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.