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.