From 794 AD to 1868 AD, Kyoto was the capital of Japan. How has the millennium left on the city, and can we identify the past years in Kyoto today? Tatsuzaburo Hayaya, who holds a doctorate in history from Kyoto University, made such an attempt in the book "Kyoto". He divided the urban space of Kyoto according to the clues of time, followed the timeline to examine every space in Kyoto one by one, and explored the imprint of time in the space.
A native of Kyoto, Hayaya Tatsuzaburo was a professor at the Institute of Humanities at Kyoto University and director of the Kyoto National Museum. He is well aware that there are numerous publications on the market about Kyoto, which is a popular tourist destination. The uniqueness of the book "Kyoto" lies in the fact that the author does not believe in various rumors and sayings about Kyoto, but relies on the training of historians to analyze the origin and changes of each scenic spot within the framework of Japanese history, and presents Kyoto to the reader in a combination of time and space. On the afternoon of April 20th, at the Aegean Store of One-Way Space, the famous screenwriter and film critic Shi Hang, together with the famous scholar and writer Shi An, shared his thoughts and feelings with readers on topics such as the book "Kyoto", Kyoto meteorology and the Beijing imagination triggered by Kyoto.
"Kyoto", by Tatsuzaburo Hayaya, translator: Li Maofan, edition: New Classics| Nova Press, January 2019
Kyoto is not a travel guide
Before his first visit to Kyoto, Heon had read about Kyoto in more than one book. He first read a book about World War II. The book tells of the atomic bombs that the United States finally dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was originally intended to be dropped on Kyoto, which was then an important military city in Japan. At that time, the wife of the U.S. military chief of operations had lived in Kyoto for many years, and she persuaded her husband to abandon the plan.
Yasunari Kawabata's "Koto" tells a lot about the memories of Kyoto and the events outside Kyoto, and Junichiro Tanizaki's "Fine Snow" has a description of Cherry Blossom Viewing in Kyoto at the beginning, all of which constitute the Kyoto imagination of Shizune. When he first went to Kyoto in 1997 and saw the extremely modern railway station, he felt that he had made the wrong station, which was not the ancient capital he imagined.
Photo credit: Banter Snaps
Unlike Shi-an, Shi Hang's impression of Kyoto first came from Akira Kurosawa's film "I Have No Regrets about Youth", which tells real historical events, starting with the forced departure of the liberal Kyoto University professor Ryukawa, until he returned to the school after the war and became the president. Shi Hang's reading experience of Kyoto mainly comes from the "Kyodai Shuangbi" in contemporary Japanese literature, the Manjo Muku, who wrote "Shikao" and "Kamogawa Hermo", and Morimi Noboruhiko, who wrote the story of foxes, tengu, and humans fighting together. In addition, he became acquainted with the geography of Kyoto through computer games set in Kyoto.
He said he had been to Kyoto at least 15 times before and after, and his understanding of Kyoto was deepening. Most people go to Kyoto, they go to Kiyomizu-dera Temple, Kinkaku-ji Temple, Ginkaku-ji Temple, Ryoanji Temple, etc., but such a superficial tour of Kyoto, what you see is the least important thing in the city. In Hayaya Tatsuzaburo's book "Kyoto", the temples that tourists visit most often mention only a few names because they are not very important in the history of Kyoto. Shi Hang also mentioned that the book "Kyoto" is not a travel guide book, it does not tell you where to buy anything, where to take a few cars, this is a book that should be carefully read before or after departure, because it integrates the history of Japan into the introduction to Kyoto.
"The book doesn't really have any conclusions, just a very calm account of things. What's going on in the city of Kyoto, that's it. Shinan said. In contrast, when we talk about people, when we talk about cities, we especially like to draw conclusions. When he was a child, his family taught him that he must not find a northeasterner or a Sichuan person to get married. "It's not a good idea to draw conclusions like this, and it's often full of loopholes."
Kyoto is a style
In the book "Kyoto", Hayaya Tatsuzaburo mentions that Kyoto's alias is "Yamashiko Mizumi". "It's not the beauty of the mountains," Shi Hang said, "it's the special colors and dynamics of the mountains at dusk, and Ozu Yasujiro also said that the mountains around Kyoto are like red bean pudding." Shinan was particularly touched by this. He said that there are many cities in Japan, known as "Little Kyoto". For example, Kurashiki, Kanazawa, Kamakura, Sawara, etc. are all small Kyoto, and their ancient buildings may be preserved more completely than Kyoto as a whole, but the reason why they are conventionally called "Little Kyoto" is not because of their ancient buildings, but because of the state of "mountain purple water".
Photo credit: Su San Lee
"Kyoto is not just a city, it is a standard, or a style, a life, a situation." Shinan said. Taking Kyoto as the criterion, there is a period in Japanese history when life still exists, and the past life continues. In Kyoto, there are some shops that sell traditional artifacts, and it feels like it was a long time ago. Some small Kyotos do not even have telephone poles, which are built outside the city to preserve the style of past life in the city. Kyoto is blessed with a large number of shops for tourists, and its real life is experienced in deep alleys.
Kyoto's weather makes us ashamed
Due to his interest in Japanese flower arrangement, Shibuan visited the Rokkakudo Hall in Kyoto twice to see the flower exhibition. Hexagonal Hall is the headquarters of the Chifang Sect, and the spring flower exhibition and autumn flower exhibition are both four days, with one batch of exhibits on the first two days and another batch on the last two days, which is equivalent to a flower show containing two exhibitions. This exhibition is a great event in the flower road world, and people from all over the world come to see the exhibition, and many foreigners also wear kimonos. "But when you leave the place where the exhibition is located and go to the city to see it, you will find that the exhibition has nothing to do with the city, and life elsewhere in the city is business as usual." Shinan said. This reminds Himan of his visit to Paris during the World Cup in France. People may talk about the World Cup at dinner, and there will be a screen on the street for everyone to watch the game, but that's it. "Life in the city has not been affected."
Photo by Daniel Chen
Kyoto is also such a city, where everyone lives their own lives, and what a small number of people do has nothing to do with the vast majority of other people. "It's not about lifting up a city or a country to do one thing; if so, it means that the city's weather is not big enough." The word "weather" is relatively vague to say, but in The temple's view, if a city is not surrounded by anyone or anything, then it can also be regarded as a city with great weather.
The city of Kyoto is powerful, and that power comes from its culture, from its conviction of its own culture. "Culture is about making us less influenced by others." Shinan said. Whether it is a person or a city, if there is culture, it will not be driven by others; but at the same time, culture makes him/her not crazy and not bluff. "Kyoto is a particularly cultured city, how literate is this city? All visitors must take special care to see where it has culture. ”
Photo by Takahiro Taguchi
Compared with the Kyoto people who live their own lives, Shi Hang said that in small towns in Jiangnan, such as Tongli or Zhouzhuang, the locals dare to go out after 9 pm, "Before they were all tourists and people who lived on tourism, you think that the local residents are meeting on the road, in fact, everyone is in each other's window, they are the state of actors." ”
Beijing could have been more like an ancient capital than Kyoto
He said he had always felt that Kyoto was very much like Beijing, not the current Beijing, but the Beijing that no longer fully existed. Kyoto was formerly the capital, but after the Meiji Restoration, it lost its status as a capital and became a cultural city. There are many cities in Japanese history, such as Nara and Kamakura, that declined after losing their status as capitals, but Kyoto became purer after not being the capital. Peiping in the 1920s and 1940s was much like Kyoto, when the Nationalist government was in Nanjing, and Peiping was a symbol of Chinese culture and a complete preservation of buildings from a long historical period.
As a Beijinger, Zhi'an has a deep impression of the city of Beijing. "I have seen the city as it was, and although Beijing has lost a large part of it when I see it, it is not far from the appearance of the ancient capital. If we hadn't demolished it, rebuilt it, and built a lot of high-rise buildings, Maybe Beijing wouldn't be worse than Kyoto, and I'm afraid it would be more in line with what we imagined Kyoto. "Because in people's imagination, an ancient should have walls, there are old, narrow streets, there are some old houses. But kyoto's roads are actually very wide. Although Kyoto was not bombed during World War II, bombing had to be prevented. In Japan, it was a machiya house, and the old houses had to be demolished and the streets widened.
In addition, reading the book "Kyoto" also made Zhi'an think of Tianjin. He felt that Osaka was like Tianjin during the Republic of China, when people who were officials in Beijing bought houses and lived in Tianjin. At that time, Tianjin was very foreign, and Beijing was very rustic. Now Tianjin is not foreign, and Beijing is not foreign. "I don't know what's going on. It would be interesting if someone could do some discussion from a macro perspective. ”
Some on-site readers asked whether there were any works, like "Kyoto" introducing Kyoto, which thoroughly sorted out and introduced the cities of China. He said that he had recently asked the author of Midnight Peking, Paul Frankie, the same question, and Frankie said that his knowledge of Beijing came from Lao She and his knowledge of Shanghai from Mu Shiying. Shi Hang recommended Jin Shoushen's book "Life in Old Beijing".
author
: Kou Huaiyu, special correspondent of the Beijing News
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: Qin Dansi; Proofreader: Xue Jingning