Peace, Quiet, and Folk Homes
by Mark Lescroart

Last August, on a magic misty gray day in the eye or the aftermath of a typhoon, I discovered and fell in love with the Meiji Jingu Shrine in Harajuku. Something about it-the way that the droning cicadas in the surrounding park filtered out the noise of the city beyond, the way the mellow smell of damp wood and incense permeated the courtyard, or perhaps just the plain, simple peace of the place-captivated me. It struck me as something I'd been looking for ever since arriving without knowing it. It was also the first haven I'd found that seemed to be at all removed from the omnipresent diligent bustle that pervades so much of Japanese life.

Even now, ten months later, I have not found many such places. Far more common are places that embody a cultural preoccupation with the relentless pursuit of the modern. And the Japanese vision of modernity often seems to stress only competence, progress, and trendiness, and to eschew all that is laid-back, slow, or old-fashioned.
I mean: there are the train stations, models of efficiency, and the trains crowded enough to press the wrinkles out of all the black suits that fill them. There are the community centers with classes and meetings, dozens and dozens of them all over the place, and so few, so few parks. There are the rivers, banked in concrete to be extra sure that the water goes exactly where it is supposed to go and nowhere else. There are the long, long stretches of neat orderly gray buildings under gray skies, seldom broken by patches of green, stretching away (in Saitama, at least) as far as the eye can see in every direction.

I do not mean to say that the Japanese do not have their releases, their places to unwind. I love the atmosphere in some of the yakitori bars, in the izakayas on any given night of the week; and I've developed a positively Japanese appreciation for a dip in a boiling hot onsen every now and again. But there are some needs, some aches deep down in your soul that cannot be released or relieved with alcohol in smoky bars or muscle-melting heat in steamy pools. And places to fulfill those needs are harder to find.

The Nihon Minkaen (Japan Open-Air Folk House Museum) in Kawasaki City is just such a place. As its title suggests, it's a rather large park, to which twenty-four different traditional folk houses from all over Japan have been moved, restored, and maintained. That is: it's a slice of the past, a well-kept vision of a world less hectic than the one we now inhabit, an informative and enjoyable (and rare) glimpse at what life in Japan was like before Docomo and Kitty-chan and J-Rail. It's absolutely magic.