Since the entire thrust of development in Kyoto since its Tower was built has been to escape from the old and build a modern city, it seems only fair to measure the place by its own standards. What if Kyoto were to wipe away its ancient heritage entirely? A dedicated modernist might feel this was justified if it meant creating a city of leading-edge contemporary culture.

This is what has happened in Hong Kong, where a tree-lined harbor filled with quaint junks gave way to a cityscape of dazzling office towers, one of the wonders of the modern world. The same may well happen in Shanghai and Bangkok, where developers have treated the charming old city centers brutally, but where dramatic new buildings are rising from the dust-hotels, restaurants, office towers, and apartments that vie with the best in Hong Kong or New York.

This did not happen – and is not happening – in Japan. The ugly view from the top of the Grand Hotel in Kyoto is less a consequence of the loss of the old than a result of the low quality of the new.

Nothing could run more contrary to the trend of Western commentary on Japan for the past fifty years than the argument that Japan has failed in its pursuit of modernity. However, that is the truth. Instead of an advanced new civilization, Japan has tenement cities and a culture of cheap industrial junk. Homes are cramped and poorly built; public environments, whether in hotels, zoos, parks, apartment buildings, hospitals, or libraries, are sadly lacking in visual pleasure and basic comforts, at least compared with those available in other advanced nations. This failure to achieve quality in the new is perhaps Japan's greatest tragedy-and it lies at the very core of its cultural meltdown today.

It's the unexpected result, a devastating boomerang, of the policy that economists and social scientists once believed was Japan's greatest strength: the policy of «poor people, strong state»; the policy of having its citizens accept a low level of consumption and limited outlets for pleasure and relaxation in their personal lives so that the nation's resources could be invested in unlimited industrial expansion. That happened, and in the process Japan nurtured a bureaucracy uneducated in modern technologies and several generations of Japanese who are ignorant of what true modernity might offer-ignorant, one might say, of the finer things of modern life. And this has had not only cultural but economic consequences.

To get some sense of contrast with other nations, consider Malaysia. As you drive between Port Klang on the Strait of Malacca and the capital, Kuala Lumpur, the highway passes through spectacular valleys of rocky cliffs. While building this road, Malaysia called in a French landscaping firm to advise on how to make it beautiful, including how to sculpt the cliffs through which the highway passes. The result of their efforts is that there was no unnecessary destruction, no concrete in sight, and the cliffs appear to be natural. It's a classic example of modern technology, in the true sense of the word, in road building. Such a highway does not exist the length or breadth of Japan, for calling in foreign consultants would have been unthinkable, and road-building techniques froze in about 1970.

In downtown Kuala Lumpur itself, high-rises are springing up everywhere, and the city is beginning to take on the sleek, elegant look one also sees in Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, and parts of Bangkok but rarely in cluttered Tokyo. By looking closely, one can discern the details that make the difference.

One is the lack of junk on rooftops. In Japan, electrical machinery and air-conditioning units appear to have been tacked onto rooftops as afterthoughts. It is possible to put unsightly mechanical components inside a building's internal structure and to integrate them architecturally, but in Japan a regulation dating from the 1950s and never altered punishes a builder for using internal space for such machinery by subtracting that space from his allowable floor-area ratio (FAR).

Japan has no regulations limiting billboards; in fact, its construction laws actively encourage billboards on top of buildings because of another regulation concerning height limits. Builders may increase the height of their structures by a story or two if the added height is merely empty boxes on the roofs. Naturally, the next step is to mount enormous logos and advertisements on these boxes. Back in Kuala Lumpur, you will not see many such signs, and most of the ones you do observe belong to Japanese-owned businesses and were designed by Japanese architectural firms that know no other way. Looking out of my apartment window in Bangkok, I can see dozens of skyscrapers, only one of which sports a large rooftop billboard – Hitachi. In Japan, there is so little understanding of sign control that Hitachi has even made a deal with the Cultural Agency to place advertisements beside all buildings designated as National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties. In Kyoto, you will see scores of metal Hitachi signs placed prominently in Zen gardens and before the gate of every historical temple and pavilion. A short walk through the grounds of Daitokuji, the fountainhead of Zen arts, yields a count of no fewer than twenty-five Hitachi signs, with four in one sub-temple, Daisen-In, alone.

Other East Asian cities-Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong-go far beyond Bangkok in regulating advertisements; Jakarta boasts some of East Asia's best sign control through a taxation policy that makes the raising and maintenance of large ads expensive. In Japan, in contrast, architects learn nothing about signage in their university courses. During the 1980s, the concept of «visual pollution» spread through the international design community, and attention began to be paid to observations that bright, flashing lights disturb the peace of residential neighborhoods, garish signs lower the tone of five-star hotels, fluorescent lights destroy the romance of parks at nighttime, and towering billboards detract from the beauty of scenic countryside. The science of avoiding and ameliorating this sort of visual pollution is a modern technology.

Visual pollution in Japan has resulted from the same vicious cycle we have seen in other aspects of its life: in the case of the environment, construction breeds dependence on more construction; in banking, deception leads to greater deception; in urban design, ugliness gradually comes to be taken for granted, which leads to ignorance and thus to more ugliness. An architect friend of mine, Lucilo Pena, helped to design the Four Seasons Hotel in Barcelona, in which the Japanese department store Sogo was one of the investors. Lucilo tells of acrimonious discussions between the hotel operators and the Japanese owners concerning signs, for Sogo wanted a huge flashing sign on the outside of the hotel, and it seemed impossible to convince Sogo's management that in Barcelona this was considered a plan that would damage the ambience of the city and lower the prestige of both the department-store owners and the hotel. Sogo gave in when its representatives realized that in the West citizens might resort to boycotts of a company that flouts local concerns, but it came as a shock.

In Japan, there are almost no zoning laws, no taxation policy, and no sign control to regulate urban or rural development – so giant billboards tower over rice paddies, vending machines stand in the lobbies of ritzy hotels and Kabuki theaters, and bright plastic signs hang in even the most stylish restaurants. People who are born, grow up, live, and work in such an environment know of no alternative; and the result is that the general public, as well as planners and architects, think this kind of look is an inherent part of modernization. It is thus not surprising that Hitachi would blazon its name across the Bangkok skyline when few American, European, Thai, or Chinese corporations feel the need to do so.

Zoning – the political and social science of making the most efficient use of different types of land – is a crucial skill that Japan's bureaucrats have failed to master. The distinction between industrial, commercial, residential, and agricultural neighborhoods hardly exists. In the residential neighborhood of Kameoka, near Kyoto, where I live, I need walk only about five minutes to find-right next door to suburban homes and rice paddies – a used-car lot, a gigantic rusting fuel tank filled with nobody knows what, a plot surrounded by a prefabricated steel wall twenty feet high in which construction waste is dumped, rows of vending machines with blinking lights, a golf driving range half the size of a football field surrounded by wire mesh hung from giant pylons and illuminated at night, a vast number of signs of every type (pinned onto trees, propped up by the roadside), and, of course, a pachinko parlor, with towers of spiraling neon and flashing strobe lights. This is the typical level of visual pollution in the suburban neighborhood of a Japanese city, and nobody considers it odd, because every structure scrupulously obeys the rules: FAR ratios, footprint quotas, allowable building materials, location of telephone poles, and so forth. It is the Through the Looking-Glass world of bureaucratic management: there is no lack of regulation, yet chaos reigns.

Many of the regulations exist to protect cartels of architectural firms and construction companies. Others, such as those that effectively prohibit residential homes from having basements, are cobweb-covered relics. Their original purpose is lost in time, yet no one considers changing them. Indeed, the complete inflexibility of these rules and regulations creates more of the clutter and crowding that characterize Japanese cities.

Kyoto, for example, had a golden opportunity in the 1960s, when it was working on renovations for the Olympic Games. Had it zoned the city differently north and south at the train station (most of the historic center lies north of the station), the old center could easily have been protected and saved. To the south, where most of the buildings except a few large temples were poor, shoddily built, and ripe for redevelopment, Kyoto could have created a new satellite city – like La Defense, the supermodern suburb of Paris. But of course this did not happen. Instead, bureaucrats applied rigid FAR and height limitations everywhere, which led to a cycle of rising land prices, high inheritance taxes, and destruction in the city center, and at the same time prevented the development of good new architecture. Rather than having a truly new city in the south and a beautiful old city in the north, Kyoto today has neither new nor old but a conglomeration where everything looks equally shabby.