Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [86]
To get some sense of contrast with other nations, consider Malaysia. As you drive between Port Klang on the Strait of Malacca and the capital, Kuala Lumpur, the highway passes through spectacular valleys of rocky cliffs. While building this road, Malaysia called in a French landscaping firm to advise on how to make it beautiful, including how to sculpt the cliffs through which the highway passes. The result of their efforts is that there was no unnecessary destruction, no concrete in sight, and the cliffs appear to be natural. It's a classic example of modern technology, in the true sense of the word, in road building. Such a highway does not exist the length or breadth of Japan, for calling in foreign consultants would have been unthinkable, and road-building techniques froze in about 1970.
In downtown Kuala Lumpur itself, high-rises are springing up everywhere, and the city is beginning to take on the sleek, elegant look one also sees in Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, and parts of Bangkok but rarely in cluttered Tokyo. By looking closely, one can discern the details that make the difference.
One is the lack of junk on rooftops. In Japan, electrical machinery and air-conditioning units appear to have been tacked onto rooftops as afterthoughts. It is possible to put unsightly mechanical components inside a building's internal structure and to integrate them architecturally, but in Japan a regulation dating from the 1950s and never altered punishes a builder for using internal space for such machinery by subtracting that space from his allowable floor-area ratio (FAR).
Japan has no regulations limiting billboards; in fact, its construction laws actively encourage billboards on top of buildings because of another regulation concerning height limits. Builders may increase the height of their structures by a story or two if the added height is merely empty boxes on the roofs. Naturally, the next step is to mount enormous logos and advertisements on these boxes. Back in Kuala Lumpur, you will not see many such signs, and most of the ones you do observe belong to Japanese-owned businesses and were designed by Japanese architectural firms that know no other way. Looking out of my apartment window in Bangkok, I can see dozens of skyscrapers, only one of which sports a large rooftop billboard – Hitachi. In Japan, there is so little understanding of sign control that Hitachi has even made a deal with the Cultural Agency to place advertisements beside all buildings designated as National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties. In Kyoto, you will see scores of metal Hitachi signs placed prominently in Zen gardens and before the gate of every historical temple and pavilion. A short walk through the grounds of Daitokuji, the fountainhead of Zen arts, yields a count of no fewer than twenty-five Hitachi signs, with four in one sub-temple, Daisen-In, alone.
Other East Asian cities-Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong-go far beyond Bangkok in regulating advertisements; Jakarta boasts some of East Asia's best sign control through a taxation policy that makes the raising and maintenance of large ads expensive. In Japan, in contrast, architects learn nothing about signage in their university courses. During the 1980s, the concept of «visual pollution» spread through the international design community, and attention began to be paid to observations that bright, flashing lights disturb the peace of residential neighborhoods, garish signs lower the tone of five-star hotels, fluorescent lights destroy the romance of parks at nighttime, and towering billboards detract from the beauty of scenic countryside. The science of avoiding and ameliorating this sort of visual pollution is a modern technology.
Visual