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!
8. New Cities
Stricken on a journey
My dreams go wandering round
Withered fields.
– Matsuo Basho (1694)
Since the entire thrust of development in Kyoto since its Tower was built has been to escape from the old and build a modern city, it seems only fair to measure the place by its own standards. What if Kyoto were to wipe away its ancient heritage entirely? A dedicated modernist might feel this was justified if it meant creating a city of leading-edge contemporary culture.
This is what has happened in Hong Kong, where a tree-lined harbor filled with quaint junks gave way to a cityscape of dazzling office towers, one of the wonders of the modern world. The same may well happen in Shanghai and Bangkok, where developers have treated the charming old city centers brutally, but where dramatic new buildings are rising from the dust-hotels, restaurants, office towers, and apartments that vie with the best in Hong Kong or New York.
This did not happen – and is not happening – in Japan. The ugly view from the top of the Grand Hotel in Kyoto is less a consequence of the loss of the old than a result of the low quality of the new.
Nothing could run more contrary to the trend of Western commentary on Japan for the past fifty years than the argument that Japan has failed in its pursuit of modernity. However, that is the truth. Instead of an advanced new civilization, Japan has tenement cities and a culture of cheap industrial junk. Homes are cramped and poorly built; public environments, whether in hotels, zoos, parks, apartment buildings, hospitals, or libraries, are sadly lacking in visual pleasure and basic comforts, at least compared with those available in other advanced nations. This failure to achieve quality in the new is perhaps Japan's greatest tragedy-and it lies at the very core of its cultural meltdown today.
It's the unexpected result, a devastating boomerang, of the policy that economists and social scientists once believed was Japan's greatest strength: the policy of «poor people, strong state»; the policy of having its citizens accept a low level of consumption and limited outlets for pleasure and relaxation in their personal lives so that the nation's resources could be invested in unlimited industrial expansion. That happened, and in the process Japan nurtured a bureaucracy uneducated in modern technologies and several generations of Japanese who are ignorant of what true modernity might offer-ignorant, one might say, of the finer things of modern life. And this has had not only cultural but economic consequences.
To get some sense of contrast with other nations, consider Malaysia. As you drive between Port Klang on the Strait of Malacca and the capital, Kuala Lumpur, the highway passes through spectacular valleys of rocky cliffs. While building this road, Malaysia called in a French landscaping firm to advise on how to make it beautiful, including how to sculpt the cliffs through which the highway passes. The result of their efforts is that there was no unnecessary destruction, no concrete in sight, and the cliffs appear to be natural. It's a classic example of modern technology, in the true sense of the word, in road building. Such a highway does not exist the length or breadth of Japan, for calling in foreign consultants would have been unthinkable, and road-building techniques froze in about 1970.
In downtown Kuala Lumpur itself, high-rises are springing up everywhere, and the city is beginning to take on the sleek, elegant look one also sees in Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, and parts of Bangkok but rarely in cluttered Tokyo. By looking closely, one can discern the details that make the difference.
One is the lack of junk on rooftops. In Japan, electrical machinery and air-conditioning units appear to have been tacked onto rooftops as afterthoughts. It is possible to put unsightly mechanical components inside a building's internal structure and to integrate them architecturally, but in Japan a regulation dating from the 1950s and never altered punishes a builder for using internal space for such machinery by subtracting that space from his allowable floor-area ratio (FAR).
Japan has no regulations limiting billboards; in fact, its construction laws actively encourage billboards on top of buildings because of another regulation concerning height limits. Builders may increase the height of their structures by a story or two if the added height is merely empty boxes on the roofs. Naturally, the next step is to mount enormous logos and advertisements on these boxes. Back in Kuala Lumpur, you will not see many such signs, and most of the ones you do observe belong to Japanese-owned businesses and were designed by Japanese architectural firms that know no other way. Looking out of my apartment window in Bangkok, I can see dozens of skyscrapers, only one of which sports a large rooftop billboard – Hitachi. In Japan, there is so little understanding of sign control that Hitachi has even made a deal with the Cultural Agency to place advertisements beside all buildings designated as National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties. In Kyoto, you will see scores of metal Hitachi signs placed prominently in Zen gardens and before the gate of every historical temple and pavilion. A short walk through the grounds of Daitokuji, the fountainhead of Zen arts, yields a count of no fewer than twenty-five Hitachi signs, with four in one sub-temple, Daisen-In, alone.
Other East Asian cities-Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong-go far beyond Bangkok in regulating advertisements; Jakarta boasts some of East Asia's best sign control through a taxation policy that makes the raising and maintenance of large ads expensive. In Japan, in contrast, architects learn nothing about signage in their university courses. During the 1980s, the concept of «visual pollution» spread through the international design community, and attention began to be paid to observations that bright, flashing lights disturb the peace of residential neighborhoods, garish signs lower the tone of five-star hotels, fluorescent lights destroy the romance of parks at nighttime, and towering billboards detract from the beauty of scenic countryside. The science of avoiding and ameliorating this sort of visual pollution is a modern technology.