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Foreword

by Donald Richie

Old Japan is vanishing. Traditional homes are being torn down, the public baths are closing; children no longer hopscotch among their chalked lozenges, their parents no longer sit on the stoop in the evening cool; the kimono has all but vanished, and tatami-mat rooms are no longer found in the newer apartments: even the food—such traditional fare as kiji donburi (pheasant over rice— deliciously faked, really chicken) and hayashi raisu (an Edwardian favorite, hashed rice)—must now be searched for. And in the place of all of this.- the home shower, the chair and table, the TV set, and victuals known as finger-licking-good from the local corner shop.

So what else is new? Things come and go—change is the essence. This is something everyone knows, and most remark upon. The Japanese certainly know it, perhaps even better than some because the fact has been so publicly pondered and regretting it has become so institutionalized.

"The world of dew is, yes, a world of dew, but even so. . ." famously remarked Kobayashi Issa in 1819—as here translated by Sato Hiroaki. Transient, ephemeral, evanescent, our world vanishes before our eyes. This we know, can perhaps appreciate, can maybe celebrate, yet even so . . .

Even so, there is nostalgia and regret at the passing of things. There is the sadness of this knowledge of the impermanence of the only world we know and there is sorrow at the death of so much which is true and beautiful.

Our sentiment is so universal that we can only question its power to continue to move us as it does, and to wonder why this feeling should be so particularly poignant in regard to Japan.

Well, one of the reasons for this poignancy is that what we call old Japan is a product nowhere else duplicated. Old Europe and old America share much. The passing is sad perhaps but then one can still find pockets of the past in the Dolomites or the Ozarks and they resemble each other more than they don't.

But Japan, a distant archipelago which cut itself off from the world for centuries and had over the years evolved its own peculiar culture—there is no place else like this. And so when its various products—the traditional ryokan, older ways of counting and measuring, the tatami mat—slowly disappear, we are aware that we will never see them again. The poignancy is strongly felt because it is permanent. All of the pockets of the past are turned inside out.

Another reason for the poignancy is that the rate of change is here so accelerated. Japan is more ripe for change than other countries. Long a poor nation, it (or more properly speaking, its government and the resulting establishment) is now rich. Hence development, that friend to change, is rampant.

Mountains, forests, rivers, the shoreline itself—all are developed, which means drastically warped from their traditional shapes. Towns and cities get developed too, and if parts can no longer pay their way (the public baths, the old-style entertainments such as the yose, the kamishibai children's theater) then they disappear. Since change is expensive, old Japan could not formerly afford it. Now it can and there is a big backlog of true and beautiful things to be gotten rid of.

Also—a reason for the acceleration—Japan now has more people in it than ever before. This means less space. Old-time spreading out—whether in public parks or private houses—has become much more expensive. More efficient housing, more efficient methods of feeding, more efficient entertainment—all of this means enormous change. Brand-new products must be consumed in ever larger doses to spur an economy whose only consideration is its own steady growth. New products are welcomed everywhere in the world—if the hype is right—but only in Japan is the shin hatsubai (newly available) so ubiquitous as to be a national institution.

Added to this is a certain fecklessness, long visible and celebrated from the Edo era—it even had a name, iki—which finds in the changing fashions and the latest modes a gratification not unknown in other countries but seldom elsewhere found in such a lavishly concentrated form. Fads and fancies follow each other in an endless parade across the tube, the screen, and onto the streets. All of these are fittingly expensive and all are dependent only upon naked novelty.

Finally—another reason for Japan's particularly poignant reaction to change—is that it is acknowledged ("a world of dew") in the same breath as it is regretted ("but even so"). Though there are resigned repetitions of that national slogan, shikata ga nai (can't be helped), there is at the same time an acknowledged sadness, a public admission of the essentially tragic nature of life.

The officially optimistic West ("no use crying over spilt milk") has never understood this. Things over there always change for the better, in the long run, for the most people—and it is only the romantics at best, the old fogies at worst, who would think otherwise.

Japan is only cautiously optimistic. It seems from these shores that the mildly pessimistic might in the long run, for the most people, turn out to be the more accurate. Hence, hundreds of years ago, a name was given this benign sense of tragedy wherein dissolution was acknowledge, accepted, and to an extent even celebrated.

The name is mono no aware, a tangled term with a disputed etymology which nonetheless illuminates Japanese art and continues to lighten Japanese life. There are various interpretations. It has been compared to the Western lacrimae rarum as well as the universal stream of Heraclitus. Regarding vanishing Japan, however, a more homely illustration might be: Look into the mirror and regard one more wrinkle, one more gray hair. The proper mono no aware attitude is not to call up for an appointment at the beauty parlor but to gaze, find things going as they must and therefore should and, if possible, smile. This is mono no aware in action. And it is a term salient to the Japanese identity.

Around 1332, aesthetic recluse Yoshida Kenko, noting all the change around him, wrote that: "The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty." And in quoting this Donald Keene noted that indeed this is "the most distinctively Japanese aesthetic ideal— perishability."

Perishability as an ideal is not a notion familiar to nor congenial with the West. Over there, the way is to decry the change and then go ahead and embrace it. Over here, in Japan, the way is to embrace the necessity of the change itself.

Let us then, in old Japanese fashion, accept (shikata ga nai) necessary change. But in celebrating our very transience let us also remember. We should, as did Kenko, write about what has passed, make lists, catalogues, and celebrate what was with the same voice that we celebrate the need, even the virtue, of its passing.

This is what Elizabeth Kiritani has done. Here quite long enough to have seen massive change, she has compiled descriptions of this vanishing Japan—and Itsuo Kiritani has deftly sketched the buildings, the objects, the very people, before they disappear. In so doing they have both rendered the past alive.

One of the reasons they can do this is that they live in one of the last stands of old Tokyo. This is the neighborhood of Yanaka, only a fifteen-minute subway ride from the Ginza, but a warren of narrow streets, temples, stands of bamboo, bathhouses, mom-and-pop stores—some of the sights of which you can see in the illustrations in this book.

I live in Yanaka too, just up the street from the old Edo-style house where the Kiritanis live. And as I sit here, following my brush, as the old essayists say, a cool summer breeze wanders into my room, bringing with it the faint scent of lotus and the rich smell of mud, for just over that ridge of trees is Shinobazu Pond, the principal ornament of Ueno Park.

That it is still there, cool in the summer and home to hundreds of water birds, is due to Elizabeth and her neighbors. She has been socially useful and politically practical in joining (and creating) groups of concerned citizens who fight against avoidable and damaging changes which continue to threaten. Shinobazu has for the time being been saved from the developers who want a parking lot instead of a pond. She and her friends marched on the officials of Taito Ward and demanded that the pond remain. This time the developers backed down, but this eight-year-old battle still goes on.

Combining then a regard for the past with a critical eye to the future, Elizabeth Kiritani has—like Kenko before her—limned the vanishing with precision, with care, and with love. So long as her work remains, old Japan will not have vanished entirely.

Summer, 1994

Tokyo