Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [93]
Commodore Perry's arrival in 1854 set off shock waves whose reverberations can still be felt today. Japan set out on a desperate effort first to resist and later to challenge the West, and while it achieved spectacular success, it did serious damage to its own cultural legacy. Today, the beautiful cities are gone, as are the superbly crafted homes, and the leisure that Edo people once had to create a great world culture. Nothing could be more ironic: pursuit of foreign gain at all costs ended up impoverishing the nation.
The paradigm established in the late nineteenth century under the influence of European nationalism was one of military conquest, and it has never really changed: Japan's bureaucratic leaders still think of economic expansion in terms of war. Military metaphors abound in business, government, and the press. Karel van Wolferen describes Japan's system as «a wartime economy operating in peacetime,» and a crucial part of this economy is the principle of poor people, strong state. The military has always hated luxury, for it makes people lazy and soft, and from this point of view poor people, strong state is a classic military approach to governance, as we know from the history of the ancient kingdom of Sparta.
Plutarch reports that Lycurgus, when drafting the laws of Sparta, began with house design. Lycurgus decreed that ceilings should be wrought by the ax, gates and doors smoothed only by the saw «Luxury and a house of this kind could not well be companions,» Plutarch comments. «Doubtless he had good reason to think that they would proportion their beds to their houses, and their coverlets to their beds, and the rest of their goods and furniture to these.»
In Japan, likewise, the poor people, strong state policy rests on cramped and poorly built housing. Matthias Ley, a German photographer based in Tokyo, told me that once, when he was taking a German publisher from Osaka Airport into Kyoto, the publisher looked out at a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, a typical jumble of concrete boxes and electric wires, and asked innocently, «So this is where the poor people live?» The answer to that question was, unfortunately, No, this is where everyone lives.
A frequent misunderstanding about Japan is the claim that there is not enough land to support its large population, that Japan is «crowded,» hence land costs are high. In fact, Japan's population density is comparable to that of many prosperous (and still-beautiful) European countries. Another myth is that, given how mountainous much of Japan is, the habitable land area is bound to be small. This begs the question of what is «habitable land.» Hills did not stop Tuscany from developing beautifully, or San Francisco, or Hong Kong. The problem lies in land use.
In Japan, there are many laws restricting both the supply of land available for housing and what can be built on it. With homes prohibitively expensive – in the early 1990s banks were arranging mortgages that would bind families unto the third generation – the people are forced to save; banks then channel these savings at low interest to industry. After the Bubble deflated in 1990, the government panicked, and since then national policy has been to prop up land prices at all costs.
One way that the government restricts land use is by rigorously enforcing low floor-to-area ratios, unchanged from the days when Japanese cities consisted mostly of one- and two-story wooden buildings. The Sunlight Law and low FAR in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka results in street after street of low buildings even in expensive commercial areas. Another way in which the government restricts land use is through outdated regulations that subsidize owners who use their land as rice paddies; large areas of Tokyo are still zoned for agriculture. A third major obstacle