The first thing that struck me about Tokyo was the silence. The city is the same size as New York, but there are no horns. No sirens. People talk in a low tone of voice. Even the buses are quiet.
I’m staying at the Palace Hotel, which overlooks the Imperial Palace grounds. A wide moat surrounds the gardens, and the wall that rises from the reflective water is canted and made of dark gray boulders that seem to have fallen into perfect place. Swans cruise past—white silhouettes against nearly black stone—and the gray tile roofs of the palace peek out from the trees on the far side of the moat.
The morning started with a visit to the Nuno shop, where we were shown amazing textiles designed by Reiko Sudo, a charming woman whose work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Lunch was at Sahsya Kanetanaka; the entire restaurant opened onto a stylized moss garden which was periodically sprayed with water—not just to irrigate the plants, but also to cool the air that wafted over where we were sitting. We sat at 50-foot-long tables, tiered as in a theater, and looking out at the minuscule but richly textured pocket garden.
The 21_21 Design Sight museum was next. Designed by architect Tadao Ando, it features beautiful concrete work, an undulating roof made from a single sheet of zinc and 40-foot-long sheets of glass. It’s set in a park with fabulous trees and grass as smooth as a pool table top, where people were scattered about, soaking up the sun in a Japanese version of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte.
We ended our first day at a complex of Buddhist shrines painted brilliant red with accents of black and gold. Giant cauldrons filled with sand held sticks of incense while people surrounded them beating the air towards their hair to capture the scent.
As we traveled along the coast, little by little the buildings grew smaller until suddenly, to the south of us, beaches appeared. To the north, the foothills and mountains Japan is famous for unfolded in dense, lush forest. The trees were new to me; I recognized very few other than the oleander that lined the highway.
Eventually we turned off into the town of Kamakura and wound our way through tiny streets up into the foothills. We were there to visit architect Yoshihiro Takishita, who has had an incredible career building traditional Japanese farmhouses known as minkas. He gave a talk about the development of the style from the 11th century onward. His own three homes contain a collection of over 200 Japanese screens, cases of porcelain, a collection of books and Buddhas and other traditional Japanese artifacts.
Takishita’s minkas
Takishita’s minkas
In Takamatsu, we saw the incredible Ritsurin Garden—hills and waterways interlaced with pools, ponds, streams and elegant wooden bridges. Everything in the garden was thoughtful and stylized.
One of the highlights of the trip so far was our next stop: the studio and workshop of sculptor and furniture designer Isamu Noguchi. There is a stone fabrication shed that Noguchi used to cut and shape the boulders for his sculptures. Three of the buildings where he worked are restored barns—their details, simple shapes and materials are elegant, inventive and unequivocally beautiful.
Ritsurin Garden
Ritsurin Garden
Ritsurin Garden
We boarded a private ferry for Naoshima island, a sizable south-facing portion of which has been developed into the Benesse Art Site—a spectacular collection of museums, installations and a hotel.
The courtyards and open landscape display sculpture, while the Benesse House Museum exhibits work by Richard Long, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein and other significant artists. The complex was designed by Tadao Ando; like the museum he designed in Tokyo, the smooth concrete with its geometric layout of rebar plugs is fantastic. Everything was spare and elegantly done.
You’re truly aware of the island beauty of Japan when you’re here. The countryside is extremely mountainous, and the cities are nestled in the flat alluvial planes. Night and day you hear the thrum of boats going back and forth between the islands.
From Naoshima we took a ferry to the island of Teshima, also part of the Benesse Site, for what was the most amazing part of the day. After a Bento box lunch, we drove a short distance to the Chichu Art Museum, a white bubble of concrete set into the grassy landscape.
The interior is one enormous white room with two circular openings to the sky. Water bubbles up through tiny holes through the floor—it is natural groundwater which pours through these openings because of hydrostatic pressure. We spent nearly an hour in the space, though I could have spent the entire day. I’ve rarely seen something of such imagination and simple creative elegance. It changes the way you think about water. It changes the way you think about simplicity. It changes the way you think about time.
Kyoto is famously a city of 2,000 temples and shrines, though, when we arrived by bullet train, it was as modern and brightly lit as Tokyo. The temples are often part of very complex building ensembles of cloisters and raised walkways, areas of combed gravel, shaped trees and gardens.
We began our visit at a centuries-old fabric house, the home of a firm that has supplied fabric to samurai, emperors and shogun. They make beautiful silks with intricate patterns, weaving in gold leaf paper cut into very thin strips.
We visited private homes as well. One, built in the 1930s, was very traditional and laid with tatami mats. Many of the hallways were wide planks of wood, as were the ceilings. Balconies enclosed in sheets of handblown glass looked out over the surrounding gardens of koi pools and beautiful Japanese maples.
The amazing Sagawa Art Museum was next. Set in a pool of water, the whole building is an abstraction of a Buddhist temple, constructed of board-formed concrete, stainless steel columns and a zinc roof. In parts of the museum there are skylights which collect water; the sunlight refracts off of them, causing almost psychedelic patterns to move across the walls in the spaces below. (This is something I am using in a yoga studio in a new house we are designing for a property in Maryland.) Everything was beautifully done, and we saw an exhibition of stone and raku done by three generations of a single family.
The Sagawa also had a modern interpretation of a teahouse, also sited in the large pool of water that surrounds the museum. They presented a demonstration of a Japanese tea ceremony, a true form of meditation. We were served tea cakes—eaten with a wooden spear—and macha, a somewhat thick green tea made with powdered leaves.
Ultimately, what I may admire most about Japanese architecture is the empty space: the long wall with the roof atop it; an uniterrupted expanse of glass. A sense of the slow passage of time. I think, perhaps, a way to express that in our buildings is to think about the way sun and shadows move across them. But more on that later.
Private home
We began our day with a visit to Rengeō-in, one of the longest temples in all of Kyoto, which houses 1,001 statues of the deity the Thousand Armed Kannon, all painted with gold leaf. It was then off to two Buddhist Temples; the first was Kinkaku-ji or The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which still houses Zen monks. We were only there for a few moments, but it was amazing to see a building done entirely in gold leaf, the structure reflected in the surrounding lake.
The second shrine, Ryōan-ji, is known for its rock garden, or kare-sansui, meaning dry landscape, its white stones raked around irregular black rocks. Ryoan-ji is also home to a water garden, tea house and tea garden.
The day concluded at the famous Shinto gates at the Nararyana Kanyuchi temple, where, under a series of orange gates, pathways weave their way to the forest.
In Nara, we headed to the Horiyu-ji temple, where there is an outstanding five-tier pagoda. The buildings here are notable for their dark wood, and are the oldest existing wood structures in the world, dating from the eighth century AD. You sense they are rooted in their surroundings like giant trees.
We drove to Osaka to visit the Chikatsu Asuka Historical Museum by Tadao Ando, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect’s first major commission.
Lunch was in downtown Osaka, which really feels like the Times Square of Japan: shops advertise their wares with giant sculptures–animated crabs, an octopus, a dragon–even Hello Kitty.
Dinner that evening was at Awatasano, a traditional Japanese restaurant overlooking a beautiful garden. We were entertained by a geisha who did a series of dances and was wonderfully elegant. She was charming and engaging, with a wonderfully sly but respectful sense of humor.
I spent the night in a traditional ryokan, Arashiyama Benkei, at the very edge of Kyoto. Is the point where Kyoto ends in the forest and the mountains begin. The ryokan sits on the banks of the wide Ōi River which follows the bottom of the mountains. It is a place to collect your thoughts and get in touch with nature.
The first thing one does when arriving and checking in is to put on a cotton robe found in your room. This is worn for almost your entire stay. We were also given pajamas. My robe barely fit my 6’6 frame–in the pajamas, however, I felt like the Jolly Green Giant sprouting out of a miniature set of sleepwear.
I stayed in a traditional tatami room, with paper sliding doors and shoji screens. Even the windows were closed by sliding these elegant paper panels. Dinner was served in my room; 20 courses, each served on a tray, were each brought in and carefully placed on the table in front of me. After dinner I went for a stroll around the hotel and its wooden courtyard. When I returned to my room, a futon had been laid out on the floor where the table had been, and a glowing paper lantern placed next to it.
In the morning I went for a walk in the bamboo forest, which reaches into the sky. The pale blue to green trunks repeat endlessly. The light comes through the leaves of the top of the bamboo and filters through the tall stems before it reaches the ground. A pale brown carpet of bamboo leaves runs across the forest floor. I returned to the ryokan where a taxi was waiting, my trip concluded. Domo Arigato, Japan.