Dogs and Demons

In the opening scene of the Kabuki play Akoya, the courtesan Akoya walks sadly along the hanamichi, the raised walkway that passes through the audience, to the stage where she faces trial. The chanters describe her beauty in captivity as «the image of a wilted peony in a bamboo vase, unable to draw water up her stem.» This verse neatly captures the irony of modern Japan: the contrast between its depressed internal condition and the wealth of industrial capital and cultural heritage it has to draw on. There is water in abundance, but something about the system prevents it from being drawn up the stem.

A friend of mine once remarked, «What is modernism? It's not the city but how you live in the city. It's not the factory but how you manage and maintain the factory.» Technology involves far more than products running off an assembly line or computer software. It could be defined as the science of managing things properly. How to design a museum exhibit, how to manage a zoo, how to renovate an old building, how to build and operate a vacation resort – these all involve very sophisticated techniques and fuel multibillion-dollar industries in Europe and the United States. None of them exist in Japan today except in the most primitive form.

Yet managing things properly is what traditional Japan did in a way that put virtually every other culture of the world to shame. The tea ceremony, for example, is nothing but an intense course in the art of managing things. The way to pick up or put down a tea bowl involves sensitivity to many different factors: the harmonious angle at which the bowl sits on the tatami brings pleasure to the eye; turning the bowl is a symbolic ritual that connects us to deep cultural roots; when the bowl is set down, the movements of the arm, elbow, and hand are utterly, even ruthlessly, efficient. Well into the twentieth century, Japan perfected quality control on the assembly line and built the world's largest and most efficient urban public-transportation systems. The care for detail and the devotion to work are certainly there – Japan has all the ingredients necessary to become the world's supremely modern country. Yet this hasn't happened.

The reason the flower is unable to draw water up its stem is that Japan has resisted change; and modernism, by definition, requires new ideas and new ways of doing things to keep up with a changing world. When the cold gray hand of the bureaucracy settled on the nation in the mid-1960s, Japan's way of doing things froze. Quality control in manufacturing and public transportation continued to develop, but Japan ignored many of the drastic changes that swept the rest of the world in ensuing decades.

Let's look at the technology of renovating old buildings. Recently, I read an article by Philip Langdon in the November 1998 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine, describing the renovation of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, one of Yale's older but more run-down buildings. The $22 million renovation included raising the roof to accommodate new faculty offices; installing high-tech devices in the basement; building a new facade to the main entrance with an attractive handicapped-accessible ramp, a tiered lecture hall with data ports, electrical outlets for every seat, and the latest in sound and lighting systems. At the same time, the university stipulated that the renovation «aintain the traditional architectural character of the undergraduate teaching spaces.»

To that end, most of the technological improvements are tucked out of sight inside floors, walls, and ceilings, while the old chalkboards-which were removed, refurbished, and then reinstalled-provide reassurance that the character of the classrooms remains intact. Where new hallways have been constructed or old corridors have been extended, their new oak-veneer paneling looks practically identical to the solid oak of the original halls. Where windows have been replaced, the new panes recreate the appearance of old.

What Yale is doing to its buildings – at a cost of $1 billion over a twenty-year period – involves some very complex processes. At the Sterling Memorial Library's periodical reading room, University Librarian Scott Bennett points out, «We literally tore the outside skin of the building off.» Yale removed the stone surface, installed modern anti-moisture systems, and then reattached the stone.

Here is how renovation is done the Japanese way: Starting around 1990, an heiress named Nakahara Kiiko purchased eight chateaus in France. She and her husband then proceeded to strip them of their interior decorations, after which they carted away statues and marble basins from the gardens and cut down the trees, leaving the properties in ruins. The saddest case was the Chateau de Louveciennes, in suburban Paris, where Madame du Barry once entertained King Louis XV. The New York Times reported:

Today, the celebrated dining room that the courtesan had lined with finely carved oak wainscoting is just a shell of bricks and plaster, stripped of the paneling. In the salons and bedrooms the marble fireplaces have been ripped out of the walls leaving large black hollows. The three-floor chateau seems a haunted place now, with shutters flapping in the wind and dark puddles on the wooden landing when rain drips through the roof.

In January 1996, French authorities jailed Nakahara on charges of «despoiling national heritage.» Concerned about her adverse effect on Japan's image in Europe, the Japanese press pilloried her for her gross insensitivity to history and cultural heritage.

Yet one could argue that Nakahara was treated unfairly. What she did to the chateaus in France is nothing other than standard practice in Japan. It is exactly what businesses, homeowners, and civic officials have done and are still doing in Kyoto, Nara, and every other city, and to tens of thousands of great houses and temples across the country. In uprooting old trees and stripping historical buildings, Nakahara was only following the customs of her native land.

In seeking the roots of Nakahara's actions, the best place to begin is the city of Kyoto. Professor Tayama Reishi of Bukkyo University in Kyoto has written:

How must Kyoto appear to one who has never visited here? Passersby clad in kimono going to and fro along quiet narrow streets between temples, rows of houses with black wooden lattices, glimpsed over tiled roofs the mountains covered with cherry blossoms, streams trickling at one's feet. Well, even if we don't believe such a city really exists, nobody can help imagining such things about a town one is about to visit for the first time. The travelers expectations must be high – until the moment when he alights from the Bullet Train.

He leaves the station, catches his first sight of Kyoto Tower, and from there on it is all shattered dreams. Kyoto Hotel cuts off the view of the Higashiyama hills, and big signs on cheap clothing stores hide Mount Daimonji. Red vending machines are lined up in front of the temples, Nijo Castle rings with taped announcements, tour buses are parked right in front of the main halls of temples. It's the same miserable scenery you see everywhere in Japan, and the same people oblivious to it all. And so the traveler spends his day in Kyoto surrounded by boredom.

It wasn't always miserable scenery and boredom. In fact, the city that the traveler dreams of was still largely intact as recently as thirty years ago. When I asked the art collector David Kidd why he chose to live in Japan, he told me the story of his arrival in Kyoto in 1952: it was Christmas Eve, and snow was falling on tiled roofs and narrow streets lined with wood-latticed shops and houses. It was a dreamlike evening, quiet, a scene from an ink painting. Kyoto worked its magic. That magic had entranced pilgrims for centuries, and was celebrated in scrolls and screens, prints and pottery, songs and poetry. The haiku poet Basho sighed, «Even when in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto.» With its refined architecture shaped by the tea ceremony and the court nobility, and its many crafts of weaving, paper-making, lacquer, and others, Kyoto was regarded by people around the world as a cultural city on a par with Florence or Rome.

In the last months of World War II, the U.S. military command decided to remove Kyoto from the air-raid list. Although Kyoto was a major population center of some strategic importance, the State Department argued that it was more than just a Japanese city-it was a treasure of the world. As a result, old Kyoto survived at the end of the war, a city of wooden houses, its streets lined with bamboo trellises. The first thing an arriving visitor saw as a train pulled in was the sweeping roof of Higashi Honganji Temple, like a great wave rising out of the sea of tiled roofs.

To the eyes of city officials, however, this sea of tiled roofs was an embarrassment, a sign to the world that Kyoto was old and impoverished. They felt the need to prove to the world that the city was «modern,» and in order to do this, at the time of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the city administration arranged for the construction of Kyoto Tower, a needle-shaped, garish, red-and-white building erected beside the railroad station. Hundreds of thousands of residents petitioned against this building, but the city government pushed the project through. It was a symbolic stake through the heart.

Kyoto's history since then has been one long effort to sweep away its past. Thirty-five years later, most of its old wooden houses have been torn down and replaced with shiny tile and aluminum. I have seen ancient gardens flattened, historic inns bulldozed, and mansions as gorgeous as any French chateau razed. The city of Kyoto legislates only the most primitive protection of old neighborhoods, and the national tax bureau allows almost no incentives for protecting historic properties. The destruction goes on as these words are being written. The Kyoto art dealer Morimoto Yasuyoshi tells me that when he takes coffee at a shop on the corner of Kita-Oji and Kawaramachi streets, he sees trucks driving by laden with rubble from demolished old houses almost daily.

In June 1997, my friend Mason Florence (the author of Kyoto City Guide) and I took a week off to drive one of those trucks ourselves, loaded with timbers from an Edo-period kura (storehouse) in the heart of the old city. Its owners were tearing it down to replace it with a new house, and they gave the wooden framework to me and my friends. We took it up to Iya Valley, on the island of Shikoku, where it sits in storage; one day we will rebuild it next to the farmhouse Mason and I own there. In 1998, Mason salvaged another truckload of beautiful old beams and sliding doors from the wreckage of one of Kyoto's largest traditional inns. But Mason's saving material from these old buildings is an exception, for by and large the owners of old structures in Kyoto simply discard the material of these ancient houses and inns as rubbish. At the antiques auctions there, old cabinets and lacquered doors sell so cheaply (or, more often, don't sell at all) that dealers pile them up outside in the rain, hardly bothering to bring them indoors for shelter.

Readers may be pardoned for wondering if the situation could possibly be so bad, since Japan's destruction of its cities and houses has received very little press abroad. One would have thought that a book like Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One would take these issues into account, for surely any measurement of being «number one» would include the quality of the rural and urban environment.

Yet it is one of the mysteries of Western experts writing about modern Japan that they happily forgive circumstances they would never countenance in their own countries. They would hardly see the destruction of Paris or Rome or San Francisco as praiseworthy, or describe the bureaucrats who ordered it as «elite» public servants taking a «long-term view.»

Could it be that in their hearts they still see the Japanese quaint natives struggling out of poverty, not really entitled to the sophisticated quality of life that is taken for granted in the West?

The heart of foreigners' tendency to go soft on Japan is an overlay of two conflicting images: even as they praise the natio for its economic success, they see Japan with pitying eyes, as a struggling, «developing» country. It's a natural mistake, given that Japan is essentially a postindustrial state with pre-industrial goals. Westerners feel some guilt and sympathy for Japan's devastation at the end of the war, and there is also the fact that Japan's economic system is configured to benefit industry and not to improve citizens' lives, with the result that its cities and countryside really do seem backward and shabby by Western standards. But Japan as «number one» and as a poor «developing» country cannot both be true. If Japan is truly an advanced society-even, as some have suggested, the world's most advanced society and a model for us all-then the destruction о heritage and environment that is accepted as a necessity in newly developing countries should not be happening here.

The tearing down of the old city of Kyoto was by no means limited to the 1950s and 1960s, when every city in the world made similar mistakes. The city's destruction really gathered speed in the 1990s, by which time Japan was a mature economy, with a per-capita income exceeding that of the United States. According to the International Society to Save Kyoto, more than forty thousand old wooden homes disappeared from the inner city of Kyoto in that decade alone. What remains is the temples seen on picture postcards, preserved along the outskirts. In the city where people live and work, the bamboo lattices and wood have largely disappeared. With no guidelines to ensure that new construction harmonizes with the old, owners have crudely remodeled wooden houses with tin and plastic, and where people have gone to the trouble of preserving an old house, they find themselves submerged in a morass of electrical wires, flashing signs, and pachinko. Professor Tayama of Bukkyo University in Kyoto describes how to do away with the beauty of an old city:

In its scale, and for its natural beauty, this city [Kyoto] had a close to ideal environment. Now let's see what we can do to destroy this environment: First let's chop up the soft line of the hills with high apartment buildings with laundry hanging from their terraces. As for places where we can't build anything, not to worry, we can darken the sky by stringing a web of telephone wires and electric lines. Let's have cars drive through Daitokuji Temple. Let's take Mount Hiei, the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism, and turn it into a parking lot, and on its peak let's build an entertainment park. . . . Let's have gasoline stations and city buses broadcast electronic noise under the name of «music»... and let's paint the buses with designs of children's graffiti. If we make sure that all the buildings are mismatched and brightly colored, that will be very effective... And to finish it off, let's fill the town with people who happily put up with unpleasantness. This Kyoto I have described is actually a fairly generous portrait.

In the early 1990s, there was a popular movement against the rebuilding of the Kyoto Hotel. City Hall next door had waived height limitations so that the rebuilt hotel, as with Kyoto Tower twenty-five years earlier, would set a precedent for the construction of more high buildings in the heart of town. Despite vigorous opposition by citizens' groups and temples such as Kiyomizu Temple, the hotel went up – and, to everyone's surprise, this grim granite edifice, wholly at odds with the traditional scale of the city, ended up looking not particularly out of place. For, in the meantime, the city had changed: a grim granite edifice fit right in.

Kyoto Hotel was just light introductory music for the triumphal march that came next in the shape of the New Kyoto Station, completed in 1997. This construction, one of Japan's most grandiose modern monuments, built at the cost of ¥150 billion ($1.3 billion), dwarfs everything that came before. Straddling the railway tracks along almost half a mile, its massive gray bulk towers over the city. True to Kyoto's postwar tradition, it aggressively denies the history of the place, almost shouting this denial to the world. A local architect, Mori Katsutoshi, says sadly, «In a historic city like this, you have to think of the quality of the design. This looks almost like some kind of storehouse, or a prison.»

Except, of course, there are Dogs and Demons touches. Tawdry artificial «culture» replaces the real thing. As reported in Far Eastern Economic Review, "Visitors can enjoy the classic Kyoto image of cherry-blossom petals falling without ever going outside: A coffee shop features a light show that imitates the effect. The Theatre 1200 turns Kyoto's 1,200 years of history into a musical that promises 'first-class hi-tech entertainment.' Afterwards visitors can dine at an Italian restaurant with frescoes that include a copy of Raphael's 'School of Athens.' »

A woman named Kato Shidzue, writing on her hundredth birthday in The Japan Times, lamented: «There must be many foreigners who come to Japan full of dreams about the country's scenery after having read Lafcadio Hearn only to be surprised and upset at the sight of the Japanese so heartlessly destroying their own beautiful and unparalleled cultural legacy.» Sadly, Ms. Kato is wrong. One looks in vain in the foreign media for expressions of surprise or concern at what has happened to Kyoto.

It would seem that Western visitors fail to distinguish – perhaps it is part of their condescension toward Asia – between well-preserved tourist sites and a thoroughly unpleasant cityscape. The fact that Kyoto has nice gardens on its periphery is enough to make them overlook the unwelcoming mass of glass and concrete cubes in the rest of the city. Yet though gardens and temples are wonderful things, world-heritage sites do not a city make. Streets and houses make a city, and in Kyoto, with the exception of three or four indifferently cared for historic blocks, the old streets have lost their integrity.

In Paris or Venice, travelers do not overlook the city and focus only on its cultural sites. Who goes to Paris just to see the Louvre, or to Venice only for the Basilica of San Marco? In both these cities, the joy lies in walking the streets, «taking the air,» eating at a nondescript hole-in-the-wall somewhere on a picturesque alley where old textures, worn stone, cast-iron street lamps, lapping water, and carved wooden shutters regale the senses with a host of impressions. On the other hand, perhaps visitors to today's Kyoto are to be excused for not expecting much. What they see must seem inevitable. How could they imagine that the destruction was deliberate, that it did not happen because of economic necessity, and that the worst of it took place after 1980?

It's part of the phenomenon of foreigners' exotic dreams of Japan. Mason Florence says, «People come to Japan seeking enchantment, and they are bound and determined to be enchanted. If you arrived in Paris or Rome and saw something like the new station you would be utterly revolted, but for most foreigners coming to Kyoto it merely whets their appetite to find the old Japan they know must be there. When they finally get to Honen-In Temple and see a monk raking the gravel under maple trees, they say to themselves, 'Yes, it does exist. I've found it!' And their enthusiasm for Kyoto ever after knows no bounds. The minute they walk out of Honen-In they're back in the jumbly modern city, but it doesn't impinge on the retina – they're still looking at the dream."

Even so, it is true that in the end Kato Shidzue is right: however attached they may be to the dream of old Japan, visitors are in fact largely not happy in Kyoto. There has been a steady decrease in the number of tourists, both domestic and foreign, during the past ten years, and those who do come visit largely out of what one might call «cultural duty» to do the round of famous temples; it's rare for visitors to come to Kyoto to rest or merely enjoy a vacation. A vacation is by definition a period of taking life easy, but in Japan beauty no longer comes easily; you have to work hard to see it. Kyoto, despite its tremendous cultural riches, has not become an international tourist mecca like Paris or Venice. There are few visitors from abroad, and their stays are short. After they've seen the specially preserved historical sites, what other reason is there to stay on?

For the reader curious to see with his own eyes the reality of today's Kyoto, I advise taking the elevator to the top of the Grand Hotel, near the railroad station, which is more or less geographically at the center of the city. Examine all 360 degrees of the view: with the exception of Toji Pagoda and a bit of the Honganji Temple roof, all one sees is a dense jumble of dingy concrete buildings stretching in every direction, a cityscape that could fairly be described as one of the drearier sights of the modern world. It is hard to believe that one is looking at Kyoto.

Beyond the jumble is a ring of green hills, mercifully spared development, but the urban blight does not stop there. To the south, the industrial sprawl stretches, unbroken, to Osaka and the coast of the Inland Sea. Across the hills and to the east lies another jumble of concrete boxes called Yamashina, and the same landscape continues interminably, past Yamashina to the drab metropolis of Nagoya, home to millions of people, but very nearly devoid of architectural or cultural interest. And on lt goes for hundreds of miles, all the way to Tokyo, which is only mildly more interesting to look at than Nagoya. When Robert MacNeil looked out of the train window during his 1996 tour of Japan and felt dismay at the sight of «the formless, brutal, utilitarian jumble, unplanned, with tunnels easier on the eyes,» he was confronting an aspect of Japan that is key to its modern crisis.

If the administrators of Kyoto could so thoroughly efface the beauty of its urban center in forty years, one can well imagine the fate that befell other cities and towns in Japan. Kyoto's eagerness to escape from itself is matched across Japan. It is not only Edo-period wooden buildings that get bulldozed. Tens of thousands of graceful Victorian or Art Deco brick schools, banks, theaters, and hotels survived World War II, but of the 13,000 that the Architectural Institute of Japan listed as historical monuments in 1980, one-third have already disappeared.

In 1968, the management of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo tore down a world-renowned masterpiece of modern architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright's Old Imperial, one of the few buildings in that district of Tokyo to have survived the Great Earthquake of 1924. Wright's fantastical hotel, built of pitted stone carved with Art Deco and Mayan-style decoration, fell to the wrecker's ball without a peep of protest from Japan's cultural authorities. The hotel management was so desperate to make its point about being ruthlessly indifferent to the past – the same point made by the erection of Kyoto Tower in 1964 – that when Wright's widow gave a speech at the hotel in 1967 protesting its destruction, workers were ordered to enter the hall and remove bricks even as she spoke.

Here is another example: Fukagawa, a neighborhood of willow-lined canals that was one of the ten scenic sights of prewar Tokyo, is today another concrete jumble. As a Japanese journalist reported in The Japan Times: «Work has started on the last remaining canals; soon they will be choked, buried and flattened with cement. As appeasement or perhaps a feeble attempt at apology, the Tokyo government turned some of the concrete space into playgrounds, equipped with a couple of swings and what must be the world's tackiest jungle gyms.»

The jungle gyms are the obligatory Dogs and Demons touch. So important are such monuments to modern Japanese culture that I have taken them up as a subject in their own right in chapters 9 and 10. One could formulate a rule of thumb to describe the fate of Japan's old places: whenever something essential and beautiful has been destroyed, the bureaucracy will erect a monument to commemorate it. Perhaps the tacky gyms are a form of atonement. It was traditional in old Japan to raise kuyo or tsuka, «atonement tombstones,» for animals and objects that humans had thrown away or used harshly for their own purposes. Thus, by Ueno Pond in Tokyo, one will find a stone monolith, the tsuka for needles, donated by seamstresses who had used needles until they were worn out and then discarded them. There are also kuyo for fish and turtle bones, sponsored by fishermen and cooks, and so forth. In that sense, Kyoto Tower and the New Kyoto Station are massive kuyo raised in honor of a civilization that was thrown away. Japan's towns and villages are littered with kuyo monuments donated by an uneasy officialdom, shiny new tombstones for lost beauty.

Decades ago, when the decline of Fukagawa began, the novelist Nagai Kafu wrote: «I look at Fukagawa and I see the sadness of a woman no longer beautiful, whom men had used and abused to suit their needs. She's tired, stripped of her dignity, waiting to die.» The same sad words could be written about most of Japan's historical neighborhoods, for the burying of the old Japan under slipshod new buildings is by no means limited to big cities. It is a simple objective truth that, with the exception of a few corners preserved for tourists in showpiece cities such as Kurashiki (and even in Kurashiki, says Mason Florence, «travelers must shut their eyes between the station and the three preserved blocks»), today not a single beautiful town – and only a handful of villages – is left in all Japan. There is the occasional old castle, or a moat with lotuses, but step ten feet away and you are back in the world of aluminum and electric wires.

The phenomenon is not, of course, unique to Japan. China, Korea, Thailand, and other fast-growing economies in Asia are not far behind. Modernity came to East Asia so rapidly that it was as if there simply wasn't enough time to learn how to adapt its old houses and cities to modern comforts. And old meant dirty, dark, poor, and inconvenient.

The lovely traditional houses of Japan, Thailand, and Indonesia may have been reasonably clean and comfortable when they were occupied by people who were close to nature and were temperamentally suited to living in such houses. But for people accustomed to modern lifestyles, one must admit that these houses are often prone to mud and dust, dark, and inconvenient; they need to be restored with amenities to make them clean, airy, and comfortable. Kyoto residents complain, «Why do we have to live in a museum? Do people expect us to go back to the Edo period and also wear chonmage [traditional hairdos, such as sumo wrestlers wear]?»

The tragedy is that people in Kyoto have equated preserving thе old city with enduring the old lifestyle, when in fact it is eminently possible to restore Asia's old houses in harmony with the needs of a modern society. With the right skills, the work can even be inexpensive, at least compared with the cost of building a new house. You don't need to go back in time, fold yourself into a kimono, and have your hair styled in a chonmage in order to live in an old house, yet, lacking the experience (that is, the technology) to combine old and new, people find it difficult to imagine this. This story, which was related to me by Marc Keane, a garden designer living in Kyoto, gives a sense of the prevailing ethos:

I visited an old couple the other day who live in an old house-a magnificent old house with fine wood and workmanship throughout, even a pillar in the tokonoma alcove made of rare black sandalwood. We were trying to convince the couple, who plan to tear the house down, sell half the property and live in a pre-fab house on the other half, that their house was very special, an important heritage in fact, and with a little fixing in the kitchen and bath, would be the best for them to live in. The lady of the house said an interesting thing-a horrible thing really. She said that her friends, and members of the local community (you know, the local nosy old grandmothers), on seeing the way they live, in an old wooden house with a bath using a wood-stove, and an old earthen-floored kitchen, would say to her, «Mrs. Nishimura, your lifestyle is so un-cultured.» Can you get that: «UN-cultured.» Everything about their lifestyle, for me, is an embodiment of the best of Japanese culture, and yet many people (in fact the old couple themselves, I guess) see the very same things as «un-cultured.»

Keane suggested a little fixing of the kitchen and bath, advising the couple to preserve but modernize the house. Sadly, most Japanese today don't realize that this is possible – at least, not without overwhelming expense and difficulty.

You will hear similar responses from people living in traditional structures almost anywhere in East Asia. Interestingly, in nations that were formerly European colonies, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, the influence of the West somewhat mitigates the situation. Although this influence is a contentious issue, the West has had centuries of experience in coping with modern technology. Ex-colonies of European powers inherited Western-trained civil-service regimes, and it is partly due to this that beautiful modern cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur have developed.

Outside Japan, the demands of international tourism have encouraged architects to experiment with designs that successfully combine Asian art with new technologies. It is common to find foreigners like Marc Keane in Kyoto, who appreciate traditional culture with an enthusiasm that local people have forgotten-and who inspire them to rediscover and re-create their own heritage. Thailand, with its remarkable openness to foreigners, has benefited from the efforts of people such as the legendary silk magnate Jim Thompson, whose mansion in Bangkok, built in the traditional Thai style, has exerted an incalculable influence on Thai designers and architects. Bali, a bastion of thriving ancient culture, and with a relatively unspoiled environment, likewise owes its salvation partly to generations of Dutch, German, American, and Australian residents who loved the island and joined the Balinese in preserving it.

Occasionally one sees foreigners having an impact in certain out-of-the-way niches in Japan, such as Iya Valley in Shikoku, where the Chiiori Project, a volunteer movement centered on Mason Florence's and my old farmhouse, is drawing numerous foreign travelers and exchange teachers. The sight of all these foreigners trekking to such a remote place is reawakening local interest in reviving Iya's natural beauty. Another case is that of Sarah Cummings, a native of Pennsylvania, who took on the management of a traditional sake brewery in the town of Obuse in Nagano Prefecture. Although the brewery was housed in a spectacular old building, its sales were declining and the business was on the verge of failure when Cummings joined. To everyone's surprise, she chose tradition as her sales pitch. She refurbished the building and got the company to brew its sake in authentic cedar vats for the first time in fifty years, becoming one of only a few firms in the country to do so. Today the brewery is thriving and its sake has achieved a national reputation. «I was surprised when Sarah chose a traditional ceramic bottle,» said the brewery's owner, «but it appeals to young people. Since wine has become so popular, it's really important to attract a new generation to sake.»

Unfortunately, Iya Valleys and Sarah Cummingses are all too rare. Japan chose, for better or for worse, to go it alone. Japan generally has not allowed foreigners to play an important role in its society, and, given its neglected tourist industry, it sees few foreign travelers. The idea that «old equals inconvenient» set hard and fast in Japan, along with many other ideas from the 1960s, since the country was ah but closed to Western influence in every area except industrial technology. Since then, having failed to train designers and city planners to adapt the old architecture to new lifestyles, the idea has become self-reinforcing. Most old buildings in Japan are unloved and have been repaired cheaply, if at all; they are indeed uncomfortable and inconvenient. Unfortunately, so are the new buildings, which are constructed of cheap materials, cramped, poorly lit, badly heated, and uninsulated. Because of its pervasive fear of discomfort and inconvenience, the Japanese public never quite feels that it has escaped the squalid old lifestyle.

By now, the equation of old and natural with inconvenient is made obsessively. Recently, a village in Gifu built a hamlet in the prehistoric style as a tourist attraction. As part of the ambience, «inconvenience will be deliberately added,» said press reports. «There will be no electricity in the hamlet except for probably a naked bulb in the hut," said Okuda Toshio, a local official in charge of tourism. "We'd like visitors to have a rare experience of inconvenience and enjoy rich natural life.»

Meanwhile, of course, if you travel around Japan you will see many old temples that the Cultural Ministry has restored to perfection, not to mention flawlessly repaired and polished old houses in «Old House Parks.» The work that goes into these buildings is a credit to Japan's famed perfectionism. Yet these restored structures tend to be sterile, uncomfortable spaces; their restoration is predicated on the assumption that the buildings will never be used again. Or, if people continue to live in them, they must abandon most modern conveniences.

On the other hand, the National Museum or the Craft Museum in Tokyo are examples of historical buildings that also function as places to live or work, and both are shabby and poorly maintained. In the Cultural Ministry's main offices in Ueno, paint is peeling off the walls, dim fluorescent lights flicker, electric wires are pinned to the walls, gloomy offices are filled with piles of dusty papers, there is no proper heating or ventilation-all this in a grand historic building just a block from the National Museum.

The technology of restoration, when applied to living cities, involves sophisticated techniques of combining old and new, as was demonstrated by Yale University. Restoration technology in Japan came to a halt in about 1965, and since then officials have concentrated on ways of perfectly preserving the old. When it comes time to make an old building functional, or to build a new building with old touches that have warmth and texture, nobody knows what to do. Because of its frozen technology, Japan is torn between two extremes – old-shabby or new-sterile – and often a combination of the worst of both defines the look of modern Japan.

The preservation of vibrant old cities, sophisticated resort management, and high-quality residential and furniture design don't occur in a vacuum. Like all other arts and industries, they thrive only when watered with liberal amounts of money. The readiest source of such money would be tourism – an industry in which Japan has very conspicuously failed. The story of this failure is one of the most remarkable tales of modern Japan, for it occurred not through accident but as the result of a deliberate national policy.

During the boom years of postwar manufacturing, Japan's industrial leaders considered tourism a minor business, a sideshow to the real work of the nation, which was to mass-produce things. While Europe, the United States, and other Asian nations were developing sophisticated tourist infrastructures, Japan was trashing Kyoto, concreting Iya Valley, and designing resorts out of chrome and Formica.

Some economic writers have seen the lack of attention paid to tourism as a great success, for it was part of what has been called the «war on service-ization.» According to such views, any work except that of producing objects on an assembly line or building things is a waste of national effort. Tourism, according to this analysis, merely supports menial low-paid jobs, unlike manufacturing, which creates high-tech, high-salaried jobs. Such an argument presumes that everyone involved in tourism is a waiter or a maid, and neglects the economic activity generated by architects, landscape artists, makers of furniture and dining ware, painters and sculptors, electricians, manufacturers of lighting equipment, tour-company operators, hotel managers, taxi and charter companies, airline companies, lawyers, accountants, travel agents, performers and musicians, interior decorators, instructors of swimming, scuba diving, dance, and language, owners of souvenir shops and restaurants, printers, visual artists, PR and advertising firms, and much more. The «anti-services» theorists also forget that in Japan more than 10 percent of the workforce is engaged in low-paying, hard-hat construction work-financed by government subsidy-and there is no alternative industry to sop up the excess labor force.

In any case, it is undoubtedly true that Japan succeeded in repressing service industries. Unfortunately, some of the services, such as software design, communications, and banking, turned out to be enormous moneymakers. Tourism, likewise, surprised everybody by becoming transformed, overnight, from a lackluster wallflower into a glamorous starlet wooed by all.

Elsewhere in the world, an explosive growth of the international tourist industry began in the late 1980s and picked up pace in the 1990s. By the turn of the century, international tourism accounted for about 8 percent of the world's total export earnings, ahead of autos, chemicals, food, computers, electronics, and even oil and gas. The dramatic growth of tourism didn't fit into Japan's strategies, for it is based on mobility, a concept not dear to Japan's bureaucrats, whose complicated operational structures depend on borders being sacrosanct and people, ideas, and money not traveling easily. When newly enriched populations around the world began to travel by the tens of millions, it became clear that tourism would be one of the most important industries of the twenty-first century. Many states and cities in Europe and the United States, not to mention Asian countries such as Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, earn a considerable proportion of their income from tourism. The World Tourism Organization (WTO) estimates that 657 million tourists visited a foreign country in 1999, spending $532 billion.

Meanwhile, tourism within Japan has been dwindling across the board. In the years 1992-1996, the number of people traveling in their own country grew by less than 1 percent, and the value of domestic tours dropped 3 percent every year. For many local areas the fall has been severe, as, for example, on the Ise-Shima promontory of Mie Prefecture. Though it is home to Ise Shrine, Japan's holiest religious site, as well as Mikimoto pearl culturing, Ise-Shima s tourist arrivals in 1999 dropped to a twenty-year low, 40 percent below its height decades earlier. As domestic tourism waned, the number of Japanese traveling abroad nearly quadrupled, from 5 million in 1985 to almost 16 million people in 1998, soaring by 25 percent in just two years (1993-1995). By 1999 this had risen to a record 17 million, with no end to the increase in sight; significantly, a high percentage of these travelers were what the Japan Travel Bureau (JTB) calls «repeaters,» for whom travel abroad is a «habitual practice.» One reason the Japanese are making a habitual practice of travel abroad is that it is cheaper than travel in Japan: it costs roughly the same to fly from Tokyo to Hong Kong as to take the train from Tokyo to Kyoto. It costs me more to travel for a few days to Iya Valley in Shikoku than to spend a week in Honolulu.

Traveling abroad, the Japanese cannot help noticing that they find quality in hotel design and service, in life in general, which they cannot find at home. The contrast is especially strong in Southeast Asia, where resort design and management are highly advanced, and where hotels have been built with natural materials and a sensitive regard for local culture.

Dr. Johnson said, «To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.» In the decline of domestic travel lies the paradox of modern Japan: After decades of economic growth providing a per capita income many times their neighbors', the Japanese are not able to enjoy their own country. They are not happy at home^.

The number of foreign visitors to Japan, never large, has grown only sluggishly, from about 3.5 million in 1990 to 4.5 million in 1999. Japan ranks thirty-second in the world for foreign tourist arrivals, far behind Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia – and light-years behind China, Poland, or Mexico, each of which admits tens of millions of tourists every year. For all the literature about Japan's international role, it's sobering to realize that Japan has very nearly fallen off the tourist map. Every year more people visit Tunisia or Croatia than visit Japan. Another way to assess the amount of tourism is the number of foreign visitors against national population. In Japan, the ratio is only 3 percent, ranking eighty-second in the world. (The corresponding number for South Korea is more than double: 8 percent.)

The economic consequences of Japan's failed tourist industry are serious. In 1998, when 4.1 million foreign visitors came to Japan, the United States had 47 million visitors and France had 70 million. The United States earned $74 billion, France raised about $29.7, and Japan had only $4.1 billion. Looking at it from a balance-of-payments point of view, we see that U.S. citizens spent $51.2 billion in tourism abroad but earned $23 billion more than that. Japan, by contrast, spent $33 billion overseas but had a $29 billion tourism deficit.

It is commonly believed that among the many reasons tourism in Japan has lost its appeal to both foreigners and the Japanese people, the most important are the high yen and the cost of travel within Japan. But these arguments are not entirely persuasive. Well-heeled foreign travelers think nothing of spending thousands of dollars to stay in posh resorts in Phuket or Bali, but give Japan a wide berth. The real reason is that the rewards in scenic beauty and travel amenities are very slim. How ever much tourists enjoy a quiet Zen rock garden in Kyoto they confront a chaotic and trashy modern cityscape the minute they walk out of the garden. At the hotel, they will seek i n vain for anything to remind them that they are in Kyoto, and instead be oppressed by an environment of shiny polyester wallpaper and garish chandeliers. The visitor to a famous waterfall or stand of pine trees on a beach has to frame the view very closely to shut out the concrete embankments that are the universal mark of the modern Japanese landscape. No one will write an idyllic book about Japan like Summer in Provence or Under the Tuscan Sun.

With Japan's old-fashioned manufacturing and construction economy beginning to stagnate in the 1990s, it came as a jolt to the government to realize that perhaps services do matter to a modern economy, and a few officials began looking at the long-ignored issue of tourism. It quickly became clear that Kyoto, Nara, and Japan's once lovely rural villages were nearly beyond help, but there was hope: theme parks. Today, the Japanese flock to theme parks featuring reconstructed European cities, such as Huis Ten Bosch (Dutch) in Kyushu and Shima Spain in Mie, or a replica of Mount Rushmore (at one-third the scale) under construction in Tochigi Prefecture. These are spotless and completely artificial, like the enormous Seagaia complex in Miyazaki, which, though located on the coast, boasts a fully enclosed artificial beach. The number of adult tourists visiting these theme parks (close to 8 million touring Huis Ten Bosch and Shima Spain as early as 1994) wiU soon surpass the number visiting Kyoto. The designers of Huis Ten Bosch used natural materials such as rough bricks, incorporated sign control, buried power lines, and established design guidelines; with its lovingly tended lawns, it is much more appealing than a cluttered and unloved Kyoto. It would seem that Japan's premier tourist destinations will end up having nothing to do with its own culture, becoming watered-down copies of Western originals.

Obviously, these cannot have much appeal to Westerners, but the hope is that they will draw Asian tourists. «For Hong Kong's Wong Chun Chuen, [neither Mount Fuji nor Kyoto] compares with that hallowed sanctum of the Japanese soul, San-rio Puroland,» writes Tanikawa Miki. Sanrio Puroland is a mini-medieval Europe on the outskirts of Tokyo, built indoors with a nymphs' forest, floating riverboats, and cartoon characters such as Hello Kitty. Sanrio's 150,000 Asian visitors represented 10 percent of the total number of visitors in 1996, while at Huis Ten Bosch, Asian visitors numbered 330,000, about 8 percent of the total.

In January 1999, China ended its ban on visiting Japan, and many in the tourism industry see it as Japan's last great hope. «China has the potential to become our largest foreign market,» says Shimane Keiichi, the president of Japan Travel Bureau's subsidiary Asia Tourist Center. «China has a population of over 1.2 billion. If about 1 percent of Chinese a year come to Japan, we will get about 12 million visitors.» The long-term problem is that if tourism will depend on gimmicky theme parks, there is competition ahead when Hong Kong, Thailand, Korea, and Taiwan jump on that bandwagon. It bodes ill that the Japanese site that most travelers from mainland China want to see is Tokyo Disneyland, for at the beginning of 1999 Disney announced that it was negotiating to build a new Disneyland in or near Hong Kong.

Since badly conceived development is defacing beyond recognition the attractions that were unique to Japan, it is time to build new attractions, and this suits the Construction State. The government has announced its plans for another wave of halls and monuments. The Japan National Tourist Organization (a wing of the Transport Ministry) says that its Welcome Plan 21 involves «building a broad range of tourist attractions [italics mine]. For example, Japan could create rekishi kaido, or 'Japanese historic highways,' as well as theme districts around the country, complete with roads and international exchange facilities.» An example is the Ise Civil War Era Village, near the Grand Shrine of Ise, a wholly artificial medieval town that is meant to evoke Japan during the civil wars of the sixteenth century.

In the coming decades, we can look forward to the raising of hundreds of facilities designed specially for travelers under the banner of «international tourism.» Japan must build these monuments-that is a certainty, for the construction industry requires it. Typical of what the next wave will probably be is ASTY Tokushima, a monument that sits at the confluence of two rivers in the town of Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku. ASTY Tokushima features a multipurpose hall and the Tokushima Experience Hall, where, as the prefectural tourism bureau puts it, travelers can discover «passionate romantic Tokushima.» The passionate romantic experience includes the Yu-ing Theatre, where two robots perform traditional puppet-ballad drama, and a corner where visitors can gaze at photographs of Tokushima s scenery as it changes from season to season.

The end of the road for the domestic tourism industry is when it gives up on natural or historical attractions altogether and makes concrete itself an attraction. This is beginning to happen, for Japan Railways and local towns are sponsoring package tours of their dams and cement fortifications. Flyers advertising dam tours are often seen in subways and buses. «At Atsui Dam, everywhere you look, it's huge!» trumpets a publicity pamphlet from the Construction Ministry, urging travelers to join a bus tour and come and see cement being poured. «It's almost the last chance to see Atsui Dam while under construction,» the pamphlet says invitingly.

There is hardly the need to create fake tourist facilities or to rely on cement-pouring at dams for excitement when Japan has plenty of the real thing. Still, the modern malaise seems to have created an inability to distinguish between what is fake and what is real. Kyoto prides itself on being Japan's «cultural capital,» yet for the past fifty years it has put all its energies into destroying its old streets and houses. The Cultural Zone in the New Kyoto Station typifies the confusion; there a tearoom provides a light show of cherry blossoms instead of the real thing, and the restaurant features a copy of a Raphael fresco-«culture» with no particular connection to Kyoto at all.

Recent events in Kyoto show that a sizable minority of its citizens are angry about all this. In November 1998, one group miraculously succeeded in halting a very destructive project. The story began more than a year earlier, when the city office announced plans for its newest monument – right in the middle of Pontocho, one of the few historic city blocks left, a narrow street of bars and geisha houses running alongside the Kamo River, with the Sanjo Bridge to the north and Shijo Bridge to the south. The city proposed to demolish a segment in the middle of Pontocho and build a new bridge modeled on one that spans the Seine-not even one of the famous old bridges, with picturesque stone arches, but a modern structure of steel girders and tubular concrete pilings of no distinction. To add insult to injury, the city fathers actually proposed to call this copy the Pont des Arts, and enlisted the support of France's President Chirac, who in a classic case of foreign misunderstanding of Japan endorsed the project because it was French inspired. For many, this was the last straw. Professor Saino Hiroshi wrote:

Pontocho is part of our cultural heritage, representing Kyoto's cityscape based on a wood-based culture. It was built as an integral piece of the space along the river. [The new bridge] will conflict with traditional architecture such as Shimbashi [an old neighborhood on the other side of the river], and furthermore [Pontocho] has something rarely seen in other cities – traditional architecture extending continuously 600 meters down it – and one feels a sense of historical atmosphere. This will be split in two by a modern European-style bridge right in the middle of it, which will greatly decrease its cultural value.

This time the protests of Saino and others did not go unheard, as they had in 1964 with Kyoto Tower, in 1990 with Kyoto Hotel, and in 1994 with the design competition for the New Kyoto Station. The concerned citizens of Kyoto amazed everyone by gathering such overwhelming support for their anti-bridge petition that the project was discontinued.

For now. One must keep in mind that the Law of Concepts still applies: once a concept, always a concept. After all, the city has been planning this bridge for a long time, perhaps decades, so it canceled only the French design, reserving the option to build another bridge at Pontocho later, with a different design. Sooner or later, the old street of Pontocho is probably doomed.

Yet some parts of Kyoto could in fact be saved. Hundreds of temples and shrines and thousands of wooden homes still stand. The bones of the old city are still there. With well-planned zoning and design guidelines, some parts of it could be revived. And this is also true of other cities and towns in Japan, which still boast numerous wooden houses in the traditional style. For the most part, these houses are in a shambles, their roofs leaking and their pillars leaning, or fixed up with slapdash improvements featuring tin and vinyl. A house or a neighborhood that is in reasonably good repair can be picked out from its unsightly surroundings only with difficulty, but it is still there. It is another case of «a wilted peony in a bamboo vase, unable to draw water up her stem.» The water – a proud and ancient culture – exists in abundance.

Or does it? The supply of beautiful old places is not inexhaustible, and the time may come in the not very distant future when Japan will have damaged its old cities beyond hope. Some fear this time is already here. The Japanese realize that something is amiss. Recently, a television drama featured the following wry segment:

A hotel manager is entertaining a foreign guest, taking him to the finest restaurants and hotels. Finally, the foreigner says, «Fine meals, fine hotels, entertainment parks. I can get that anywhere in the world. But where can I see the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji portrayed by the print artist Hokusai? What about the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, where the feudal lords used to stay on their trips to Tokyo, and which featured in so many prints and paintings?» Of course, the Thirty-six Views and the Fifty-three Stations have completely disappeared. The hotel manager thinks he must have misunderstood. What could the foreigner be talking about? So at the end of the segment he decides to take English lessons!