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By Root 1223 0

generation doesn't. Students are not shocked by images of environmental destruction the way I am – they got used to it growing up.» Recently, Andrew Maerkle, the sixteen-year-old son of an American family in Osaka, and his parents and I had occasion to drive east from Kobe, through Osaka, and down the coast of the Inland Sea to the town of Izumi-Otsu, near the New Kansai Airport. For hours we drove along elevated expressways, giving us a view to the horizon of unrelieved industrial horror. In that bleak landscape live millions of people, in desolate rows of apartments barely distinguishable from the factories around them. Andrew gazed at the flashing billboards, the towering pylons for high-tension wires, the flaming smokestacks, the jumble of buildings stretching to the horizon without a tree or a park, and commented, «I read a lot of Japanese manga comics at school, and I was always impressed by their view of the future. Apocalyptic. Now I see where it comes from.»

Just as people get used to bleak cityscapes, they come to feel at home with cheap industrial materials. Kyoto art expert David Kidd once said to me, «The Japanese have gotten so used to living with fake wood that they can't tell the difference between it and real wood. They think they're the same.» A good place to see this confusion at work is the Arita Porcelain Museum, in northern Kyushu, dedicated to the traditional craft of hand-enameled Imari ceramics. The structure, designed in the rococo style, is built of concrete covered with plaster to look like stone; the dining-room tables are plastic, with printed wood patterns-this in a museum built at great expense to celebrate hand craftsmanship!

One does not expect this lack of understanding of materials in Japan, for «love of materials» is one of the most sublime principles of traditional Japanese art – with its unpainted wood, rough stone surfaces, and unglazed pottery. And yet modern Japan is notable for its persistent use of ill-processed plastic, chrome, highly glazed tile, aluminum, and concrete. These cheap industrial materials are everywhere. At a recent show at the Idemitsu Museum, famed as Tokyo's greatest museum of Asian ceramics, there was a bonsai at the entrance – in an orange plastic pot.

How could a nation that once seemed to have an inherent understanding of natural material fall into the unquestioning use of industrial junk? As with its destruction of the countryside, the explanation cannot be simplistic arguments about «Westernization» or about uniquely «Asian» values. It may be that the very tradition of using plain materials, without treatment or processing, underlies Japan's guileless use of plastic and aluminum today; Japanese builders are simply taking what they find in their environment and using it, as is. Another factor may be the traditional «love of reflective surfaces,» once evidenced by gold screens, smooth lacquer, and the glint of polished swords. But the simpler, probably truer explanation is that Japan has embraced an old-fashioned idea of modernism, in which these bright shiny surfaces show that one is wealthy and technologically advanced, and quiet, low-key environments suggest backwardness. In any case, the key word is «shiny.» Japan is caught in a time warp, its vision of the future derived from sci-fi movies of the 1960s.

The poor people, strong state policy has been in effect more or less since 1868, with only a few decades of relief (notably a brief cultural renaissance in the 1920s and another in the 1960s). For most of the past century and a half, Japan's leaders have single-mindedly aimed at foreign expansion, and this has distorted the nation's modern development. For hundreds of years during the Edo period (in fact, for most of its recorded history), Japan did not aim at conquering its neighbors, either militarily or economically; instead, it applied its energies to itself, and the results were not economic poverty or cultural stagnation, as one might suppose. Instead, Japan flourished, so much so that by the early nineteenth century it was, per capita, by far