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Philip BrambleI knew a couple from New Zealand who lived in the same small city in Japan that I did. The wife had been hired to teach English at a small, family-run English school, and one of the benefits of her employment was that she and her husband got to live rent-free in the old-but-beautiful traditional Japanese house that the family used for the school. (She would teach lessons in the house during the daytime while her husband commuted to another job; at night, the house was for the two of them only.) They loved the house and were dismayed to learn that the family owners were planning to eventually tear the house down. Their reason for doing so was very straightforward: taxes. The inheritance taxes at the time -- the then-owner was very old -- made preservation financially impossible, whereas if the owners just tore the structure down and replaced it with a small, metered parking lot they would pay much less in taxes and earn income to boot. My friend couldn't believe it. "In New Zealand, the government does everything it can to make sure old houses like this are saved," she said.
Philip BrambleI had the same feeling in France when I stayed with a friend's family at their farmhouse in the countryside. Such a beautiful stone building! Moreover, you could tell that this building would be passed down to someone else just as it had been passed down to the over the years.
Philip BrambleA yurt can indeed be special inside. I was lucky enough to stay for a couple of nights in a yurt that was rented out by a Kazakh family in the mountains of Xinjiang. It was incredibly lush inside: carpet after carpet piled high, with soft futons for sleeping on and cushions everywhere. No doubt it was gussied up for the tourists, but it nevertheless made for one of the softest, soundest nights of sleeping I ever had in China.
The other picture I wanted to share was of the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower in Tokyo. It's instantly recognizable, but what I hadn't noticed until watching the second video was how much it resembled the form of the Chinese stone pagoda as pictured in the diagram. I don't know whether that was intentional, but it's remarkable nonetheless.
Philip BrambleI really enjoyed reading "Between Ise and Katsura"; it's a good summary of Japanese architectural practice. There was one thing that caught my eye, however, and I hope you don't mind me bringing this up because I figure it's the nature of scholarship to be dedicated to getting things right. On p. 16, in reference to the peculiar log construction of the Shoso-in, the 1,200-year-old storehouse of imperial treasures, it says, "In summer the heat contracted the logs letting in the breeze through the gaps; in winter the dampness expanded them keeping the interiors dry." I did some digging around in some of the books that I have; in A.L. Sadler's Japanese Architecture: A Short History (p.46) it also says the timbers shrank in summer and expanded in winter, while in John H. & Phyllis G. Martin's Nara: A Cultural Guide to Japan's Ancient Capital (p. 39) and June Kinoshita & Nicholas Palevsky's Gateway to Japan (p.576) it merely says that the timbers expanded in humid weather and shrank in dry weather. Having experienced Japan's unbearably humid summers and dry Siberian airmasses of winter, it would seem to me that the latter is actually the case. The treasures would be preserved because the summer heat would expand the logs, blocking out the humidity, while the winter cold would contract them, permitting dry air to circulate inside.
Philip BrambleOn p. 155, Wheatley writes, "It also follows that all the interior space of a Chinese city was not always built over immediately after the walls had been raised, or perhaps ever." This is certainly true in the case of Kyoto, which was built to resemble Chang-an (modern-day Xi'an.) The eastern half of the city filled up quickly enough, but the western side just sort of petered out into farmland even a century afterward.
Incidentally, reading about feng-shui made me recall how the Bank of China building in Hong Kong was reputed to have been built with a horrible alignment in regards to feng-shui (maybe that was the Communist Party saying they weren't going to pay attention to old traditions?) I had to go dig up a photo I took of the building in 1994; there's nothing about it that says it is out of whack with the cosmos (it's the tall building at middle left), but it suddenly dawned on me that it might have been an inspiration for Barad-dur when Peter Jackson was filming The Lord of the Rings.
Philip BrambleVery likely, yes. Many years ago I taught at one of the major language schools in Japan. In a discussion with a woman who had gone shopping for a car, I asked her what she had considered: the price, the make and model, the color, and so on. She responded, "The direction." I was momentarily confused. "Oh, you mean you bought a car from a dealer that is in the same direction as you go to work." She shook her head. "No, my office is in the other direction."
Now I was thoroughly confused. "Fusui," she said, and I suddenly realized she was talking about feng shui. What she meant was that feng shui dictated what direction she should look for a car that would be lucky -- in this case, meaning one that would avoid accidents. She checked her horoscope, went driving in that direction, and stopped at a dealer to buy a car that she was satisfied with. Everything else that I might have thought would be more relevant in buying a car was trumped by this one overriding factor.
I changed the conversation.
Philip BrambleIf there is one phrase from this course that is going to stick with me for a long time to come, it is Dr. Bharne's statement: "Colonialism is a subjective terrain." I think an evaluation of colonialism does not rest simply upon the what or the who, but also the when. Eventually, the jarring immediacy of colonialism diminishes the further it recedes into history, and what it leaves behind is invariably bound with the culture that survives. I have a British friend who writes for Lonely Planet; he says that every time he visits India he meets people who are happy to meet him not just as a travel writer but as someone who is British. People will often speak fondly of the British legacy to him, even when he himself tries to balance the scales by bringing up old atrocities and apologizing for them (he is British, after all.) But time, like art, can change one's perspective.
On a different note, I was struck by the housing unit in Fujian. Not only was it a marvelously self-contained unit, but I was immediately reminded of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. In the hutongs of Beijing in the early years of the PRC there was always at least one busybody who seemed to be in charge of knowing what everyone in that particular hutong was doing. Here, though, the building is set up so that everyone can monitor everyone else. No getting out of line here!
I visited Fujian Province several years ago and spent a little time in the city of Quanzhou. I've attached a couple of photos of interesting housing I found there while walking through the foothills.
Philip BrambleHi! I'm P. Sean Bramble -- I'm one of those middle-name people -- and I teach U.S. history and modern world history at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. Before returning stateside to teach, I spent two decades teaching in Asia: one year in Shanghai, China, and the rest in Japan: three of those years in the Goto Islands (the setting for part of Martin Scorsese's film Silence) and the remainder in modern Fukuoka and historic Dazaifu. Pre-covid (was there truly such a time?) there were few things I thought more enjoyable than getting on an airplane to go far away, with naught more than a book or three to keep me company as I landed in a foreign city to make my way through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats to a quiet coffee shop, where the clock has a pendulum that swings relentlessly but the hands are forever frozen at twenty-five past two.
Not that I've ever been to such a place, mind you, but if and when this pandemic ever ends you'll know where to find me.
