ABSTRACT
Exploration of the ideas and institutions of authority as embodied in and moulded by architecture has offered considerable scope for identifying the fundamental motive forces at work in Japanese history. In so doing the centrality of the architectonic impulse in Japan, springing from those fundamental human attributes of ambition and creativity, of awe for the intangible and respect for the palpable, has been revealed. Both architecture and authority exhibit a dynamic and cumulative character, grounded in tradition and continuity, sometimes arbitrary and forceful, sometimes mannered and lacking power. In drawing together the relationship between architecture and authority as revealed by a range of architectural achievement, from the oldest buildings of Nara to the newest in Tokyo, it is salutary to return to the sombre warning made explicit at the opening of the Tale of Heike that ‘all is vanity and evanescence’. What is the meaning of the architecture of authority when so many of the most vaunting architectural statements of religious and political authority have proved so short lived? It would almost seem that buildings created by the greatest ambition proved the most transitory. The fate of the palaces of eighth-century Nara, and the castles of sixteenth-century Azuchi and seventeenth-century Edo, prompts us to ask whether the architecture of authority contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. This was the question which concerned Kamo no Chomei, retired court poet and Buddhist monk, in the year 1212:
Whence does he come, where does he go, man that is born and dies? For whose benefit does he torment himself in building houses that last but a moment, for what reason is his eye delighted by them? This too we do not know. Which will be first to go, the master or his dwelling?… Of all the follies of human endeavour, none is more pointless than expending treasures and spirit to build houses in so dangerous a place as the capital.1
