Books

I love books.  Don't you?  I love the way they feel, the way the pages sound when they turn.  I like to be around them.  Which is why I went to Jimbocho today.  Just like there is a restaurant supply district here and a musical instrument district, there is a section of town that is near three universities that is the used book store district.  I am not kidding.  It is on Yasukuni-dori and it looks like this:

When you get off the train, you see these big murals on the wall in the station because Jimbocho is block after block of used book stores.  They smell delightful, holy cow.  You walk in and they smell like old paper and years of knowledge accumulated and stored.  I spent a couple of happy hours this morning wandering in and out of the stores, and I certainly did not get to all of them.  After all, it was too early for the adult book stores to be open.  And there were some that were not adult book stores that had not opened by the time I had to leave to get lunch and then meet the class.

(A parenthetical word about lunch, here, while it is on my mind:  Most places in town you can get some version of soba or udon, which is pronounced oo DO(n).  You sort of swallow the "n".  And the bowl of noodles will be about six bucks, which is great.  There is another kind of lunch joint that sells rice with thinly-sliced steak and onions on top.  Which sounds pretty good, of course.  Then they give you a raw egg, and the expectation is that you mix some soy sauce with it and pour it over the meat and rice.  It does not really cook, so now you have raw egg all through your lunch, and if you are me you regret doing that.  Yesterday I tried to not do that part, and the octogenarian woman who spoke no English ran over and said in Japanese "Put the egg in it before you eat it!  No!  No!  Don't eat it without the egg!  The egg!  Put!!  The!!  Egg!!  Put it on the dish first!!  HOLY GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!? ARE YOU A MORON?!? PUT THE FUCKING EGG ON THE FUCKING RICE YOU IDIOT!!!"  Or something like that.  That was the gist anyway.  I put the egg in.  And then decided I did not want to eat that for lunch anymore.  So I had noodles today, which had much less shouting accompanying it and was delicious and cost me $6.80.  End of parenthetical statement.)

Where was I?  Oh, Jimbocho.  So a beautiful morning perusing books, most of which were written in a language I can not read.  This was the problem.  I really almost bought a whole bunch of them just for the covers, but I restrained myself.  The smell when you walk in to a used book store is one of my favorite smells in the world.  If someone bottled it I would wear it as a cologne.  It is different from a library, there are added notes of desperation and resignation.  Desperation and resignation on the part of the books, you know.  Some of them, even if they are handsomely bound in leather, have long since resigned themselves to the fact that no one is ever going to buy a book chronicling the ebb and flow of city finances for some now-defunct small town in rural Michigan, for example.  But there they sit, and they make such a lovely aroma when you walk in.  It is like they are air fresheners except they actually smell good.

There are so many used books and used book stores the books are even out of the street.  There are piles and piles of them for a buck or two.  And you walk by the first joint and think "Wow, that is a lot of books."  The you realise that you have just seen the first of maybe a hundred book stores.  The map at the top of this post shows the stores.  There are, to put it mildly, lots.

Each store is small, maybe eighteen feet wide, and most of them are arranged the same way:  Books on both sides and then a central set of shelves as well.  And a lot of them are arranged with two front doors, so that you can go in one side and out the other.  Holy god there are books.  Stacked right to the ceiling.  Big books and little books and books of all sizes.  Sets are sometimes tied together with twine. 

As I looked them I started to notice something even more obsessive:  They are often typed by store.  So you have the World War II book store.  Pretty much everything in there has to do with the Great War.  Then you have a joint like this one, which was all sheet music.  The whole joint was sheet music.  Music for everything from Bach to the Beatles.  Operas, individual songs, some from the 1920's, some published last year.  Again, desperately hard not to buy them just for the covers, but I persevered.  Then there was the place that is filled with books like the ones below.  Canvas bound hard-covered books in these very pleasing cardboard dust jackets.  No idea what they are about, but there is a whole store full of 'em if you have a need.  You pay the shipping and I will send them along.  They were really pleasing all on the shelf like that.  And only five or six bucks each!  Such a bargain, if only I knew what they were. 





















 Then there is the place that is only movie scripts.  Maybe some TV scripts in there too, hard for me to tell.  Here is one movie that I missed, I wonder what it is about?  Well, I don't wonder, it seems pretty self explanatory really, but either way, I seem to have missed its debut in theaters:

 This place had a scary looking statue watching you as you poked around, to make sure that you didn't try anything funny.  I did not try anything funny.

 This store is all pop and fashion and music magazines.  VERY hard not to buy the Star Wars magazines in Japanese.  Some great hair-metal band covers too. 

 Like this one.  I don't know who these guys are but I really really want to.  They are on fire.

 And there is a lot of pulp fiction.  I mean bin after bin.  Crappy sci-fi, crappy romance novels, cheap teen fiction.  Most of it for sale for a buck or two, there is just the language thing.

So a lovely morning walking around.  And a lot of time spent with books and people who love books.

Time to cook

Like any big city (and Tokyo is a BIG city, 13 million and counting) Tokyo has districts that cater to specific disciplines or past times.  Day before yesterday, for example, I took a walk down Meidi-dori, which has five blocks of nothing but musical instrument stores.  If you can't find it on Meidi-dori, you can't play music on it.  It was pretty cool.

Most stores won't let you photograph inside, but here are some highlights:

Ukulele Planet.  An entire store of ukes, from $20 kid's ukes to $2000 Martin ukes and everything in between.  They had a flying V uke, they had vintage Hawaiian ukes, they had everything.  I played a little 1920's banjo uke that had a great sound.  I miss playing music an awful lot, I have not played since we have been here.

There was also a store the name of which I think is BOSS (though that could have been the name of something in the store, hard for me to tell.  The top floor was all Martin acoustic guitars.  I played a lovely little number that I had never seen, called the "Arlo Guthrie," a parlor size six-string with a real presence.  Really nice to play.  The fourth floor was all Gibson guitars and holy moly.  Nice stuff.

The first floor of all of the guitar shops is dedicated to electric guitars, and there is rock blaring out of every one.  Staffed exclusively by young men in their early twenties with carefully coiffed hair and a careful "I am WAAAAAY cooler then you are" look about them, they seem to favor American rock and especially bands like Poison, Dokken, and Stryper.  If these names don't sound familiar think 1980's hair-metal bands.  It was really funny to walk around and hear the sounds of my high school years blasting out at me.

So I wandered around and played some guitars and generally had a grand time.  And then yesterday I went to the district around Tawaramashi-dori, which is where you go if you want to start a restaurant.  I mean, there was everything there you could imagine, from burners and pots and pans to flatware to mugs and bowls.  A favorite for me were the stores that sell the fake food that a lot of restaurants put in their window to advertise what you can get there.  I would have brought back a whole load as presents for folks, but a single piece of sushi roll was $35, and a bowl of ramen was over @200!  But then, these are hand-crafted (out of plastic, but that does not make them less of a craft object, after all).  So I contented myself with taking photos.

Here are some of the sights:

Just so you know where you are, there is a giant chef's head and giant tea cups.

A really lovely bench in a store that sold only wooden plates and bowls and cups.

Bulk hashi, or chopsticks.  Thousands and thousands of hashi.

...Aaaaand fancy hashi.  Again, it is hard not to make the comparison to Ollivander's wand shop from Harry Potter.

Plastic food.  This place was amazing.

I mean, the sushi looks like real sushi.  And it is $30-$50 per piece.

Plastic Bread.

Plastic ramen.  I can't help it, I love this stuff.

And of course plastic beer.  Mmmm.  Now I am thirsty.

These hang in restaurants to tell you what food they serve.  So these all say things like "Ramen with Pork."  They sure look beautiful, though.

So.  Many.  Little.  Bowls.

And baskets!  We got your baskets here!

The amount of different ceramics is really overwhelming.

And this is the cheap stuff...

WOOD.  DEN.  BOWLS.

You have no idea how hard it was not to come home with about 50 of these...

Paper straw for presentation.  In every color you could imagine.

More Old Stuff (houses)

My favorite museum in the United States is the Henry Ford Museum.  Maybe another time I will write about that, it is really incredible and if you are ever within a hundred miles of Detroit you should really really go.

I am not within a hundred miles of Detroit.

Yesterday, though, I was within a hundred miles of the village of Takayama in the Gifu Prefecture.  We were staying in Nagoya for a couple of nights because a pretty special museum has been created in Takayama and we felt like it was worth the trip.

There were two basic types of domestic dwellings in historic Japan:  The machiya, or town house and the noka, or farm house.  We saw a LOT of machiya in Kyoto, as well as in other places here, but we had not really seen the noka style, in part because farm houses tend to be out on farms, you know, and hard to get to.  Also, there do not tend to be a whole lot of them left.

Nevertheless, it is an important building type when talking about traditional Japanese architecture, adn we felt strongly that we needed to see them.  In a lot of ways, noka help make sense of the development of Japanese buildings.

There is a school of thought (often contested) that rather than building out of wood, architecture came from the practice of weaving.  The reason that some people contest this is that weaving is seen as "women's work," while building is "man stuff."  as clearly poppycock as this is, there have been heated articles published on both sides of this (well, heated for architectural historians, anyway.)  The thing is, that we had built structures before we learned to smelt metal.  And when you look at yurts and tipi and Bedouin tents, you see very plainly (I think) that weaving and fabric were almost certainly the precursor to wood and iron in the built environment.

I am not an architectural historian, though, and my understanding of the whole debate is pedantic at best.  The point of all of this is that when you look at noka houses, you see a really interesting overlap of wood construction and weaving.  And I think that is very very cool.

The reason I invoked the Henry Ford at the beginning of this post is that one of the things that the man after whom the museum is named undertook was to dismantle buildings that he thought were important to the history of America and move them all onto the grounds as a village, Greenfield Village.  It is pretty amazing.  The original Manlo Park is there, all set up, and a turn of the century steam-powered machine shop, which as you can imagine I just love.

So Takayama has the same thing, but with roka houses called Hida No Sato or the Hida Folk Village.  There are around 30 buildings, moved there from all over the Hida Prefecture and lovingly reassembled for visitors to view.  It really is worth the two-hour train ride.

Far from being mouldy old houses, these structures are lovingly kept in good repair, and fires are lit in each one every day because, as the literature says, a hearth fire keeps the house vital, and prevents rot and decay.  True for so many things, don't you think?

So we went up there, the train taking us out of Nagoya and up up up into the mountains, which here are impossibly steep.  A river pounded its way to the sea as we went against it, up to Nagoya.

One of the things I love about vernacular architecture is the way that tool marks are left visible.  The presence of adz marks and chisel marks keeps the maker present all the time, and the Japanese tendency to maintain the "tree-ness" of the beams makes for a really lovely environment, I think.

Here are some photos, though they really don't do it justice.

A thatch=roofed roka house

The central hearth.  I am in love with the mechanism for adjusting the height of the kettle.

I mean really, how could you not want this to be the view from your living room?

Inside of a roof.  Weaving and sewing and wood work.

This is a ladder that goes up into the roof that is carved out of a log.  Lovely.

A very labor-intensive way to make planks.

Planks form a log

Another lovely view.

Jointery.

Logs on a sledge ready to be pulled to a work site.

This beam was reused from somewhere else, and still bears the joints that were cut in it before.  Wabi-sabi.

A double hammer water mill for grinding rice.  I love that the forked stick is a double trough.

Tools Abroad

This trip has been a constant juxtaposition of the very old and the very new (we recently went to see this building designed by Kengo Kuma that is pretty stunning, and built in part by temple carpenters imported specifically.).  Toggling back and forth has made me constantly aware of my default stance that old stuff is better than new stuff, which of course I do not believe across the board, but that tends to color how I see the world. 

We also are getting to spend a fair amount of time with tools and the way things are made, which I also love, and which is new for a lot of these students, as it turns out.  It has been exciting to see them get excited about making and about the idea that they can make stuff.  And I get to also see some incredible stuff, of course.

The story goes that in 1610, a temple carpenter in Nagoya started a carpentry business named after himself, Takenaka.  Today the descendants of Masataka Takenaka run one of the five biggest architecture and engineering firms in the country.  When they say it is a family business they are not lying.  In about 1985, the corporation decided that it was worried about the decline of traditional wood working and carpentry in Japan and started a museum dedicated to wood and wood working tools.

Holy crap.

When the Japanese get it in their heads to do something, they don't ever really go halfsies.  The Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum is one of the finest museums of any type that I have visited anywhere ever.  It rivals the Henry Ford, it rivals the Smithsonian.  The displays are in Japanese and English, they are thoughtful, they are interactive, they are well thought out.  It was just a joy to be there.  There were video demonstrations of things that the students otherwise would never have seen, like two people using a saw to make lumber out of trees.  There were displays about making tools.  There were different species of wood with plane shavings that you could smell.  I mean, if I had several million dollars and a year I could could not have set up a better shrine to traditional Japanese carpentry.  Also?  There is a full-time staff of six architectural historians.

PEOPLE!  Come to Kobe!  Go to this museum!

Actually, they are doing a joint project with GSD at Harvard next year, and part of the collection will be there.  So go there, if you can't come to Japan.

There is a reverence and a gentleness to the way that the tools are shown that came through to me, an idea that there is something that is still relevant and necessary about these tools.  And every edge tool was meticulously sharpened, something we would not do in the States, which betrays a nuanced difference between attitudes:  in the States I think we would want to preserve the object in the moment it came to the museum.  In Japan, at this museum, it was clear that the displays were put together by people that saw these tools as living objects.  They have a purpose and a use, and as Miya-Daiku Ogawa says in a video there "Sharp tools don't lie."  You would no more display a dull chisel than you would display a 1903 Harley-Davidson with square wheels on it.  It just would not work that way, and this is an object that is made to work.  So you show it the way that it would be if it was working.

It is a difference in stance that I have commented on here before, this idea of what is "real," what is "historically accurate," and I am really interested in it.  History, of course, is notoriously subjective.  It is, as the famous quote goes, written by the winners.  And so who are we to say what the best way to celebrate and present history is, and how best to talk about it?  Is it lying to say that a building that was built this year is the exact same building that was built a hundred years ago, if it was built in the same way with the same tools?  Not from a certain (very Japanese) point of view.  Similarly, it is only appropriate to sharpen a plane iron to a mirror hone before presenting it.

I suppose that one of the things about travel is that it allows you to step back and look at the assumptions that you make every day and question them.  I sure am doing that here, sometimes on a daily basis.  Here are some images from the museum.

Two-person saw with an instructional video.  There was also a video about how to assemble the saw.

A "Standard Carpenter's Tool Chest"

A display of sumitsubo, which they use instead of chalk lines.

A very funny Indonesian wooden hand plane.

"Woods of Japan" complete with end grain, face grain, and shavings to smell.

Adzes.  Lots of adzes.

More joint samples.

Yet more joint samples

"How to make a ryoba saw."

"A Miya-Daiku's Tool Chest"

The different finishes and the waste that comes from using an adze, a spear plane, a roughing plane, and a hand plane in that order.  Holy cow