Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [91]
A curious aspect of the tree war is the primitive level of skill with which it is waged. Japan is the land of bonsai and is famous worldwide for its great gardening traditions. Many and varied are the techniques for pruning and shortening each twig and bough-gradual clipping over years or even decades to shape a branch as it grows, props to support old tree limbs as they droop, canvas wrappings to protect bark from cold and insects, and much more – sensitive techniques developed over centuries, of which until recently the West knew little. Yet tree pruning in Japan today is truly a hack job. No gradual, delicate work here-just limbs roughly chainsawed off at the base, with no treatment to protect against insects and rot. «What bothers me the most,» says Mason Florence, «is the brutality of it. The trees look like animals mutilated or skinned alive in medical experiments.»
A world of traditional skills in the arts of building homes and cities evaporated when postwar Japan despoiled its old neighborhoods. The destruction happened so quickly that these arts and crafts never had a chance to adapt to modern Japanese life, and today they seem to have lost relevance. The quiet, low-key comforts, the incredible finesse of detail found, for example, in Japan's old inns belong to an entirely different civilization from the shiny Bakelite interiors of Kyoto's new hotels. Similarly, in just a few decades Japanese public gardening technique went from tender pruning to brutal hack jobs.
A salient element in any comparison of Singapore's advanced city planning, which has given it the name Garden City, and Japan's is the treatment of trees. The drive from Changi Airport into downtown Singapore is one of the pleasures of the modern world. You whirl along a highway lined with a canopy of spreading trees – all newly planted in the past few decades – and under bridges from which flowering vines trail. Southeast Asian garden expert William Warren, in his book on Singapore, has included this highway and also the airport itself as examples of Asia's great gardens. He told me, «I was astonished at the devotion of the botanical staff in Singapore. These are well-educated professionals who love, really love, their work.» In Japan, you will not find professionalism, and certainly nothing like love, among those who tend city streets. Work crews saw off branches according to a program drawn up by bureaucrats in downtown offices. Aside from a few showpieces, like Tokyo's Omotesando fashion street, you would be hard put to find trees arching over a road even in a small provincial town, and if you do, you had better enjoy it, photograph it, and treasure it, because it will probably not be there the next time you visit. Chainsawing is the law of the land.
Yet «Tokyo is a resort!» writes Sano Tadakatsu, director general of International Economic Affairs at MITI. It is because of the winter sun, he explains, so sadly lacking in northern European cities; the lack of sunlight drives Europeans to take those regrettable long vacations in their lovely holiday homes. In contrast, sun-drenched Tokyo is so marvelous that «even foreigners living in Japan do not want to have holiday homes,» and in any case, «children born in this high growth era see nothing wrong with concrete buildings.»
Sano is right. What happens to people living in cities like Tokyo? They get used to it. «Many people of my generation feel angry,» says Igarashi Takayoshi, the author of a best-selling book on wasteful public works. «We have an idea of how nature should be, but the younger