Fuyu, « floating,» could not be a better image for the rootless feeling of modern Japanese architecture. And designs abound for imaginary cities wholly unrelated to the real places where architects live. Recently, Isozaki curated an exhibition called «Mirage City-Another Utopia,» featuring fantastical buildings to be located on the uninhabited island of Haishi, off Hong Kong. As Kathryn Findlay has said, «Mirage City sums up the attitude that architects here have: detachment and distance from the places where they build.»

The second important development affecting architecture in Japan was the increase in money flowing to construction. On the crest of the monumentalist wave, Japanese architects had opportunities to design structures far more bizarre – and more numerous – than they could have imagined several decades earlier. Largesse from the construction industry funds glossy magazines and pamphlets advertising the work of Japanese architects to all the world.

Foreign designers find the wild and wacky fantasies of Japanese architects amusing, even enviable. What fun it must be to throw off the fetters and design as one might for a science-fiction set or a comic book! The international design community lionizes architects like Kurokawa and Isozaki. They have what architects everywhere desire but almost never have the luck to find: lots of money and total freedom.

The structures decorated with sheets or domes of perforated aluminum designed by Hasegawa Itsuko, Queen of Monuments, dot the landscape from the far north to the distant south. Her work, which epitomizes the manga school, also provides an opportunity to deploy the academic doublespeak used to glorify her aesthetic. The architect described her Nagoya World Design Expo Pavilion as follows:

A distant view of this building emulates a misty landscape, with layers of perforated metal panels and see-through screens reflecting the atmospheric colors of the clouds and seas. The garden is reminiscent of the spiky rocks in Guilin, China or a group of chador-covered Muslim women. It is actually a rest area with custom-designed chairs made of perforated plywood and shaded by milky white fabric tents. Imaginary trees made with expanded metal sheets and FRP (Fiber Reinforced Plastic) change their appearance constantly by reflecting sunlight. A deformed geodesic dome «high mountain» is also clad with FRP and perforated metal sheets, and surrounded with a great sense of nature.

Let's think about this. Hasegawa's «great sense of nature» includes a «misty landscape» made of perforated metal sheeting, a «garden» of brightly painted plywood, and «trees» of aluminum and plastic cutouts borne on steel columns. Words cannot do justice to what this structure really looks like: a jumble of functionless, pseudo-tech decoration, with columns sprouting sheets of metal and plastic cut into squares and ovals. This is nature on the Death Star, not on earth. Pure manga.

And why not? What is the Nagoya World Design Expo Pavilion anyway but another monument with no inherent purpose? A clutter of sterile decoration is as good a design as any other, although what this has to do with nature is a mystery. Hasegawa s masterpiece is considered to be the Shonandai Cultural Center, built for the city of Fujisawa. It consists of a hodgepodge of huge spheres, littered with bits and pieces of glass and aluminum, with her trademark metal and plastic trees.

This she calls «architecture as a second nature.» She goes on to say, «We thought that if we architecturally recreated a primal hill (which existed on the site before development) and established vestiges of nature hidden in the urbanity, then we could possibly find a new nature in the man-made environment.» This, she believed, would help us move «from the 20th century history of exploitation to a more soft-edged symbiotic unity.»

Let's return to our study of how to build a monument. Having achieved a «soft-edged symbiotic unity» in the design, the next step is to build, for construction is the whole point. The budgets sometimes make this comically clear: in an extreme case, the city of Ono in Kyushu had to fill its museum with replicas because no money had been set aside to buy art. The contractors, commonly chosen by closed bids, feed a percentage of the profits back to local politicians. Bureaucrats, architects, and laborers on the work crew all benefit.

Trouble arrives later, when the bills come due. Monuments are albatrosses for the cities and towns that commission them. Osaka has lost so much money on its waterfront projects that the prefecture has gone bankrupt and survives financially only by borrowing from the central government. The optimistic prognosis for the new Tokyo Bay projects is that expenditures will break even in 2034! Subsidies may cover construction, but they do not cover the management of monuments, as small towns have learned to their horror.

The operations headache goes back to the fact that most monuments do not satisfy any real need. In the case of Shuto's concert hall, the operating cost in the opening year was ?30 million. This hall was one of Takeyama's greatest hits, combining architectural interest with high-tech acoustics, but since the village didn't need a concert hall it stands silent most of the year. The town of Chuzu (population 12,000) in Shiga is burdened with a combined cultural hall and health center (Sazanami Hall) dreamed up by the architect Kurokawa Kisho, which cost ?2.2 billion to build and requires ?44 million a year to manage. In order to maintain Sazanami Hall, the town had to cut its general expenditures from ?20 million to ?13 million-and this was only to cover operations, before it had to begin repaying its share of the construction budget (?1.6 billion).

Tokyo has added the biggest behemoth to its extensive stable of white elephants. The Tokyo International Forum, beloved of world architectural critics for its curving glass walls following the train tracks near Tokyo Station and for its tall atrium, was completed for ?165 billion in January 1997. It opened with a high occupancy rate, having rented out its meeting rooms to municipal agencies celebrating its completion. But within a few months occupancy had sunk to below 30 percent, with no hope for a revival in sight. Lovely though the atrium is, there was no need for it in the first place. Although it is labeled an «international forum,» it is neither much of a forum nor international, though its upkeep is world-class: this elephant gobbles fodder to the tune of ?4.6 billion a year. And the new Yokohama Stadium, constructed at a cost of ?60 billion, has only one purpose-to host a few competitions in the Soccer World Cup planned for 2002. There is no long-term use in sight, and Yokohama expects maintenance fees to run into hundreds of millions of yen every year.

To make matters worse, all these halls and stadiums face fierce competition from one another. The commuting town of Sakae (population 25,000), an hour outside Tokyo, opened a multipurpose civic center in July 1995, with a hall that seats 1,500 people, welfare facilities, and a «community base» called «Fureai [Get-in-touch] Plaza Sakae.» Unfortunately for Sakae, the neighboring, even smaller towns of Inzai and Shiroi opened similar halls at the same time. Meanwhile, not far away, the cities of Matsudo, Sakura, and Narita all have big halls of their own. Sakae can't compete.

Small towns burdened with heavy operations fees turn again to mother's breast, the Construction Ministry, from which they can suckle more subsidies if they agree to build new monuments. The town of Igata is caught in such a cycle of dependency. Igata agreed to build three nuclear-power generating facilities in its environs in exchange for hefty grants (?6.2 billion for the third plant alone). But the town used up all the money on multipurpose town halls and other facilities, so it approved expansion of the third plant in exchange for more subsidies. These did not suffice to return the village to financial health, for the cost of maintaining its empty monuments was so high that Igata exhausted the funds by 1995. Igata now has no choice but to accept another power station.

Managing monuments successfully is largely beyond the capacity of the bureaucrats who are in charge of them. In some cases, there is no choice but to give up the original purpose of the hall and recycle it. The town of Nakanita, in Miyagi Prefecture in Kyushu, led the way in the 1980s with its Bach Concert Hall, at the time the most high-tech concert hall in Japan, which today is used for karaoke contests and piano lessons.

The painter Allan West, who lives in Nezu, Bunkyo-ku Ward, in Tokyo, described his experience with a new center that opened in his neighborhood. The organizers intended to have an «international room» for crafts use by locals, so he stopped by to ask what their plans for the room were. They had no idea. He suggested that they install a printmaking press for public use, and gave them a catalog of presses. They weren't interested.

Yet they had taken the trouble to draw up regulations for the international room:

1. The room can be used only by groups of at least ten or eleven people.

2. At least seven of these people must live within a six-block area of Nezu.

3. They must pay ?3,000 per person, per day.

4. They are not allowed to leave any materials at the hall.

5. A majority of a group's members must be present in order for them to use the room.

Allan then offered to buy and donate equipment for the room, but they turned him down. «It seemed like the building administration wanted to make their lives easier by making the facility impossible to use,» Allan says.

Concerned about the low level of management know-how, the National Land Agency opened a course of study for people in charge of cultural halls in February 1995. According to Kogure Nobuo, the cultural-affairs director of the Local Autonomy Unified Center, participants come for one reason: «Their desperate problem is that they can't make ends meet.»

One thing is clear: an entirely new service industry is in the making. Every year billions of dollars will flow nationwide to support tens of thousands of directors, curators, planners, office workers, and sales and custodial staffs. What is remarkable about this situation is that it runs counter to the official Japanese view that a service economy is not as viable, productive, or profitable as a manufacturing and construction economy. What, then, are we to make of the business of managing monuments, which employs so many people to provide for so little social need, creates no wealth, and relies almost entirely on public handouts for funding?