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Overview
"An elegiac prose celebration . . . a classic in its genre."—Publishers Weekly
In this acclaimed travel memoir, Donald Richie paints a memorable portrait of the island-studded Inland Sea. His existential ruminations on food, culture, and love and his brilliant descriptions of life and landscape are a window into an Old Japan that has now nearly vanished. Included are the twenty black and white photographs by Yoichi Midorikawa that accompanied the original 1971 edition.
Donald Richie (1924-2013) was an internationally recognized expert on Japanese culture and film.
Yoichi Midorikawa (1915-2001) was one of Japan's foremost nature photographers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611729160 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stone Bridge Press |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 745,542 |
| File size: | 18 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Yoichi Midorikawa: Yoichi Midorikawa (1915-2001) was one of Japan's foremost nature photographers. His work was widely published and received many Japanese and international awards.
Read an Excerpt
I hear they are building a bridge
To the island of Tsu. Alas . . .
To what now
Shall I compare myself?
—old Japanese poem
THE INLAND SEA is a nearly landlocked, lakelike body of water bounded by three of Japan’s four major islands. It is entered through but four narrow straits, three opening to the south into the Pacific Ocean and one—called Kammon or Barrier Gate—to the west into the narrow sea that separates Japan from Korea and the rest of Asia.
By Japanese standards it is a long sea. At approximately the same latitudes in other parts of the world it would stretch from Little Rock to Dallas, from Cyprus almost to Crete. But, like the land of Japan itself, it is also narrow.
Traveling westward along its length, one feels the shores pressing close, as though it were a large river rather than a small sea. On the right are the mountains of Hoshu—in the foreground, low hills ranged one behind the other and then, behind them, the snow-capped spine of the country itself, the Japan Alps. On the left are first the sharp and Chinese-looking mountains of the island of Shikoku, so different that it appears another land, and then the flat coasts of Kyushu. This shallow sea is a valley among these mountainous islands.
It has been called the Aegean of the East. There are, however, differences. The Greek islands are few, and they stand from the sea as though with an effort, as though to indicate the water’s great depth. The islands of the shallow Inland Sea are different. They are small, and there are many—hundreds of them, so many that a full count has never been made, or certainly not one that everyone can agree upon. They rise gracefully from this protected, stormless sea, as if they had just emerged, their beaches, piers, harbors all intact. Some have springs, most have wells; many are covered with forest, almost all have trees or bushes. A castaway, given the choice between a Greek and a Japanese island, would swim toward the latter. It looks like a place where it would be nice to live.
Grandeur is missing, the precipitous hard-rock climbs of Santorin. But, in place of vertical magnificence, there is the horizontal majesty of the panorama. Wherever one turns there is a wide and restful view, one island behind the other, each soft shape melting into the next until the last dim outline is lost in the distance.
This sea, flat as a meadow, looks domesticated. From its surface rise the islands, fingers and noses of some shallowly submerged range, but softened and rounded—female mountains of unexampled loveliness, all loins and haunches, skirts of sand of purest white, fields of deepest green, and black, black bushes. These islands, even those on which no one lives, seem civilized, or at least as though waiting for civilization.
The Japanese call this part of their country the Seto Naikai, a name that might be translated as a sea within straits; and though its beauty is famous, it is perhaps significant that the Japanese have long thought of it mainly in terms of navigability (a sea within straits) because—lying at the mercantile crossroads of the nation—it has always been something to get across rather than merely to enjoy. Consequently, to this day, though widely known, it is little understood and, except for those few islands where the larger steamers pause on their way between Honshu and Shikoku and Kyushu, little visited. It extends from Osaka and Kobe to Shimonoseki and Moji, but when most people speak of the Inland Sea, they mean the more scenic and heavily islanded part that begins at the island of Shodo and ends just past Hiroshima.
The people of the Inland Sea have been called backward. And so they are. Living in island towns, cut off from each other and from the mainland, they are like mountain villagers separated from the next village by whole ranges. They know much of their own island and nothing of the next, though it is framed daily in their bay. Island-bound, or else wild to leave; distrustful of all new information, or else possessed of wide and curious knowledge—these people’s lives are circumscribed by the placid, lakelike sea. If their lives have little width, however, they do attain depth. A good catch of fish, the spring festival, a fine tangerine harvest—such events evoke a feeling and a response with which the mainland city-dweller in Japan is now largely unfamiliar.
So the people are indeed backward, if this means a people living eternally in the present, a people for whom becoming means little and being everything. At the same time, living on their history, treasuring it, they are distrustful of mere novelty. Their present is their own and not that of frantic Tokyo or Osaka. The froth of novelty pouring continually into the country casts barely a ripple around these islands, where the headman remains the headman because his father was, where nicknames last for generations, where life is so much slower than in the cities and—since it still follows the round of the seasons—so much more natural.
The islands of the Inland Sea are among the last places on earth where men rise with the sun and where streets are dark and silent by nine at night. Here is the last of old Japan, this valley-like sea where the waters turn green or blue with the season, where the islands stand black against the horizon or lie like folded fur under the noonday sun, where the blue and silver of towns and villages merge with the rich yellows, browns, and greens of the patchwork land.
These islands are extraordinarily beautiful, and a part of their beauty is that it is passing. Already the modern mainland is reaching out, converting each captured island into an industrial waste; already the fish, once so abundant, are leaving their annual paths, maintained over the centuries, and seeking clearer depths. When this paradise, this ideal sea garden—310 miles long, 40 miles at its widest and 4 at its narrowest—when it goes, devoured by the land, so will the people who inhabit it, the race of the Seto Naikai that these islands have created.
But not quite yet. A few islands have been captured as Honshu pushed its factory-littered shoreline into the sea, but only here and there. The great bridges that will inundate Shikoku and, eventually, all the larger islands in between with buses and motorcars are still only on the drawing boards. Though fish have been driven from the shallow shore waters, they continue to live farther out. In a few decades, however, the ruin will be complete.
It is to this Inland Sea that I am bound.
*****
KOBE, FROM WHERE I have just come, is indication enough of Japan’s sad future. It has become a large, overgrown, unfinished-looking city. It contains big new hotels shouldering out shrines and temples, big new banks pushing away parks and gardens, big new parking lots where the gracious old inns of the city once stood. Yet enough of the old remains to spoil the effect of a new Los Angeles. The city is a hybrid. East and West have collided here and the wreckage is strewn at large.
Kobe looks like Manila, that city which is neither one thing nor the other. It is like the gentle tiglon—no teeth, no claws, the strongest characteristics of each parent having been canceled out. In the abject Philippines the resemblance to this unhappy animal is stronger in that such has been the fate not only of the city but of the countryside as well. In Japan the symptoms are, as yet, mainly visible only in the larger cities.
It is at Kobe, or at Yokohama, that the sea-borne traveler gets his first glimpse of new Japan. A single look, one would think, would be enough to send him back home again. Nor does the air-borne traveler fare better with the airports of Tokyo and Osaka.
Even here at Himeji the destruction is already well begun, though the results are less unsightly. I am sitting in front of the new railway station, all 1960-ish modern with square windows, escalators, free-form counters, a playground on the roof, probably a bowling alley in the basement. In order to construct this gleaming building all the old trees around the station were cut down, and here the station sits baking in dusty sunlight.
New Japan does not like trees. Its totem is the bulldozer. Whole stretches of park are razed, healthy trees ripped out like sound teeth by this voracious machine, and then, eventually, the whole is landscaped with grass that cannot grow without shade and with bushes that wither in the eternal glare.
I squint into the sun and watch the people as I wait for the bus that will take me to the port of Shikama. It is morning and the people are mainly farm women who have carried their produce into town and are now resting, squinting, wiping the dust from their faces. They wear traditional farm-woman garb—padded trousers, straw sandals, their bundles caught in great squares of cloth. So dressed their mothers and their mothers’ mothers. Yet, as I watch, one of the younger suddenly draws from her pouchlike front pocket a shiny compact from which she powders her face. Back to the farm? On to the cabaret? Either seems likely.
I look around. There are still local faces in Japan. It has been only a century since the opening of the country, only decades since people began to move freely from region to region. Before this, for hundreds of years, people lived where they were born. High mountains, a lack of roads, a martinet government kept people in their place. Even now one sees a kind of eyebrow, a cast of nose, that is sure Ibaragi, certain Kyoto.
Japan continues to give this unexampled view of history. It also offers the excitement of watching change. Old and new in these small provincial cities continue to exist side by side, and the new is often built directly beside, rather than directly on top of. One may, for a time, compare; for a space, see history in the gap. Very attractive to a heritage-starved, history-parched American.
I stand up. My bus is coming.
I look eagerly for the sea. On the trip from Kobe to Himeji I saw little enough of it. A glimpse of its eastern reaches, as yet islandless, on the other side of factory chimneys, fertilizer plants, salt works and the belching fogs of heavy industry. Now the bus trip to the harbor gives no indication that the sea is anywhere near. The port is like a deserted lot, piled with rusting refuse, boilers, wrecked autos. All of this, I tell myself, is typical of the mainland whose dust I am about to shake from my feet, as I spend the next days and weeks touring the Inland Sea. I lean forward, impatient for the horizon.
The islands of this sea will be my steppingstones, out, far away from the smoking land, onto the formless water. I will continue into history, island after island, far to the west, far to the south.
The ferryboat shudders, whistles blow, people shout. A magical moment. One is sea-borne. The distant city grows dim. A sudden sun-struck ground mist spreads out from the land but cannot catch us. The open sea is ahead and from somewhere above comes the cry of a sea bird_a long, lonely, piercing cry, different far from the chirrupings of land. And then, as though in answer, a sailor in some corner of the ship, already hard at work, begins a song—a folk song, perhaps, from the islands that I shall visit.
I turn toward the sea. I don’t care if I never come back.
• • • • •
A JOURNEY IS always also something of a flight. You go to reach, but you also go to escape. I am going to see the islands and all that they seem to promise, but, at the same time, I am going to escape the mainland and all that I already know it contains. I find less fault with Japan than with the century that is destroying this country along with all the others. Now, to escape is no sentimental gesture, it is survival.
Anyone coming to Japan is, in a way, already escaping the worst—as glimpsed in other countries, mainly in America. But I have lived for a quarter of a century in Japan now and have watched the growing blight whose traces might well be yet invisible to those coming from more fully corroded capitals.
And it is not just the pollution, the smog, the death of forests and oceans that I seek to escape from. It is the future. In Japan, for the moment, the past still lives. But already in the larger cities one is aware of the pressures of affluence and overpopulation, those twin ogres, one seemingly benign, the other already wrathful, that are killing the world.
Along with too many people and too much money have come the ills that now afflict America, Europe, Japan alike. And while I can accept the crowds, the autos, the television, I cannot accept the diminution of humanity that follows—the sensationalism, the cynicism, the brutality.
Though I am not interested in the humane disciplines, not interested in humanity itself, I am interested in people, some of them, and I believe in them, a few of them. This may not make me a humanist. It certainly makes me a romantic. Perhaps that is why I chose this land to live in. Certainly this is why, now that it is too crowded for me, too unhealthy, too like the land I came from, I want to move onward.
Or rather, perhaps, backward. As one leaves the city now, one moves backward in time, back to places no more crowded and only slightly less spoiled than they were a hundred years ago, places where history lives and superstition is truth. It is no paradox that this is the only progress now.
In Japan one feels, even now, cut off from rampaging history. One is in a still backwater that modern civilization has not yet had time to consume. One feels, more and more, the impermanence of such few places as the Inland Sea, and consequently, one feels their beauty more strongly because in another quarter of a century they too will have disappeared.
To talk to other people, to make pleasant acquaintances and perhaps friends, to learn something of what is now so rapidly vanishing, to become close, if only for a moment, with someone, anyone—this is my quest. I’ll be satisfied with even less. I want to observe what people were like when they had time and space, because this will be one of the final opportunities.
I think of hot, crowded, smog-covered Tokyo, of steaming Osaka, of poor fragmented Kyoto, and I know that even there, right now, there are carpenters and stonecutters who take pride in their work, taxi drivers who polish their cars, salesmen who believe in the company, housewives who believe in happiness, disinterested politicians, students who have faith in the future, and waitresses who manage smiles for each of their hundreds of daily customers. And I know that such things have largely vanished elsewhere. And I wondered what depths of humanity the Japanese must contain that, even now, despite everything, they remain civil to each other, remain fond of each other.
And so I want to go to the font of that humanity, to this still and backward place where people live better than anywhere else because they live according to their own natures.
Table of Contents
THE INLAND SEAby Donald Richie
Contents
List of Photographs
The Inland Sea
Map of the Inland Sea
Author’s Note to the Original Edition
Author’s Note to the 2002 Edition