Replicas enjoy a high status in Japan. Most historical buildings are actually replicas of originals long lost to fire or bombing; yet this doesn’t diminish them in Japanese eyes. I would even venture to say that replicas are sometimes given a higher status than originals in Japan. Alan Booth tells an amusing story in Looking for the lost, in which a display, consisting of an autograph and handprint of Konishiki, a famous sumo rikishi, is being discussed. Someone suggests that the display might be a manufactured print, rather than the genuine article. After the ensuing debate, in which everyone offers their verdict on the display, a test is performed. The signature turns out to be printed. Its owner beams with pride. Everyone is delighted! How surprisingly clever! they seem to think. For them, the manufactured print represents the rikishi no less than an autograph. Or perhaps it is that an original, whatever it might be, is nothing but a dream, or could only ever be a dream, and any dream is as real as any other.

There is a telling passage in A Japanese mirror, by Ian Buruma:

What meets the eye in Japan is often all there is. Japan is, after all, as Roland Barthes observed, the empire of signs, the land of the empty gesture, the symbol, the detail that stands for the whole. The fetishist ikon is so powerful that the real thing becomes superfluous.

Buruma is discussing a fetishist coffee bar, decorated with inflated condoms and female underwear, and crewed by naked waitresses. One of the points he develops is that there is often no connection between the appearance and an underlying intent. Thus men can happily sit and drink coffee in such an environment, or read explicitly sexual and violent material in public, without shame, and without others suspecting them of prurient or deviant leanings. Their activities are not being ‘read into’. Equally, the performing of religious rituals (or any other kind) implies no actual beliefs, and only the virtues of conformism and appropriateness. When Emi suggested, during one of our trips around Kyoto, that I perform the purification and prayer ritual at Fushimi-inari shrine I demurred, saying that I felt it would be hypocritical to go through the act when I didn’t believe in it, and that it would be a rude parody of those who do. ‘It doesn’t matter!’ she said, ‘No-one believes.’

Booth also mentions the Japanese predilection for the superficial. He describes Daruma’s nine-year meditation during which his arms and legs atrophied from lack of use: ‘as a result the Japanese, being infinitely more comfortable with outward appearance than with inward illumination, associate him not with piety, but with roundness,’ (that is, with armlessness and leglessness).

Many of the religious icons of Japan are replicas. Often, the reason for this is that the original probably never actually existed. Examples include the objects supposed to reside at Ise-jingu, Atsuta-jingu, and the Tokyo Imperial Palace – the belongings of the gods. The existence of replicas of mythological objects is itself often questionable, but it doesn’t really matter whether these things exist or not, whether they are real or replicas, because they will never be seen anyway. Kobo Daishi relics, such as calligraphy and seals, are found at many temples along the junrei no tabi (pilgrimage) taken by Oliver Statler in Japanese pilgrimage. It is obvious that opportunities to see putative Kobo Daishi relics actually motivate pilgrims, and so many temples promote objects of clearly dubious provenance. Yet even when the unauthenticity is readily admitted, pilgrims don’t seem at all worried.

Other objects have been replicated for different reasons. The whole of Heian-jingu in Kyoto is actually a replica of a larger building, the Byodo-in temple at Uji. The fact that one is Shinto and the other Buddhist is just one of the many curiosities in the relationship between these two systems of belief. The reason for the replication has never been clear to me.

Replication is nothing new in Japanese architecture. During the Heian era the Hall of Cool Breezes in the imperial palace compound was replicated, down to tiny details, but at a reduced scale, in the west wing of the Sanjo Mansion. Many of the people of the court moved between the two buildings, and must have found the shift in scale marginally disconcerting. The reason for this replication, as far as anyone can tell, was nothing more than great admiration for the original. The replica enhances the importance of the original, and vice versa.

Sometimes the object being replicated, and the replica itself are only a few feet apart. The image of Amida in the Jodo-in of Enryaku-ji is a replica, but the original is in a box just behind it. The same is true of the image of Shaka in the nearby Shaka-do, and the image of Yakushi in the Kompon-chu-do. The concealment of the originals may well be for the protection of valuable religious art, but has the paradoxical effect of rendering the valuable objects quite useless, and possibly without value. If we cannot see art, does it have any value?

In The lady and the monk, Pico Iyer recognises this Japanese tendency towards appearance and surface, but from his position, that of a romantic outsider, it is not easily understood. To such a person, the veneration of perfection in tiny things will be seen as a preoccupation with details, niceties, protocols and fastidiousness. No words can explain how satisfying such superficial qualities can be, regardless of whether they accord with inner feelings, seething or serene. Moreover, Japanese writers praise appearances, not essences, because they know essences don’t matter, or even exist. Iyer, by contrast, maintains that ‘good souls’ are important, but finally admits it is hard to argue the point. His suggestion that Zen is suitable to people not prone to deep introspection is surely his own superficial reaction to Japanese attitudes towards appearance – he’s still lost on the assumption that there is something more real below. I feel that the sham of his position is exposed in the passage in which Sachiko is probing the possibility of leaving her husband, obviously looking for some honest passion from Iyer, a westerner full of romantic ideas, but ultimately arid, lifeless and cerebral in a passionate sexual Japan. Iyer is too careful about being true to himself to plunge in bodily, whole-heartedly, with reckless abandon to the moment. How graphically the tables of self-restraint are turned on him!