Allan Stem's alarm about Japan's semiconductor challenge reflected only
part of the picture. There was also plenty going on with Japanese
research in addition to information processing. Superconductivity was
getting a big push, as was biotechnology, optoelectronics, advanced
materials. Although we in the West think of Japan as a newcomer in the
high-tech sweepstakes, it actually has a long tradition of innovation.
A typical for-instance: in the area of advanced materials those of us
hooked on swords know the Japanese were already creating "new
materials" hundreds of years ago that still haven't been bettered. Back
then it was flawless steel for _katana _blades; today it's, say,
gallium arsenide crystals for laser-driven semiconductors. How, one
might inquire, did all this expertise come about?
To stick to materials research, if you think a moment you realize it's
a discipline that actually must have begun in the latter days of the
Stone Age. "High technology" in those times meant figuring new ways to
use fire and clay to create something nature had neglected to provide.
Not integrated circuits, but a decent water pot.
And the Japanese have been making terrific pots for a thousand years.
As it happens, some historians claim the very first Japanese pottery
was made in the province of Tamba, near Kyoto. Why mention this?
Because, then as now, technology and politics had a way of getting
mixed together in Japan, and Tamba was a perfect example. Tamba's
artisans made great use of a special oven known as a climbing-chambered
kiln. Whereas ceramics kilns elsewhere in the country were narrow and
high, Tamba's climbing-hill chambers were wide and low, thereby
allowing the fire to touch the clay directly. The result was a rugged,
flame-seared stoneware that pleased the manly eye--powerful earthy
grays, burnt reds, greenish-browns, all with a hard metallic luster.
Thus Tamba was a locale much frequented by the warrior shoguns.
Which may be why Tamba province has another claim to history as well.
It is the location of the one-time warrior castle- fortress of
Sasayama, once a regional command post of the Tokugawa strongmen in
Tokyo. You won't find overly much about Sasayama in the usual
guidebooks, since it has the kind of history that's more interesting to
Japanese than to tourists. The place has no gaudy vermilion temples, no
bronze Buddhas ten stories high. Fact is, very little remains of the
fortress itself these days except for a wide moat, green with lotuses,
and a few stone walls lined with cherry trees that blossom an exquisite
white for a few breathtaking moments each spring.
Although the castle is now burned down, a few homes of the samurai
retainers of its various warlords remain. If you stand on the rocky
edge of the moat at its southwest corner and look down through the
cherry trees, you'll see an old-style house built some two hundred
years ago by the twelfth _daimyo_ of Sasayama for his most loyal
retainer. Its walls of white plaster are interspersed with beams of
dark wood, its thatch roof supported by the traditional ridgepole.
Think of it as the home of the samurai most trusted, the guardian of
the gates, the warrior nearest the fount of power.
Perhaps it will not seem surprising, therefore, that this ancient
samurai residence, in the shogun stronghold closest to ancient Kyoto,
was now home base for a powerful warrior of modern Japan. Matsuo Noda.
Samurai had once battled in Sasayama's streets; many's the time its
castle had been stormed by raging armies; much blood had been shed and
much honor lost. But the event that occurred in Sasayama precisely two
weeks after Tamara Richardson's dinner in New York was a historical
moment more important than any in its thousand years prior.
It began shortly after dawn, a cool September gray just ripening to
pink over the mountains. The early sounds of morning--birdsong, the
faint bell of the tofu seller, the steam whistle of the autumn sweet-
potato vendor--were only beginning to intrude on the quiet. Noda was
where he always was at this moment: on the veranda overlooking his
personal garden, a classic Zen-style landscape whose central pond was
circled by natural-appearing rocks, trees, bushes, paths. It was, of
course, about as "natural" as those sculptured hedges at Versailles. In
order to create the illusion of perspective and depth, the stones along
the foreshore of the pond were bold, rugged, massively detailed, while
those on the opposite side were dark, small, smooth--a little trick to
make them seem farther away than they were.
It's a game heavy with nuance. For example, the stone footpath on the
left side of the pond may look as if it goes on forever, but that's
just part of the art: the stones get smaller toward the back, curving
in and out among the azalea bushes till they make one last twist and
disappear among the red pines and maples at the rear. Which trees,
incidentally, have themselves been slightly dwarfed, again enhancing
the illusion of distance, just as the back is deliberately shaggy and
dark, like the beginnings of a forest that goes on for miles.
Noda's Zen garden, which deludes rational judgment by manipulating all
the signposts we use to gauge distance and space, appeared to be
limitless. The secret was that nothing actually ends: everything simply
fades out and gets lost. It was a closed space that seemed for all the
world as if it went on and on if you could only somehow see the rest of
it. Yet peek only a few yards away, and you've got the mundane streets
of sleepy Sasayama.