Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

Millions of Japanese who do not have a clear sense of the mechanisms involved nonethelessgrieve at the steady disappearance of all that was once so beautiful in their environment. Since I began writing in Japanese ten years ago, my mailbox has been full of letters from people who share my concern: One tells me how his hometown has become ugly, another describes how she came home to find her favorite waterfall buried in a concrete coffin. The letters frequently say, «I feel as you do, but I never dared to voice it before.» In a typical letter to me, Ms. Kimoto Yoko writes: «I have come to realize that Japanese themselves do not realize how ugly their surroundings have become. I was of course one of these people that didn't realize it. When I talked to people around me about the sorts of things discussed in your book, I found I was speaking to people who had no idea of these things. While the place I live in is not Iya Valley, it is still a rural village. And yet here too, I've seen that what was ugly already is becoming increasingly ugly.»

People feel that beauty in their surroundings is doomed and that they are powerless to stop it. The landscape artist Harada Taiji, interviewed in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper, said, «Whenever I find a small village I rush to it on my bad legs. It's not quite that the scenery is running away from me, but I feel, 'I've got to capture this quickly or it will disappear. When I find a wonderful place, I worry that someone will come and take it away from me.' »

The decline of domestic travel in Japan and an explosive growth of foreign travel in recent years indicate a large measure of national malaise. I believe it is possible that most Japanese know, somewhere deep in their hearts, that they are despoiling their own country, but what they know in their hearts they find difficult to think about consciously, given the array of government ideology and misinformation pitted against them. Other factors, too, make it unlikely that environmental destruction will become a mainstream political issue. One is the deep-rooted Japanese concentration on the instant or small detail, as in a haiku poem. This is beautifully expressed in the paintings on the sliding doors at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto: a few parrots, their feathers brightly painted in red and green, sit on gray branches in a landscape drawn in stark shades of black ink on white paper. The Zen message of the painting is that the parrots are the focus of our attention-hence we see them in color, while the background black-and-white trees are nearly invisible to the mind's eye.