How many absolutely boring pieces of writing are there about the ineffable Japanese aesthetic? How many treatises on cherry blossoms and kimonos, how much lazy garbage about the effortless blend of the modern and the traditional?
Or as you may have said in a 7th grade geography report, a laaaaand of contraaaasts.
And I can't say I've ever been particularly taken by the traditional aesthetics more than those of any other country – sure, I appreciate a gorgeous Zen temple, but I can't say I'll be sitting down to a tea ceremony anytime soon – and the standard-issue pop-culture exports have always left me cold, other than a handful of Studio Ghibli offerings and Murakami novels, and a few baked-as-fuck viewings of Dragonball Z in my teens.
But I do love Japan. And thus it was that I found myself in the country yet again, this time in Hokkaido.
What I truly love, the thing that really keeps me coming back for more, is something likewise ineffable, but somehow the inverse of the standard message. It is not some harmonious marriage of the old and the new, the local and the global, but the precise opposite – the way in which the global is completely broken down into constituents, then rebuilt through the lens of the local, with little attention paid to the original design.
Consider the town of Otaru, half an hour north of Sapporo. It's one of the few places where a significant amount of the architecture of the Taisho and early Showa Periods in the early 20th Century has been preserved, a rarity in a country where everything is either 10 or 1000 years old. Otaru stayed a backwater as more and more governmental and commercial affairs moved to Sapporo, and along its icy coast, bits of the newly industrial Japan have remained unchanged.
This isn't to say it's terribly historic – in this sense, it has no more concentration of historical architecture than the average Midwestern county seat, and in fact probably far less. Rather, what makes it interesting, is the particular architectural vocabulary, rendered in concrete and marble. You see touches of Gotham art deco, echoes of the American civic variation of Beaux-Arts, Doric columns and meander motifs taken from Greek revival, a Bavarian half-timber here and there – even a Soviet mosaic left from attempts to seek diplomacy across the Sea of Okhotsk. I step inside an old civic building to purchase snacks and local wines as gifts, and it is cozy and old-fashioned in the same way a small town American post office with WPA murals is. And yet while the ideas were imported, the construction comes from an entirely different reference point.
Less an imitation than a full-scale terraform. And those local wines? Made from forgotten American grape varieties, Niagara and Delaware and Campbell Early, wines with the musky and foxy flavor of a Ray Bradbury summer day in a hallucination of a Midwestern town on Mars.
It was a pattern I noticed when I set foot in Bar Yamazaki, an institution located on the fourth floor of an anonymous building in Sapporo's Susukino entertainment district. To walk in is to step back in time 40 or 50 years to the peak of Japan's economic boom. Their 100 year old barman recently died, but his vision – an earth-toned wonderland of tartan-vested bartenders, red carpets and high-backed stools in matching red leather, wood paneling and ornate hanging lamps, remains unchanged. Of the drinks that won international competitions in 1976 and 1981, with names like the “Polestar Twinkle,” with unfashionable vodka-amaretto bases and green Maraschino cherries as garnishes (ever even seen one of those before outside a fruitcake?), with black-and-white photos of the awards presented by men in combovers at Geneva lakeside hotels. In what universe is the Balalaika or the Valencia or the Silent Third a “classic cocktail,” as the menu would have it? And the bottles of cordials behind the bar, do they even make these anymore? The labels certainly haven't changed, for Cheritier-Guyot Kummel, Mazarine Creme de Cassis, Vosges Anisette – memories of staring at the bottom shelf at the liquor store as a small-child, the ugly Victorian-font labels on plastic bottles of blackberry brandy and sloe gin seeming to indicate the pathway to an adult world... as would be that promotional clock from the '70s, topped with a brass statuette of a kilted Scottish clan warrior, tucked in neatly beside the SoCo.
In the 1970s, before making his genre-defiling masterpiece Hausu, Nobuhiko Obayashi rose to fame as a director of high-concept advertisements. This bar in Sapporo reminded me of nothing as much as this:
Yes, Charles Bronson tuxedo'd in a lowlit piano bar before cruising home to smoke a pipe shirtless and douse himself in Mandom – incidentally a product I used after a bath in the Noboribetsu Onsen the next day, all the while whistling the theme song, “Otoko No Sekai,” or in its international version “Lovers of the World.” The audio version of a shag-carpeted conversation pit.
But in Hokkaido, everything is even more a terraform than in other parts of Japan.
This is the final surviving push of Japanese imperial might after the Meiji Restoration. When, with guidance from the stern and muttonchopped New England missionaries who built Sapporo's Odori Park and the clock tower with its small-paned Puritan windows, as defenseless against the Arctic winds as in the farmhouses of Massachusetts. Dreaming of imperial glory, the Meiji state pushed into what were deemed virgin lands, beyond the outpost of ethnic Japanese around Hakodate, at the southernmost tip of Hokkaido.
“Boys, be ambitious!” commanded William Smith Clark, founder of the Sapporo Agricultural College, and a well-known figure in Japan to this day.
And that ambition came in the form of the same tactics that were still then being used against the Plains Indians were used against the Ainu in an attempt to push the Japanese nation northward, with land cleared for crops, with methods of hunting salmon and deer restricted or downright made illegal, with an agenda of forced assimilation.
I stare out from my seat on the train at the meadows, the sea, the snow-streaked mountain cols, the smoking volcanoes.
At the end of the day, history is the same series of echoes and reflections – only the walls of the mirror maze differ.
One I find to be a charming piece of kitsch. The other an unspeakable grotesque.
