for Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and later incorporated into the Zen Buddhist temple Rokuon-ji (otherwise known as Kinkaku-ji), it is thanks to buildings such as this one that Kyoto was mostly spared from damage during the Second World War. Though considered as a possible target for the atomic bomb that ultimately landed on Hiroshima, Kyoto was recognized as a city of such profound cultural importance that US Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson declared it to be “the one city that they must not bomb without my permission.” Yet throughout the war one of the young acolytes living at Rokuon-ji was longing for the bombs to land. He harbored a strange obsession with the Golden Pavilion that could only be consummated by seeing it burn down with him inside. When the war ended with the building still intact, the acolyte made its destruction his mission in life, plotting an act of simultaneous arson and suicide. He was half successful: in 1950 he burned the building to the ground, but lost his nerve and escaped the fire. Quickly arrested, tried, and jailed, he was found to be suffering from various mental and physical illnesses, and died within a few years. The Golden Pavilion, on the other hand, rose from the ashes: a gleaming replica was completed in 1955. There are conflicting opinions regarding the acolyte’s true motives (famously fictionalized in Mishima Yukio’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), but in any case the building you will see in Kyoto today is not the original Golden Pavilion. In fact, this was not even the first time it had been completely destroyed by fire, and like every wooden building in Japan it has been subject to frequent repair and constant replacement of parts over its lifetime. Very little of the structure has ever been “original” in any conventional sense. Yet, in the minds of the Japanese public, the current structure is indeed the real thing; it just happens to be made of new materials.
This demonstrates something quite fundamental about people’s attitudes toward historical authenticity in Japan. Naturally, if the Parthenon were to be destroyed and rebuilt, it would be seen as a substitute for the lost original. In the West, ideas may change but substance should be eternal; in the East, it seems that the opposite is true. Indeed, much of the traditional architecture you will encounter in Kyoto today may be old in form but relatively new in substance. Made of fragile materials—wood, paper, bamboo, earth— subject to a humid climate and frequent natural disasters, these buildings require constant repair. The fabric of the city has its own languid metabolism, a pulse of ongoing construction and destruction, replication and renewal. Manifesting the paradoxical Japanese love of both the patinated and the pristine, these artifacts from the ancient past are suffused with the smell of freshly cut wood and newly laid tatami mats, surrounded by fastidiously manicured hedges and raked gravel. The houses and gardens of Kyoto remain ageless.
Perhaps the most common phrase to be found on a kakejiku (hanging scroll) in a tokonoma alcove is ichi go ichi e (“one occasion, one encounter”). The implication is that every moment is irreducibly unique. Above and beyond historical narratives and cultural intentions, the ineffable spaces, shadows, scents, and sounds of these houses and gardens are best experienced in all their sensual immediacy and intensity, right here and right now.
aristocratic villas
One of the more curious aspects of Imperial rule during Kyoto’s thousand-year tenure as capital of Japan is the insei (cloistered rule) system, in which an Emperor would officially retire but continue to exert power from behind the scenes. Abdicating at an early age and forcing one of his own children—often no more than an infant—to ascend the Chrysanthemum Throne, the Emperor would take the title of daijo tenno (Retired Emperor) or, in cases where he entered the Buddhist priesthood, the title of daijo hoo (Cloistered Emperor). It was not unknown for there to be several Retired Emperors living at the same time, but only one would be acknowledged to have authority. For most of Kyoto’s history, this was more or less irrelevant anyway: real power lay elsewhere. At the end of the Heian Period (794–1185) it had become generally accepted that the Retired Emperor was ruling with the titular Emperor as a figurehead, yet at that same historical moment effective control of the nation shifted to the military government of the Kamakura Shogunate. From the Kamakura Period (1185–1333) onward, the balance of power continued to oscillate between the military dictators and the Imperial family, but for the most part lay beyond a somewhat farcical series of façades: a nominal Emperor who was controlled by a Retired Emperor who answered to the Shogun who delegated to his military generals.
It was this very lack of ultimate responsibility that allowed the Retired Emperors the freedom to cultivate their hobbies, to study and contribute to the development of arts such as the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and calligraphy. Imperial wealth was used to sponsor and indulge poets, painters, and sculptors. Those Retired Emperors and other members of the nobility who commissioned retirement villas and summer palaces often collaborated on the designs with the carpenters and gardeners they employed. Produced for the wealthiest clients on the best sites by the most skilful artisans using the highest-grade materials, the aristocratic villas of Kyoto are quintessential examples of the qualities of traditional Japanese architecture.
Katsura Imperial Villa
LOCATION NISHIGYO-KU
ESTABLISHED IN 1615
BUILT FOR HACHIJONOMIYA TOSHIHITO
Invariably described as the apotheosis of sukiya -style architecture, the buildings and gardens that make up Katsura Imperial Villa in fact display an eclectic hybrid of design approaches. The architecture juxtaposes and intermingles shoin and sukiya elements and spaces, with even a trace of the shinden style in its relationship to the garden and miniature lake. It is, of course, this very heterogeneity that defines Katsura as an exemplar of purest sukiya.
One of two surviving Imperial villas located in Kyoto (the other is Shugakuin Imperial Villa), Katsura Imperial Villa was originally built in 1615 as a country residence for Prince Toshihito (1579–1629), a member of the Hachijonomiya family, and later expanded by his son, Prince Toshitada (1619–62). The three main buildings—Koshoin, Chushoin, and Shingoten—were built in stages, cumulatively forming a linked, diagonally stepping composition known as ganko (flying geese). As well as reducing the apparent building volume, the subtle dynamism of this arrangement enhances natural light and ventilation inside, and creates intimate relationships with the lake outside. Four unique tea houses are distributed throughout the villa grounds, and the whole comprises a picturesque kaiyushiki teien (stroll garden) around the lake. The many historical accounts of visits by members of the nobility to Katsura Imperial Villa invariably mention touring the garden by boat as well as by foot, stopping to admire the view at prescribed locations. Indeed, despite the naturalistic appearance, every part of the garden has been deliberately and precisely composed using a design technique known as miegakure, in which various elements alternately disappear and reappear in different aspects as one moves about. Undoubtedly the finest example of the integration of architecture and environment to be found in Japan, Katsura Imperial Villa’s complexities and contradictions have allowed observers to interpret it in multiple ways—during the early twentieth century several notable European architects believed they had discovered here a precursor to the modernist simplicity and functionalism they were then pursuing.