Japan – Millisphere

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly one-thousandth of the world population. Around seven million but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens to examine human geography.

Kyoto prefecture (2015 population 2.6 million) is too small to qualify as a millisphere. Kyoto is part of the Kansai region (23 million) which includes the city of Osaka (8.8 million). Kyoto combined with neighbouring Shiga prefecture (1.4 million) gives a total population of 4 million.

The Shiga prefecture surrounds Lake Biwa (the largest freshwater body of water in Japan) and is within commuting distance from Kyoto. Shiga recently considered changing the name of their prefecture as one strategy to attract tourists away from Kyoto.

Kyoto has more visitors every year than either Mecca or Disneyland and is now suffering from “over-tourism”. Mecca has 15 million pilgrims annually (four million for the haj) and Disneyland Anaheim, LA has 18 million paying visitors every year.

Because of its history and its temples Kyoto was already a popular destination for the Japanese and visitor numbers hovered around 40 million per year from 1975-99, hit 50 million in 2008, and by 2015 there were 57 million tourists, around half of them foreigners, bringing US$9 billion to the city that year.

In 2003 there were only five million foreign visitors to Japan, which then launched the “Visit Japan” campaign. By 2017 there were 27 million foreign visitors, 85 percent of them from Asia. Three-quarters of Japan’s foreign tourists come from just China, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

In 2005, on a stop-over on the way to Europe, I was one of those foreign tourists. Tourism locations around the world are popular for a good reason and Kyoto’s reason is it’s temple gardens. The reason I wanted to see them was quite prosaic; I was a landscape gardener and had seen photos of famous Japanese gardens.

I knew that these minimal, natural but somehow stylised compositions had their design rooted in the Japanese culture and the Shinto and Buddhist religions. Once while grappling with the aesthetics of rock placing, in New Zealand, I found myself climbing up a stream bed after a summer flash-flood. The way the rocks and sand had been rearranged read like a static representation of the forces of nature and seemed pleasing to my eye. I decided then that one day I wanted to make the landscaper’s pilgrimage and see the rock gardens of Kyoto.

At Osaka airport we were met by Masami, from nearby Mie, who had stayed with us in New Zealand when she had toured our country. Personifying the Japanese spirit of Omotenashi (hospitality) Masami shepherded us by rail to Kyoto and a hostel, stayed the night, took us around some prime sights, went back to work, and returned on the last day to put us back on the plane at Osaka.

It was winter and the off season in Kyoto. Snow had recently crushed bamboo, rushes and grasses and then melted away. Black crows called from the trees and white herons waded in the cold Kamo River. We headed for Rokuon-ji Temple to see the pavilion, papered with gold leaf, reflected in its landscaped pond.

At the top of my list was Rhoan-ji with its garden of rocks and raked sand thought to represent who knows what. Around the back (I didn’t realise that there was a back, or an approach) there was a water-basin. The inscription on the stone basin said “I learn only to be contented”. Masami translated it as “I learn so I will not want.” More to the point I thought.

“Learning should be for its own sake, not for profit or gain” … “Learn only satisfaction,” in other words be content with what you have.

At Daitoku-ji my preconception of the Japanese garden was shattered. One garden was dedicated to Sorin Ohtoma (1530-1589) a Christian feudal lord from Kyushu. Viewed from a corner of the garden, rocks are arranged to hint at the reclining form of a cross – a cross “burdened on the multitude of the world, symbolised by the numberless grains of sand.”

These days the multitudes are the flag following, selfie-stick wielding tourists, feverish to photograph everything, desperate to consume the next experience, and caring little for the consequences. One solution to “pollution by tourism” is to stay at home.

The Last Column

I had proposed to write this, my last column for the Wanganui Chronicle, on the millisphere of Shikoku, the smallest, and least populous of Japan’s four major islands. An old friend had recently returned from the 88 temple pilgrimage around the island, but he got called away before I could interview him in depth, his mother was dying.

I was following a trail of populations with negative growth. In 2010 Japan’s population peaked at 128.5 million, it is now around 127 million. In 1990 Shikoku Island had a population of 4.2 million, now it is 3.9 million.

My friend said that in mountainous Shikoku, where hydrangeas grow naturally, it was common to see abandoned homes complete with furniture and ornaments, and elderly farmers, bent double, still working their vegetable gardens. I learned that “natural farmer” Mansanobu Fukuoka, the author of The One-Straw Revolution (1975), was from Shikoku.

Signing off made me reflect on what I’d learned writing columns. Generally they were about “place”, from local (Mosquito Point) to global (Donetsk). In the last two years I have managed to chronicle 66 millispheres and at this rate it will take me another thirty years to write up all one thousand – a millisphere being a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population – that would make me one hundred when I publish the last one. At 700 words per millisphere that’s a 700,000 word book, almost as many as the 780,000 word King James Authorised Version of the bible.

By definition every millisphere has roughly the same number of inhabitants (now an average of around 7.8 million) but they all have quite different geographies, both physical and human. All millispheres have connections with other millispheres and change is inevitable.

Some millispheres are also states: The Central African Republic is the world’s poorest, Switzerland the wealthiest and Hong Kong has the highest average income. Israel is a millisphere but so is “Palestine” (Israel, Gaza and the West Bank combined). The millisphere is merely a lens to examine human geography and different lenses see different things. New Zealand is a millisphere, but so is “Te Moananui” (New Zealand plus all the other islands of the Pacific).

Some millisphere columns have dwelt on war and the arms industry, and the evidence points to competing empires causing most major conflicts in the world. Religion and nationalism are marshalled to give a conflict legitimacy but it’s usually about a few grabbing the money and resources. Last century’s Cold War between America and the Soviet Union is still playing itself out, for no other reason than profits and “jobs, jobs, jobs,” to quote Donald Trump. The conclusion that the world would be a better place without “the great powers” is a hard one to avoid.

Religion is a dangerous topic but also a defining component of the geography of a millisphere – along with its rocks, plants and animals. I’ve been taken to the Press Council for “gratuitous references” to Jews, and found not guilty. I try be to tolerant but seeing a Russian Orthodox Christian minister in full beard and Byzantine robes, on a Vice News video, sprinkling holy water on a Ukrainian missile launcher, makes me want to say something rude, and that goes for Muslims shouting “Allahu akbar” as they pull the trigger.

I’m not a Buddhist but I want to write up Bodhgaya in India where the Buddha had his moment of realisation. I’ve just met a dancer from Moscow and I want to write up relevant millispheres for the coming football World Cup in Russia. I’ve started researching Sonora in Mexico in preparation for the trial in New York of Chapo Guzman and I still want to do Shanghai, Kyoto, Laos, Alexandria, Mosul and the millispheres that make up the Netherlands (17 million).

Tempting as it is to travel again, my garden, friends, family and a small black-and-white dog are keeping me close to home. It will be good to take a break from writing – I’ve got a couple of building projects on – but I’ve set up a blog at millisphere.blogtown.co.nz and I will continue “mapping millispheres,” some that I’ve seen, some not.