Dogs and Demons

and the three preserved blocks»), today not a single beautiful town – and only a handful of villages – is left in all Japan. There is the occasional old castle, or a moat with lotuses, but step ten feet away and you are back in the world of aluminum and electric wires.

The phenomenon is not, of course, unique to Japan. China, Korea, Thailand, and other fast-growing economies in Asia are not far behind. Modernity came to East Asia so rapidly that it was as if there simply wasn't enough time to learn how to adapt its old houses and cities to modern comforts. And old meant dirty, dark, poor, and inconvenient.

The lovely traditional houses of Japan, Thailand, and Indonesia may have been reasonably clean and comfortable when they were occupied by people who were close to nature and were temperamentally suited to living in such houses. But for people accustomed to modern lifestyles, one must admit that these houses are often prone to mud and dust, dark, and inconvenient; they need to be restored with amenities to make them clean, airy, and comfortable. Kyoto residents complain, «Why do we have to live in a museum? Do people expect us to go back to the Edo period and also wear chonmage [traditional hairdos, such as sumo wrestlers wear]?»

The tragedy is that people in Kyoto have equated preserving thе old city with enduring the old lifestyle, when in fact it is eminently possible to restore Asia's old houses in harmony with the needs of a modern society. With the right skills, the work can even be inexpensive, at least compared with the cost of building a new house. You don't need to go back in time, fold yourself into a kimono, and have your hair styled in a chonmage in order to live in an old house, yet, lacking the experience (that is, the technology) to combine old and new, people find it difficult to imagine this. This story, which was related to me by Marc Keane, a garden designer living in Kyoto, gives a sense of the prevailing ethos:

I visited an old couple the other day who live in an old house-a magnificent old house with fine wood and workmanship throughout, even a pillar in the tokonoma alcove made of rare black sandalwood. We were trying to convince the couple, who plan to tear the house down, sell half the property and live in a pre-fab house on the other half, that their house was very special, an important heritage in fact, and with a little fixing in the kitchen and bath, would be the best for them to live in. The lady of the house said an interesting thing-a horrible thing really. She said that her friends, and members of the local community (you know, the local nosy old grandmothers), on seeing the way they live, in an old wooden house with a bath using a wood-stove, and an old earthen-floored kitchen, would say to her, «Mrs. Nishimura, your lifestyle is so un-cultured.» Can you get that: «UN-cultured.» Everything about their lifestyle, for me, is an embodiment of the best of Japanese culture, and yet many people (in fact the old couple themselves, I guess) see the very same things as «un-cultured.»

Keane suggested a little fixing of the kitchen and bath, advising the couple to preserve but modernize the house. Sadly, most Japanese today don't realize that this is possible – at least, not without overwhelming expense and difficulty.

You will hear similar responses from people living in traditional structures almost anywhere in East Asia. Interestingly, in nations that were formerly European colonies, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, the influence of the West somewhat mitigates the situation. Although this influence is a contentious issue, the West has had centuries of experience in coping with modern technology. Ex-colonies of European powers inherited Western-trained civil-service regimes, and it is partly due to this that beautiful modern cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur have developed.

Outside Japan, the demands of international tourism have encouraged architects to experiment with designs that successfully combine Asian art with new technologies. It is common to find foreigners like Marc Keane in Kyoto, who appreciate traditional culture with an enthusiasm that local people have forgotten-and who inspire them to rediscover and re-create their own heritage. Thailand, with its remarkable openness to foreigners, has benefited from the efforts of people such as the legendary silk magnate Jim Thompson, whose mansion in Bangkok, built in the traditional Thai style, has exerted an incalculable influence on Thai designers and architects. Bali, a bastion of thriving ancient culture, and with a relatively unspoiled environment, likewise owes its salvation partly to generations of Dutch, German, American, and Australian residents who loved the island and joined the Balinese in preserving it.

Occasionally one sees foreigners having an impact in certain out-of-the-way niches in Japan, such as Iya Valley in Shikoku, where the Chiiori Project, a volunteer movement centered on Mason Florence's and my old farmhouse, is drawing numerous foreign travelers and exchange teachers. The sight of all these foreigners trekking to such a remote place is reawakening local interest in reviving Iya's natural beauty. Another case is that of Sarah Cummings, a native of Pennsylvania, who took on the management of a traditional sake brewery in the town of Obuse in Nagano Prefecture. Although the brewery was housed in a spectacular old building, its sales were declining and the business was on the verge of failure when Cummings joined. To everyone's surprise, she chose tradition as her sales pitch. She refurbished the building and got the company to brew its sake in authentic cedar vats for the first time in fifty years, becoming one of only a few firms in the country to do so. Today the brewery is thriving and its sake has achieved a national reputation. «I was surprised when Sarah chose a traditional ceramic bottle,» said the brewery's owner, «but it appeals to young people. Since wine has become so popular, it's really important to attract a new generation to sake.»

Unfortunately, Iya Valleys and Sarah Cummingses are all too rare. Japan chose, for better or for worse, to go it alone. Japan generally has not allowed foreigners to play an important role in its society, and, given its neglected tourist industry, it sees few foreign travelers. The idea that «old equals inconvenient» set hard and fast in Japan, along with many other ideas from the 1960s, since the country was ah but closed to Western influence in every area except industrial technology. Since then, having failed to train designers and city planners to adapt the old architecture to new lifestyles, the idea has become self-reinforcing. Most old buildings in Japan are unloved and have been repaired cheaply, if at all; they are indeed uncomfortable and inconvenient. Unfortunately, so are the new buildings, which are constructed of cheap materials, cramped, poorly lit, badly heated, and uninsulated. Because of its pervasive fear of discomfort and inconvenience, the Japanese public never quite feels that it has escaped the squalid old lifestyle.

By now, the equation of old and natural with inconvenient is made obsessively. Recently, a village in Gifu built a hamlet in the prehistoric style as a tourist attraction. As part of the ambience, «inconvenience will be deliberately added,» said press reports. «There will be no electricity in the hamlet except for probably a naked bulb in the hut,' said Okuda Toshio, a local official in charge of tourism. 'We'd like visitors to have a rare experience of inconvenience and enjoy rich natural life.»

Meanwhile, of course, if you travel around Japan you will see many old temples that the Cultural Ministry has restored to perfection, not to mention flawlessly repaired and polished old houses in «Old House Parks.» The work that goes into these buildings is a credit to Japan's famed perfectionism. Yet these restored structures tend to be sterile, uncomfortable spaces; their restoration is predicated on the assumption that the buildings will never be used again. Or, if people continue to live in them, they must abandon most modern conveniences.

On the other hand, the National Museum or the Craft Museum in Tokyo are examples of historical buildings that also function as places to live or work, and both are shabby and poorly maintained. In the Cultural Ministry's main offices in Ueno, paint is peeling off the walls, dim fluorescent lights flicker, electric wires are pinned to the walls, gloomy offices are filled with piles of dusty papers, there is no proper heating or ventilation-all this in a grand historic building just a block from the National Museum.

The technology of restoration, when applied to living cities, involves sophisticated techniques of combining old and new, as was demonstrated by Yale University. Restoration technology in Japan came to a halt in about 1965, and since then officials have concentrated on ways of perfectly preserving the old. When it comes time to make an old building functional, or to build a new building with old touches that have warmth and texture, nobody knows what to do. Because of its frozen technology, Japan is torn between two extremes – old-shabby or new-sterile – and often a combination of the worst of both defines the look of modern Japan.

The preservation of vibrant old cities, sophisticated resort management, and high-quality residential and furniture design don't occur in a vacuum. Like all other arts and industries, they thrive only when watered with liberal amounts of money. The readiest source of such money would be tourism – an industry in which Japan has very conspicuously failed. The story of this failure is one of the most remarkable tales of modern Japan, for it occurred not through accident but as the result of a deliberate national policy.

During the boom years of postwar manufacturing, Japan's industrial leaders considered tourism a minor business, a sideshow to the real work of the nation, which was to mass-produce things. While Europe, the United States, and other Asian nations were developing sophisticated tourist infrastructures, Japan was trashing Kyoto, concreting Iya Valley, and designing resorts out of chrome and Formica.

Some economic writers have seen the lack of attention paid to tourism as a great success, for it was part of what has been called the «war on service-ization.» According to such views, any work except that of producing objects on an assembly line or building things is a waste of national effort. Tourism, according to this analysis, merely supports menial low-paid jobs, unlike manufacturing, which creates high-tech, high-salaried jobs. Such an argument presumes that everyone involved in tourism is a waiter or a maid, and neglects the economic activity generated by architects, landscape artists, makers of furniture and dining ware, painters and sculptors, electricians, manufacturers of lighting equipment, tour-company operators, hotel managers, taxi and charter companies, airline companies, lawyers, accountants, travel agents, performers and musicians, interior decorators, instructors of swimming, scuba diving, dance, and language, owners of souvenir shops and restaurants, printers, visual artists, PR and advertising firms, and much more. The «anti-services» theorists also forget that in Japan more than 10 percent of the workforce is engaged in low-paying, hard-hat construction work-financed by government subsidy-and there is no alternative industry to sop up the excess labor force.

In any case, it is undoubtedly true that Japan succeeded in repressing service industries. Unfortunately, some of the services, such as software design, communications, and banking, turned out to be enormous moneymakers. Tourism, likewise, surprised everybody by becoming transformed, overnight, from a lackluster wallflower into a glamorous starlet wooed by all.

Elsewhere in the world, an explosive growth of the international tourist industry began in the late 1980s and picked up pace in the 1990s. By the turn of the century, international tourism accounted for about 8 percent of the world's total export earnings, ahead of autos, chemicals, food, computers, electronics, and even oil and gas. The dramatic growth of tourism didn't fit into Japan's strategies, for it is based on mobility, a concept not dear to Japan's bureaucrats, whose complicated operational structures depend on borders being sacrosanct and people, ideas, and money not traveling easily. When newly enriched populations around the world began to travel by the tens of millions, it became clear that tourism would be one of the most important industries of the twenty-first century. Many states and cities in Europe and the United States, not to mention Asian countries such as Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, earn a considerable proportion of their income from tourism. The World Tourism Organization (WTO) estimates that 657 million tourists visited a foreign country in 1999, spending $532 billion.

Meanwhile, tourism within Japan has been dwindling across the board. In the years 1992-1996, the number of people traveling in their own country grew by less than 1 percent, and the value of domestic tours dropped 3 percent every year. For many local areas the fall has been severe, as, for example, on the Ise-Shima promontory of Mie Prefecture. Though it is home to Ise Shrine, Japan's holiest religious site, as well as Mikimoto pearl culturing, Ise-Shima s tourist arrivals in 1999 dropped to a twenty-year low, 40 percent below its height decades earlier. As domestic tourism waned, the number of Japanese traveling abroad nearly quadrupled, from 5 million in 1985 to almost 16 million people in 1998, soaring by 25 percent in just two years (1993-1995). By 1999 this had risen to a record 17 million, with no end to the increase in sight; significantly, a high percentage of these travelers were what the Japan Travel Bureau (JTB) calls «repeaters,» for whom travel abroad is a «habitual practice.» One