In the opening scene of the Kabuki play Akoya, the courtesan Akoya walks sadly along the hanamichi, the raised walkway that passes through the audience, to the stage where she faces trial. The chanters describe her beauty in captivity as «the image of a wilted peony in a bamboo vase, unable to draw water up her stem.» This verse neatly captures the irony of modern Japan: the contrast between its depressed internal condition and the wealth of industrial capital and cultural heritage it has to draw on. There is water in abundance, but something about the system prevents it from being drawn up the stem.

A friend of mine once remarked, «What is modernism? It's not the city but how you live in the city. It's not the factory but how you manage and maintain the factory.» Technology involves far more than products running off an assembly line or computer software. It could be defined as the science of managing things properly. How to design a museum exhibit, how to manage a zoo, how to renovate an old building, how to build and operate a vacation resort – these all involve very sophisticated techniques and fuel multibillion-dollar industries in Europe and the United States. None of them exist in Japan today except in the most primitive form.

Yet managing things properly is what traditional Japan did in a way that put virtually every other culture of the world to shame. The tea ceremony, for example, is nothing but an intense course in the art of managing things. The way to pick up or put down a tea bowl involves sensitivity to many different factors: the harmonious angle at which the bowl sits on the tatami brings pleasure to the eye; turning the bowl is a symbolic ritual that connects us to deep cultural roots; when the bowl is set down, the movements of the arm, elbow, and hand are utterly, even ruthlessly, efficient. Well into the twentieth century, Japan perfected quality control on the assembly line and built the world's largest and most efficient urban public-transportation systems. The care for detail and the devotion to work are certainly there – Japan has all the ingredients necessary to become the world's supremely modern country. Yet this hasn't happened.

The reason the flower is unable to draw water up its stem is that Japan has resisted change; and modernism, by definition, requires new ideas and new ways of doing things to keep up with a changing world. When the cold gray hand of the bureaucracy settled on the nation in the mid-1960s, Japan's way of doing things froze. Quality control in manufacturing and public transportation continued to develop, but Japan ignored many of the drastic changes that swept the rest of the world in ensuing decades.

Let's look at the technology of renovating old buildings. Recently, I read an article by Philip Langdon in the November 1998 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine, describing the renovation of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, one of Yale's older but more run-down buildings. The $22 million renovation included raising the roof to accommodate new faculty offices; installing high-tech devices in the basement; building a new facade to the main entrance with an attractive handicapped-accessible ramp, a tiered lecture hall with data ports, electrical outlets for every seat, and the latest in sound and lighting systems. At the same time, the university stipulated that the renovation «aintain the traditional architectural character of the undergraduate teaching spaces.»

To that end, most of the technological improvements are tucked out of sight inside floors, walls, and ceilings, while the old chalkboards-which were removed, refurbished, and then reinstalled-provide reassurance that the character of the classrooms remains intact. Where new hallways have been constructed or old corridors have been extended, their new oak-veneer paneling looks practically identical to the solid oak of the original halls. Where windows have been replaced, the new panes recreate the appearance of old.

What Yale is doing to its buildings – at a cost of $1 billion over a twenty-year period – involves some very complex processes. At the Sterling Memorial Library's periodical reading room, University Librarian Scott Bennett points out, «We literally tore the outside skin of the building off.» Yale removed the stone surface, installed modern anti-moisture systems, and then reattached the stone.

Here is how renovation is done the Japanese way: Starting around 1990, an heiress named Nakahara Kiiko purchased eight chateaus in France. She and her husband then proceeded to strip them of their interior decorations, after which they carted away statues and marble basins from the gardens and cut down the trees, leaving the properties in ruins. The saddest case was the Chateau de Louveciennes, in suburban Paris, where Madame du Barry once entertained King Louis XV. The New York Times reported:

Today, the celebrated dining room that the courtesan had lined with finely carved oak wainscoting is just a shell of bricks and plaster, stripped of the paneling. In the salons and bedrooms the marble fireplaces have been ripped out of the walls leaving large black hollows. The three-floor chateau seems a haunted place now, with shutters flapping in the wind and dark puddles on the wooden landing when rain drips through the roof.

In January 1996, French authorities jailed Nakahara on charges of «despoiling national heritage.» Concerned about her adverse effect on Japan's image in Europe, the Japanese press pilloried her for her gross insensitivity to history and cultural heritage.

Yet one could argue that Nakahara was treated unfairly. What she did to the chateaus in France is nothing other than standard practice in Japan. It is exactly what businesses, homeowners, and civic officials have done and are still doing in Kyoto, Nara, and every other city, and to tens of thousands of great houses and temples across the country. In uprooting old trees and stripping historical buildings, Nakahara was only following the customs of her native land.

In seeking the roots of Nakahara's actions, the best place to begin is the city of Kyoto. Professor Tayama Reishi of Bukkyo University in Kyoto has written:

How must Kyoto appear to one who has never visited here? Passersby clad in kimono going to and fro along quiet narrow streets between temples, rows of houses with black wooden lattices, glimpsed over tiled roofs the mountains covered with cherry blossoms, streams trickling at one's feet. Well, even if we don't believe such a city really exists, nobody can help imagining such things about a town one is about to visit for the first time. The travelers expectations must be high – until the moment when he alights from the Bullet Train.

He leaves the station, catches his first sight of Kyoto Tower, and from there on it is all shattered dreams. Kyoto Hotel cuts off the view of the Higashiyama hills, and big signs on cheap clothing stores hide Mount Daimonji. Red vending machines are lined up in front of the temples, Nijo Castle rings with taped announcements, tour buses are parked right in front of the main halls of temples. It's the same miserable scenery you see everywhere in Japan, and the same people oblivious to it all. And so the traveler spends his day in Kyoto surrounded by boredom.

It wasn't always miserable scenery and boredom. In fact, the city that the traveler dreams of was still largely intact as recently as thirty years ago. When I asked the art collector David Kidd why he chose to live in Japan, he told me the story of his arrival in Kyoto in 1952: it was Christmas Eve, and snow was falling on tiled roofs and narrow streets lined with wood-latticed shops and houses. It was a dreamlike evening, quiet, a scene from an ink painting. Kyoto worked its magic. That magic had entranced pilgrims for centuries, and was celebrated in scrolls and screens, prints and pottery, songs and poetry. The haiku poet Basho sighed, «Even when in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto.» With its refined architecture shaped by the tea ceremony and the court nobility, and its many crafts of weaving, paper-making, lacquer, and others, Kyoto was regarded by people around the world as a cultural city on a par with Florence or Rome.

In the last months of World War II, the U.S. military command decided to remove Kyoto from the air-raid list. Although Kyoto was a major population center of some strategic importance, the State Department argued that it was more than just a Japanese city-it was a treasure of the world. As a result, old Kyoto survived at the end of the war, a city of wooden houses, its streets lined with bamboo trellises. The first thing an arriving visitor saw as a train pulled in was the sweeping roof of Higashi Honganji Temple, like a great wave rising out of the sea of tiled roofs.

To the eyes of city officials, however, this sea of tiled roofs was an embarrassment, a sign to the world that Kyoto was old and impoverished. They felt the need to prove to the world that the city was «modern,» and in order to do this, at the time of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the city administration arranged for the construction of Kyoto Tower, a needle-shaped, garish, red-and-white building erected beside the railroad station. Hundreds of thousands of residents petitioned against this building, but the city government pushed the project through. It was a symbolic stake through the heart.

Kyoto's history since then has been one long effort to sweep away its past. Thirty-five years later, most of its old wooden houses have been torn down and replaced with shiny tile and aluminum. I have seen ancient gardens flattened, historic inns bulldozed, and mansions as gorgeous as any French chateau razed. The city of Kyoto legislates only the most primitive protection of old neighborhoods, and the national tax bureau allows almost no incentives for protecting historic properties. The destruction goes on as these words are being written. The Kyoto art dealer Morimoto Yasuyoshi tells me that when he takes coffee at a shop on the corner of Kita-Oji and Kawaramachi streets, he sees trucks driving by laden with rubble from demolished old houses almost daily.

In June 1997, my friend Mason Florence (the author of Kyoto City Guide ) and I took a week off to drive one of those trucks ourselves, loaded with timbers from an Edo-period kura (storehouse) in the heart of the old city. Its owners were tearing it down to replace it with a new house, and they gave the wooden framework to me and my friends. We took it up to Iya Valley, on the island of Shikoku, where it sits in storage; one day we will rebuild it next to the farmhouse Mason and I own there. In 1998, Mason salvaged another truckload of beautiful old beams and sliding doors from the wreckage of one of Kyoto's largest traditional inns. But Mason's saving material from these old buildings is an exception, for by and large the owners of old structures in Kyoto simply discard the material of these ancient houses and inns as rubbish. At the antiques auctions there, old cabinets and lacquered doors sell so cheaply (or, more often, don't sell at all) that dealers pile them up outside in the rain, hardly bothering to bring them indoors for shelter.