Keats wrote, «the trees / That whisper round a temple become soon / Dear as the temple's self» – a sentiment clearly not in the mind of the Cultural Ministry when it restored Zuiryuji Temple in the town of Takaoka in 1996. In the true spirit of Nakahara Kiiko, it cut down and uprooted a grove of ancient keaki and pine trees that had stood for hundreds of years in the temple courtyard and replaced them with a wide expanse of raked gravel. Although the temple's founder had expressly designed the courtyard to conjure up the cypress groves of Zen temples in China, the ministry decided that flat gravel was more Zen to their liking – and certainly more beautiful than those messy old trees that interfered with the view.

The new war on urban trees is baffling. I cannot fathom its causes, but I can proffer a guess. The inconvenience posed by trees hardly compares with the telephone poles that take up space on both sides of narrow roads, but perhaps the trees, with their unruly branches going this way and that, offend the authorities' spirit of order. Perhaps the long decades of sacrificing everything to industrial growth have had their effect: sterility has become a part of modern Japanese style. Certainly, if you travel in Asia you can immediately recognize the Japanese touch in hotels and office buildings by the lack of trees and, instead, the rows of low-clipped azalea bushes around them.

A curious aspect of the tree war is the primitive level of skill with which it is waged. Japan is the land of bonsai and is famous worldwide for its great gardening traditions. Many and varied are the techniques for pruning and shortening each twig and bough-gradual clipping over years or even decades to shape a branch as it grows, props to support old tree limbs as they droop, canvas wrappings to protect bark from cold and insects, and much more – sensitive techniques developed over centuries, of which until recently the West knew little. Yet tree pruning in Japan today is truly a hack job. No gradual, delicate work here-just limbs roughly chainsawed off at the base, with no treatment to protect against insects and rot. «What bothers me the most,» says Mason Florence, «is the brutality of it. The trees look like animals mutilated or skinned alive in medical experiments.»

A world of traditional skills in the arts of building homes and cities evaporated when postwar Japan despoiled its old neighborhoods. The destruction happened so quickly that these arts and crafts never had a chance to adapt to modern Japanese life, and today they seem to have lost relevance. The quiet, low-key comforts, the incredible finesse of detail found, for example, in Japan's old inns belong to an entirely different civilization from the shiny Bakelite interiors of Kyoto's new hotels. Similarly, in just a few decades Japanese public gardening technique went from tender pruning to brutal hack jobs.

A salient element in any comparison of Singapore's advanced city planning, which has given it the name Garden City, and Japan's is the treatment of trees. The drive from Changi Airport into downtown Singapore is one of the pleasures of the modern world. You whirl along a highway lined with a canopy of spreading trees – all newly planted in the past few decades – and under bridges from which flowering vines trail. Southeast Asian garden expert William Warren, in his book on Singapore, has included this highway and also the airport itself as examples of Asia's great gardens. He told me, «I was astonished at the devotion of the botanical staff in Singapore. These are well-educated professionals who love, really love, their work.» In Japan, you will not find professionalism, and certainly nothing like love, among those who tend city streets. Work crews saw off branches according to a program drawn up by bureaucrats in downtown offices. Aside from a few showpieces, like Tokyo's Omotesando fashion street, you would be hard put to find trees arching over a road even in a small provincial town, and if you do, you had better enjoy it, photograph it, and treasure it, because it will probably not be there the next time you visit. Chainsawing is the law of the land.

Yet «Tokyo is a resort!» writes Sano Tadakatsu, director general of International Economic Affairs at MITI. It is because of the winter sun, he explains, so sadly lacking in northern European cities; the lack of sunlight drives Europeans to take those regrettable long vacations in their lovely holiday homes. In contrast, sun-drenched Tokyo is so marvelous that «even foreigners living in Japan do not want to have holiday homes,» and in any case, «children born in this high growth era see nothing wrong with concrete buildings.»

Sano is right. What happens to people living in cities like Tokyo? They get used to it. «Many people of my generation feel angry,» says Igarashi Takayoshi, the author of a best-selling book on wasteful public works. «We have an idea of how nature should be, but the younger generation doesn't. Students are not shocked by images of environmental destruction the way I am – they got used to it growing up.» Recently, Andrew Maerkle, the sixteen-year-old son of an American family in Osaka, and his parents and I had occasion to drive east from Kobe, through Osaka, and down the coast of the Inland Sea to the town of Izumi-Otsu, near the New Kansai Airport. For hours we drove along elevated expressways, giving us a view to the horizon of unrelieved industrial horror. In that bleak landscape live millions of people, in desolate rows of apartments barely distinguishable from the factories around them. Andrew gazed at the flashing billboards, the towering pylons for high-tension wires, the flaming smokestacks, the jumble of buildings stretching to the horizon without a tree or a park, and commented, «I read a lot of Japanese manga comics at school, and I was always impressed by their view of the future. Apocalyptic. Now I see where it comes from.»

Just as people get used to bleak cityscapes, they come to feel at home with cheap industrial materials. Kyoto art expert David Kidd once said to me, «The Japanese have gotten so used to living with fake wood that they can't tell the difference between it and real wood. They think they're the same.» A good place to see this confusion at work is the Arita Porcelain Museum, in northern Kyushu, dedicated to the traditional craft of hand-enameled Imari ceramics. The structure, designed in the rococo style, is built of concrete covered with plaster to look like stone; the dining-room tables are plastic, with printed wood patterns-this in a museum built at great expense to celebrate hand craftsmanship!

One does not expect this lack of understanding of materials in Japan, for «love of materials» is one of the most sublime principles of traditional Japanese art – with its unpainted wood, rough stone surfaces, and unglazed pottery. And yet modern Japan is notable for its persistent use of ill-processed plastic, chrome, highly glazed tile, aluminum, and concrete. These cheap industrial materials are everywhere. At a recent show at the Idemitsu Museum, famed as Tokyo's greatest museum of Asian ceramics, there was a bonsai at the entrance – in an orange plastic pot.

How could a nation that once seemed to have an inherent understanding of natural material fall into the unquestioning use of industrial junk? As with its destruction of the countryside, the explanation cannot be simplistic arguments about «Westernization» or about uniquely «Asian» values. It may be that the very tradition of using plain materials, without treatment or processing, underlies Japan's guileless use of plastic and aluminum today; Japanese builders are simply taking what they find in their environment and using it, as is. Another factor may be the traditional «love of reflective surfaces,» once evidenced by gold screens, smooth lacquer, and the glint of polished swords. But the simpler, probably truer explanation is that Japan has embraced an old-fashioned idea of modernism, in which these bright shiny surfaces show that one is wealthy and technologically advanced, and quiet, low-key environments suggest backwardness. In any case, the key word is «shiny.» Japan is caught in a time warp, its vision of the future derived from sci-fi movies of the 1960s.

The poor people, strong state policy has been in effect more or less since 1868, with only a few decades of relief (notably a brief cultural renaissance in the 1920s and another in the 1960s). For most of the past century and a half, Japan's leaders have single-mindedly aimed at foreign expansion, and this has distorted the nation's modern development. For hundreds of years during the Edo period (in fact, for most of its recorded history), Japan did not aim at conquering its neighbors, either militarily or economically; instead, it applied its energies to itself, and the results were not economic poverty or cultural stagnation, as one might suppose. Instead, Japan flourished, so much so that by the early nineteenth century it was, per capita, by far the wealthiest Asian nation and boasted some of the world's most beautiful cities, literally millions of superbly crafted traditional homes, and an incredibly rich cultural tradition that has since exerted a powerful influence on the rest of the world.

Commodore Perry's arrival in 1854 set off shock waves whose reverberations can still be felt today. Japan set out on a desperate effort first to resist and later to challenge the West, and while it achieved spectacular success, it did serious damage to its own cultural legacy. Today, the beautiful cities are gone, as are the superbly crafted homes, and the leisure that Edo people once had to create a great world culture. Nothing could be more ironic: pursuit of foreign gain at all costs ended up impoverishing the nation.

The paradigm established in the late nineteenth century under the influence of European nationalism was one of military conquest, and it has never really changed: Japan's bureaucratic leaders still think of economic expansion in terms of war. Military metaphors abound in business, government, and the press. Karel van Wolferen describes Japan's system as «a wartime economy operating in peacetime,» and a crucial part of this economy is the principle of poor people, strong state. The military has always hated luxury, for it makes people lazy and soft, and from this point of view poor people, strong state is a classic military approach to governance, as we know from the history of the ancient kingdom of Sparta.

Plutarch reports that Lycurgus, when drafting the laws of Sparta, began with house design. Lycurgus decreed that ceilings should be wrought by the ax, gates and doors smoothed only by the saw «Luxury and a house of this kind could not well be companions,» Plutarch comments. «Doubtless he had good reason to think that they would proportion their beds to their houses, and their coverlets to their beds, and the rest of their goods and furniture to these.»