KyotoCity Plan and Reflection

Brad Mlecko

6/09/03

The Japanese imperial capital at Nara lasted for less than eighty years, hardly a blink in history’s eye, before moving a short distance away to Kyoto—where it would remain for over a millennium. The Nara period of Japan’s history saw an emergence of the imported Buddhist sect as a strong political entity—an event that would contribute to the intrigues that led to the change in location. The new capital of Kyoto was, like Nara, one of many facets of Japanese civilization that was borrowed from the advanced Chinese civilization of the time—China might very well have reached the height of its civilization during the Tang Dynasty. As in Nara, there was a deliberate design to Kyoto’s urban planning, a design that incorporates not only the Chinese model, but, deliberately or not, also includes characteristics that seem uniquely Japanese. Wandering around in Kyoto in the early 21st Century, one can still see vestiges of this uniquely Japanese design, despite the over 1,200 years since Kyoto’s founding. Kyoto is a unique and well-preserved city and, in many ways, offers a window into Japan’s past—it seems as if one can gaze back into Japan’s imperial history, long before Commodore Perry or the Meiji government, before even the might of powerful samurai such as Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Kyoto speaks volumes about not only Japanese history, but about the characteristics of the Japanese people themselves throughout the ages.

A brief tenure at Nara, and the need for a move…

Nara was founded in the year 710 C.E., the first Japanese capital to be based upon an imported Chinese design. The emperor had already by this time become somewhat of a figurehead, manipulated by strong families and imprisoned by ceremony and ritual. The Yoro Code of 718 made changes to the Chinese model of government, which saw the emperor as “a temporary adjudicator of the will of heaven, [holding] office by virtue and good behavior through a mandate of heaven to rule effectively and please the gods.”1 This code established that the emperor did not simply have a mandate given by heaven to rule, but was actually a divine being. Thus, officially, the emperor’s status had been increased, while, behind the scenes, this increase in status led to a diminishment of the emperor’s power in controlling day-to-day affairs within Japan.

Another key feature of Nara’s culture and politics was the emergence of the powerful Buddhist sects, recently transmitted from China, via Korea, to Japan. During the Nara period, six sects of Buddhism made their presences known—the Sanron sect was the oldest in Japan, but had arrived only a little over a century before the founding of Nara, in 625 C.E. The tradition as a whole was, thus, “aristocratic, elitist, and exclusive, for the peasant in the field lacked both the time to appreciate and the comprehension to understand the complex religious doctrines.”2 Buddhism grew alongside, not supplanting, the native Shinto tradition. Shinto, a uniquely Japanese religion, was something the commoners and peasants could take part in, and was too strong a part of Japanese life to be abandoned. The nobility even held onto Shinto—the Fujiwara family build Shinto shrines in addition to the Buddhist temples it supported.3 Nevertheless, the integration would, for a time, would cause problems for the emperor and the Japanese court.

In 752 C.E., the Emperor Shomu dedicated an enormous wooden hall to house an enormous (fifty three feet high, and on a sixty eight foot wide throne) representation of the Buddha—this temple was powerfully endorsed by the state, and the emperor used the Buddhist religion to increase the legitimacy of the highly centralized state. The proclamation of the emperor at the dedication, which still survives to this day, demonstrates a powerful stance of Buddhism as a part of the state’s legitimacy. Shomu eventually abdicated the throne and retired to a monastery; his daughter, Empress Shotoku, a Buddhist as well, became involved with the head of a Buddhist sect and made him her chief minister. After her death, this monk, named Dokyo, desired to become emperor himself, but was prevented by the Fujiwara family. Buddhism’s influence in Nara waned, but was not by any means gone.

This discussion of Buddhism is important—in some ways, the emergence of Buddhism seems to be one of the reasons the move was made to Kyoto, and, more importantly to this discussion, why Kyoto was laid out in the way it was. There seems to be a powerful logical connection between the design of Kyoto and the interactions between politics and religion in Imperial Japan, and the conditions that existed during the short tenure of Nara as capital are precisely, it seems, what led to the need for a move as well as a change.

Kyoto was not the first site to be considered as a new home for the imperial court—in 784 C.E., the Emperor Kammu rapidly built a palace in Nagaoka, a short distance from Kyoto. According to Milton W. Meyer, it was the “insubordination of the great monasteries”4 that prompted Kammu to desire such a drastic change. Under the previous emperors, the influence of Buddhism developed rapidly; the relatively short period of time that it took for Nara to be abandoned by the court seems to demonstrate the power that Buddhist monks were accumulating. The move to Nagaoka, however, did not prove to be favorable—in addition to the economic pains imposed on the peasantry by the rapid move, “bad omens” persisted during the decade after the move, and eventually the court made the decision to make another move. This time the destination would be Kyoto.

The Kyoto Solution…

The area occupied by the city of Kyoto was not empty when it was chosen by the Fujiwara-backed emperor—Korean immigrants, the Hata family, had settled the area in the previous century. The new city, like Nara based on the imported Chinese design of Chang’an, measured 4.5 kilometers from the east to the west, and 5.2 kilometers from the north to the south. A checkerboard pattern was followed, with the imperial palace in the north and center of the grid. Heading south through the city, starting at the palace was a hundred meter wide boulevard.

The Chinese model at Chang’an had been arranged deliberately to face the four points of the compass, with four palaces corresponding to each direction. The purpose of the pattern was due to an “express desire to represent or reproduce the pattern of the cosmos”5 in the earthy abode of the representative of heaven, the emperor. The idea that it is possible to accurately represent the divine order of the cosmos seems to be a powerful one. Apparent disorder on the earth can be rearranged by human hands into an orderly plan; there is an implication that humans, strengthened by their convictions, actually can rearrange the earth, in a sense, controlling it and bringing about a (sort of) heaven-on-earth, although only in representation.

The Japanese adoption does not seem to contain within it the allusions to the possibility of control—rather, there seems to be, in Kyoto, an attempt to place a human model of order on top of an already existing order. This requires some clarification. The native Japanese tradition of Shinto is a nature-oriented one. Human beings need to, it seems to imply, fit in alongside the natural order, as a part of it, rather than as a force that alters the natural order to properly fit their needs and goals. In Japan up to the present day, Shinto shrines are often placed in more natural settings, fitting in with natural in a somewhat logical manner, co-existing without any dominance given to the human order or the natural order. The human and the natural order seem to exist as one and the same, rather than as separate concepts.

Fosco Maraini refers to the “protection” that Kyoto’s location offered—in the northeast, is MountHiei, the home to Buddhist monasteries. In the West is Atago-yama, the “Mount of the Cave of Love,” an important Shinto shrine. In one direction, the ancient gods of Japan protect, in another, the imported ideas of Buddhism offer protection. This idea, of both religions having an important and prevalent position, seems to set the stage for what Kyoto says about the Japanese people.

Kyoto would remain the home of the emperor of Japan for over a millennium, until the Meiji Restoration moved the emperor’s residence to the former-Tokugawa center of Edo (present-day Tokyo). During this time, Japan passed through multiple dynasties, civil wars, the rise and fall of the shoguns, the Mongols, and a wealth of other defining moments in Japanese history. Despite all of this time, it seems that it is possible to still see, underneath the surface, vestiges of the ancient, Chinese-influenced plan, in all of its altered, Japanese glory.

Reflection…

It seems appropriate to shift to a first person perspective when discussing what it is to wander around in the streets of present-day Kyoto—I had the absolute pleasure of experiencing the city first-hand for a full-week in December of 2002. Kyoto is a city that I, personally, could spend months, maybe years, exploring. It has taken me months of thought to finally pull together my reflections on the city into a series of words that make sense, and I will do my best to communicate my reflections that for some time I felt unable to put into words.

Kyoto in the early twenty-first century is both a modern city and not a modern city at the same time. One of the most striking observations I made while wandering was the co-existence of traditional Japan and modern Japan, side by side in many locations throughout the city. For example, in a shopping district, in between music stores, shoe stores, shops catering to travelers, and other various products of Japan’s rapid adoption of a capitalist economic system, there was a Shinto shrine that looked like it had been lifted up out of an Akira Kurosawa samurai film and slapped down in the modern world. It was a beautiful construction, with ornate banners and a pleasing wood architecture. People walked past it as if it was nothing out of the ordinary; it seemed that the only person who stopped in their tracks and looked at the shrine as if it seemed out of place was myself, the American college student experiencing the Far East for the first time in his life. I should also add that the shrine was in use, as were the several other similar shrines that my fellow travelers and I encountered on our numerous daylong excursions, continually getting lost in the city.

Most cities that I have experienced in the United States are not places that I would feel comfortable getting lost in; our cities, for the most part, do not seem to have the aesthetic appeal (in my subjective opinion, of course) that Kyoto has, unless one finds aesthetic appeal in functionality and convenience. I do not wander in the city of Chicago the way I found myself wandering in Kyoto. In Chicago, I never get the feeling that around the next corner there might be something entirely unexpected, something like a shrine in shopping mall—it is a safe bet, it seems, to assume that there will not be, in the shopping malls of America, any sort of religious representations. Likewise, with rare exception, I did not find anything too out of the ordinary, in the urban layout, in the Japanese city of Tokyo. (The capital Tokyo speaks much less directly about the Japanese people—it has the feel of being rapidly rebuilt after the bombing of World War II, with some often confusing twists and turns, but overall the feeling of a Western city). Kyoto was, thankfully, not touched during the Second World War by American bombs, although it was a potential target for one of the atomic bombs dropped in 1945. It is not a young city, like Chicago and present-day Tokyo. Kyoto seems to almost speak to its visitors; after over a thousand years of growth, the city seems to be a window that offers glimpses of what is unique about the Japanese people, what sets them apart from other cultures in the world.

Fosco Maraini, an Italian scholar who visited Japan in the late fifties, published in 1960 a book called Meeting With Japan—I found his reflections to be extremely useful in piecing together what I was feeling after my stay in Kyoto. Maraini compares Kyoto to the Italian city of Florence,6 the center of the Italian Renaissance which to this day has preserved in it much of the architecture that characterized the Renaissance; centuries after their deaths, one can still gaze up at the works of Michelangelo and Botticelli. With this starting point in mind, I was able to move in the direction of realizing how important Kyoto is to Japanese culture; Florence is a living window to the European Renaissance, and Kyoto holds a similar place in the realm of Japanese history.

Maraini refers to the Japanese “love of the devious and unexpected”7 when referring to how Kyoto has developed over the centuries, and my experience of Kyoto seemed to absolutely confirm this idea. Within the city, one can find many cultural landmarks—the Nishihonganji and Higashihonganji temples, the shogun’s NijoCastle, and the old Imperial palace all fit into places that seem to be within the old geometric pattern of the city. However, if one looks at a map of Kyoto, with the city center in the center of the map, one sees dozens of shrines and temples outside of the pattern that was borrowed from the Chinese. The Japanese, after adopting the pattern from the Chinese, proceeded to remove from the pattern many of the important parts of the city. According the Maraini, the “terrestrial pleasures” are left within the city, while the “ascetic pleasures” are removed and hidden from obvious view. One has to go searching for the latter in Kyoto.

My experience in Kyoto involved a lot of wandering, as I mentioned before—some of the most amazing things I saw in Kyoto were encountered by chance, stumbling into a small temple complex, or seeing a pagoda from the distance and finding a way towards it. Many of these temples and shrines were not visible until we were right on top of them—they were obscured from view until the very last second possible, then they seem to almost appear out of nowhere, jumping right out at a visitor and surprising him or her. Even when we knew what we were looking for, such as at the Silver Pavilion, we had to work our way through “obstacles” until we could see the important site; it almost seemed to make it so that the search for a site was just as important as the finding the site itself. Around the edges of the city, the shrines and temples represent both the native Shinto tradition and the transplanted Buddhist tradition—they exist in the natural areas outside the city side by side, fitting into the natural pattern almost perfectly.

All of this information—the history of Kyoto and Nara, the way Kyoto developed—seems to point to the incredible adaptability that the Japanese people have demonstrated throughout their long history. Whenever confronted with an extreme situation, the Japanese seem to have responded in a way that allowed them to continue on existing as a powerful civilization. When presented with the problem of Buddhism gaining political power, the emperor saw the need to move to a place that allowed for a better co-existence of Buddhism and Shinto. Centuries later, when confronted with industrialization, the Japanese adopted quickly in order to compete with the Western powers. And after the Second World War, the Japanese adopted Western capitalism quickly in order to guarantee their success in the post-war world economy.

Not only is the adaptability reflected in Kyoto, but also the idea of Japanese religious integration. The example of the “protections” offered by both traditions speaks of this, as well as the presence of Shinto and Buddhist shrines all around the edges of the city. For centuries these two traditions have co-existed in Japan, each going through periods of prominence, but never eclipsing one another entirely.

What is amazing about Kyoto is that all of this is directly observable through walking through the streets of the city. One can mix the experience of Kyoto with a little knowledge and understanding of Japanese history and religion, and the result is an experience of living history. It may not provide access to the entirety of Japanese history and experience, but it provides a foundation for finding a greater understanding of the themes within Japanese history and religion that could be found to exist. The Japanese are an adaptable people, interested in preserving their tradition, as well as moving on from that tradition. They seem to, however, never have any desire to forget the past or where it is that they came from; they seem to never want to forget what the foundation of their civilization actually is. Kyoto, in how it has been preserved, seems to reflect all of this. It is a challenge to see the significance of how Japan has developed, just as it is a challenge for a civilization to last as long as that of Japan has; this city seems to be one of the most significant landmarks in Japanese tradition.