The two regulations that have had the most devastating effect on Japan's cities are those concerning the inheritance tax and the so-called Sunlight Law. Japan's inheritance tax is one of the highest in the world; as land prices have risen continually for a half century, inheritors of old houses almost invariably have to sell them in order to pay the tax. For the purchasers, these prices are so high that it is uneconomical to leave single-story old wooden buildings standing, so they tear them down and build apartment blocks. The Tax Office grants very few exemptions for buildings in historic neighborhoods, and the tax guidelines, determined by the central government, are inflexible, so that local administrations cannot easily structure their own neighborhood systems. Faced with laws like this, Kyoto didn't stand a chance.

The Sunlight Law was passed in the 1960s as a well-meaning effort to restrict high buildings that would shroud their neighbors in shade. It created a formula whereby buildings must fit within a diagonal «shadow line,» which means that the higher they rise the narrower they must be. This accounts for the stepped, pyramidal look of most Japanese buildings. Americans made a similar mistake in the 1960s and 1970s, when «street setback» was a magic phrase. This had disastrous effects on thousands of American cities, for it turns out that buildings that come right up to the sidewalk create an intimacy that setback structures lack. New York City learned this to its cost when zoning laws encouraged the sterile office towers on the Avenue of the Americas, which are set back from the street and fronted by wide vacant plazas.

Japan's Sunlight Law also restricts building because on a given plot of land a higher structure often cannot use to the full whatever is allowed by local FAR regulations. As a result,Tokyo has an average FAR of less than 2 to 1, the lowest of any world capital, including Paris and Rome. «Low density» sounds attractive – until one realizes what this means for the inhabitants of a metropolis with 30 million people: the highest land prices in the world, cramped apartments and homes (millions of Tokyo residents dwell in spaces even smaller than the official minimum of fifty square meters), exorbitant commercial rents, and crowded commuter trains that must transport people several hours from their homes to work. With buildable land in Tokyo expensive and scarce, the Construction Ministry favors plans by big construction companies to build giant cities underground. From their underground apartments, it imagines, residents will speed on subways to subterranean office buildings. So effective is the Sunlight Law that future homeowners in Tokyo need never see the light of day.

Japan is the world's only advanced country that does not bury telephone cables and electric lines. While a handful of neighborhoods, such as the central Marunouchi business district of Tokyo, have succeeded in laying cables underground, these are mostly expensive showpieces. Even the most advanced new residential districts customarily do not bury cables, as I discovered when I was working on the Sumitomo Trust Bank/Trammell Crow project on Kobe's Rokko Island in 1987. Kobe City touted the island-brand-new landfill in the harbor – as a supermodern, futuristic neighborhood. With telephone poles. In the countryside, a «priority policy» dictates that until every large city has buried every one of its power lines, which the Construction Ministry is encouraging them not to do, no rural area can do the same with support from the central government.

Here, in a nutshell, is Japan's bureaucratic dynamic at work The first stage, the starting point after Japan's defeat in World War II, is the poor people, strong state principle. Central planners considered the extra effort and expense required to do such things as burying cables luxurious and wasteful, drawing needed resources away from industry.

The second stage, policy freeze, came in the early 1970s. Unaccustomed to burying cables, Japan's bureaucrats came to believe that the nation shouldn't, indeed couldn't, bury them. They cooked up justifications for the policy, such as the added dangers in the event of earthquakes. (In fact, a nation that is likely to have frequent earthquakes should bury lines, as became clear in the Kobe quake of 1995. Toppled poles carrying live wires were one of the biggest dangers, blocking traffic and wreaking havoc with rescue efforts.) Another argument was that Japan had uniquely damp soil, which made it harder to bury lines there than in other countries. (This belongs to the «Special Snow» school of thought, made famous when trade negotiators in the 1980s asserted that «Japanese snow is unsuitable to foreign skis.») The inner logic is that Japan's uniqueness forbids it to bury cables. Since burying cables is not what Japan has done, it is un-Japanese to do so.

The third stage is addiction. Making concrete and steel pylons has become a profitable cartelized business; meanwhile, utilities have a free hand to plan power grids without regard for the look of urban or rural neighborhoods, for the inconvenience posed by poles jutting into narrow roads, or for anything else. And since the power companies have not learned the skill of efficient, safe, and well-designed cable laying and have never had to factor in the costs, today they simply cannot afford them. Meanwhile, the Construction Ministry, driven by the «uniquely damp soil» ideology, has mandated protective coverings юг underground cable strong enough to survive the apocalypse, making it the most expensive in the world.

My friend Morimoto Yasuyoshi recently moved to Sanjo Street, in the heart of historic Kyoto. When people in the neighborhood got together to discuss revitalizing this famous but now shabby street, he suggested that the city remove the clutter of aboveground wires and lines and bury them. He learned that this would be close to impossible, because of a rule that says when a street decides to bury its lines, property owners must forfeit their right to a few square feet of space on the pavement to allow for electrical boxes every fifty meters or so. (Why there must be boxes so close together, and above ground, is not clear. After all, the basic idea is to put all the apparatus underground. It would seem to spring from bureaucratic resistance to the very idea of burying wires. Something should be above ground!) Japan's land values being what they are, no one can afford to give up those precious square feet.

Mild addiction results in total addiction when Japan ends up relying on technologies that actually require the existence of poles. In the 1990s, Japan began pushing the PHS cellular phone as its big contender in the mobile-phone business. Unlike other new systems, which are truly wireless and satellite-linked, PHS sends signals to small relay boxes that must be set up every few dozen meters on traffic-light or telephone poles. With the full weight of officialdom thrown behind PHS, Japan will never bury its power lines and phone wires.

We have reached the final stage: decoration. Since about 1995, the trend has been to replace the old concrete poles in certain city blocks with fancy ones clad in polished bronze. Rather like the «designer concrete» (shaped like hexagons or molded to look like rocks) that Japan is developing for its rivers and mountains, designer telephone poles are now in evidence. It's a classic Dogs and Demons approach to city planning: The city feels it has done something. Each pole, up close, looks prettier. However, the street, festooned with wires, looks as cluttered as before.

Combine the Sunlight Law with regulations that encourage machinery boxes and billboards on rooftops, and you get the chaotic look of the typical Japanese cityscape. Add to this the absence of zoning and sign control, and factor in vending machines and electric and phone wires-and you get the visual clutter that is a defining feature of daily life in Japan. Japanese architects have become so accustomed to it that they can imagine no alternative. Despite manifold evidence to the contrary in garden-filled, neatly organized old Kyoto and Beijing-not to mention Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, and Jakarta – Japanese architects justify shadeless trashy cities as somehow uniquely «Asian.» When Baba Shozo, a former editor of Japan Architect magazine, was asked whether there might be some improvement in city planning, such as more parks (the average is 14 percent open space for cities in Japan, versus 35 percent in Europe and 40 percent in the United States), he is reported to have responded, «It's absolutely not necessary. Tokyo's population is totally satisfied with the way things are... After all, we are living in an Asian city. It's natural the way it is. Parks and open spaces are not required. Who needs green space?»

Foreign writers on Japanese architecture condescendingly accept this line of reasoning. Christine Hawley writes of a Tokyo neighborhood: «The scale was distinctly 'sub' urban, and architectural grain identifiably oriental. There was of course the visual compression of space, the use of low, horizontally defined buildings covered in banners, signs, and the ubiquitous web of service lines as they run in and around the buildings.» City planners in Singapore and Malaysia, the most vociferous champions of «Asian values,» would be surprised to learn that poorly regulated advertisements and unburied service lines are «identifiably oriental.»

Clutter is not the whole story. People crave open views and clean city lines, so planners respond with monumental «new cities,» boasting wide avenues and enormous office towers surrounded by pavemented parks and windswept plazas. The pendulum swings in the direction of total sterility. One cannot fail to be struck by the complete inhumanity of the new urban landscape at Kobe's Port Island or Tokyo's Makuhari and Odaiba. Gigantic office towers are surrounded by empty access roads, vacant squares, and shadeless rows of pollarded trees. There is no middle ground in Japan's cities – only the two extremes of shabby or sterile.

«New Japan does not like trees,» Donald Richie wrote in The Inland Sea back in 1971. In Richie's day, this truth was expressed in the tendency to bulldoze parks and plazas; in the 1980s it developed into an aversion to falling leaves, which was discussed in an earlier chapter; in the 1990s, it became an attack on branches. Until very recently, in Tokyo, shady tree-lined avenues surrounded the zoo side of Ueno Park and Tokyo University, but not anymore. A desire on the part of civic administrators to widen the streets and do away with shade has led to new rules that require the pruning of all branches that extend over a roadway; this policy has been carried out all over the country.