Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [112]
Slogans require a certain amount of care in handling, since their true intent is often far from their surface meaning. Take, for example, the term «symbiotic unity,» kyosei, used by Hasegawa Itsuko to describe her metal-and-plastic trees. Kyosei literally means «living together,» and it is a rallying cry for modern Japanese architecture, made famous by Kurokawa Kisho, who used it to justify proposals like the one for filling in Tokyo Bay by razing a mountain range. Kyosei, in other words, is exactly the opposite of «symbiotic unity with the environment.»
There is a lesson here that has profound implications for the way foreign media report on Japan. It is all too easy to accept the slogans at face value and not question what is really going on. For example, the city of Nagoya made plans to wipe out Fujimae, Japan's most important tidal wetland (after the loss of Isahaya), and use it as a dump site. Faced with local opposition, the Fujimae project is now on hold – although the future of the wetlands is far from secure. Yet Nagoya plans to host Expo 2005 based on the theme «Beyond Development: Rediscovering Nature's Wisdom.» How many foreigners will attend Expo 2005, visit charmingly designed pavilions, listen to pious speeches about Japan's love of nature and about «rediscovering nature's wisdom,» and never guess the devastation Nagoya plans for the wetlands right outside Expo 2005 s gates?
In the case of modern Japanese architecture, foreign critics come as pilgrims to the holy sanctuary, abandoning critical faculties that they use quite sharply at home. Consider the following effusion by Herbert Muschamp, the architectural critic for The New York Times, on the Nagi Museum:
Try to visit the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in the rain, when the drops form rippling circles within the square enclosure of a shallow pool and the steel wires that rise from the pool in gentle loops make it seem as if the drops have bounced off the surface back into the air, freezing into glistening silver arcs. Or go when it's sunny, go when it snows. Just go, or try to imagine yourself there. Though Nagi is barely a dot on the map, the museum is more startlingly original than any built by a major city in recent years.
The reader will recall that the Nagi Museum is the one that cost three times the village's annual budget, with only three artworks housed in three sections (in Muschamp's succinct description, "a cylinder and a crescent, both sheathed with corrugated metal, and a connecting rectangular solid of cast concrete"). Inside the cylinder, the artwork consists of a replica of the sand garden at Ryoanji Temple pasted onto the curving walls. «The museum, completed last year,» Muschamp informs us, «is one element of a municipal program designed to strengthen the town's cultural life, partly in the hope of encouraging young people to remain in the town instead of migrating to the big city.» If Muschamp really believes that three works of esoteric contemporary art housed in a tube, a crescent, and a block would keep young people from leaving this remote village, then he might also believe all the other slogans: that Kyoto is an avant-garde city at the turning point of civilization, that Okinawa is an info-communications hub for the entire Asia-Pacific region, and that the city of Nagoya is moving beyond development to rediscover nature's wisdom.
Observers sometimes find that what is most touching about the Orochi Loop is the naive faith of the people of Yokota in the wonders of «technology,» and it brings a smile to city dwellers' lips when we think of how pleased the villagers have been with the Loop's big red-painted bridge, kept lit all night. But the same is true of the international art experts who write about modern Japanese design. What could be more quaint than architectural critics' unquestioning acceptance of weird monuments because they