The History Of Japanese Gardens | Art Of Japanese Life | Journal

in the beginning there was nothing but a dark primordial ocean but then two young Gods Izanagi and isanami looked across the void and saw potential one day they plunged a spear into the endless ocean and stirred when they removed the spear drops of water fell from its tip and formed a group of islands and together these islands became the whole known [Music] world the gods called their creation oashi makuni the land of the eight great Islands today its inhabitants call it nion the Land of the Rising Sun but we know it by a different [Music]

name Japan has fascinated me since I was a boy it's always seemed like a parallel universe a society so similar and yet so different from our own and in this series I finally have my chance to explore the Japanese imagination I'll seek out its greatest artworks both old and new but this is also a journey into Japanese life I'll travel through its lands Scapes and its cities I'll enter its homes wow meet its Crafts People witness its rituals and even sample its food so this little bento box is like a work of art and it's

almost too beautiful to [Music] eat Japan is a society in which so much is informed by Aesthetics not just painting and sculpture not just Homes and Gardens but the way you look at Cherry Blossom the way you drink tea even the way you arrange your lunchbox and that's what I as an art historian find so inspiring about this place in Japan almost everything has the capacity to become art in this episode I'm going to explore Japanese attitudes to Nature from great landscape painting and Zen Gardens to Falling blossoms and soaring mountains the natural world is

Central to traditional Japanese Aesthetics and yet in modern Japan that old relationship is deeply uncertain but Japanese artists continue to work with nature to Revere it and to draw inspiration from the landscape that surrounds [Music] them Japan is one of the most densely populated places on Earth it is famous around the world for its vast cities and advanced technology most of its CI cens live far away from nature amid NeverEnding Urban Landscapes and yet an astonishing 73% of Japan is uninhabited by humans its mountains are so Steep and its forests so dense that people can

barely penetrate them and though beautiful this country lives on a geological knife edge Japan contains 10% of the world's active volcanoes and experiences a staggering 1,500 earthquakes a year in Japan nature is ignored at one's [Music] Peril these are the sacred K Mountains in Central Southern Japan the Japanese have revered nature for [Music] Millennia these beliefs are embodied in the country's native religion known today as Shinto but in some ways it isn't even a [Music] religion has no founder no scriptures for centuries it didn't even have a name but it did believe the world is

inhabited by Spirits known as Cami and these Cami are all around [Music] us they live in the sun and the wind in trees and animals and even in rocks and boulders for Shinto the world is endlessly animated by the Divine and here deep in the forest is a shrine there is a simple aesthetic zigzags of paper hang from rope made of rice straw it's something you see all over Japan but beyond these components Shinto doesn't produce much art the focus is on nature [Music] itself although some natural phenomena get more attention than others this is

nachy Falls it's one of the tallest waterfalls in Japan and of course it boasts its very own CI every morning a Shinto priest makes an offering to the spirit of the waterfall sake and rice are placed on a table along inside a golden [Music] wand ritual is at the heart of Shintoism Kami can be good and bad just like humans and rituals are performed to maintain good relationships between the human world and the Cami World in so much of the world religion is about God gods and Saints and Prophets but here in Nai and in

countless other parts of Japan nature itself is being venerated and as I look up at this waterfall 133 M high I can see why but even though Shinto doesn't have a strong tradition of religious imagery I believe its influence can be felt right through the history of Japanese art even in the most unlikely [Music] places these are netsuke they were used as toggles on the end of purse strings as part of traditional Japanese dress they depicted all sorts of things and though just accessories for clothing they are now revered as breathtaking miniature [Music] sculptures and

this is a particularly special [Music] one so this bizarre little Masterpiece was made a few hundred years ago probably by an artist called Haru mitsu who was based in isay one of the great Shinto centers of Japan and it depicts a pretty much life-size cada that's beautifully carved out of boxwood every single detail is anatomically correct so we have the compound eyes at the top the beautiful tracery of the veined Wings and this this is the thorax and abdomen those contain the muscles that produce the famous carda chirp and if I turn it over onto

the other side which I'm really quite nervous about doing because I'm extremely clumsy we will see there is even more detail on the underside and you can see that the sard is even grasping a little Branch absolutely [Music] beautiful sadas have a really important place in Japanese culture they are seen as symbolic of the summer when they come out and this object was probably worn during the summer months but they're also seen as strangely Melancholy creatures there's that famous Haiku nothing in the Cry of sakadas suggests they're about to die but it's not only sakadas

Japanese literature is filled with references to all kinds of insects to caterpillars and beetles and fireflies and dragon flies and indeed even today many Japanese people have insects as pets and it's even possible to visit Beetle petting zoos now this all might sound rather OD but actually it's deeply revealing because in Japan nothing in nature is too small to be important everything is deserving of our respect everything is deserving of our attention even an intensely irritating ins SE like this one and that I'm sure is partly down to Shinto but Shinto isn't the only religion

in Japan with a special relationship to [Music] Nature [Applause] [Music] [Music] there in Japan there are numerous different schools and sects of Buddhism but one kind particularly intrigues me because it helped produce some of the world's most sophisticated landscape art forms it is known by the Japanese as Zen Zen doesn't rely on scriptures or Dogma but instead tries to promote an intuitive understanding of the world through meditation and repeated practical [Music] exercises [Music] for [Applause] [Music] [Music] Zen monks used a number of methods to discipline their minds and their bodies and to help with meditation

and one of them one of these methods was painting monk started to make brush paintings in Black Ink on paper and silk now this technique had been developed by the Chinese centuries earlier the Japanese were quick Learners and perhaps the greatest of these Japanese inkwash painters was a man called sesu Toyo sesu was born in Western Japan in 1420 at the age of 11 he enrolled in a Zen temple where he trained to be a priest but according to one anecdote sesu showed little affinity for Zen discipline one day sesu was so badly behaved that

his Masters got hold of some rope and tied him to a pole as a punishment now after several hours of this sesu became so distressed that he started to cry and his tears gradually formed a puddle at his feet but then some something remarkable happened using his toe as a brush sesu painted the outline of a rat into his tears and then the rat came to life GED through the rope and set sesu free in the late 1460s sesu traveled to China and there he learned the art of inkwash painting from its native Masters he

went on to become one of Japan F's greatest painters and I've come to the Tokyo National Museum to see his Masterpiece a painting I've wanted to see for many years and we are the first film crew to ever be granted access to it when it's not on [Music] display this is the splashed ink landscape sesi painted it in 1495 when he was in his mid 70s and though it might only have taken a few minutes minutes to make it is the result of a lifetime's experience and skill now I'll be honest with you at first

doesn't look like much just looks like some spatters on a page but gradually an image a landscape begins to appear in the foreground a craggy outc crop of rock covered by trees and bushes and in the background these towering mountains that are half hidden by Mists or perhaps an incoming rain shower but as you look at this picture longer you begin to see yet more so down there that is a little wooden building you can see the Triangular roof there's a fence around its perimeter and that believe it or not is a wine tavern and

we know that because the wine tavern Banner is hanging out the front of it but there's more even than that because below that wine tavern you can see two near horizontal strokes and those represent the ripples on a lake and to the right two people are rowing a boat across it you know I find this painting absolutely breathtaking and what is so exciting about it is the way it unfolds in front of your eyes the way that by looking at it you bring it to life and what I admire so much about it is how

he's achieved so much with such limited resources look at the varieties of blacks these deep dark Inky blacks in the foreground and yet in the background these blacks that are so pale they're almost white and look at the variety of Strokes the wide brush Strokes the narrow brush Strokes the wet the dry the washes the scratches all this different variety of marks combined and mobilized to create this [Music] landscape and you know the thing I can't get off my mind this was made in 1495 1495 back in Europe we had the Renaissance going on and

there were no images as audacious as this one you know it would take 300 years 400 years for the watercolors of Turner and sazan before any Western artist made anything as abstract as this sesu had helped create an intoxicating aesthetic one that preferred ambiguity to Clarity absence to presence and the hazy mysteries of nature this quality is evident in the work of sesh's countless followers this is haawa tohaku pine trees in the Mist painted onto a folding screen about 100 years after sesu landscape the trees drift in and out of the Mists one can almost

taste the cold wet [Music] air empty space is as important as the landscape it surrounds and this emptiness is surely a visual metaphor for the silences of Zen meditation Zen Buddhism didn't simply Inspire the Japanese to depict the natural world it also encouraged them to recreate it while sesu and his colleagues pioneered landscape painting other monks turned to Horticulture I've come to the northern edge of Kyoto to see one of Japan's greatest Gardens rangi might be the most written about Garden in the world but it's also one of the least understood we don't know who

designed it we don't know who built it we don't know when it was made and we suddenly don't know what it means I've come early in the morning to beat the crowds but I'm not allowed to Step Beyond the Vera this isn't a garden for walking in the ground is covered in white shirakawa gravel that's carefully ra every morning and emerging from the gravel a 15 craggy Stones surrounded by Moss arranged almost randomly but there's nothing random about them because 15 is an important number in Zen it symbolizes completeness since the entire Buddhist World contains

seven continents and eight oceans but from where I'm sitting you can't see 15 stones you can only see 40 in fact it doesn't matter where you go you can never see all 15 stones at once and this is thought to be a reminder of human imperfection one mind can never understand [Music] everything as time passes something remarkable happens the gaps between the the stones come to life the emptiness fills up and suddenly this modest Courtyard becomes a vast Panorama of the world one moment the stones are moss covered Islands in a Rippling foaming ocean the

next their mountaintops seen from above the clouds and then just like that they're nothing more than a group of rocks in some gravel people have been trying to decipher the meaning of this Garden for years but I think its meaning if it has any meaning ultimately comes from within us because like sash's paintings and like so much Japanese culture this Garden is an almost blank canvas a place that enables the mind to wander in any direction it pleases my [Music] the Zen preference for uncertainty and suggestiveness might still seem alien to us fact loving imperical

positivistic westerners but it became a crucial part of Japanese culture and you can't understand Japanese culture until you begin to embrace the beauty of [Music] mystery I've come 300 mil north of Kyoto to a suburb of Tokyo called omia it's an unremarkable place and seems a world away from the wildernesses that inspired Shinto priests and Zen monks but this place happens to be the nation's epicenter of another art form that combines nature and [Music] culture these of course are bonsai like many Japanese art forms Bonsai emerged in China it came to Japan perhaps as early

as the 6th century and it continues to be practiced today K Yamada is unusual most Bonsai artists are men but kowe is the fifth generation of her family to keep Bonsai and many of them are extremely old it's a beautiful tree and how old do you think it is uh we think over 300 years over 300 years old in the west we might think of bonsai as little more than pot plants but in Japan it is a major imaginative Endeavor just like sesu and the creators of Zen Gardens the Bonsai artist is a maker of

[Music] worlds for so what come Bonsai tell us about Japanese attitudes to [Music] Nature for [Music] just around the corner from cow yamada's Nursery is Oma's Bonsai Museum it's like an exclusive Art Gallery but in the place of paintings and sculptures there are trees and I've come to see one in particular This Magnificent Bonsai is estimated to be about 500 years old it's a goom Matsu tree a Japanese five needle Pine that only grows in Japan and Korea and is one of the most popular species used in the creation of bonsai and this creation is

so remarkable that it's even been given a name it's called uzushio which means whirlpool in Japanese and you can see why the whole tree spirals with this remarkable muscular energy it was actually designed to resemble a wave or a tsunami crashing down on the shore the wood spirals with the currents and torrents of water and the needles are like the fingers of froth of a wave as it breaks on the shore so though it's small though it's potted this is about the untame ability of nature you'll also notice there's a great deal of dead wood

on it the whole front has become this white oopi piece of Driftwood that spirals like an S throughout the tree and there are dead branches that are broken off now this isn't an accident this was cultivated this was styled it was created and the purpose was to make this tree look aged and weathered to make it look like it had lived a long hard life out Exposed on a clifftop mutilated by the winds and the rain and the lightning and I'm reminded this piece is about the same age as Michelangelo's David both of them about

500 years old and this too is a sculpture and indeed seeing it in this location in a museum setting it has been elevated to the status of art but this is a living sculpture hasn't been created once it has been created and recreated and reshaped and cultivated and nourished and kept alive for Generations and you know there's a paradox at the heart of this as on the one hand it's deeply contrived deeply created deeply manufactured but it also attempts to look like it's the creation of chance and nature Bonsai is ultimately about persistence in nature

and culture but the Japanese also find beauty in something far more [Music] fleeting this is the flower of the prunus calata or as it's more commonly known cherry blossom the Japanese have revered the life cycle of this delicately petal tree flower for more than a thousand years and in March and April every year year they gather beneath it to party and picnic this celebration known as Hanami has become a vast National Industry and millions of tourists now travel to Japan to join in no other country does anything quite like this but the mert disguises a

Melancholy the Japanese were fascinated with Blossom because they found it unbearably poignant after all here was this beautiful little organism that emerged grew and dazzled and then within little more than a week fell to the ground and died for the Japanese it was of course a fact of nature but it was also a lesson about The Human Condition a reminder that our lives also are painfully brief in Japan Blossom is celebrated not in spite of its transience but because of it it is beautiful precisely because it doesn't last but the preoccupation with cherry blossom was

part of a broader set of interests Japanese culture celebrates all of the seasons not simply the spring and so in Japanese art alongside the paintings of cherry blossoms there are also pictures of verdant summer foliage vilon Maple Leaves of the Autumn and the deep Snows of [Music] winter I've often wondered why the Japanese are so preoccupied with the seasons and I think there are two reasons first the seasons are really explicit here the wins are bitterly cold and dry the summers are hot and wet and in the spring and the Autumn the foliage just explodes

into these unbelievable colors but I think there's another reason as well written language came very late to Japan and so the cycle of the seasons became a really important tool for measuring time not just natural time but human time as well and of all of these pictures of Japanese seasonal surprises one is without doubt the most famous it is housed in the nezu museum in Tokyo [Music] [Music] this is orata corin's irises a pair of six paneled screens dating back to 1710 irises begin to bloom across Japan in May when spring explodes into summer and

in this utterly irresistible painting Corin captures the excitement of those first really hot days of the year the colors are so vivid and intense the greens the greens look like they were painted only a few minutes ago and haven't even had time to dry yet the petals are painted from the most expensive blue pigment in the business and the background made from gold foil dazzles like sunlight reflecting off the water this painting was actually inspired by a 10th Century poem that told the story of a group of Travelers who stopped for lunch at a riverbank

that was Ablaze with irises The Travelers were reminded of a similar spot back at home and became all nostalgic now this painting is also about Nostalgia it's about longing for things that have gone and you can just imagine 300 years ago the original owners of this paint painting looking at it on a cold Winter's Night and feeling all warm inside what I admire so much about this painting is its Simplicity Corin has distilled his subject to its fundamental ingredients and then repeated them rhythmically almost as though it's music and there is a little secret to

how he's achieved that if you actually look very closely at this painting you begin to see that it's actually stenciled this irus over here is identical to that one over there this pattern down here is absolutely identical to that pattern over [Music] there what an image I know it's famous but it really deserves to be I challenge anyone to stand in front of this picture and not become just a little bit happier but the Japanese don't only celebrate the small and ephemeral in fact their most famous natural symbol is anything [Music] [Music] but [Music] 3,776

M High Mount Fuji is the tallest mountain in Japan a dormant volcano that could erupt at any moment Fuji has been revered here since prehistoric times venerated by Shinto and Buddhism alike the Japanese have been rapidz about Mount Fuji for centuries and it has inspired vast quantities of Po one winter in the 1680s the father of haiku Basho made a journey to Mount Fuji but the weather was so bad that the mountain was invisible many people would have been annoyed but not baso this is what he wrote In The Misty Rain Mount Fuji is veiled

all day how intriguing Faso like his Zen predecessors Miss and mystery was exciting after all who wants an answer when you can have a question yet Mount Fuji's Global Fame is surely a result of something less ambiguous Mount Fuji is almost ludicrously perfect even on a drab and overcast day like today triangular snowcapped nearly symmetrical this is a mountain almost as imagined by a child and mount Fuji's form has been crucial to its Fame like the pyramids like the Eiffel Tower its silhouette alone has become the metonym for an entire culture that Flawless shape inevitably

attracted artists they have been depicting Mount Fuji since at least the 11th century this ink painting once thought to be by sesu shows the mountain shrouded in that mandatory mist and towering over a wondrous landscape but one artist immortalized it like no other internationally he is the most famous figure in all of Japanese art almost as famous as Fuji [Music] [Music] itself hawasi was born not far from Mount Fuji in 1760 just a few years after its last eruption and he remained obsessed with the volcano throughout his life he lived in Edo now Tokyo which

was already one of the biggest cities in the world hawasi success came slowly he's best known for his woodcut Prints but throughout his life he loved to experiment he made brush paintings of people and plants and he also made erotica the diversity of his output was breathtaking but for those who knew him this wasn't surprising at [Music] all hawasi I think it's safe to say was a Restless Soul he changed his name more than 20 times he moved house 93 times but the one unshakable thing in his life was his obsession with art Hawai was

passionately maniacally pathologically obsessed with his craft and was relentlessly determined to get better at it hawasa indeed made his finest work late in life and the best of it was arguably a series of prints about Mount Fuji between 1830 and 1833 when he was in his early 70s Hawai produced his master piece 36 views of Mount Fuji initially three dozen woodcuts printed in an array of vivid colors they depict the sacred Mountain from every imaginable Viewpoint from towns sea and sky from close up and vast distances in all seasons and weather conditions and ever surrounded

by life in its endless abundance this is number 33 in the series from the Mishima pass in Kai Province just to the northwest of the volcano and I find this such a heartwarming image that refers back to the old Shinto worship of trees this group of Travelers down here they're on a journey and they have stumbled on this remarkable cedar tree a tree so big that it doesn't even fit into Hawker siiz picture and quite delightfully they are measuring its circumference by linking arms around it but of course they and even the tree are dwarfed

by the Giant mountain behind them which is almost being tickled by the clouds now we've all seen this image before it's actually one of the most famous pictures in all of art but for that very reason we haven't always looked at it properly people are so taken with this extraordinary wave that they don't always notice the rest of the picture picture they don't notice for instance that there are in fact more than 20 people depicted here 22 shaven headed fishermen who are heading home after a long shift on the water and have run into a

spot of bother and you can see them grabbing hold of their Skiffs as they're tossed around on the surf are they going to make it well I think they probably are because in the distance the sacred Mountain disguised as another wave is watching on I don't really think we can understand how truly powerful this image originally was because we in the west we read images like texts from left to right while the Japanese read images the other way so for us we are traveling with the wave and it's really quite good fun but for the

Japanese they are traveling against the wave and it's really quite terrifying it's an absolutely breathtaking piece of design every single element is manipulated to amplify y the drama it's printed in this Bright synthetic Prussian Blue pigment that hasn't lost any of its intensity over the years and the froth I absolutely love the froth which is depicted as hundreds of individual fingers trying to grab hold of their victims and this one is so simple but I could look at it for hours and hours and hours fine wind clear sky otherwise known as red food g red

because that's the color the mountain turns when the Sun hits it in the Autumn months now for all the Great Waves Global Fame within Japan this image was the most popular print of the series by some way and you can see why it has a Simplicity that no other image has there are no people there's no foreground there is simply mountain and Sky divided by one absolutely beautiful line but that Simplicity is De receptive because in reality this is an unbelievably risky piece of work because what hawasi has done is he has taken the very

subject of his picture Mountain itself and pushed it off center and almost off the edge of the page and then to counterbalance that decision he's filled the whole left hand side of the page with all these details the the Green Forest the clouds that look like a school of fish and even his signature and the title now without those this whole composition would fall apart and yet it works absolutely perfectly and that is what I find so thrilling about looking at this picture we are watching an artist at the very top of his game setting

himself an almost impossible challenge and then triumphing in the end hawasi Unforgettable images celebrate both the permanence and impermanence of nature because whatever takes place around it Mount Fuji stands firm hawas siiz humans are tiny and inconsequential by comparison and have little influence on their environment but in the years after hwasa's death Japan's relationship with its landscape changed [Music] dramatically in the 20th century Japanese Society rapidly modernized cities expanded vast waves of Countryside were developed and Roads and Rail lines Cut Across the Nation at the same time Japan was repeatedly ravaged by natural disasters and

these made the Japanese people yet more determined to control their environment concreting their coastlines and damning thousands of rivers today it sometimes seems that the Japanese aren't in harmony with nature they are at war with it Alex Kerr has written extensively about modern Japan's troubled relationship with its environment transformation of nature is not unique to Japan I mean this has happened absolutely everywhere um it happened with great speed and great thoroughness in Japan uh based on on a on a kind of industrial sense that uh we everything should be uh made industrially useful and so

let's cut down those messy for forests and replant them with nice sui trees that line up in rows and they'll grow fast and they'll be good industrial Lumber you know uh let's straighten out those messy rivers and line them with concrete and that will be uh so much more civilized and and international and modern tens of thousands of rivers have been damned as a matter of fact it's said that only three Three Rivers remain that are undamned and even those of course have concrete embankments uh now this is something that everybody did uh look at

America where we built just horrendous dams by the Thousand uh but at some point and this happened in most other industrialized nations there came a point maybe 20 30 years ago when we started to look back and review whether this was necessary and America we've torn down hundreds of dams including some very large ones Japan unfortunately is stuck on autopilot and so the idea that we must Dam these Rivers got fixed in the bureaucratic system and goes on [Music] forever so it's natural to ask well why why couldn't Japan stop and I think one aspect

of it is that Japan is thorough and thoroughness is the strength of this culture that's why you have t ceremony and that's why you have the Excellence in car manufacturer and Camera manufacturer and the delicacy of Japanese art and the incredible refinement of the gardens all of that but these are two-edged swords and so the other side of it is that once Japan starts concreting boy will it concrete and it can never stop until the last tiny little bit of roughness has been smoothed out and there's another twist uh which I think uh is part

of this Paradox of how can Japan be the land of aesthetic sensibility which it still is and large parts of it be as ugly as they are and I think it's because of focus and it's often been pointed out that the Japanese are capable of looking at the beautiful rice Patty and completely ignoring the big billboard that's stuck right in the middle of [Music] it well the thing about this Jurassic nature of Japan is that that was ancient Shinto there was something mysterious Divine uh that's where the Japanese saw the gods and what I found

as I go around Japan talking and writing about these things is an incredible response from the Japanese that feeling is still within them and I think that gives me hope and I am already starting to feel a bit of a shift uh Japan is beginning or the Japanese are now beginning to look at their natural environment and think wait a minute uh so there's something uh to be hopeful [Applause] [Music] for all cultures are contradictory of course they are but one of the most obvious contradictions here is in the Japanese people's relationship to their environment

because on the one hand Japanese culture has from the very beginning been so sensitive to the beauty and fragility of nature but on the other hand one only has to travel around this country to see how much of the landscape has been scarred but even today the great Shinto Spirit still survives I'm traveling to a place I've wanted to visit for a long [Music] time Nima is a small island in the sto Inland sea in the southwest of Japan it was originally inhabited only by fishermen but now it has some very different residence about 25

years ago in the early 1990s a Japanese educational publisher called the benesse corporation together with other supporters started transforming this small island into a center of Modern Art Nima is now home to dozens of museums installations and art projects and contemporary art from all over the [Music] world there's a distinctly James Bond field to the place but I've come to see a work in which ancient Shinto attitudes to Nature have been brilliantly revived by the great Japanese photographer Hiroshi [Music] sugimoto sugimoto has long been inspired by Nature he is perhaps most famous for a series

of photographs began in [Music] 1980 black and white images or all identical in form of seas skies and Horizons from all over the world but though they are Universal they owe much to Japan they remind me of the mythical ocean origins of the country the ambiguous Inky brush Strokes of Zen painters and hawasi attempts to capture a single form in every possible way what I want to represent is the consciousness of the human being at the very early stage I was looking for some kind of image that I can share with uh uh early men

ancient people and probably seascapes just came to my mind that the sea the land we we changed it so we cannot see the the land that the St age people used to watch but the ccape might be we can share the same [Music] images but on Nima sugimoto took on a quite different project this is the goor shrine inspired by Shintoism and Japan's ancient past it is both an artwork and a sanctuary there has been a shrine here since the 15th century but it fell out of use in more recent times in 2002 sugimoto was

commissioned to make an artwork on the site and decided to build a new kind of structure I surprised myself that I received the kind of architectural commission that made made my life change that wasn't uh uh totally unexpected unplanned of my life that I became an architect now the design is based on buildings at isay in southern Japan the holiest place in Shintoism the Shintoism is not well organized it's very hard to explain and after the Buddhism came to Japan in the 6th Century only that time the people can write about the Kami and think

about Kami with language but uh I think it's a very very primtive stage of human mind but it's still barable we have to think backwards how human lived with nature for many many thousands of [Music] years leading down from the small building a set of glass steps descends straight straightened the ground to a hidden chamber [Music] below here sugimoto has created a space he feels evokes prehistoric Japan so atmospheric down here deep beneath the volcanic Japanese rock and though this is a modern work of art by a modern artist there is something consciously ancient about

it because this piece is inspired by the old Shinto idea that the world around us even the ground on which we stand is animated and energized by the sacred we destroyed so much nature now I think it's a turning point point so world has be H study again the the Shintoism kind of concept of spiritualism to how to live with nature that's the message from Japanese Shintoism I [Music] think [Music] I am back to where I started in Japan's dense forests the flicker of the spirits all around me in the course of my journey I

have encountered a culture whose preoccupation with nature seems almost hardwired that sees the landscape as sacred and has painted and reshaped it for centuries and though modern Japan doesn't always seem to Value Nature Nature has shaped its values aesthetic principles so different from those of the West it's often said that Japanese culture is all about harmony with nature but that's not what I've seen this landscape may be beautiful but it's also unstable and dangerous and that Paradox I think is at the heart of Japanese interactions with nature on the one hand they celebrate it they

Revere it they mythologize it but on the other hand they possess an old yearning to tame it [Applause] [Music] in the next episode I'll take a very different path through Japan a path through its greatest cities it's a story marked by dramatic periods of Destruction and renewal that unleash new forms of creativity I'll explore its ancient capital and its refined [Music] culture I'll sample the energy of the emerging Metropolis before delving into today's Mega City from its dark underbelly to its shimmering [Music] future [Music]