Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [90]
Combine the Sunlight Law with regulations that encourage machinery boxes and billboards on rooftops, and you get the chaotic look of the typical Japanese cityscape. Add to this the absence of zoning and sign control, and factor in vending machines and electric and phone wires-and you get the visual clutter that is a defining feature of daily life in Japan. Japanese architects have become so accustomed to it that they can imagine no alternative. Despite manifold evidence to the contrary in garden-filled, neatly organized old Kyoto and Beijing-not to mention Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, and Jakarta – Japanese architects justify shadeless trashy cities as somehow uniquely «Asian.» When Baba Shozo, a former editor of Japan Architect magazine, was asked whether there might be some improvement in city planning, such as more parks (the average is 14 percent open space for cities in Japan, versus 35 percent in Europe and 40 percent in the United States), he is reported to have responded, «It's absolutely not necessary. Tokyo's population is totally satisfied with the way things are... After all, we are living in an Asian city. It's natural the way it is. Parks and open spaces are not required. Who needs green space?»
Foreign writers on Japanese architecture condescendingly accept this line of reasoning. Christine Hawley writes of a Tokyo neighborhood: «The scale was distinctly 'sub' urban, and architectural grain identifiably oriental. There was of course the visual compression of space, the use of low, horizontally defined buildings covered in banners, signs, and the ubiquitous web of service lines as they run in and around the buildings.» City planners in Singapore and Malaysia, the most vociferous champions of «Asian values,» would be surprised to learn that poorly regulated advertisements and unburied service lines are «identifiably oriental.»
Clutter is not the whole story. People crave open views and clean city lines, so planners respond with monumental «new cities,» boasting wide avenues and enormous office towers surrounded by pavemented parks and windswept plazas. The pendulum swings in the direction of total sterility. One cannot fail to be struck by the complete inhumanity of the new urban landscape at Kobe's Port Island or Tokyo's Makuhari and Odaiba. Gigantic office towers are surrounded by empty access roads, vacant squares, and shadeless rows of pollarded trees. There is no middle ground in Japan's cities – only the two extremes of shabby or sterile.
«New Japan does not like trees,» Donald Richie wrote in The Inland Sea back in 1971. In Richie's day, this truth was expressed in the tendency to bulldoze parks and plazas; in the 1980s it developed into an aversion to falling leaves, which was discussed in an earlier chapter; in the 1990s, it became an attack on branches. Until very recently, in Tokyo, shady tree-lined avenues surrounded the zoo side of Ueno Park and Tokyo University, but not anymore. A desire on the part of civic administrators to widen the streets and do away with shade has led to new rules that require the pruning of all branches that extend over a roadway; this policy has been carried out all over the country.
Keats wrote, «the trees / That whisper round a temple become soon / Dear as the temple's self» – a sentiment clearly not in the mind of the Cultural Ministry when it restored Zuiryuji Temple in the town of Takaoka in 1996. In the true spirit of Nakahara Kiiko, it cut down and uprooted a grove of ancient keaki and pine trees that had stood for hundreds of years in the temple courtyard and replaced them with a wide expanse of raked gravel. Although the temple's founder had expressly designed the courtyard to conjure up the cypress groves of Zen temples in China, the ministry decided that flat gravel was more Zen to their liking – and certainly more beautiful than those messy old trees that interfered with the view.
The new war on urban trees is baffling. I cannot fathom its causes, but I can proffer a guess. The inconvenience posed by trees hardly compares with the telephone poles