Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [96]
Today's younger Japanese designers, who have grown up in landscapes such as the one the Maerkle family saw when they drove from Kobe to Izumi-Otsu, or the equally horrifying vista welcoming visitors at Narita Airport when they take the Narita express train into Tokyo, work accordingly. As Lycurgus predicted, people proportion «their beds to their houses, and their coverlets to their beds, and the rest of their goods and furniture to these.» Standardized shiny surfaces are what people really like and feel comfortable in. The victory of the industrial mode in Japanese life can be sensed in health spas, which, far from being relaxing natural retreats, look rather like clinics, with bright white corridors and attendants in surgical smocks. Boutique hotels, even were they to be introduced into Japan, would be bound to fail.
Tokyo and Osaka may boast a handful of attractive international hotels designed by foreigners, but the Japanese countryside remains solidly in the hands of domestic designers. Japanese resorts are so ill designed, so destructive of their surroundings, that in May 1997 the Environment Agency reported that 30 percent of all those surveyed did not live up to the agency's assessment criteria. By American, European, or Indonesian standards, that number would rise to more than 90 percent.
A good example of the sort of thing that happens can be seen in Iya Valley. Iya has Japan's last vine bridge, built by Heike refugees in the twelfth century and rehung with fresh vines regularly ever since. The Vine Bridge is Iya's most famous monument, visited by more than 500,000 people every year. What happened to it? The River Bureau flattened the riverbanks below with concrete; the Forestry Agency constructed a metal bridge right next to it; and resort builders then covered the surrounding valley slopes with concrete boxes and billboards. Travelers who have come from distant prefectures to get a view of the romance of the Heike line up on the metal bridge and take photographs, carefully framing the Vine Bridge to screen out the concrete and the billboards. The choice of accommodation is between minshuku (bed-and-breakfast in old homes) or a few big tourist hotels. Minshuku in old thatch-roofed houses sound attractive – and indeed would be, except that the interiors have been redone with synthetic veneer and fluorescent lights, and yet they still lack modern conveniences such as clean flush toilets and heated bathrooms. So a visit to the Vine Bridge in Iya is only, and just, that: one has seen the Vine Bridge, but there is little in the experience to relax the body or please the heart. In this, Iya'sVine Bridge symbolizes the anomalous fate of old cities like Kyoto and of rural scenery throughout Japan. Iya's mountains and gorges are nothing less than spectacular, the Vine Bridge itself a romance. Rich possibilities for cultural experience and travel are simply there for the taking – and yet a failure of «tourism technology» causes them to be ignored or damaged.
Ill-applied modernity can also be seen at the onsen (hot springs), which were one of Japan's most wonderful traditions. There are thousands of onsen in romantic environments beside rivers, atop mountains, and along pine-tree-clad seacoasts; they once boasted lovely buildings of wood and bamboo, exquisite service, healing hot waters, and the chance to relax amid beautiful natural scenery. You could lie in the hot water by an open window and watch the mist rise from the river or the trees around you.
Well, the onsen are still there, the hot water still flows, and the service is still good. But the ambience that made onsen uniquely relaxing is vanishing with the mists. Old onsen have been restored with lots of chrome and Astroturf, all the slapdash additions that damaged Kyoto; meanwhile, new onsen tend to look like cheap business hotels plopped down