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>> Shofuso means pine breeze villa.
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The house was designed by Junzo Yoshimura in 1953,
and is considered one of the most authentic Japanese sites
outside of Japan today.
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>> The Japanese house was originally designed to be
displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
and was designed by an architect named Yoshimura Junzo.
He traveled to a number of sites in Japan,
and picked one for the main model
that he based his house on.
That building was the guest quarters
of the Kojo-in Temple in Otsu, just outside of Kyoto, Japan.
He adapted it to make it a little bit more
modern, a little more interesting, and a little bit
more accessible.
>> It was built in Nagoya, reassembled in Manhattan,
and then exhibited for a year and a half in New York before
being disassembled and moved to Philadelphia in 1957.
It was moved to the site of a previous Japanese garden
and structure, the Buddhist Temple
Gate, that had stood till 1955 until it burned to the ground.
It's a shoin centered house, which
means it's centered around a desk,
and would have been the home of a very
wealthy and educated person.
>> A shoin is a place where a visitor to the house,
or especially if it was a scholar,
could sit on the floor, use the desk as a writing space
or a reading space, and that would be made more convenient
by the fact that it's lighted by a window immediately behind
the desk.
That window could be opened, or it
can be closed off with white paper screens called shoji.
The shoji have a wooden frame.
Over the wooden frame, they stretch
a thin layer of mulberry paper.
That allows light to come in, but it keeps the wind out.
And it also evens out the light, so
that it doesn't give you the harsh shadows
that direct sunlight might.
And it's very easy light to read by,
or to simply spend your time in.
The entrance to the house compound is through a gate.
The gate is in a wall that's designed
to reflect castle walls in Japan,
or the walls around Buddhist temples, a masonry wall covered
with a flat white stucco that then has a small tile
roof on top of it.
That wall can be really beautiful
when the shadows of trees, branches, fall on it,
or when the light plays across it
at different times of the day.
>> Some of the distinctive architectural features
of Shofuso are the sliding panel doors,
which are actually walls.
The entire building is surrounded
on the exterior and the interior with sliding panels
that are either wood on the exterior, which are the amado,
and protect the house from the elements, or on the interior,
there are paper doors, either thin paper doors that
allow light through, called shoji, on the exterior,
or paper panels that slide to enclose rooms,
and they're fusuma.
All the panels can be removed for indoor-outdoor living
to expand the spaces and to shrink the spaces as they
would have been needed.
Artist Hiroshi Senju, who is internationally
renowned for his abstract paintings,
created a series of fusuma murals entitled "Waterfall"
for our interior.
It's the only installation of its kind outside of Japan
and represents our waterfalls.
>> Mr. Senju saw the house and donated these murals,
which represent waterfalls, to the house.
Waterfalls are an important symbolic addition
to the house because the water is designed to symbolically
protect the house from probably its worst
enemy in the world, fire.
Mr. Senju also takes that theme and plays it out
a little bit differently on each wall,
with abstract sheets of water that
appear to flow down the wall, painted with a pigment that
picks up the light and reflects it back
at you in different ways, depending on the time of day
and the quality of light in the room.
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>> Shofuso is at the site of the first Japanese garden in North
America.
It was built by the Japanese government for the 1876
Centennial Exposition.
Shofuso's gardens were designed by landscape architect Tansai
Sano, and incorporate three different types of gardens
onto our grounds.
We have a pond and hill garden out in front of the house.
We have a tea garden that surrounds our teahouse.
And we have a small courtyard garden,
which is enclosed by the rest of the building.
>> The central design idea for the garden around the Japanese
house is that it fits in with the house,
and makes an integrated whole.
When you sit in the main space, the space
seems to flow out from the house, to the veranda,
to the near part of the garden, to the middle of the garden,
and to the far part of the garden,
in a very seamless kind of flow that gives you
a sense that the house and the garden
are really integrated and intimately tied to one another.
Part of this comes from the philosophy
of how nature is actually viewed in Asia, as opposed to the way
it's viewed in the West.
In the West, we build our houses to keep the natural world out.
We make strong, solid walls.
We open them up with only small windows and doors
so that we can close everything out.
In Japan, the natural world is invited in.
The seasons are enjoyed as a natural phenomenon
that everyone appreciates.
The garden is designed in the same way,
so that the space of the house and the space of the garden,
while separate, are very much in conversation with one another.
It allows the viewer to see both mountains and water--
that is to say, the hills of the garden that are
made to look like mountains--
and the water that flows through it.
Those are symbols, in turn, of yin and yang, yin,
the wet, dark principle of the universe, yang,
the dry, warm principle of the universe,
that are also equated with female and male.
So the garden includes all these aspects
that make it a philosophical statement,
as well as a beautiful thing to look at.
Looking out from the house, you see not only the garden,
but the things that are beyond the garden.
And that type of garden is actually called a shakkei,
a borrowed view garden.
Here at the Japanese house, we make
it work in a number of ways.
The house was originally designed
so that we could look across the pond
and see Memorial Hall, the large building that
is the last remnant of the 1876 Centennial Celebration.
The various elements of the garden
all have symbolic meaning.
We have a pair of trees in the garden that
are both pine trees, but one is the male pine,
the other is the female pine.
It's not that they are literally that way, and one has flowers
and the other one doesn't, but that they are symbolically
shaped so that one looks large and vertical.
The other looks softer, gentler, and more horizontal.
Everything in the garden is thought
of as living and sentient.
Even the trees, which clearly are
living things, even though they move much more
slowly than we do, are thought to have the Buddha nature--
that is to say, they are sentient beings that
can someday become Buddhas.
Many thinkers even think of the rocks and the water
as having the Buddha nature, as being capable of awakening,
or may be more awakened than any of us are all the time.
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Near the main entrance to the compound,
there's a piece of stone that's not Japanese at all.
It's actually a water stone from China,
taken from the bed of a lake.
And it's limestone that's been eroded into patterns.
Those patterns are thought of as reflecting the li in Chinese,
[JAPANESE] in Japanese, the principles
of the universe, the logic behind which
the universe works.
Only that kind of logic allows soft water
to eat away at hard stone.
But time and the principles of the universe
make beautiful objects out of even the plainest of stones.
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One of the great natural features of the garden
is our pond.
Around the pond, there are many, many elements
that work together to make it seem even more like a part
of the natural world.
Of course, if you are out in a forest,
you would expect a pond to have some fish in it.
So our pond has koi, beautiful fish that are bred
and have been bred for centuries in Japan and China
to have a brilliant coloration and intriguing patterns.
The koi can't live in just a still pond, though.
They need oxygen in the water.
And the best way to get the oxygen naturally into the water
is with a waterfall.
So, we have one that flows into the pond
and provides a visual sight to look at.
It also provides the sound of water flowing into the pond
all the time.
And it helps the koi to breathe, to have oxygen in their water,
so they can stay alive.
There's also a mulberry tree planted over the stream leading
into the pond.
And that's a kind of symbolic way of feeding the fish.
The mulberry berries can drop off of the tree into the stream
and flow down into the pond.
And then the fish can enjoy them.
In fact, the fish eat a lot of other things, too.
But at least symbolically, we have a whole natural world,
plants feeding the fish, the fish living in the pond,
the water and the waterfall, all working together
to make a natural universe within the walls
of the Japanese garden.
In addition to the natural elements in our garden,
there are a number of man-made features, as well.
They're made of stone that harmonizes nicely
with the natural stones of the garden.
But they're hand-carved, beautiful objects
that, in some cases, are functional, as well.
We have a number of lanterns in different styles,
one by the pond that's very low, and whose light could shine out
across the pond in a beautiful reflection.
That kind of lantern is called a yukimi doro.
Yukimi has two meanings.
Doro means lantern.
Yukimi can mean to look at snow, but it can also
mean to look at while moving, so that you might think
of the change in the reflection of the light off of the pond
as you walked around it.
There are other lanterns placed near intersections
of the paths, so that those areas could
be lighted at night.
In addition, we have two Buddhist objects in our garden.
One is a pagoda that was given to the house
by the Mayor of the city of Kyoto in 1959,
when the house was brought here from New York.
The second one is a large statue of the Bodhisattva Jizo.
Jizo is a guardian of children who
is thought of as a spiritual force that
can help any child that might die into their next life.
He stands in one corner of the garden like a quiet guardian,
keeping watch over things and just
making sure that our garden is always peaceful and quiet.
The materials of the house are almost all very natural.
The wood is hinoki, an evergreen that
produces a natural insecticide, like we would think of cedar.
Hinoki is very easy wood to work.
It has an interesting property that after, it's
been planed or cut and exposed to oxygen for a few years,
it becomes harder, and then becomes
a more durable material.
That allows the makers of the house
to use it without any finish.
So there's no varnish, there's no paint, put on it.
The natural color of the wood can be enjoyed.
And it allows the carpenters to make complicated, fitted joints
and hold the house together, almost like a three
dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
Some of those joints are held together not by a nail,
but by a pin that goes all the way through the joint from one
side to the other.
The ends of the pin are covered with kugi kakushi, star shaped
or flower shaped ornaments that punctuate
the spaces of the beams.
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The roof of the house is made from layer
upon layer of bark taken from the hinoki tree.
>> It's a curved roof made of 12 inches of hinoki bark in strips
a half inch wide by 12 inches long.
150 different people in Japan still know how to do this.
And when we have the roof repaired,
we have to bring craftsman over, and they sit up on the roof,
and they replace swaths of our roof
till it's 12 inches thick and ready to withstand
the elements again.
>> For the main part of the house, there are no gutters,
at least not suspended by the roof.
The rain falls onto the roof, comes off,
and there's actually a stone structure
built into the ground around the edges of the veranda
to catch the rain and run it off into the pond.
But the teahouse and the bathhouse don't work that way.
Their roofs are made of hinoki shingles rather than
simply hinoki bark.
And they're a little bit smoother,
so the rain falls a lot faster.
At the corner of the copper gutters,
there are, instead of downspouts, chains.
The chains lead the water simply down to the stream
and away from the house.
And they have the added benefit that in a light rain,
the sound of the water makes a light tinkling noise
as it comes down the chain.
It's another example of how the house, rather
than fighting against nature, uses nature
to enhance its own beauty.
>> As a traditional Japanese house,
all visitors to Shofuso have to remove their shoes.
It's a Japanese tradition, but it's
also to preserve the materials that Shofuso is made of.
The tatami mats are the straw mats
that are on the floor throughout Shofuso.
They're about an inch and a half thick.
It's rice straw bound together, very soft under foot.
The size of the tatami mats is three foot
by six foot approximately, which traditionally in Japan, is
the amount of space one person would
need to live, to sleep, to eat, and to live through the day.
So a tatami room that has four tatami mats
would be considered large enough for four people.
The kitchen that's attached to Shofuso
would not have been part of the original structure,
but was added by Junzo Yoshimura for exhibition purposes.
>> Yoshimura decided to contrast a little bit with the austerity
of the shoin style.
He would put a kitchen on the building that
showed the style of a farmhouse maybe from the late 17th
or early 18th century.
The beams are a lot less smoothly carved, show a lot
more of their natural form.
And the wood is a little bit darker.
>> The kitchen is a traditional 17th century Japanese-style
kitchen.
The oven has a basin for broth, a wok, and a rice cooker.
>> The cabinet on one wall of the kitchen is one of the last
pieces of furniture that came with the house when it was
originally brought from Japan in the 1950s.
This tansu is designed so that it
has spaces to store all the things you
might need in the kitchen, plates, cups,
but also has open work on a number of the panels,
so that you could actually store food inside and close it off.
It's what the Amish would have called a fly safe.
>> The bathhouse has a traditional Japanese soaking
bath on one side.
And it has a traditional urinal and squat toilet
on the other side.
>> In the bath, they use a lot of bamboo.
It's a good place for it because it's very humid in Japan,
and the bamboo tends to split if the weather is too dry.
The bamboo can be laid along the floor,
allowing water to actually pass through it.
So it can be a good place to rinse a tea bowl or wash
yourself, and that sort of thing.
>> We also have a tea garden, which is a traditional type
of garden that would be outside of a Japanese teahouse that
guests would make their way through to come to the teahouse
when they were called by the host.
>> Off to one side, we have a small structure called
a teahouse, or chashitsu.
It's a building designed for serving tea,
especially for serving tea and what,
in English, we often call the tea ceremony,
and what in Japanese is called chanoyu.
Chanoyu is not only the act of serving that tea.
It's the practice, the study, the discipline,
of the tea master, who builds their tea from many elements
and brings their taste to a kind of perfection.
In a typical roji, or tea garden, in Japan,
you would find that the garden is divided
into an outer section and an inner section,
usually by a gateway in the middle of it.
Our garden at the Japanese house,
however, is not divided by a fence or a gate,
but actually divided by a stream that passes
through the middle of it.
So when we pass from the outer garden over a small slab stone
bridge into the inner garden, we go through the same kind
of psychological change of intimacy
that happens in a tea garden in Japan
when you pass through that central gate.
The path goes beside a wash basin
called a chozubachi, or sometimes a tsukubai,
in Japanese.
And right next to that is a stone lantern,
allowing the visitor to use that wash basin even
in the dead of night, because tea ceremonies can be,
of course, performed not only in the middle of the day,
but any time, day or night.
After washing their hands and rinsing their mouth
at the stone basin, the guest would then go into the teahouse
through a small door.
Everyone enters the teahouse at the same level.
It doesn't matter if you're a warlord, a captain of industry,
the President of the United States,
or just an ordinary person.
Everyone has to go into the room from the floor level up.
And it's a great equalizer.
It makes everyone in the ceremony
feel as though they're the same kind of person as the people
next to them.
>> [JAPANESE]
>> The teahouse is for traditional Japanese tea.
It's a very small room with a very low ceiling.
There's a small hearth for heating water.
There's a tokonoma, which is a ceremonial niche for exhibiting
a scroll and an ikebana arrangement.
>> Natural materials are especially important
in the teahouse, where you're really close to them.
The space is very small, only about nine feet square.
Through the center of it, there's
a pillar that is so unfinished that they left the bark on it,
almost as though the trees were growing right
through the center of the house.
Other materials in that part of the building
include woven hinoki strips to make the ceilings,
and of course, tatami mats.
The Japanese tea ceremony in the 16th century
generated two concepts that are thought
of as the sort of ruling aesthetic principles for tea
practice.
The two ideas are called wabi and sabi.
Wabi roughly means simplicity, keeping things simple,
not necessarily taking shortcuts, but keeping
things simple and undecorated.
You might think of the plain wooden surfaces of the timbers
in the Japanese houses, a beautiful example of wabi.
They're not decorated in any way.
They just use their own natural shape
as a kind of beauty in and of itself.
Sabi is a related concept.
It has to do with simplicity, but it has even more
to do with something being loved and used over generations,
even hundreds of years.
One of the examples of it that we see at the Japanese house
is in the repairs that have been made
to the edges of the veranda.
On a couple of occasions, we've had Japanese carpenters
visit and repair those parts.
Now, an American carpenter might simply pull out the whole board
and replace it.
But the Japanese carpenters instead
will cut a shape that is an appealing shape into the wood,
take away the old damaged wood, and replace it
with wood that almost perfectly matches the old wood.
There's a slight difference in color,
but that difference points to the way the house has
been used, loved, and aged.
And it's a very sabi kind of detail.
In many ways, the design seems to really reflect
the principles of Zen, the ideas of bringing yourself
to a centered, quiet place, setting stably, being where
you are, when you're there.
>> When you're in a tea room, whether you're the host
or the guest, you should be completely focused on what
you're doing at any given moment.
You should not think about anything
that happened before you came into the tea room.
You shouldn't think about what you're
going to do when you go home.
For that moment, when you're there,
when you're watching the most prepare tea,
and when you're drinking it, especially when you're
drinking it, you're thinking only about what's
happening right in front of you, the tea that you're drinking,
the preparation that you're watching.
And also the other people in the room.
So as we practice tea ceremony, we practice that focus.
We practice maintaining a very calm and very tranquil
state of mind.
We want to keep a very tranquil mood throughout the room.
We want to make sure that there's nothing that disturbs
the state of mind of the guest.
So it can be a meditative experience,
if people want it to be, or even if they're
just sitting and chatting and have a good time,
there's nothing to disrupt their good mood.
The scroll that's hanging in the room today
has a very simple phrase on it.
It's [NON-ENGLISH].
And meaning of that is, tea and zen are one, one taste.
We often say that the taste of tea in the bowl
is the taste of Zen.
And so, the scroll reflects that idea, also.
Zen is, of course, one branch or sect of Buddhism.
It's a branch where the primary thing that's emphasized
is Zen, Zen being the Japanese pronunciation
of the Chinese transliteration of the Indian term
[INDIAN] meaning meditation, stillness.
It's a branch of Buddhism that's all about personal experience
and personal practice.
The ideas of shin, gyo and so are
three concepts that are developed out
of the Zen Buddhist world.
In Zen, we talk about ways to perceive and understand
the world around you.
One way is the ordinary kind of perception that we have,
which at its best, shows us all the details, all
the complexities, of life.
On the other hand, after meditating for a long time,
one attains a state where all those details cease
to matter completely, and you are reduced
to the simplest of essences.
Well, that first state with all the details is called shin.
Shin can be translated as truth, or simply that state
with all of the meticulous details of the universe.
Its opposite is called so.
So is written with a character that means grass.
And these terms originally were used for calligraphy criticism,
and developed to talk about this pure, straight form in shin,
the very loose and cursive form of so.
The Zen practitioner then learns to understand
that neither the shin perception of all the details,
nor the so perception of none of the details,
is really perfect perception.
Perfect perception comes when you
transcend the distinction between shin
and so into the perception called gyo, semi-cursive,
if you take it back to the calligraphy concept.
At the Japanese house, those three concepts
show up in a number of ways.
One way is in our pathways.
We have some areas that are paved with straight stones that
are placed perfectly together in a very formal, a very straight,
kind of way, that we would call shin.
In other areas, we have flagstones or stepping stones
that are separated, that are in random shapes.
The most random of those shapes are what
we would call a so pathway.
Between them, you might think of a pathway
that has straight edges, but irregular stones in the center.
That would be the gyo style pathway.
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>> Since there has been a Japanese presence at our site
since 1876, and we at this site have been the repeated
recipients of gifts from the people of Japan,
starting with that first garden in 1876,
through the Buddhist temple gate installed in 1909,
through Shofuso's installation in 1957,
and then Hiroshi Senju's gift of fusuma paintings in 2007.
Shufosu is the physical embodiment
of the longtime friendship between Japan
and the people of Philadelphia.
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