Late night TV

Japanese TV is pretty bad - game shows, food shows, Samurai soaps and shows which humiliate animals are some of the highlights, but then there are sometimes long and wonderful programmes about music, art, Noh Theatre, Nihon Buyo (traditional Japanese dance) and so on. Watching TV late, an older woman is dancing - first on old film in black and white - she looks around 60, completely without the Miyake Odori coquettishness I had come to associate with women's Nihon Buyo. Short, almost dumpy, with an intense power, deriving I think from her extreme precision of placing, eyes, dynamic and gesture. Extraordinary sudden jumps, one landing on two knees, and fierce stamps out of the blue. Later, more film of her, now in colour and probably aged about 80, with white hair and a face more mask-like than ever, in a samurai dance. Revelatory - the title of a booklet documenting a Butoh festival in Budapest is 'The Intensity of Age'. It could refer to this amazing performer.

Travelling to the Northern Alps

Travelling on a train through Japan, one might suppose at times that the whole of the central island of Honshu, except where a mountain disturbs the flow, is a continuous city. In pinprick contrast to the murrain of concrete, asphalt, steel and wire that litters the land, Japanese people plant tiny urban gardens, often on the city pavements themselves. Before coming to Japan, I had imagined wide paddy fields, with blowing seas of young rice plants; apart from the fact that the rice planting season is more than a month away, such fields as appear are hemmed in by the railway line on one ide and urbanisation on the other. Only the wild and woolly hills, heaped on most horizons, truly defy the clutter of Japan's post-war sprawl.





Going North, into the Japanese Alps, the train meanders along a wide river valley, gradually climbing as the hills grow larger and behind them white mountains loom. As we rise higher, it is as if we have gone back in time two weeks: below, on the coastal plain, cherry blossom has been and gone. Here, higher and cooler, it is still in its fullest bloom, clustering in clouds in the populous valleys and smouldering high among the still bare trees on the mountainside.





I found myself unable to resist the challenge of Japan's most famous poetic form, so here are

Two haikus

The big man enters
a noisy toyshop and buys
a paper balloon

* * *

The baby's eyes close
slowly like the sun setting
on the horizon

Akashi, Miyajima, Hiroshima

Tamba Pottery

The cloud comes sniffing

down the mountainside

and kiln smoke rises cautiously

to meet it

In the long house

pots stand, brown glazed

under our reverent gaze

______________________________

Outside the Imperial Palace, Tokyo

The pine trees are sculpted like poodles

each clump and pom pom

studiously thinned and shaped

by men in hard hats

No off-shoots, stray wisps

or ambitious twigs

mar the perfect asymmetry

Each specimen conforms to the model

painted a thousand thousand times

for a thousand years

______________________________

Akashi

In the local library, just round the corner from where I am staying, we asked if there was any dance activity for older people. Yes, there was a ballroom class going on right now. We peeped in and were immediately invited to come in and watch. The Mini Mini Dance Circle comp[rised about 16 men and 24 women, plus teacher, assistant teacher and manager. They are aged between 60 and 80, meet weekly and perform around 3 times a year. The group had beautiful co-ordination and style. The teaching was meticulously precise. Apparently, some of the group had been attending for years and some for only a few months, but the difference was not really visible. Each person pays 1,000Yen per month (maybe £8) and although the hall is given free by the town, the group is entirely self-supporting.

It seems that there are another 3 older people's ballroom clubs in this small city, all well attended. I surmise that in fact ballroom dancing is the most widespread dance activity practised by older people in Japan (as it probably is in the UK). There is also in Akashi a blind person's club and a wheelchair dancing club.

Miyajima Island

We come to this little island, just off the coast from Hiroshima, to attend the Toukasai (peach blossom) Festival. Here, every April, Noh players come here from all over Japan to dedicate themselves to their art and perform for two full days in the beautiful little Noh theatre within the Buddhist temple of ... It is also the site of an extraordinary ritual dedicated to two forest deities at the Shinto shrine of Daisho-do. As we come off the ferry, we are amazed to see little Shika deer wandering about the streets, happy among the throng of visitors, tolerant of being stroked and eating one's tourist map. After checking in to our beautiful traditional-style riyokan, which has been an inn run by the same family for 300 years, we walk to the Shinto shrine. A crowd of several hundred is gathered around an oblong enclosure with an altar at one end, with what seem to be customary offerings of apples and oranges and blossom. Along with most of those present, we write our wishes on small pieces of wood (which we pay for - there is always much good fortune on offer at Japanese temples and shrines, but it always costs) and give them back to a monk who stacks these prayers into wooden boxes. A group of yellow-clad monks arrive and station themselves around the edge of the space, at one end sits what look like senior monks in blue. The ceremony seems to be all wood and fire related. Ritual actions are repeated in each corner of the space - we are sprayed with water from a tree branch, arrows are shot from bows, wind is wafted over us. All the while a continuous and vigorous chanting is kept up - I ask a Japanese friend if she knows what the chant is saying, but it is not in Japanese - possibly Sanskrit? In the centre of the space is a large cubic shape which is covered in cypress branches. Finally, one of the monks sets fire to it. It burns fiercely and as the flames destroy the outer covering, we can see that there is a solid wood frame holding it together. The monks offer the wooden prayer sticks we have all inscribed to the head monk, who blesses them. The monks then throw them in bundles onto the fire. This takes a long time as there are hundreds of these prayers to be blessed and burnt. After the fire has consumed all our wishes and sent them heavenwards on the sweetly coniferous smoke, the monks expertly rake out the embers into a lane of smouldering ashes. They line up in their bare feet and march in file with high-kneed stamping along the burning pathway. After, many people, and in particular older people, walk along the embers. No-one appears to be hurt. I am too chicken to try (and, I rationalise, I do not want to take my touristic prurience into a scene which obviously means a great deal to many there. The whole ritual is very clear and performed with great aplomb and good humour by the monks who seem quite unsanctimonious yet generally respectful nthroughout.

Noh Plays

We had already seen a Noh play in Osaka, soon after leaving Tokyo. Later I bought a book of some of Arthur Whaley's translations of Noh plays and began to get a sense of the form. Somewhere I read that W.B.Yeats had writtren some 'Noh plays' and I began to realise why when I saw the mixture of deep sympathy with the natural world, love of words and music and intense melancholy that characterises these slow moving and ritualised events and which has so many echoes in Irish literature and art. In Miyajima, as part of the complex which forms the Buddhist Temple, there are two stages: a Noh theatre, where the plays are performed by different companies for two whole days and another, smaller and ancient stage where Bugaku dances dating from the 8th century are also performed during this festival. The entire monastery is built into the sea, on stilts, so at high tide one sits and watches the plays just a couple of feet above the water, with shoals of little spotted fish swimming below. As the tide receded on our second morning, a deer wandered across the sand between stage and shrine, while overhead a wide-winged kite circled and one was reminded of the closeness of nature, spirituality and art in Japanese culture.

Hiroshima

A pilgrimage to Hiroshima was always on the itinerary, with the main event a visit to the Peace Museum. This is magnificent: beautifully constructed, hugely informational, harrowing and crystal clear in both its condemnation of Japanese militarism and the absolute evil of nuclear weapons. I was sharply reminded how marginal this issue has become in British politics - almost forgotten as a cause for real debate - and ashamed at how flabby I had become about it. Hiroshima is the one placwe that can speak with absolute authority about nuclear weapons and their use and it has one message above all others that is written on the cenotaph of all those who died on and after August 6th 1945:

Let all the souls here rest in peace

For we shall not repeat the evil

Waiting for my friends outside the Peace Museum, a young Japanese woman and an older woman, who might have been her mother, approached me. They said hello and asked me where I was from aqnd why I had come to Hiroshima. I answered as best I could, unsure where this was leading. Finally the younger woman said to me 'I am studying the bible. Have you read this?' and she pulled out of her bag - what else? - The Watchtower.

Shortly after, an older Japanese man and a younger woman came up to me. 'May we talk to you?' he said. 'I am a guide and my friend is a volunteer guide who would like to practice her English'. 'Go ahead', I said. The younger woman, reading from her book, explained the meaning and symbolism of the monument behind us which commemorated those who died as a result of the atom bomb. I congratulated her. The older man explained that he was 81 and was a child in Hiroshima when the bomb exploded. His family all died, but he survived. Where was I from, he asked and when I told him, responded 'Ah, I think England is a place which values what is important and will support the road to world peace'. I said I hoped so. 'Our mayor has written a peace declaration. Perhaps you will make sure people in England know about it'. I said I had a copy of the declaration and I would do as he asked and I would also tell people I had met him and how important that was to me. He thanked me and they both left.

Cherry blossom in Kyoto

Kyoto is a narrow city, lying North to South between two lines of hills. It was the former capital of Japan and has the reputation of being the most beautiful city in the country. At first sight it is not very different from Tokyo or Osaka, but soon you realise that around every corner is an amazing and ancient temple or an engmatic zen garden - perhaps nothing but raked gravel and a number of rocks. A feature of many temples is a large red entrance gate: one shrine has taken this to almost absurd lengths, with paths winding up a mountainside lined with thousands of gates, each only about 2 feet from the one before. The gates form something like a ceiling to the path, so you climb the stone steps through a red tunnel, all the way to the summit, 650 metres up. Every few hundred steps there is a shrine, mostly guarded by foxes, one with an oen mouth and one with a closed mouth. Buddhist shrines are a sort of sacred jumble of stone statuary, offerings, (including, here, miniature torils or gates), candles, water springs. As you return downhill and approach the main temple buildings, the shrines get closer and closer together, jostling for space until they converge in a mad agglomeration. In most ways the Japanese have exquisite visual sense, but there seem to be two areas where this doesn't apply - shrines and town and city planning: national treasures of ancient sites seem to be frequently buried in a mass of insensitive new development.

Tokyo and Kyoto are the least threatening cities I have ever been in. The traffic seems docile, the people amenable, phenomenally helpful and friendly, if often rather nervous at first.

Talk talk

In Tokyo posts and traffic lights
Talk to you as you go past

In Kyoto at the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine
A raven talked to me
And so did three cats
But the foxes were silent as stone

In Akashi the toilet talked to me
When I would have preferred it
To hold its peace
_____________________________________________
Sakora kubuki means a cherry blossom blizzard
_____________________________________________

During the brief, 2 week cherry blossom season, you feel sure that the Japanese are a nation of tree-worshippers. Crowding every park, castle and temple, snapping the blossom by day and by night, picnicing under the trees on blue plastic sheets in huge groups, it supercedes all other national concerns.


Kyoto

A long meeting with Norikazu Sato and his wife Ritsuko. Nori runs the Japanese Contemporary Dance Network, based in Kyoto. Nori was originally a Butoh performer. He spent 2 years in New York, working for Dance Theatre Workshop and was very impresses with the US network NPA. On rreturning to Japan in 1997, he decided to set up a dance network in Japan, to link up and give strength and suppor to the emerging contemporary dance groups and individuals as well as other connected organisations such as theatres, promoters and even critics. JCDN now runs an annual touring circuit, taking a large number of companies and individuals on tour throughout Japan and to other Asian countries. JCDN also arranges choreographic residencies for Japanese and foreignartists and exchanges with other countries. Recently, the importance of of the UK initiatives in community dance has been recognised and artists such as Cecilia Macfarland and Rosie Lee have run intergenerational projects and esrtablished Japanese choreographers have been commissioned o create work in community contexts. This work is adding to the work that Yuko Ajichi has been doing for some years (se Blog 1) with her Muse Company, bringing artists such as Wolfgang Stange to Japan.

Butoh.

Whichever way you turn in Japan, you come up against Butoh. Butoh was Japan's first post war indigenous modern dance/theatre form. In the post-war period, US modern dance was a driving force in Japanese dance, but in 1960, choreographer Tatsume Hijikata and performer Kazuo Ohno launched Butoh, the 'dance of darkness'. This was in part a raction to both the American modern dance tradition, which was seen as imported, and to the traditional dance-theatre forms such as Noh Theatre. There were some correspondences between Noh and Butoh, as far as I can tell, with Butoh borrowing the intense and slow pace of Noh and its sliding walk and transmuting its masks into a stark white make-up. The form's darkness seems to me to reflect the pain and devastation of Hiroshima and perhaps had some part to play in helping Jaqpan face its past - its miliyarism, the cataclysmic and humiliatingnature of its defeat (and the appallingmeans by which the defeat was effected) and its post-war years as a virtual American fiefdom. It's hard to imagine what that succession of events might mean to a nation's psyche, but I feel sure that Butoh has been on part an examination of that question.

Butoh's first performer, Kazuo Ohno, began his performking career in his 40s and is still al;ive at 103. He performed into his 90s. His son, Yoshito Ohno, works in his father's studio in Yokohama and, himself in his 70s, continues to perform in Kazuo's improvisational and theatrical style.

First Days

I've been in Japan for 9 days now and this is my first blog. I have been awarded a Churchill Travelling Fellowship to research older people and dance in Japan. I'm travelling with my partner, Jacky Lansley, who has received funding from two Japanese foundations to research interdisciplinary performance in Japan. Our interests co-incide at some points - we are editing a book of interviews with 'older' dancers we have conducted over the past 10 years and want to add one or two Japanese dancers to the list of interviewees. In both traditional and contemporary performing arts, older performers are almost the norm in Japan, which has the highest life xpectancy of any country in the world.

Arrived in Tokyo late on a Sunday night. On Monday visited Ueno Park, near where we're staying and was amazed to find the park thronging with thousands of people. After a while realised that this was the start of the Cherry Blossom Festival even though the cherry blossom was barely out. I was charmed by a delightful performance n the side of a path by a young man with a diabolo, accokpanied by a young woman playing the accordion. Both moved as dancers and blended skill with a light and humorous manner. Visited the National Gallery and saw paintings (portraits, long narrative cartoon-like sagas, battles), panels, kimonos, swords, statues of buddhas, shrines. Struck that there were very few Westerners anywhere - I suppose it is not anybody's holiday time right now and tourists are few.

Later that week we had a tortuous journey to find the studio of Yoshito Ohno. Yoshito is the son of Kazuo Ohno, one of the founders of Butoh dance - the particular manifestation of contemporary dance thatre that developed in Japan in the 50s and 60s and still has many practitioners of different kinds. Kazuo Ohno is still alive, though quite ill, at 103 (he was dancing well into his 90s) and Yoshito has kept his tradition alive and is a formidable performer and teacher in his own right. He must now be in is 70s. Having found the right train we got out at the wrong stop nd followed a rudimentary map that was psted on the studio's website deep into the heart of Yokohama suurbia. It was pouring with rain. With the almost inexplicable generosity of spirit that seems to be a feature of Japanese towards helpless foreigners, a man we asked the way of walked around the area with us for nearly an hour in the pouring rain. In fact he failed, but somehow, 5 minutes later, someone else took us to the door of the studio.

We found Yoshito conducting a small class, giving the participants each a piece of raw, unspun silk to improvise with, drawing out the different qualities of tensile strength and extreme softness. His own demonstrations were minimal, but moving and extraordinary. As the dancers worked, he played different musics and altered the lighting to bring a moment of total theatre to this small studio in a suburb of Yokohama. At the end of class, we joined him and the daners in eating garlic bread and drinking tea. Yoshito agreed to be nterviewed by us when we returned to Tokyo at the end of April.

The following day we visited Yuko Ajichi in her office in Tokyo. Yuko has been a pioneer in the development of community dance in Japan and has brought over such artists as Wolfgang Stange and Adam Benjamin, as wel as commissioning established Japanese choreographers to make work for integrated groups. With Yuko and two other artists, Aki and Hiromi, we spent several hours talking, eating and drinking. We made an arrangement to watch some classes that \aki regularly gives in a ay centre r people wth learning iabilities.

We rounded of an exhausting week (just negotiating Tokyo's transport system is a major test of endurance and ingenuity - it is n fact superb, but difficult to penetrate as an outsider) by going to see a production Henry VI, directed by Yukio Ninagawa, at he Saitama |Theatre on the outskirts of Tokyo. It was superb - the direction was a sort of choreography, played on a traverse stage with endless 'alarms and excursions' of fighting men hurtling from one side to the other. The physicality of the Japanese actors was striking and seemed t b second nature them. The following day we went back to the Saitama Theatre to talk to two of the producers about the work Ninagawa has been doing with the 'Golden Thjeatre of Saitama - a project now several years old of a non-professional company of older performers. They come from all over Japan and were selected by audition. There are 42 of them and new work is written for hem by playwrights. They rehearse for a month each year and perform for a month. Some of them have the opportunity to perform in other productions at the theatre - several of them were part of the 'mob' in Henry VI. It is obviously a very well-funded initiative and has a working practice that those of us who work with older people's theatre or dance groups might envy. Unfortunately, the group is not in rehearsal or performance right now, so we could not watch them.