Dogs and Demons

smokestacks, the jumble of buildings stretching to the horizon without a tree or a park, and commented, «I read a lot of Japanese manga comics at school, and I was always impressed by their view of the future. Apocalyptic. Now I see where it comes from.»

Just as people get used to bleak cityscapes, they come to feel at home with cheap industrial materials. Kyoto art expert David Kidd once said to me, «The Japanese have gotten so used to living with fake wood that they can't tell the difference between it and real wood. They think they're the same.» A good place to see this confusion at work is the Arita Porcelain Museum, in northern Kyushu, dedicated to the traditional craft of hand-enameled Imari ceramics. The structure, designed in the rococo style, is built of concrete covered with plaster to look like stone; the dining-room tables are plastic, with printed wood patterns-this in a museum built at great expense to celebrate hand craftsmanship!

One does not expect this lack of understanding of materials in Japan, for «love of materials» is one of the most sublime principles of traditional Japanese art – with its unpainted wood, rough stone surfaces, and unglazed pottery. And yet modern Japan is notable for its persistent use of ill-processed plastic, chrome, highly glazed tile, aluminum, and concrete. These cheap industrial materials are everywhere. At a recent show at the Idemitsu Museum, famed as Tokyo's greatest museum of Asian ceramics, there was a bonsai at the entrance – in an orange plastic pot.

How could a nation that once seemed to have an inherent understanding of natural material fall into the unquestioning use of industrial junk? As with its destruction of the countryside, the explanation cannot be simplistic arguments about «Westernization» or about uniquely «Asian» values. It may be that the very tradition of using plain materials, without treatment or processing, underlies Japan's guileless use of plastic and aluminum today; Japanese builders are simply taking what they find in their environment and using it, as is. Another factor may be the traditional «love of reflective surfaces,» once evidenced by gold screens, smooth lacquer, and the glint of polished swords. But the simpler, probably truer explanation is that Japan has embraced an old-fashioned idea of modernism, in which these bright shiny surfaces show that one is wealthy and technologically advanced, and quiet, low-key environments suggest backwardness. In any case, the key word is «shiny.» Japan is caught in a time warp, its vision of the future derived from sci-fi movies of the 1960s.

The poor people, strong state policy has been in effect more or less since 1868, with only a few decades of relief (notably a brief cultural renaissance in the 1920s and another in the 1960s). For most of the past century and a half, Japan's leaders have single-mindedly aimed at foreign expansion, and this has distorted the nation's modern development. For hundreds of years during the Edo period (in fact, for most of its recorded history), Japan did not aim at conquering its neighbors, either militarily or economically; instead, it applied its energies to itself, and the results were not economic poverty or cultural stagnation, as one might suppose. Instead, Japan flourished, so much so that by the early nineteenth century it was, per capita, by far the wealthiest Asian nation and boasted some of the world's most beautiful cities, literally millions of superbly crafted traditional homes, and an incredibly rich cultural tradition that has since exerted a powerful influence on the rest of the world.

Commodore Perry's arrival in 1854 set off shock waves whose reverberations can still be felt today. Japan set out on a desperate effort first to resist and later to challenge the West, and while it achieved spectacular success, it did serious damage to its own cultural legacy. Today, the beautiful cities are gone, as are the superbly crafted homes, and the leisure that Edo people once had to create a great world culture. Nothing could be more ironic: pursuit of foreign gain at all costs ended up impoverishing the nation.

The paradigm established in the late nineteenth century under the influence of European nationalism was one of military conquest, and it has never really changed: Japan's bureaucratic leaders still think of economic expansion in terms of war. Military metaphors abound in business, government, and the press. Karel van Wolferen describes Japan's system as «a wartime economy operating in peacetime,» and a crucial part of this economy is the principle of poor people, strong state. The military has always hated luxury, for it makes people lazy and soft, and from this point of view poor people, strong state is a classic military approach to governance, as we know from the history of the ancient kingdom of Sparta.

Plutarch reports that Lycurgus, when drafting the laws of Sparta, began with house design. Lycurgus decreed that ceilings should be wrought by the ax, gates and doors smoothed only by the saw «Luxury and a house of this kind could not well be companions,» Plutarch comments. «Doubtless he had good reason to think that they would proportion their beds to their houses, and their coverlets to their beds, and the rest of their goods and furniture to these.»

In Japan, likewise, the poor people, strong state policy rests on cramped and poorly built housing. Matthias Ley, a German photographer based in Tokyo, told me that once, when he was taking a German publisher from Osaka Airport into Kyoto, the publisher looked out at a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, a typical jumble of concrete boxes and electric wires, and asked innocently, «So this is where the poor people live?» The answer to that question was, unfortunately, No, this is where everyone lives.

A frequent misunderstanding about Japan is the claim that there is not enough land to support its large population, that Japan is «crowded,» hence land costs are high. In fact, Japan's population density is comparable to that of many prosperous (and still-beautiful) European countries. Another myth is that, given how mountainous much of Japan is, the habitable land area is bound to be small. This begs the question of what is «habitable land.» Hills did not stop Tuscany from developing beautifully, or San Francisco, or Hong Kong. The problem lies in land use.

In Japan, there are many laws restricting both the supply of land available for housing and what can be built on it. With homes prohibitively expensive – in the early 1990s banks were arranging mortgages that would bind families unto the third generation – the people are forced to save; banks then channel these savings at low interest to industry. After the Bubble deflated in 1990, the government panicked, and since then national policy has been to prop up land prices at all costs.

One way that the government restricts land use is by rigorously enforcing low floor-to-area ratios, unchanged from the days when Japanese cities consisted mostly of one- and two-story wooden buildings. The Sunlight Law and low FAR in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka results in street after street of low buildings even in expensive commercial areas. Another way in which the government restricts land use is through outdated regulations that subsidize owners who use their land as rice paddies; large areas of Tokyo are still zoned for agriculture. A third major obstacle to effective land use in Japan is that people cannot easily convert most mountain land for residential or commercial use. The virtual taboo against it dates to antiquity, when mountains were thought to be the domain of the gods, not of people. Given that most of Japan's landmass is mountainous, this effectively limits development to the crowded plain-lands and valleys.

After Lycurgus had finished laying down the laws for Sparta, he gathered the king and the people together and told them that all was complete, except for one final question that he needed to ask of the Oracle at Delphi. He made all the citizens take a solemn oath that they would not alter a single letter of his laws until he returned. Lycurgus went to Delphi and starved himself to death there, so as never to return, and the people, bound by their oath, maintained his laws unchanged for the next nine hundred years.

Japan is like this. Lycurgus left in about 1965, and since then nobody has changed anything. Land-use planners, for example, have never seriously examined the old taboo on mountain land, which has been a blessing in part, given the primitive state of Japanese city planning and the lack of environmental-impact controls. Although they have been replanted with cedar and honeycombed with concrete roads and embankments, at least the mountains have been spared the fate of the plainlands. On the other hand, this has driven up the cost of residential land elsewhere, which is why Japanese houses are 20 to 30 percent smaller than European homes and about three times more expensive, though they are built of shoddy, flimsy materials-plywood, tin, aluminum, molded vinyl sheets and, as the Kobe earthquake proved, are not designed to be earthquake-resistant (the lead in this technology is now coming from the United States). Most houses are almost completely uninsulated; people usually heat their rooms with separate units (commonly kerosene heaters) and have no special ventilation for exhaust fumes. Discomfort-bone-chilling cold in winter and sweaty heat in summer – is a defining feature of Japanese life.

One important trend in domestic architecture is quietly transforming neighborhoods across the country: prefabricated housing. «Prefab» in Japan means totally prefabricated, with the entire structure mass-manufactured by giant housing companies and delivered to homeowners as one package. Prefab homes now account for a majority of new Japanese houses – and in this there is some progress, and also a final blow to the urban landscape. On the plus side, the new homes are cleaner and more convenient than the old houses they replace. On the minus side, they represent the victory of sterility. Inside and outside surfaces consist of shiny processed materials so unnatural as to be unrecognizable. One cannot say whether they are concrete, metal, or something else, although for the most part they are plastic, extruded in various forms, and colored and tex-turized to look like concrete or metal. Industrial materials have had the last word: people now live within walls and on floors made of material that might as well be in a spaceship. This might have some futuristic appeal except that the houses are designed with exactly the same clutter and lack of ventilation and insulation as before.

Saddest of all is the utter uniformity of the prefab houses. Neighborhood after neighborhood has seen whatever character it once had disappear before rows of mass-produced homes in the shape of Model A, B, or C, all clad in exactly the same gray shade of hybrid construction material. It's another cycle in Japan's descending cultural spiral, something that no mere upturn or downturn in the economy is going to affect.

In any event, very few people, including the rich, have homes to which they can invite strangers with pride. A dinner party in Japan means dining out. A wedding reception in the back yard? Unthinkable. Most Japanese, regardless of wealth, education, taste, or personal interests, pass most of their social lives in public spaces- restaurants, wedding halls, and hotel banquet rooms. Modern Japanese homes are not places where one can commune intimately with one's friends.

Lycurgus would have approved. One of his most effective laws was one that forced all Spartan men to eat at the same communal table, never at home. «For the rich,» Plutarch wrote, «being obliged to go to the same table with the poor, could not make use of or enjoy their abundance, nor so much as please their vanity by looking at or displaying it. So that the common proverb, that Plutus, the god of riches, is blind, was nowhere in all the world literally verified but in Sparta. There, indeed, he was not only blind, but like a picture, without either life or morion.»

The restricting of the population to cramped, expensive, and now characterless prefabricated housing made of low-grade industrial materials suited Japan's policy of benefiting old-line manufacturing industries at all costs. However, new industries like interior design can prosper only when people are comfortable and educated enough to develop a higher level of taste.

The results are evident in hotels and resorts. While Kyoto is famed for its lovely old inns, the city has no modern hotel of international quality In Paris, Rome, Peking, or Bangkok, one can find modern hotels that incorporate local materials and design in such a way as to provide a sense of place, but Kyoto boasts not a single such instution. The big hotels (such as the Kyoto, Miyako, Brighton, and Prince), with their aluminum, granite, and glass lobbies, deny Kyoto's wood-and-paper culture in every way. Compare the wooden lattices and tree-lined entrance to the Sukhotai Hotel in Bangkok with the wall of dirty concrete and the narrow cement steps leading up to the Miyako Hotel, Kyoto's most prestigious. Stroll through the gardens filled with ponds and pavilions at the Inter-Continental or the Hilton in Bangkok, and then look at Kyoto Hotel's public plaza, a tiny barren area of granite paving surrounded by a yellow plastic bamboo fence. Drink a leisurely cup of coffee amid the greenery under the soaring teak-timbered vaults of the Hyatt in Bangkok, and then visit Kyoto's Prince, the hotel where most conventioneers stay, with its low ceilings and almost every surface of plastic and aluminum. For a nightcap, you could view the Bangkok skyline from the fiftieth floor of the Westin Hotel – surrounded by polished teak and rosewood paneling; or you could enjoy the floodlit rock and waterfall in the garden of the Royal Hotel in Kyoto – the rock being made of molded green fiberglass. One finds the same lack of quality in Tokyo, a city with only two attractive hotels, the Park Hyatt and the Four Seasons. In the case of the Park Hyatt, the low-key lighting, the elegant use of wood in hallways and elevators-all this was accomplished by shutting out Japanese designers. «We couldn't allow Japanese designers to be involved,» the management told me. «They wanted to fill it with aluminum and fluorescent lights.» And in the Four Seasons, where I noticed recently that the gold screens on the walls