Dogs and Demons

biggest drum, the biggest sand clock, and the world's longest beach bench. In Tokyo, monuments on the drawing boards include Taisei Corporation's 4,000-meter cone- shaped building known as X-SEED4000. Its base would be six kilometers wide and it would sit above the ocean, housing 500,000 people. The reason for the name X-SEED is that, though shaped like Mount Fuji, the monument's height would exceed that of Mount Fuji by several hundred meters, so residents could enjoy looking down on the mountain.

Shimizu Corporation is proposing a far more modest 800-meter skyscraper (almost twice the height of the Sears Tower in Chicago), on pillars above a city. Kajima Corporation is pursuing a stacked structure, a so-called Dynamic Intelligent Building, which consists of several fifty-story structures piled on top of one another. Ohbayashi Corporation, for its part, has announced plans for the 2,100-meter Aeropolis 2001, whose shadow will darken the environs of Tokyo.

While these companies have put their plans on hold due to the bursting of the Bubble, their concepts are dear to the Construction Ministry's heart, and as we have seen in the case of Nagara Dam, once a concept, always a concept. Aoki Hitoshi, a senior specialist with the Construction Advisory Section of the Construction Ministry, says, «The construction companies put a great deal of work into developing them, and it seemed a shame not to utilize them. Aside from the military, development of such buildings is an ideal frontier in which scientific research can be extended. We hope that in the future this can be developed into a national project.» How these structures will get around the Sunlight Law is a mystery, but in the case of monuments, ministries waive restrictions. Whatever it costs, something like these will surely get built.

Mile-high buildings are just the beginning. The grandiose visions of Japan's builders and architects go further-nothing less than reshaping the land itself. The new Comprehensive National Development Plan, or Zenso, is considering a network of expressways across the country, as well as mammoth tunnels and bridges linking all of Japan's islands, despite the fact that road, rail, and air systems already link them. The jewel in the crown would be a brand-new capital built on land far away from Tokyo; this will provide opportunities for monuments on a scale beyond anything yet imagined. Estimated by the government to cost ¥14 trillion, it will house 600,000 people in a 9,000-hectare site surrounding the National Diet, to be called Diet City. The construction work will essentially involve flattening an entire prefecture – and eight prefectures have passed resolutions urging that this new capital be built in their territory.

The architect Kurokawa Kisho proposes to expand Tokyo by creating a 30,000-hectare island in the bay, laced with canals and freeways. This island would be home to 5 million people, with an additional million housed in another new city built at the Chiba end of the bay and connected by a bridge. The cost of this scheme comes to around ¥300 trillion (twenty times the Apollo program), and it would require men and machines to level an entire range of mountains yielding 8.4 billion cubic meters of landfill (125 times what builders excavated to cut the Suez Canal), this on top of the 900 million cubic meters already shaved off the mountains of Chiba Prefecture to build the Tokyo-Chiba trans-bay bridge.

The world knows Japan as the land of the miniature, of restraint, of quiet good taste, of devotion to the low-key but telling detail. Nakano Kiyotsugu wrote a best- selling book published in 1993 in which he argued that the very core ideal of traditional Japanese culture was Seihin no Shiso, the «philosophy of pure poverty.» By pure poverty, Nakano meant the simplicity of life of the eighteenth-century Buddhist monk Ryokan, famed for living happily in a thatched hut. Ryokan's chief pleasure in life was playing with the local children. «Pure poverty» inspired many of Japan's greatest works of literature, such as Kamo no Chomei's Record of the Ten-Foot-Square Hut, written in the early thirteenth century, which describes a life of meditation in a modest natural setting, and which set a pattern that the philosopher Yoshida Kenko and the poets Saigyo and Basho followed in later years; it reached its apex in the tea ceremony. Tea masters designed tearooms to be small, unobtrusive structures, made of humble woods and bamboo.

The philosophy of pure poverty penetrates every facet of traditional Japan. Visitors to Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, home of the famous rock garden, will have seen a stone water basin in the garden at the back, whose motto is known to schoolchildren across the land: four characters are carved in it, surrounding a square hole in the center of the stone, which is a visual pun, since all four have the radical for «mouth,» a square, in them. The message-the essence of Zen, one could even say of Buddhism in general – is Ware Tada Таrи Shiru, which means «I know only what is enough.» Another translation is «I know the limits, and that is enough.» Nakano writes plaintively:

When I speak of Japanese culture to foreigners, the problem always circles back to the way we live today, which is only natural. The reason I began talking about this side of Japanese culture is I wanted to say, «The Japanese products you see and the people making them are not all there is to the Japanese! This is what our traditional culture was!» While I know full well that it is being lost in today's Japan, it was my desire to introduce the best, the supreme point of Japanese culture.

If «pure poverty» and «knowing what is enough» were the supreme points of Japanese culture, where in the world did Japan's modern gigantism, the insistence on the biggest and the longest, the taste for the bombastic, come from? Within traditional culture itself, coexisting with pure poverty has been an other tendency, a competitive streak. When the imperial court built cities like Kyoto and Nara, it did so with an eye over its shoulder at China and Korea. In Nara, the very first order of business was to devote all the energies of the state to building the Hall of the Great Buddha, intended to compete with the largest temples of the Tang-dynasty capital in Chang-An. Today's Todaiji, though a much smaller reconstruction, is still the largest wooden structure in the world.

Later rulers celebrated their reigns with undertakings such as the Great Buddha in Kamakura, Hideyoshi's Himeji Castle, and the Shogun's Palace in Edo, which are among the larger structures of the premodern world. In short, Japan also has a strong tradition of celebrating its rulers' power through impressive monuments. What is going on today may be a similar affirmation of wealth and power.

Thoreau wrote: «Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East, to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them – who were above such trifling.» The answer is, of course, that none were above it. Every state, as it acquires wealth, goes through a phase in which it enjoys building bigger and taller structures. Versailles, the Houses of Parliament, the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower – these are all Western monuments. Newly industrializing Asian countries are headed one after another in the same direction, with mega-projects scheduled for China, Malaysia, and Singapore. From the Pyramids of Egypt to Malaysia's new Linear City (a twelve-kilometer mall and office building planned to straddle the Klang River in Kuala Lumpur), monument building would seem to be a universal need, perhaps even a basic human desire.

There is, however, one critical difference between ancient societies and those of today, and it is that raising huge monuments in pre-industrial times was difficult, involving massive mobilization of people and resources. Notre-Dame, the Forbidden City, the Potala Palace, Angkor Wat, the Vatican took centuries to complete. In contrast, the gigantic office towers and fanciful museums of today are apparently projects that even small and poorly developed nations can easily do. As the twenty-first century dawns, the construction of huge monuments is no longer a proof of advanced civilization. In other advanced industrial nations, the advent of a new skyscraper these days rarely brings more than a yawn-if not outright opposition. But Japan seems stuck in a pre-industrial mode in which such monuments still invariably astound and amaze. It's Japan's old competitive streak in action, but not updated to a newer model of development. Therefore Japan must keep building more and bigger and higher and grander in order to impress its citizens that it has «arrived,» or, in the words of Nakaoki Yutaka, the governor of Toyama Prefecture, «so that people can feel they have become rich.» Monuments prove to people that they live in a successful modern state. But of course the real test of a successful modern state is the degree to which it rises above such trifling.

Why is it that monument building has triumphed to such an extreme in modern times, while Japan's strong tradition of «pure poverty» has been swept away like a straw in a gale? It's a case of breakdown and imbalance-and this inability to keep a balance lies at the core of Japan's modern cultural trauma.

A clue to the problem may be found in what I call the theory of Opposite Virtues. Nations, like people in this respect, may pride themselves most highly on the quality they most lack. Hence «fair play» is a golden virtue in Great Britain, the country that attacked and subjugated half the globe. «Equality» was the banner of Soviet Russia, where commissars owned lavish dachas on the Black Sea and the proletariat lived no better than serfs. The United States prides itself on its high «moral standard,» while perpetuating racial and moral double standards. And then there is l'amour in France, a nation of cold-blooded rationalists. Or Canadians priding themselves most on being so distinctively «Canadian.»

In Japan we must look at the time-honored ideal of Wa, «peace.» Wa means security, stability, everything in its proper place, «knowing what is enough.» Yet a persistent irony of Japanese history since 1868 is that for all the emphasis on peace and harmony, they are exactly the virtues that Japan did not pursue. At the end of the nineteenth century, rather than settling back to enjoy its new prosperity, Japan embarked on a campaign to conquer and colonize its neighbors. By the 1930s, it had already acquired a tremendous empire in East Asia; this inability to stop led to its suicidal attack on the U.S. base at Pearl Harbor, as a result of which it lost everything. Something similar is happening again. Perhaps Japan values Wa so highly for the very reason that it has such a strong tendency toward imbalance and uncontrollable extremes.

Prewar history and Japan's present rush toward environmental and fiscal disaster indicate a fatal flaw in Japan's social structure. The emphasis on shared responsibility and obedience leads to a situation in which nobody is in charge, with the result that once it is set on a certain course, Japan will not stop. There is no pilot, nobody who can throw the engines into reverse once the ship of state is under way; and so it moves faster and faster until it crashes onto the rocks.

The rhythm is predictable. In studying traditional arts in Japan, one encounters the classic pattern of jo, ha, kyu, zanshin, which appears everywhere, from the wiping of the scoop in the tea ceremony to the dramatic finale of a Kabuki dance. Jo means 'introduction,' the initial start of a movement. Ha means «break» – when the movement breaks into medium speed. Kyu means «rush,» the sprint at the end. These all lead to a full stop, known as zanshin, «leaving behind the heart,» after which another cycle begins. A simple English translation of this sequence would be «slow, faster, fastest, stop.» In the context of twentieth-century history, one might translate it as «slow, faster, fastest, crash.» Japan never rests at ha but always continues to kyu, and nothing can stop it thereafter but catastrophe. Zanshin.

After recovering from its defeat in World War II, Japan set out to lead the world as a great industrial power. Pure poverty did not fit into this scenario; gigantic construction did. With industry and construction as the sole national goals, Japan turned on her own land, attacking the mountains and valleys with bulldozers, sweeping away old cities, filling in the harbors-essentially turning the nation into one large industrial battleship. Nobody can slow her as she steams full speed ahead toward a colossal shipwreck.

Another factor that prevents Japan from coming to its senses is the effect of the damage already done. Gavan McCormack has written, «The real and growing need is for imaginative projects designed to undo some of the damage to the environment: begin de-concreting the rivers and coast, demolishing some of the dams, restoring some of the rivers to their natural course.» Such a process has in fact begun in the United States, but in Japan it is nearly inconceivable. Consciousness of environmental issues is so low and heedless development has already so damaged Japan's urban and rural settings that what it would take to repair them beggars the imagination. It's a self-fulfilling cycle: as the texture of city life and the natural environment deteriorates, there are fewer and fewer places in which people can enjoy the quiet, meditative lifestyle of «pure poverty,» and fewer and fewer people who can appreciate what it ever meant.

A child brought up in Japan today may have a chance to travel to Shikoku'sTokushima Prefecture, but the closest he will come to enjoying its native culture is to see