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By Root 1202 0

pollution in Japan has resulted from the same vicious cycle we have seen in other aspects of its life: in the case of the environment, construction breeds dependence on more construction; in banking, deception leads to greater deception; in urban design, ugliness gradually comes to be taken for granted, which leads to ignorance and thus to more ugliness. An architect friend of mine, Lucilo Pena, helped to design the Four Seasons Hotel in Barcelona, in which the Japanese department store Sogo was one of the investors. Lucilo tells of acrimonious discussions between the hotel operators and the Japanese owners concerning signs, for Sogo wanted a huge flashing sign on the outside of the hotel, and it seemed impossible to convince Sogo's management that in Barcelona this was considered a plan that would damage the ambience of the city and lower the prestige of both the department-store owners and the hotel. Sogo gave in when its representatives realized that in the West citizens might resort to boycotts of a company that flouts local concerns, but it came as a shock.

In Japan, there are almost no zoning laws, no taxation policy, and no sign control to regulate urban or rural development – so giant billboards tower over rice paddies, vending machines stand in the lobbies of ritzy hotels and Kabuki theaters, and bright plastic signs hang in even the most stylish restaurants. People who are born, grow up, live, and work in such an environment know of no alternative; and the result is that the general public, as well as planners and architects, think this kind of look is an inherent part of modernization. It is thus not surprising that Hitachi would blazon its name across the Bangkok skyline when few American, European, Thai, or Chinese corporations feel the need to do so.

Zoning – the political and social science of making the most efficient use of different types of land – is a crucial skill that Japan's bureaucrats have failed to master. The distinction between industrial, commercial, residential, and agricultural neighborhoods hardly exists. In the residential neighborhood of Kameoka, near Kyoto, where I live, I need walk only about five minutes to find-right next door to suburban homes and rice paddies – a used-car lot, a gigantic rusting fuel tank filled with nobody knows what, a plot surrounded by a prefabricated steel wall twenty feet high in which construction waste is dumped, rows of vending machines with blinking lights, a golf driving range half the size of a football field surrounded by wire mesh hung from giant pylons and illuminated at night, a vast number of signs of every type (pinned onto trees, propped up by the roadside), and, of course, a pachinko parlor, with towers of spiraling neon and flashing strobe lights. This is the typical level of visual pollution in the suburban neighborhood of a Japanese city, and nobody considers it odd, because every structure scrupulously obeys the rules: FAR ratios, footprint quotas, allowable building materials, location of telephone poles, and so forth. It is the Through the Looking-Glass world of bureaucratic management: there is no lack of regulation, yet chaos reigns.

Many of the regulations exist to protect cartels of architectural firms and construction companies. Others, such as those that effectively prohibit residential homes from having basements, are cobweb-covered relics. Their original purpose is lost in time, yet no one considers changing them. Indeed, the complete inflexibility of these rules and regulations creates more of the clutter and crowding that characterize Japanese cities.

Kyoto, for example, had a golden opportunity in the 1960s, when it was working on renovations for the Olympic Games. Had it zoned the city differently north and south at the train station (most of the historic center lies north of the station), the old center could easily have been protected and saved. To the south, where most of the buildings except a few large temples were poor, shoddily built, and ripe for redevelopment, Kyoto could have created a new satellite city – like