Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Japan by Kerr

Author:Kerr
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Industries, Non-fiction, Government, Asia, General, Economic Conditions, Nonfiction, Political Science, Comparative, Japan, Business & Economics, History
ISBN: 9780809095216
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Published: 2001-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Zoning – the political and social science of making the most efficient use of different types of land – is a crucial skill that Japan's bureaucrats have failed to master. The distinction between industrial, commercial, residential, and agricultural neighborhoods hardly exists. In the residential neighborhood of Kameoka, near Kyoto, where I live, I need walk only about five minutes to find-right next door to suburban homes and rice paddies – a used-car lot, a gigantic rusting fuel tank filled with nobody knows what, a plot surrounded by a prefabricated steel wall twenty feet high in which construction waste is dumped, rows of vending machines with blinking lights, a golf driving range half the size of a football field surrounded by wire mesh hung from giant pylons and illuminated at night, a vast number of signs of every type (pinned onto trees, propped up by the roadside), and, of course, a pachinko parlor, with towers of spiraling neon and flashing strobe lights. This is the typical level of visual pollution in the suburban neighborhood of a Japanese city, and nobody considers it odd, because every structure scrupulously obeys the rules: FAR ratios, footprint quotas, allowable building materials, location of telephone poles, and so forth. It is the Through the Looking-Glass world of bureaucratic management: there is no lack of regulation, yet chaos reigns.

Many of the regulations exist to protect cartels of architectural firms and construction companies. Others, such as those that effectively prohibit residential homes from having basements, are cobweb-covered relics. Their original purpose is lost in time, yet no one considers changing them. Indeed, the complete inflexibility of these rules and regulations creates more of the clutter and crowding that characterize Japanese cities.

Kyoto, for example, had a golden opportunity in the 1960s, when it was working on renovations for the Olympic Games. Had it zoned the city differently north and south at the train station (most of the historic center lies north of the station), the old center could easily have been protected and saved. To the south, where most of the buildings except a few large temples were poor, shoddily built, and ripe for redevelopment, Kyoto could have created a new satellite city – like La Defense, the supermodern suburb of Paris. But of course this did not happen. Instead, bureaucrats applied rigid FAR and height limitations everywhere, which led to a cycle of rising land prices, high inheritance taxes, and destruction in the city center, and at the same time prevented the development of good new architecture. Rather than having a truly new city in the south and a beautiful old city in the north, Kyoto today has neither new nor old but a conglomeration where everything looks equally shabby.

The two regulations that have had the most devastating effect on Japan's cities are those concerning the inheritance tax and the so-called Sunlight Law. Japan's inheritance tax is one of the highest in the world; as land prices have risen continually for a half century, inheritors of old houses almost invariably have to sell them in order to pay the tax.

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