Exposition Celebrating Ancient Route Opens Today : Japan’s ‘Silk Road Fever’ Hits All-Time High

The desert has come to Japan.

Workmen have installed a piece of China’s Taklimakan Desert in Nara Park, sealed inside a tent-like structure surrounded by gamboling deer and lush green hills.

They imported 30 tons of authentic Taklimakan sand and used heaters and dehumidifiers to recreate the desert’s harsh climate, allowing people to experience a landscape so alien to these misty islands that it might as well be from the moon.

Yet the mysterious allure of this particular patch of desert grabs the soul of the Japanese. Why? It comes from the Silk Road.

Blend of Romance, Hokum

A curious blend of romance, archeology and hokum is brewing here. Nara, Japan’s capital between 646 and 794, asserts that it was the “eastern terminus” of the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that linked the Roman, Persian, Indian and Chinese civilizations.

Now, Nara, located about 25 miles east of Osaka, is celebrating its purported position at the end of the road between West and East. The city opens an $82-million Silk Road Exposition today, featuring not only museum pieces from Central Asia but also folk dancers from various cultures along the route.

Camels might be expected, but sponsors reluctantly abandoned the idea of importing them because of the expense. Instead, Nara’s famous tame deer will be in evidence as usual, begging for rice crackers in the park. Before the show closes in October, more than 6 million tourists are expected to study history, taste exotic food and watch Disney-style robots act out episodes from “The Arabian Nights.”

‘Silk Road Fever’

The extravaganza represents the latest stage of what might be called “Silk Road fever.” Even the most ardent enthusiasts admit that Japan played no direct role in the lucrative trade that flowed along the route for many centuries. But this is the way Buddhism came to Japan, they say, along with other ideas and important technologies.

Moreover, the mystique of the Silk Road allows Japanese to skip over the Koreans and Chinese--from whom they imported their earliest civilization--and to ponder a branch of their cultural roots, which can be traced all the way to the Mediterranean.

“Japanese culture flowed off that road,” says Kazutoshi Nagasawa, a history professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University. “It’s a meeting point of East and West. So many civilizations brushed against each other there in ancient times.”

Nagasawa pioneered Japanese scholarship at the Middle East end of the trade route in the mid-1960s, but mass popularity of the Silk Road did not start until 1979, when Japan’s quasi-governmental television network, NHK, loaded video gear onto camelback for an overland odyssey from China to Rome. The caravan switched to four-wheel-drive vehicles as it weaved its way through Soviet Central Asia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Turkey and Greece.

Rare Visual Feast

The resulting two-part documentary series offered a rare visual feast and achieved phenomenal success. NHK, one of the sponsors of the Nara exposition, began airing the third installment of its marathon Silk Road programming this month, exploring the sea routes of antiquity--routes that today are plied by oil tankers and form industrial Japan’s lifeline.

The travel itch inflamed by the NHK’s initial two-part Silk Road series coincided neatly with the opening of remote areas inside China to foreigners. Japanese tours to sites along the trade route, including the real Taklimakan, have flourished.

“If a Japanese wants to look into his past, he travels to Nara,” says Tetsuya Kawamoto, chief producer of the NHK series. “If he wants to go one step further, he’s got to go to the Silk Road.”

Marketing Buzzword

So powerful is the symbolism of the Silk Road that the term “Shiruku Rohdo” has become a marketing buzzword.

The Tokyo telephone book lists 50 separate entries for businesses named Silk Road. Among them are a dozen bars and 11 coffeehouses, not to mention several boutiques, hairdressers, mah-jongg parlors, a public bath, a cosmetics shop and a manufacturer of artificial flowers.

A Tokyo ice cream shop serves a flavor it describes as Silk Road Sesame. Japan’s tobacco monopoly sells a Silkroad brand of cigarettes that claims to be “luxurious and aromatic.”

“There’s a resonance to the words ‘Silk Road’ that goes right to the Japanese heart,” NHK’s Kawamoto says. “You imagine luxurious silk contrasting with harsh terrain. It’s the romance of the desert. It symbolizes the interchange of cultures between East and West.”

Ferdinand von Richthofen, the German geographer who coined the term “Silk Road” in the late 19th Century, was a “brilliant copywriter,” Kawamoto says. “If he had come up with something different, we might not have these same feelings.”

Three-Year Project

The Silk Road frenzy has spilled onto the diplomatic scene, too. Japanese representatives recently persuaded UNESCO--the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization--to lend its name to an ambitious three-year project in which an international team of scientists and historians will explore and document the Silk Road.

UNESCO wants Japan to pick up 90% of the tab, but that should not pose a problem. Organizers have already received inquiries from 44 Japanese companies interested in purchasing official product status, as if they were preparing to sponsor the Olympics of archeology.

One company wanted its product to be designated the official boot of the UNESCO Silk Road Project, says Banri Namikawa, the project’s executive photographer.

“It’s just like the Japanese to think that if you stick on the name Silk Road, that anything will sell,” he says. “It’s embarrassing.”

In a foreshadowing of the boom to come, about 88,000 people attended Namikawa’s Silk Road photo exhibition in a Tokyo department store gallery in 1972. The coffee-table book from that collection is now in its 18th edition.

Eventually, all roads lead to Nara, the theory goes. Here, the Imperial Household Agency holds treasures at the Shoso-in Repository that are regarded as material evidence of Japan’s ties to Silk Road trade.

Precious Collection

Objects such as a Chinese-made lacquered ewer with a Persian-style design, presumably originating from gift exchanges between Japanese and Chinese imperial courts around the 8th Century, are cherished because they illustrate the easterly flow of ideas and culture. The collection is considered so precious that only a fraction of it is displayed at the Nara National Museum for a few weeks each October.

Strictly speaking, Western scholars have traditionally defined the Silk Road as the overland trade route between Istanbul, Antioch and Tyre, and the ancient Chinese capitals of Xian and Luoyang. But Japanese academe has stretched it out a little, from Rome to Nara.

“The cultural flow didn’t stop in Xian. It kept going east,” says Sadamu Kawada, chief curator of the Nara National Museum. “There’s no mistaking that a lot of cultural influences came to Japan over the Silk Road.”

But how to distinguish between cultural influences from the trade route and those from China itself is not a question being asked.

“I don’t think there’s any deep meaning behind the Silk Road phenomenon,” says Kazunori Kuroha, a publicist for the Nara exposition. “Japanese don’t have complex thoughts when we visit a shrine or a temple, and it’s the same with the Silk Road. This is strictly romance.”