Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [95]
Lycurgus would have approved. One of his most effective laws was one that forced all Spartan men to eat at the same communal table, never at home. «For the rich,» Plutarch wrote, «being obliged to go to the same table with the poor, could not make use of or enjoy their abundance, nor so much as please their vanity by looking at or displaying it. So that the common proverb, that Plutus, the god of riches, is blind, was nowhere in all the world literally verified but in Sparta. There, indeed, he was not only blind, but like a picture, without either life or morion.»
The restricting of the population to cramped, expensive, and now characterless prefabricated housing made of low-grade industrial materials suited Japan's policy of benefiting old-line manufacturing industries at all costs. However, new industries like interior design can prosper only when people are comfortable and educated enough to develop a higher level of taste.
The results are evident in hotels and resorts. While Kyoto is famed for its lovely old inns, the city has no modern hotel of international quality In Paris, Rome, Peking, or Bangkok, one can find modern hotels that incorporate local materials and design in such a way as to provide a sense of place, but Kyoto boasts not a single such instution. The big hotels (such as the Kyoto, Miyako, Brighton, and Prince), with their aluminum, granite, and glass lobbies, deny Kyoto's wood-and-paper culture in every way. Compare the wooden lattices and tree-lined entrance to the Sukhotai Hotel in Bangkok with the wall of dirty concrete and the narrow cement steps leading up to the Miyako Hotel, Kyoto's most prestigious. Stroll through the gardens filled with ponds and pavilions at the Inter-Continental or the Hilton in Bangkok, and then look at Kyoto Hotel's public plaza, a tiny barren area of granite paving surrounded by a yellow plastic bamboo fence. Drink a leisurely cup of coffee amid the greenery under the soaring teak-timbered vaults of the Hyatt in Bangkok, and then visit Kyoto's Prince, the hotel where most conventioneers stay, with its low ceilings and almost every surface of plastic and aluminum. For a nightcap, you could view the Bangkok skyline from the fiftieth floor of the Westin Hotel – surrounded by polished teak and rosewood paneling; or you could enjoy the floodlit rock and waterfall in the garden of the Royal Hotel in Kyoto – the rock being made of molded green fiberglass. One finds the same lack of quality in Tokyo, a city with only two attractive hotels, the Park Hyatt and the Four Seasons. In the case of the Park Hyatt, the low-key lighting, the elegant use of wood in hallways and elevators-all this was accomplished by shutting out Japanese designers. «We couldn't allow Japanese designers to be involved,» the management told me. «They wanted to fill it with aluminum and fluorescent lights.» And in the Four Seasons, where I noticed recently that the gold screens on the walls were antiques of high quality, I knew instantly that no Japanese designer would have chosen them. At the front desk, I asked who did the decor, and was told «designers from the Regent Chain in Hong Kong.»
So far we have been speaking of big city hotels with hundreds of rooms; when it comes to small garden hotels or boutique hotels, the contrast with other advanced nations is even more striking. There was a brief period in the late 1980s, at the height of the Bubble, when price was no object, when a few brave developers created hotels of striking originality, such as Kuzawa Mitushiro's colorful И Palazzo in Fukuoka, done in collaboration with Aldo Rossi. But with the collapse of the Bubble, developers settled back into the convenient old pattern of «business hotels,» with their cramped rooms, flat decor, and limited facilities. It would be fair to say that the very concept of a boutique hotel has yet to exist in Japan. There is no such thing as New York's witty Paragon or W hotels, nothing with the minimalist chic of Ian Schrager's