Retreat To the Past — page 3

Well, paradise is meant to be lost, and gradually I lost it. As the years passed, the poet gave way to a writer who rarely had the time to visit Chiiori. The house began to decay. By the late '80s, Japan's construction frenzy had penetrated even to Iya, and I began to fear that the numinous valley would end up encased in concrete. I visited less and less. In 1997, I moved to Bangkok. Worried that Chiiori was falling into disrepair, I invited photographer Mason Florence to join me as co-owner. Mason, who had been interested in acquiring an old thatched house, went up to Iya to see Chiiori. He took with him an old friend and adviser, and when they walked in and saw the leaking roof and rotting floors, his friend said, "Let's get out of here—fast!"

But Mason stayed, and soon a swirl of activity enveloped the house as Mason brought in carpenters and repairmen. One day we were visited by a group of Western teachers brought over by the government to teach English in schools across Japan, and soon Chiiori evolved into a sort of clubhouse for them, a place to sit around the irori and talk of environmental ideals.

The teachers were followed by tourist groups and day visitors. Eventually, young Japanese started coming as well. They're the new generation, unimpressed by the vision of "progress" that bedazzled their parents, and out of place in bureaucratized modern Japan. In 1999 we founded The Chiiori Project, which has come to be seen as symbolic of attempts across Japan to revive rural regions through alternatives to subsidized dam and road building. Today, we rent three other houses in the village, and have a staff of three Japanese and two British volunteers. Chiiori has become a move-ment. And once more, Iya is a sanctuary for those who go against the grain of their time.

Chiiori, so active again, has called me back, and I spend far more time in Iya these days than I did in the '90s. And yet, Chiiori is no longer home—it now belongs to the public. Hundreds of people visit each year. The majority come for dinner or to spend a night, simply to experience the romance of the place, while others come as volunteers to cut and carry thatch, dig ditches or build sheds. Where I had dreamed of a world of yugen, I return to Iya and now find a group of young people gathered for a jazz weekend, and—chickens! They're keeping chickens on the grounds nowadays. While I've lost my private Iya, a new generation has found it. When Kohei Watanabe, a 31-year-old advertising executive in Tokyo, visited for a corporate retreat, he remarked: "This place has shown me how to be Japanese." Although the concrete is still encroaching, Iya goes on being a "thin place," a doorway to Japan's ancient Shinto roots.

When I was still a young romantic, I imagined that I was following in the footsteps of the 5th century Chinese nature poet Xie Lingyun. His dream house was "a mysterious dwelling of the utmost emptiness, hung round with wild plants like a mist." The owner of such a house, wrote Xie, would "deduce heaven and earth and straddle the four seas" from his perch above the clouds.

These days, my thoughts in Iya have mostly to do with the volunteers, the chicken coop, how we will pay for the next thatching of the roof. But sometimes, when I'm alone on the veranda at Chiiori, or sipping tea at the cottage of my old neighbor Omo-san, the mist starts silently swirling up from the valley below—and then the world falls away. Green emptiness envelops me, and I'm back in paradise.

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Aug. 18, 2004	Aug. 19, 2003	Aug. 20, 2003