Tokyo and Osaka may boast a handful of attractive international hotels designed by foreigners, but the Japanese countryside remains solidly in the hands of domestic designers. Japanese resorts are so ill designed, so destructive of their surroundings, that in May 1997 the Environment Agency reported that 30 percent of all those surveyed did not live up to the agency's assessment criteria. By American, European, or Indonesian standards, that number would rise to more than 90 percent.
A good example of the sort of thing that happens can be seen in Iya Valley. Iya has Japan's last vine bridge, built by Heike refugees in the twelfth century and rehung with fresh vines regularly ever since. The Vine Bridge is Iya's most famous monument, visited by more than 500,000 people every year. What happened to it? The River Bureau flattened the riverbanks below with concrete; the Forestry Agency constructed a metal bridge right next to it; and resort builders then covered the surrounding valley slopes with concrete boxes and billboards. Travelers who have come from distant prefectures to get a view of the romance of the Heike line up on the metal bridge and take photographs, carefully framing the Vine Bridge to screen out the concrete and the billboards. The choice of accommodation is between minshuku (bed-and-breakfast in old homes) or a few big tourist hotels. Minshuku in old thatch-roofed houses sound attractive – and indeed would be, except that the interiors have been redone with synthetic veneer and fluorescent lights, and yet they still lack modern conveniences such as clean flush toilets and heated bathrooms. So a visit to the Vine Bridge in Iya is only, and just, that: one has seen the Vine Bridge, but there is little in the experience to relax the body or please the heart. In this, Iya'sVine Bridge symbolizes the anomalous fate of old cities like Kyoto and of rural scenery throughout Japan. Iya's mountains and gorges are nothing less than spectacular, the Vine Bridge itself a romance. Rich possibilities for cultural experience and travel are simply there for the taking – and yet a failure of «tourism technology» causes them to be ignored or damaged.
Ill-applied modernity can also be seen at the onsen (hot springs), which were one of Japan's most wonderful traditions. There are thousands of onsen in romantic environments beside rivers, atop mountains, and along pine-tree-clad seacoasts; they once boasted lovely buildings of wood and bamboo, exquisite service, healing hot waters, and the chance to relax amid beautiful natural scenery. You could lie in the hot water by an open window and watch the mist rise from the river or the trees around you.
Well, the onsen are still there, the hot water still flows, and the service is still good. But the ambience that made onsen uniquely relaxing is vanishing with the mists. Old onsen have been restored with lots of chrome and Astroturf, all the slapdash additions that damaged Kyoto; meanwhile, new onsen tend to look like cheap business hotels plopped down in the countryside or, at best, like bland white-and-gray bank lobbies.
It sometimes happens that enlightened owners manage to preserve the mood of an old onsen or design an attractive new one, but nothing can replace the lost rivers, mountains, and sea-coasts in which the onsen stand. Hardly a hot spring the length and breadth of Japan has not been in some way degraded by ugly, ill-designed resorts or civil-engineering projects. Robert Neff, the head of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, writing about his search for «hidden onsen » far from the beaten track, summed up the situation sadly:
As Japan's countryside gives way before concrete, plastic, automatic vending machines, and pachinko parlors, hidden onsen make us forget the passage of time. It is a joy when I can report that such places still exist. Alas, they are on the verge of extinction. When I visited them some years back, these places were wonderfully untouched. But when I go to visit hidden onsen nowadays all vestige of former scenery has been removed, and replaced with modern monstrosities totally out of keeping with the surroundings. Or new highways, dams, hideous bridges, ski lifts, ropeways, and electrical generating stations are built where they can be seen right out the front door. [Translated from the Japanese]
Onsen were a true cultural treasure, which would have appealed to travelers from around the world; if they had been developed with truly modern design and management, there is no doubt that Japan could have based a thriving international tourist industry on them. Not so now. A few lovely onsen do exist, but loveliness in Japan has become a luxury that few can afford. Most of the affordable onsen have become places «neither here nor there» – a mix of nice scenery and eyesores – places you might visit if you happened to be in Japan and had some free time, but not destinations you would cross an ocean or spend a lot of money to see.
The historian Gibbon, an expert on the rise and fall of empire, wrote, «All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.» Thirty or forty years ago, Japan had all the earmarks of modernism: technical finesse in manufacturing, clean cities, trains that ran on time. For bureaucrats, architects, university professors, and city planners, Japan seemed to have the perfect formula, and it needed only to develop on a grander scale along established lines. It was so deceptively reassuring that few observers noticed that time had stopped. Confident in their belief that their country had «got it right,» Japan's leaders firmly resisted new ideas, whether domestic or foreign. Lacking the critical ingredient, change, culture in Japan took on modernism's outward forms but lost its heart. Without new attitudes and fresh knowledge, the quality of life in cities and countryside, as Gibbon could have predicted, did indeed retrograde. This is the paradox of modern Japanese life: that although it is known as a nation of aesthetes, there is hardly a single feature of modern Japan touched by the hand of man that one could call beautiful.
In 1694, the haiku poet Basho set out on his final journey, one that he expected to be his greatest – he was traveling from the town of Ueno near Nara to Osaka, where he planned to meet with his disciples, put an end to their bickering, and set the haiku world to rights. But it didn't turn out that way. Basho fell sick along the way and died, having accomplished nothing. As his disciples gathered around his bedside, he granted them one final haiku:
Stricken on a journey
My dreams go wandering round
Withered fields.
After the 1960s, fueled by one of the greatest economic booms in world history, Japan embarked on a journey to a brave new world. During the next few decades, the old world was swept away with the expectation that a glorious new world would replace it. But somewhere along the way Japan was stricken on its journey. It is now clear that there will be no glorious new, no sparkling extravaganza of the future like Hong Kong, no tree-lined garden city like Singapore, not even a Kuala Lumpur or a Jakarta. Only withered fields – an apocalyptic expanse of aluminum, Hitachi signs, roof boxes, billboards, telephone wires, vending machines, granite pavement, flashing lights, plastic, and pachinko.
