Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [75]
Readers may be pardoned for wondering if the situation could possibly be so bad, since Japan's destruction of its cities and houses has received very little press abroad. One would have thought that a book like Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One would take these issues into account, for surely any measurement of being «number one» would include the quality of the rural and urban environment.
Yet it is one of the mysteries of Western experts writing about modern Japan that they happily forgive circumstances they would never countenance in their own countries. They would hardly see the destruction of Paris or Rome or San Francisco as praiseworthy, or describe the bureaucrats who ordered it as «elite» public servants taking a «long-term view.»
Could it be that in their hearts they still see the Japanese quaint natives struggling out of poverty, not really entitled to the sophisticated quality of life that is taken for granted in the West?
The heart of foreigners' tendency to go soft on Japan is an overlay of two conflicting images: even as they praise the natio for its economic success, they see Japan with pitying eyes, as a struggling, «developing» country. It's a natural mistake, given that Japan is essentially a postindustrial state with pre-industrial goals. Westerners feel some guilt and sympathy for Japan's devastation at the end of the war, and there is also the fact that Japan's economic system is configured to benefit industry and not to improve citizens' lives, with the result that its cities and countryside really do seem backward and shabby by Western standards. But Japan as «number one» and as a poor «developing» country cannot both be true. If Japan is truly an advanced society-even, as some have suggested, the world's most advanced society and a model for us all-then the destruction о heritage and environment that is accepted as a necessity in newly developing countries should not be happening here.
The tearing down of the old city of Kyoto was by no means limited to the 1950s and 1960s, when every city in the world made similar mistakes. The city's destruction really gathered speed in the 1990s, by which time Japan was a mature economy, with a per-capita income exceeding that of the United States. According to the International Society to Save Kyoto, more than forty thousand old wooden homes disappeared from the inner city of Kyoto in that decade alone. What remains is the temples seen on picture postcards, preserved along the outskirts. In the city where people live and work, the bamboo lattices and wood have largely disappeared. With no guidelines to ensure that new construction harmonizes with the old, owners have crudely remodeled wooden houses with tin and plastic, and where people have gone to the trouble of preserving an old house, they find themselves submerged in a morass of electrical wires, flashing signs, and pachinko. Professor Tayama of Bukkyo University in Kyoto describes how to do away with the beauty of an old city:
In its scale, and for its natural beauty, this city [Kyoto] had a close to ideal environment. Now let's see what we can do to destroy this environment: First let's chop up the soft line of the hills with high apartment buildings with laundry hanging from their terraces. As for places where we can't build anything, not to worry, we can darken the sky by stringing a web of telephone wires and electric lines. Let's have cars drive through Daitokuji Temple. Let's take Mount Hiei, the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism, and turn it into a parking lot, and on its peak let's build an entertainment park. . . . Let's have gasoline stations and city buses broadcast electronic noise under the name of «music»... and let's paint the buses with designs of children's graffiti. If we make sure that all the buildings