Noted Los Angeles based Urbanist Vinayak Bharne’s latest book “Zen Spaces and Neon Places – Reflections on Japanese Architecture and Urbanism,” has been praised as “….easily the most enjoyable book on Japan in a long time…..” It compiles the twenty-year intellectual relationship of an architect, city planner and scholar with a culture in which he was not born. The book goes from historic Nara to post-modern Tokyo, from contemplative tea-huts to kinky love hotels, and from ancient shrines to modern landmarks – unraveling a complex discussion on what is Japanese about the built world we experience in Japan today, and reminding us why Japan continues to be a reference for our times. Bharne share his nspiration behind this effort and the lessons therein
1. Let’s start from the beginning. You went to Japan for the first time from India in 1993 on a national scholarship at the age of nineteen. Is there a single tread that connects that trip and all the others you made till your last one in 2013?
The 1993 Japan trip was my first outside my native India. I had read a lot on Japan to win the scholarship, but did not know anything beyond the obvious aspects of Japanese culture and architecture. But I remember visiting the famous Zen garden of Ryoan-ji, and also visiting Ginza, and being equally fascinated with what I saw and felt in both these places. And I think this contradictory duality is what stayed with me over the years: The fanatical austerity of a dry meditative Zen garden or the rustic simplicity of a Shinto shrine, versus the riot of consumerist signage of Ginza and Shinjuku or the unbelievable pace of urban life in Japanese cities. And exploring how and where these extremes came from, and reflecting on this for twenty years is what Zen Spaces & Neon Places is all about.
2. You begin the book with the ancient Ise Shrine and end in Tokyo. Do these two places represent an emblematic Japanese duality you wish to highlight?
Ise and Tokyo form compelling bookends to the larger narrative. They are both equally Japanese because there is nothing like them anywhere else on the planet, and not even in Japan. Ise is the only Shinto Shrine today that is still fully reconstructed every twenty years. And there is no city with the density, intensity and pulse of Tokyo. The perceived contrast between these two places could not be greater. Also, Ise’s origins are shrouded in ancient myth, while modern Tokyo’s birth was relatively recent, after the capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo. And both places are well-known today to the wider world. So it made sense to use them as the frames of the bigger argument.
3. Is this book an effort on your part to fill a gap in the architectural literature of Japan?
I did not make this book to do anything particular as such, but I think that there are very few books that attempt to capture the complexity of the Japanese built environment holistically. I mention three books that have inspired me – Japanness in Architecture by Arata Isozaki, Rediscovering Japanese Space by Kisho Kurokawa, and From Shinto to Ando by Gunter Nitschke. I single out these books because most English books on Japanese architecture are highly biased, in that they focus heavily on traditional Japanese architecture or exclusively on its Modern architecture. My interest was to offer a sweeping panorama of how the Japan we see today has been shaped and reshaped by so many circumstances, and to highlight how its cultural blueprints have endured in so many ways, if we have the eyes to see them. I think in this sense, the book is quite different from many English books on Japanese architecture out there.
4. You argue for a stripping away of the minimalist image of Japanese architecture that remains dominant even today. Could you elaborate on this?
In 1933, the Modern German architect Bruno Taut on his first trip to Japan proclaimed the Ise Shrine and the Katsura Villa as the ultimate archetypes of Japanese culture. This was highly biased and manipulative proclaim, from someone who knew nothing about Japan. But in a time when both Japanese and Western architects were getting increasingly wooed by Modern architecture and its abstract tendencies, the austere aesthetic of these two buildings was like a confirmation for them. And the whole world caught on to the idea that Japanese architecture is dominantly minimal and monochromatic. Of course nothing could be further from the truth. So the very first chapter of the book unravels the richness and diversity of traditional Japanese architecture and aesthetics – from the raw structuralism of the Todai-ji Temple, the pure white of the castle, the rich ornamental baroque of the Nishi Hongan-ji Temple and the Nikko Shrine, and the bold red hues of the Heian Palace or the Fushimi Inari Shrine. Unless one sees how diverse and complex Japanese architecture truly is, we will never even begin to understand it.
5. One of the chapters that caught my attention is on frontality, titled “The Mondrian in the Japanese Room.” This is a lesser known side of Japan. How did you come to this?
I first encountered the Mondrian reference in Arthur Drexler’s 1955 book “The Architecture of Japan”. There were just a couple of cursory mentions on how Japanese interiors resemble Mondrian’s compositions, but that point stayed with me. Then in 1993, just days before leaving for Japan, I came across an essay by an Argentinian architect Gorge Ferras, in Process Architecture No. 25, that offered a compelling argument on Japanese architecture being frontal in nature. It was these two pieces that framed this exploration. And each time I visited Japan, I would explore this notion, particularly when I stayed in Zen monastic quarters. Drexler and Ferras were both right: the walls of traditional Japanese rooms, due to their strict linearity and bareness are indeed like Mondrian compositions, if you know how to perceive them through absolute frontality. And this opens up a whole other way of understanding architectural space, not through length, breadth and height, but through personalization, subjectivity and metaphor.
6. You elaborate on the century-long exchange between Japan and the West. What are some of the key discoveries in this regard?
It has been the most multifaceted exchange. When Japan opened its doors in 1868 in the Meiji Era, the whole of the West was intrigued with what had been a mysterious culture for too long. The traditional Japanese house became a kind of enigma because it was a complete contrast to the Western way of living. The dry Zen garden became a new found discovery in landscape design. Japan in turn was embracing Westernization – from the incandescent bulb, to Victorian style buildings. Then a paradigmatic moment happened in 1947, when the American Occupation insinuated Western democracy in Japan, and that brought a lot of cultural changes in public life, public space and governance. As Western Modern architects came to Japan, another layer of exchange began, because it created a whole generation of young Japanese architects who they inspired and even taught. And then past the 80’s economic boom, Japanese architects gradually began to question some of their own assumptions and began to reread their culture. So the exchange goes from Western narcissism towards Japan to Japan’s seduction with the West to finally Japan’s transcendence of Westernization. And its physical manifestations go from the Metabolism movement, which is Japan’s exaggerated homage to Western Modern architecture to Tokyo Disneyland and the Tokyo Metropolitan Tower, which are emblematic of Japan’s unabashed embrace of Western symbols, to finally the recent experimental architecture of figures such as Toyo Ito and Shigeru Ban.
7. Another chapter that stood out was the one comparing the parallel evolutions of Kyoto and Renaissance Rome. Most of us don’t put this connection together. How did you arrive at it?
Kyoto is a city I have adored for the longest time. It is the ultimate repository of Japan’s architectural and urban history, because it served as the capital for more than a thousand years. When I went to Kyoto for the first time in 1993 and saw places like the Katsura Villa and the Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion), the immediate question in mind was: What were other cultures doing when these places were being conceived in Japan? And the answers were fascinating. For example, the Zen garden of Ryoan-ji was built in the exact same year as the completion of Michelangelo’s Pieta. The Katsura Villa was a contemporary of the Versailles Palace in France. And Kyoto’s birth was parallel to the rebirth of Rome as a Christian city. So I wrote a paper for Kyoto Journal titled “Kyoto: The View from Rome” examining their parallel evolutions and architectural epochs. This chapter is an update on that piece. The comparison with Rome, one of Europe’s greatest cities, is more symbolic than anything else. It is my way of glorifying what I consider to be one of Asia’s greatest cities.
8. What are some of the most significant lessons we can learn from Japanese cities?
Japanese cities like Tokyo are vivid reminders that eventually, cities are events in flux; they are fleeting entities that have their own rhythms of change and rebirth. Tokyo has been built and rebuilt so many times in its history. At the peak of the 80s economic boom, the annual degree of change within Tokyo’s densely built urban zones was as much as 30%, from façade improvements to entire new structures. Another lesson is what I call urban immunity, that is, the inherent resilience to things others see as unthinkable. Tokyo for example has been destroyed by natural disasters so many times, and yet the city has thrived in its own way. It is almost as if what we call disaster has become some kind of a cyclical occurrence. We would never conventionally think of living in a city that we know is going to be destroyed from time to time. Another lesson is that our reading of urban form as the lens for judging a good city is not always true. Tokyo at first glance looks chaotic and fragmented, but in its mix of uses, density and mobility efficiency, it pales almost any city in the world. Of course this does not mean we forgive everything in Japanese cities. In the book, I lament the destruction of cities like Ise and Kyoto through rampant unchecked sprawl. The point is that Japanese cities are not universal models, and not everything is good out there, but they fundamentally challenge the way we, particularly in the West, are used to thinking of what cities are and ought to be.
9. In the final chapter, you touch on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster and the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. What do you see for the future of Japan through these two events?
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster is an event of global proportions. None of us really know the truth. All our knowledge is largely based on what we have heard through media or research reports, not tested ourselves. So talking about it is difficult. But what has been vivid is the gravity of the recovery efforts, the good and not so good sides of it. And it was amidst these efforts that Japan won the Olympic bid. On the one hand it gave Japan a lot of optimism because it is an opportunity for Japan to come back onto the global radar. On the other, it is an event demanding enormous attention and finances, which many argue should go into disaster recovery or the rising homeless population within the economic downturn. At the end of the day, the destinies of places like Japan, like any other, will be decided by the people in power. So there is no clear answer to this question. What is clear is that Japan will have to tackle a lot of issues it has not previously encountered – homelessness, a shrinking demographic, the rise of other Asian economies etc. Japan will always remain a reference point for any Asian country – because it became Asia’s first industrialized democracy and economic superpower – but it will now have to reinvent itself and rethink its larger future for a completely new time. And through this process, new guises and new contradictions will surface. The narrative of Zen Spaces & New Places will continue.
10. What is next? Will you update the book in future editions with new reflections?
As I say in the Epilog, this book is but a stopping point on a continuing journey, an important stopping point, but a stopping point nonetheless. So yes – the journey continues. I have an ongoing project to chart a strategic enhancement plan for the urban surrounds of the Ise Shrine. I would like to explore lesser known second and third tier cities of Japan. Understand the rural side and its contemporary condition. Sink my teeth into Japan’s zoning and planning processes and instruments. I have barely scratched the surface. And I am not going to hesitate to say that. Japan is my second home. It will keep calling me back.
