By now, the equation of old and natural with inconvenient is made obsessively. Recently, a village in Gifu built a hamlet in the prehistoric style as a tourist attraction. As part of the ambience, «inconvenience will be deliberately added,» said press reports. «There will be no electricity in the hamlet except for probably a naked bulb in the hut," said Okuda Toshio, a local official in charge of tourism. "We'd like visitors to have a rare experience of inconvenience and enjoy rich natural life.»

Meanwhile, of course, if you travel around Japan you will see many old temples that the Cultural Ministry has restored to perfection, not to mention flawlessly repaired and polished old houses in «Old House Parks.» The work that goes into these buildings is a credit to Japan's famed perfectionism. Yet these restored structures tend to be sterile, uncomfortable spaces; their restoration is predicated on the assumption that the buildings will never be used again. Or, if people continue to live in them, they must abandon most modern conveniences.

On the other hand, the National Museum or the Craft Museum in Tokyo are examples of historical buildings that also function as places to live or work, and both are shabby and poorly maintained. In the Cultural Ministry's main offices in Ueno, paint is peeling off the walls, dim fluorescent lights flicker, electric wires are pinned to the walls, gloomy offices are filled with piles of dusty papers, there is no proper heating or ventilation-all this in a grand historic building just a block from the National Museum.

The technology of restoration, when applied to living cities, involves sophisticated techniques of combining old and new, as was demonstrated by Yale University. Restoration technology in Japan came to a halt in about 1965, and since then officials have concentrated on ways of perfectly preserving the old. When it comes time to make an old building functional, or to build a new building with old touches that have warmth and texture, nobody knows what to do. Because of its frozen technology, Japan is torn between two extremes – old-shabby or new-sterile – and often a combination of the worst of both defines the look of modern Japan.

The preservation of vibrant old cities, sophisticated resort management, and high-quality residential and furniture design don't occur in a vacuum. Like all other arts and industries, they thrive only when watered with liberal amounts of money. The readiest source of such money would be tourism – an industry in which Japan has very conspicuously failed. The story of this failure is one of the most remarkable tales of modern Japan, for it occurred not through accident but as the result of a deliberate national policy.

During the boom years of postwar manufacturing, Japan's industrial leaders considered tourism a minor business, a sideshow to the real work of the nation, which was to mass-produce things. While Europe, the United States, and other Asian nations were developing sophisticated tourist infrastructures, Japan was trashing Kyoto, concreting Iya Valley, and designing resorts out of chrome and Formica.

Some economic writers have seen the lack of attention paid to tourism as a great success, for it was part of what has been called the «war on service-ization.» According to such views, any work except that of producing objects on an assembly line or building things is a waste of national effort. Tourism, according to this analysis, merely supports menial low-paid jobs, unlike manufacturing, which creates high-tech, high-salaried jobs. Such an argument presumes that everyone involved in tourism is a waiter or a maid, and neglects the economic activity generated by architects, landscape artists, makers of furniture and dining ware, painters and sculptors, electricians, manufacturers of lighting equipment, tour-company operators, hotel managers, taxi and charter companies, airline companies, lawyers, accountants, travel agents, performers and musicians, interior decorators, instructors of swimming, scuba diving, dance, and language, owners of souvenir shops and restaurants, printers, visual artists, PR and advertising firms, and much more. The «anti-services» theorists also forget that in Japan more than 10 percent of the workforce is engaged in low-paying, hard-hat construction work-financed by government subsidy-and there is no alternative industry to sop up the excess labor force.

In any case, it is undoubtedly true that Japan succeeded in repressing service industries. Unfortunately, some of the services, such as software design, communications, and banking, turned out to be enormous moneymakers. Tourism, likewise, surprised everybody by becoming transformed, overnight, from a lackluster wallflower into a glamorous starlet wooed by all.

Elsewhere in the world, an explosive growth of the international tourist industry began in the late 1980s and picked up pace in the 1990s. By the turn of the century, international tourism accounted for about 8 percent of the world's total export earnings, ahead of autos, chemicals, food, computers, electronics, and even oil and gas. The dramatic growth of tourism didn't fit into Japan's strategies, for it is based on mobility, a concept not dear to Japan's bureaucrats, whose complicated operational structures depend on borders being sacrosanct and people, ideas, and money not traveling easily. When newly enriched populations around the world began to travel by the tens of millions, it became clear that tourism would be one of the most important industries of the twenty-first century. Many states and cities in Europe and the United States, not to mention Asian countries such as Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, earn a considerable proportion of their income from tourism. The World Tourism Organization (WTO) estimates that 657 million tourists visited a foreign country in 1999, spending $532 billion.

Meanwhile, tourism within Japan has been dwindling across the board. In the years 1992-1996, the number of people traveling in their own country grew by less than 1 percent, and the value of domestic tours dropped 3 percent every year. For many local areas the fall has been severe, as, for example, on the Ise-Shima promontory of Mie Prefecture. Though it is home to Ise Shrine, Japan's holiest religious site, as well as Mikimoto pearl culturing, Ise-Shima s tourist arrivals in 1999 dropped to a twenty-year low, 40 percent below its height decades earlier. As domestic tourism waned, the number of Japanese traveling abroad nearly quadrupled, from 5 million in 1985 to almost 16 million people in 1998, soaring by 25 percent in just two years (1993-1995). By 1999 this had risen to a record 17 million, with no end to the increase in sight; significantly, a high percentage of these travelers were what the Japan Travel Bureau (JTB) calls «repeaters,» for whom travel abroad is a «habitual practice.» One reason the Japanese are making a habitual practice of travel abroad is that it is cheaper than travel in Japan: it costs roughly the same to fly from Tokyo to Hong Kong as to take the train from Tokyo to Kyoto. It costs me more to travel for a few days to Iya Valley in Shikoku than to spend a week in Honolulu.

Traveling abroad, the Japanese cannot help noticing that they find quality in hotel design and service, in life in general, which they cannot find at home. The contrast is especially strong in Southeast Asia, where resort design and management are highly advanced, and where hotels have been built with natural materials and a sensitive regard for local culture.

Dr. Johnson said, «To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.» In the decline of domestic travel lies the paradox of modern Japan: After decades of economic growth providing a per capita income many times their neighbors', the Japanese are not able to enjoy their own country. They are not happy at home^.

The number of foreign visitors to Japan, never large, has grown only sluggishly, from about 3.5 million in 1990 to 4.5 million in 1999. Japan ranks thirty-second in the world for foreign tourist arrivals, far behind Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia – and light-years behind China, Poland, or Mexico, each of which admits tens of millions of tourists every year. For all the literature about Japan's international role, it's sobering to realize that Japan has very nearly fallen off the tourist map. Every year more people visit Tunisia or Croatia than visit Japan. Another way to assess the amount of tourism is the number of foreign visitors against national population. In Japan, the ratio is only 3 percent, ranking eighty-second in the world. (The corresponding number for South Korea is more than double: 8 percent.)

The economic consequences of Japan's failed tourist industry are serious. In 1998, when 4.1 million foreign visitors came to Japan, the United States had 47 million visitors and France had 70 million. The United States earned $74 billion, France raised about $29.7, and Japan had only $4.1 billion. Looking at it from a balance-of-payments point of view, we see that U.S. citizens spent $51.2 billion in tourism abroad but earned $23 billion more than that. Japan, by contrast, spent $33 billion overseas but had a $29 billion tourism deficit.

It is commonly believed that among the many reasons tourism in Japan has lost its appeal to both foreigners and the Japanese people, the most important are the high yen and the cost of travel within Japan. But these arguments are not entirely persuasive. Well-heeled foreign travelers think nothing of spending thousands of dollars to stay in posh resorts in Phuket or Bali, but give Japan a wide berth. The real reason is that the rewards in scenic beauty and travel amenities are very slim. How ever much tourists enjoy a quiet Zen rock garden in Kyoto they confront a chaotic and trashy modern cityscape the minute they walk out of the garden. At the hotel, they will seek i n vain for anything to remind them that they are in Kyoto, and instead be oppressed by an environment of shiny polyester wallpaper and garish chandeliers. The visitor to a famous waterfall or stand of pine trees on a beach has to frame the view very closely to shut out the concrete embankments that are the universal mark of the modern Japanese landscape. No one will write an idyllic book about Japan like Summer in Provence or Under the Tuscan Sun .

With Japan's old-fashioned manufacturing and construction economy beginning to stagnate in the 1990s, it came as a jolt to the government to realize that perhaps services do matter to a modern economy, and a few officials began looking at the long-ignored issue of tourism. It quickly became clear that Kyoto, Nara, and Japan's once lovely rural villages were nearly beyond help, but there was hope: theme parks. Today, the Japanese flock to theme parks featuring reconstructed European cities, such as Huis Ten Bosch (Dutch) in Kyushu and Shima Spain in Mie, or a replica of Mount Rushmore (at one-third the scale) under construction in Tochigi Prefecture. These are spotless and completely artificial, like the enormous Seagaia complex in Miyazaki, which, though located on the coast, boasts a fully enclosed artificial beach. The number of adult tourists visiting these theme parks (close to 8 million touring Huis Ten Bosch and Shima Spain as early as 1994) wiU soon surpass the number visiting Kyoto. The designers of Huis Ten Bosch used natural materials such as rough bricks, incorporated sign control, buried power lines, and established design guidelines; with its lovingly tended lawns, it is much more appealing than a cluttered and unloved Kyoto. It would seem that Japan's premier tourist destinations will end up having nothing to do with its own culture, becoming watered-down copies of Western originals.