Now, I want to shift back to our map.
So that sort of gives us a little bit
of a taste of what's happening between 10,000 and 5000 BCE
in the Mesopotamian world.
Now, a very similar type, but slightly different
cultural a molecule emerges far off in China and East Asia.
And whoop.
The map here just disappeared.
OK.
Can't show that.
And the first society, the equivalent,
if you will, to something like Catal Huyuk,
where we see the agro-pastoral worldview coming into form
is the Hemudu, which are in Southern China.
And they produce the first culture
that specializes on rice.
Now wild rice had been growing, obviously,
since thousands and thousands of years.
But in southern China, they decided
to specialize in wild rice, perhaps
largely because that's the only main grain that they had.
The forest was too far away and so forth.
They began to produce the rice.
Now rice is a very, very, very difficult thing to grow.
Its back breaking work.
You have to make the trenches.
And then there's wet rice and dry rice.
That's showing you wet rice, which
is even more back breaking than [dry] rice.
But it grows in the window wetlands and marshes.
And so what we in Hemudu is a different architecture, not
an architecture of mud bricks, which
you can get from the local river,
but an architecture built up on logs, right?
Elevated, the whole house is elevated up off the ground.
The reason is pretty simple.
You want to be close to your rice field as possible.
But the ground is a marsh.
So I don't live in a marsh.
I mean why-- who likes to live a marsh?
You want to walk around in the mud
wake in the morning with brushing your teeth in the mud?
No.
No one likes to do that.
So obviously, you put the house up on pillars.
It also is good because, once again, you want to keep dry.
You want to keep the rain-- you want to keep the grain dry.
And you want to keep yourself dry.
So we see in a different architectural formation,
which is the elevated house.
So this is about 5,000 to 3,000 BCE.
These are reconstructed, by the way.
This is not original.
But basically we know enough now to figure out roughly
what these things that might have looked like.
So here we see in the marsh what these things are.
You put a lot of poles in.
And then you build a platform.
And then on this platform, you build a house.
All that sounds like, oh, OK, it's working out a problem.
But first I need a rather substantial capacity
to work with lumber.
It's not that easy.
You got to chop down the wood.
You've got to put the pole up.
And then if you can put a lot of poles,
the whole thing may be wibbly-wobbly.
So now I need to produce mortise and tenon, which
puts one log in to another log, so that it doesn't wiggle.
And so I have the connections and the technology
and the woodworking technologies that go with this,
it begins to develop.
Here we see Hemudu down here.
This is the rice belt.
And then there's a millet belt, which
I'm not going to talk about.
It's in the book.
I mentioned Banpo.
But 5,000 to 3,000 BCE is a long time.
But even after that, it took an even astonishing long time
for the jump to be made to Japan.
So 300 CE is when the jump goes from China to Japan.
So basically, practically 5,000 years
after it's in China and being developed,
and they're making rice, someone gets on a boat
and brings rice culture to Japan.
The transformation is truly, truly astonishing.
And almost overnight we see this arrival
off a different culture.
So the natives, if you will, of Japan get pushed back.
They get pushed to the north.
And the newcomers into Japan, basically, bring their rice,
bring their technology, bring their irrigation.
They bring the entire package.
This is no experiment with rice.
The rice machine is arriving, with people, boats, granaries,
the whole production.
They know what they're doing.
They kick out everybody who's there,
send them off to the north, and then
go to work to basically transform, at that time,
the Western coast of Japan into a rice making paradise.
Now the people who lived in Japan at that time
were still first society people.
They were in this integrated world.
They didn't know anything about rice.
They had animals and fishes and plants and so forth.
They had a culture which worshiped sacred forests.
So still today, if you go to Japan,
there are these residual sacred forests.
And in the sacred forests, you'll
find a special stone, special trees,
that belong to something called the kami.
A kami is a spirit that lives in that stone.
And they mark off-- the rope around it identifies it
as the special spirit stone, which
means be careful around this stone.
Treat it with respect.
There's a little deity living in there.
And the whole landscape was filled with these thousands
and thousands of little kami-- in a tree, in a rock,
in a gravel area, in something like that.
Well the new rice people who landed,
they begin to integrate some of these aspects
into their culture.
And they produce a rice god out of the kami.
They took a kami and they said, OK, one of them
is going to be dedicated to rice.
And that is called Inari.
And so their god-- in the West, its Demeter
who becomes the goddess of the grain.
In Japan, it's Inari.
And little stones-- and if you go to far off away, into where
there's maybe some villagers, you'll see these stones.
And They're dressed in a particular way.
And these are so they kami of the field of Inari.
So Inari means carrying rice.
And still today Inari shrines are everywhere through Japan.
If you travel through Japan, you'll see them quite a bit,
3,200 of these shrines.
So just to see how powerful rice became in the Chinese world
and how quickly you developed from first society world
into a rice world.
So my friend drives a Honda.
And I put a lecture together last year.
And I said, God, I didn't know Honda meant rice.
Toyota means-- I mean rice's everywhere.
Even you're driving a rice.
Breakfast is morning rice, and so forth like that.
So the rice is the food, the god, the culture, everything.
So rice, of course, is a very special food.
And it needs to be elevated.
So these are very settlers brought with them
the architecture of elevation.
And they built the storehouses.
This is a recreated one that we are pretty confident,
so it looks a little bit like this.
On these posts.
And the beautiful thick thatched roof
to protect it from the winds and the rain.
And a fence around it, which was a sacred fence, too.
Because not only did the rice live in there,
but Inari lived in there, the god.
And if you cross the fence, the god's
not going to be happy with you.
And he may do something bad to you.
So this is not just a granary in this
is storage warehouse sense, but it's actually
a religious space.
And in that sense, it adopts and perpetuates
this idea of the three partite zoning, if you will,
of sacred plan that we talked about,
is the outdoor, the visitors center-the visitors area, which is the lower part, the sacred fire,
and then in the West the elevated part, so to speak.
And this is taking the plan and just putting it up
and make it into a section.
So the lower part of the world, in the lower world
it's not a moral world.
It's a world of animals, if you will,
of fishes and these things, the world of the humans,
and then the world of the rice, which is the world of the gods.
So we see these early granaries.
And we have to remember that these are now increasingly
becoming sites of certain types of religion.
So here we see a bronze vessel that was found in China.
But we can see, standing on the top
around some ceremony that's taking place,
this sort of space here where you can see someone
at the head of it and other people at the back
on this elevated platform.
And it looks lot like a granary.
But there are people in that place now.
So it's very quickly that we get from just a granary,
as a semi important place, to something like a shrine.
And this is the Ise shrine, which
is the most important shrine, or one
of the most important shrines in Japan.
It's absolutely fabulous.
You must visit it, if you can.
And immediately, say, you could see that this comes out
of the ancient granary tradition,
except that no grain is stored in here.
This is empty.
And what also happens is that by the time
the Ise shrine gets built, the emperor-we have now a very strong imperial world.
And the emperor basically says, this is my shrine.
So you're worshipping not just the granary world,
but you're worshiping a particular shrine that
has to do with the imperial world.
So between 100-- it took 600 years
to go from the first settlers coming into Japan from China,
landing, making rice, and in 600 years
they have already something like an emperor.
I mean, that's fast.
But it shows how rice needs very, very
strong vertical culture to organize the people to do
the work, to centralize the rice,
and then to redistribute it.
And to do that, the emperor and the rice god
have to be really good friends.
And so I'm showing you-- this is just where it is in the world.
But in order to save time, I'm just going to quickly-it consists of two zones that are-- one is built.
And one is unbuilt.
And then every 20 years, this one gets built.
And this one gets taken down.
And if you're ever in Japan during the event,
you really, really, really need to go.
[CHANTING]
So they cut down the trees.
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
[LAUGHS]
Ah.
[CHANTING]
The rebuilding takes eight years.
First, the sacred trees must-I have an-[CHANTING]
The rebuilding takes eight years.
First the sacred trees-All right.
So these trees are chopped down, 10,000 of them.
That's a lot of trees.
Woo!
And they're not just any trees.
These are sacred trees from a sacred grove
that belongs to the emperor.
And then they have to be brought to the site, which
is a long process because it's like 500 kilometers away.
[CHANTING]
So thousands of people are brought
into the culture and the cult, if you will,
of reproducing in this building.
It gets deeper.
The load started to take its toll.
It's best if you don't think about how much this costs,
as much $500 million dollars.
About how may trees are involved?
Up to 10,000.
$500 million is what the cost is to produce those things today.
And then here's the emperor.
Whoops.
It's thought that two decades is right amount of time
to pass on the techniques of forestry and carpentry
from father to son.
Here is the emperor.
--Crown Prince Naruhito is here today.
He pays a visit to the sacred inner shrine.
So he's in that white thing up there,
watching the whole thing transpire in front of him.
So that's the granary magnified into an imperial symbol.
But throughout Japan, you're going
to find these little guys, little hondens, in the forests.
You have to look hard for them.
You might even walk right by them and not
even know they're there-- which are sort of like mini
houses, mini things, where the kami, special kami are
so presiding.
So what we see, if you will, in total here is
sort of a strange phenomenon, where originally all
you had were the kami living in the raw nature,
specialized places like that.
Then the rival of the Chinese world-- of the Hemudu Chinese
rice culture.
They produce granaries.
And they integrate this into a world view
and produce a new deity, Inari.
They deity then now lives in two different ways-in the magnified way, for the emperor,
and in this local, quiet way, off into the middle of forests
somewhere.
So in one sense, there's a magnification that takes place.
And the other sense, a miniaturization
that takes place.
So you can imagine, if you will, that the same building,
the same prototype becomes a question of where's the real?
And where's the model?
You're going to encounter this again and again, I think,
in some of these early talks.
So we have the granary.
But the granary becomes a symbolic form, enlarged.
And so It's sort of like saying, we do garages.
Because we all need cars, right?
And the President of United States
makes a giant garage five times bigger than any garage.
And there's no car in there.
Because it's not really about cars anymore.
It's about just saying, I have the biggest car.
And every one of the country's has got to build it for me.
And that would be sort their thing.
And then, to you and me, we'll make
a little bitty miniature garages.
And we'll stick them out in our backyards.
So we have three scales.
We have the real garage, which my cars are in.
And then we've got the mega scale, the intensity of that.
And then we've got the equally intense miniature.
All of these are, in some sense, equally powerful.
But they were working a difference
of scales of reality.
And that's the critical component here.
Now in Japan, you don't live in your granaries.
But to close, I just want to point to a development that
took place in the south to Japan and the Philippines
and many parts in the South Pacific areas,
where a similar radical transformation took place,
where people arrived with the grain package intact.
They came onto shores and said, this is going to be.
We're going to make grain.
If you don't like it, scoot.
And they kicked out the first society people
and modernized, if you will, this relationship
to god and relationship to territory.
And one of the great example of this the Philippines,
the Ifugao.
If you ever go to the Philippines,
make sure to visit there.
They transformed pretty much a mountainsides area
into another grain machine paradises of the world.
And here, the terraces, you got to imagine back
breaking hard work it takes to make this.
You don't just this with some guys with a backhoe.
You have to have a very, very powerful work ethic.
And you have to have a strong centralized ideal.
In this case, they don't have an emperor.
But they have a very, super strong fascination or identity
around the rice god, who is-- the statues of him
are placed in the fields and called Bulul.
And so you see the fields at the back.
And here on the sides are these Bululs,
which are carved and placed, and which
gave quasi- sexual potency to the field,
to make sure that the fields generate year in and year out.
And they actually live in the granaries.
So here we see a situation where the culture has become,
the granary has become almost like the emperor.
And the Bulul is the invisible god
who controls the destinies of this entire region.
So you see one of these under construction, a little bit
more modern times, maybe sort of modern slats and so forth,
but relatively sophisticated architectural formation
nonetheless.
So we have now contrasting grain culture worlds.
In one case, we have in the granary
as a sort of powerful symbolic architecture.
In Japan, you don't live in them.
They became lived in by the gods, ultimately.
In the Philippines you actually then are living in this thing.
Most the time, you spent sleeping around it.
You don't, actually-- it's like how do you seep in there?
You don't I mean, you might sleep when it's a little rainy.
But basically you're eating and having meals
and communal events are taking place in this thing.
In Catal Huyuk, what we see is a similar intensification,
but one where the bull and the female worldviews
are sort of combining into the agro-pastoral world, but still
modeled around ancestor cults.
The ancestor cults are still very, very strong here.
This is very much powerful about ancestral cults.
But here the ancestral cults are still,
I would say, more like 90% percent of the story.
Here rice has beaten back the ancestral world,
and the ancestral world has sort of blended in with that world.
It was really only much later that you
could say with the places when we talk about Tel es-Sawwan,
where we see the grain goddess now ruling and distributing
the goods.
that takes place a little bit later.
But still the key thing here that both places
develop architecture of intensity.
These were not just places where you live.
This is not shelters-- it's often
the word that comes to mind.
This has nothing to do really with shelter but architecture
of an intensity that we don't understand.
We don't really have that in our modern world.
I mean, yeah, I like my house.
I have a mortgage on it for the next 50 years or whatever.
If something happens to it, I'll be sad.
But that's a different type of intensity
than these types of intensities.