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
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Sakora kubuki means a cherry blossom blizzard
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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.
