheet steel, textured lucite.

In this architectural stew (something from every place on earth) even the authentically Japanese takes on the pleasant flavor of ersatz novelty. Thus the old Toshogu Shrine in Ueno or the Awashimado (1618) in Asakusa appear in Tokyo’s Disneyland context just as pleasingly synthetic as the new Japanese modernstyle restaurant gotten up almost right as a French bistro.

In the face of this massive transplantation of everywhere else right into the heart of the capital, the Disney enterprises would seem to face the stiffest of competition. Tokyo is a mammoth Disneyland with an area of nearly 2,500 sq. km., and a working staff of almost 12 million. Yet net only Tokyo but all of Japan seems always to have the time (and the money) for the little imported Disneyland perched on reclaimed land in the outskirts.

One of the reasons would be that Japan is the real home of all such concepts as Disneyland has come to exemplify. To go there is, in a way, to come home. It was in Japan, after all, that the concept of the microcosm has been most fully elaborated, from its beginnings right down to Walkman-type baby loudspeakers for the ears, the wrist-watch TV, and the smallest and fastest silicon chip yet.

Japan, too, has also displayed a fondness for the geographical microcosm, the bringing together of famous places into a single locality. Look at the number of little towns in Japan that sport a Ginza, plainly a replica of what was once Tokyo’s most famous shopping street. And look at the number of gardens that have a little Mount Fuji, small but climbable, included among their attractions.

Indeed, the classical Japanese garden gives ready indication of how dear the microcosmic impulse has long been to the Japanese heart, and how early the Japanese had perfected these small visitable worlds.

Take, for example, the Korakuen in Tokyo—an Edo-period garden. One climbs a small hill which calls itself Mount Lusha in China, and finds oneself at a replica of the Togetsu bridge from Kyoto’s Arashiyama district. But the view is not the river but Hangzhou’s famous lake—we are back in China again. Not for long, however; climb another hill and here is Kyoto once more, the veranda platform of the Kiyomizu Temple, one of the famous sights of the city.

Some Edo gardens are even more Disneyland-like. For example Tokyo’s Rikugien in Komagome. Here, in one place, arranged somewhat like a miniature golf course, are all of the 88 classical sites, all tiny, and all with noticeboards explaining the Chinese or Japanese association.

Lest it be thought that all of this is just big-city Tokyo and late-Edo commercialism, Japan’s claim to early Disneyfication must be defended. Did you know that the garden of the elegant Katsura Villa is itself a miniaturization of famous scenic attractions from elsewhere—that there is the Sumiyoshi pine, and the Tsutsumi waterfall, and the Oigawa river, and the famous wooded spit on the other side of Japan, Ama no Hashidate? And that even the elegant moss-garden, that of Saiho-ji, contains—if one knows how to find them—scenes from ten famous places, reproductions often famous things (rocks, etc.), ten poetic references, and ten famous pine trees—all reproductions, fancied though they be, of something somewhere else?

Even Ryoan-ji’s famous rock garden has its Disney attributes. Those rocks—what are they, besides being just rocks? Well, they are various things. They are manifestations of the infinite, or they are islands in the ocean, a section of the famous Inland Sea. Or (a very Disney touch, this) they are a mother tiger and her frolicking cubs.

Even earlier, the avatar of Walt Disney was alive and well in Japan. He would have loved the Byodo-in, replica of a Chinese water pavilion, with imitation Chinese swan-boats (phoenixes, actually) being poled and pushed about. And he would have noted with pleasure that in gardens of the period everything was always something else—something from far away. One way of arranging garden rocks in inland Kyoto was suhama (graveled seashore) and another was ariso (rocky beaches). Earlier yet, Japanese gardens were displaying the vision that later made Disneyland famous. Here in the first gardens what do we find? Why, things from far away indeed. The garden was a representation of Sukhavati, the Western Paradise of the Buddha Amitabha. And those rocks in the water were the three islands of the blessed—Horai, Hojo and Eishu. And that big rock in the middle—that is Mount Sumeru itself.

The date of this kind of garden is 1000. Just think—almost 1000 years ago Japanese vision and technique had in Sumeru made the first Space Mountain!

It is evident that the Japanese claim to prior Disneyfication is a very strong one. No other country has brought the principle of the microcosm—ikebana, bonsai, chanoyu, gardens—to such profuse perfection. No other has managed to turn so much into something else.

So, when one wonders why Japan, such a Disneyland itself, needed a real Disneyland, one must conclude that it found here something in which a true fellow-feeling was discovered. And also, perhaps, because in Disneyland it recognized as well one of its own enduring qualities.

This is a passion amounting to near genius for kitsch. If kitsch is defined as primarily something pretending to be something else—wood acting like marble, plastic acting like flowers, Anaheim, California, acting like the Mississippi—then Japan has a long history, a celebrated expertise and a strong claim to mastery in just this very thing. In fact, Japan often enough has been called “the home of kitsch.”

If this is true then, with understandable enthusiasm Japan embraced the biggest piece of kitsch in the West. Did so, then broke off a chunk and brought it home to add to its collection.

—1985