{"id":1272,"date":"2013-01-24T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2013-01-24T20:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1272"},"modified":"2013-01-24T12:00:18","modified_gmt":"2013-01-24T20:00:18","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s3e6-form-over-function-with-john-dougill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1272","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E6: Form Over Function with John Dougill"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Colin Marshall sits down seven stories above Kawaramachi, Kyoto, Japan with John Dougill, professor of British culture at Ryukoku University, blogger at Green Shinto<\/a>, and author of books including Kyoto: A Cultural History<\/em>, In Search of Japan’s Hidden Christians<\/em>, and Oxford in English Literature<\/em>. They discuss the commonalities between the Kyoto geisha and the English gentleman, who practice their respective cultures’ ritual, regulation, and repression; form’s dominance over function in Japan, as exemplified by one young fellow in a Union Jack t-shirt; how he got a handle on Japan by writing a book on Kyoto, and how in the process the scales fell from his eyes, revealing the “magical paradise” he lives in; his ambivalence toward the “sprawling urban mess” that has built up around modern Kyoto; Oxford, the other city in his life, and the formula of “old buildings and young people” that makes it ideal; his early feelings of isolation and anger toward Japan, and how he overcame them; coming to represent British culture in Japan, using Marmite and other traditional tools; his attractions to “earth religions,” particularly Shinto, which he considers to be the true essence of Japanese culture; the Japanese tendency to contextually follow a variety of religious traditions and honor a variety of “equally valid” though sometimes opposing truths; how Japan’s “hidden Christians” created and protected their own mixed folk religion; his current project, a book on Japan’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and the problems inherent in a place becoming one; how Kyoto’s younger generation has preserved and repurposed traditional machiya buildings; and the process by which he has come to see his own country through Japanese eyes, which means he sees a great deal of “rudeness, dirtiness, and lack of efficiency” \u2014 a different Britain, in other words, than the one he grew up in.<\/p>\n

Download the interview from\u00a0Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/em>\u2019s feed<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Marshall sits down seven stories above Kawaramachi, Kyoto, Japan with John Dougill, professor of British culture at Ryukoku University, blogger at Green Shinto, and author of books including Kyoto: A Cultural History, In Search of Japan’s Hidden Christians, and Oxford in English Literature. They discuss the commonalities between the Kyoto geisha and the English […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1272"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1276,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions\/1276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}