Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [16]
In this respect, as in many others, Japan challenges our idea of what modernism consists of. Kirei, in Japan, is a case of industrial modes carried to an extreme, an extreme so destructive to nature and cities as to turn the very concept of modernism on its head. An inability to let anything natural stand, a need to sterilize and flatten every surface-far from being comfortable with advanced technology, as Japan is so often portrayed, this is a society experiencing profound difficulties with it.
The cultural crisis might be easier to resolve if it were simply a matter of Japanese tradition versus Western technology. But the situation is made more complex-and also chronic and severe-by the fact that the roots of the problem lie in tradition itself. People who admire the Japanese traditional arts make much of the «love of nature» that inspired sand gardens, bonsai, ikebana flower arranging, and so forth, but they often fail to realize that the traditional Japanese approach is the opposite of a laissez-faire attitude toward nature. These arts were strongly influenced by the military caste that ruled Japan for many centuries, and they demand total control over every branch and twig.
Indeed, total control is one of Japan's exemplary traits, father of some of its greatest cultural marvels and of its high quality on the assembly line. The kind of sloppiness that is taken for granted in the West has no place in Japan. But a trait like total control is a double-edged sword, for it has cruel and deadly resuits when married to the powers of modern technology and then applied to the natural environment.
Writers on Japan commonly lament the contrast between the nation's contemporary ugliness and its traditional beauty. Discussion focuses on the conflict between modernity and traditional values, but this is to neglect one of the most thought-provoking elements of Japan's twentieth-century disasters: the problem is not that traditional values have died but that they have mutated. Maladapted to modernity, traditional values become Frankenstein's monsters, taking on terrifying new lives. As Donald Richie, the dean of Japanologists in Tokyo, points out, «What's the difference between torturing a bonsai and torturing the landscape?»
In 1995, the citizens of Kamakura woke one day to find that the municipality was felling more than a hundred of the city's famed cherry trees – Kamakura's official symbol – in order to build a concrete support barrier on a hillside. The reason? Some residents had complained of rocks rolling down the slopes, and officials had condemned the hill, which was within temple grounds, as an «earthquake hazard.» In modern Japan, it requires a surprisingly small threat from nature to elicit this «sledgehammer to a mosquito» reaction. Every bucket of sand that might wash away in a typhoon, every rock that might fall from a hilltop is a threat the government must deal with – using lots of concrete.
Quietly, almost invisibly, a strong ideology grew up during the past fifty years to support the idea that total control over every inch of hillside and seashore is necessary. This ideology holds that nature is Japan's special enemy, that nature is exceptionally harsh here, and that the Japanese suffer more from natural calamities than do other people. One can taste the flavor of this attitude in the following excerpt from a publication of the Construction Ministry's River Bureau:
Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and droughts have periodically wreaked havoc on Japan. For as long as Japanese