The building of monuments is now so important for Japan that it deserves to be studied as an independent sector of the economy. What follows is, I believe, the first step-by-step outline of the business and planning of monuments in either Japanese or English.

Government subsidies underpin it all. With construction so lucrative to bureaucrats and politicians in charge, building mama has overrun every part of Japan. Most of the «pork» goes to the countryside, since the Liberal Democratic Party, heavily dependent on the rural agricultural vote, has governed Japan with only slight interruptions for a half century, and it supports a policy of special rural subsidies, most of which are earmarked for construction. That is why the more remote the countryside, the greater the damage. A tiny mountain village like Iya Valley in Shikoku depends on construction for more than 90 percent of its income; government handouts for building dams, roads, and kominkan (community halls) are its very lifeblood.

In the case of halls and monuments, the Ministry of Home Affairs'Bonds for Overall Servicing of Regional Projects (chisosai bonds) channel much of the subsidies to local entities. Using chisosai bonds, towns can borrow up to 75 percent of the cost of their monuments from the government, which shoulders 30 to 50 percent of the interest. Subsidies also cover 15 percent of «ground preparation,» including landfill and foundation work, which is often the most expensive part of construction.

In addition, Japan has a Monument Law. In the 1980s, Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru began with a onetime grant of ?100 million to rural areas to use any way they wished. Had the money gone to «dogs» – planting trees, beautifying river-banks – it might have led to real benefits, but it was intended for «demons,» for striking monuments and attention-gathering events that are much more expensive. So with only ?100 million, small towns could do nothing much. (Perhaps the biggest success story concerned the town of Tsuna, in Hyogo Prefecture, which used its money to buy a sixty-three-kilo gold nugget, and drew more than a million tourists to see it.) Takeshita followed up with a full-fledged law that provides subsidies to «specially targeted projects for building up old hometowns (furusato zukuri) » waiving interest on loans for «ground preparation» and facilitating chisosai bond issues. Even with subsidies, villages like Toyodama can hardly afford the expense of their mosques and museums, but with debt so easy and with bonds matched by government grants, provincial towns have not resisted; during the 1990s, small towns borrowed about a trillion yen for their monuments.

So the money is there (albeit on loan). The next step is to plan what sort of hall your town is to have, and planning a monument isn't easy. The architect YamazakiYasutaka, an expert in civic-hall construction, says, «They are not building these halls in order to vitalize culture. The aim is, through building halls, to vitalize the economy. To put it strongly, in the name of these halls, local governments are simply building whatever they want to build.»

The journalist Nakazaki Takashi illustrates how a hall gets planned. When the village of Nagi in Okayama decided that it needed a monument, its first idea was a museum of calligraphy, but regional authorities pointed out that a monument is not a monument unless a famous architect designs it. So Nagi approached Isozaki Arata, and Isozaki told village officials that if they would allow him a free hand in designing a museum according to his own ideals, he would agree to do it. Flattered by the famous architect's attention and at a loss how to build a monument otherwise, Nagi agreed to Isozaki's terms. What the village got was a modern museum housing only three artworks, two by Isozaki's cronies and one by his wife, with a small token calligraphy gallery tacked on at the back. The three artworks (valued at ?300 million) were included as part of the construction budget, but Isozaki never told the village the details of the fees the artists received; the total cost came to ?1.6 billion, about three times the village's annual tax income. Takatori Satoshi, the director of the museum, said, «There was nobody in the village who could talk back. It could be that those who had some idea of what was going on were scared and didn't dare raise their hands.»

The town of Shuto in Yamaguchi Prefecture (population 15,000) set out to build a community meeting place. The town fathers consulted with the construction-department head at the prefectural office, and in a scenario reminiscent of Nagi's, the department head called in his college buddy, the architect Takeyama Sei, who proposed a concert hall. While this was far from the original purpose of a meeting place, and though Shuto villagers had little need for a concert hall, who were they to argue? The Shuto Cultural Hall (Pastora Hall) opened in 1994, a huge concrete block in the middle of rice paddies, with a rooftop performance space large enough to seat 1,500 people.

The next step after «planning» is «design.» Commercial architecture accounts for most of the new buildings in Japan, which is of course true around the world, and in Japan these are designed largely by in-house designers working for giant construction firms and architectural agencies. These buildings share a common grayness, uniformity, and cheap commercialism. As for independent architects, their work generally falls into the two familiar styles: manga (comic-book fantasy) or massive (overwhelming office block).

The leader of the massive camp is Tange Kenzo, whose solid, single-piece constructions aim to impress with weight and majesty. This style dominated in the 1960s, when he designed the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, and at first it featured traditional Japanese forms duplicated in concrete, such as pillar and post, or jutting roof beams. A turning point came in the 1970s, when Isozaki Arata insisted that it didn't matter if a building looked Japanese or Western. Japanese culture, he argued, had no core, so the architect was free to quote wittily from any tradition. This was the beginning of the manga style, with its emphasis on curious shapes and fantastic decorations. Architecture came to be seen as «contemporary art,» as a form of sculpture.

The architects Ito Toyo, Shinohara Kazuo, and others took the next step when they invented the term fuyu-sei,« floating,» to describe a type of building made of punched metal, colored plastic, and glass with a quality of temporariness and impermanence. This self-consciously trashy, cheap, shiny look caught on like wildfire, and it dominates mainstream architecture in Japan today, even inducing a «massive» builder like Hara to add fuyu touches to his New Kyoto Station.

During the high-growth decades of the 1960s and 1970s, two developments influenced architects in Japan. Kathryn Findlay, a British architect working in Tokyo, put it this way, «From the 1970s a number of Japanese architects felt that it was necessary to divorce architecture from society, economies, and city planning, and become a self-referential art.» So in the first development Japanese architects considered that they should not be constrained by the buildings' environment. They felt no need to harmonize their buildings with cities, no requirement to site them vis-a-vis rivers or hills, and no need to take a backward glance at history. In a sense, Isozaki was perhaps right when he declared that Japanese culture had no core.

Of course, when architects sit down in front of their desks and start drawing, who knows what extraordinary visions may flow from their pens? Dreaming up castles in the air is part of what they are supposed to do. But in most modern contexts local history and the natural environment have tempered their dreams. In the 1930s, Le Corbusier drew up a plan for Paris that would have demolished the old urban center and replaced it with wide avenues fronted by rows of tall rectangular office blocks. He called this plan Ville Radieuse, "Radiant City." But Parisians dismissed Radiant City with horror, and today it is considered a byword for the misguided schemes of egotistical architects. The history of modern architecture in America is replete with the corpses of similar bizarre ideas.

A fierce argument rages between architects whose buildings are meant to stand alone as pure art, «object-oriented,» and those whose structures meld into their surroundings «contextually.» Mostly, city planners try to strike a balance between the two points of view.

In Japan, however, there is no «context,» only «objects.» Hasegawa Itsuko, the high priestess of the fuyu movement, has written: «At the opening [of an exhibition] we were shown a video of modern Japan. Scenes overflowing with people, cars, and consumer goods, scenes of chaotic cities and architecture, a confusion of media information, coexistence of traditional ceremonies and people's multi-faceted life of today-after seeing it once even I, who live amongst it, found myself completely exhausted.» The logical direction out of this chaos is escape from the dreary and prosaic Japanese urban landscape. Any touch of variety, even something hideous, is a welcome release. Upon seeing the Hinomaru Driving School, a black building with a huge red globe emerging from it, Shuwa Tei, the president of a Tokyo architectural firm, said, «It's so ugly and unexpected it's endearing.» Hasegawa sums it up: «Architecture that fits in with the city and leads people into various activities-through these alone we will not see liberated space... We must aim at developing a liberated architectural scene worldwide, by conceptualizing architecture between time and space.»

What this jargon means is that it is old-fashioned to design buildings that actually fulfill a useful purpose or improve people's lives, and it is more important to have buildings that are «liberated» from «time and space.» An example of a liberated building would be Saishunkan Seiyaku Women's Dormitory in Kumamoto, designed by Sejima Kazuyo and commissioned by Isozaki Arata for a project known as Artpolis. This building from the early 1990s, intended to house young women employees of a pharmaceutical company, won the Japan Institute of Architecture's Newcomer's Prize. Judges praised it for its elegant modernism, which Sejima achieved by squeezing four women into each room of the living quarters and having a large common space; she based her concept on the Russian Supremacist view of housing. Design an uncomfortable, even miserable, apartment block of the sort you might find in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, and the Japan Institute of Architecture will award you a prize for elegant modernism.