Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [101]
One can find many of the architectural wonders of the world in a monument somewhere in Japan. Tokyo boasts a French chateau at Ebisu Garden Place, a Gaudi-style walkway with curving mounds inset with broken tiles at Tama New Town, and a German village in Takanawa, Minato-ku Ward. «However,» as the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho says, «just look around you at the sea of signs in kanji characters and kana alphabets, and in a moment your good mood crashes to earth in real-life Japan. Alas, however hard we strive to bring in foreign culture, in the end it is nothing but 'foreign-style.' On the other hand, maybe the inability to do anything for real could be called 'Japanese-style.' »
Hanker for Italy? You can find a Venetian palazzo in Kotaru, or an entire Michelangelo inlaid courtyard re-created at the Tsukuba Civic Center Building in Ibaragi. In Akita you can visit the Snow Museum, which keeps samples of snow in chilled display chambers. In Yamanashi, a Fruit Museum is housed in fruit-shaped glass-and-steel spheres described by the architect as «either planted firmly in the ground or attempting to reject the earth, as if they had just landed from the air and were trying to fly away.» And in Naruto,Tokushima, the Otsuka Museum of Art houses a thousand renowned works of Western art-fi-om the Sistine Chapel to Andy Warhol-duplicated on ceramic panels. In Tokyo, fanciful monuments are legion. Typical of the genre is the Edo-Tokyo Museum, a snouted metal body raised high on megalithic legs. The city built it to celebrate the culture of the Edo period. As one commentator has said, «What this look-alike of a Star Wars battle station has to do with Tokyo's past is a mystery. At any moment you expect it to zap the graceful national sumo stadium next door and reduce it to galactic dust.»
Monuments come in two basic varieties: manga and massive. The manga approach is typified by functionless decoration-the stainless-steel tubes topped with dragon heads at the sword museum in Yokota, for example, or Asahi's Super Dry Hall in Tokyo, reported as «what can only be described as an objet, a kind of golden beet resting on a black obsidian-like pedestal. . . . This is the Flamme A'Or (Flame of Gold) representing, we are told, the 'burning heart of Asahi beer.' Or maybe the head on a glass of that same product. Or something from Ghostbusters. The flame is hollow, so serves no practical purpose at all. Call it architecture as sculpture.» Known locally as the «turd building,» Asahi's Super Dry Hall was designed by a French architect, replacing what the Tokyo historian Edward Seidensticker believes to have been the city's last remaining wooden beer hall, dating from Taisho if not late Meiji.
Into the massive category fall the supercities being planned for landfill in the harbors of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe, as well as fortresses like the Tokyo Municipal Office Complex in Shinjuku. The most lavishly funded monuments, like the New Kyoto Station, manage to combine manga and massive in one structure.
What both categories of monument have in common is excess. Braggadocio. In Shelley's famous sonnet "Ozymandias," the poet describes a traveler coming across the ruins of a gigantic statue in the desert. On the base of the statue, an inscription reads:
«My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!» Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Japan has a bad case of the Ozymandias syndrome. «Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands» of miserable houses, ugly apartments, shadeless streets, bleak office buildings, and the clutter of signs and electric wires stretch far away. But Japan's planners seem to believe that the world will stand in amazement before these monuments, the larger and more strident the better.
Hence the pride that the town of Yokota takes in the fact that the Orochi Loop is Japans longest highway cloverleaf. Other towns have built the longest stone stairway (3,333 steps), the biggest waterwheel, the world's