{ISE} A Micropedia of Life, Death, Decay, Thought Experiments Time Travel & The Concept of Free Wifi
India Jacobs Third Year History and Theory Term Two 2014
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Evolution
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Rate of Growth Decay
{ Schrondinger’s Cat
Organic
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Hinoki Agricultural Year
Time Travel The Fourth Dimension
Tralfamadore
Temporality
Architectural Identity
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Disposable
{ Replicants
Preservation Restoration
{ Facelifts
Demolition
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The Grand Ise Shrine
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Shinto
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Shikinen Sengu
Amaterasu Omikami
The Ship of Theseus
Timelessness
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The Shinto Directive
The Phoenix Permanence
INTRODUCTION
The following is a choice aggregate of terms, topics, ideas, concepts, theories and metaphors selected for the purpose of adding depth to a certain understanding of the fundamental nature of the Grand Ise Shrine, its history, its essence, what it represents and what can be concluded from its existence as a thing that exists in the world today. Think of it as a very ornate symbolic logic equation or proof, in which all bold terms are related and all are integral to a final conclusion, therefore, a final conclusion will inevitably relate all the bold terms on which it is based. I am not proposing a solution or a revolt against standards and ideals, simply presenting a discussion of a cultural phenomenon that I find to be replete with paradox and debate.
T he G rand Ise Shrine: Hidden among dense camphor groves on the banks of the Isuzu river lie the Ise shrines, in the Mie prefecture of modern day Japan. Surrounded by four fences, the inner shrine, Naiku, and the outer shrine, Geku, are rarely seen by anyone other than members of the imperial court and high priests. The Ise shrines, ancient in tradition and form and new in materials, are rebuilt every twenty years. (Coulmas) The clean lines and refined simplicity of the shrines are recreated down to the smallest detail by skilled artisans. The architecture of the shrines at Ise, both Naiku and Geku, has come to represent a certain style of Japanese aesthetics and cultural identity. (Loo) . Although the specific date to which the shrines originate is unknown (estimates date them back to at least the fourth or fifth century), Shikinen Sengu was first practiced at the shrines in 690 with Naiku and 692 with Geku. (Watanabe) Shikinen Sengu: The ritualized ceremony surrounding the periodic rebuilding of Ise Jengu. Performed in twenty year rebuilding cycles, Shikinen sengu culminates at the end of the twentieth Kanname-sai ceremony, which is practiced annually and is the most important Ise ceremony of the year. Shikinen Sengu was performed last year, 2013, for the 62nd time and will occur again in 2033. It has been carried out in exactly the same manner every twenty years, observing traditional customs and methods, for the past 1300 years, the first recorded ceremony occurring in 692 AD. (Coulmas) Shinto: Ise is the most significant and revered of Shinto sites. In relation to the Japanese political culture, however, the shrines at Ise once inextricably linked to Shinto State, the emperor and the imperial family, have become a more neutral symbolization of Japanese culture and architecture since the end of World War II. (Reynolds) Amaterasu O mikami: The Shinto goddess from whom the Imperial family claimed a direct lineage. Naiku, the inner shrine, is dedicated to her. The Shinto Directive: When Japan lost the war in 1945, it was the goal of the occupying American forces to create a separation between Shinto and the government and remove the public’s idea of the emperor’s divinity, thus affecting the public’s opinion of Ise. This became known as the Shinto Directive. Soon after it was issued, Emperor Hirohito denied his divinity. (Loo) Agricultural Year: The calendar system based on when crops are planted and harvested. The Shinto ceremonies practiced at Ise occur in accordance with the agricultural year in Japan. For example, the offering of the first fruits of the harvest, in October, to goddess Amaterasu Omikami, in the annual ceremony Kanname-sai. Hinoki: Traditional Japanese cypress, hinoki, is the primary material used in the rebuilding of the shrines. The material language of the shrines has not changed since ancient times. The other materials used include kaya, a reed for the thatched roof, gold-copper sheet metal and enameled copper balls (that serve a minimal decorative purpose), a small number of iron fasteners and white, river-washed pebbles for ground cover. Historically, the forests surrounding Ise Jingu provided a sufficient supply of hinoki; since the eleventh century however, additional hinoki has been imported from other parts of Japan to supplement the native source. Because Ise is the most sacred site in the Shinto state, only the highest quality materials are chosen. (Adams) T ralfamadore: a planet invented by novelist and writer Kurt Vonnegut and a recurring element in six of his works. Its inhabitants are known as Tralfamadorians, an alien race whose existence is experienced in all time periods simultaneously. There is no question of “why?” Things just are. If a
human were to exist in the same manner, you could imagine a long caterpillar like creature, with legs of an infant at one end and the legs of an old man at the other. Any event, any moment in a person’s life could be pinpointed, every movement mapped from start to end, eliminating the concept of free will with the awareness of life’s predetermined nature, at least in a Vonnegut crafted universe. (Vonnegut) O rganic: Biological in origin and thus will exhibit signs of decay faster than an inorganic substance. Rocks are inorganic. Metal is inorganic. Humans are organic. Plants are organic. Hinoki is organic. T he Fourth Dimension: Time, invisible to the human eye and as an element, immaterial. It is experienced on Earth linearly. Its passing is observable in rates of change, movement, growth and decay. T ime T ravel: Welcome to the infinitely expanding sphere of time based tourism. Don’t limit your summer holiday to a Cartesian grid. Travel through space and time! Tired of the navigating the crowds at the Eiffel Tower? Visit Paris when it was still a muddy wasteland traversed only by the occasional cave dweller, or better yet, see the City of Light before the discovery of fire. But remember not to leave any evidence or make anyone aware of your existence or else you may irreparably alter the course of history! Imagine you are the seasoned time traveler and you are traveling to Ise, today then 500 years ago, then 800 years ago, you cannot note any observable changes in its physical being. What would be the point? The information you could gather from said trip displaying the cultural values and aesthetic sensibilities of fifth century Japan would be the same. Preservation: The act of keeping a thing in its original state. Restoration: The act of returning a thing from a state of disrepair to its original state. Facelift: The periodic renewal of a person’s face through the interference of a plastic surgeon, usually for the purposes of removing signs of age. This process is purely cosmetic and while it may result in the visage of a younger person, ideally a younger version of the person undergoing the procedure, it does not in fact reduce the actual age of said person. Demolition: [In regard to an architectural construct] the tearing down of a building, structure, installation, or interior finishes, as in the renovation of a kitchen or bathroom. Disposable: A term applied to the comparatively temporary existence of Japanese homes by a podcast from the radio program, Freakonomics, whose economists and researchers relate social phenomena to economic trends. According to recent statistics, half of Japanese homes are demolished within 38 years, essentially Japanese homes have a half life of 38 years (in the States, that number is 100 years for the equivalent statistic). Almost two thirds of all houses in Japan were built in the last 35 years. It’s not that homes are built with a shorter lifespan in mind, in fact the quality of new construction in Japan exceeds the quality of construction in most countries, it’s just that physical homes (not land) lose almost all fiscal value within fifteen to thirty years. Contrast this to most western developed countries where homes usually appreciate in value when they are well maintained or minimally restored. It is suggested in the podcast that the explanation for this cultural difference and resulting economic pattern is that ingrained in the Japanese psyche is the value of “newness” as something spiritually clean and pure. (Rosalsky)
Schrodinger’s C at: A thought experiment in quantum physic invented by Erwin Schrodinger in attempt to explain how an atom of radioactive material, uranium for example, cannot be determined decayed or undecayed until it has been observed. Until it is observed it is assumed both decayed and undecayed. In a hypothetical situation, a cat is in an opaque box with a uranium atom and a vial of poison gas attached to meter that will read out whether or not the atom has decayed. If it has decayed, the meter will break the vial and the cat will die. If the atom has not decayed, the cat will not die. The human observer in the situation does not know whether or not the cat is alive or dead, so until the box is opened, the cat remains both alive and dead in the mind of the observer. Similarly, it can be assumed that until measured, the electrons of an atom will spin both clockwise and counterclockwise. (Johnson) “When I hear about Schrodinger’s Cat, I reach for my gun.” – Stephen Hawking The Grand Ise Shrine is living two simultaneous existences. It is both old and new, living and dead. Occupying the exact spatial envelope of its predecessors, built in the same manner and inaugurated every twentieth year in a ceremony that hasn’t changed since 690 AD. The wood decays, the vast majority of its builders are dead but the tradition is undecayed, unaltered by the passage of time. But just like the analogy of the cat, our language is too clumsy to define both the essences of the state of electrons and the nature of Ise. At once, it is occupies two sides of a Venn diagram whose circles represent polar opposites in which no logical overlap should occur. Decay: The natural process by which organic matter breaks down or is changed into smaller units, different elements, and/or different physical states. Observing the ways in which different organisms, objects and substances undergo this transformation is an incredibly enthralling and illuminating experience. An understanding of decay gives us a deeper understanding of our own temporal existence. Rate of G rowth: a time based measurement; the amount of mass or area acquired by a living organism (infant, maple tree, etc.) or entity (a population of fish, a redwood forest, etc.) over a unit of time. T imelessness: A highly sought after and unattainable quality, usually associated with truth and beauty. An intangible absolute, emitting an overall sense that the object at which it is aimed is not necessarily of this time or specific to any time really, that it could trace its origin to any historical time period and still possess the same level of truth. Permanence: Nothing is permanent. The concept of permanence is merely that, a concept and a theoretical ideal. T he Phoenix: A mythical bird which periodically, every few hundred years combusts in a fiery ball of flames and is reborn from its own ashes. It is frequently used as a symbolic device in film, music, literature etc., representative of spiritual renewal. Replicants: A highly sophisticated type of robot, and key element of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). The replicants appear physically exactly the same as humans but lack certain idiosyncrasies. Their memories are installed and programmed into them.
Naiku #63, was rebuilt in exactly the same form and appearance as Naiku #62 and #61 and #60 and so on, and is younger than the majority of the pilgrims who visit it, yet it is imbued with a sense of sanctity and cultural significance worthy of structure first built in the fourth or fifth century AD. Imagine that you are a young child your pet Labrador was hit by a truck. Your parents go out that night and buy a Labrador that looks just like the dead one, but alive. Can you expect Labrador #2 to know all the same tricks as the one before it, or have a similar disposition? Would that not desecrate the memory of Labrador #1? T emporality: An inherent quality in the nature and physical states of every known element of the universe. A primary tenet of the Buddhist faith, i.e. realization of life’s temporality is a release from desire, the root of suffering. Evolution: Exhibited in the advancement and specification over time of all biological bodies of the domains; Eukaryota, Archaea, and Bacteria. The process by which our species progressed from eukaryotic cells to multicellular organisms to fish to amphibian to mammal to Homo sapiens sapiens, modern humans. T he Ship of T heseus: A paradox and thought experiment introduced by Plutarch in The Life of Theseus, in which Theseus’s ship is repaired so many times that eventually no piece of the original ship remains, as with each repair an original element was removed and replaced with a newer version of the same element. The question is raised: is it still the same ship? Architectural Identity: An amalgam of the following; the purpose any given construct serves, the activities of its inhabitants and the way in which its spaces are utilized, the ways in which it is perceived by its users/inhabitants, its place in a causal relationship [is it the result of a need and/or desire, will its being result in another construct, or the furthering of an idea/motion?], the relationship of the construct to its location in space and time, etc. A paradox exists embedded in the identity of Ise in that one of the key elements of its existence is human interference, the same interference that results in a completely un-human state in which the construct is not allowed to exhibit any signs of age or decay, if you consider a key component of what it means to be human, a being that changes or grows over time. In perfectly preserving this piece of history, we deny the site its inherent ability as a man-made construct to mark the passage of time and act as a record of human history.
AN EXPERIMENT:
Every moment in time that has occurred or will occur is happening concurrently, at this moment in time, but as humans who occupy only three dimensions, our experience of time is linear. Imagine an infinite number of transparent sheets of glass. On each sheet there is etched an outline of that moment in time, any unit of time, that year, month, week, day, hour, second, etc. Each sheet is a visual representation of equal units of time. The sheets are stacked face to face, stretching in two directions from the beginning of the existence of the universe to the end of time, or for all intensive purposes, infinitely into the future. There is a given number that you are aware of, based on your understanding of history of culture and what nonfiction imagery you have absorbed. There is a smaller number that you have experienced personally and there is an even smaller number which you retain in your consciousness, all of which are represented on panels positioned prior to the panel representing the “current” moment in time. However, the panels whose contents you are unaware of, are still written, they still exist. They are just positioned, in this linear arrangement, in what we consider “the future.” That is of course, a universe in which everything is predetermined, a concept debated by philosophers for centuries.
Layered images of Hiroshima over the last century {original}
Layered images of Ise Jingu over the last century {original}
Imagine you were to choose two geographical points on the Earth’s surface, for the purposes of the experiment, one is a macroscopic view of Hiroshima and the other is Naiku, the Inner Shrine at Ise Jengu. Gather a handful of slides depicting both locations at any point within the last 1500 years and arrange the images of Hiroshima on top of each other. Do the same for the images of Naiku. The resulting representation of Hiroshima is essentially incomprehensible. In comparison, the layered images of Naiku are almost crystalline in their homogenous clarity.
Hiroshima has changed drastically over the last century, undoubtedly due to the devastation of the Atomic bomb in 1945. Its beginnings, destruction, rebirth and evolution can be starkly contrasted to the static, fixed nature of Ise, the city a dynamic entity and the shrine a definitive object, frozen in time. One can project that for decades and centuries to come, assuming the continuation of the human race and the geographic location of Japan, that the historical fabric of Hiroshima will continue to grow in character, to deepen and become richer and more multidimensional, while the essence of Ise will grow only in age. It is true that historical sites often become more significant with age. For example, the curiosities of the average bed and breakfast sightseeing map toting tourist may be peaked more by a two thousand year old hypothetical wall of stone than by a one thousand year old hypothetical wall of stone. The fact of the matter is however, that it is still just an organized pile of rocks in a hypothetical countryside between two hypothetical gas stations that has outgrown its function. The hypothetical villagers have left it in place just as their hypothetical fathers and their hypothetical fathers’ hypothetical fathers etc. etc. While historical age is a factor, it does not necessarily make something more valuable or worthwhile. At a certain point, as beings with a lifespan of roughly 75-80 years, we lose our comprehension of deep time, or time before our own memories. The 85th Shikinen Sengu will have little more value to those involved as it did to those involved in the 74th or the 66th. And to the eye of the time traveller, there will be absolutely no difference in any of the aforementioned ceremonies.
ADENDUM Overall, I find the customs surrounding the rebuilding of the Ise Grand Shrine to be unnatural, un-human and unnecessary. As a construct resembling inhabitable space that is rarely even seen let alone inhabited by any one albeit the chance high priest, it really serves very little function, other than acting as a mark of cultural traditions, and an exemplar of Japanese aesthetics. I am not promoting any abandonment of cultural values, or destruction of artifacts but the means in which they are kept alive with Ise seem terribly backwards. Museums try to prevent the decay of famous works by controlling light and humidity, but those are in most cases original objects, not decade old replicas. Shouldn’t the original object be more significant or culturally valuable as it is an exemplar of its time and of the societal principles from which it was born? Wouldn’t the existence of infinite copies detract from its significance? Decay is a natural element of human existence and a form of advancement. It is integral to the way in which matter evolves. It seems rather short-sighted to follow or take part in a tradition so stringently, and to keep every element exactly the same as the one before it, like fundamentalist Christians taking words written (in a different language, in the context of a different society) almost two thousand years ago, as absolute truth, without any room for debate or negation. I won’t debate that traditions give us our sense of cultural identity, but I would encourage an approach that allows for the natural evolution of a space, a time and a species. The Japanese attitude toward rebuilding homes so often has led to a rich culture of architectural experimentation, with the pressures of attaining timelessness or permanence removed, unlike Western architecture. This experimentation with space and aesthetics leads to the evolution of new forms and gives birth to new visual sensibilities. It is a progressive force. At Ise, the design and approach remain stagnant. Given homes and shrines are not used in the same way, but it feels as if it is denying the natural course of time, when it could be made to grow more powerful over time as opposed to maintaining a perpetual state and cycle.
Bibliography
Rosalsky, Greg, auth. "Why Are Japanese Homes Disposable?." Freakonomics Radio. WNYC 93.9 FM, 27 Feb 2014. web. 30 Mar 2014. <http://freakonomics.com/2014/02/27/why-arejapanese-homes-disposable-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-3/>. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-FiveSlaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade. New York, New York: Dell Publishing, 1969. Print. Adams, Cassandra. "Japan's Ise Shrine and Its Thirteen-Hundred-Year-Old Reconstruction Tradition." Journal of Architectural Education. 52.1 (1998): 49-60. Print. Coulmas, Florian. "Eternal Change at the Grand Shrine of Ise." Japan Quarterly. 411 (1994): 36-43. Print. . Loo, Tze M. "Escaping Its Past: Recasting the Grand Shrine of Ise." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. 11.3 (2010): 375-92. Print. Johnson, George. "On Skinning Schrodinger's Cat." New York Times. (1996): Archives. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. Watanabe, Yasutada. Shinto Art: Ise and Izumo Shrines. New York: Weatherhill/Heibonsha, 1974.