All That Glitters
Kinkakuji and the Mythmaking Power of Opulence in Japanese Architecture
From the delicate pink sandstone of The Palace of the Winds in Jaipur, to the iconic red steel of the Tokyo tower, to the rich orange adobe of Pueblo dwellings, color has the power to be a defining feature of a work of architecture when it is used to its full potential.
Of all of the world’s architectural traditions, traditional Japanese architecture is perhaps the least associated with garish tones. However, standing out from the rest of its more muted architectural peers, Kinkakuji in Kyoto employs a shocking golden hue all around its two upper floors. The Golden Pavilion’s gold leaf renders the building a domineering, shimmering presence within the context of its garden and temple complex. The abnormality of such a bold, colorful visage has not gone unnoticed throughout Japanese history; the beauty of Kinkakuji’s unique color purportedly led to the obsession with and subsequent burning of the temple by a crazed monk in 1950. The subsequent reconstruction of the pavilion and dramatization of the events in a widely famous novel by Yukio Mishima took the power of gold to a whole new level. Kinkakuji demonstrates the ability of architectural narratives to change the way that people perceive buildings; in this case, redefining the nature of the temple’s beauty and the impact of its hue in a way that went on to retrospectively reverberate through its entire history.
Kinkakuji at the Complex Entrance, Photo by Author, June 2017.
Prototypical Japanese architecture, inspired by what is today known as the Shinto tradition, had a very delicate and specific way of handling its relationship with nature. In a general sense, the purpose of such architecture was to frame and emphasize its site, using the built world as a vehicle for glorifying the innate beauty of the natural world (this concept is most clearly seen in torii gates). In later Buddhist architecture, the concept of shakkei took hold: this “borrowed scenery” framed by structures was intended to be brought within the domain of a building, imbuing the built world with the compositional benefits of nature itself (Nute).
With the rise of Zen Buddhism in Japan, architecture took on a slightly different bent. Now, the creation of a built environment was fused inseparably with the garden space that surrounded it. These garden spaces were meticulously conceived by calculated human planning to be peaceful, otherworldly realms of pleasure: bubbles of Zen away from the rest of the world. This approach was notably different from the tradition of reverence for the natural world which came before it.
Kinkakuji was originally conceived as a retirement temple villa for Shogun Yoshimitsu in the Muromachi period. This period had a great emphasis on the arts, as shoguns sought to legitimize themselves through ascetic and architectural pursuits (Ulak). Yoshimitsu purchased the site in 1397 from the family of Saionji Kintsune, the powerful statesman whose own villa had originally been there. By 1400, the shogun had begun to build his own complex to realize his vision of a private Zen paradise upon the earth (Noboru). It is important to note that the original Kinkakuji was simply one part of a larger complex of buildings, all of which were used by Yoshimitsu and his family on a daily basis. However, Kinkakuji was the only one which included opulent touches of gold; this was likely to emphasize the religious importance of the Zen chapel on its upper story.
The garden of the complex is a tapestry of interwoven paths, each with the express purpose of displaying spectacular views of the Golden Pavilion. Kyoko Pond, the primary natural feature within the complex which Kinkakuji is perched alongside, also serves just a vehicle to enhance its golden mystique. The reflective quality of the gold leaf breaks up the light which strikes the temple, and the reflection of the whole building is further diffused in the shimmering mirror image in the pond (Alex). Though the actual structure is far from gargantuan (it is only three floors), the way that light reflects off of the temple’s facade, as well as the design of the entire site to showcase this fact, allows it to command all of its visitors’ attention. If the entirety of the temple complex was a Zen Buddhist bubble differentiated from the rest of the world, Kinkakuji itself was the most special of all, an otherworldly retreat for the ascetic aspirations of Yoshimitsu (Alex).
Upon Yoshimitsu’s death, his son converted Kinkakuji fully into a Zen Buddhist temple in accordance with the wishes expressed in his will. Throughout the period of the Onin Civil War in the 1400s, all of the buildings in the temple complex were burned to the ground except for Kinkaku itself (Noboru). The striking temple remained a popular attraction for Buddhist pilgrims and tourists alike to visit in Kyoto. However, as time progressed, tourists were not the only ones for whom the temple’s golden hue had a profound effect. In 1950, one of the three novice monks in residence at Kinkakuji, supposedly driven mad by the temple’s golden beauty, destroyed five hundred years of architectural legacy when he burned it to the ground.
It is difficult to separate the narrative of the true events leading up to the temple’s destruction from the dramatized version portrayed in Yukio Mishima’s famous novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima conducted extensive research in planning to write his novel, including interviewing the arsonist himself in prison, but his book remains an exaggerated portrayal of the incident. By the time that the novel was published in 1959, Kinkakuji had already been reconstructed; yet, already, the perception of the arson portrayed by Mishima had begun to affect the very identity of the temple.
There has been wide speculation regarding Hayashi Token’s motivations for burning down Kinkakuji. The most popular explanation (the version portrayed in Mishima’s novel) asserts that Hayashi, stricken with self-hatred for his perceived ugliness, developed an urge to destroy all that was beautiful (Borowitz). The golden hue of Kinkakuji certainly made it the most striking building in Kyoto, and Hayashi developed an obsession with destroying it. The gold of the temple imbued a beauty seen nowhere else in Japanese architecture’s usually muted tones and natural materials. Even the buildings surrounding the golden temple are far more traditional; Hayashi inhabited one of these structures with a clear view of the pavilion, allowing his obsession to grow.
Also asserted in this interpretation of events was the fact—confirmed by Hayashi in several statements he later made to investigators—that many felt that the spectacle of Kinkakuji’s golden hue had begun to overly commercialize Buddhism (Borowitz). The gawking tourists who came to see the temple may have angered Hayashi, as they were only there to ogle at a novel exception to the norm of the less colorful architecture which they were used to. Undoubtedly, the temple made a lot of money from the tourist traffic, and this could have been perceived as taking away from the religious integrity of the spiritual work that monks like Hayashi were doing there.
Kinkakuji Temple, Hiroshi Yoshida, Ohmi Gallery. 1933, ohmigallery.com.
The narrative of the mad monk infuriated by Kinkakuji’s beauty and its commercialization was also largely perpetuated by the media at the time of the event. However, throughout the narrative of Kinkakuji’s destruction, inconsistencies are plentiful. Hayashi constantly contradicted himself to investigators and in court; at one point, he began stating that he had only burned down the temple in the culmination of frustration with the chief priest with whom he was in an argument (Borowitz). In addition, the level of golden shimmer which the temple actually had at this time is not entirely known. It is important to note that the Kinkakuji which exists today looks quite different from the version that existed prior to 1950. The use of the gold leaf was likely far less prominent, as can be seen in Hiroshi Yoshida’s 1933 woodblock print in which the temple’s hue is not as luminous as it currently appears. Would the temple’s (perhaps underwhelming) golden sheen really have been enough to simultaneously entrance and anger Hayashi to the point of arson? 1950s Japanese newspapers, as well as Yukio Mishima, certainly seemed to think so.
Within the context of the temple’s modern form, however, perhaps the question of Hayashi’s true motivation does not matter as much as it would seem. As the temple was rebuilt following its arson, everyone working on it must have been aware of the media’s narrative regarding Hayashi’s motives. The identity assigned to the temple was that of a mystical, exaggeratedly glowing golden beacon capable of mesmerizing a person to the point of arson. The true past form of Kinkakuji did not matter as much as its cultural perception; despite the fact that the Kinkakuji of the past had not really been that golden, people began to remember it that way. At this point, it had been transmuted from a work of architecture to an idea, and it was this idea that the Japanese people were rebuilding, golder and shinier than ever before.
By 1984, the golden coating on the new temple had already begun to fade away. It was then resurfaced with new gold leaf, five times thicker than its original iteration, and took upon the breathtaking quality which its luminous facade projects today. At this point, Mishima’s novel had become culturally ubiquitous, synonymous with the entire concept of the Golden Pavilion in the literary canon of Japanese architecture. The narrative portrayed in the novel—that the temple’s rich golden opulence had been powerful enough to drive someone mad—had become a well-known cultural fact, despite some of Hayashi’s assertions that the golden hue of the temple did not actually have much to do with its arson. However, for those who made the decision to resurface it with much more intense gold leaf than what might be considered a truly faithful reproduction, it only made sense to restore Kinkakuji’s fading façade to what they subconsciously assumed it must have looked like at its iconic historical peak, the evening before it was engulfed in flame.
Curiously, Mishima was perhaps aware of his own power regarding the Golden Pavilion; he confessed in his 1965 essay Muromachi no Bigaku that he preferred the Kinkakuji “that people complain about resembling a movie set, the kinkirakin (glittering gold) Kinkakuji” over the more reserved Kinkakuji of the past. Mishima himself therefore was already seeing Kinkakuji more as a feature of a real-life literary epic than a physical building, an attitude which would only be re-emphasized in the 1984 renovation. Thus, the golden concept of Kinkakuji had usurped its physical form (Mizuta).
Perhaps originally, Hayashi’s motivation for burning down Kinkakuji wasn’t as poetic as the popular narrative suggests- maybe he really was just angry with the chief priest. But as people began to read more meaning into the crime, the temple began to take on a more garish, more golden identity as a cultural icon in the minds of the Japanese people. Now, the golden temple truly is the ultimate architectural tourism hotspot that so many speculated Hayashi resented; it is an exaggeration and amplification of the usually muted principles of Japanese design (Mizuta). Mishima’s work became an unintentional self-fulfilling prophecy, demonstrating the potential power of what one might today consider “fake news” to impact architecture.
Kinkakuji’s golden color began as a design choice by Shogun Yoshimitsu in an effort to create a truly special, architecturally differentiated space for religious contemplation. For many visitors, the Golden Pavilion’s opulent hue only serves its original purpose of drawing attention to the temple—and therefore Buddhist tradition—by way of a cultural anomaly. For those who know its storied past, the gold leaf of the temple contains a much more dramatic story about the nature of architectural narrative in the present: a lens through which to view a building’s ever-changing, nebulous identity that inevitably becomes architectural history.
Kinkakuji from Behind the Pond, Photo by Author, June 2017.
Works Cited
Alex, William. Japanese Architecture. Literary Licensing, LLC, 2013.
Borowitz, Albert. Terrorism for Self-Glorification: the Herostratos Syndrome. Kent State University Press, 2005.
Mizuta, Miya Elise. Luminous Environment: Light, Architecture and Decoration in Modern Japan, Japan Forum, 18:3, 2006, 339-360, DOI: 10.1080/09555800600947223.
Nobru, Asano. “Kinkaku-Ji (Rokuon-Ji).” My Kind of Kyoto.
Nute, Kevin. Place, Time and Being in Japanese Architecture. TAYLOR & FRANCIS, 2016.
“The Way of the Warrior.” The Art of Japanese Architecture, by David E. Young et al., Tuttle Publishing, 2014, pp. 84–93.
Ulak, James T. “Japanese Architecture.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 11 Sept. 2012.
