This weekend I finished the questionnaire related to the Machiya, what are the qualities for living and working. How to take these qualities with us to the next generations in Japan and abroad. I’m warned by several people that it wouldn’t be easy to reach Kyoto people, especially those who live in a Machiya, to fill in the questionnaire. Today I had a meeting with Suwa-san. She wrote her thesis about the Machiya: how it Lees verder
As former generations used to sing in the Netherlands ‘brand in Mokum’ (fire in Amsterdam), in Kyoto it’s a real issue to avoid fire with so many wooden houses and temples. Nearly all the temples have been rebuild after a fire and most of them are not older than 150 years. The last big fire in Kyoto has been in november 1864. As a first action, they have a red basket of water and a Lees verder
While waiting at the entrance of the Doshisha University I made this picture. not very elegant figure with a huge cigarette. When the person I was waiting for arrived, he told me it was a sign for not smoking while walking (and standing) in this area. That was the meaning of the strange combination of the pictogram of a person in a very strange position and the big cigarette. Later that day I saw the Lees verder
For the last two weeks I’ve been diving into the Machiya: the tradition, the structure, the dwellers. I try to understand a little bit about the Kyoto culture in relation to the Machiya, but everything is so interwoven with each other and so different from my culture, that it’s very difficult to get a finger on the essence of the Machiya so far. Sometimes I see infographics to explain a ritual. It helps, but it’s Lees verder
Life in a Machiya is not always fun. Yesterday night when I was reading in bed, I heard some strange scrabbling. The girl upstairs told me yesterday that she has a leaking roof, but that couldn’t happen on my floor. After I took my glasses of I saw a huge cockroach around the edges of the wall. It disappeared with some help from me, behind a cabinet. Fortunately I slept well. Today I bought some Lees verder
During the two weeks I’m in Kyoto I try to figure out why there’s such a big gap between tradition and modernity in every aspect of life in Kyoto/Japan. Sometimes reading Alex Kerr (Lost Japan or Dog and Demons) helps me understanding this incredible lack of beauty of traditional crafts in modern life. But reading this makes me very depressive about the future of this country. Today, although it was raining almost all day long, Lees verder
Through our eyes we can look and observe the world around us. Sometimes we use a painting, filmscreen or photo to focus on what we should see and avoid the noise around it. Three years ago I saw the work of Job Koelewijn at de Pont Tilburg. He put a container at the entrance. You could go inside and sit on own of the cinema seats. You were looking through a big hole that looked Lees verder
Taniguchi (professor at the Doshisha University) explained me one of the first days about living in a traditional japanese house. In a traditional house everything in life is takes place in the same room: day: living, eating, sleeping, all in one room year: summer, autumn, winter, spring (with differences in the garden and in the shutters) lifetime: birth ceremony, marriage, funeral all took place in the same house. Now we have in a modern japanese Lees verder
Ellie told me that there’s a Machiya transported to the Boston Children’s Museum. I found on the website images where it looked like ‘Alice in Wonderland’. This Machiya has been taken apart in Kyoto and was rebuild by Japanese carpenters in the museum (1979-1980). In an interview in the Harvard Magazine Yukio Lippit (professor in the humanities) says: “You can really only understand a Japanese building by taking it apart.†I don’t know whether a Lees verder
Culture reveals itself slowly. Every day you see new things, although your eye must have seen them before. Only when you make connections, references, relationships you can communicate and understand better the things you’ve seen. This first week is a great lesson in modesty and slow looking.