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First published in Japan by Sekaibunka Publishing Inc. 2016
First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books 2018
Copyright © Alex Kerr and Kathy Arlyn Sokol, 2016
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Illustrations by Tetsuji Fujihara
ISBN: 978-0-141-98834-4
Foreword
ONE Gates 
TWO Walls 
THREE Shin Gyo So 
FOUR Floors 
FIVE Tatami 
SIX Plaques 
SEVEN Fusuma 
EIGHT Screens 
NINE Enma-do 
Acknowledgements
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When I studied Chinese classics at Oxford, at the end of each term there was a terrifying event, called “Handshaking.” Dressed in a medieval black frock, each student in turn would be ushered into a room lined with oil paintings, in which he found his professor along with the Master of the College, and some other dons seated at the end of a long oak table. You sat at one end of the table, the dons sat at the other, and they talked about you. Not always flatteringly.
Fresh from 1960s liberated America, I was badly equipped to handle the British dry approach to study. In Japan I’d been imbued with Zen and old thatched farmhouses, which fit poorly with the academic fine points I was supposed to be learning. My tutors viewed me as a Japan-influenced hippy. The low point came when I was asked to write an essay on China’s ancient book of divination, the I Ching. I discussed its historical background, the philology of the unusual characters found in its text, what later commentators had said about it—all the stuff that had been assigned in my tutorial. At the end of the essay, I wrote, “But this is just background. The main thing about the I Ching is that it works.”
That was the last straw. When I walked into Handshaking at the end of that term, I saw grim faces at the end of the table. One of my tutors had written a letter to the dons, which was read aloud. It went on for some time. The concluding words were: “Mr. Kerr is your typical American. He lacks academic rigor. He researches only the ephemera that draw his interest; he’s quick to latch on to superstitions, myths, and oddities. He waves these peculiar interpretations around as if they were sparklers. His tales are not scholarship, and they are not to be given credit, all his protestations notwithstanding.”
I say this in the name of proper disclosure, because this book follows more or less in the vein of that ill-fated I Ching essay. The inspiration to write it came from fellow writer and longtime Kyoto resident Kathy Arlyn Sokol, with whom I’ve often gone on temple-viewing outings. One day Kathy commented, “I wish we had a record of the things you say as we walk through these temples. I think our conversations should be shared with others.” So we decided to create a book that wouldn’t be written, but rather spoken. We sat down with a recorder, and over several years, I would talk and Kathy recorded and transcribed. She sent edited transcripts to me and I used these as the base for an expanded text, which Kathy edited again. Back and forth it went, until finally we completed these nine essays. While they’ve been rewritten and revised, we’ve tried to keep the tone closer to speech than to writing.
I’ve lived in Kyoto for decades, but what brought me to Kyoto was a coincidence. It was not that I had set my heart on being here. When I was quite young my family moved to Yokohama in 1964. I went to school there and later attended university in Tokyo—very far from Kyoto and Kansai. While in university, I discovered Iya Valley in Shikoku and later bought an old thatched farmhouse in the Iya mountains, a house that became my passion. I used to commute between Tokyo and Iya, with Kyoto being just a place I passed through on the way.
I don’t think I would ever have come to live in Kyoto except that I met art collector David Kidd, who became my mentor. David, who had lived in a Ming palace in Beijing before coming to Japan in the early 1950s, was a connoisseur and a great wit. He’s much quoted in this book. In 1976, David founded a program of traditional arts at Oomoto Foundation, located in Kameoka, a town at the western edge of Kyoto, and he asked me to come and help out with the Oomoto school. Without realizing what I was getting into, I obeyed David, came to Oomoto, and had a life-changing discovery of Tea ceremony, Noh drama, martial arts, and so on. A year later, after graduating university, I took a job at Oomoto’s International Department. In 1977 I moved into an old house in Kameoka—and I’ve been here ever since.
Living just outside of Kyoto, I found myself regularly going into the city. In those days it was a different place from Kyoto today. There were many beautiful old houses still standing. The temples hadn’t been polished to the state in which we see them now. They were dingier, darker, but there were fewer rules about what rooms you could enter and whether you could take a photo or not. You could get up close to an old ink painting hung in a murky tokonoma alcove that turned out to be a masterpiece, or push open a door along a corridor and find a secret garden beyond it.
Kyoto is very much on the world tourism route, so I always had a lot of visitors. Anyone who lives here finds that they are constantly taking guests to visit temples. Since I had to do these tours so often, I came up with a “Three-to-One” policy. Each time visiting friends and I went out, we would go to the three famous places they wanted to see, and then to one place that I wanted to see. It might be a minor temple I’d read about somewhere, or a little-visited back garden within the grounds of a famous place. Discoveries could be found just a few steps off the well-beaten tourist path.
“Three-to-One” was a way to relieve the monotony of always traipsing to see the same clichéd sites. Yet repeatedly brought back to these sites for the sake of my visitors, I learned that there’s an “off-the-beaten path” way to look at even the most famous landmarks. Standing yet again at tourist-clogged Kiyomizu or Kinkakuji, in my boredom I’d look away from where I’d always looked before, and I would notice something; like the little “roofs” sheltering the ends of all the wooden crossbeams sticking out from the framework beneath Kiyomizu’s verandah. That made me think about roofs. And suddenly the familiar old place looked new.
Confucius said, “When I reached sixty, my ears were in order” (
). I always thought that an odd remark. But as the years went by, I realized that you needed to look and look again before these places would unlock their secrets. One could call it “getting one’s eyes in order.” For one temple, the experience might be gradual, like a photographic image emerging in a chemical bath in the darkroom. For another, a new way of looking would come in one “Ah hah!” moment.
I once saw hanging in a tearoom a calligraphy with words by Zen master Dogen that said, “In all the world, there’s nothing really hidden” (
). Everything we need to know is right there in front of us if we would just look at it. Likewise, most of the insights that Kathy and I arrived at turned out to be nothing very secret. It was just a matter of revisiting the obvious.
For example, before you talk about Kyoto, you need to start with Japan. That would seem obvious enough. Well, what was Japan? It was the end of the line of the Silk Road. For millennia, people and objects, knowledge and cultural traditions, religion and philosophy flowed here from Persia, India, Tibet, Korea, China, Java, Siam, and the South Seas.
Japan, a group of islands removed from the turmoil of the continent, took these things and slowly polished them. As centuries went by, Buddhism vanished from India, Chinese dynasties came and went, but their cultural treasures, like time capsules packed off and sent to another planet, survived destruction in their countries of origin—in Japan. This country ended up as a giant storehouse of ancient Asian wisdom. Within Japan, for a thousand years Kyoto was the capital, and so, compressed into this small space, the best and most precious were further refined.
The Meiji Restoration came along in 1868, and Japan modernized. It began to lose its link to that tradition, but one city had the critical mass of weavers, dyers, Tea ceremony schools, Noh drama, Zen temples, and Shinto shrines, and cocooned within these protective shells, the knowledge of old things survived in Kyoto. The treasure house at the end of the Silk Road that had been Japan shrank down to the treasure chest of Kyoto, making this city urgently important for anybody interested in Asian culture. It’s all here.
In the process of doing this book, it became clear that the themes of Kyoto are truly endless. Kathy and I could easily do another nine essays. In fact we did do another set, but reluctantly put them aside so that this book could be of manageable length. Maybe one day, we’ll polish up the remaining essays for a new edition.
This book is neither a coherent history nor a summing up of everything important about Kyoto, nor even about one particular temple. I don’t go into much detail about the facts of things. Actually, that’s not right. The book is bursting with facts, but only the ones that were helpful in taking me and Kathy into the byways we wanted to explore. For a thoroughgoing introduction to Kyoto, I recommend John Dougill’s Kyoto: A Cultural History, with its detailed historical outline, and Gouverneur Mosher’s enchanting Kyoto: A Contemplative Guide, which tells the tales of twelve famous places.
Another thing I remember from my Oxford days is a tutorial on the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, who used to talk about the “wanderings of the truth picker” (
). This book is about letting the mind wander in the whys of things. Why temple gates needn’t have doors, but gardens must always have fences. In these talks, Kathy and I found that the starting point might be something as trivial as the cracks between tatami mats. Wandering on from that, but of course never, ever, stepping on those cracks, we arrived at unexpected conclusions about Japanese society.
What’s in these pages doesn’t fit in with the history of Japan or Kyoto as usually taught or understood. Much of it is just “lore.” It’s oral history of a zany sort, because the thoughts are scattered and come from so many random people and places, an anecdote I once heard from a Shinto priest at Oomoto, or a witticism casually dropped by David Kidd.
Much of what I say may turn out not even to be true. Although it should have been. In short, what you will find here is not scholarship, and it’s not to be given credit, all my protestations notwithstanding.
