Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [99]
Yokota had a beautiful 1920s railroad station facing a nice town square, but in the 1970s the city fathers had rebuilt the shops with their backs turned to the station and the square. West suggested that they resurrect the town square and station, which would give back some life to the center of Yokota, and the citizens supported this, saying they were sick of having to hold their annual festival in the town-hall parking lot. But the officials wouldn't hear of this, as it didn't use enough money. They also dismissed the suggestion to bury telephone wires, because it went against the Construction Ministry's agenda for rural areas. Someone proposed refurbishing an ancient local temple, where the priest, a mahjongg addict, had gambled everything away to local gangsters, who stripped the temple bare, right down to the ornamental tiles on the roof, and left it to rot. But the local officials showed no interest in fixing it up or restoring it.
Thus in the first round of machi okoshi in Yokota, an unnecessary elevated highway, specially designed to be twice the required length and have double the destructive effect, wiped out a scenic valley. In the second round, advice to restore the town square and temple went unheeded, and phone lines remained above ground. The third round was the construction of another monument: Yokota built a large museum to the art of sword-making, crowned by another Orochi, this one a helix of eight entwined stainless-steel tubes topped with dragon heads. This, too, failed to make Yokota an attractive place to live in or visit, and its depopulation continues. Soon it will be time for round four, and what form the next Orochi monument will take is anyone's guess.
«Dogs are difficult; demons are easy.» Dogs are the simple, unobtrusive factors in our surroundings that are so difficult to get right; demons are grandiose surface statements. Anyone can draw a demon. Dogs are zoning, sign control, the planting and tending of trees, burial of electric wires, protection of historic neighborhoods, comfortable and attractive residential design, environmentally friendly resorts. Demons are Orochi bridges and multipurpose halls-any kind of monument, the bigger, more expensive, and more outrageous the better: «cultural» halls shaped in ovals or in diamonds, as ships or as flames; museums in huge tubes with rock gardens plastered on their curving walls, museums made to look like galactic starships, museums with no artworks at all. Rural villages have meeting halls and sports stadiums big enough for the Olympics. Cities fill in their harbors for futuristic metropolises as if they expected their size to double or triple.
When the Construction State meets disappointed civic pride, the results are such as the world has never seen before. Consider once again an example from Kyoto. When Japan Railways sponsored a design competition in the early 1990s for the New Kyoto Station (completed in 1998), it attracted attention worldwide. Here was an opportunity to make up for the damage done by the Kyoto Tower in 1965 and to re-establish Kyoto as Japan's cultural capital. The proposed designs split into two main categories: there were those who tried to incorporate traditional Kyoto forms, for example, making the station look like a large-scale Sanjusangendo, or Hall of the Thousand Buddhas, one long narrow building with a tiled roof. As trains arrived in such a station, passengers would feel they were entering into Kyoto's past. The second category was of resolute modernism. The architect Ando Tadao designed a square arch (rather like the arch at La Defense in Paris), using a modern form but drawing inspiration from Kyoto's history. When Japan Railways built the old station, which runs east-west for blocks, it cut Karasuma Road, Kyoto's north-south axis, in two, effectively severing the northern and southern