The restricting of the population to cramped, expensive, and now characterless prefabricated housing made of low-grade industrial materials suited Japan's policy of benefiting old-line manufacturing industries at all costs. However, new industries like interior design can prosper only when people are comfortable and educated enough to develop a higher level of taste.
The results are evident in hotels and resorts. While Kyoto is famed for its lovely old inns, the city has no modern hotel of international quality In Paris, Rome, Peking, or Bangkok, one can find modern hotels that incorporate local materials and design in such a way as to provide a sense of place, but Kyoto boasts not a single such instution. The big hotels (such as the Kyoto, Miyako, Brighton, and Prince), with their aluminum, granite, and glass lobbies, deny Kyoto's wood-and-paper culture in every way. Compare the wooden lattices and tree-lined entrance to the Sukhotai Hotel in Bangkok with the wall of dirty concrete and the narrow cement steps leading up to the Miyako Hotel, Kyoto's most prestigious. Stroll through the gardens filled with ponds and pavilions at the Inter-Continental or the Hilton in Bangkok, and then look at Kyoto Hotel's public plaza, a tiny barren area of granite paving surrounded by a yellow plastic bamboo fence. Drink a leisurely cup of coffee amid the greenery under the soaring teak-timbered vaults of the Hyatt in Bangkok, and then visit Kyoto's Prince, the hotel where most conventioneers stay, with its low ceilings and almost every surface of plastic and aluminum. For a nightcap, you could view the Bangkok skyline from the fiftieth floor of the Westin Hotel – surrounded by polished teak and rosewood paneling; or you could enjoy the floodlit rock and waterfall in the garden of the Royal Hotel in Kyoto – the rock being made of molded green fiberglass. One finds the same lack of quality in Tokyo, a city with only two attractive hotels, the Park Hyatt and the Four Seasons. In the case of the Park Hyatt, the low-key lighting, the elegant use of wood in hallways and elevators-all this was accomplished by shutting out Japanese designers. «We couldn't allow Japanese designers to be involved,» the management told me. «They wanted to fill it with aluminum and fluorescent lights.» And in the Four Seasons, where I noticed recently that the gold screens on the walls were antiques of high quality, I knew instantly that no Japanese designer would have chosen them. At the front desk, I asked who did the decor, and was told «designers from the Regent Chain in Hong Kong.»
So far we have been speaking of big city hotels with hundreds of rooms; when it comes to small garden hotels or boutique hotels, the contrast with other advanced nations is even more striking. There was a brief period in the late 1980s, at the height of the Bubble, when price was no object, when a few brave developers created hotels of striking originality, such as Kuzawa Mitushiro's colorful И Palazzo in Fukuoka, done in collaboration with Aldo Rossi. But with the collapse of the Bubble, developers settled back into the convenient old pattern of «business hotels,» with their cramped rooms, flat decor, and limited facilities. It would be fair to say that the very concept of a boutique hotel has yet to exist in Japan. There is no such thing as New York's witty Paragon or W hotels, nothing with the minimalist chic of Ian Schrager's creations-just the standard shiny marble lobbies one sees everywhere, with rooms designed with basic industrial efficiency. «But hotels are not just places to sleep,» says Schrager. «You're supposed to have fun there.»
Today's younger Japanese designers, who have grown up in landscapes such as the one the Maerkle family saw when they drove from Kobe to Izumi-Otsu, or the equally horrifying vista welcoming visitors at Narita Airport when they take the Narita express train into Tokyo, work accordingly. As Lycurgus predicted, people proportion «their beds to their houses, and their coverlets to their beds, and the rest of their goods and furniture to these.» Standardized shiny surfaces are what people really like and feel comfortable in. The victory of the industrial mode in Japanese life can be sensed in health spas, which, far from being relaxing natural retreats, look rather like clinics, with bright white corridors and attendants in surgical smocks. Boutique hotels, even were they to be introduced into Japan, would be bound to fail.
Tokyo and Osaka may boast a handful of attractive international hotels designed by foreigners, but the Japanese countryside remains solidly in the hands of domestic designers. Japanese resorts are so ill designed, so destructive of their surroundings, that in May 1997 the Environment Agency reported that 30 percent of all those surveyed did not live up to the agency's assessment criteria. By American, European, or Indonesian standards, that number would rise to more than 90 percent.
A good example of the sort of thing that happens can be seen in Iya Valley. Iya has Japan's last vine bridge, built by Heike refugees in the twelfth century and rehung with fresh vines regularly ever since. The Vine Bridge is Iya's most famous monument, visited by more than 500,000 people every year. What happened to it? The River Bureau flattened the riverbanks below with concrete; the Forestry Agency constructed a metal bridge right next to it; and resort builders then covered the surrounding valley slopes with concrete boxes and billboards. Travelers who have come from distant prefectures to get a view of the romance of the Heike line up on the metal bridge and take photographs, carefully framing the Vine Bridge to screen out the concrete and the billboards. The choice of accommodation is between minshuku (bed-and-breakfast in old homes) or a few big tourist hotels. Minshuku in old thatch-roofed houses sound attractive – and indeed would be, except that the interiors have been redone with synthetic veneer and fluorescent lights, and yet they still lack modern conveniences such as clean flush toilets and heated bathrooms. So a visit to the Vine Bridge in Iya is only, and just, that: one has seen the Vine Bridge, but there is little in the experience to relax the body or please the heart. In this, Iya'sVine Bridge symbolizes the anomalous fate of old cities like Kyoto and of rural scenery throughout Japan. Iya's mountains and gorges are nothing less than spectacular, the Vine Bridge itself a romance. Rich possibilities for cultural experience and travel are simply there for the taking – and yet a failure of «tourism technology» causes them to be ignored or damaged.
Ill-applied modernity can also be seen at the onsen (hot springs), which were one of Japan's most wonderful traditions. There are thousands of onsen in romantic environments beside rivers, atop mountains, and along pine-tree-clad seacoasts; they once boasted lovely buildings of wood and bamboo, exquisite service, healing hot waters, and the chance to relax amid beautiful natural scenery. You could lie in the hot water by an open window and watch the mist rise from the river or the trees around you.
Well, the onsen are still there, the hot water still flows, and the service is still good. But the ambience that made onsen uniquely relaxing is vanishing with the mists. Old onsen have been restored with lots of chrome and Astroturf, all the slapdash additions that damaged Kyoto; meanwhile, new onsen tend to look like cheap business hotels plopped down in the countryside or, at best, like bland white-and-gray bank lobbies.
It sometimes happens that enlightened owners manage to preserve the mood of an old onsen or design an attractive new one, but nothing can replace the lost rivers, mountains, and sea-coasts in which the onsen stand. Hardly a hot spring the length and breadth of Japan has not been in some way degraded by ugly, ill-designed resorts or civil-engineering projects. Robert Neff, the head of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, writing about his search for «hidden onsen» far from the beaten track, summed up the situation sadly: