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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
high-pressure medium, needs experience. The unaccustomed feels the sensation of being in a panic, in a
tempest, in a cyclone. Yet all this is order.
The monster streets leap rivers, span sea-ways, with bridges of stone, bridges of steel. Far as the eye can
reach, a bewilderment of masts, a web-work of rigging, conceals the shores, which are cliffs of masonry.
Trees in a forest stand less thickly, branches in a forest mingle less closely, than the masts and spars of
that immeasurable maze. Yet all is order.
III
Generally speaking, we construct for endurance, the Japanese for impermanency. Few things for
common use are made in Japan with a view to durability. The straw sandals worn out and replaced at
each stage of a journey, the robe consisting of a few simple widths loosely stitched together for wearing,
and unstitched again for washing, the fresh chopsticks served to each new guest at a hotel, the light shoji
frames serving at once for windows and walls, and repapered twice a year; the mattings renewed every
autumn, - all these are but random examples of countless small things in daily life that illustrate the
national contentment with impermanency.
What is the story of a common Japanese dwelling? Leaving my home in the morning, I observe, as I pass
the corner of the next street crossing mine, some men setting up bamboo poles on a vacant lot there.
Returning after five hours' absence, I find on the same lot the skeleton of a two-story house. Next
forenoon I see that the walls are nearly finished already, - mud and wattles. By sundown the roof has
been completely tiled. On the following morning I observe that the mattings have been put down, and the
inside plastering has been finished. In five days the house is completed. This, of course, is a cheap
building; a fine one would take much longer to put up and finish. But Japanese cities are for the most part
composed of such common buildings. They are as cheap as they are simple.
I cannot now remember where I first met with the observation that the curve of the Chinese roof might
preserve the memory of the nomad tent. The idea haunted me long after I had ungratefully forgotten the
book in which I found it; and when I first saw, in Izumo, the singular structure of the old Shinto temples,
with queer cross-projections at their gable-ends and upon their roof-ridges, the suggestion of the
forgotten essayist about the possible origin of much less ancient forms returned to me with great force.
But there is much in Japan besides primitive architectural traditions to indicate a nomadic ancestry for
the race. Always and everywhere there is a total absence of what we would call solidity; and the
characteristics of impermanence seem to mark almost everything in the exterior life of the people,
except, indeed, the immemorial costume of the peasant and the shape of the implements of his toil. Not
to dwell upon the fact that even during the comparatively brief period of her written history Japan has
had more than sixty capitals, of which the greater number have completely disappeared, it may be
broadly stated that every Japanese city is rebuilt within the time of a generation. Some temples and a few
colossal fortresses offer exceptions; but, as a general rule, the Japanese city changes its substance, if not
its form, in the lifetime of a man. Fires, earth-quakes, and many other causes partly account for this; the
chief reason, however, is that houses are not built to last. The common people have no ancestral homes.
The dearest spot to all is, not the place of birth, but the place of burial; and there is little that is permanent
save the resting-places of the dead and the sites of the ancient shrines.
The land itself is a land of impermanence. Rivers shift their courses, coasts their outline, plains their
level; volcanic peaks heighten or crumble; valleys are blocked by lava-floods or landslides; lakes appear
and disappear. Even the matchless shape of Fuji, that snowy miracle which has been the inspiration of
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