• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1127 0

and thousands of wooden homes still stand. The bones of the old city are still there. With well-planned zoning and design guidelines, some parts of it could be revived. And this is also true of other cities and towns in Japan, which still boast numerous wooden houses in the traditional style. For the most part, these houses are in a shambles, their roofs leaking and their pillars leaning, or fixed up with slapdash improvements featuring tin and vinyl. A house or a neighborhood that is in reasonably good repair can be picked out from its unsightly surroundings only with difficulty, but it is still there. It is another case of «a wilted peony in a bamboo vase, unable to draw water up her stem.» The water – a proud and ancient culture – exists in abundance.

Or does it? The supply of beautiful old places is not inexhaustible, and the time may come in the not very distant future when Japan will have damaged its old cities beyond hope. Some fear this time is already here. The Japanese realize that something is amiss. Recently, a television drama featured the following wry segment:

A hotel manager is entertaining a foreign guest, taking him to the finest restaurants and hotels. Finally, the foreigner says, «Fine meals, fine hotels, entertainment parks. I can get that anywhere in the world. But where can I see the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji portrayed by the print artist Hokusai? What about the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, where the feudal lords used to stay on their trips to Tokyo, and which featured in so many prints and paintings?» Of course, the Thirty-six Views and the Fifty-three Stations have completely disappeared. The hotel manager thinks he must have misunderstood. What could the foreigner be talking about? So at the end of the segment he decides to take English lessons!

8. New Cities

Electric Wires and Roof Boxes

Stricken on a journey

My dreams go wandering round

Withered fields.

– Matsuo Basho (1694)

Since the entire thrust of development in Kyoto since its Tower was built has been to escape from the old and build a modern city, it seems only fair to measure the place by its own standards. What if Kyoto were to wipe away its ancient heritage entirely? A dedicated modernist might feel this was justified if it meant creating a city of leading-edge contemporary culture.

This is what has happened in Hong Kong, where a tree-lined harbor filled with quaint junks gave way to a cityscape of dazzling office towers, one of the wonders of the modern world. The same may well happen in Shanghai and Bangkok, where developers have treated the charming old city centers brutally, but where dramatic new buildings are rising from the dust-hotels, restaurants, office towers, and apartments that vie with the best in Hong Kong or New York.

This did not happen – and is not happening – in Japan. The ugly view from the top of the Grand Hotel in Kyoto is less a consequence of the loss of the old than a result of the low quality of the new.

Nothing could run more contrary to the trend of Western commentary on Japan for the past fifty years than the argument that Japan has failed in its pursuit of modernity. However, that is the truth. Instead of an advanced new civilization, Japan has tenement cities and a culture of cheap industrial junk. Homes are cramped and poorly built; public environments, whether in hotels, zoos, parks, apartment buildings, hospitals, or libraries, are sadly lacking in visual pleasure and basic comforts, at least compared with those available in other advanced nations. This failure to achieve quality in the new is perhaps Japan's greatest tragedy-and it lies at the very core of its cultural meltdown today.

It's the unexpected result, a devastating boomerang, of the policy that economists and social scientists once believed was Japan's greatest strength: the policy of «poor people, strong state»; the policy of having its citizens accept a low level of consumption and limited outlets for pleasure and relaxation in their personal lives so that the nation's resources could be invested in