If the administrators of Kyoto could so thoroughly efface the beauty of its urban center in forty years, one can well imagine the fate that befell other cities and towns in Japan. Kyoto's eagerness to escape from itself is matched across Japan. It is not only Edo-period wooden buildings that get bulldozed. Tens of thousands of graceful Victorian or Art Deco brick schools, banks, theaters, and hotels survived World War II, but of the 13,000 that the Architectural Institute of Japan listed as historical monuments in 1980, one-third have already disappeared.

In 1968, the management of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo tore down a world-renowned masterpiece of modern architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright's Old Imperial, one of the few buildings in that district of Tokyo to have survived the Great Earthquake of 1924. Wright's fantastical hotel, built of pitted stone carved with Art Deco and Mayan-style decoration, fell to the wrecker's ball without a peep of protest from Japan's cultural authorities. The hotel management was so desperate to make its point about being ruthlessly indifferent to the past – the same point made by the erection of Kyoto Tower in 1964 – that when Wright's widow gave a speech at the hotel in 1967 protesting its destruction, workers were ordered to enter the hall and remove bricks even as she spoke.

Here is another example: Fukagawa, a neighborhood of willow-lined canals that was one of the ten scenic sights of prewar Tokyo, is today another concrete jumble. As a Japanese journalist reported in The Japan Times: «Work has started on the last remaining canals; soon they will be choked, buried and flattened with cement. As appeasement or perhaps a feeble attempt at apology, the Tokyo government turned some of the concrete space into playgrounds, equipped with a couple of swings and what must be the world's tackiest jungle gyms.»

The jungle gyms are the obligatory Dogs and Demons touch. So important are such monuments to modern Japanese culture that I have taken them up as a subject in their own right in chapters 9 and 10. One could formulate a rule of thumb to describe the fate of Japan's old places: whenever something essential and beautiful has been destroyed, the bureaucracy will erect a monument to commemorate it. Perhaps the tacky gyms are a form of atonement. It was traditional in old Japan to raise kuyo or tsuka, « atonement tombstones,» for animals and objects that humans had thrown away or used harshly for their own purposes. Thus, by Ueno Pond in Tokyo, one will find a stone monolith, the tsuka for needles, donated by seamstresses who had used needles until they were worn out and then discarded them. There are also kuyo for fish and turtle bones, sponsored by fishermen and cooks, and so forth. In that sense, Kyoto Tower and the New Kyoto Station are massive kuyo raised in honor of a civilization that was thrown away. Japan's towns and villages are littered with kuyo monuments donated by an uneasy officialdom, shiny new tombstones for lost beauty.

Decades ago, when the decline of Fukagawa began, the novelist Nagai Kafu wrote: «I look at Fukagawa and I see the sadness of a woman no longer beautiful, whom men had used and abused to suit their needs. She's tired, stripped of her dignity, waiting to die.» The same sad words could be written about most of Japan's historical neighborhoods, for the burying of the old Japan under slipshod new buildings is by no means limited to big cities. It is a simple objective truth that, with the exception of a few corners preserved for tourists in showpiece cities such as Kurashiki (and even in Kurashiki, says Mason Florence, «travelers must shut their eyes between the station and the three preserved blocks»), today not a single beautiful town – and only a handful of villages – is left in all Japan. There is the occasional old castle, or a moat with lotuses, but step ten feet away and you are back in the world of aluminum and electric wires.

The phenomenon is not, of course, unique to Japan. China, Korea, Thailand, and other fast-growing economies in Asia are not far behind. Modernity came to East Asia so rapidly that it was as if there simply wasn't enough time to learn how to adapt its old houses and cities to modern comforts. And old meant dirty, dark, poor, and inconvenient.

The lovely traditional houses of Japan, Thailand, and Indonesia may have been reasonably clean and comfortable when they were occupied by people who were close to nature and were temperamentally suited to living in such houses. But for people accustomed to modern lifestyles, one must admit that these houses are often prone to mud and dust, dark, and inconvenient; they need to be restored with amenities to make them clean, airy, and comfortable. Kyoto residents complain, «Why do we have to live in a museum? Do people expect us to go back to the Edo period and also wear chonmage [traditional hairdos, such as sumo wrestlers wear]?»

The tragedy is that people in Kyoto have equated preserving thе old city with enduring the old lifestyle, when in fact it is eminently possible to restore Asia's old houses in harmony with the needs of a modern society. With the right skills, the work can even be inexpensive, at least compared with the cost of building a new house. You don't need to go back in time, fold yourself into a kimono, and have your hair styled in a chonmage in order to live in an old house, yet, lacking the experience (that is, the technology) to combine old and new, people find it difficult to imagine this. This story, which was related to me by Marc Keane, a garden designer living in Kyoto, gives a sense of the prevailing ethos:

I visited an old couple the other day who live in an old house-a magnificent old house with fine wood and workmanship throughout, even a pillar in the tokonoma alcove made of rare black sandalwood. We were trying to convince the couple, who plan to tear the house down, sell half the property and live in a pre-fab house on the other half, that their house was very special, an important heritage in fact, and with a little fixing in the kitchen and bath, would be the best for them to live in. The lady of the house said an interesting thing-a horrible thing really. She said that her friends, and members of the local community (you know, the local nosy old grandmothers), on seeing the way they live, in an old wooden house with a bath using a wood-stove, and an old earthen-floored kitchen, would say to her, «Mrs. Nishimura, your lifestyle is so un-cultured.» Can you get that: «UN-cultured.» Everything about their lifestyle, for me, is an embodiment of the best of Japanese culture, and yet many people (in fact the old couple themselves, I guess) see the very same things as «un-cultured.»

Keane suggested a little fixing of the kitchen and bath, advising the couple to preserve but modernize the house. Sadly, most Japanese today don't realize that this is possible – at least, not without overwhelming expense and difficulty.

You will hear similar responses from people living in traditional structures almost anywhere in East Asia. Interestingly, in nations that were formerly European colonies, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, the influence of the West somewhat mitigates the situation. Although this influence is a contentious issue, the West has had centuries of experience in coping with modern technology. Ex-colonies of European powers inherited Western-trained civil-service regimes, and it is partly due to this that beautiful modern cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur have developed.

Outside Japan, the demands of international tourism have encouraged architects to experiment with designs that successfully combine Asian art with new technologies. It is common to find foreigners like Marc Keane in Kyoto, who appreciate traditional culture with an enthusiasm that local people have forgotten-and who inspire them to rediscover and re-create their own heritage. Thailand, with its remarkable openness to foreigners, has benefited from the efforts of people such as the legendary silk magnate Jim Thompson, whose mansion in Bangkok, built in the traditional Thai style, has exerted an incalculable influence on Thai designers and architects. Bali, a bastion of thriving ancient culture, and with a relatively unspoiled environment, likewise owes its salvation partly to generations of Dutch, German, American, and Australian residents who loved the island and joined the Balinese in preserving it.

Occasionally one sees foreigners having an impact in certain out-of-the-way niches in Japan, such as Iya Valley in Shikoku, where the Chiiori Project, a volunteer movement centered on Mason Florence's and my old farmhouse, is drawing numerous foreign travelers and exchange teachers. The sight of all these foreigners trekking to such a remote place is reawakening local interest in reviving Iya's natural beauty. Another case is that of Sarah Cummings, a native of Pennsylvania, who took on the management of a traditional sake brewery in the town of Obuse in Nagano Prefecture. Although the brewery was housed in a spectacular old building, its sales were declining and the business was on the verge of failure when Cummings joined. To everyone's surprise, she chose tradition as her sales pitch. She refurbished the building and got the company to brew its sake in authentic cedar vats for the first time in fifty years, becoming one of only a few firms in the country to do so. Today the brewery is thriving and its sake has achieved a national reputation. «I was surprised when Sarah chose a traditional ceramic bottle,» said the brewery's owner, «but it appeals to young people. Since wine has become so popular, it's really important to attract a new generation to sake.»

Unfortunately, Iya Valleys and Sarah Cummingses are all too rare. Japan chose, for better or for worse, to go it alone. Japan generally has not allowed foreigners to play an important role in its society, and, given its neglected tourist industry, it sees few foreign travelers. The idea that «old equals inconvenient» set hard and fast in Japan, along with many other ideas from the 1960s, since the country was ah but closed to Western influence in every area except industrial technology. Since then, having failed to train designers and city planners to adapt the old architecture to new lifestyles, the idea has become self-reinforcing. Most old buildings in Japan are unloved and have been repaired cheaply, if at all; they are indeed uncomfortable and inconvenient. Unfortunately, so are the new buildings, which are constructed of cheap materials, cramped, poorly lit, badly heated, and uninsulated. Because of its pervasive fear of discomfort and inconvenience, the Japanese public never quite feels that it has escaped the squalid old lifestyle.