Dogs and Demons

In Japan, likewise, the poor people, strong state policy rests on cramped and poorly built housing. Matthias Ley, a German photographer based in Tokyo, told me that once, when he was taking a German publisher from Osaka Airport into Kyoto, the publisher looked out at a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, a typical jumble of concrete boxes and electric wires, and asked i

A frequent misunderstanding about Japan is the claim that there is not enough land to support its large population, that Japan is «crowded,» hence land costs are high. In fact, Japan's population density is comparable to that of many prosperous (and still-beautiful) European countries. Another myth is that, given how mountainous much of Japan is, the habitable land area is bound to be small. This begs the question of what is «habitable land.» Hills did not stop Tuscany from developing beautifully, or San Francisco, or Hong Kong. The problem lies in land use.

In Japan, there are many laws restricting both the supply of land available for housing and what can be built on it. With homes prohibitively expensive – in the early 1990s banks were arranging mortgages that would bind families unto the third generation – the people are forced to save; banks then cha

One way that the government restricts land use is by rigorously enforcing low floor-to-area ratios, unchanged from the days when Japanese cities consisted mostly of one- and two-story wooden buildings. The Sunlight Law and low FAR in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka results in street after street of low buildings even in expensive commercial areas. Another way in which the government restricts land use is through outdated regulations that subsidize owners who use their land as rice paddies; large areas of Tokyo are still zoned for agriculture. A third major obstacle to effective land use in Japan is that people ca

After Lycurgus had finished laying down the laws for Sparta, he gathered the king and the people together and told them that all was complete, except for one final question that he needed to ask of the Oracle at Delphi. He made all the citizens take a solemn oath that they would not alter a single letter of his laws until he returned. Lycurgus went to Delphi and starved himself to death there, so as never to return, and the people, bound by their oath, maintained his laws unchanged for the next nine hundred years.

Japan is like this. Lycurgus left in about 1965, and since then nobody has changed anything. Land-use pla

One important trend in domestic architecture is quietly transforming neighborhoods across the country: prefabricated housing. «Prefab» in Japan means totally prefabricated, with the entire structure mass-manufactured by giant housing companies and delivered to homeowners as one package. Prefab homes now account for a majority of new Japanese houses – and in this there is some progress, and also a final blow to the urban landscape. On the plus side, the new homes are cleaner and more convenient than the old houses they replace. On the minus side, they represent the victory of sterility. Inside and outside surfaces consist of shiny processed materials so u

Saddest of all is the utter uniformity of the prefab houses. Neighborhood after neighborhood has seen whatever character it once had disappear before rows of mass-produced homes in the shape of Model A, B, or C, all clad in exactly the same gray shade of hybrid construction material. It's another cycle in Japan's descending cultural spiral, something that no mere upturn or downturn in the economy is going to affect.

In any event, very few people, including the rich, have homes to which they can invite strangers with pride. A di

Lycurgus would have approved. One of his most effective laws was one that forced all Spartan men to eat at the same communal table, never at home. «For the rich,» Plutarch wrote, «being obliged to go to the same table with the poor, could not make use of or enjoy their abundance, nor so much as please their vanity by looking at or displaying it. So that the common proverb, that Plutus, the god of riches, is blind, was nowhere in all the world literally verified but in Sparta. There, indeed, he was not only blind, but like a picture, without either life or morion.»

The restricting of the population to cramped, expensive, and now characterless prefabricated housing made of low-grade industrial materials suited Japan's policy of benefiting old-line manufacturing industries at all costs. However, new industries like interior design can prosper only when people are comfortable and educated enough to develop a higher level of taste.

The results are evident in hotels and resorts. While Kyoto is famed for its lovely old i

So far we have been speaking of big city hotels with hundreds of rooms; when it comes to small garden hotels or boutique hotels, the contrast with other advanced nations is even more striking. There was a brief period in the late 1980s, at the height of the Bubble, when price was no object, when a few brave developers created hotels of striking originality, such as Kuzawa Mitushiro's colorful И Palazzo in Fukuoka, done in collaboration with Aldo Rossi. But with the collapse of the Bubble, developers settled back into the convenient old pattern of «business hotels,» with their cramped rooms, flat decor, and limited facilities. It would be fair to say that the very concept of a boutique hotel has yet to exist in Japan. There is no such thing as New York's witty Paragon or W hotels, nothing with the minimalist chic of Ian Schrager's creations-just the standard shiny marble lobbies one sees everywhere, with rooms designed with basic industrial efficiency. «But hotels are not just places to sleep,» says Schrager. «You're supposed to have fun there.»

Today's younger Japanese designers, who have grown up in landscapes such as the one the Maerkle family saw when they drove from Kobe to Izumi-Otsu, or the equally horrifying vista welcoming visitors at Narita Airport when they take the Narita express train into Tokyo, work accordingly. As Lycurgus predicted, people proportion «their beds to their houses, and their coverlets to their beds, and the rest of their goods and furniture to these.» Standardized shiny surfaces are what people really like and feel comfortable in. The victory of the industrial mode in Japanese life can be sensed in health spas, which, far from being relaxing natural retreats, look rather like clinics, with bright white corridors and attendants in surgical smocks. Boutique hotels, even were they to be introduced into Japan, would be bound to fail.