AMERICAN WAGES CAMPAIGN TO SAVE JAPANESE CULTURE.

Byline: Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times

It seems perfectly natural that a great defender of Japanese traditional arts should live in a gorgeous 400-year-old wooden house here in a small town near Kyoto, the ancient Japanese capital.

What does not seem so natural is that he is an American, a genial 44-year-old devotee of kabuki and calligraphy, who has emerged within Japan as a sharp-tongued spokesman for Japan's environment and traditions.

Through magazine columns, speeches and a book, all in Japanese, the American, Alex Kerr, makes the case that Japan's modernization has been so rapid and thoughtless that it has come at the price of some of the most valuable features of the national heritage.

``It's nearly too late,'' Kerr said, leaning on an antique Chinese table as the chirp of cicadas filtered through the open windows of his home, which had been shuttered and abandoned as old-fashioned until he moved in. ``It's gone so far that in order for there to be a flowering not only in the arts but in other spheres as well, something absolutely revolutionary has to take place.''

Kerr addresses one of the central puzzles of modern Japan: the contradiction between the extraordinary aesthetic sense of Japanese civilization and people, and what he describes as ``the extraordinarily ugly country that they created.''

That may be a bit harsh. But there is no denying that the spare beauty of Japanese flower decoration, or prints, or porcelain is a world apart from the tangles of concrete, neon signs and electric wires that constitute many new urban neighborhoods in Japan.

While much of Japanese daily life - even food and wrapping paper - is fabulously subtle and beautiful, new suburbs seem to be inspired less by the stark aesthetic appeal of traditional Asian architecture than by the Moscow building code.

In 1993, Kerr wrote a book in Japanese lamenting the abandonment of its environment and artistic traditions. It struck a chord in Japan, becoming the first book by a foreigner to win an annual Japanese prize for the best work of nonfiction, and it established him as a cultural critic. The book was published in English this summer as ``Lost Japan,'' by Lonely Planet, an Australian publishing house.

Kerr is scathing, in the book and in conversation, about many aspects of the arts, society and government in Japan, but nobody accuses him of being a Japan-basher. Presumably that is because his book - and his life - are infused with love for Japan and its traditional arts.

``An American who got absorbed in old Japan to such a degree would normally be lumped as a weird American,'' a reviewer in the Mainichi newspaper wrote about Kerr. ``But his plain and simple writing style makes me think that perhaps it is the modern Japanese who are weird. Maybe we are weirdos who are bigoted so that we prefer only what is new and Western.''

Tadao Andoh, Japan's most celebrated architect, said he had read Kerr's book and seen his calligraphy.

``What impresses me about his works is that he has a mission to absorb the things that Japanese have forgotten in the last two decades, and then to transmit these to future generations,'' Andoh said.

Not everyone is so friendly, though. One reviewer complained that Kerr displays ``a rash impulse to swiftly alter this country's attitudes.''

After studying Japanese and Chinese at Yale and Oxford, Kerr settled in Japan and became engrossed by kabuki, calligraphy, scrolls and antiques.

He became acquainted with leading artists and kabuki actors and became an antique dealer and calligrapher, exhibiting and selling his brush paintings of ideograms around Japan.

``Calligraphy is one of the saddest of the Japanese arts because they failed to modernize it,'' Kerr said, emphasizing his central theme that the arts should be embraced but also brought into the modern era.

The reason calligraphy has fallen out of fashion, as Kerr sees it, is that it is taught in a way that robs it of spontaneity and spirit, so that it becomes stern, formulaic and boring.

For example, Japanese students are often taught to write calligraphy in black ink while sitting in an uncomfortable position known as seiza.

Some of the great calligraphers of the past took a different tack, often whipping off works while drinking or drunk. So Kerr makes a party of calligraphy, often uncorking a bottle of wine as he mixes his inks with friends, then writing standing up in his kitchen, using colored inks and a dash of gold to make the effect more lively.

Kerr also despairs at the lack of patronage of fine Japanese arts from corporations. Some companies spent fortunes buying European Impressionist paintings for their boardrooms, but masterpieces by Japanese artists were often snapped up by foreigners because of the lack of interest within Japan.

Kerr says his most important challenge is to modernize another house he owns, a thatched cottage in a small village on the island of Shikoku, and prove that such a home also has a place in the modern age.

Kerr bought that cottage in 1973 - or, more accurately, he bought the land it was on. The home, which had been abandoned, was thrown in free.

The home is now gorgeous - though still lacking amenities like indoor plumbing - and it has been photographed for national magazines.

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Photo

Photo: Alex Kerr, an American devotee of Japanese arts, doe s calligraphy at his traditional home in Kameoka.

The New York Times