In ancient times, in faraway Izumo on the coast of the Sea of Japan, there lived a fearful eight-headed serpent, the Orochi. He ravaged the mountains and valleys far and wide, devouring the daughters of local villagers, and only when the god Susano-o vanquished him did peace come. Inside the Orochi, Susano-o found the sacred sword that still ranks as one of the three imperial treasures; nearby was founded Izumo Shrine, Japan's oldest. Since that time, the land of Izumo has been holy, so much so that the traditional name for the month of October is Kannazuki (the month without gods), because it is believed that in that month all the gods of Japan leave their native places and gather at Izumo.

Alas, all the gods of Japan cannot save the town of Yokota, in Izumo, from an enemy even worse than the Orochi: depopulation. In rural areas all across Japan, young people are fleeing to the cities, transforming the countryside into one giant old folks' home. The exodus of young people for the cities is a worldwide phenomenon, but in Japan it has been exacerbated by several factors. One is the centralization of power in Tokyo, which inhibits the growth of strong local industries. No Japanese Microsoft would for a moment consider having its headquarters in the equivalent of Redmond, Washington.

Other means of recycling the resources of the once agricultural countryside-retrofitted small-town businesses, resorts, vacation homes, tourism, parks – have not been explored, since, as we have seen, Japan's bureaucratic structures are aimed at manufacturing and construction, and little else. Civil-engineering projects and cedar plantations have not addressed core issues concerning rural areas in a postindustrial state. Worse, the new and useless roads, dams, and embankments make the countryside less attractive while failing to give it the advantages of city life. This scarred countryside does not offer appealing locations for companies to locate their headquarters or subsidiaries, for artists to set up ateliers, for retirees to build homes, or for quality resort developers to attract tourists.

What to do? With subsidies from the Construction Ministry, Yokota took its most picturesque valley and filled it up with a double-looped elevated highway complete with tunnels, bridges, concrete supports, and embankments. At one end, a brightly painted red bridge, lit by spotlights, spans the valley. The tunnels are decorated with dragon eyes, and eight viewing spots (the Orochi's eight heads) feature towering concrete pillars. Yokota proudly proclaims the «Orochi Loop» as Japan's longest highway circle. «An invitation to the world of the gods,» sings the tourist pamphlet, and indeed it is a celebration of the gods of construction who rule Japan today.

When the Orochi Loop opened in 1994, Yokota hoped that the highway would become a tourist lodestone to vie with the fabled Izumo Shrine itself. But it turned out that city dwellers are not so impressed by what is basically just another road. There are far too many concrete pillars in Tokyo and Osaka already; why come all the way to Izumo to see more?

So it was time for Yokota to take the next step in mura okoshi, « raising up the village.» Mura okoshi (there is also machi okoshi, « raising up the town,» and furusato zukuri, « building up the old hometown»), civic-improvement schemes, are sweeping the nation. The process goes like this: Yokota built the Orochi Loop, thinking it would bring tourists in and keep the locals around. It didn't. So officials called in a consulting firm, which advised, «Leave things alone. Accentuate the natural beauty of the area. This is what tourists come to see.» This advice was unwelcome, as it did not factor in the largesse of government subsidy money, so the town called in another group, with Allan West, an artist knowledgeable about nihonga (traditional Japanese painting), as a foreign adviser.

Yokota had a beautiful 1920s railroad station facing a nice town square, but in the 1970s the city fathers had rebuilt the shops with their backs turned to the station and the square. West suggested that they resurrect the town square and station, which would give back some life to the center of Yokota, and the citizens supported this, saying they were sick of having to hold their annual festival in the town-hall parking lot. But the officials wouldn't hear of this, as it didn't use enough money. They also dismissed the suggestion to bury telephone wires, because it went against the Construction Ministry's agenda for rural areas. Someone proposed refurbishing an ancient local temple, where the priest, a mahjongg addict, had gambled everything away to local gangsters, who stripped the temple bare, right down to the ornamental tiles on the roof, and left it to rot. But the local officials showed no interest in fixing it up or restoring it.

Thus in the first round of machi okoshi in Yokota, an unnecessary elevated highway, specially designed to be twice the required length and have double the destructive effect, wiped out a scenic valley. In the second round, advice to restore the town square and temple went unheeded, and phone lines remained above ground. The third round was the construction of another monument: Yokota built a large museum to the art of sword-making, crowned by another Orochi, this one a helix of eight entwined stainless-steel tubes topped with dragon heads. This, too, failed to make Yokota an attractive place to live in or visit, and its depopulation continues. Soon it will be time for round four, and what form the next Orochi monument will take is anyone's guess.

«Dogs are difficult; demons are easy.» Dogs are the simple, unobtrusive factors in our surroundings that are so difficult to get right; demons are grandiose surface statements. Anyone can draw a demon. Dogs are zoning, sign control, the planting and tending of trees, burial of electric wires, protection of historic neighborhoods, comfortable and attractive residential design, environmentally friendly resorts. Demons are Orochi bridges and multipurpose halls-any kind of monument, the bigger, more expensive, and more outrageous the better: «cultural» halls shaped in ovals or in diamonds, as ships or as flames; museums in huge tubes with rock gardens plastered on their curving walls, museums made to look like galactic starships, museums with no artworks at all. Rural villages have meeting halls and sports stadiums big enough for the Olympics. Cities fill in their harbors for futuristic metropolises as if they expected their size to double or triple.

When the Construction State meets disappointed civic pride, the results are such as the world has never seen before. Consider once again an example from Kyoto. When Japan Railways sponsored a design competition in the early 1990s for the New Kyoto Station (completed in 1998), it attracted attention worldwide. Here was an opportunity to make up for the damage done by the Kyoto Tower in 1965 and to re-establish Kyoto as Japan's cultural capital. The proposed designs split into two main categories: there were those who tried to incorporate traditional Kyoto forms, for example, making the station look like a large-scale Sanjusangendo, or Hall of the Thousand Buddhas, one long narrow building with a tiled roof. As trains arrived in such a station, passengers would feel they were entering into Kyoto's past. The second category was of resolute modernism. The architect Ando Tadao designed a square arch (rather like the arch at La Defense in Paris), using a modern form but drawing inspiration from Kyoto's history. When Japan Railways built the old station, which runs east-west for blocks, it cut Karasuma Road, Kyoto's north-south axis, in two, effectively severing the northern and southern halves of the city. With the proposed arch, Karasuma Road would become whole again, reunifying the split city, and the arch would be a reminder that Rashomon Gate, the fabled south gate of the ancient capital, had once stood on this site.

Japan Railways and the city authorities turned all these proposals down, however, and chose one designed by Professor Hara Hiroshi of Tokyo University. It divides the city as before, and does away with every reference to Kyoto's history and culture. The New Kyoto Station is a dull gray block towering over the neighborhood, so massive that Kyoto residents have taken to calling it «the battleship.» The pride of the station is a tall glass-fronted entrance lobby that resembles an airport building.

Professor Hara has a reputation as an expert on ethnic architecture, yet at a glance nothing here would appear to be particularly «ethnic.» But there are signs of the monumental architecture peculiar to modern Japan, now as ethnic as kimono. We've seen it all before in the Orochi Loop, the aggressive denial of-even attack on-the surroundings, the bombastic style, the architectural equivalent of sound coming from loudspeakers turned up to maximum volume. As Kyoto slides deeper into mediocrity, the station tries to impress by its sheer size. And, last, there are the cheap, functionless decorations. A plain gray box might not have been so bad, but Hara couldn't stop himself from adding things: miniature arches are built into the structure (apparently as a sop to Ando); the back of the station features external yellow stairways, red piping, and rows of porthole-like windows pasted onto the facade; and inside the giant entry lobby, escalators leading nowhere soar toward the sky. These are all features in which we see the influence of manga, Japanese comic books. The manga effect is reinforced in front of the station, where the first thing an arriving passenger sees is the Kyoto Mascot, a totem pole topped by big-eyed baby-faced children, molded in plastic. It's the equivalent of arriving in Florence and being greeted by Donald Duck.

The station's crowning glory is its so-called Cultural Zone, featuring a multipurpose entertainment center. As real culture disappears, these expressions of artificial culture, in the shape of cultural zones and halls, are a major source of revenue for the construction industry and hence a national imperative. Every year billions of dollars flow to such public halls; by 1995, Japan had 2,121 theaters and halls (up from 848 in 1979), and by 1997 it had 3,449 museums, the result of a museum-building rush unequaled by any other nation in the world.

Unquestioning foreign observers new to Japan often accept these halls and museums at face value. But most of these institutions satisfy no need aside from the construction industry's intention to keep building at public expense. The Kabuki actor Bando Tamasaburo says, «A multipurpose hall is a no-purpose hall.» At the theaters, events are staged that are planned and paid for by government agencies, attended mostly by people to whom they distribute free tickets. The museums are echo chambers, empty of visitors, with a few broken pots found in archaeological digs or obscure contemporary artworks chosen by the architect.