Tokyo Before Tokyo by Timon Screech

Author:Timon Screech
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

65 Katsushika Hokusai, ‘Turbo Hall at the Temple of the Five Hundred Arhats’, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei), c. 1830–32, multicoloured woodblock print. At the top of the Gohyaku Rakan-ji’s Turbo Hall, viewers look out towards Mount Fuji.

Around one century later, the authorities noticed that the pictures had darkened. They sent an official painter to copy them, or at least one of them – probably both, but only one copy is extant. Tani Bunchō’s rendition was so meticulous that it even included the artist’s signature, thanks to which the maker can be identified as Willem van Royen (illus. 64). Not a household name today, van Royen was popular in early eighteenth-century Amsterdam for nature painting, though he is unlikely to have painted the military themes. Edo thus acquired a kind of European sacralization, too, turned Buddhist, to cleverly avoid outlawed Christianity.

Later, another building was added to the Rakan-ji, in about 1780, furthering its strangeness and inserting yet another dimension. The structure was a three-storey tower with an internal spiral slope. It was dubbed the Sazae-dō, or ‘turbo shell hall’, for its twisting shape. Kannon statues, copied from those on major pilgrimage circuits, were placed in the stairwell. Having witnessed the Buddha’s sermon at Vulture Peak, and having seen the natural world of Europe, a visitor now walked through Japan’s most sacred landscapes of rebirth – all without leaving Edo.

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