In the beginning, there was nothing but a dark, primordial ocean...
..but then two young gods, Izanagi and Izanami,
looked across the void and saw potential.
One day, they plunged a spear into the endless ocean and stirred.
When they removed the spear,
drops of water fell from its tip and formed a group of islands,
and together, these islands became the whole known world.
The gods called their creation Oyashima Kuni,
the land of the eight great islands.
Today its inhabitants call it Nihon, the Land of the Rising Sun -
but we know it by a different name.
Japan has fascinated me since I was a boy.
It's always seemed like a parallel universe,
a society so similar and yet so different from our own...
..and in this series,
I finally have my chance to explore the Japanese imagination.
I'll seek out its greatest artworks, both old and new...
..but this is also a journey into Japanese life.
I'll travel through its landscapes and its cities.
I'll enter its homes...
Wow!
..meet its craftspeople...
witness its rituals...
and even sample its food.
So, this little Bento box is like a work of art,
and it's almost too beautiful to eat.
Japan is a society in which so much is informed by aesthetics,
not just painting and sculpture, not just homes and gardens,
but the way you look at cherry blossom, the way you drink tea,
even the way you arrange your lunchbox.
And that's what I, as an art historian,
find so inspiring about this place.
In Japan, almost everything has the capacity to become art.
In this episode,
I'm going to explore Japanese attitudes to nature...
..from great landscape paintings and Zen gardens...
..to falling blossoms and soaring mountains.
The natural world is central to traditional Japanese aesthetics...
..and yet in modern Japan, that old relationship is deeply uncertain...
..but Japanese artists continue to work with nature, to revere it...
..and to draw inspiration from the landscape that surrounds them.
Japan is one of the most densely populated places on Earth.
It is famous around the world
for its vast cities and advanced technology.
Most of its citizens live far away from nature,
amid never-ending urban landscapes...
..and yet an astonishing 73% of Japan is uninhabited by humans.
Its mountains are so steep and its forests so dense
that people can barely penetrate them -
and, though beautiful, this country lives on a geological knife edge.
Japan contains 10% of the world's active volcanoes
and experiences a staggering 1,500 earthquakes a year.
In Japan, nature is ignored at one's peril.
These are the sacred Kii mountains in central southern Japan.
The Japanese have revered nature for millennia.
These beliefs are embodied in the country's native religion,
known today as Shinto...
..but, in some ways, it isn't even a religion.
Shinto has no founder, no scriptures.
For centuries, it didn't even have a name -
but it did believe the world is inhabited by spirits known as kami,
and these kami are all around us.
They live in the sun and the wind...
in trees and animals...
and even in rocks and boulders.
For Shinto, the world is endlessly animated by the divine...
..and here, deep in the forest, is a shrine.
There is a simple aesthetic.
Zigzags of paper hang from rope made of rice straw.
It's something you see all over Japan...
..but, beyond these components, Shinto doesn't produce much art.
The focus is on nature itself...
..although some natural phenomena get more attention than others.
This is Nachi Falls.
It's one of the tallest waterfalls in Japan,
and, of course, it boasts its very own kami.
MAN CHANTS
Every morning, a Shinto priest makes an offering
to the spirit of the waterfall.
Sake and rice are placed on a table alongside a golden wand.
CHANTING CONTINUES
Ritual is at the heart of Shintoism.
Kami can be good and bad, just like humans,
and rituals are performed to maintain good relationships
between the human world and the kami world.
In so much of the world, religion is about gods and saints and prophets -
but here in Nachi, and in countless other parts of Japan,
nature itself is being venerated,
and as I look up at this waterfall, 133 metres high, I can see why.
But even though Shinto doesn't have a strong tradition
of religious imagery,
I believe its influence can be felt
right through the history of Japanese art -
even in the most unlikely places.
These are netsuke.
They were used as toggles on the end of purse strings
as part of traditional Japanese dress.
They depicted all sorts of things...
..and though just accessories for clothing,
they are now revered as breathtaking miniature sculptures...
..and this is a particularly special one.
So, this bizarre little masterpiece was made a few hundred years ago,
probably by an artist called Harumitsu, who was based in Ise,
one of the great Shinto centres of Japan,
and it depicts a pretty much life-size cicada
that's beautifully carved out of boxwood.
Every single detail is anatomically correct.
So we have the compound eyes
at the top,
the beautiful tracery of the veined wings,
and this, this is the thorax and abdomen.
Those contain the muscles that produce the famous cicada chirp -
and if I turned it over onto the other side,
which I'm really quite nervous about doing, because I'm extremely clumsy,
we will see there is even more detail on the underside.
And you can see that the cicada is even grasping a little branch.
Absolutely beautiful.
Cicadas have a really important place in Japanese culture.
They are seen as symbolic of the summer, when they come out,
and this object was probably worn during the summer months.
But they're also seen as strangely melancholy creatures.
There's that famous haiku.
"Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die" -
but it's not only cicadas.
Japanese literature is filled with references to all kinds of insects,
to caterpillars and beetles and fireflies and dragonflies,
and indeed, even today, many Japanese people
have insects as pets,
and it's even possible to visit beetle petting zoos.
Now, this all might sound rather odd,
but actually, it's deeply revealing,
because in Japan, nothing in nature is too small to be important.
Everything is deserving of our respect,
everything is deserving of our attention,
even an intensely irritating insect like this one -
and that, I'm sure, is partly down to Shinto.
But Shinto isn't the only religion in Japan
with a special relationship to nature.
In Japan, there are numerous different schools and sects
of Buddhism, but one kind particularly intrigues me,
because it helped produce
some of the world's most sophisticated landscape art forms.
It is known by the Japanese as Zen.
BELL RINGS
Zen doesn't rely on scriptures or dogma
but instead tries to promote an intuitive understanding of the world
through meditation and repeated practical exercises.
Zen monks used a number of methods
to discipline their minds and their bodies and to help with meditation,
and one of them, one of these methods, was painting.
Japanese monks started to make brush paintings
in black ink on paper and silk.
Now, this technique had been developed by the Chinese
centuries earlier,
but the Japanese were quick learners.
And perhaps the greatest of these Japanese ink wash painters
was a man called Sesshu Toyo.
Sesshu was born in western Japan in 1420.
At the age of 11, he enrolled in a Zen temple,
where he trained to be a priest -
but, according to one anecdote,
Sesshu showed little affinity for Zen discipline.
One day, Sesshu was so badly behaved
that his masters got hold of some rope
and tied him to a pole as a punishment.
Now, after several hours of this,
Sesshu became so distressed that he started to cry,
and his tears gradually formed a puddle at his feet -
but then something remarkable happened.
Using his toe as a brush,
Sesshu painted the outline of a rat into his tears,
and then the rat came to life,
gnawed through the rope and set Sesshu free.
In the late 1460s, Sesshu travelled to China,
and there he learned the art of ink wash painting
from its native masters.
He went on to become one of Japan's greatest painters,
and I've come to the Tokyo National Museum to see his masterpiece,
a painting I've wanted to see for many years...
and we are the first film crew to ever be granted access to it
when it's not on display.
This is the splashed ink landscape.
Sesshu painted it in 1495 when he was in his mid-70s,
and though it might only have taken a few minutes to make,
it is the result of a lifetime's experience and skill.
Now, I'll be honest with you. At first, it doesn't look like much.
It just looks like some spatters on a page -
but gradually, an image, a landscape, begins to appear.
In the foreground,
a craggy outcrop of rock covered by trees and bushes...
..and in the background,
these towering mountains that are half hidden by mists
or perhaps an incoming rain shower...
..but as you look at this picture longer, you begin to see yet more -
so, down there, that is a little wooden building.
You can see the triangular roof.
There's a fence around its perimeter -
and that, believe it or not, is a wine tavern,
and we know that because the wine tavern banner
is hanging out the front of it...
..but there's more even than that, because below that wine tavern,
you can see two near-horizontal strokes,
and those represent the ripples on a lake...
..and to the right,
two people are rowing a boat across it.
You know, I find this painting absolutely breathtaking,
and what is so exciting about it
is the way it unfolds in front of your eyes...
..the way that, by looking at it, you bring it to life...
..and what I admire so much about it
is how he's achieved so much with such limited resources.
Look at the varieties of blacks,
these deep, dark, inky blacks
in the foreground,
and yet, in the background,
these blacks that are so pale
they are almost white...
and look at the variety of strokes,
the wide brushstrokes, the narrow brushstrokes,
the wet, the dry,
the washes, the scratches,
all this different variety of marks
combined and mobilised to create this landscape...
..and you know the thing I can't get off my mind?
This was made in 1495.
1495!
Back in Europe, we had the Renaissance going on,
and there were no images as audacious as this one.
You know, it would take 300 years, 400 years,
for the watercolours of Turner and Cezanne,
before any Western artist made anything as abstract as this.
Sesshu had helped create an intoxicating aesthetic,
one that preferred ambiguity to clarity,
absence to presence,
and the hazy mysteries of nature.
This quality is evident in the work of Sesshu's countless followers.
This is Hasegawa Tohaku's pine trees in the mist,
painted onto a folding screen about 100 years after Sesshu's landscape.
The trees drift in and out of the mists.
One can almost taste the cold, wet air.
Empty space is as important as the landscape it surrounds...
..and this emptiness is surely a visual metaphor
for the silences of Zen meditation.
Zen Buddhism didn't simply inspire the Japanese
to depict the natural world,
it also encourage them to recreate it.
While Sesshu and his colleagues pioneered landscape painting,
other monks turned to horticulture.
I've come to the northern edge of Kyoto
to see one of Japan's greatest gardens.
Ryoan-ji might be the most written-about garden in the world,
but it's also one of the least understood.
We don't know who designed it. We don't know who built it.
We don't know when it was made -
and we certainly don't know what it means.
I've come early in the morning to beat the crowds...
but I'm not allowed to step beyond the veranda.
This isn't a garden for walking in.
The ground is covered in white Shirakawa gravel
that's carefully raked every morning...
..and emerging from the gravel are 15 craggy stones,
surrounded by moss,
arranged almost randomly...
but there's nothing random about them...
..because 15 is an important number in Zen.
It symbolises completeness, since the entire Buddhist world
contains seven continents and eight oceans...
..but from where I'm sitting...
..you can't see 15 stones. You can only see 14.
In fact, it doesn't matter where you go,
you can never see all 15 stones at once,
and this is thought to be a reminder of human imperfection.
One mind can never understand everything.
As time passes, something remarkable happens.
The gaps between the stones come to life.
The emptiness fills up...
..and suddenly this modest courtyard
becomes a vast panorama of the world.
One moment the stones are moss-covered islands
in a rippling, foaming ocean...
..the next, they're mountaintops seen from above the clouds.
And then, just like that,
they're nothing more than a group of rocks in some gravel.
People have been trying to decipher
the meaning of this garden for years,
but I think its meaning, if it has any meaning,
ultimately comes from within us,
because, like Sesshu's paintings and like so much Japanese culture,
this garden is an almost blank canvas,
a place that enables the mind to wander in any direction it pleases.
The Zen preference for uncertainty and suggestiveness
might still seem alien
to us fact-loving, empirical, positivistic Westerners,
but it became a crucial part of Japanese culture -
and you can't understand Japanese culture
until you begin to embrace the beauty of mystery.
I've come 300 miles north of Kyoto to a suburb of Tokyo called Omiya.
It's an unremarkable place and seems a world away
from the wildernesses that inspired Shinto priests and Zen monks...
..but this place happens to be the nation's epicentre
of another art form that combines nature and culture.
These, of course, are bonsai.
Like many Japanese artforms, bonsai emerged in China.
It came to Japan perhaps as early as the sixth century,
and it continues to be practised today.
Kaori Yamada is unusual.
Most bonsai artists are men...
..but Kaori is the fifth generation of her family to keep bonsai,
and many of them are extremely old.
It's a beautiful tree...
..and how old do you think it is?
We think over 300 years. Over 300 years old.
In the West, we might think of bonsai
as little more than pot plants,
but in Japan, it is a major imaginative endeavour.
Just like Sesshu and the creators of Zen gardens,
the bonsai artist is a maker of worlds.
So, what can bonsai tell us about Japanese attitudes to nature?
Just around the corner from Kaori Yamada's nursery
is Omiya's bonsai museum.
It's like an exclusive art gallery,
but in the place of paintings and sculptures there are trees...
..and I've come to see one in particular.
This magnificent bonsai is estimated to be about 500 years old.
It's a Goyomatsu tree,
a Japanese five-needle pine that only grows in Japan and Korea,
and it's one of the most popular species used
in the creation of bonsai -
and this creation is so remarkable that it's even been given a name.
It's called Uzushio, which means "whirlpool" in Japanese -
and you can see why.
The whole tree spirals with this remarkable, muscular energy.
It was actually designed to resemble a wave or a tsunami
crashing down on the shore.
The wood spirals with the currents and torrents of water,
and the needles are like the fingers of froth of a wave
as it breaks on the shore.
So, though it's small, although it's potted,
this is about the untamability of nature.
You'll also notice there's a great deal of dead wood on it.
The whole front has become this white,
ossified piece of driftwood
that spirals like an S throughout the tree,
and there are dead branches that have broken off.
Now, this isn't an accident.
This was cultivated, this was styled,
it was created,
and the purpose was to make this tree look aged and weathered,
to make it look like it had lived a long, hard life,
out exposed on a clifftop,
mutilated by the winds and the rain and the lightning...
..and I'm reminded, this piece is about the same age
as Michelangelo's David -
both of them about 500 years old,
and this, too, is a sculpture -
and, indeed, seeing it in this location, in a museum setting,
it has been elevated to the status of art -
but this is a living sculpture.
It hasn't been created once, it has been created and recreated
and reshaped and cultivated and nourished
and kept alive for generations...
..and, you know, there's a paradox at the heart of this,
because on the one hand, it's deeply contrived, deeply created,
deeply manufactured,
but it also attempts to look like it's the creation
of chance and nature.
Bonsai is ultimately about persistence in nature and culture...
but the Japanese also find beauty in something far more fleeting.
This is the flower of the Prunus serrulata
or, as it's more commonly known, cherry blossom.
The Japanese have revered the life cycle
of this delicately petalled tree flower
for more than a thousand years...
..and in March and April every year,
they gather beneath it to party and picnic.
This celebration, known as Hanami,
has become a vast national industry,
and millions of tourists now travel to Japan to join in.
No other country does anything quite like this...
..but the merriment disguises a melancholy.
The Japanese were fascinated with blossom
because they found it unbearably poignant.
After all, here was this beautiful little organism
that emerged, grew and dazzled
and then, within little more than a week,
fell to the ground and died.
For the Japanese, it was, of course, a fact of nature,
but it was also a lesson about the human condition,
a reminder that our lives also are painfully brief.
In Japan, blossom is celebrated not in spite of its transience
but because of it. It is beautiful precisely because it doesn't last...
..but the preoccupation with cherry blossom
was part of a broader set of interests.
Japanese culture celebrates all of the seasons,
not simply the spring...
..and so, in Japanese art, alongside the paintings of cherry blossoms,
there are also pictures of verdant summer foliage...
..vermillion maple leaves of the autumn...
..and the deep snows of winter.
I've often wondered why the Japanese are so preoccupied with the seasons,
and I think there are two reasons.
First, the seasons are really explicit here.
The winters are bitterly cold and dry, the summers are hot and wet,
and in the spring and the autumn,
the foliage just explodes into these unbelievable colours -
but I think there's another reason, as well.
Written language came very late to Japan,
and so the cycle of the seasons
became a really important tool for measuring time -
not just natural time, but human time, as well...
..and of all these pictures of Japanese seasonal surprises,
one is without doubt the most famous.
It is housed in the Nezu Museum in Tokyo.
This is Ogata Korin's Irises,
a pair of six panelled screens dating back to 1710.
Irises begin to bloom across Japan in May,
when spring explodes into summer,
and in this utterly irresistible painting,
Korin captures the excitement
of those first really hot days of the year.
The colours are so vivid and intense.
The greens look like they were painted only a few minutes ago
and haven't even had time to dry yet.
The petals are painted from the most expensive blue pigment
in the business, and the background, made from gold foil,
dazzles like sunlight reflecting off the water.
This painting was actually inspired by a tenth-century poem
that told the story of a group of travellers
who stopped for lunch at a river bank
that was ablaze with irises.
The travellers were reminded of a similar spot back at home
and became all nostalgic.
Now, this painting is also about nostalgia -
it's about longing for things that have gone,
and you can just imagine, 300 years ago,
the original owners of this painting
looking at it on a cold winter's night and feeling all warm inside.
What I admire so much about this painting is its simplicity.
Korin has distilled his subject to its fundamental ingredients
and then repeated them rhythmically,
almost as though it's music -
and there is a little secret to how he's achieved that.
If you actually look very closely at this painting,
you begin to see that it's actually stencilled.
This iris over here is identical to that one over there.
This pattern down here is absolutely identical
to that pattern over there.
What an image.
I know it's famous, but it really deserves to be.
I challenge anyone to stand in front of this picture
and not become just a little bit happier.
But the Japanese don't only celebrate the small and ephemeral.
In fact, their most famous natural symbol is anything but.
3,776 metres high, Mount Fuji is the tallest mountain in Japan -
a dormant volcano that could erupt at any moment.
Fuji has been revered here since prehistoric times,
venerated by Shinto and Buddhism alike.
The Japanese have been rhapsodising about Mount Fuji for centuries,
and it has inspired vast quantities of poetry.
One winter in the 1680s,
the father of haiku, Basho, made a journey to Mount Fuji,
but the weather was so bad that the mountain was invisible.
Many people would have been annoyed, but not Basho.
This is what he wrote.
"In the misty rain, Mount Fuji is veiled all day."
How intriguing!
For Basho, like his Zen predecessors,
mist and mystery was exciting.
After all, who wants an answer when you can have a question?
Yet Mount Fuji's global fame
is surely a result of something less ambiguous.
Mount Fuji is almost ludicrously perfect,
even on a drab and overcast day like today.
Triangular, snow-capped, nearly symmetrical,
this is a mountain almost as imagined by a child -
and Mount Fuji's form has been crucial to its fame.
Like the pyramids, like the Eiffel Tower,
its silhouette alone has become a metonym for an entire culture.
That flawless shape inevitably attracted artists.
They have been depicting Mount Fuji since at least the 11th century.
This ink painting, once thought to be by Sesshu,
shows the mountain shrouded in that mandatory mist
and towering over a wondrous landscape...
..but one artist immortalised it like no other.
Internationally, he is the most famous figure
in all of Japanese art -
almost as famous as Fuji itself.
Hokusai was born not far from Mount Fuji in 1760,
just a few years after its last eruption,
and he remained obsessed with the volcano throughout his life.
He lived in Edo, now Tokyo,
which was already one of the biggest cities in the world.
Hokusai's success came slowly.
He's best known for his woodcut prints,
but throughout his life he loved to experiment.
He made brush paintings of people and plants,
and he also made erotica.
The diversity of his output was breathtaking -
but for those who knew him,
this wasn't surprising at all.
Hokusai, I think it's safe to say, was a restless soul.
He changed his name more than 20 times.
He moved house 93 times -
but the one unshakeable thing in his life was his obsession with art.
Hokusai was passionately, maniacally,
pathologically obsessed with his craft
and was relentlessly determined to get better at it.
Hokusai, indeed, made his finest work late in life,
and the best of it was arguably a series of prints about Mount Fuji.
Between 1830 and 1833, when he was in his early seventies,
Hokusai produced his masterpiece, Thirty-Six Views Of Mount Fuji,
initially three dozen woodcuts
printed in an array of vivid colours.
They depict the sacred mountain from every imaginable viewpoint,
from towns, sea and sky,
from close up and vast distances...
..in all seasons and weather conditions...
..and ever surrounded by life in its endless abundance.
This is number 33 in the series,
from the Mishima Pass in Kai province,
just to the north-west of the volcano,
and I find this such a heart-warming image
that refers back to the old Shinto worship of trees.
This group of travellers down here, they are on a journey,
and they have stumbled on this remarkable cedar tree,
a tree so big it doesn't even fit into Hokusai's picture,
and, quite delightfully,
they are measuring its circumference
by linking arms around it -
but, of course, they, and even the tree, are dwarfed
by the giant mountain behind them,
which is almost being tickled by the clouds.
Now, we've all seen this image before.
It's actually one of the most famous pictures in all of art -
but, for that very reason,
we haven't always looked at it properly.
People are so taken with this extraordinary wave
that they don't always notice the rest of the picture.
They don't notice, for instance,
that there are in fact more than 20 people depicted here,
22 shaven-headed fishermen
who are heading home after a long shift on the water
and have run into a spot of bother -
and you can see them grabbing hold of their skiffs
as they're tossed around on the surf.
Are they going to make it?
Well, I think they probably are -
because, in the distance, the sacred mountain,
disguised as another wave,
is watching on.
I don't really think we can understand
how truly powerful this image originally was,
because we, in the West, we read images, like texts,
from left to right
while the Japanese read images the other way.
So, for us, we are travelling with the wave,
and it's really quite good fun,
but for the Japanese,
they are travelling against the wave
and it's really quite terrifying.
It's an absolutely breathtaking piece of design.
Every single element is manipulated to amplify the drama.
It's printed in this bright synthetic Prussian blue pigment
that hasn't lost any of its intensity over the years -
and the froth, I absolutely love the froth,
which is depicted as hundreds of individual fingers
trying to grab hold of their victims...
and this one is so simple,
but I could look at it for hours and hours and hours.
Fine Wind, Clear Sky,
otherwise known as Red Fuji -
red because that's the colour the mountain turns
when the sun hits it in the autumn months.
Now, for all The Great Wave's global fame,
within Japan this image was the most popular print of the series
by some way - and you can see why.
It has a simplicity that no other image has.
There are no people. There's no foreground.
There is simply mountain and sky
divided by one absolutely beautiful line -
but that simplicity is deceptive,
because, in reality, this is an unbelievably risky piece of work,
because what Hokusai has done
is he has taken the very subject of his picture, the mountain itself,
and pushed it off centre and almost off the edge of the page,
and then, to counterbalance that decision,
he's filled the whole left-hand side of the page with all these details,
the green forest, the clouds that look like a school of fish
and even his signature and the title.
Now, without those, this whole composition would fall apart,
and yet it works absolutely perfectly -
and that is what I find so thrilling about looking at this picture.
We're watching an artist at the very top of his game
setting himself an almost impossible challenge
and then triumphing in the end.
Hokusai's unforgettable images
celebrate both the permanence and impermanence of nature,
because whatever takes place around it, Mount Fuji stands firm.
Hokusai's humans are tiny and inconsequential by comparison,
and have little influence on their environment...
..but in the years after Hokusai's death,
Japan's relationship with its landscape changed dramatically.
In the 20th century, Japanese society rapidly modernised.
Cities expanded, vast swathes of countryside were developed
and roads and rail lines cut across the nation.
At the same time,
Japan was repeatedly ravaged by natural disasters...
..and these made the Japanese people yet more determined
to control their environment...
..concreting their coastlines and damming thousands of rivers.
Today it sometimes seems
that the Japanese aren't in harmony with nature -
they are at war with it.
Alex Kerr has written extensively
about modern Japan's troubled relationship with its environment.
The transformation of nature is not unique to Japan.
This has happened absolutely everywhere.
It happened with great speed and great thoroughness in Japan...
based on a kind of industrial sense
that everything should be made industrially useful,
and so let's cut down those messy forests
and replant them with nice sugi trees that line up in rows,
and they'll grow fast and they'll be good industrial lumber, you know?
Let's straighten out those messy rivers
and line them with concrete,
and that will be so much more civilised
and international and modern.
Tens of thousands of rivers have been dammed.
As a matter of fact,
it's said that only three rivers remain that are undammed -
and even those, of course, have concrete embankments.
Now, this is something that everybody did.
Look at America, where we built just horrendous dams by the thousand,
but at some point -
and this happened in most other industrialised nations -
there came a point maybe 20, 30 years ago
when we started to look back and review whether this was necessary -
and in America, we've torn down hundreds of dams,
including some very large ones.
Japan, unfortunately, is stuck on autopilot,
and so the idea that we must dam these rivers
got fixed in the bureaucratic system and goes on forever.
So it's natural to ask, well, why? Why couldn't Japan stop?
I think one aspect of it is that Japan is thorough,
and thoroughness is the strength of this culture.
That's why you have the tea ceremony
and that's why you have the excellence in car manufacture
and camera manufacture and the delicacy of Japanese art
and the incredible refinement of the gardens, all of that -
but these are two-edged swords,
and so, the other side of it is, that once Japan starts concreting,
boy, will it concrete -
and it can never stop until the last tiny little bit of roughness
has been smoothed out.
And there's another twist,
which I think is part of this paradox
of how could Japan be the land of aesthetic sensibility,
which it still is,
and large parts of it be as ugly as they are?
And I think it's because of focus,
and it's often been pointed out
that the Japanese are capable of looking at the beautiful rice paddy
and completely ignoring the big billboard
that's stuck right in the middle of it.
The thing about this Jurassic nature of Japan
is that that was ancient Shinto.
There was something mysterious, divine...
That's where the Japanese saw the gods...
..and what I've found,
as I go around Japan talking and writing about these things,
is an incredible response from the Japanese.
That feeling is still within them, and I think that gives me hope,
and I'm already starting to feel a bit of a shift.
Japan is beginning, or the Japanese are now beginning,
to look at their natural environment and think, "Wait a minute."
So, there's something to be hopeful for.
All cultures are contradictory - of course they are -
but one of the most obvious contradictions here
is in the Japanese people's relationship to their environment,
because on the one hand,
Japanese culture has, from the very beginning,
been so sensitive to the beauty and fragility of nature,
but on the other hand,
one only has to travel around this country
to see how much of the landscape has been scarred...
..but even today, the great Shinto spirit still survives.
I'm travelling to a place I've wanted to visit for a long time.
Naoshima is a small island on the Seto Inland Sea
in the south-west of Japan.
It was originally inhabited only by fishermen,
but now it has some very different residents.
About 25 years ago, in the early 1990s,
a Japanese educational publisher called the Benesse Corporation,
together with other supporters,
started transforming this small island into a centre of modern art.
Naoshima is now home to dozens of museums,
installations and art projects,
and contemporary art from all over the world.
There's a distinctly James Bond feel to the place...
..But I've come to see a work
in which ancient Shinto attitudes to nature
have been brilliantly revived
by the great Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Sugimoto has long been inspired by nature.
He is perhaps most famous
for a series of photographs begun in 1980...
..black and white images,
all identical in form,
of seas, skies and horizons
from all over the world...
..but though they are universal,
they owe much to Japan.
They remind me of the mythical ocean origins of the country...
..the ambiguous inky brushstrokes of Zen painters...
..and Hokusai's attempts to capture a single form in every possible way.
What I want for the present is the consciousness of the human being
at the very early stage.
I was looking for some kind of image that I can share with early man,
ancient people, and probably...
..seascapes came to my mind,
the sea. The land, we changed it,
so we cannot see the land that the Stone Age people used to watch -
but the seascape, might be we can share the same images.
But on Naoshima, Sugimoto took on a quite different project.
This is the Go'o Shrine.
Inspired by Shintoism and Japan's ancient past,
it is both an artwork and a sanctuary.
There has been a shrine here since the 15th century,
but it fell out of use in more recent times.
In 2002, Sugimoto was commissioned to make an artwork on the site
and decided to build a new kind of structure.
I surprised myself that I received a kind of architecture commission.
That made my life change. That wasn't...
totally unexpected.
I'm proud of my life, that I became an architect, now!
HE CHUCKLES
The design is based on buildings at Ise, in southern Japan,
the holiest place in Shintoism.
The Shintoism is not well organised.
It's very hard to explain -
and after the Buddhism came to Japan in the sixth century,
only that time the people can write about coming...
and think about coming, with language -
but I think it's a very, very primitive stage of human mind...
..but still valuable - we have to think backwards,
how humans lived with nature
for many, many thousands of years.
Leading down from the small building,
a set of glass steps descends straight into the ground
to a hidden chamber below.
Here, Sugimoto has created a space he feels evokes prehistoric Japan.
It's so atmospheric down here,
deep beneath the volcanic Japanese rock -
and though this is a modern work of art by a modern artist,
there is something consciously ancient about it,
because this piece is inspired by the old Shinto idea
that the world around us, even the ground on which we stand,
is animated and energised by the sacred.
We destroy so much nature,
and now I think it's a turning point.
So, what has to be studied again,
the Shintoism kind of concept of spiritualism,
how to live with nature.
That's the message from Japanese Shintoism, I think.
I am back to where I started...
..in Japan's dense forests,
the flicker of the spirits all around me.
In the course of my journey,
I have encountered a culture whose preoccupation with nature
seems almost hard-wired,
that sees the landscape as sacred
and has painted and reshaped it for centuries -
and though modern Japan doesn't always seem to value nature,
nature has shaped its values,
aesthetic principles so different from those of the West.
It's often said that Japanese culture
is all about harmony with nature,
but that's not what I've seen.
This landscape may be beautiful,
but it's also unstable and dangerous,
and that paradox, I think,
is at the heart of Japanese interactions with nature.
On the one hand, they celebrate it, they revere it, they mythologise it,
but on the other hand, they possess an old yearning to tame it.
In the next episode, I'll take a very different path through Japan...
..a path through its greatest cities.
It's a story marked by dramatic periods of destruction and renewal
that unleashed new forms of creativity.
I'll explore its ancient capital and its refined culture.
I'll sample the energy of the emerging metropolis...
..before delving into today's megacity,
from its dark underbelly to its shimmering future.
It was a bright August morning,
and commuters were making their way to work in a provincial city
in western Japan. It was shaping up to be a day like any other.
But at exactly 08:15,
an American bombardier above them pulled a lever.
The commuters may have seen a flash of light,
but within seconds, they and the city of Hiroshima
were engulfed in the largest man-made explosion in history.
70,000 people were killed instantly,
and the city was all but annihilated.
It was the beginning of the nuclear age.
But the Japanese had seen disasters before.
The history of Japanese cities is the history of their destruction.
For centuries, indeed millennia,
earthquakes, fires, floods, tsunamis and wars
have decimated the country's towns and cities over and over again.
But this relentless cycle has had a dramatic creative impact.
It has forced the Japanese
to constantly rebuild and reimagine their cities,
and today, they are some of
the most dynamic places in the world.
To discover why, I'm going to explore the culture
of three great Japanese cities in three decisive eras.
Kyoto, the country's capital for over a thousand years.
A city of elegance and splendour that gave birth
to a golden age of painting and poetry
and even turned tea into an art form.
Holding this bowl is a kind of revelation.
Edo, a teeming metropolis with a dark underbelly.
A floating world of actors, artists,
and sex workers that produced a bohemian, urban culture
centuries before the West.
And Tokyo, today the largest urban area on the planet,
a conveyor belt of fashion, film,
and contemporary art that now influences the entire world.
These three cities produce some of Japan's finest
and most distinctive art, but they did more than that.
They also shaped the country's attitude
towards its past and present,
as well as to East and West, and in doing so,
they helped mould the very idea of Japan itself.
In the spring of 793 AD,
a small group of men embarked on a journey through Honshu.
They claimed they were on a hunting trip.
But they weren't hunting animals,
they were searching for a piece of land.
The men were convinced that their hometown,
which was called Nagaoka-kyo, was cursed.
For the best part of a decade, it had been ravaged by floods,
disease, famine, and even a series of mysterious murders.
They knew they had to abandon it,
but first, they had to find a site for a new city.
They hadn't gone far before they alighted on something promising,
a vast, fertile basin,
surrounded on three sides by a fortress of mountains,
and irrigated by not one, but two rivers.
They had found their site.
By the autumn of the following year,
the Emperor had founded his capital here.
He called it Heian-kyo, capital of peace and tranquillity,
though it later became known as Kyoto.
Kyoto has been built and rebuilt many times since then,
but it remains a place of unparalleled riches.
It is home to 1,600 temples, 400 shrines,
and 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites,
more than any other city in the world.
The original city of Kyoto was a work of art in its own right.
It was inspired by Chang'an, the great capital of China,
and every part of it was carefully planned.
The city was organised, almost like New York,
according to a strict grid system.
Now, these streets were splendid thoroughfares.
Even the narrowest of them was 78 feet wide, and the widest of them,
Suzaku Avenue, which ran right down through the middle of the city,
that was almost 300 feet wide.
It was probably the widest boulevard in the world at the time.
And Suzaku Avenue terminated right here, in the north of Kyoto,
at the city palace.
Now, I've got to say, looking down over this scale model,
I really think it looks like a wonderful place to live.
Most of the houses are one storey high, so it's light, it's airy.
There are gardens, there are lakes, there are rivers.
It is a world away from the dark warrens of filth
that made up most cities at the time.
Kyoto was the blueprint for a utopia,
a dream of a rational and beautiful society
that the Emperor hoped would last forever.
But it wasn't as perfect as it seemed.
Over the following generations,
the palace burned down no less than 14 times,
and the whole western half of the city was repeatedly flooded.
But this didn't prevent the fortunate members of the court
from enjoying the finer things in life...
..most of them borrowed from the Chinese.
They ruminated on cherry blossoms and staged moon-watching ceremonies.
They even collected crickets
and made music to accompany their chirps.
In Kyoto, style was emphatically substance.
If any one idea governed the cultural values of the court,
it was the word miyabi.
Now, miyabi doesn't have a direct English translation,
but it meant a kind of refinement or aesthetic sensibility -
the ability to recognise and appreciate beauty
in all of its forms.
The culture of Kyoto was advanced in another notable way.
Many of its leading practitioners were women,
and the greatest of them was Murasaki Shikibu.
Born into a minor aristocratic family around 973 AD,
Murasaki served as a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial Court.
But in her spare time, she started writing something.
Murasaki was writing a story of monumental proportions,
indeed, twice as long as War And Peace.
It spanned four generations and 75 years.
It contained 430 different characters and 795 unique poems.
And today, many consider it to be
the first novel ever written anywhere in the world.
It was called The Tale Of Genji.
The story focuses on the life of a rakish young prince
called Hikaru Genji.
Intelligent, beautiful and possessed with impeccable taste,
Genji is the paragon of miyabi.
And though he spends much of his youth womanizing,
he becomes one of the court's most powerful men.
He builds a grand palace in the city
and fills it with the women he loves.
But then things start to go wrong.
Genji marries a woman who then bears another man's child.
His relationships with his other lovers deteriorate,
and when his greatest love dies, Genji loses the will to live.
It is not long before his life also comes to an end.
"The whole world mourned Genji.
"It was as if a light had gone out.
"For his ladies, for his grandchildren,
"for others who had been close to him, the sadness was, of course,
"more immediate and intense.
"'It is true,' they all thought,
"'The cherry blossoms of spring are loved
"'because they bloom so briefly.'"
Genji's life was indeed cut short,
but Murasaki's remarkable novel lived on.
Many illustrations of The Tale Of Genji
were made in painted hand scrolls.
Here in the Tokugawa Museum in Nagoya,
are the oldest examples from the 12th century.
Only fragments survive,
but they are some of the country's greatest treasures.
They are almost a millennium old.
The complex patterns of colour and shape
still convey powerful emotional stories.
And I've come to look at one of the most affecting.
This painting captures a turning point in Genji's life.
While he was away, his wife had an affair with his nephew.
She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy called Kaoru.
Now Genji didn't want to admit to being cuckolded,
so he had to except Kaoru as his heir even though he knew he wasn't.
And here, we can see Genji holding the baby boy in his arms,
and though this image is small and old and tatty,
you can still see the complex,
powerful emotions racing across Genji's face.
It's taut with resentment and humiliation and yet,
as Genji looks down on that beautiful, innocent boy,
we can see him beginning to soften.
His eyebrows are lifting and his little pink lips
are curling into a smile.
The composition has been used to emphasise and dramatise
Genji's own torn state of mind.
So these powerful diagonals race across the surface of the picture
and imprison Genji right into the corner.
The fabrics tumble into this chaotic mess of lines,
and, perhaps most powerfully of all,
the relationship between Genji here and his wife,
who has become a nun following her indiscretion, speaks volumes.
They are together, but they are, of course, completely apart.
This masterpiece of Japanese art
reminds me that, though times may change,
human emotions don't.
The people of Kyoto had mastered the art of painting...
..but aesthetics pervaded everything they did.
Poetry, calligraphy, garden design and over the centuries,
it even extended to tea.
The Japanese had been enjoying tea since the ninth century,
when it was introduced from China.
But in the late 16th century,
it began to take on a special significance.
At the Buddhist temple of Daitoku-ji
is a teahouse made in honour
of the great Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyu.
Here, in a small, simple room,
Rikyu and his companions turned tea drinking into an art form.
Sen no Rikyu believed that tea was much more than a drink,
it was a revelation.
When drunk in the right way,
tea helped people rise to a different plane of consciousness.
"When you hear the water splash into the tea bowl," he once said,
"you will feel the dust in your mind is washed away."
Sen no Rikyu's ideas gradually crystallised
into what we know as the Japanese tea ceremony.
TRANSLATION:
Sen no Rikyu wanted the tea ceremony
to express an appreciation of modesty,
imperfection and impermanence,
and this even extended to his utensils.
He thought traditional ceramics were too elaborate,
so he set about finding an alternative.
He asked a craftsman called Chojiro
to fashion a simple, undecorated tea bowl.
This was the beginning of raku pottery,
and Chojiro's descendants are still making it today.
Raku Kichizaemon XV is the 15th generation of potters in his family.
He continues a tradition that was started 450 years ago,
and he is, in my view,
one of Japan's greatest living artists.
So, where are we here?
Here's many, many old clay.
Now, I use the clay, this clay,
my grand-grandfathers rub
about 100 years ago.
Wow. And are you collecting clay for your descendants?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
TRANSLATION:
This is a seminal tea bowl.
It was made by Chojiro, the founder of raku pottery.
It's more than 400 years old.
It might even have been used by Sen no Rikyu
in the late 16th century.
Now, at first, it doesn't look like much.
It's small and misshapen,
the walls aren't straight, the lips are wobbly,
and it's covered in a simple, plain black glaze.
But to really appreciate it, you need to pick it up...
..because holding this bowl is a kind of revelation.
The weighting, the texture, the temperature are all just perfect.
And as I hold it, I can feel this groove
running along the middle of it
that fits the hands perfectly.
It feels almost as though
you're feeling Chojiro's fingers 400 years later.
This is an artwork to be held, to be touched, to be felt.
This is an artwork to be used.
This tea bowl is the epitome of wabi-sabi,
that Japanese reverence for the imperfect, the unfinished,
the worn-out, because to appreciate those things
isn't only to be humble,
it's to understand that we, too, are imperfect.
We, too, are as flawed as this tea bowl.
So this object isn't simply a bowl, it's a lesson.
A lesson to all of us to appreciate the simpler things in life.
In the 800 years since its founding,
Kyoto had done much to establish a classical Japanese culture,
although much of it had been Chinese in flavour.
Kyoto would continue to flourish after 1600,
but a new regime was coming, and it would create a new great city.
Japan was embroiled in civil war for the entire 16th century...
..until, in 1600,
a warrior called Tokugawa Ieyasu took control of the country.
He was given the title shogun
and established the Tokugawa Shogunate
which ruled the country for more than 260 years.
Rejecting Kyoto, Ieyasu moved his capital
to a down-at-heel fishing village
300 miles north called Edo.
It would not remain a fishing village for long.
Like most Japanese cities, Edo was prone to destruction.
In fact, over the next few centuries,
it was torn apart by fire pretty much every 20 to 30 years,
but those fires did nothing to suppress Edo's growth.
By the early 1700s, more than a million people lived there,
twice as many as in London.
It had become one of the largest cities - perhaps THE largest city -
in the world.
The Tokugawa closed the country's borders
to all but a few Dutch traders
and enforced a rigid social hierarchy.
The rulers of Edo preached a gospel of discipline and austerity,
but not everyone was listening.
Over time, the townsfolk started to make their own culture,
a popular culture, a counterculture of astonishing vitality.
Their Edo was populated by actors,
dancers, sumo wrestlers, puppet shows,
gangsters and courtesans.
It was a long way from the refined culture of the court.
Japan had seen nothing like it before.
These decadent goings-on
were centred around Edo's pleasure district,
a walled community that was often referred to as ukiyo,
which in English means floating world.
But the floating world wasn't only a physical place,
it was also a state of mind.
"Living only for the moment,
"turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow,
"the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves,
"singing songs, drinking wine,
"diverting ourselves and just floating, floating,
"caring not a whit for the pauperism staring us in the face,
"refusing to be disheartened,
"like a gourd floating along with the river current -
"this is what we call the floating world."
We tend to talk a lot about 19th-century Paris
being the epitome of a modern, urban, decadent culture,
but Edo was doing exactly the same thing 200 years earlier.
And Edo's floating world produced art forms
that were distinctly Japanese.
One of them was kabuki.
Legend has it that kabuki was invented in Kyoto in 1603,
the same year as the shogunate itself.
It's said that it started when a group of women
staged an explicit song and dance routine
for a group of staggered men, and, unsurprisingly,
it proved popular.
Kabuki developed into a striking form of theatre,
with highly stylised movement and extravagant costumes.
The best actors became major city celebrities.
Kabuki theatres could be raucous places.
The audiences hissed and booed, they leapt onstage,
they started scuffles and riots in the stands.
In rooms like this,
the strict social order of the shogunate
could be temporarily and deliriously abandoned.
The government tried to regulate this exuberant new art form,
but it proved popular even with the samurai, and it's still going today.
Ichikawa Ebizo is the 11th generation
in a single dynasty of kabuki performers
that goes back more than 300 years to the Edo period.
He is also one of the most famous men in Japan.
TRANSLATION:
MUSIC PLAYS
Kabuki was first performed by an all-female cast, but the shogunate,
who disliked its licentious reputation,
banned women from the stage.
They were soon replaced by men in both male and female roles.
Performances could last all day and attracted every social class.
Young and old, rich and poor rubbed shoulders.
TRANSLATION:
Lots of what we know today about traditional kabuki
comes from the remarkable images that immortalized it.
Like kabuki, they were a crucial part of Edo's floating world,
and are now synonymous with Japanese culture in general.
Wood block printing had been practised in Japan
for hundreds of years,
but in the Edo period,
it became possible to make full-colour prints
for the first time.
They became hugely successful.
They were very common and usually very cheap...
..but they are now the best-known images in Japanese art.
Kazuo Watanabe is a woodcut artist.
He has been making prints for 50 years
and uses the same methods pioneered in 17th-century Edo.
How did you start as an Ukiyo-e print maker in the first place?
TRANSLATION:
Woodcuts were bought and sold around Edo in their thousands,
and many focused on the floating world.
The Japanese even called them Ukiyo-e,
pictures of the floating world.
And no artist captured it better than Kitagawa Utamaro.
Utamaro is one of the great enigmas in art.
His pictures may be world famous,
but we know virtually nothing about the man who made them.
We don't know when he was born, we know nothing about his background.
He's mentioned in no official records.
He left behind no letters, no diaries, no personal documents.
Like the floating world, Utamaro thrived in the half light.
One thing, however, seems likely -
Utamaro spent plenty of time in Edo's red light district.
A third of all of his pictures are of the city's sex workers.
Utamaro's fascination with the women of Edo
is evident in a book he published in 1788,
called The Poem Of The Pillow.
It consisted of 12 salacious images.
This is a rare, early copy
containing the original Utamaro prints,
and I've come to see my favourite.
This picture depicts a man and a woman
kissing upstairs in a teahouse.
We know it's upstairs
because the leaves of a camellia tree are peeking out,
almost eavesdropping, over the balcony.
There's some suggestion that the characters are already having sex.
On the fan, there's a poem that reads,
"Its beak caught firmly in the clam shell,
"the snipe cannot escape of an autumn evening."
Fortunately, perhaps unfortunately,
we can neither see the beak nor the clam shell.
But you know what I find so seductive about this image
is what ISN'T shown.
We can't, for instance, see the faces of this couple.
We have to imagine who they are.
It's the details that are so irresistible.
The curve of her buttocks.
The nape of her neck,
which at the time was considered more sexual even than the genitals.
Her hair standing up on end.
His left hand touching her shoulder.
Her left hand touching his chin.
Phew!
But, I tell you, if you look closer,
there is something truly remarkable in this picture.
Right here, half hidden by her hair, is an eye, his eye,
looking at her, or perhaps it's looking at us.
Now, I have no evidence for this whatsoever,
but I wonder, I just wonder,
whether that is Utamaro himself, staring at us across the centuries.
Utamaro was a master of understatement.
But not all his images showed such restraint.
Erotic images were popular with both men and women
at every level of society in Japan.
We might see them as vaguely pornographic today,
but the term wouldn't have been understood in 18th-century Edo.
They were called shunga,
which literally meant spring pictures,
and they celebrated intimacy and sexual pleasure
in imaginative and often explicit detail.
But the floating world was not the only subject of wood block printing.
In the 1850s, Hiroshige made 100 views
of the great city of Edo itself.
They capture its shop fronts, its teeming streets...
..its waterways and its coast.
The images themselves are breathtaking.
The inventiveness, the dynamism, the wit
and the irrepressible beauty.
Hiroshige, Utamaro
and the other printmakers of Edo had perfected
a remarkable Japanese art form,
but they'd also established the basis of a new visual grammar,
bold, graphic, economical,
and it wouldn't be long before their style caught on around the world.
In the mid-19th century,
Japanese trade routes began to open
and their goods began to be sent across the seas.
Kimonos, fans, writing paper,
porcelain and pottery, lacquerware and,
of course, countless ukiyo-e prints soon flooded the West,
and the West was astonished.
European artists were impressed by ukiyo-e prints.
They turned up in Manet's backgrounds...
..and Monet's foregrounds.
Vincent van Gogh was so inspired by Hiroshige
that he copied this image of Edo,
and so Japanese innovations helped shape modern art as we know it.
The people of Edo had achieved something really rather significant.
They had invented a culture that, for the first time,
seemed distinctly Japanese,
and one that then went on to influence the rest of the world.
But as Japan changed the West, so the West changed Japan.
Previously isolated for hundreds of years,
traditional Japanese society now seemed out of step with modern life.
The rule of the samurai and their closed borders was coming to an end.
From the 1860s,
Japan would discard much of its centuries-old culture
and aim instead to become a modern, industrial nation.
As a statement of intent, the city of Edo would be rebranded.
Japan's capital was both new and old.
It was essentially still the city of Edo.
Same site, same buildings, many of the same residents.
But it was now reactivated with a new identity and a new name.
From the 13th of September, 1868, we would know it as Tokyo.
It was in Tokyo where these Western aspirations
first took physical form,
and most noticeably, in architecture.
At the end of the 19th century,
European-looking buildings began to appear on the city streets.
The Ministry of Justice could have been transplanted from Paris.
And the city's neo-Baroque train station
seems to better belong in Amsterdam.
But the most striking anomaly was the Crown Prince's residence,
completed in 1909.
This is Akasaka Palace.
Its architect, Tokuma Katayama,
spent a year travelling through Europe,
studying the great royal residences of Germany, France and Britain.
And with this building, I'm sure you'll agree,
he's channelling the spirit of Buckingham Palace.
It is, if such a thing is possible, even more regal inside.
The grand staircase is made out of Carraran marble from Italy
and Languedoc marble from France.
And the vast state rooms upstairs are overflowing with decoration.
There are paintings done in the European manner.
And the chandeliers,
which each contain 7,000 pieces and weigh almost a tonne,
were specially shipped in from France.
If I were taken into this building blindfolded,
and not told where I was,
I am pretty sure I would never guess that it was in Japan.
Walking through this palace,
if anything, it feels like I'm in Versailles.
A strange alter ego of Versailles, but that was the point.
This building, and many others like it in Tokyo,
were part of an attempt to represent Japan as, well, a European power.
It was a brazen act of cultural appropriation.
Akasaka Palace ended up costing a huge 5.1 million yen.
It was deemed too extravagant even for the Crown Prince,
and it spent much of the 20th century uninhabited.
Outside the palace, Tokyo was changing in other ways.
A huge programme of construction and industrialization was under way.
Railways, trams and trunk roads transformed the fabric of the city.
And then it was transformed yet further
by a series of very Japanese disasters.
On the 1st of September, 1923, the Great Kanto earthquake struck Tokyo,
killing 142,000 people and obliterating much of the city.
Tokyo had barely recovered when it was torn apart again.
During the Second World War, the US Air Force
embarked on an aerial bombing campaign against Japan.
67 cities were targeted, 500,000 people were killed,
and more than half of Tokyo was destroyed.
As Japan rebuilt itself once again,
it embraced a new kind of supercharged modernity,
where progress with a capital P was all that mattered.
Between 1945 and 1963,
the population of Tokyo grew from 3.5 million to over 10 million,
as increasingly people deserted the countryside
and moved to the city.
At the same time, the nation experienced
unprecedented economic growth.
And yet, in the process of remodelling Tokyo,
many were left behind,
stuck in the cracks between the shiny developments.
And these cracks just about survive
in a small part of Shinjuku called Golden Gai.
Golden Gai was rebuilt after the war and soon became a world of its own,
a warren of alleys and bars.
This was the floating world of modern Tokyo,
a place Utamaro might have felt at home.
And in 1961, a modern-day Utamaro stepped into it - Daido Moriyama.
The founding father of Japanese street photography.
He was 23 when he first came to Tokyo
and found a day job as a camera assistant,
but at night, he was sucked into the darkness of Shinjuku.
TRANSLATION:
Moriyama's methods are simple.
He wanders up and down the streets of Shinjuku,
ducking into narrow alleys and dark corners, looking in every direction.
And as he goes,
he uses a small, portable camera to take snap, after snap, after snap.
Moriyama's early photographs
captured the rootless and hedonistic inhabitants
of Tokyo's underbelly.
But increasingly, he subverted his medium.
In 1972, in his classic work Farewell Photography,
his portraits of the city were so blurred, grainy
and uncomposed that they were almost illegible.
Do you find the city particularly exciting
at certain times of the day or night?
TRANSLATION:
If any one photograph captures Moriyama's work, it is this one,
made in 1971.
An unkempt stray dog glances back at the photographer
in the winter sunshine.
The dog is surely a proxy for Moriyama himself,
a loner scavenging the streets for scraps.
But it is also perhaps a symbol of Japan,
a country that hadn't yet found its identity
in the turbulence of the 20th century.
And yet, in the following years,
Japan raced yet further into the future.
The economic miracle that had begun in the 1960s
reached its peak in the 1980s,
and the country became the second largest economy in the world.
Tokyo was the motor of these changes,
and was rebuilt and redeveloped
at a relentless rate.
But though its eyes were firmly focused on the future,
the culture of the city remained haunted by the past.
In 1987, the classic anime film, Akira, was released.
It begins with an all-too-familiar scene -
Tokyo being razed to the ground.
The story that follows has all the necessary ingredients
of modern science fiction -
post apocalyptic dystopia, government conspiracy,
and children with superpowers.
It consists of 160,000 hand-drawn images and features 327 colours,
50 of which were specially created for the film.
But the star of the show is neo-Tokyo itself,
a dazzling setting for dreams and nightmares.
In the following year,
another film revisited the wartime destruction of Japan's cities.
Grave Of The Fireflies is a landmark in animation history.
It tells the tragic story of two siblings' struggle to survive
during the final months of the Second World War.
The film was directed by Isao Takahata,
one of the co-founders of Studio Ghibli,
and it drew on his own memories of the war.
TRANSLATION:
Now in his eighties,
Takahata has published a book about the connection
between the sequential art of early Japanese hand scrolls
and anime, which he sees as belonging
to the same narrative art tradition.
Wow.
So, this is a fire tearing down the city?
TRANSLATION:
When you look at a scroll like this,
do you feel like you're looking at the work
of people in the same business as you?
The great anime films were just part of a broader blossoming
of Japan's creative industries,
which were born out of distinctly Japanese urban experiences,
but spoke to the wider world.
Since the 1980s, Japan, and Tokyo in particular,
has become a creative hub for food, fashion, film, consumer electronics,
computer games and many other forms of popular culture.
Take a pick of a recent craze or fad -
it's likely to have originated here.
Tokyo's designers have, together, challenged Paris
as a world leader in fashion.
Lifestyle brands have tackled the problems of urban living
and gone on to conquer the world.
And its pop culture has attracted millions of fans
and built a vast, international audience.
In many of these areas,
the great city of Tokyo absorbed the most modern fashions,
remade them in thrilling ways,
and then exported them back to the world.
This dizzying, high-speed,
urban aesthetic has also influenced Japan's artists.
They have derived inspiration from the city,
and from the popular culture it produced.
But of all of them, none better captures the zeitgeist
than an 87-year-old woman called Yayoi Kusama.
TRANSLATION:
Kusama has been creating her own brand of pop art since the 1960s,
resulting in a psychedelic array of popular,
but deeply personal imagery.
But Kusama's most celebrated installations
are her mirror rooms...
..small, dark chambers covered on all sides in reflective surfaces...
..illuminated only by twinkling LEDs
and transformed into infinite indoor galaxies.
You can understand why this art has delighted people around the world.
It's like... I don't know,
it's almost like falling into a kaleidoscope,
or stepping onto a sci-fi stage set.
But you know what, more than anything else,
this piece reminds me of?
It reminds me of the city.
It reminds me of an almost infinite metropolis,
glittering away in the night.
Over the centuries, cities have inspired
some of Japan's greatest art,
but they are, themselves, creations,
dynamic, complex and often beautiful.
This is a story of Japan's urban imagination
and how three great cities built its art and culture.
In Kyoto, the Japanese mastered beauty and elegance.
In Edo, they found their own, often mischievous, voice.
And in Tokyo, they turned destruction into creation.
And in the process,
they helped define a country as it relentlessly searched for itself.
Cities are engines of cultural change
because they throw people together,
to compete and collaborate and innovate.
It's the case around the world, of course,
but I can't think of many countries
that are more defined by their cities than Japan.
In the final episode,
I'll be venturing into the most intimate spaces in Japan -
its homes.
I'll explore how, in Japan, the house became a work of art.
Guided by the spirit of the craftsmen who made it,
and the rich traditions that developed within its walls,
the Japanese house went on to transform our lives in the West.
This is an ordinary Japanese home...
..but every day it produces something extraordinary.
I'd like to introduce you to my lunch.
This is a bento box.
Now, it's said that in Japan,
you eat with your eyes. It's really, really important to appreciate
the appearance of what you're about to consume.
And, what's more, this bento box even carries meaning.
Its theme is Japan's favourite season - spring.
So, these little things are cut into the shape of cherry blossoms
and there are a number of vegetables including this rape blossom
that only come out in the springtime.
So this little bento box is almost like a work of art.
It's got technique, it's got form,
it's got meaning, it's got symbolism,
and it's almost too beautiful to eat.
In Japan, much of domestic life is informed by aesthetics.
The home itself can be a work of the imagination...
..and many of the activities that take place inside it
are performed with precision and grace.
The modern world was thought to have destroyed
the ancient Japanese art of life,
but beauty still abounds...
..as artists reinvent these old traditions for a new era.
But the Japanese house has also influenced the West.
It helped create modern architecture as we know it...
..and transformed how many of us live today.
Japan has a population of 127 million people.
It is one of the most densely inhabited places in the world.
And the vast majority of people live in endless cities, in small flats.
But it wasn't always like this.
100 years ago, 85% of Japan's population lived in the countryside,
and they had done for centuries.
Most of their rural homes are long gone.
But a few remain.
Miyama is one of Japan's last surviving traditional villages.
And these are minka -
vernacular houses once lived in by most of Japan's people.
These minka might look rustic,
but they're actually an amazing piece of technology,
designed to combat the extremes of the Japanese climate.
The thatched roofs are steep enough to wash away the heavy summer rains
and the winter snows,
and the buildings have been lifted off the ground
to create as much ventilation as possible during the hotter
and more humid months of the year.
And Japan's geography even dictated the way they were built.
One of the defining features of this village,
and indeed much of Japan's traditional architecture,
is the abundance of wood.
It's absolutely everywhere.
There are at least two reasons for that.
The first reason is that wood is plentiful in Japan,
while stone, which is mostly volcanic here,
is too hard to build with.
The second reason, and this is a little bit morbid I'm afraid,
is that on the whole, wooden houses are safer.
Yes, they're more likely to burn down,
but they're less likely to crush their occupants
in the event of an earthquake
and easier to reassemble in its aftermath.
But though Japan's traditional house builders took up woodworking
for practical reasons, they very quickly turned it into an art form.
In fact, Japanese craftspeople pioneered
a consummate form of carpentry unequalled in the West.
And were able to construct whole houses without screws,
nails or glue.
Just ingenious techniques.
These techniques are still in use today...
..here at Nakamura Yoshiyaki's workshop in Kyoto.
Nakamura is one of Japan's most respected sukiya-daiku,
or master carpenters.
To become a sukiya-daiku,
one must master a complex code, combining ethics and practicalities.
It's even present in the way a carpenter uses his tools.
Respect is a cornerstone of the sukiya-daiku's philosophy,
and it also applies to materials.
In Japan, wood is more than a commodity.
According to Shinto, it comes from a living, even sacred organism,
and has to be treated with reverence.
Nakamura and his carpenters teach this philosophy to
the younger generations.
Each apprentice trains for five years.
Through often menial tasks,
they learn the correct attitude and techniques.
In Japan, people talk a lot about the spirit of the shokunin,
the spirit of the craftsman, or artisan,
and that spirit is abundantly clear here in Mr Nakamura's workshop.
The men are working with such precision and focus.
They are measuring and re-measuring and re-measuring again
to get everything just right.
And perhaps most surprisingly of all,
they are working in almost total silence.
There's no chitchat, there are no jokes,
there is unbelievable concentration on the work at hand.
And I get a real sense here of a deference, of a pride,
in belonging to a grand old tradition of carpentry
and house-building that goes back way into the Japanese past.
One of Japan's finest surviving homes can be found in Yokohama,
on the outskirts of Tokyo.
This is Rinshunkaku.
It was built in 1649 by a samurai lord called Yorinobu Tokugawa.
The owner's main residence was a fortified castle
filled with armaments, but when he wasn't working,
he'd come here to his fantasy home.
This was his refuge,
a place for contemplation and aesthetic reflection.
But looking at it today,
you know what I find most striking about it, is its modesty.
At exactly the same time,
European rulers were building these vast baroque palaces,
and this, by contrast, is so humble.
In fact, the only outward sign of extravagance is the second storey,
which was almost unheard of in Japan at the time.
It's clear where this house got its inspiration.
The low eaves, the wood, the way it's raised up from the ground -
it refers back to the minka of Japan's rural past.
Refined and elaborated.
But the real beauty lies inside.
It is influenced by the simple aesthetic of Zen Buddhism.
And it contains all the ingredients of
the traditional Japanese interior.
The rooms are open-plan and free from clutter.
The exterior walls are shoji screens,
whose paper surfaces infuse the home with soft otherworldly light.
The floors are tatami,
rice straw mats that dictate the size and proportions of every room.
But the most important feature of this house is almost invisible.
It is a unique Japanese concept known as ma.
Ma is of fundamental importance to Japanese aesthetics,
and its way of life.
It refers to the negative spaces between things.
The most obvious example of ma is silence.
If I were to pause...
..midway through this sentence, we might find it unsettling.
But in Japanese thought, that gap, that interval,
is just as full and just as full of meaning as
the words that surround it.
Now, ma appears in many Japanese art forms, it appears in painting
and calligraphy, in drama and in martial arts,
but it's also present in Japanese homes,
and Rinshunkaku is full of it.
Just look around
and you'll find negative space everywhere.
Rinshunkaku's floor plan is endlessly flexible.
Partitions slide behind one another to open up the rooms.
Even the outside walls are movable.
The effect is one continuous space, and it extends even to the outdoors.
Light, functional, versatile,
Rinshunkaku is a lesson in domestic design.
And houses like it have profoundly influenced modern architecture
in the West, in the work of architects
and designers like Frank Lloyd Wright...
..Charles and Ray Eames...
Walter Gropius...
and Le Corbusier.
When modernist architects and designers first encountered
traditional Japanese houses, they were astonished.
As far as they were concerned, this was modernist architecture
that just happened to be hundreds of years old.
And of course, today, open-plan living,
minimalist interiors and clean, simple lines have become
the very principles of 21st-century living,
but those principles were pioneered centuries ago in houses like these.
Amid all this minimalism,
one place in the Japanese home was reserved for extravagance...
..and was dedicated to decoration.
It was known as the tokonoma.
It might look like an empty recess,
but this alcove was once the heart of the Japanese home.
The owner of the property would sit here,
and was therefore framed by his tokonoma.
But his tokonoma would also be the stage set
for some carefully selected objects.
The tokonoma would include a scroll, often with calligraphy...
..and it would be joined by a simple floral arrangement...
..which had to be just so...
..because this was an art form in its own right -
ikebana.
Many Japanese people are obsessed with flower arranging.
Because ikebana is not only a hobby,
but a highly personal form of expression.
A popular art form of domestic life,
there are over 1,000 ikebana schools in Japan today.
But its origins lie in religion.
It started here at Shiunzan Chohoji Temple in Kyoto.
In the 15th century,
it was the home of a Buddhist monk called Senkei Ikenobo.
Ikenobo was responsible for arranging offerings to the Buddha...
..and he was particularly enamoured of flowers.
On 25th of February, 1462,
Senkei Ikenobo made a very special flower arrangement.
It was a complex freestanding construction
of about a dozen different flowers in a golden vase,
and it was replete with symbolism.
Now, apparently it caused something of a stir.
In fact, the people of Kyoto flocked to the temple
simply in order to get a look at it.
We don't know exactly what the flowers looked like,
but Senkei Ikenobo did leave us some clues.
This is a really quite special document.
It's a five-metre long scroll that dates back to the 1480s, 1490s.
And for years it was locked away and hidden away from sight.
Its contents were known as the secret transmissions
and were passed only from one master to the next.
Even today, no-one is entirely sure of its exact meaning.
But this part of the scroll seems to offer us a glimpse of
the very earliest ikebana creations.
They are, of course, beautiful drawings,
and they're perfectly preserved,
but what's so fascinating about them is
the text around them reveals how each one of these arrangements
served a different function
and captured a different moment in people's lives.
So, this one on the left is called a farewell flower.
It's an arrangement you make when you're saying goodbye
to a family member or a friend or a colleague.
And this one on the right is pretty much the opposite.
It's called a waiting flower,
and it's something you make when
you're waiting for a loved one to return.
And this final arrangement,
this was made to celebrate a young person becoming a monk.
There is still much to be learned from this document,
but I think it makes clear that
ikebana was not simply flower arranging,
it was a subtle and elusive medium that was all about expressing
the joys and the hardships of life.
And over 500 years of history,
practitioners of ikebana have attempted to master it.
This is Manabu Noda.
He may look like a bank manager,
but he is one of Japan's most respected ikebana masters.
Students come to Ikenobo from around the world
to see him work wonders with flowers.
There are very specific guidelines about looking at ikebana.
You position yourself here, one tatami mat back from the tokonoma,
and it's very, very important that you are face-to-face with
the arrangement. You can't be looking at it from the sides.
Anyway, once you have your position, take a breath...
..compose yourself and then you can begin to look.
And you have to begin by looking at the very base of the arrangement.
You're looking specifically at the point at which
the plants first emerge from the water.
Now, that's a really, really important part of ikebana.
It's known as the mizugiwa, the water's edge,
and that is the origin of life itself.
Anyway, once you've meditated and reflected on that,
then you begin to raise your head and follow the line of
the plants upwards and upwards and upwards
until you reach the very top.
And when you reach the very top, take another breath...
..and then you can begin to appreciate
the arrangement in its entirety.
It consists of three plants.
Japanese iris...
..spiraea and green maple.
They've been chosen because of the season,
reflecting a specific moment when late spring turns into early summer.
The composition of this piece is absolutely fantastic.
It's all about visual harmony,
so there is harmony between the different colours,
between the purples and the whites and the greens,
there's harmony between straight lines and curves, and of course,
there's also harmony between positive space and negative space,
between the flowers and the ma that exists between them.
This is known as a shoka arrangement.
Now, shoka in Japanese means living flower.
And this arrangement really does chart the life story of a flower.
We see how at the beginning
it emerges from the ground and shoots upwards
and then gets affected and bent by the elements,
by the wind and the rain,
but it continues its journey nonetheless.
So, there is a real sense of a life story taking place here,
and I love this allusion to different stages in life.
So two of the irises are blooming quite beautifully,
but another one is still in bud.
And in some ways that's even more important
because that is about the future and is about hopes for the future.
You know, I never thought I'd say this,
but it really is quite moving to look at this arrangement
because, while on the surface,
it is all about the life story of a group of plants,
it's impossible not to reflect on our own lives too.
The journeys we have to make, the hardships we have to endure,
and of course, the transience of life itself.
Who would have thought that a group of flowers
could contain so much meaning?
But ikebana is not simply floristry.
It is a domestic art form full of style and symbolism.
And it's not alone.
In the traditional Japanese tokonoma,
ikebana is accompanied by a hanging scroll.
This often contains another of Japan's great ancient art forms.
Calligraphy, or shodo.
Shinochooji is a quiet neighbourhood, not far from Kyoto.
And this is the home of one of
the rising stars of Japanese calligraphy.
Every day, Tomoko Kawao practices for three or four hours,
copying great works by history's shodo masters.
To create each character, there's a set order of strokes.
A pattern that hasn't changed for millennia.
Tomoko is best known for her monumental works of calligraphy,
and it is captivating to watch her make them.
Tomoko's painting reads Shu-Ha-Ri,
a traditional phrase which describes the stages of mastering a form.
To learn, to break away and finally to transcend.
This is such a dynamic image.
It reminds me of a Jackson Pollock or a Franz Kline,
and I love the variety of marks here.
There are these big long swipes that are three or four feet long,
there are spatters and there are paint trails
and there are these droplets that seem to explode into a spray.
And over there, there's a huge puddle of ink
that hasn't even dried yet.
It's amazingly exciting to look at,
but this isn't simply about the image,
it's about the action that produces the image.
This is an art of the body.
It's about discipline, about control, about movement.
Calligraphy, of course, is an ancient art form, but in this room
and on this paper, it couldn't be more alive.
Today, most Japanese homes seem far removed from
the country's graceful traditions.
Everyday life may be ordered and peaceful,
but it isn't particularly Japanese.
Critics have claimed that people no longer care about
preserving their native traditions.
Here, at least, in Kyoto,
there are signs that one of Japan's everyday art forms
is still being embraced.
The kimono, Japan's national costume.
But these people aren't locals.
They're mostly Asian tourists who've paid vast sums of money
to play-act Japan's past.
Over the past century, Japan has had to negotiate a tricky path.
How to keep its heritage alive and relevant amidst
the perpetual change of modern life.
Since the 1950s,
Japan's booming population transformed
the way its citizens lived.
It produced vast sprawling cities across the country,
most of them formed without any planning to speak of.
Much as we like to valorise the art of the Japanese home,
Japan's rapid urbanisation in the 20th century has made domestic life
extremely challenging.
In Tokyo, more than 6,000 people inhabit every square kilometre.
And this has led to homes becoming smaller,
precisely as they become more expensive.
Barely a month goes by without a story appearing in the press
about young Tokyo workers living in apartments
that aren't much larger than coffins.
Incredibly, the average Japanese home now only lasts for 30 years.
Inheritance tax is so high that it's often cheaper to bulldoze
the family home and start again.
The relentless rebuilding of Japan in the post-war years
has produced vast swathes of awful architecture
and some really horrible homes,
but it's also created opportunities.
There are more architects per capita in Japan
than in any other country in the world.
And because of relaxed planning regulations
and severely limited space,
these architects have been able to take creative risks
that aren't always possible elsewhere.
And the humble home has become the ground zero of experimentation.
All sharp edges, repeated forms and concrete walls.
Even in the most sleepy neighbourhood, you'll stumble upon
houses that seem to have crash-landed from the future.
Or at least from some postmodernist textbook.
Some have no windows, and others, no walls.
But there is method in this madness.
Japanese cities can be aggressively ugly and messy places.
And modern houses like this one are, I think,
part of a fight against that.
They're an attempt to make spaces that are beautiful and ordered
and peaceful amid the seemingly endless
urban chaos that surrounds them.
They are, in many respects, a return to the ancient lessons of Zen,
but crossbred with modern minimalism.
In fact, what we might call zenimalism has become a trademark
of Japan's most famous architects like Tadao Ando...
Toyo Ito...
..and Kengo Kuma.
They have established zenimalism as a major national style of architecture,
and exported it to the rich and famous around the world.
But though zenimalism began with the rich, it soon reached everyone else.
A number of companies began to commercialise the new aesthetic...
..packaging Japanese minimalism for the mass market.
And the most successful of them all was Muji.
Since 1980, Muji has been turning Zen into an off-the-peg commodity.
This high street nirvana proved exceptionally successful.
The company is now worth more than $2 billion,
and has nearly 700 stores around the world.
Its famous name is an abbreviation of mujirushi, which means no brand,
yet image is what Muji is all about.
Its shops are decorated like luxury spas.
Pointless appliances are deceptively functional...
..and products have clean lines and plain colours.
The whole thing seems modern and international...
..but there are nods everywhere to ancient Japanese aesthetics.
This is a revealing example of the Muji aesthetic.
A bag of stones.
Now, there's nothing fancy about it.
The stones themselves are perfectly unremarkable,
and the packaging is almost comically restrained.
No logo, no poetic description,
just stone written in Japanese
and then of course underneath in English.
But though at first it seems like such a simple product,
it is in fact full of references.
It taps into these great old Japanese ideas about
the mysteries of nature, about modesty and imperfection.
And of course, when you arrange these stones in a bowl in your home,
you are continuing a tradition that goes all the way back
to the great Zen rock gardens of the past.
In much of its advertising,
Muji offers up a timeless vision of the Land Of The Rising Sun.
It also offers to bring the beauty of Zen into your home,
provided you purchase its products.
Many of us think that Muji epitomises the Japanese aesthetic,
that it's the product of an entire people
who miraculously understand that less is more.
But Muji isn't the real Japan,
just like IKEA isn't the real Sweden
and Laura Ashley isn't the real Britain.
The real Japan is anything but Zen.
It's a place of urban clutter,
exposed power cables
and small, messy homes.
To understand these homes,
I've come to an apartment block in the heart of Tokyo
and to one of the great chroniclers
and champions of contemporary Japanese life.
Like half of all Tokyo dwellers,
photographer and journalist Kyoichi Tsuzuki
lives in a single-person apartment,
where one space is used for several different functions -
living, working and sleeping.
Not to mention storage.
But Kyoichi is one of the lucky ones.
It's not uncommon for a family of four to live in a space this size.
It's a long way from the fantasy adverts of Muji.
When a lot of Western people in particular think of Japanese homes,
they think of tatami mats...
Yeah. ..and shoji screen and Zen and minimalism.
Yeah. What do you think about that conception?
It's quite a bit embarrassing, I think, no?
It's just because we think of British lifestyle is like
Downton Abbey or something, you know.
So, it's not real at all.
Fake news, you know?
Fake news. Yeah.
For over 25 years,
Kyoichi has been tirelessly documenting
the homes of Tokyo's youth.
Until recently, no-one talks about...
..normal people, normal life.
In Tokyo today, the average size of an apartment is 60 square metres,
the equivalent of 36 tatami mats.
For example, you know, this is a typical...
Tokyo apartment...
like you... So, is this all one apartment?
Yeah, it's all one apartment.
Do you remember the person who lived here? Was it a student or...?
He was a... He was a young, cartoon, manga artist.
You know, whenever I go to those apartments, I just tell them,
don't try to clean up, you know.
I want to see as you live.
Yes. I feel like I'm showing like a dark outside of Tokyo.
In his seminal 1993 book, Tokyo: A Certain Style,
Kyoichi photographed portraits of 100 people,
not by capturing their faces, but their flats.
In doing so, he documented the lives of ordinary city dwellers
who'd been largely ignored.
This is a house...
of a guy who is a music critic.
You go into a small path,
and there's a really old Japanese-style house, you know.
Really cheap. Wow!
Look at that. Yeah. Oh, my gosh!
So... He needs some more shelves, doesn't he?
I know, I know.
The shelving is already full, you know...
Yeah. So, he has to just pile his new CDs all the time, no?
But, what...?
What's going to happen when he needs, like, this one,
and he has to grab the bottom one?
You talk about empty space.
There's that word - ma.
Ma. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You didn't see much of it in your travels.
No, no.
There's no space for ma, I think.
No space for space. No space for space, exactly.
To traditional critics,
these homes epitomised all that was wrong with modern Japanese life.
We forget that Zen attitude or philosophy
and we lost our classic aesthetics and everything,
so it was so negative point of view towards...
modern life, and I wanted to change that.
I met a young DJ wannabe.
He lives in that four and a half tatami room.
So, this is all one room?
Yeah, yeah. Three metres squared.
That's his...? The entire floor space would be...?
One metre. But, you know, there is a famous saying in Zen,
that you need only a half tatami to meditate.
Only one tatami to sleep,
so more than that is just a luxury.
Kyoichi's work documents a fascinating urban phenomenon.
Within the confines of tiny spaces,
people have found remarkable freedom.
Plundering East and West, old and new,
their magpie aesthetic has produced a style that both is
and isn't Japanese, and seems genuinely democratic.
I mean, going into a rich people's place is not interesting at all, no?
Because it's Zen, it's not their lifestyle,
it's a decorator's lifestyle, no?
Or a architect's lifestyle.
Because minimalism is to hide your personality, so I was...
I was really into going to, you know, poor kids' apartments
because let's show us their lifestyle.
There's no closet, no?
So you see the wall, you know, you see what they are wearing.
Small places is a representation of people's life.
Everyday life, I think.
In the course of my journey,
I've discovered different types of Japanese home.
Traditional and modern, minimalist and maximalist.
But in a remote and mountainous part of Nagano,
one architect is building houses like no-one else.
His name is Terunobu Fujimori.
Fujimori isn't a conventional architect.
In fact, he only started designing buildings in his 40s,
and he runs his practice, if we can call it a practice, like few others.
For years, many of his projects were completed not by professionals,
but by a gaggle of friends, including a novelist,
a sake brewer, a publisher, and a priest.
Now, it might sound like the start of a bad joke,
but the results, when they came, were spectacular.
On a small patch of land behind his house
is one of his most bizarre creations.
This is the flying mud boathouse.
Oh!
One of Fujimori's fantastical teahouses.
Wow!
So cosy in here! Yeah, yeah, yeah!
Oh.
This is great. Good.
Have a cup of tea. Yeah.
This bowl is my favourite.
This is your favourite? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Please. I get the...
I get your favourite? Yeah, yeah. Oh, thank you very much!
Delicious. Delicious.
Very strong. Yeah, too strong!
Fujimori's style may be eccentric,
but it's grounded in some of Japan's oldest beliefs.
Growing up in the countryside,
Fujimori spent his childhood tending the trees in the nearby forest,
but the trees provided more than timber.
Childhood baseball.
The ball and the bat.
One, two, three.
Oh, no!
When Fujimori grew up, he didn't become an architect,
but an eminent architectural historian.
He might never have built a thing, but in 1989,
he was asked by the people of his village to design a museum,
dedicated to an ancient Shinto shrine.
Inspired by the region's natural surroundings,
Fujimori wanted to channel Japan's prehistoric past.
His first building left most people baffled.
But there were some sympathisers.
Young architects of his generation, like Toyo Ito and Tadao Ando.
Commissions weren't forthcoming,
so Fujimori designed a spectacular house for himself.
Dandelion House was the first in a series of buildings
sprouting all manner of plant life.
Leeks.
Grass.
Even trees.
With these buildings,
Fujimori hoped to bring nature back into Japanese homes.
But Fujimori has created a high-rise of his own...
..though it looks like it was dreamed up by Lewis Carroll
or Studio Ghibli.
This is the Too High Teahouse.
Only 2.2 metres wide, this is a house on a truly human scale.
The gilded lantern in the ceiling
turns the whole place golden at sunset.
And the window overlooks his beloved hometown
and his first work of architecture.
Though this building belongs to a great Japanese tradition,
it taps into something far more universal and far more human.
And I love how personal this building is.
I love the fact that it was tailored to the size of Fujimori's own body.
I love the fact that he built it with his friends.
And I love the fact that,
as you look out over the various views around it,
you can see the mountains that he loved so much.
You can see his family home,
the plot of land on which he was born.
Though this building is small,
it encapsulates so much of Fujimori's life.
You know, climbing up here and crawling inside
was like a return to childhood.
It was like a regression to the womb.
And I think Fujimori is reminding us that,
for all of our talk of houses and apartments and palaces,
for all of our talk of modernism and minimalism,
and for all those aspirations we have about additional bedrooms
and ensuite bathrooms, that ultimately, and originally,
a home is a place of shelter.
It's about making a safe haven to call one's own.
This series has explored Japan's rich and complex culture.
A culture that has been shaped by the outside world,
but is unlike any other.
In the process,
I've seen exceptional works of art, from its old masterpieces...
..to its modern installations.
Its tranquil gardens, to its exuberant art forms.
But in the course of my travels,
I've found art in more than just artworks.
I've found beauty in landscapes...
..the seasons...
..in people's homes,
and above all, in their lives.
One of the things I've noticed here over and over again is
the artfulness of people.
There's a precision and elegance in so much of what they do.
Japan, of course, is a complex and challenging place,
and not all of it is beautiful,
but it does seem to me to be a culture that has, for centuries,
cared profoundly about detail, about getting the little things right,
and that is why, even in the most ordinary places,
beauty can usually be found.