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| 31/12/1992 |
| FAST-FORWARD INTO THE PAST |
THE SECOND OF THREE ESSAYS ON JAPAN, FOLLOWING A VISIT IN 1991.
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| Nowhere in the world can you journey into the past as swiftly or as comfortably as you can on the Shinkansen bullet train in Japan. It is the noiseless equivalent of H. G. Wells’ time machine. To catch, for example, the Hikari or light express which operates between Tokyo and Kyoto is to journey not only in a south-westward curve along the spine of the country but to travel back into its past. One can embark at Tokyo and disembark at Kyoto precisely two hours, forty-four minutes and many centuries later. Kyoto and Tokyo, sharing frugally the same letters of the alphabet, represent the capitals of old and new Japan, for Kyoto had been the original capital since 794 until it was superseded in 1868 by Tokyo during the Meiji restoration. |
| The bullet train passes mellifluously through three central regions of Japan – traveling through Kanto, Chubu and then Kinki, in which the city of Kyoto is situated. The panorama which moves past the train window in one continuous narrative is like a latterday e-makimono or painted scroll, with only a section visible at one time, framed in the train window. It is like watching a modern adaptation of Takayoshi’s famous illustrations of The Tales of Genji. From this hi-tech train, though, the traditional figures and scenes of medieval life bustling in those pictorial chronicles have been replaced by a modern iconography, seen from a similar elevation. [EXTRACT] |
Published in THE NATION 31 Dec. 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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| 31 December 1992 |
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