Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [76]
In the early 1990s, there was a popular movement against the rebuilding of the Kyoto Hotel. City Hall next door had waived height limitations so that the rebuilt hotel, as with Kyoto Tower twenty-five years earlier, would set a precedent for the construction of more high buildings in the heart of town. Despite vigorous opposition by citizens' groups and temples such as Kiyomizu Temple, the hotel went up – and, to everyone's surprise, this grim granite edifice, wholly at odds with the traditional scale of the city, ended up looking not particularly out of place. For, in the meantime, the city had changed: a grim granite edifice fit right in.
Kyoto Hotel was just light introductory music for the triumphal march that came next in the shape of the New Kyoto Station, completed in 1997. This construction, one of Japan's most grandiose modern monuments, built at the cost of ¥150 billion ($1.3 billion), dwarfs everything that came before. Straddling the railway tracks along almost half a mile, its massive gray bulk towers over the city. True to Kyoto's postwar tradition, it aggressively denies the history of the place, almost shouting this denial to the world. A local architect, Mori Katsutoshi, says sadly, «In a historic city like this, you have to think of the quality of the design. This looks almost like some kind of storehouse, or a prison.»
Except, of course, there are Dogs and Demons touches. Tawdry artificial «culture» replaces the real thing. As reported in Far Eastern Economic Review, "Visitors can enjoy the classic Kyoto image of cherry-blossom petals falling without ever going outside: A coffee shop features a light show that imitates the effect. The Theatre 1200 turns Kyoto's 1,200 years of history into a musical that promises 'first-class hi-tech entertainment.' Afterwards visitors can dine at an Italian restaurant with frescoes that include a copy of Raphael's 'School of Athens.' »
A woman named Kato Shidzue, writing on her hundredth birthday in The Japan Times, lamented: «There must be many foreigners who come to Japan full of dreams about the country's scenery after having read Lafcadio Hearn only to be surprised and upset at the sight of the Japanese so heartlessly destroying their own beautiful and unparalleled cultural legacy.» Sadly, Ms. Kato is wrong. One looks in vain in the foreign media for expressions of surprise or concern at what has happened to Kyoto.
It would seem that Western visitors fail to distinguish – perhaps it is part of their condescension toward Asia – between well-preserved tourist sites and a thoroughly unpleasant cityscape. The fact that Kyoto has nice gardens on its periphery is enough to make them overlook the unwelcoming mass of glass and concrete cubes in the rest of the city. Yet though gardens and temples are wonderful things, world-heritage sites do not a city make. Streets and houses make a city, and in Kyoto, with the exception of three or four indifferently cared for historic blocks, the old streets have lost their integrity.
In Paris or Venice, travelers do not overlook the city and focus only on its cultural sites. Who goes to Paris just to see the Louvre, or to Venice only for the Basilica of San Marco? In both these cities, the joy lies in walking the streets, «taking the air,» eating at a nondescript hole-in-the-wall somewhere on a picturesque alley where old textures, worn stone, cast-iron street lamps, lapping water, and carved wooden shutters regale the senses with a host of impressions. On the other hand, perhaps visitors to today's Kyoto are to be excused for not expecting much. What they see must seem inevitable. How could they imagine that the destruction was deliberate, that it did not happen because of economic necessity, and that the worst of it took place after 1980?
It's part of the phenomenon of foreigners' exotic dreams of Japan.