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Foreword
by Donald Richie
Old Japan is vanishing. Traditional homes are being torn down, the public baths are closing; children no longer hopscotch among their chalked lozenges, their parents no longer sit on the stoop in the evening cool; the kimono has all but vanished, and tatami-mat rooms are no longer found in the newer apartments: even the food—such traditional fare as kiji donburi (pheasant over rice— deliciously faked, really chicken) and hayashi raisu (an Edwardian favorite, hashed rice)—must now be searched for. And in the place of all of this.- the home shower, the chair and table, the TV set, and victuals known as finger-licking-good from the local corner shop.
So what else is new? Things come and go—change is the essence. This is something everyone knows, and most remark upon. The Japanese certainly know it, perhaps even better than some because the fact has been so publicly pondered and regretting it has become so institutionalized.
"The world of dew is, yes, a world of dew, but even so. . ." famously remarked Kobayashi Issa in 1819—as here translated by Sato Hiroaki. Transient, ephemeral, evanescent, our world vanishes before our eyes. This we know, can perhaps appreciate, can maybe celebrate, yet even so . . .
Even so, there is nostalgia and regret at the passing of things. There is the sadness of this knowledge of the impermanence of the only world we know and there is sorrow at the death of so much which is true and beautiful.
Our sentiment is so universal that we can only question its power to continue to move us as it does, and to wonder why this feeling should be so particularly poignant in regard to Japan.
Well, one of the reasons for this poignancy is that what we call old Japan is a product nowhere else duplicated. Old Europe and old America share much. The passing is sad perhaps but then one can still find pockets of the past in the Dolomites or the Ozarks and they resemble each other more than they don't.
But Japan, a distant archipelago which cut itself off from the world for centuries and had over the years evolved its own peculiar culture—there is no place else like this. And so when its various products—the
