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By Root 1131 0

Mason Florence says, «People come to Japan seeking enchantment, and they are bound and determined to be enchanted. If you arrived in Paris or Rome and saw something like the new station you would be utterly revolted, but for most foreigners coming to Kyoto it merely whets their appetite to find the old Japan they know must be there. When they finally get to Honen-In Temple and see a monk raking the gravel under maple trees, they say to themselves, 'Yes, it does exist. I've found it!' And their enthusiasm for Kyoto ever after knows no bounds. The minute they walk out of Honen-In they're back in the jumbly modern city, but it doesn't impinge on the retina – they're still looking at the dream."

Even so, it is true that in the end Kato Shidzue is right: however attached they may be to the dream of old Japan, visitors are in fact largely not happy in Kyoto. There has been a steady decrease in the number of tourists, both domestic and foreign, during the past ten years, and those who do come visit largely out of what one might call «cultural duty» to do the round of famous temples; it's rare for visitors to come to Kyoto to rest or merely enjoy a vacation. A vacation is by definition a period of taking life easy, but in Japan beauty no longer comes easily; you have to work hard to see it. Kyoto, despite its tremendous cultural riches, has not become an international tourist mecca like Paris or Venice. There are few visitors from abroad, and their stays are short. After they've seen the specially preserved historical sites, what other reason is there to stay on?

For the reader curious to see with his own eyes the reality of today's Kyoto, I advise taking the elevator to the top of the Grand Hotel, near the railroad station, which is more or less geographically at the center of the city. Examine all 360 degrees of the view: with the exception of Toji Pagoda and a bit of the Honganji Temple roof, all one sees is a dense jumble of dingy concrete buildings stretching in every direction, a cityscape that could fairly be described as one of the drearier sights of the modern world. It is hard to believe that one is looking at Kyoto.

Beyond the jumble is a ring of green hills, mercifully spared development, but the urban blight does not stop there. To the south, the industrial sprawl stretches, unbroken, to Osaka and the coast of the Inland Sea. Across the hills and to the east lies another jumble of concrete boxes called Yamashina, and the same landscape continues interminably, past Yamashina to the drab metropolis of Nagoya, home to millions of people, but very nearly devoid of architectural or cultural interest. And on lt goes for hundreds of miles, all the way to Tokyo, which is only mildly more interesting to look at than Nagoya. When Robert MacNeil looked out of the train window during his 1996 tour of Japan and felt dismay at the sight of «the formless, brutal, utilitarian jumble, unplanned, with tunnels easier on the eyes,» he was confronting an aspect of Japan that is key to its modern crisis.

If the administrators of Kyoto could so thoroughly efface the beauty of its urban center in forty years, one can well imagine the fate that befell other cities and towns in Japan. Kyoto's eagerness to escape from itself is matched across Japan. It is not only Edo-period wooden buildings that get bulldozed. Tens of thousands of graceful Victorian or Art Deco brick schools, banks, theaters, and hotels survived World War II, but of the 13,000 that the Architectural Institute of Japan listed as historical monuments in 1980, one-third have already disappeared.

In 1968, the management of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo tore down a world-renowned masterpiece of modern architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright's Old Imperial, one of the few buildings in that district of Tokyo to have survived the Great Earthquake of 1924. Wright's fantastical hotel, built of pitted stone carved with Art Deco and Mayan-style decoration, fell to the wrecker's ball without a peep of protest from Japan's cultural authorities. The hotel management was so desperate to make its