Having recently been to Naoshima to see the pumpkin sculptures by Kusama Yayoi, I came home and watched Donald Keene's film 'The Island Sea' for the first time in years. He wrote the book first and then made the film thirty years with music by the late Takemitsu Toru. It is a lament for a disappearing Japan and Keene makes no bones about his preference for diversity over oneness.
Keene first visits a temple which is in disrepair and will cost a lot to rebuild. The priest is in a dilemma should he repair the temple at great cost or destroy it and build a new one? To preserve things costs a lot of money hes says. He loves the music of Sinatra as his sister loved the movies of Audrey Hepburn..
Keene then visits a shrine at the shrine at the top of a hill which is appropriate says Keene as to arrive out of breathe is to arrive as if you are new born. Shinto, he explains, is the only animist religion left in the world. Its essence is unknown and unknowable just like us!
Keene reflects on various truths that he has come to know about Japan and the Japanese. In Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku Keene visits a plaza which is an unusual space for Japan... Rarely do they acknowledge their love of aimless wandering he says. From his boat he observes a shrine on a hill and says the greatest beauty is always accidental... Beauty, he says, depends on a context. And once the context is seen it becomes inevitable. Keene describes himself as being suddenly very happy. Compared to when he is in Tokyo, he knows who he is. He is a man in a boat looking at a landscape...
One island he visits is the site of the Heike and the Genji wars, massacres that were held according to pre-determined rules. Elaborate etiquette and formality was necessary for the killing if women and children as it is for the drinking of a simple cup of tea. He also visits Oshima where there was a leprosorium. Music was piped around the island for the blind so they could find their way. It is a beautiful but inaccessible place. At night they can see the lights of Takamastu.
Keene then then visits the man harvesting seaweed. He enjoys his freedom. He says he doesn't have to answer to anyone in a big company. They truly are a sea people, says Keene, an island people. It is hard to imagine them in big cities; ancient castles and modern cities are not their true homes. But they have been changed by history, they became suspicious under the long lasting rule of the Tokugawa family. In reality they are more Mediterranean than Asian... They must have all been like that throughout the islands
Over time the inhabitants of the Inland Sea eave been called backward... Being restricted to their villages they knew their own island but nothing about the nest... A good catch of fish and a local festival was what they could relate to... The rest of the country was irrelevant. The crew visited a local school where there classroom with only one student in them.
On the island of Ikuchi a new temple at Satoda by a wealthy businessman in memory of his mother. He built copies of famous sites around Japan in a new temple so that people didn't have to travel too far. For example, he built a replica of the Nikko Gate, In this way argues Keene, kitsch becomes art like the Albert memorial in London. The old man wanted to make something beautiful. In the process he created his own world. He forced the world to recognise his vision like a true artist
Keene's commentary turned inward after this point. He looked at the concepts of loneliness and being lonesome. He argues that there is a distinction between the two that Japan fosters and observes. One often feels like a foreigner in Japan. Silent, Keene decides to give way to his emotions and be unhappy, Japan teaches us, however, he observes, to distrust the emotions, You can change your mood like you can change your mind.
When travelling Keene observes there is never enough to do. Travellers inevitably need to fill up the emptiness. Sex is one way to take home some attractive memories. Keene suggests that there is no better way to take the temperature of the land... Sex is the ideal souvenir...
He next looks at Japanese women and how a fifteen year old girl can never again be the person she is now. She will forget what it was like to be fifteen. The girl he is talking to has been promised in marriage by her father to another man. She says the conversation took fifteen minutes. Asked about the young man she is to marry she says he is a hard worker.
He next looks at Japanese women and how a fifteen year old girl can never again be the person she is now. She will forget what it was like to be fifteen. The girl he is talking to has been promised in marriage by her father to another man. She says the conversation took fifteen minutes. Asked about the young man she is to marry she says he is a hard worker.
Next Keene talks to an old woman who lost her husband during the war. She had to work hard to support her children. She did this by selling papers for over thirty years and by selling fish in the mountains. To do this this she had to carry a baby on her back.
Keene talks about the postcard views on the Inland Sea. He observes that foreign visitors either love or loathe Japan. He looks at the examples of Lafcadio Hearne and Bernard Shaw. Hearne fell in love with the country. Bernard Shaw loathed it and refused to take his shoes off on the tatami floors. Keene observes that only in appearances lies the true reality...
On some of the islands there are now no people living there. Some of these were used as submarine bases during the war. They are not much visited. There are only ruins. There are warrens of tunnels that once had a purpose. There are bunkers that housed machine guns. The tunnels once led somewhere filled with running troops. Now they lie open. There are names scratched on the walls. The names of school girls and soldiers...
Visiting Hiroshima, he says that the city, the largest in southern Honshu is too important to become a museum.. Despite the atom bomb life goes on... One forgets death... Life is too strong except on one occasion for each individual. Keene says that Hearne died having written 'Japan an Interpretation'. Rather than being about Japan this book was about himself. He was interpreting himself. Keene is not going to find the Japanese because they are all around him and real. He thought that he could find himself. In Japan there are no demands on outsiders.. A foreigner will always belong to a one member society. A foreigner will always be different. A foreigner is tolerated but is only responsible to himself. There is a respite with the weather. It will be an Indian summer, all the more lovely because it is false.
The beautiful shrine of Itsukushima is. designed to to be experienced not viewed. One is meant to wander... There are no walls in the shrine so one looks through the shrine like through a forest. It is truly a sea country with many of its most beautiful shrines facing the sea. When considering the qualities of the Japanese Keene sees that because of globalisation the reality of one world is coming. In the meantime he wants to celebrate our differences for as long as possible...
