measurement of being «number one» would include the quality of the rural and urban environment.
Yet it is one of the mysteries of Western experts writing about modern Japan that they happily forgive circumstances they would never countenance in their own countries. They would hardly see the destruction of Paris or Rome or San Francisco as praiseworthy, or describe the bureaucrats who ordered it as «elite» public servants taking a «long-term view.»
Could it be that in their hearts they still see the Japanese quaint natives struggling out of poverty, not really entitled to the sophisticated quality of life that is taken for granted in the West?
The heart of foreigners' tendency to go soft on Japan is an overlay of two conflicting images: even as they praise the natio for its economic success, they see Japan with pitying eyes, as a struggling, «developing» country. It's a natural mistake, given that Japan is essentially a postindustrial state with pre-industrial goals. Westerners feel some guilt and sympathy for Japan's devastation at the end of the war, and there is also the fact that Japan's economic system is configured to benefit industry and not to improve citizens' lives, with the result that its cities and countryside really do seem backward and shabby by Western standards. But Japan as «number one» and as a poor «developing» country cannot both be true. If Japan is truly an advanced society-even, as some have suggested, the world's most advanced society and a model for us all-then the destruction о heritage and environment that is accepted as a necessity in newly developing countries should not be happening here.
The tearing down of the old city of Kyoto was by no means limited to the 1950s and 1960s, when every city in the world made similar mistakes. The city's destruction really gathered speed in the 1990s, by which time Japan was a mature economy, with a per-capita income exceeding that of the United States. According to the International Society to Save Kyoto, more than forty thousand old wooden homes disappeared from the inner city of Kyoto in that decade alone. What remains is the temples seen on picture postcards, preserved along the outskirts. In the city where people live and work, the bamboo lattices and wood have largely disappeared. With no guidelines to ensure that new construction harmonizes with the old, owners have crudely remodeled wooden houses with tin and plastic, and where people have gone to the trouble of preserving an old house, they find themselves submerged in a morass of electrical wires, flashing signs, and pachinko. Professor Tayama of Bukkyo University in Kyoto describes how to do away with the beauty of an old city:
In its scale, and for its natural beauty, this city [Kyoto] had a close to ideal environment. Now let's see what we can do to destroy this environment: First let's chop up the soft line of the hills with high apartment buildings with laundry hanging from their terraces. As for places where we can't build anything, not to worry, we can darken the sky by stringing a web of telephone wires and electric lines. Let's have cars drive through Daitokuji Temple. Let's take Mount Hiei, the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism, and turn it into a parking lot, and on its peak let's build an entertainment park. . . . Let's have gasoline stations and city buses broadcast electronic noise under the name of «music»... and let's paint the buses with designs of children's graffiti. If we make sure that all the buildings are mismatched and brightly colored, that will be very effective... And to finish it off, let's fill the town with people who happily put up with unpleasantness. This Kyoto I have described is actually a fairly generous portrait.
In the early 1990s, there was a popular movement against the rebuilding of the Kyoto Hotel. City Hall next door had waived height limitations so that the rebuilt hotel, as with Kyoto Tower twenty-five years earlier, would set a precedent for the construction of more high buildings in the heart of town. Despite vigorous opposition by citizens' groups and temples such as Kiyomizu Temple, the hotel went up – and, to everyone's surprise, this grim granite edifice, wholly at odds with the traditional scale of the city, ended up looking not particularly out of place. For, in the meantime, the city had changed: a grim granite edifice fit right in.
Kyoto Hotel was just light introductory music for the triumphal march that came next in the shape of the New Kyoto Station, completed in 1997. This construction, one of Japan's most grandiose modern monuments, built at the cost of ¥150 billion ($1.3 billion), dwarfs everything that came before. Straddling the railway tracks along almost half a mile, its massive gray bulk towers over the city. True to Kyoto's postwar tradition, it aggressively denies the history of the place, almost shouting this denial to the world. A local architect, Mori Katsutoshi, says sadly, «In a historic city like this, you have to think of the quality of the design. This looks almost like some kind of storehouse, or a prison.»
Except, of course, there are Dogs and Demons touches. Tawdry artificial «culture» replaces the real thing. As reported in
A woman named Kato Shidzue, writing on her hundredth birthday in
It would seem that Western visitors fail to distinguish – perhaps it is part of their condescension toward Asia – between well-preserved tourist sites and a thoroughly unpleasant cityscape. The fact that Kyoto has nice gardens on its periphery is enough to make them overlook the unwelcoming mass of glass and concrete cubes in the rest of the city. Yet though gardens and temples are wonderful things, world-heritage sites do not a city make. Streets and houses make a city, and in Kyoto, with the exception of three or four indifferently cared for historic blocks, the old streets have lost their integrity.
In Paris or Venice, travelers do not overlook the city and focus only on its cultural sites. Who goes to Paris just to see the Louvre, or to Venice only for the Basilica of San Marco? In both these cities, the joy lies in walking the streets, «taking the air,» eating at a nondescript hole-in-the-wall somewhere on a picturesque alley where old textures, worn stone, cast-iron street lamps, lapping water, and carved wooden shutters regale the senses with a host of impressions. On the other hand, perhaps visitors to today's Kyoto are to be excused for not expecting much. What they see must seem inevitable. How could they imagine that the destruction was deliberate, that it did not happen because of economic necessity, and that the worst of it took place
It's part of the phenomenon of foreigners' exotic dreams of Japan. Mason Florence says, «People come to Japan seeking enchantment, and they are bound and determined to be enchanted. If you arrived in Paris or Rome and saw something like the new station you would be utterly revolted, but for most foreigners coming to Kyoto it merely whets their appetite to find the old Japan they know must be there. When they finally get to Honen-In Temple and see a monk raking the gravel under maple trees, they say to themselves, 'Yes, it does exist. I've found it!' And their enthusiasm for Kyoto ever after knows no bounds. The minute they walk out of Honen-In they're back in the jumbly modern city, but it doesn't impinge on the retina – they're still looking at the dream.'
Even so, it is true that in the end Kato Shidzue is right: however attached they may be to the dream of old Japan, visitors are in fact largely not happy in Kyoto. There has been a steady decrease in the number of tourists, both domestic and foreign, during the past ten years, and those who do come visit largely out of what one might call «cultural duty» to do the round of famous temples; it's rare for visitors to come to Kyoto to rest or merely enjoy a vacation. A vacation is by definition a period of taking life easy, but in Japan beauty no longer comes easily; you have to work hard to see it. Kyoto, despite its tremendous cultural riches, has not become an international tourist mecca like Paris or Venice. There are few visitors from abroad, and their stays are short. After they've seen the specially preserved historical sites, what other reason is there to stay on?
For the reader curious to see with his own eyes the reality of today's Kyoto, I advise taking the elevator to the top of the Grand Hotel, near the railroad station, which is more or less geographically at the center of the city. Examine all 360 degrees of the view: with the exception of Toji Pagoda and a bit of the Honganji Temple roof, all one sees is a dense jumble of dingy concrete buildings stretching in every direction, a cityscape that could fairly be described as one of the drearier sights of the modern world. It is hard to believe that one is looking at Kyoto.
Beyond the jumble is a ring of green hills, mercifully spared development, but the urban blight does not stop there. To the south, the industrial sprawl stretches, unbroken, to Osaka and the coast of the Inland Sea. Across the hills and to the east lies another jumble of concrete boxes called Yamashina, and the same landscape continues interminably, past Yamashina to the drab metropolis of Nagoya, home to millions of people, but very nearly devoid of architectural or cultural interest. And on lt goes for hundreds of miles, all the way to Tokyo, which is only mildly more interesting to look at than Nagoya. When Robert MacNeil looked out of the train window during his 1996 tour of Japan and felt dismay at the sight of «the formless, brutal, utilitarian jumble, unplanned, with tunnels easier on the eyes,» he was confronting an aspect of Japan that is key to its modern crisis.
If the administrators of Kyoto could so thoroughly efface the beauty of its urban center in forty years, one can well imagine the fate that befell other cities and towns in Japan. Kyoto's eagerness to escape from itself is matched across Japan. It is not only Edo-period wooden buildings that get bulldozed. Tens of thousands of graceful Victorian or Art Deco brick schools, banks, theaters, and hotels survived World War II, but of the 13,000 that the Architectural Institute of Japan listed as historical monuments in 1980, one-third have already disappeared.
In 1968, the management of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo tore down a world-renowned masterpiece of modern architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright's Old Imperial, one of the few buildings in that district of Tokyo to have survived the Great Earthquake of 1924. Wright's fantastical hotel, built of pitted stone carved with Art Deco and Mayan- style decoration, fell to the wrecker's ball without a peep of protest from Japan's cultural authorities. The hotel management was so desperate to make its point about being ruthlessly indifferent to the past – the same point made by the erection of Kyoto Tower in 1964 – that when Wright's widow gave a speech at the hotel in 1967 protesting its destruction, workers were ordered to enter the hall and remove bricks even as she spoke.
Here is another example: Fukagawa, a neighborhood of willow-lined canals that was one of the ten scenic sights of prewar Tokyo, is today another concrete jumble. As a Japanese journalist reported in
The jungle gyms are the obligatory Dogs and Demons touch. So important are such monuments to modern Japanese culture that I have taken them up as a subject in their own right in chapters 9 and 10. One could formulate a rule of thumb to describe the fate of Japan's old places: whenever something essential and beautiful has been destroyed, the bureaucracy will erect a monument to commemorate it. Perhaps the tacky gyms are a form of atonement. It was traditional in old Japan to raise
Decades ago, when the decline of Fukagawa began, the novelist Nagai Kafu wrote: «I look at Fukagawa and I see the sadness of a woman no longer beautiful, whom men had used and abused to suit their needs. She's tired, stripped of her dignity, waiting to die.» The same sad words could be written about most of Japan's historical neighborhoods, for the burying of the old Japan under slipshod new buildings is by no means limited to big cities. It is a simple objective truth that, with the exception of a few corners preserved for tourists in showpiece cities such as Kurashiki (and even in Kurashiki, says Mason Florence, «travelers must shut their eyes between the station
