This programme contains some scenes of a sexual nature.
It was a bright August morning,
and commuters were making their way to work in a provincial city
in western Japan. It was shaping up to be a day like any other.
But at exactly 08:15,
an American bombardier above them pulled a lever.
The commuters may have seen a flash of light,
but within seconds, they and the city of Hiroshima
were engulfed in the largest man-made explosion in history.
70,000 people were killed instantly,
and the city was all but annihilated.
It was the beginning of the nuclear age.
But the Japanese had seen disasters before.
The history of Japanese cities is the history of their destruction.
For centuries, indeed millennia,
earthquakes, fires, floods, tsunamis and wars
have decimated the country's towns and cities over and over again.
But this relentless cycle has had a dramatic creative impact.
It has forced the Japanese
to constantly rebuild and reimagine their cities,
and today, they are some of
the most dynamic places in the world.
To discover why, I'm going to explore the culture
of three great Japanese cities in three decisive eras.
Kyoto, the country's capital for over a thousand years.
A city of elegance and splendour that gave birth
to a golden age of painting and poetry
and even turned tea into an art form.
Holding this bowl is a kind of revelation.
Edo, a teeming metropolis with a dark underbelly.
A floating world of actors, artists,
and sex workers that produced a bohemian, urban culture
centuries before the West.
And Tokyo, today the largest urban area on the planet,
a conveyor belt of fashion, film,
and contemporary art that now influences the entire world.
These three cities produce some of Japan's finest
and most distinctive art, but they did more than that.
They also shaped the country's attitude
towards its past and present,
as well as to East and West, and in doing so,
they helped mould the very idea of Japan itself.
In the spring of 793 AD,
a small group of men embarked on a journey through Honshu.
They claimed they were on a hunting trip.
But they weren't hunting animals,
they were searching for a piece of land.
The men were convinced that their hometown,
which was called Nagaoka-kyo, was cursed.
For the best part of a decade, it had been ravaged by floods,
disease, famine, and even a series of mysterious murders.
They knew they had to abandon it,
but first, they had to find a site for a new city.
They hadn't gone far before they alighted on something promising,
a vast, fertile basin,
surrounded on three sides by a fortress of mountains,
and irrigated by not one, but two rivers.
They had found their site.
By the autumn of the following year,
the Emperor had founded his capital here.
He called it Heian-kyo, capital of peace and tranquillity,
though it later became known as Kyoto.
Kyoto has been built and rebuilt many times since then,
but it remains a place of unparalleled riches.
It is home to 1,600 temples, 400 shrines,
and 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites,
more than any other city in the world.
The original city of Kyoto was a work of art in its own right.
It was inspired by Chang'an, the great capital of China,
and every part of it was carefully planned.
The city was organised, almost like New York,
according to a strict grid system.
Now, these streets were splendid thoroughfares.
Even the narrowest of them was 78 feet wide, and the widest of them,
Suzaku Avenue, which ran right down through the middle of the city,
that was almost 300 feet wide.
It was probably the widest boulevard in the world at the time.
And Suzaku Avenue terminated right here, in the north of Kyoto,
at the city palace.
Now, I've got to say, looking down over this scale model,
I really think it looks like a wonderful place to live.
Most of the houses are one storey high, so it's light, it's airy.
There are gardens, there are lakes, there are rivers.
It is a world away from the dark warrens of filth
that made up most cities at the time.
Kyoto was the blueprint for a utopia,
a dream of a rational and beautiful society
that the Emperor hoped would last forever.
But it wasn't as perfect as it seemed.
Over the following generations,
the palace burned down no less than 14 times,
and the whole western half of the city was repeatedly flooded.
But this didn't prevent the fortunate members of the court
from enjoying the finer things in life...
most of them borrowed from the Chinese.
They ruminated on cherry blossoms and staged moon-watching ceremonies.
They even collected crickets
and made music to accompany their chirps.
In Kyoto, style was emphatically substance.
If any one idea governed the cultural values of the court,
it was the word miyabi.
Now, miyabi doesn't have a direct English translation,
but it meant a kind of refinement or aesthetic sensibility -
the ability to recognise and appreciate beauty
in all of its forms.
The culture of Kyoto was advanced in another notable way.
Many of its leading practitioners were women,
and the greatest of them was Murasaki Shikibu.
Born into a minor aristocratic family around 973 AD,
Murasaki served as a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial Court.
But in her spare time, she started writing something.
Murasaki was writing a story of monumental proportions,
indeed, twice as long as War And Peace.
It spanned four generations and 75 years.
It contained 430 different characters and 795 unique poems.
And today, many consider it to be
the first novel ever written anywhere in the world.
It was called The Tale Of Genji.
The story focuses on the life of a rakish young prince
called Hikaru Genji.
Intelligent, beautiful and possessed with impeccable taste,
Genji is the paragon of miyabi.
And though he spends much of his youth womanizing,
he becomes one of the court's most powerful men.
He builds a grand palace in the city
and fills it with the women he loves.
But then things start to go wrong.
Genji marries a woman who then bears another man's child.
His relationships with his other lovers deteriorate,
and when his greatest love dies, Genji loses the will to live.
It is not long before his life also comes to an end.
"The whole world mourned Genji.
"It was as if a light had gone out.
"For his ladies, for his grandchildren,
"for others who had been close to him, the sadness was, of course,
"more immediate and intense.
"'It is true, ' they all thought,
"'The cherry blossoms of spring are loved
"'because they bloom so briefly.'"
Genji's life was indeed cut short,
but Murasaki's remarkable novel lived on.
Many illustrations of The Tale Of Genji
were made in painted hand scrolls.
Here in the Tokugawa Museum in Nagoya,
are the oldest examples from the 12th century.
Only fragments survive,
but they are some of the country's greatest treasures.
They are almost a millennium old.
The complex patterns of colour and shape
still convey powerful emotional stories.
And I've come to look at one of the most affecting.
This painting captures a turning point in Genji's life.
While he was away, his wife had an affair with his nephew.
She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy called Kaoru.
Now Genji didn't want to admit to being cuckolded,
so he had to except Kaoru as his heir even though he knew he wasn't.
And here, we can see Genji holding the baby boy in his arms,
and though this image is small and old and tatty,
you can still see the complex,
powerful emotions racing across Genji's face.
It's taut with resentment and humiliation and yet,
as Genji looks down on that beautiful, innocent boy,
we can see him beginning to soften.
His eyebrows are lifting and his little pink lips
are curling into a smile.
The composition has been used to emphasise and dramatise
Genji's own torn state of mind.
So these powerful diagonals race across the surface of the picture
and imprison Genji right into the corner.
The fabrics tumble into this chaotic mess of lines,
and, perhaps most powerfully of all,
the relationship between Genji here and his wife,
who has become a nun following her indiscretion, speaks volumes.
They are together, but they are, of course, completely apart.
This masterpiece of Japanese art
reminds me that, though times may change,
human emotions don't.
The people of Kyoto had mastered the art of painting...
but aesthetics pervaded everything they did.
Poetry, calligraphy, garden design and over the centuries,
it even extended to tea.
The Japanese had been enjoying tea since the ninth century,
when it was introduced from China.
But in the late 16th century,
it began to take on a special significance.
At the Buddhist temple of Daitoku-ji
is a teahouse made in honour
of the great Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyu.
Here, in a small, simple room,
Rikyu and his companions turned tea drinking into an art form.
Sen no Rikyu believed that tea was much more than a drink,
it was a revelation.
When drunk in the right way,
tea helped people rise to a different plane of consciousness.
"When you hear the water splash into the tea bowl," he once said,
"you will feel the dust in your mind is washed away."
Sen no Rikyu's ideas gradually crystallised
into what we know as the Japanese tea ceremony.
Sen no Rikyu wanted the tea ceremony
to express an appreciation of modesty,
imperfection and impermanence,
and this even extended to his utensils.
He thought traditional ceramics were too elaborate,
so he set about finding an alternative.
He asked a craftsman called Chojiro
to fashion a simple, undecorated tea bowl.
This was the beginning of raku pottery,
and Chojiro's descendants are still making it today.
Raku Kichizaemon XV is the 15th generation of potters in his family.
He continues a tradition that was started 450 years ago,
and he is, in my view,
one of Japan's greatest living artists.
So, where are we here?
Here's many, many old clay.
Now, I use the clay, this clay,
my grand-grandfathers rub
about 100 years ago.
Wow. And are you collecting clay for your descendants?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
This is a seminal tea bowl.
It was made by Chojiro, the founder of raku pottery.
It's more than 400 years old.
It might even have been used by Sen no Rikyu
in the late 16th century.
Now, at first, it doesn't look like much.
It's small and misshapen,
the walls aren't straight, the lips are wobbly,
and it's covered in a simple, plain black glaze.
But to really appreciate it, you need to pick it up...
because holding this bowl is a kind of revelation.
The weighting, the texture, the temperature are all just perfect.
And as I hold it, I can feel this groove
running along the middle of it
that fits the hands perfectly.
It feels almost as though
you're feeling Chojiro's fingers 400 years later.
This is an artwork to be held, to be touched, to be felt.
This is an artwork to be used.
This tea bowl is the epitome of wabi-sabi,
that Japanese reverence for the imperfect, the unfinished,
the worn-out, because to appreciate those things
isn't only to be humble,
it's to understand that we, too, are imperfect.
We, too, are as flawed as this tea bowl.
So this object isn't simply a bowl, it's a lesson.
A lesson to all of us to appreciate the simpler things in life.
In the 800 years since its founding,
Kyoto had done much to establish a classical Japanese culture,
although much of it had been Chinese in flavour.
Kyoto would continue to flourish after 1600,
but a new regime was coming, and it would create a new great city.
Japan was embroiled in civil war for the entire 16th century...
until, in 1600,
a warrior called Tokugawa leyasu took control of the country.
He was given the title shogun
and established the Tokugawa Shogunate
which ruled the country for more than 260 years.
Rejecting Kyoto, Ieyasu moved his capital
to a down-at-heel fishing village
300 miles north called Edo.
It would not remain a fishing village for long.
Like most Japanese cities, Edo was prone to destruction.
In fact, over the next few centuries,
it was torn apart by fire pretty much every 20 to 30 years,
but those fires did nothing to suppress Edo's growth.
By the early 1700s, more than a million people lived there,
twice as many as in London.
It had become one of the largest cities - perhaps THE largest city -
in the world.
The Tokugawa closed the country's borders
to all but a few Dutch traders
and enforced a rigid social hierarchy.
The rulers of Edo preached a gospel of discipline and austerity,
but not everyone was listening.
Over time, the townsfolk started to make their own culture,
a popular culture, a counterculture of astonishing vitality.
Their Edo was populated by actors,
dancers, sumo wrestlers, puppet shows,
gangsters and courtesans.
It was a long way from the refined culture of the court.
Japan had seen nothing like it before.
These decadent goings-on
were centred around Edo's pleasure district,
a walled community that was often referred to as ukiyo,
which in English means floating world.
But the floating world wasn't only a physical place,
it was also a state of mind.
"Living only for the moment,
"turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow,
"the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves,
"singing songs, drinking wine,
"diverting ourselves and just floating, floating,
"caring not a whit for the pauperism staring us in the face,
"refusing to be disheartened,
"like a gourd floating along with the river current -
"this is what we call the floating world."
We tend to talk a lot about 19th-century Paris
being the epitome of a modern, urban, decadent culture,
but Edo was doing exactly the same thing 200 years earlier.
And Edo's floating world produced art forms
that were distinctly Japanese.
One of them was kabuki.
Legend has it that kabuki was invented in Kyoto in 1603,
the same year as the shogunate itself.
It's said that it started when a group of women
staged an explicit song and dance routine
for a group of staggered men, and, unsurprisingly,
it proved popular.
Kabuki developed into a striking form of theatre,
with highly stylised movement and extravagant costumes.
The best actors became major city celebrities.
Kabuki theatres could be raucous places.
The audiences hissed and booed, they leapt onstage,
they started scuffles and riots in the stands.
In rooms like this,
the strict social order of the shogunate
could be temporarily and deliriously abandoned.
The government tried to regulate this exuberant new art form,
but it proved popular even with the samurai, and it's still going today.
Ichikawa Ebizo is the 11th generation
in a single dynasty of kabuki performers
that goes back more than 300 years to the Edo period.
He is also one of the most famous men in Japan.
Kabuki was first performed by an all-female cast, but the shogunate,
who disliked its licentious reputation,
banned women from the stage.
They were soon replaced by men in both male and female roles.
Performances could last all day and attracted every social class.
Young and old, rich and poor rubbed shoulders.
Lots of what we know today about traditional kabuki
comes from the remarkable images that immortalized it.
Like kabuki, they were a crucial part of Edo's floating world,
and are now synonymous with Japanese culture in general.
Wood block printing had been practised in Japan
for hundreds of years,
but in the Edo period,
it became possible to make full-colour prints
for the first time.
They became hugely successful.
They were very common and usually very cheap...
but they are now the best-known images in Japanese art.
Kazuo Watanabe is a woodcut artist.
He has been making prints for 50 years
and uses the same methods pioneered in 17th-century Edo.
How did you start as an Ukiyo-e print maker in the first place?
Woodcuts were bought and sold around Edo in their thousands,
and many focused on the floating world.
The Japanese even called them Ukiyo-e,
pictures of the floating world.
And no artist captured it better than Kitagawa Utamaro.
Utamaro is one of the great enigmas in art.
His pictures may be world famous,
but we know virtually nothing about the man who made them.
We don't know when he was born, we know nothing about his background.
He's mentioned in no official records.
He left behind no letters, no diaries, no personal documents.
Like the floating world, Utamaro thrived in the half light.
One thing, however, seems likely -
Utamaro spent plenty of time in Edo's red light district.
A third of all of his pictures are of the city's sex workers.
Utamaro's fascination with the women of Edo
is evident in a book he published in 1788,
called The Poem Of The Pillow.
It consisted of 12 salacious images.
This is a rare, early copy
containing the original Utamaro prints,
and I've come to see my favourite.
This picture depicts a man and a woman
kissing upstairs in a teahouse.
We know it's upstairs
because the leaves of a camellia tree are peeking out,
almost eavesdropping, over the balcony.
There's some suggestion that the characters are already having sex.
On the fan, there's a poem that reads,
"Its beak caught firmly in the clam shell,
"the snipe cannot escape of an autumn evening."
Fortunately, perhaps unfortunately,
we can neither see the beak nor the clam shell.
But you know what I find so seductive about this image
is what ISN'T shown.
We can't, for instance, see the faces of this couple.
We have to imagine who they are.
It's the details that are so irresistible.
The curve of her buttocks.
The nape of her neck,
which at the time was considered more sexual even than the genitals.
Her hair standing up on end.
His left hand touching her shoulder.
Her left hand touching his chin.
Phew!
But, I tell you, if you look closer,
there is something truly remarkable in this picture.
Right here, half hidden by her hair, is an eye, his eye,
looking at her, or perhaps it's looking at us.
Now, I have no evidence for this whatsoever,
but I wonder, I just wonder,
whether that is Utamaro himself, staring at us across the centuries.
Utamaro was a master of understatement.
But not all his images showed such restraint.
Erotic images were popular with both men and women
at every level of society in Japan.
We might see them as vaguely pornographic today,
but the term wouldn't have been understood in 18th-century Edo.
They were called shunga,
which literally meant spring pictures,
and they celebrated intimacy and sexual pleasure
in imaginative and often explicit detail.
But the floating world was not the only subject of wood block printing.
In the 1850s, Hiroshige made 100 views
of the great city of Edo itself.
They capture its shop fronts, its teeming streets...
its waterways and its coast.
The images themselves are breathtaking.
The inventiveness, the dynamism, the wit
and the irrepressible beauty.
Hiroshige, Utamaro
and the other printmakers of Edo had perfected
a remarkable Japanese art form,
but they'd also established the basis of a new visual grammar,
bold, graphic, economical,
and it wouldn't be long before their style caught on around the world.
In the mid-19th century,
Japanese trade routes began to open
and their goods began to be sent across the seas.
Kimonos, fans, writing paper,
porcelain and pottery, lacquerware and,
of course, countless ukiyo-e prints soon flooded the West,
and the West was astonished.
European artists were impressed by ukiyo-e prints.
They turned up in Manet's backgrounds...
and Monet's foregrounds.
Vincent van Gogh was so inspired by Hiroshige
that he copied this image of Edo,
and so Japanese innovations helped shape modern art as we know it.
The people of Edo had achieved something really rather significant.
They had invented a culture that, for the first time,
seemed distinctly Japanese,
and one that then went on to influence the rest of the world.
But as Japan changed the West, so the West changed Japan.
Previously isolated for hundreds of years,
traditional Japanese society now seemed out of step with modern life.
The rule of the samurai and their closed borders was coming to an end.
From the 1860s,
Japan would discard much of its centuries-old culture
and aim instead to become a modern, industrial nation.
As a statement of intent, the city of Edo would be rebranded.
Japan's capital was both new and old.
It was essentially still the city of Edo.
Same site, same buildings, many of the same residents.
But it was now reactivated with a new identity and a new name.
From the 13th of September, 1868, we would know it as Tokyo.
It was in Tokyo where these Western aspirations
first took physical form,
and most noticeably, in architecture.
At the end of the 19th century,
European-looking buildings began to appear on the city streets.
The Ministry of Justice could have been transplanted from Paris.
And the city's neo-Baroque train station
seems to better belong in Amsterdam.
But the most striking anomaly was the Crown Prince's residence,
completed in 1909.
This is Akasaka Palace.
Its architect, Tokuma Katayama,
spent a year travelling through Europe,
studying the great royal residences of Germany, France and Britain.
And with this building, I'm sure you'll agree,
he's channelling the spirit of Buckingham Palace.
It is, if such a thing is possible, even more regal inside.
The grand staircase is made out of Carraran marble from Italy
and Languedoc marble from France.
And the vast state rooms upstairs are overflowing with decoration.
There are paintings done in the European manner.
And the chandeliers,
which each contain 7,000 pieces and weigh almost a tonne,
were specially shipped in from France.
If I were taken into this building blindfolded,
and not told where I was,
I am pretty sure I would never guess that it was in Japan.
Walking through this palace,
if anything, it feels like I'm in Versailles.
A strange alter ego of Versailles, but that was the point.
This building, and many others like it in Tokyo,
were part of an attempt to represent Japan as, well, a European power.
It was a brazen act of cultural appropriation.
Akasaka Palace ended up costing a huge 5.1 million yen.
It was deemed too extravagant even for the Crown Prince,
and it spent much of the 20th century uninhabited.
Outside the palace, Tokyo was changing in other ways.
A huge programme of construction and industrialization was under way.
Railways, trams and trunk roads transformed the fabric of the city.
And then it was transformed yet further
by a series of very Japanese disasters.
On the 1st of September, 1923, the Great Kanto earthquake struck Tokyo,
killing 142,000 people and obliterating much of the city.
Tokyo had barely recovered when it was torn apart again.
During the Second World War, the US Air Force
embarked on an aerial bombing campaign against Japan.
67 cities were targeted, 500,000 people were killed,
and more than half of Tokyo was destroyed.
As Japan rebuilt itself once again,
it embraced a new kind of supercharged modernity,
where progress with a capital P was all that mattered.
Between 1945 and 1963,
the population of Tokyo grew from 3.5 million to over 10 million,
as increasingly people deserted the countryside
and moved to the city.
At the same time, the nation experienced
unprecedented economic growth.
And yet, in the process of remodelling Tokyo,
many were left behind,
stuck in the cracks between the shiny developments.
And these cracks just about survive
in a small part of Shinjuku called Golden Gai.
Golden Gai was rebuilt after the war and soon became a world of its own,
a warren of alleys and bars.
This was the floating world of modern Tokyo,
a place Utamaro might have felt at home.
And in 1961, a modern-day Utamaro stepped into it - Daido Moriyama.
The founding father of Japanese street photography.
He was 23 when he first came to Tokyo
and found a day job as a camera assistant,
but at night, he was sucked into the darkness of Shinjuku.
Moriyama's methods are simple.
He wanders up and down the streets of Shinjuku,
ducking into narrow alleys and dark corners, looking in every direction.
And as he goes,
he uses a small, portable camera to take snap, after snap, after snap.
Moriyama's early photographs
captured the rootless and hedonistic inhabitants
of Tokyo's underbelly.
But increasingly, he subverted his medium.
In 1972, in his classic work Farewell Photography,
his portraits of the city were so blurred, grainy
and uncomposed that they were almost illegible.
Do you find the city particularly exciting
at certain times of the day or night?
If any one photograph captures Moriyama's work, it is this one,
made in 1971.
An unkempt stray dog glances back at the photographer
in the winter sunshine.
The dog is surely a proxy for Moriyama himself,
a loner scavenging the streets for scraps.
But it is also perhaps a symbol of Japan,
a country that hadn't yet found its identity
in the turbulence of the 20th century.
And yet, in the following years,
Japan raced yet further into the future.
The economic miracle that had begun in the 1960s
reached its peak in the 1980s,
and the country became the second largest economy in the world.
Tokyo was the motor of these changes,
and was rebuilt and redeveloped
at a relentless rate.
But though its eyes were firmly focused on the future,
the culture of the city remained haunted by the past.
In 1987, the classic anime film, Akira, was released.
It begins with an all-too-familiar scene -
Tokyo being razed to the ground.
The story that follows has all the necessary ingredients
of modern science fiction -
post apocalyptic dystopia, government conspiracy,
and children with superpowers.
It consists of 160,000 hand-drawn images and features 327 colours,
50 of which were specially created for the film.
But the star of the show is neo-Tokyo itself,
a dazzling setting for dreams and nightmares.
In the following year,
another film revisited the wartime destruction of Japan's cities.
Grave Of The Fireflies is a landmark in animation history.
It tells the tragic story of two siblings' struggle to survive
during the final months of the Second World War.
The film was directed by Isao Takahata,
one of the co-founders of Studio Ghibli,
and it drew on his own memories of the war.
Now in his eighties,
Takahata has published a book about the connection
between the sequential art of early Japanese hand scrolls
and anime, which he sees as belonging
to the same narrative art tradition.
Wow.
So, this is a fire tearing down the city?
When you look at a scroll like this,
do you feel like you're looking at the work
of people in the same business as you?
The great anime films were just part of a broader blossoming
of Japan's creative industries,
which were born out of distinctly Japanese urban experiences,
but spoke to the wider world.
Since the 1980s, Japan, and Tokyo in particular,
has become a creative hub for food, fashion, film, consumer electronics,
computer games and many other forms of popular culture.
Take a pick of a recent craze or fad -
it's likely to have originated here.
Tokyo's designers have, together, challenged Paris
as a world leader in fashion.
Lifestyle brands have tackled the problems of urban living
and gone on to conquer the world.
And its pop culture has attracted millions of fans
and built a vast, international audience.
In many of these areas,
the great city of Tokyo absorbed the most modern fashions,
remade them in thrilling ways,
and then exported them back to the world.
This dizzying, high-speed,
urban aesthetic has also influenced Japan's artists.
They have derived inspiration from the city,
and from the popular culture it produced.
But of all of them, none better captures the zeitgeist
than an 87-year-old woman called Yayoi Kusama.
Kusama has been creating her own brand of pop art since the 1960s,
resulting in a psychedelic array of popular,
but deeply personal imagery.
But Kusama's most celebrated installations
are her mirror rooms...
small, dark chambers covered on all sides in reflective surfaces...
illuminated only by twinkling LEDs
and transformed into infinite indoor galaxies.
You can understand why this art has delighted people around the world.
It's like... I don't know,
it's almost like falling into a kaleidoscope,
or stepping onto a sci-fi stage set.
But you know what, more than anything else,
this piece reminds me of?
It reminds me of the city.
It reminds me of an almost infinite metropolis,
glittering away in the night.
Over the centuries, cities have inspired
some of Japan's greatest art,
but they are, themselves, creations,
dynamic, complex and often beautiful.
This is a story of Japan's urban imagination
and how three great cities built its art and culture.
In Kyoto, the Japanese mastered beauty and elegance.
In Edo, they found their own, often mischievous, voice.
And in Tokyo, they turned destruction into creation.
And in the process,
they helped define a country as it relentlessly searched for itself.
Cities are engines of cultural change
because they throw people together,
to compete and collaborate and innovate.
It's the case around the world, of course,
but I can't think of many countries
that are more defined by their cities than Japan.
In the final episode,
I'll be venturing into the most intimate spaces in Japan -
its homes.
I'll explore how, in Japan, the house became a work of art.
Guided by the spirit of the craftsmen who made it,
and the rich traditions that developed within its walls,
the Japanese house went on to transform our lives in the West.