The Art of Japanese Life

This programme contains some scenes of a sexual nature.

It was a bright August morning,

and commuters were making their way to work in a provincial city

in western Japan. It was shaping up to be a day like any other.

But at exactly 08:15,

an American bombardier above them pulled a lever.

The commuters may have seen a flash of light,

but within seconds, they and the city of Hiroshima

were engulfed in the largest man-made explosion in history.

70,000 people were killed instantly,

and the city was all but annihilated.

It was the beginning of the nuclear age.

But the Japanese had seen disasters before.

The history of Japanese cities is the history of their destruction.

For centuries, indeed millennia,

earthquakes, fires, floods, tsunamis and wars

have decimated the country's towns and cities over and over again.

But this relentless cycle has had a dramatic creative impact.

It has forced the Japanese

to constantly rebuild and reimagine their cities,

and today, they are some of

the most dynamic places in the world.

To discover why, I'm going to explore the culture

of three great Japanese cities in three decisive eras.

Kyoto, the country's capital for over a thousand years.

A city of elegance and splendour that gave birth

to a golden age of painting and poetry

and even turned tea into an art form.

Holding this bowl is a kind of revelation.

Edo, a teeming metropolis with a dark underbelly.

A floating world of actors, artists,

and sex workers that produced a bohemian, urban culture

centuries before the West.

And Tokyo, today the largest urban area on the planet,

a conveyor belt of fashion, film,

and contemporary art that now influences the entire world.

These three cities produce some of Japan's finest

and most distinctive art, but they did more than that.

They also shaped the country's attitude

towards its past and present,

as well as to East and West, and in doing so,

they helped mould the very idea of Japan itself.

In the spring of 793 AD,

a small group of men embarked on a journey through Honshu.

They claimed they were on a hunting trip.

But they weren't hunting animals,

they were searching for a piece of land.

The men were convinced that their hometown,

which was called Nagaoka-kyo, was cursed.

For the best part of a decade, it had been ravaged by floods,

disease, famine, and even a series of mysterious murders.

They knew they had to abandon it,

but first, they had to find a site for a new city.

They hadn't gone far before they alighted on something promising,

a vast, fertile basin,

surrounded on three sides by a fortress of mountains,

and irrigated by not one, but two rivers.

They had found their site.

By the autumn of the following year,

the Emperor had founded his capital here.

He called it Heian-kyo, capital of peace and tranquillity,

though it later became known as Kyoto.

Kyoto has been built and rebuilt many times since then,

but it remains a place of unparalleled riches.

It is home to 1,600 temples, 400 shrines,

and 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites,

more than any other city in the world.

The original city of Kyoto was a work of art in its own right.

It was inspired by Chang'an, the great capital of China,

and every part of it was carefully planned.

The city was organised, almost like New York,

according to a strict grid system.

Now, these streets were splendid thoroughfares.

Even the narrowest of them was 78 feet wide, and the widest of them,

Suzaku Avenue, which ran right down through the middle of the city,

that was almost 300 feet wide.

It was probably the widest boulevard in the world at the time.

And Suzaku Avenue terminated right here, in the north of Kyoto,

at the city palace.

Now, I've got to say, looking down over this scale model,

I really think it looks like a wonderful place to live.

Most of the houses are one storey high, so it's light, it's airy.

There are gardens, there are lakes, there are rivers.

It is a world away from the dark warrens of filth

that made up most cities at the time.

Kyoto was the blueprint for a utopia,

a dream of a rational and beautiful society

that the Emperor hoped would last forever.

But it wasn't as perfect as it seemed.

Over the following generations,

the palace burned down no less than 14 times,

and the whole western half of the city was repeatedly flooded.

But this didn't prevent the fortunate members of the court

from enjoying the finer things in life...

most of them borrowed from the Chinese.

They ruminated on cherry blossoms and staged moon-watching ceremonies.

They even collected crickets

and made music to accompany their chirps.

In Kyoto, style was emphatically substance.

If any one idea governed the cultural values of the court,

it was the word miyabi.

Now, miyabi doesn't have a direct English translation,

but it meant a kind of refinement or aesthetic sensibility -

the ability to recognise and appreciate beauty

in all of its forms.

The culture of Kyoto was advanced in another notable way.

Many of its leading practitioners were women,

and the greatest of them was Murasaki Shikibu.

Born into a minor aristocratic family around 973 AD,

Murasaki served as a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial Court.

But in her spare time, she started writing something.

Murasaki was writing a story of monumental proportions,

indeed, twice as long as War And Peace.

It spanned four generations and 75 years.

It contained 430 different characters and 795 unique poems.

And today, many consider it to be

the first novel ever written anywhere in the world.

It was called The Tale Of Genji.

The story focuses on the life of a rakish young prince

called Hikaru Genji.

Intelligent, beautiful and possessed with impeccable taste,

Genji is the paragon of miyabi.

And though he spends much of his youth womanizing,

he becomes one of the court's most powerful men.

He builds a grand palace in the city

and fills it with the women he loves.

But then things start to go wrong.

Genji marries a woman who then bears another man's child.

His relationships with his other lovers deteriorate,

and when his greatest love dies, Genji loses the will to live.

It is not long before his life also comes to an end.

"The whole world mourned Genji.

"It was as if a light had gone out.

"For his ladies, for his grandchildren,

"for others who had been close to him, the sadness was, of course,

"more immediate and intense.

"'It is true, ' they all thought,

"'The cherry blossoms of spring are loved

"'because they bloom so briefly.'"

Genji's life was indeed cut short,

but Murasaki's remarkable novel lived on.

Many illustrations of The Tale Of Genji

were made in painted hand scrolls.

Here in the Tokugawa Museum in Nagoya,

are the oldest examples from the 12th century.

Only fragments survive,

but they are some of the country's greatest treasures.

They are almost a millennium old.

The complex patterns of colour and shape

still convey powerful emotional stories.

And I've come to look at one of the most affecting.

This painting captures a turning point in Genji's life.

While he was away, his wife had an affair with his nephew.

She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy called Kaoru.

Now Genji didn't want to admit to being cuckolded,

so he had to except Kaoru as his heir even though he knew he wasn't.

And here, we can see Genji holding the baby boy in his arms,

and though this image is small and old and tatty,

you can still see the complex,

powerful emotions racing across Genji's face.

It's taut with resentment and humiliation and yet,

as Genji looks down on that beautiful, innocent boy,

we can see him beginning to soften.

His eyebrows are lifting and his little pink lips

are curling into a smile.

The composition has been used to emphasise and dramatise

Genji's own torn state of mind.

So these powerful diagonals race across the surface of the picture

and imprison Genji right into the corner.

The fabrics tumble into this chaotic mess of lines,

and, perhaps most powerfully of all,

the relationship between Genji here and his wife,

who has become a nun following her indiscretion, speaks volumes.

They are together, but they are, of course, completely apart.

This masterpiece of Japanese art

reminds me that, though times may change,

human emotions don't.

The people of Kyoto had mastered the art of painting...

but aesthetics pervaded everything they did.

Poetry, calligraphy, garden design and over the centuries,

it even extended to tea.

The Japanese had been enjoying tea since the ninth century,

when it was introduced from China.

But in the late 16th century,

it began to take on a special significance.

At the Buddhist temple of Daitoku-ji

is a teahouse made in honour

of the great Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyu.

Here, in a small, simple room,

Rikyu and his companions turned tea drinking into an art form.

Sen no Rikyu believed that tea was much more than a drink,

it was a revelation.

When drunk in the right way,

tea helped people rise to a different plane of consciousness.

"When you hear the water splash into the tea bowl," he once said,

"you will feel the dust in your mind is washed away."

Sen no Rikyu's ideas gradually crystallised

into what we know as the Japanese tea ceremony.

Sen no Rikyu wanted the tea ceremony

to express an appreciation of modesty,