I have to agree with Kevin Rafferty's opinion in his Feb. 28 article, "Why's Japan grown so ugly?" The myth of the Japanese love for nature is supported by the continuing degradation of the rural and coastal landscape. Rafferty refers to Alex Kerr's lament, but the reasons for this degradation is the continual abuse of funding for construction, as Gavan McCormack explains in "The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence."
While the national government searches for policies to halt rural depopulation and help underachieving local economies, the continuation of the repetitious 1960s over-concretization of every surface and the slicing of the skyscape with electric wiring takes precedence over sympathetic design and architecture, which would be one way of attracting not only the foreign tourist dollar but also the domestic yen for rural revitalization.
The Great Hanshin Earthquake (1995) proved for Kobe that massive concretization is not fail-safe. As Rafferty refers to English heritage architecture preservation, he could also have referred to the difficult weather in that country as well, and yet the coastal and rural villages there do try and preserve heritage design, supported by the guidelines of the relevant governments.
Therein lies the issue -- the support of the governments. As McCormack argues (and increasingly other Japanese researchers), the construction state of Japan will continue as long as money is at the heart of land development -- the love of nature and Japanese heritage is not.
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