Word: ryoanji
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...still remember the light breeze, the gurgle of flowing water, and that joyful sense of release. Tourists flock to the rock gardens of Ryoanji; I found my Zen behind a great sushi restaurant, against a stunning 12th floor view of southern Kyoto, amidst the hustle and bustle of an underground Starbucks. I refer, of course, to the delights of the sit-down toilet. Only after stumbling every morning to a porcelain bowl in the floor can you understand the genius of Western plumbing. For a month, my brother and I made daily pilgrimages to our favorite sites; they became...
Outside the Ryoanji temple, the newest Japanese surfaces shine. The taxi drivers bustle, sweeping huge feather dusters over their cars, flicking specks from the bright metal. The ritual, a writer once remarked, makes them look like chambermaids in the first act of a French farce. But it is utterly Japanese, a set piece: the drivers handle their dusters like samurai. The scene is a sort of cartoon of the busy, fastidious superego that is supposed to preside in the Japanese psyche. The drivers even wear white gloves. There is probably not a dirty taxicab in Japan...
These taxis in the old capital city of Kyoto wait outside the doors of the ineffable, of another Japan entirely. The Ryoanji temple's Zen rock garden?five austerely abstract boulder mounds set in a sea of curried sand pebbles?is a celebrated spiritual masterpiece. The garden is absolutely still, and yet tense with an obscurely bullying profundity. A guide whispers the sermons in the stones, the allegories: the rocks are, maybe, tigers swimming across the sea. Or they are whales rocking in the deep. Or perhaps they are these mysterious islands themselves: Japan. The abbot of Ryoanji...
...less an aspect of the country's cultural heritage than the design of a "stolen view" garden or the traditional cutting of a mortise-and-tenon joint in a cedar beam. Like the rest of that heritage, it is dying. The souvenir shop of the famous Ryoanji temple in Kyoto sells boxes of tiny oblong sugar candies. The boxes are exquisitely plain, made of thin strips of unpainted pine. But touch one with a cigarette and it melts: the pine is, in fact, printed Styrofoam...
...structure that comes closest to satisfying Tange's new ideal is his Kagawa Prefectural Office, completed last year. With its massive exposed beams rising in tiers, ceramic Zen symbols emblazoned on its walls, and a rock garden in the tradition of the Ryoanji Temple, it strikes an unmistakably Japanese note in the modern idiom of reinforced concrete. As well as recalling the past, Tange believes his building must also "make an image of our new social structure." For Tange this means the new democracy in which citizens are now invited to become part of the government. To welcome them...
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