Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [88]
The two regulations that have had the most devastating effect on Japan's cities are those concerning the inheritance tax and the so-called Sunlight Law. Japan's inheritance tax is one of the highest in the world; as land prices have risen continually for a half century, inheritors of old houses almost invariably have to sell them in order to pay the tax. For the purchasers, these prices are so high that it is uneconomical to leave single-story old wooden buildings standing, so they tear them down and build apartment blocks. The Tax Office grants very few exemptions for buildings in historic neighborhoods, and the tax guidelines, determined by the central government, are inflexible, so that local administrations cannot easily structure their own neighborhood systems. Faced with laws like this, Kyoto didn't stand a chance.
The Sunlight Law was passed in the 1960s as a well-meaning effort to restrict high buildings that would shroud their neighbors in shade. It created a formula whereby buildings must fit within a diagonal «shadow line,» which means that the higher they rise the narrower they must be. This accounts for the stepped, pyramidal look of most Japanese buildings. Americans made a similar mistake in the 1960s and 1970s, when «street setback» was a magic phrase. This had disastrous effects on thousands of American cities, for it turns out that buildings that come right up to the sidewalk create an intimacy that setback structures lack. New York City learned this to its cost when zoning laws encouraged the sterile office towers on the Avenue of the Americas, which are set back from the street and fronted by wide vacant plazas.
Japan's Sunlight Law also restricts building because on a given plot of land a higher structure often cannot use to the full whatever is allowed by local FAR regulations. As a result,Tokyo has an average FAR of less than 2 to 1, the lowest of any world capital, including Paris and Rome. «Low density» sounds attractive – until one realizes what this means for the inhabitants of a metropolis with 30 million people: the highest land prices in the world, cramped apartments and homes (millions of Tokyo residents dwell in spaces even smaller than the official minimum of fifty square meters), exorbitant commercial rents, and crowded commuter trains that must transport people several hours from their homes to work. With buildable land in Tokyo expensive and scarce, the Construction Ministry favors plans by big construction companies to build giant cities underground. From their underground apartments, it imagines, residents will speed on subways to subterranean office buildings. So effective is the Sunlight Law that future homeowners in Tokyo need never see the light of day.
Japan is the world's only advanced country that does not bury telephone cables and electric lines. While a handful of neighborhoods, such as the central Marunouchi business district of Tokyo, have succeeded in laying cables underground, these are mostly expensive showpieces. Even the most advanced new residential districts customarily do not bury cables, as I discovered when I was working on the Sumitomo Trust Bank/Trammell Crow project on Kobe's Rokko Island in 1987. Kobe City touted the island-brand-new landfill in the harbor – as a supermodern, futuristic neighborhood. With telephone poles. In the countryside, a «priority policy» dictates that until every large city has buried every one of its power lines, which the Construction Ministry is encouraging them not to do, no rural area can do the same with support from the