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Culture and the Gods - Japan vs. the Christian West 

Culture and the Gods

In any analysis of Japanese architecture, two historical considerations must be kept in mind for a proper understanding of its depth and complexity: First, that the institutions of all modern cultures—from politics, economics, communications, and sports to art, music, dance, and theater—are descended from sacred rituals dedicated to the God or gods of those cultures. And second, that these institutions have become secularized over time as their functions devolved from a means of influencing the gods to ends in themselves that influence humans not as beneficiaries, but as consumers. These realities are crystallized in the following quotes from Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959).

“Society must always be a secular superstructure on a sacred base.”

“The gods, over time, retreat into invisibility, bringing the emancipation of the social power structure and the economic process from divine control and divine ends.”

In short, Japanese architecture developed from the relationship the Japanese people maintained with their gods. Those gods are an integral part of daily life in Japan. There are eight million kami (“spirit deities”) according to Japanese mythology—creator kami, nature kami, ancestor kami, and mortals elevated to kami status—collectively known as yaoyorozu no kami. Moreover, these deities are bioregionally endemic to the Japanese archipelago given their inextricable connection to not only specific areas of the country, but the imperial family. (As a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess, the emperor is believed to be a living god.)

In traditional homes, household guardian deities were essentially “part of the family.” The kamidana (“family Shinto altar”) (Fig. 25) overlooks the living or main room from a shelf situated above eye level, while the kōjin or sanbōkōjin (“god of fire, hearth, and kitchen”) (Fig. 26) is guardian of the elements and locale of food preparation.1 On the grounds outside the house are the idogami (“god of the well”) (Fig. 27) and kawaya no kami or benjogami (“god of the toilet”) (Fig. 28).2 Then there are special occasions, including oshōgatsu (“New Year”), when the toshigami (“year god”) (Fig. 29) is invited into Japanese homes for three days of ritual food, drink, social networking and recreation3 to help ensure a safe, healthy, and prosperous coming year.

While the household gods oversee their domestic domains, higher ranking, shrine-based kami regularly join their mortal supplicants at matsuri (“festivals”) designed to elicit their blessings. Depending on the festival’s objective, its agenda could entail days of bacchanalian feasting, drinking, performative entertainment, and orgiastic abandon. Until the not-so-distant past, fertility festivals culminated with participating villagers randomly coupling with fertility gods that had taken on the appearance of fellow opposite-sex villagers, often masked, as the means of requesting abundant children and crop harvests.4 To reiterate, the physical act of intercourse was the request to the fertility goddess.

This lifestyle of intimate proximity to the gods that continued for millennia is still alive and well in the Japanese belief that mortal humans occupy the same reality as the immortal kami they worship. There is, of course, a border within this shared reality that separates mortality from immortality—the border between the realms of the sacred and the profane. The sacred realm, by definition, is the realm of the gods, while home for mortals is the secular realm of work and daily life. The sacred realm is a realm of magic, the domain of supernatural power, the forum where mortals enlist that power on their own behalf. (Now as then, the Japanese expect their requests to be granted.) The sacred realm is the realm of miracles and cataclysms, of creation and destruction, of life and death.

Even in today’s more international, more secular Japan, the degree of ritualization still infusing daily life demonstrates the culture’s fealty to its kami. One feature of Shinto is the permeability of the sacred-profane interface; humans can enter and exit the sacred realm at will, as they do regularly at festivals and other ritual celebrations. In ancient times, however, Japanese dependence on their gods—read “nature” in their animistic worldview—dictated that almost every act in daily life was undertaken only after ritual requests for the gods’ approval. Motivated by fear of the kami’s wrath should they neglect their obligations, showing the gods proper respect was an absolute condition for living in harmony with nature.

The Japanese remain aware of their special relationship of co-dependence on their natural environment, although not to the extent that the sense of urgency dominated their lives in the past. They feel a kinship with nature as a hybrid of mother surrogate and womb-like oasis of spiritual rejuvenation, much like Antaeus, son of the Earth goddess Gaea in Greek mythology, whose strength was renewed whenever he touched the earth. Animate and inanimate denizens of nature are regarded by many as fellow members of an extended family from which the Japanese derive a sense of security by being part of “something bigger.” They see nature as a dimension permeated with spiritual essence. This is the culture that, even today, promotes the healing qualities of shinrinyoku (“forest bathing”) as spiritual purification and revitalization that has been described as a “symbolic return to the womb” and “spiritual “homecoming.”

Bringing Nature Inside

The goal of the traditional Japanese home was to create a living space that struck a harmonious balance between man and nature—where residents were shielded from the threats of the natural world, while enjoying its beauty and life-sustaining bounty. Architects relied on innovative structural design and building techniques to integrate the natural world into human lifestyles, including a sense of closeness and belonging to nature via outdoor sights, sounds and smells throughout the household interior. 

An important part of Japanese architecture in the medieval period was the blending of home and garden, a style initially enjoyed only by the samurai class. The garden was designed to be viewed from various points in the house by moving back sliding windows and walls. The garden itself was typically landscaped and might contain trees, flowering shrubs, groups of special grasses, areas of moss, artificial hills, water features, and a rock garden, although it was not necessarily a large space as these features could be miniaturized.

Construction Techniques and Guidelines

Natural techniques, materials and aesthetics from roof to foundation were a traditional sign of respect for the structure’s natural environment—the gods of nature. In response to a worldview based on change and the impermanent nature of life, the ancient Japanese arrived at the “natural” solution: do not build to last. Rather than resisting the environment, houses were designed to follow its whims, so if the worst happened, they could be easily rebuilt again. This approach resulted in few old Japanese buildings surviving to the present day, but the architectural styles, techniques and guidelines that showcase the cultural and spiritual values of Japan’s heritage most certainly have.

• Simplicity in natural materials, natural techniques and functional design. No waste. Natural resources used fully and efficiently.

• The preference for living materials preserved in their raw, unfinished state after completion of construction.

• Consistency between the part and the whole, one implying the other. Uniformity of means and ends throughout. Every part of a traditional Japanese house suggests the structure in its entirety, and vice versa.

• This holistic approach identifies the house itself, including its structural and conceptual components, as “a living member” of its natural environment.

The Christian West

The Japanese relationship with nature and Shinto stands in stark contrast with that of the Christian West, its patriarchal power structure and monotheistic God. Whereas the Japanese have always enjoyed a more intimate, personal relationship with their kami due to those deities’ physical proximity and prolific numbers, many Christians feel separated from God by the immeasurable distance to Heaven, omnipresence notwithstanding. As in Shinto, however, the Christian attitude towards nature mirrors the image of that God. Christians see their God as the Supreme Deity over all others, and themselves, in the Jewish tradition, as the “chosen ones” by virtue of that God’s “higher authority.” God’s judgment being infallible, what stands in His way—obstacles to His interests or “manifest destiny”—must be vanquished. This posture is reminiscent of the battle cries of ancient tribal warfare that, “My god is better than your god,” and reinforced by centuries of enslavement and warfare of the ancient Hebrew tribes.

As creator of the universe, including the natural environment on planet Earth, God is nature’s master. This right of “authorship,” in turn, entitles His believers to free reign in advancing agendas deemed to be in His interests. Church dogma, which pits the higher realm of the soul against the lower realm of the body, a.k.a. “the flesh,” portrays nature as a chaotic domain of soulless creatures, vegetation and natural formations. The soul is pristine purity, while nature is savage, sinful, and, in every sense, “dirty.” It is without law, structure or order, ruled only by base passions and survival of the strongest—the antithesis of the reason, self-restraint, morality, and godliness of the Christian soul. Sexual intercourse, for instance, is a sin of the flesh on the level of unbridled animal impulse. It must be blessed by God in the sacrament of marriage to receive Christ’s blessing, and even then, only for purposes of reproduction. (In Japan, sex was originally a sacred act.) Spiritually, the faithful must conquer nature or be conquered by it.

Christians feel little kinship with nature, and perhaps even less inclination to coexist with or bring the natural world into their homes. In their eyes, nature has little intrinsic value except as one of God’s creations, giving Him the right to do with it as He sees fit. As sex is a necessary evil in replenishing the armies of Christ, so natural resources are a means to an end—materials to build His Kingdom—in furthering God’s plan for mankind. Moreover, by extension the Christian dominion over nature extends to conquests of its non-Christian human occupants, who are likewise soulless. Christianity’s de facto policy as a proselytizing faith calls for such heathens to be converted, subjugated or, if that fails, exterminated.

Christians take pride in the conquest of nature as the expansion of God’s estate and reaffirmation of His authority. The golden age of the Christian landgrab was the Age of Exploration—fifteenth to seventeenth centuries—as European explorers seized land worldwide occupied by native inhabitants in the name of God and country. The Christian conquerors subjugated the people, colonized their territories, and, in some cases, continued the oppression well into the twentieth century. Today, this pride in conquest remains evident in such venues as the popular television series “Yellowstone,” in which Kevin Costner as John Dutton looks out with satisfaction on the vast estate his family appropriated from Native Americans a century earlier. Christians feel justified in such conquests, legitimizing them as God’s will, taming the land as they tamed the wild stallions that once roamed free on it. As the Christian God created man in His own image, so His believers recreated—and continue to recreate—the natural world in theirs.

There are two major features differentiating the architectural styles that emerge from these respective worldviews. First, while Japanese architecture reflects its culture’s philosophy of living in harmony with nature, its Western counterpart is designed to protect residents from outdoor environments seen as qualitatively more inhospitable. Christian homes present a more impermeable man-nature interface, largely shutting out nature, as opposed to Japan’s “open door” policy of inviting it in.

Second, in contrast with Japan’s transitory worldview and cyclical calendar, Western architecture reflects the Christian reverence for permanence and linear time leading to Christ’s Second Coming at the End of Days. This worldview is reflected in the many European buildings made of stone as durable, time-defying monuments that served as centerpieces of cities in the transition to urbanization. This transition began centuries sooner in Christian Europe than in Japan, providing a clear contrast between the two traditional styles of architecture in terms of lifestyle base and primary building material: Japanese nature and wood (Fig. 36) versus European cities and stone (Fig. 37). Archeologists have noted the complete rupture between the foundations of the first cities and the previous rural style of life that those city dwellers abandoned. While the lives of rural villagers fit their natural surroundings, Henri Frankfort argues that, “the city was at variance, rather than in keeping, with the natural order,” with Norman O. Brown presenting the psychological perspective that, “The city reflects the new masculine aggressive psychology of revolt against the female principles of dependence and nature.”

The first major break with the nature-based lifestyle came in the area of food production. Cities, by definition, are divorced from primary food production; the earliest urban centers were settlements of men who depended for their sustenance on the production of agricultural labor not their own. These cities were founded away from the harvest fields of the country—from nature—with walls built to mark off this new kind of space. The second break, related to the first, was the concentration of religious power. Cities have always been sacred spaces; the first were cathedral cities, their economies devoted to sacred ends, “a divine household.” The temple buildings that dominated the first cities were enduring monuments to the gods or, in the Christian West, God. Since the Middle Ages, stone has served as the primary construction material for churches and castles—the repositories of power in these sacred centers. In contrast, Japanese cities have been described as retaining many features, indeed the “feel,” of rural life (Fig. 38, 39). The following quote from Frank Lloyd Wright, while metaphorically curious in the extreme, graphically portrays the architect as less than a fan of the urban jungle: “To look at the plan of a great city is to look at something like the cross-section of a fibrous tumor.”

Footnotes

1 This god is also referred to as kamadogami and kamagami.  

2 Indoor plumbing is a recent convenience in middle-class Japanese homes.

3 Oshōgatsu was observed for up to two weeks in the past, and is still celebrated for one week in certain regions of Japan.

4 In the invisible world of the gods, the human, animal and vegetable fertility principles were one and the same. It was widely believed in Japan that when the male semen ejaculated into the female, the gods auguring human fertility would be simultaneously moved to cause germination in the crops. In some places, copulation was also considered essential to the successful culture of silkworms.

Culture and the Gods in Satsuma

I have already found many examples of the traditional features described above in the two weeks I have been in Japan, both here and in Obama. In addition, there are more-or-less standard fixtures that, while not architectural features per se, are found in Japanese homes with equal or greater regularity: the kamidana (family Shinto altar) (Fig. 40) and the butsudan (family Buddha altar) (Fig. 41).

The focus of the kamidana is on protection by household gods and ritual magic. In my grandmother’s house, it is located in the kitchen. The primary “occupant” of this miniature wooden shrine is the sanbōkōjin—the god of fire, hearth and kitchen, which watches over food preparation requiring the use of fire and the areas of preparation. Other ritual offerings on the Takenouchi kamidana include sacred sakaki leaves, a cup of tea, and a ritual good luck artifact known as a Daruma doll. Rice cakes known as mochi are also offered, but all perishable offerings must remain fresh while on the altar.

The butsudan, on the other hand, is associated with matters of death as the family’s gateway to their ancestors. This is an altar used to pray to and communicate with the souls of ancestors and recently deceased family members. It contains ritual artifacts and offerings, as well as photographs of grandparents and great-grandparents. There is etiquette to be observed before praying to loved ones at the butsudan: lighting a stick of incense, placing it in the ashtray and striking the singing bowl. The butsudan is often located in one of the main rooms in the tokonoma, a recessed space used to display scrolls, artifacts and other decorative pieces.

Based on the close relationship the Japanese have with nature and nature gods, one of the features of the traditional architecture has been to bring nature into the house. The goal is a balance between inside and outside spaces by allowing access to nature without direct exposure to potential real-life dangers. Below are some examples that I have observed and read about:

Week 2: Return to Kagoshima

My aunt met me at Kagoshima station, an hour’s drive from my grandmother’s house (Fig. 46). I’d been there many times, but had not seen it—or her—in five years. She’s relatively healthy for 94, but she is 94, so this trip was very special to me. The house was just as I remembered. The center of activity was still the kotatsu (Fig. 47), a low table with built-in heating element and blankets that trap the heat under the table, where it warms users’ legs. The only new additions were a flushing toilet—replacing the previous plastic seat over a deep pit—and my aunt’s cat, a stray she adopted several years ago.

I have always loved this house, and it was nostalgic to walk through it again. But this time it took on new meaning, because now I was looking at it with more analytical eyes. I found them gravitating to the various wooden surfaces, admiring the grain and the types of joints used.  One area I studied at length was the back room and hallway, which had no ceiling, leaving the underside of the roof exposed (Figs. 48, 49). This gave me an unobstructed view of the rafters—connected by wooden joints throughout—including holes in some beams where other beams had once fit. My grandmother explained that these beams had come from another house, which had been disassembled to provide the materials for this now hundred-year-old frame.

Another interesting discovery—one I could appreciate only after touring Hosshinji and being here now—were the similarities between the temple and this house. That is, the timber framing of both structures, the use of open space (Fig. 50) with optional privacy by closing the fusuma (Fig. 51), and the layout of the temple and my grandmother’s house came from the same architectural school of thought.

I found many of the same resemblances in my uncle’s house next door, a newer structure built in the early 1970s. The frame is wood and the rooms are partitioned with fusuma, which can be opened to create one large room for family gatherings or other functions (Fig. 52). The room layout is not identical to that of my grandmother’s, but follows the same basic style. Which, from my perspective, shows that, despite the break with traditional architectural styles in urban areas, many Satsuma residents remain partial to the old ways.

Another interesting feature of the three houses I had access to—my grandmother’s and, next door, my uncle’s and great-uncle’s (scheduled for renovation)—was the height of the ceilings. I first noticed that, in my grandmother’s four-room home, the ceilings of the two front rooms were higher than those of the remaining two. After that, I found the same height disparity in my great-uncle’s house, but not in my uncle’s, which was built half a century later. My grandmother explained that this height difference was a social courtesy extended to guests—a throwback to Japan’s class hierarchy—with the eventual house-wide standardization reflecting the loosening of those feudal norms.

But although I was gaining a new appreciation of traditional Japanese architecture, the actual renovation of my great-uncle’s house—my apprenticeship—was being held up by a paperwork delay with no foreseeable resolution. That being the case, I plan to continue exploring the town and hopefully meet the carpenter face-to-face. I already have many questions for him, and look forward to seeing the tools of his trade and, if I’m lucky, some of his past projects around town.

One of the things I have always loved about my grandmother's house is the view from the side veranda, or engawa—a charming collection of flowers, wild and planted, and garden with okra, eggplant, string beans, pumpkins, blueberries and more (Fig. 53). Across the road, wet rice paddies extend as far as the eye can see and, beyond them, mountains (Fig. 54). The garden’s horn of plenty has no single harvest date—just pick and eat when ready. My grandmother estimates that over half the homes in Satsuma keep gardens of varying sizes that produce one crop or another throughout most of the year. I grew up in the American suburbs, but this is a life that, for me, wouldn’t take much getting used to.

This concludes Week 2. I hope it was informative and entertaining. Next week, I will be visiting the house that the carpenter and I will eventually be renovating, and maybe even starting to work on if my uncle’s paperwork is approved. Thanks for tuning in, hope to see you for the next one.