Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [78]
Here is another example: Fukagawa, a neighborhood of willow-lined canals that was one of the ten scenic sights of prewar Tokyo, is today another concrete jumble. As a Japanese journalist reported in The Japan Times: «Work has started on the last remaining canals; soon they will be choked, buried and flattened with cement. As appeasement or perhaps a feeble attempt at apology, the Tokyo government turned some of the concrete space into playgrounds, equipped with a couple of swings and what must be the world's tackiest jungle gyms.»
The jungle gyms are the obligatory Dogs and Demons touch. So important are such monuments to modern Japanese culture that I have taken them up as a subject in their own right in chapters 9 and 10. One could formulate a rule of thumb to describe the fate of Japan's old places: whenever something essential and beautiful has been destroyed, the bureaucracy will erect a monument to commemorate it. Perhaps the tacky gyms are a form of atonement. It was traditional in old Japan to raise kuyo or tsuka, «atonement tombstones,» for animals and objects that humans had thrown away or used harshly for their own purposes. Thus, by Ueno Pond in Tokyo, one will find a stone monolith, the tsuka for needles, donated by seamstresses who had used needles until they were worn out and then discarded them. There are also kuyo for fish and turtle bones, sponsored by fishermen and cooks, and so forth. In that sense, Kyoto Tower and the New Kyoto Station are massive kuyo raised in honor of a civilization that was thrown away. Japan's towns and villages are littered with kuyo monuments donated by an uneasy officialdom, shiny new tombstones for lost beauty.
Decades ago, when the decline of Fukagawa began, the novelist Nagai Kafu wrote: «I look at Fukagawa and I see the sadness of a woman no longer beautiful, whom men had used and abused to suit their needs. She's tired, stripped of her dignity, waiting to die.» The same sad words could be written about most of Japan's historical neighborhoods, for the burying of the old Japan under slipshod new buildings is by no means limited to big cities. It is a simple objective truth that, with the exception of a few corners preserved for tourists in showpiece cities such as Kurashiki (and even in Kurashiki, says Mason Florence, «travelers must shut their eyes between the station and the three preserved blocks»), today not a single beautiful town – and only a handful of villages – is left in all Japan. There is the occasional old castle, or a moat with lotuses, but step ten feet away and you are back in the world of aluminum and electric wires.
The phenomenon is not, of course, unique to Japan. China, Korea, Thailand, and other fast-growing economies in Asia are not far behind. Modernity came to East Asia so rapidly that it was as if there simply wasn't enough time to learn how to adapt its old houses and cities to modern comforts. And old meant dirty, dark, poor, and inconvenient.
The lovely traditional houses of Japan, Thailand, and Indonesia may have been reasonably clean and comfortable when they were occupied by people who were close to nature and were temperamentally suited to living in such houses. But for people accustomed to modern lifestyles, one must admit that these houses are often prone to mud and dust, dark, and inconvenient; they need to be restored with amenities to make them clean, airy, and comfortable. Kyoto residents complain, «Why do we have to live in a museum? Do people expect us to go back to the Edo period and also wear chonmage [traditional hairdos, such as sumo wrestlers wear]?»
The tragedy is that people in Kyoto have equated preserving thе old city with enduring the old lifestyle, when in fact it is eminently possible to restore Asia's old houses in harmony with the needs