Japanese cool has, for decades now, been associated with everything fast, hi-tech and jangly; it's the TVs on taxi dashboards, the control-panels on toilets, the underground universes around major train stations that keep buzzing even after a natural calamity that stunned the rest of us. And if you're looking for a world-defining Japanese art form, you're more likely to turn these days to anime and manga than to any of the country's classical painters or mock-European forms. So it was shocking for me to go to the sleepy, faraway island of Naoshima – now turned into an "art island" rich with museums and installations – and find the coolest thing I've seen in my 24 years of living in Japan. It was, in some ways, the reverse of technology.
The structures around Naoshima are super-hi-tech, 23rd-century constructions of grey reinforced concrete, with every next-generation innovation; but they take you back to the principles of spareness, simplicity and concentration that graced the haiku, brush-and-ink paintings and Noh dramas of old. Where technology makes you speedy, up-to-the-minute and all-over-the-place, Naoshima so calms, grounds and slows you that you feel as if you've stepped into a meditative shrine.
The journey to the old fishermen's haunt in the Seto Naikai, or Inland Sea, is like a journey through the past. I set out from my home in Nara on a brilliant late-autumn afternoon, the trees blazing red, gold and radiant yellow all around me. To get to the remote island involved a bus, a train, another train to Kyoto, a bullet-train to Okayama and then another local train, a slow ferry and a bus before, five hours later, I arrived at Naoshima's Benesse House, the showpiece hotel where I was staying. With each change of vehicle, modernity seemed to thin out a little and I was closer to the old. By the time I left Okayama, I was in the middle of a much earlier Japan of unmanned ticket offices and deserted piers. The faces were simpler here – two local girls, swathed in grey earmuffs, had the countenances of Noh masks – and there were few signs in English.
The train from Okayama clanked along, the opposite of a bullet train, stopping at an empty platform every two or three minutes, and as we inched past, I could see regiments of uniform houses, with grey tiled roofs, bunched against a hillside, smoke rising from the rice-paddies in front of them. By the time we arrived at the ferry town of Uno, I could hardly recall the Godiva coffee-shops and high-rises of Kyoto.
When I reached Naoshima itself, I began to feel as if I'd stepped out of time altogether, in a world so deep in the past – and so far ahead in the future – that I lost all sense of when I was. Benesse House is a stylish and sleek construction, with Bose CD players on every desk – but no TVs or internet reception – and each room individually designed by the self-taught Osaka architect Tadao Ando. Its corridors are full of original contemporary canvasses and eerie light sculptures projecting classic Japanese landscapes through the near-dark. And the effect of all the modern art is, oddly, to take you back to the transfixing simplicity of an old ryokan, or traditional inn, where simply watching the sun make stripes across the tatami mats, or figures cast silhouettes against the paper windows, becomes so absorbing you never want to leave your room.
After the Benesse Company, a publishing firm centered in Okayama, took over the southern half of the island in 1985, working with the then-mayor Chikatsugu Miyake, it called in the minimalist Ando and invited him to design a huge swatch of natural park to be an international centre of art. Rising to the opportunity – surely any architect's dream – he opened Benesse House in 1992, then created a Benesse House Museum (with hotel rooms on the second and third floors) up the road, and then built what is now known as the Oval, a James Bondian series of six more rooms for guests on the top of a mountain behind the museum, reached by private monorail. In 2004, he completed the Chichu Museum which is a 20-minute walk away.
In all my 50 years I've never seen a place as pure and elevating as the Chichu, and it speaks for the pristine futurism that makes Naoshima such a unique place. There are five major pieces – a set of Monet water lilies, a large chamber with a reflecting 6ft granite sphere at its centre by the American land artist Walter de Maria and three light installations by the American James Turrell. Rather than observing these pieces, though, you more or less inhabit them. In one Turrell piece – Open Field – you walk into a room flooded with an unearthly orange light. Then, one at a time, you step up some stairs and into another large room suffused in soothingly deep blue light. Turn around, and the people in the room behind look like art works. Turn back, and you're in a kind of dream state.
Ten minutes walk from the Chichu, I came upon a new museum, opened only last year, to show off the works of the Korean-born Lee Ufan, again in a tall, grey, windowless Ando construction in a field. One of the pieces there, a single rock placed in front of a great earth-coloured slab, with a light shining on it, looked like a moving representation of a figure praying. Walking back from there towards Benesse House, I passed 88 buddhas along the side of the road made from industrial waste. A huge cube sat on a beach, and a "Cultural Melting Bath" hot tub on the cliffs above. At one point, on the silent road framed by glowing trees and the Inland Sea, I realised I could hear water lapping against the shore from two different beaches, each in a different key.
The protected spaces and air of discerning clarity mark every detail in Naoshima. There are no pachinko parlours on the small island of 3,600 people, no video arcades, no clamorous department stores. Cars are rare and you can walk from one site to the very farthest in about an hour. If you look out to sea, you can watch the fishing boats slowly drifting to one of the quiet neighbouring islands; when you head into one of the museums, sometimes slipping off your shoes before entering a room, you're in a prayerful hush again.
While Benesse House is clearly the classic place to stay, budget-minded travellers can sleep in one of 10 Mongolian yurts on the beach 10 minutes' walk away, for less than £30 a night, or in various family-run minshuku, or guest houses, among the island's villages.
In one 18th-century village, Honmura, 30 minutes' walk from Benesse House, six old wooden houses showcase the most contemporary of modern art works. Everywhere you look in Naoshima, the locals, and visiting artists, are coming up with new projects. There's the "I ❤ YU" bathhouse in the port town of Miyanoura – where you bathe surrounded by a zany, eclectic "scrapbook" of work, including an aeroplane cockpit and a collage of erotica – and the Miaow Shima café in Honmura where you can sip coffee among a dozen sleeping cats.
Naoshima is not like anything in the west, but more an ultra-cool reference and homage to what Japan has been doing all along, in cutting away distraction and using frames and light and silence to still the mind and train one in attention.
And at a time when the modern nation has absorbed such a series of shocks, and is thinking about what grounds and steadies it, it makes more sense than ever to seek out this forward-looking shrine to the past.
Essentials
Doubles at Benesse House (00 81 87 892 2030; benesse-artsite.jpen/benessehouse) cost from £246 per night. Yurts on the beach (Tsutsuji-so Lodge, 00 81 87 892 2838; tsutsujiso.no-blog.jp/english) cost £28 per person per night. To get to Naoshima, take the bullet-train to Okayama and a local train to Uno, followed by a 20-minute ferry ride
Pico Iyer is the author of The Lady and The Monk, a novel about the first 24 years he has spent living in Japan
