Visual pollution in Japan has resulted from the same vicious cycle we have seen in other aspects of its life: in the case of the environment, construction breeds dependence on more construction; in banking, deception leads to greater deception; in urban design, ugliness gradually comes to be taken for granted, which leads to ignorance and thus to more ugliness. An architect friend of mine, Lucilo Pena, helped to design the Four Seasons Hotel in Barcelona, in which the Japanese department store Sogo was one of the investors. Lucilo tells of acrimonious discussions between the hotel operators and the Japanese owners concerning signs, for Sogo wanted a huge flashing sign on the outside of the hotel, and it seemed impossible to convince Sogo's management that in Barcelona this was considered a plan that would damage the ambience of the city and lower the prestige of both the department-store owners and the hotel. Sogo gave in when its representatives realized that in the West citizens might resort to boycotts of a company that flouts local concerns, but it came as a shock.
In Japan, there are almost no zoning laws, no taxation policy, and no sign control to regulate urban or rural development – so giant billboards tower over rice paddies, vending machines stand in the lobbies of ritzy hotels and Kabuki theaters, and bright plastic signs hang in even the most stylish restaurants. People who are born, grow up, live, and work in such an environment know of no alternative; and the result is that the general public, as well as planners and architects, think this kind of look is an inherent part of modernization. It is thus not surprising that Hitachi would blazon its name across the Bangkok skyline when few American, European, Thai, or Chinese corporations feel the need to do so.
Zoning – the political and social science of making the most efficient use of different types of land – is a crucial skill that Japan's bureaucrats have failed to master. The distinction between industrial, commercial, residential, and agricultural neighborhoods hardly exists. In the residential neighborhood of Kameoka, near Kyoto, where I live, I need walk only about five minutes to find-right next door to suburban homes and rice paddies – a used-car lot, a gigantic rusting fuel tank filled with nobody knows what, a plot surrounded by a prefabricated steel wall twenty feet high in which construction waste is dumped, rows of vending machines with blinking lights, a golf driving range half the size of a football field surrounded by wire mesh hung from giant pylons and illuminated at night, a vast number of signs of every type (pinned onto trees, propped up by the roadside), and, of course, a pachinko parlor, with towers of spiraling neon and flashing strobe lights. This is the typical level of visual pollution in the suburban neighborhood of a Japanese city, and nobody considers it odd, because every structure scrupulously obeys the rules: FAR ratios, footprint quotas, allowable building materials, location of telephone poles, and so forth. It is the Through the Looking-Glass world of bureaucratic management: there is no lack of regulation, yet chaos reigns.
Many of the regulations exist to protect cartels of architectural firms and construction companies. Others, such as those that effectively prohibit residential homes from having basements, are cobweb-covered relics. Their original purpose is lost in time, yet no one considers changing them. Indeed, the complete inflexibility of these rules and regulations creates more of the clutter and crowding that characterize Japanese cities.
Kyoto, for example, had a golden opportunity in the 1960s, when it was working on renovations for the Olympic Games. Had it zoned the city differently north and south at the train station (most of the historic center lies north of the station), the old center could easily have been protected and saved. To the south, where most of the buildings except a few large temples were poor, shoddily built, and ripe for redevelopment, Kyoto could have created a new satellite city – like La Defense, the supermodern suburb of Paris. But of course this did not happen. Instead, bureaucrats applied rigid FAR and height limitations everywhere, which led to a cycle of rising land prices, high inheritance taxes, and destruction in the city center, and at the same time prevented the development of good new architecture. Rather than having a truly new city in the south and a beautiful old city in the north, Kyoto today has neither new nor old but a conglomeration where everything looks equally shabby.
The two regulations that have had the most devastating effect on Japan's cities are those concerning the inheritance tax and the so-called Sunlight Law. Japan's inheritance tax is one of the highest in the world; as land prices have risen continually for a half century, inheritors of old houses almost invariably have to sell them in order to pay the tax. For the purchasers, these prices are so high that it is uneconomical to leave single-story old wooden buildings standing, so they tear them down and build apartment blocks. The Tax Office grants very few exemptions for buildings in historic neighborhoods, and the tax guidelines, determined by the central government, are inflexible, so that local administrations cannot easily structure their own neighborhood systems. Faced with laws like this, Kyoto didn't stand a chance.
The Sunlight Law was passed in the 1960s as a well-meaning effort to restrict high buildings that would shroud their neighbors in shade. It created a formula whereby buildings must fit within a diagonal «shadow line,» which means that the higher they rise the narrower they must be. This accounts for the stepped, pyramidal look of most Japanese buildings. Americans made a similar mistake in the 1960s and 1970s, when «street setback» was a magic phrase. This had disastrous effects on thousands of American cities, for it turns out that buildings that come right up to the sidewalk create an intimacy that setback structures lack. New York City learned this to its cost when zoning laws encouraged the sterile office towers on the Avenue of the Americas, which are set back from the street and fronted by wide vacant plazas.
Japan's Sunlight Law also restricts building because on a given plot of land a higher structure often cannot use to the full whatever is allowed by local FAR regulations. As a result,Tokyo has an average FAR of less than 2 to 1, the lowest of any world capital, including Paris and Rome. «Low density» sounds attractive – until one realizes what this means for the inhabitants of a metropolis with 30 million people: the highest land prices in the world, cramped apartments and homes (millions of Tokyo residents dwell in spaces even smaller than the official minimum of fifty square meters), exorbitant commercial rents, and crowded commuter trains that must transport people several hours from their homes to work. With buildable land in Tokyo expensive and scarce, the Construction Ministry favors plans by big construction companies to build giant cities underground. From their underground apartments, it imagines, residents will speed on subways to subterranean office buildings. So effective is the Sunlight Law that future homeowners in Tokyo need never see the light of day.
Japan is the world's only advanced country that does not bury telephone cables and electric lines. While a handful of neighborhoods, such as the central Marunouchi business district of Tokyo, have succeeded in laying cables underground, these are mostly expensive showpieces. Even the most advanced new residential districts customarily do not bury cables, as I discovered when I was working on the Sumitomo Trust Bank/Trammell Crow project on Kobe's Rokko Island in 1987. Kobe City touted the island-brand-new landfill in the harbor – as a supermodern, futuristic neighborhood. With telephone poles. In the countryside, a «priority policy» dictates that until every large city has buried every one of its power lines, which the Construction Ministry is encouraging them not to do, no rural area can do the same with support from the central government.