Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [72]
The process has the insistent quality of Japan's march to war in the 1930s. Inose Naoki writes:
At the moment, our citizens are waiting again for the "End of the War." Before World War II, when Japan advanced deeply into the continent, it was like the expansion of bad debts [today], and unable to deal with the consequences, we plunged into war with the United States. We should have been able to halt at some stage, yet even though we were headed for disaster, nobody could prevent it. At this point, lacking an «Imperial Decree,» there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop what is going on.
7. Old Cities
Kyoto and Tourism
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.
– Dr. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (1750)
In the opening scene of the Kabuki play Akoya, the courtesan Akoya walks sadly along the hanamichi, the raised walkway that passes through the audience, to the stage where she faces trial. The chanters describe her beauty in captivity as «the image of a wilted peony in a bamboo vase, unable to draw water up her stem.» This verse neatly captures the irony of modern Japan: the contrast between its depressed internal condition and the wealth of industrial capital and cultural heritage it has to draw on. There is water in abundance, but something about the system prevents it from being drawn up the stem.
A friend of mine once remarked, «What is modernism? It's not the city but how you live in the city. It's not the factory but how you manage and maintain the factory.» Technology involves far more than products running off an assembly line or computer software. It could be defined as the science of managing things properly. How to design a museum exhibit, how to manage a zoo, how to renovate an old building, how to build and operate a vacation resort – these all involve very sophisticated techniques and fuel multibillion-dollar industries in Europe and the United States. None of them exist in Japan today except in the most primitive form.
Yet managing things properly is what traditional Japan did in a way that put virtually every other culture of the world to shame. The tea ceremony, for example, is nothing but an intense course in the art of managing things. The way to pick up or put down a tea bowl involves sensitivity to many different factors: the harmonious angle at which the bowl sits on the tatami brings pleasure to the eye; turning the bowl is a symbolic ritual that connects us to deep cultural roots; when the bowl is set down, the movements of the arm, elbow, and hand are utterly, even ruthlessly, efficient. Well into the twentieth century, Japan perfected quality control on the assembly line and built the world's largest and most efficient urban public-transportation systems. The care for detail and the devotion to work are certainly there – Japan has all the ingredients necessary to become the world's supremely modern country. Yet this hasn't happened.
The reason the flower is unable to draw water up its stem is that Japan has resisted change; and modernism, by definition, requires new ideas and new ways of doing things to keep up with a changing world. When the cold gray hand of the bureaucracy settled on the nation in the mid-1960s, Japan's way of doing things froze. Quality control in manufacturing and public transportation continued to develop, but Japan ignored many of the drastic changes that swept the rest of the world in ensuing decades.
Let's look at the technology of renovating old buildings. Recently, I