Thus in the first round of machi okoshi in Yokota, an unnecessary elevated highway, specially designed to be twice the required length and have double the destructive effect, wiped out a scenic valley. In the second round, advice to restore the town square and temple went unheeded, and phone lines remained above ground. The third round was the construction of another monument: Yokota built a large museum to the art of sword-making, crowned by another Orochi, this one a helix of eight entwined stainless-steel tubes topped with dragon heads. This, too, failed to make Yokota an attractive place to live in or visit, and its depopulation continues. Soon it will be time for round four, and what form the next Orochi monument will take is anyone's guess.
«Dogs are difficult; demons are easy.» Dogs are the simple, unobtrusive factors in our surroundings that are so difficult to get right; demons are grandiose surface statements. Anyone can draw a demon. Dogs are zoning, sign control, the planting and tending of trees, burial of electric wires, protection of historic neighborhoods, comfortable and attractive residential design, environmentally friendly resorts. Demons are Orochi bridges and multipurpose halls-any kind of monument, the bigger, more expensive, and more outrageous the better: «cultural» halls shaped in ovals or in diamonds, as ships or as flames; museums in huge tubes with rock gardens plastered on their curving walls, museums made to look like galactic starships, museums with no artworks at all. Rural villages have meeting halls and sports stadiums big enough for the Olympics. Cities fill in their harbors for futuristic metropolises as if they expected their size to double or triple.
When the Construction State meets disappointed civic pride, the results are such as the world has never seen before. Consider once again an example from Kyoto. When Japan Railways sponsored a design competition in the early 1990s for the New Kyoto Station (completed in 1998), it attracted attention worldwide. Here was an opportunity to make up for the damage done by the Kyoto Tower in 1965 and to re-establish Kyoto as Japan's cultural capital. The proposed designs split into two main categories: there were those who tried to incorporate traditional Kyoto forms, for example, making the station look like a large-scale Sanjusangendo, or Hall of the Thousand Buddhas, one long narrow building with a tiled roof. As trains arrived in such a station, passengers would feel they were entering into Kyoto's past. The second category was of resolute modernism. The architect Ando Tadao designed a square arch (rather like the arch at La Defense in Paris), using a modern form but drawing inspiration from Kyoto's history. When Japan Railways built the old station, which runs east-west for blocks, it cut Karasuma Road, Kyoto's north-south axis, in two, effectively severing the northern and southern halves of the city. With the proposed arch, Karasuma Road would become whole again, reunifying the split city, and the arch would be a reminder that Rashomon Gate, the fabled south gate of the ancient capital, had once stood on this site.
Japan Railways and the city authorities turned all these proposals down, however, and chose one designed by Professor Hara Hiroshi of Tokyo University. It divides the city as before, and does away with every reference to Kyoto's history and culture. The New Kyoto Station is a dull gray block towering over the neighborhood, so massive that Kyoto residents have taken to calling it «the battleship.» The pride of the station is a tall glass-fronted entrance lobby that resembles an airport building.
Professor Hara has a reputation as an expert on ethnic architecture, yet at a glance nothing here would appear to be particularly «ethnic.» But there are signs of the monumental architecture peculiar to modern Japan, now as ethnic as kimono. We've seen it all before in the Orochi Loop, the aggressive denial of-even attack on-the surroundings, the bombastic style, the architectural equivalent of sound coming from loudspeakers turned up to maximum volume. As Kyoto slides deeper into mediocrity, the station tries to impress by its sheer size. And, last, there are the cheap, functionless decorations. A plain gray box might not have been so bad, but Hara couldn't stop himself from adding things: miniature arches are built into the structure (apparently as a sop to Ando); the back of the station features external yellow stairways, red piping, and rows of porthole-like windows pasted onto the facade; and inside the giant entry lobby, escalators leading nowhere soar toward the sky. These are all features in which we see the influence of manga, Japanese comic books. The manga effect is reinforced in front of the station, where the first thing an arriving passenger sees is the Kyoto Mascot, a totem pole topped by big-eyed baby-faced children, molded in plastic. It's the equivalent of arriving in Florence and being greeted by Donald Duck.
The station's crowning glory is its so-called Cultural Zone, featuring a multipurpose entertainment center. As real culture disappears, these expressions of artificial culture, in the shape of cultural zones and halls, are a major source of revenue for the construction industry and hence a national imperative. Every year billions of dollars flow to such public halls; by 1995, Japan had 2,121 theaters and halls (up from 848 in 1979), and by 1997 it had 3,449 museums, the result of a museum-building rush unequaled by any other nation in the world.
Unquestioning foreign observers new to Japan often accept these halls and museums at face value. But most of these institutions satisfy no need aside from the construction industry's intention to keep building at public expense. The Kabuki actor Bando Tamasaburo says, «A multipurpose hall is a no-purpose hall.» At the theaters, events are staged that are planned and paid for by government agencies, attended mostly by people to whom they distribute free tickets. The museums are echo chambers, empty of visitors, with a few broken pots found in archaeological digs or obscure contemporary artworks chosen by the architect.
For Japanese architects, cultural halls are a leading source of income, and designing them is a dream. The buildings need not harmonize with their surroundings, nor need they provide a community service or indeed fulfill any recognizable function, and this gives architects a free hand, to put it mildly The result is a plethora of buildings that are fanciful to the point of being bizarre. In Fujiidera City, on the outskirts of Osaka, one can find an office building in the shape of a huge concrete boat. In Toyodama, a town with a population of 5,000, the Home of Culture is a ¥1.8 billion extravaganza in the shape of a multi-storied white mosque. The Desert on the Moon Hall (¥400 million), on the Miyado coast, is shaped like an Arabian palace, complete with bronze statues of camel riders in an artificial dunescape.
One can find many of the architectural wonders of the world in a monument somewhere in Japan. Tokyo boasts a French chateau at Ebisu Garden Place, a Gaudi-style walkway with curving mounds inset with broken tiles at Tama New Town, and a German village in Takanawa, Minato-ku Ward. «However,» as the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho says, «just look around you at the sea of signs in kanji characters and kana alphabets, and in a moment your good mood crashes to earth in real-life Japan. Alas, however hard we strive to bring in foreign culture, in the end it is nothing but 'foreign-style.' On the other hand, maybe the inability to do anything for real could be called 'Japanese-style.' »