For Japanese architects, cultural halls are a leading source of income, and designing them is a dream. The buildings need not harmonize with their surroundings, nor need they provide a community service or indeed fulfill any recognizable function, and this gives architects a free hand, to put it mildly The result is a plethora of buildings that are fanciful to the point of being bizarre. In Fujiidera City, on the outskirts of Osaka, one can find an office building in the shape of a huge concrete boat. In Toyodama, a town with a population of 5,000, the Home of Culture is a ?1.8 billion extravaganza in the shape of a multi-storied white mosque. The Desert on the Moon Hall (?400 million), on the Miyado coast, is shaped like an Arabian palace, complete with bronze statues of camel riders in an artificial dunescape.

One can find many of the architectural wonders of the world in a monument somewhere in Japan. Tokyo boasts a French chateau at Ebisu Garden Place, a Gaudi-style walkway with curving mounds inset with broken tiles at Tama New Town, and a German village in Takanawa, Minato-ku Ward. «However,» as the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho says, «just look around you at the sea of signs in kanji characters and kana alphabets, and in a moment your good mood crashes to earth in real-life Japan. Alas, however hard we strive to bring in foreign culture, in the end it is nothing but 'foreign-style.' On the other hand, maybe the inability to do anything for real could be called 'Japanese-style.' »

Hanker for Italy? You can find a Venetian palazzo in Kotaru, or an entire Michelangelo inlaid courtyard re-created at the Tsukuba Civic Center Building in Ibaragi. In Akita you can visit the Snow Museum, which keeps samples of snow in chilled display chambers. In Yamanashi, a Fruit Museum is housed in fruit-shaped glass-and-steel spheres described by the architect as «either planted firmly in the ground or attempting to reject the earth, as if they had just landed from the air and were trying to fly away.» And in Naruto,Tokushima, the Otsuka Museum of Art houses a thousand renowned works of Western art-fi-om the Sistine Chapel to Andy Warhol-duplicated on ceramic panels. In Tokyo, fanciful monuments are legion. Typical of the genre is the Edo-Tokyo Museum, a snouted metal body raised high on megalithic legs. The city built it to celebrate the culture of the Edo period. As one commentator has said, «What this look-alike of a Star Wars battle station has to do with Tokyo's past is a mystery. At any moment you expect it to zap the graceful national sumo stadium next door and reduce it to galactic dust.»

Monuments come in two basic varieties: manga and massive. The manga approach is typified by functionless decoration-the stainless-steel tubes topped with dragon heads at the sword museum in Yokota, for example, or Asahi's Super Dry Hall in Tokyo, reported as «what can only be described as an objet, a kind of golden beet resting on a black obsidian-like pedestal. . . . This is the Flamme A'Or (Flame of Gold) representing, we are told, the 'burning heart of Asahi beer.' Or maybe the head on a glass of that same product. Or something from Ghostbusters. The flame is hollow, so serves no practical purpose at all. Call it architecture as sculpture.» Known locally as the «turd building,» Asahi's Super Dry Hall was designed by a French architect, replacing what the Tokyo historian Edward Seidensticker believes to have been the city's last remaining wooden beer hall, dating from Taisho if not late Meiji.

Into the massive category fall the supercities being planned for landfill in the harbors of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe, as well as fortresses like the Tokyo Municipal Office Complex in Shinjuku. The most lavishly funded monuments, like the New Kyoto Station, manage to combine manga and massive in one structure.

What both categories of monument have in common is excess. Braggadocio. In Shelley's famous sonnet "Ozymandias," the poet describes a traveler coming across the ruins of a gigantic statue in the desert. On the base of the statue, an inscription reads:

«My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!» Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Japan has a bad case of the Ozymandias syndrome. «Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands» of miserable houses, ugly apartments, shadeless streets, bleak office buildings, and the clutter of signs and electric wires stretch far away. But Japan's planners seem to believe that the world will stand in amazement before these monuments, the larger and more strident the better.

Hence the pride that the town of Yokota takes in the fact that the Orochi Loop is Japans longest highway cloverleaf. Other towns have built the longest stone stairway (3,333 steps), the biggest waterwheel, the world's biggest Ferris wheel (Yokohama waterfront), the biggest stewpot (six meters wide, able to feed 30,000 people), the biggest drum, the biggest sand clock, and the world's longest beach bench. In Tokyo, monuments on the drawing boards include Taisei Corporation's 4,000-meter cone-shaped building known as X-SEED4000. Its base would be six kilometers wide and it would sit above the ocean, housing 500,000 people. The reason for the name X-SEED is that, though shaped like Mount Fuji, the monument's height would exceed that of Mount Fuji by several hundred meters, so residents could enjoy looking down on the mountain.

Shimizu Corporation is proposing a far more modest 800-meter skyscraper (almost twice the height of the Sears Tower in Chicago), on pillars above a city. Kajima Corporation is pursuing a stacked structure, a so-called Dynamic Intelligent Building, which consists of several fifty-story structures piled on top of one another. Ohbayashi Corporation, for its part, has announced plans for the 2,100-meter Aeropolis 2001, whose shadow will darken the environs of Tokyo.

While these companies have put their plans on hold due to the bursting of the Bubble, their concepts are dear to the Construction Ministry's heart, and as we have seen in the case of Nagara Dam, once a concept, always a concept. Aoki Hitoshi, a senior specialist with the Construction Advisory Section of the Construction Ministry, says, «The construction companies put a great deal of work into developing them, and it seemed a shame not to utilize them. Aside from the military, development of such buildings is an ideal frontier in which scientific research can be extended. We hope that in the future this can be developed into a national project.» How these structures will get around the Sunlight Law is a mystery, but in the case of monuments, ministries waive restrictions. Whatever it costs, something like these will surely get built.

Mile-high buildings are just the beginning. The grandiose visions of Japan's builders and architects go further-nothing less than reshaping the land itself. The new Comprehensive National Development Plan, or Zenso, is considering a network of expressways across the country, as well as mammoth tunnels and bridges linking all of Japan's islands, despite the fact that road, rail, and air systems already link them. The jewel in the crown would be a brand-new capital built on land far away from Tokyo; this will provide opportunities for monuments on a scale beyond anything yet imagined. Estimated by the government to cost ?14 trillion, it will house 600,000 people in a 9,000-hectare site surrounding the National Diet, to be called Diet City. The construction work will essentially involve flattening an entire prefecture – and eight prefectures have passed resolutions urging that this new capital be built in their territory.

The architect Kurokawa Kisho proposes to expand Tokyo by creating a 30,000-hectare island in the bay, laced with canals and freeways. This island would be home to 5 million people, with an additional million housed in another new city built at the Chiba end of the bay and connected by a bridge. The cost of this scheme comes to around ?300 trillion (twenty times the Apollo program), and it would require men and machines to level an entire range of mountains yielding 8.4 billion cubic meters of landfill (125 times what builders excavated to cut the Suez Canal), this on top of the 900 million cubic meters already shaved off the mountains of Chiba Prefecture to build the Tokyo-Chiba trans-bay bridge.

The world knows Japan as the land of the miniature, of restraint, of quiet good taste, of devotion to the low-key but telling detail. Nakano Kiyotsugu wrote a best-selling book published in 1993 in which he argued that the very core ideal of traditional Japanese culture was Seihin no Shiso, the «philosophy of pure poverty.» By pure poverty, Nakano meant the simplicity of life of the eighteenth-century Buddhist monk Ryokan, famed for living happily in a thatched hut. Ryokan's chief pleasure in life was playing with the local children. «Pure poverty» inspired many of Japan's greatest works of literature, such as Kamo no Chomei's Record of the Ten-Foot-Square Hut, written in the early thirteenth century, which describes a life of meditation in a modest natural setting, and which set a pattern that the philosopher Yoshida Kenko and the poets Saigyo and Basho followed in later years; it reached its apex in the tea ceremony. Tea masters designed tearooms to be small, unobtrusive structures, made of humble woods and bamboo.

The philosophy of pure poverty penetrates every facet of traditional Japan. Visitors to Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, home of the famous rock garden, will have seen a stone water basin in the garden at the back, whose motto is known to schoolchildren across the land: four characters are carved in it, surrounding a square hole in the center of the stone, which is a visual pun, since all four have the radical for «mouth,» a square, in them. The message-the essence of Zen, one could even say of Buddhism in general – is Ware Tada Таrи Shiru, which means «I know only what is enough.» Another translation is «I know the limits, and that is enough.» Nakano writes plaintively:

When I speak of Japanese culture to foreigners, the problem always circles back to the way we live today, which is only natural. The reason I began talking about this side of Japanese culture is I wanted to say, «The Japanese products you see and the people making them are not all there is to the Japanese! This is what our traditional culture was!» While I know full well that it is being lost in today's Japan, it was my desire to introduce the best, the supreme point of Japanese culture.