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paradise. This monument is evidence that even hundreds of years ago, when all of Japan was beautiful, Iya was seen as something unique, as a Shangri-La.
    So far, I have only written of Iya’s beautiful side, but in truth there was already a snake in this Garden of Eden:
kaso

(depopulation). It began in 1964, when my family arrived in Yokohama. In that year, the imbalance between city and rural incomes passed a critical point, and farmers from all over Japan fled the countryside. Much poorer and with a more loosely organized society than the rice-growing communities of the plains, Iya was especially hard hit, as villagers moved down to Tokushima and Osaka. After 1970, the pace of
kaso
increased, and Iya was filled with abandoned houses. It occurred to me that I could own a house there.
    These days, all of rural Japan gives the impression of becoming one enormous senior citizens’ home. Back then, although the tide of depopulation in Iya was advancing, the villages were still alive. Even the abandoned houses were in beautiful condition.
    Starting in the fall of 1972, I spent about six months ‘house hunting’. I traveled around looking at dozens of houses, not only in Iya but throughout Kagawa, Kochi and Tokushima Prefectures as well. I wound up visiting over a hundred houses in the end. I toured the countryside with friends in search of interesting abandoned houses, and when we found one, we would brazenly explore inside. It was just a matter of loosening the wooden shutters, which were usually not even locked. There were some unbelievably magnificent houses that had been left to rot. One indigo-dying mansion near Tokushima had a two-meter-wide verandah surrounding the entire house, of the sort you would only see today in Nijo Castle in Kyoto. The floorboards were over ten centimeters thick, all cut from precious
keaki
wood.
    Breaking into these abandoned houses, I experienced many things that could never have been learned from books. I was able to see with my own eyes the reality of Japan’s traditional ways of life. When a family decided to leave their house for the big city, they would take practically nothing away with them. What good were straw raincoats, bamboo baskets and utensils for handling firewood going to be in Osaka? Everything that had been a feature of life in Iya for a thousand years had become irrelevant
overnight. On entering one of these houses, it looked as though the residents had simply disappeared. The detritus of their daily life lay undisturbed, like a snapshot frozen in time. Everything was in place: the open newspaper, remains of fried eggs in the pan, discarded clothing and bedding, even the toothbrushes in the sink. The influences of modernization were already visible here and there – ceilings had been tacked up against the rafters to protect against the winter cold, and aluminum door and window frames had been installed – but one could still see much of the original condition of the houses. However, only a few years later, artificial materials were everywhere, covering not only ceilings, but floors, walls and pillars. The interiors disappeared under a layer of plastic and plywood.
    Western visitors to Japan, appalled at the disregard for city heritage and the environment, always ask, ‘Why can’t the Japanese preserve what is valuable at the same time as they modernize?’ For Japan as a nation, the old world has become irrelevant; it all seems as useless as the straw raincoats and bamboo baskets abandoned by the Iya villagers. In the West, contemporary clothing, architecture and so on have developed naturally out of European culture, so there are fewer discrepancies between ‘modern culture’ and ‘ancient culture’. The industrial revolution in Europe advanced gradually, taking place during the course of hundreds of years. This is why it was possible for much of the countryside of England and France to be left relatively unspoiled, why numerous medieval towns still remain, and