are made by children of those ages to celebrate passage into each successive phase of childhood. The doubling of an odd number is even more auspicious: the gosekku (five seasonal festivals) are held on the first day of the first month, the third day of the third month, the fifth day of the fifth month, and so on. This predilection for odd numbers underlies all traditional Japanese aesthetics. A haiku poem, for example, comprises seventeen syllables divided 5/7/5, and waka classic verse comprises thirty-one syllables divided 5/7/5–7/7. The renowned Ryoan-ji stone garden contains three rock clusters, comprising three, five, and seven rocks respectively, and all fifteen can never be seen simultaneously—from any given viewpoint, at least one is hidden behind the others. Simultaneously insufficient and excessive, an odd number cannot be balanced or resolved without leaving a remainder—an intimation of the existence of something more than the immediately perceptible. It is this disquieting sense of incompletion that gives tension and dissonance to all the traditional arts, whether the laconic simplicity of haiku, the spontaneous black brush strokes on white paper in a sumi-e painting, the incongruous twisted branches in ikebana, or the irregular accents and subtle misalignments in sukiya architecture. Such serene yet precariously suspended compositions always rely on the intuition and imagination of the observer for their completion.
Selected by Japanese photographer Akihiko Seki, this book contains a collection of houses in the widest sense of the word: exemplars, variations, and hybrids of the shinden, shoin, and sukiya styles, with buildings ranging from summer villas for the aristocracy to town-houses for ordinary citizens, from monumental Buddhist temples to insubstantial garden huts, and from personal homes to traditional inns. All have their related gardens, whether tsuboniwa (condensed courtyard gardens), kaiyushiki teien (picturesque stroll gardens), karesansui (“dry landscape”) stone gardens, shakkei (the “borrowed scenery” of a distant landscape), or some combination of these and other types. Each one is a fine example of traditional Kyoto house and garden design, yet to discuss the historical origins of this architecture is not as straightforward as it may seem. Take, for example, the gold leaf-clad Kinkaku (known in English as the Golden Pavilion), one of Kyoto’s most famous and spectacular structures. Built in 1397 as part of a retirement villa for Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and later incorporated into the Zen Buddhist temple Rokuon-ji (otherwise known as Kinkaku-ji), it is thanks to buildings such as this one that Kyoto was mostly spared from damage during the Second World War. Though considered as a possible target for the atomic bomb that ultimately landed on Hiroshima, Kyoto was recognized as a city of such profound cultural importance that US Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson declared it to be “the one city that they must not bomb without my permission.” Yet throughout the war one of the young acolytes living at Rokuon-ji was longing for the bombs to land. He harbored a strange obsession with the Golden Pavilion that could only be consummated by seeing it burn down with him inside. When the war ended with the building still intact, the acolyte made its destruction his mission in life, plotting an act of simultaneous arson and suicide. He was half successful: in 1950 he burned the building to the ground, but lost his nerve and escaped the fire. Quickly arrested, tried, and jailed, he was found to be suffering from various mental and physical illnesses, and died within a few years. The Golden Pavilion, on the other hand, rose from the ashes: a gleaming replica was completed in 1955. There are conflicting opinions regarding the acolyte’s true motives (famously fictionalized in Mishima Yukio’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), but in any case the building you will see in Kyoto today is not the original Golden Pavilion. In fact, this was not even the first time it had been completely destroyed by fire, and like every wooden building in Japan it has been subject to frequent repair and constant replacement of parts over its lifetime. Very little of the structure has ever been “original” in any conventional sense. Yet, in the minds of the Japanese public, the current structure is indeed the real thing; it just happens to be made of new materials.
This demonstrates something quite fundamental about people’s attitudes toward historical authenticity in Japan. Naturally, if the Parthenon were to be destroyed and rebuilt, it would be seen as a substitute for the lost original. In the West, ideas may change but substance should be eternal; in the East, it seems that the opposite is true. Indeed, much of the traditional architecture you will encounter in Kyoto today may be old in form but relatively new in substance. Made of fragile materials—wood, paper, bamboo, earth— subject to a humid climate and frequent natural disasters, these buildings require constant repair. The fabric of the city has its own languid metabolism, a pulse of ongoing construction and destruction, replication and renewal. Manifesting the paradoxical Japanese love of both the patinated and the pristine, these artifacts from the ancient past are suffused with the smell of freshly cut wood and newly laid tatami mats, surrounded by fastidiously manicured hedges and raked gravel. The houses and gardens of Kyoto remain ageless.
Perhaps the most common phrase to be found on a kakejiku (hanging scroll) in a tokonoma alcove is ichi go ichi e (“one occasion, one encounter”). The implication is that every moment is irreducibly unique. Above and beyond historical narratives and cultural intentions, the ineffable spaces, shadows, scents, and sounds of these houses and gardens are best experienced in all their sensual immediacy and intensity, right here and right now.
aristocratic villas
One of the more curious aspects of Imperial rule during Kyoto’s thousand-year tenure as capital of Japan is the insei (cloistered rule) system, in which an Emperor would officially retire but continue to exert power from behind the scenes. Abdicating at an early age and forcing one of his own children—often no more than an infant—to ascend the Chrysanthemum Throne, the Emperor would take the title of daijo tenno (Retired Emperor) or, in cases where he entered the Buddhist priesthood, the title of daijo hoo (Cloistered Emperor). It was not unknown for there to be several Retired Emperors living at the same time, but only one would be acknowledged to have authority. For most of Kyoto’s history, this was more or less irrelevant anyway: real power lay elsewhere. At the end of the Heian Period (794–1185) it had become generally accepted that the Retired Emperor was ruling with the titular Emperor as a figurehead, yet at that same historical moment effective control of the nation shifted to the military government of the Kamakura Shogunate. From the Kamakura Period (1185–1333) onward, the balance of power continued to oscillate between the military dictators and the Imperial family, but for the most part lay beyond a somewhat farcical series of façades: a nominal Emperor who was controlled by a Retired Emperor who answered to the Shogun who delegated to his military generals.
It was this very lack of ultimate responsibility that allowed the Retired Emperors the freedom to cultivate their hobbies, to study and contribute to the development of arts such as the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and calligraphy. Imperial wealth was used to sponsor and indulge poets, painters, and sculptors. Those Retired Emperors and other members of the nobility who commissioned retirement villas and summer palaces often collaborated on the designs with the carpenters and gardeners they employed. Produced for the wealthiest clients on the best sites by the most skilful artisans using the highest-grade
