Posts Tagged Japan
Museum peace: Japan’s Naoshima island
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 9, 2011
The "art island" of Naoshima is dotted with calming concrete installations a world away from Tokyo's frenetic pace. Pico Iyer enjoys a moment of serenity
Japanese cool has, for decades now, been associated with everything fast, hi-tech and jangly; it's the TVs on taxi dashboards, the control-panels on toilets, the underground universes around major train stations that keep buzzing even after a natural calamity that stunned the rest of us. And if you're looking for a world-defining Japanese art form, you're more likely to turn these days to anime and manga than to any of the country's classical painters or mock-European forms. So it was shocking for me to go to the sleepy, faraway island of Naoshima – now turned into an "art island" rich with museums and installations – and find the coolest thing I've seen in my 24 years of living in Japan. It was, in some ways, the reverse of technology.
The structures around Naoshima are super-hi-tech, 23rd-century constructions of grey reinforced concrete, with every next-generation innovation; but they take you back to the principles of spareness, simplicity and concentration that graced the haiku, brush-and-ink paintings and Noh dramas of old. Where technology makes you speedy, up-to-the-minute and all-over-the-place, Naoshima so calms, grounds and slows you that you feel as if you've stepped into a meditative shrine.
The journey to the old fishermen's haunt in the Seto Naikai, or Inland Sea, is like a journey through the past. I set out from my home in Nara on a brilliant late-autumn afternoon, the trees blazing red, gold and radiant yellow all around me. To get to the remote island involved a bus, a train, another train to Kyoto, a bullet-train to Okayama and then another local train, a slow ferry and a bus before, five hours later, I arrived at Naoshima's Benesse House, the showpiece hotel where I was staying. With each change of vehicle, modernity seemed to thin out a little and I was closer to the old. By the time I left Okayama, I was in the middle of a much earlier Japan of unmanned ticket offices and deserted piers. The faces were simpler here – two local girls, swathed in grey earmuffs, had the countenances of Noh masks – and there were few signs in English.
The train from Okayama clanked along, the opposite of a bullet train, stopping at an empty platform every two or three minutes, and as we inched past, I could see regiments of uniform houses, with grey tiled roofs, bunched against a hillside, smoke rising from the rice-paddies in front of them. By the time we arrived at the ferry town of Uno, I could hardly recall the Godiva coffee-shops and high-rises of Kyoto.
When I reached Naoshima itself, I began to feel as if I'd stepped out of time altogether, in a world so deep in the past – and so far ahead in the future – that I lost all sense of when I was. Benesse House is a stylish and sleek construction, with Bose CD players on every desk – but no TVs or internet reception – and each room individually designed by the self-taught Osaka architect Tadao Ando. Its corridors are full of original contemporary canvasses and eerie light sculptures projecting classic Japanese landscapes through the near-dark. And the effect of all the modern art is, oddly, to take you back to the transfixing simplicity of an old ryokan, or traditional inn, where simply watching the sun make stripes across the tatami mats, or figures cast silhouettes against the paper windows, becomes so absorbing you never want to leave your room.
After the Benesse Company, a publishing firm centered in Okayama, took over the southern half of the island in 1985, working with the then-mayor Chikatsugu Miyake, it called in the minimalist Ando and invited him to design a huge swatch of natural park to be an international centre of art. Rising to the opportunity – surely any architect's dream – he opened Benesse House in 1992, then created a Benesse House Museum (with hotel rooms on the second and third floors) up the road, and then built what is now known as the Oval, a James Bondian series of six more rooms for guests on the top of a mountain behind the museum, reached by private monorail. In 2004, he completed the Chichu Museum which is a 20-minute walk away.
In all my 50 years I've never seen a place as pure and elevating as the Chichu, and it speaks for the pristine futurism that makes Naoshima such a unique place. There are five major pieces – a set of Monet water lilies, a large chamber with a reflecting 6ft granite sphere at its centre by the American land artist Walter de Maria and three light installations by the American James Turrell. Rather than observing these pieces, though, you more or less inhabit them. In one Turrell piece – Open Field – you walk into a room flooded with an unearthly orange light. Then, one at a time, you step up some stairs and into another large room suffused in soothingly deep blue light. Turn around, and the people in the room behind look like art works. Turn back, and you're in a kind of dream state.
Ten minutes walk from the Chichu, I came upon a new museum, opened only last year, to show off the works of the Korean-born Lee Ufan, again in a tall, grey, windowless Ando construction in a field. One of the pieces there, a single rock placed in front of a great earth-coloured slab, with a light shining on it, looked like a moving representation of a figure praying. Walking back from there towards Benesse House, I passed 88 buddhas along the side of the road made from industrial waste. A huge cube sat on a beach, and a "Cultural Melting Bath" hot tub on the cliffs above. At one point, on the silent road framed by glowing trees and the Inland Sea, I realised I could hear water lapping against the shore from two different beaches, each in a different key.
The protected spaces and air of discerning clarity mark every detail in Naoshima. There are no pachinko parlours on the small island of 3,600 people, no video arcades, no clamorous department stores. Cars are rare and you can walk from one site to the very farthest in about an hour. If you look out to sea, you can watch the fishing boats slowly drifting to one of the quiet neighbouring islands; when you head into one of the museums, sometimes slipping off your shoes before entering a room, you're in a prayerful hush again.
While Benesse House is clearly the classic place to stay, budget-minded travellers can sleep in one of 10 Mongolian yurts on the beach 10 minutes' walk away, for less than £30 a night, or in various family-run minshuku, or guest houses, among the island's villages.
In one 18th-century village, Honmura, 30 minutes' walk from Benesse House, six old wooden houses showcase the most contemporary of modern art works. Everywhere you look in Naoshima, the locals, and visiting artists, are coming up with new projects. There's the "I ❤ YU" bathhouse in the port town of Miyanoura – where you bathe surrounded by a zany, eclectic "scrapbook" of work, including an aeroplane cockpit and a collage of erotica – and the Miaow Shima café in Honmura where you can sip coffee among a dozen sleeping cats.
Naoshima is not like anything in the west, but more an ultra-cool reference and homage to what Japan has been doing all along, in cutting away distraction and using frames and light and silence to still the mind and train one in attention.
And at a time when the modern nation has absorbed such a series of shocks, and is thinking about what grounds and steadies it, it makes more sense than ever to seek out this forward-looking shrine to the past.
Essentials
Doubles at Benesse House (00 81 87 892 2030; benesse-artsite.jpen/benessehouse) cost from £246 per night. Yurts on the beach (Tsutsuji-so Lodge, 00 81 87 892 2838; tsutsujiso.no-blog.jp/english) cost £28 per person per night. To get to Naoshima, take the bullet-train to Okayama and a local train to Uno, followed by a 20-minute ferry ride
Pico Iyer is the author of The Lady and The Monk, a novel about the first 24 years he has spent living in Japan
Shusaku Arakawa obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 16, 2010
Japanese architect and artist whose challenging designs tilted at mortality
The Japanese architect and artist Shusaku Arakawa believed that it was immoral for people to have to die. With his wife, Madeline Gins, he designed houses and public spaces that were supposed to help stop us from ageing. His death, at the age of 73, is a flaw in his philosophy of transhumanism, or reversible destiny. "This mortality thing is bad news," Gins said after he died, adding that she would now increase her efforts to prove that "ageing can be outlawed".
For Arakawa and Gins, the ideal form of a house was one that kept residents in a "perpetually tentative relationship with their surroundings". The more our homes challenge us, architecturally, the more likely we are to stay young, grappling with their complexities and, in the case of Arakawa and Gins's flats and houses, their sheer oddity – even perversity.
Their most extreme design, the Bioscleave house (2008), in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, took eight years to build and cost the couple $2m of their own money. Before this colourful and bewildering home was finished, Arakawa and Gins lost the small fortune that they had accumulated since the early 1960s. They had invested money through Bernard Madoff, the American conman they had met at an art exhibition in New York, and the resulting loss led them to close their office in Manhattan.
The Bioscleave house boasted at least three dozen shades of paint. The building features sloping floors in the guise of cartoon-like sand dunes, windows placed where no window is normally placed, level changes aimed at conveying a feeling of being in two places at once, no doors, no privacy, curiously shaped rooms and any number of other surrealist tricks.
The house was designed to keep residents and visitors on their toes – they are hard pushed to even remain vertical. A number of floor-to-ceiling poles were provided, which can be grasped if the inevitable sense of disorientation gets a bit too much.
These curious devices were intended to stimulate us in ways conventional homes do not. A state of comfort, according to Arakawa and Gins, creates anxiety because, although cosseting, it can only ever be finite – and thus shortens rather than prolongs life.
Arakawa rarely used his first name. He was born in Nagoya, studied maths and medicine at the University of Tokyo and attended Musashino art school in Tokyo, where he made surrealist prints. He set off for New York in 1961 with, he claimed, just $14 and the artist Marcel Duchamp's phone number in his pockets. He took a course at Brooklyn Museum art school where, in 1962, he met and married Gins, a fellow student. In 1987 they started the Containers of Mind Foundation together, which later evolved into the Architectural Body Research Foundation. These were the hard-to-place philosophical stepping-stones of their lifelong attempt to create buildings that would enable us to defy death.
They began to paint a series of 83 large paintings on the theme of the mechanism of meaning which were exhibited around the world and, over the years, paid for Arakawa and Gins' architectural experiments. To date, these are a project for a city of reversible destiny on 75 acres of Tokyo wasteland (it never happened); the Bioscleave house; and nine reversible destiny lofts in Mitaka, Tokyo, completed in 2005 at a total cost of around $6m.
The reversible destiny lofts boast colourful rooms in the form of cylinders, cubes and spheres and are known for being interesting and challenging, rather than comfortable, to live in. They are dedicated to the memory of Helen Keller, the American author and political activist who lost her sight and hearing as a child. Keller was a role model for Arakawa and Gins because by relearning how to communicate, she somehow proved that reversible destiny was possible.
The pair believed that the ideal residents of their homes should, following the same principle, be blank slates so that their experience of architecture was continually novel. In this way, explained Arakawa, they would forget that they had to die.
Arakawa had exhibitions of his work around the world, including at the Angela Flowers Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also wrote poetry, animated by such thought-provoking sentiments as "when I am away from you, I feel like a watermelon seed", and "he is elegant between his toes".
He published several tantalising books with Gins, notably The Mechanism of Meaning (1971), Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die (1997) and Making Dying Illegal (2006).
Gins survives him.
• Shusaku Arakawa, artist and architect, born 6 July 1936; died 18 May 2010
Rust lust: Richard Hendy’s ode to a decaying Japan | Chris Michael
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 22, 2010
Japan's population is shrinking, leaving a landscape of crumbling architecture and shuttered neglect. Blogger Richard Hendy has fallen for its eerie beauty
Outside Tokyo and its other metropolises, Japan is dying a strange death. It's due to demographics. First: advances in medicine and a diet high in raw squid have helped to make Japan the oldest society that has ever existed in the long history of human societies. Second, because of its ridiculously low birth rate and frosty attitude to immigrants, Japan is now the first large industrialised country to experience a population decrease as a result of natural causes. In short, as its oldsters get even older, and its youngsters spend all their time commuting on packed trains in identical black suits instead of having wild unprotected sex, Japan's population is shrinking. Very rapidly, in fact. In 2008, it lost 79,000 people. If such trends continue, the Japanese child and working-age population will decrease by almost half in the coming 50 years, while the ranks of the elderly will swell.
What does this mean? To Richard Hendy, whose ongoing online essay Spike Japan is some of the funniest and saddest writing on contemporary Japan today – and to whom I am in debt for the statistics in the preceding paragraph – it means rust. Lots and lots of beautiful rust.
A self-proclaimed "luster after rust", Hendy travels the Japanese hinterland taking photos of crumbling architecture and shuttered buildings. He goes to the remote, and not-so-remote, places from which the population is disappearing. He tracks abandoned railway lines. He takes pictures of deserted schools. He wanders through silent factories. And he revels, if that's the right word, in the melancholy beauty of his adopted country's air of neglect. He says things such as "What a patchwork quilt of corrugation" or "Look how delicately the embers of rust lick up and down the ridges and furrows; how the windows shed tears, grow beards of rust". Meanwhile, he unspools a wry and uniquely informed commentary on Japan's twin woes: economic (aka "the malodorous pall of the Bubble") and demographic. Together, these two demons have all but utterly consumed hundreds of towns, thousands of villages. Hendy is determined, in his odd way, to honour them.
You can scan through Spike Japan for the spectacular snaps, but you'll likely soon be snared by the stories, too; the rhapsodies about decaying infrastructure. He goes to Oizumi, where the Brazilian descendants of Japanese emigres had a large, vibrant community until the recession shuttered most of the main-street shops. He follows the Kashima Tetsudo line, which recently joined the ranks of Hokkaido's dead railways; between 1985 and 1989 it lost a full 20 passenger lines, "an axe even more brutal and wielded over a shorter span than the one Richard Beeching brought down on British Rail in the 1960s". He takes snaps of disused bridges, forsaken hamlets and station platforms lost to encroaching greenery. The photos have an eerie poignancy. Can this really be the world's second-largest economy?
Like most Japanophiles, he has a taste for kitsch. He gets drunk at a bad dance party in an abandoned brewery in Kushiro. He raves about "the magnifience of [the] squalor", of the dilapidated former party district of Monbetsu. He visits what must be the least scary House of Horrors ever constructed, a shabby joke of a ride populated with creaky animatronic monsters that ends with two talking bears pleading for the disputed Northern Territories to be returned to Japan.
But he saves his best photos, and his best writing, for "the big one": Yubari, in Hokkaido. Explaining his fascination with Yubari, he writes:
It's always been about the unparalleled enormity of what Yubari has been through in the last half-century, as it lost almost all its coal mines in a single generation, from 1965 to 1990, and a staggering 90% of its population in two generations: 1960 to the present. The poster children for the industrial decline of the US, places like Youngstown, Ohio, Gary, Indiana, even the baddest of them all, Detroit – none come close to the experience of Yubari, which has gone from being a vibrant if still gritty metropolis of around 120,000 people in 1960, replete with cinemas, dancehalls, and even a five-storey department store, to a mere shell of a city. It's a city in name only, its 11,500 people strung out across the hills and mountains in what now amounts to no more than a straggle of villages.
Yubari now staggers forward on the crutch of its comically optimistic melon industry, as well as an exceedingly creepy caramel factory, where the employees on the assembly line wear white biological-hazard suits like something out of ET. Hendy takes awestruck photos of the posters of Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant and John Wayne films that Yubari administrators have seen fit to erect throughout its desolate town centre. Elsewhere, he finds a poster for a sweet potato liquor that proclaims: "Our town will revive full of smile in near future," and a huge, corroded pillar reading: "Model town: with everyone's effort we can drive away bad behaviour." The pillar is the only remnant of the nearby town of Kashima, home to 20,000 people in 1960, now vanished from the map in all but name.
Most affecting of all is the hilarious, terrifying, heartbreaking ruin of Coal History Village. Like failing mining towns the world over, when supplies ran low, Yubari turned to the dark alchemy of tourism in a desperate bid to turn coal into gold. Coal History Village was half museum, half theme park. The entire complex, water slides and all, now stands derelict. The photos are incredible. "Everything in Yubari rusts," Hendy writes.
As Yubari, so Japan. Hendy's demographics seem implacable: the dependency ratio of retirees to the working population will skyrocket. Medical costs will join it in the clouds. The pension system will run out of money. Spending on infrastructure will stop. The economy will shrink, year after year after year. "Japan is on the threshold of turning into the world's first post-growth society," Hendy writes. That he's able to find beauty on the other side of that threshold is, perhaps, his most remarkable achievement.