www.minka-ichiku.com Japanese Country Style Chapter 1

Japanese Country Style: Putting New Life into Old Houses
by Yoshihiro Takishita

Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Encountering the Japanese Folk House
[the full text, accompanied in the original by two color photos, two black and white, and one map]

I was born and raised in a town called Shirotori, in the Gujo region of Gifu Prefecture. It is situated northwest of the town of Gujo Hachiman (famous for its Bon Festival), in amongst the mountains of the higher reaches of the Nagara River. About thirty kilometers (nineteen miles) north of Shirotori, along the Gujo Highway, is a village called Shokawa. When I was a junior high school student, I heard that the Miboro Dam would be constructed there and went to see the site. At that time, I saw my first gassho zukuri house, a type of traditional folk dwelling (minka) with a steep roof in the shape of "praying hands" (gassho). It made a powerful -- even a shocking -- impression on me. It was the house of the Toyama family and one of the largest examples of the type. Currently, this house receives many visitors, having become a museum, but, at that time, old dwellings such as this were being pulled down one after another to make way for the construction of the dam. Some houses had fortunately escaped being pulled down by being moved to the city, and this was the first time I ever heard the term minka ichiku: the removal and reconstruction of minka dwellings. Since then, the expression has come to dominate my life.

In 1963, after entering a university in Tokyo, I had an experience that was to play a decisive role in my way of life from then on. At an acquaintance's suggestion, I went to look at a late Edo-period (1600-1868) dwelling, originally from Chichibu, in Saitama. I later learned that this house, which had been moved and reassembled in Tokyo's Roppongi district, was known as Senri-an and belonged to Meredith Weatherby, the American chairman of a publishing firm that introduces Japanese art overseas.

I was captivated by the massive, lustrous central pillar, the high ceiling, and the curved black beams that snaked beneath it, not to mention the breathtakingly impressive living room, as seen from the mezzanine floor. A collection of Japanese antiques decorated the room, making the expanse of this old dwelling yet more appealing. Wooden sculptures of the gods of wind and thunder that were perched on the beams in the living room are still as clear in my mind's eye as if I had seen them yesterday.

At that time, I lived with my foster father, John Roderick, in a rented house halfway up Mount Nagoe in Kamakura. With a wide view of the sea, it was a perfect location, though a temporary accommodation. After seeing the Weatherby House, our longing for the house of our dreams, a restored minka, became ever stronger. Then, one day, in the year after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, we had welcome news from my mother, who ran a kimono shop in my hometown of Shirotori. She told me that part of a village called Izumi, about three hours by car to the west, was due to be submerged by the construction of a dam, and that we could obtain one of the minka. The fact that the Naka Ise district, which is where Izumi is situated, was also the site of an ochiudo legend (of the flight of the defeated Heike soldiers in the twelfth century) enhanced its appeal.

I lost no time in having my parents show my foster father and me to the village. The condition of the narrow road was not good, and it seemed like it would wind on deep between the mountains forever. When we finally arrived at Naka Ise, we found a small hamlet of about a dozen dwellings, all in the gassho zukuri style with thatched roofs. I had the impression that I had stumbled back into the Edo period.

It must have been just after the end of the rice harvest, when the villagers were catching their breath, and they regarded our party with curious looks. I still cannot forget the moment I set foot in the house of the village headman, as the assembled villagers stared. We stepped up from the earthen floor into the house itself, and, as my eyes became accustomed to the semi-darkness inside, I could make out the curved beams, which looked as if they were flying beneath the ceiling. "This is it!" I thought, moved almost to the point of agitation. At the same moment, I noticed an odor, which seemed somehow very comforting. Was this the smell engendered by long years of living at one with nature? Time seemed to flow comfortably in this space that enveloped me so peacefully. "This is the only house I could ever want," I thought. To our astonishment, the owner, a descendant of the Heike, offered it to us as a gift.

Although we had obtained the house itself, it was to be a long time before we could finally live in it. First, we had to look for land. After a year and a half of searching here and there, we eventually found a suitable location on Kamakura's Genjiyama mountain, overlooking Mount Fuji and Sagami Bay, and the moment of actually transferring the dwelling came at last. Carpenters from Gujo, heir to the master's tradition of the Hida region of Gifu, began the work, and I also helped with the transfer as much as possible. It was more interesting and fulfilling than I had expected.

With the cooperation of a number of people, the house was finally completed, and I once again experienced the thrill I had as a boy upon seeing the Toyama family home for the first time and on seeing Senri-an in Roppongi. But delighted as I was to have realized my long-standing dream, I felt physically and mentally weary. I had graduated from university, and with no clear view of my future career, I set off overseas in search of a new beginning. It was a haphazard, spur-of-the-moment, shoestring journey around Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the United States, but it brought me into contact with all kinds of different cultures and taught me the habit of observing and learning from things. In particular, my firsthand contact with the "stone-building" culture of the West had, almost without my knowing it, strengthened the attractions for me of Japan's "wooden buildings." In later life, on many occasions and in many places, I have had cause to think of this journey as an incomparably rich source of fertilization in my life.

About a year and a half after setting out, I started to feel the urge to return to Japan. Little by little, the fresh impressions I had initially gotten from traveling were disappearing. Mentally, I formed an image of a possible lifestyle after returning home. Barely waiting to unpack, I visited an old friend, and, on the basis of his advice and my enthusiasm for places like Senri-an, I decided to open an antique business in my home on Genjiyama, in Kamakura.

I decorated my two-story house, with its gassho frame, with folk craft objects and other antiques, using them in my everyday life, and selling them when there was a buyer. I saw customers by appointment only, a very congenial system. When I actually opened for business, I was fortunate in meeting many wonderful, discerning customers. Word of mouth helped too, and business went smoothly.

At one point, the Salomons, an American businessman and his Japanese wife, came looking for antiques. After a quick look around, the husband said to his wife, "Choose anything you like as a birthday present." She immediately replied, "What I want is a house like this!" As a result, I later came to build a vacation home for them in Karuizawa, but even then I never would have thought that this would become my life's work. However, after finishing the Salomon House, I found myself with more and more similar work, transferring and reassembling old houses. In retrospect, it was that single comment by Mrs. Salomon that prompted me to devote my life to the reconstruction of old houses.

After this, at the time when I contracted to build my fourth house, I had a peculiar experience. After purifying the four corners of the house with ritual salt and sak, I rubbed the central pillar over and over again, marveling at its long years of service and imagining its history. Once the thatch had been taken off, the whole primitive structure of the roof was revealed, lashed together from the gassho frame and brushwood. Next, the roof beams were lowered to the ground, and there emerged from beneath them the form of the wonderful interlocking beams of curved timber as well as the sturdy pillars. Once the straw mats and bamboo had been lowered from the roof space and the earthen walls had been removed from between the pillars, the bare skeleton of the house was revealed. These were the main beams and pillars. Bulky and robust and extremely beautiful, they appeared sculptural, with a lifelike dignity. It was so enchanting that I would happily have left it as it was to be able to gaze at it forever. The peculiar experience I mentioned came a few moments later, when the beams and pillars were finally dismantled and laid on the ground. The vital light they had radiated a moment ago was lost in an instant. What remained were a few worn old pieces of timber. The mortises and joints that had been cut here and there were painful to look at, like great wounds in the wood: it was a truly pathetic sight. Removed from their role of forming the frame of the house, the pillars and beams had simply become some old timber. In this cruel state the lumber seemed to be speaking to me. I seemed to hear voices imploring me to do something. The one task I could undertake in response to the wordless pleas for attention was, of course, to revive them through relocation and reconstruction. When the pillars and beams were reassembled as a contemporary home, when that space had been restored, that was when the beautiful luster would shine forth once more.

And so I became ever more entranced by the work of relocating and reconstructing old minka. The joy of seeing a house finished is different every time, and there is nothing better; it more than makes up for the two or three years of toil it takes to get the job done. Before I knew it, thirty houses had been transplanted and were thriving in their new locations.

[Below are two consecutive pages showing the Roderick House.]

www.minka-ichiku.com Japanese Country Style Chapter 1