Suburban ugliness in Japan
Monday, July 16th, 2007There is something about japanese suburbs (if you can call them that) that looks very wrong in my eyes. Houses can be almost zen-inspired (although it’s not very common), people have incredibly well-tended mini-gardens in front of their houses - often on the street - and kids playing happily with their unicycles in the street. Noone seems to notice what you can see in the first of the pictures below, that the street is getting choked in cables hanging from the ubiqitous concrete poles.
Compounding the problem is that these poles are treated as some kind of do-whatever-you-want-and-hope-it-doesn’t-fall-down tree. The following picture is the view from my window on the second floor, not very exciting to wake up to a couple of big transformers and fat power cables rolled up in a bunch of teensy optical fibers every morning. Pay special attention to all the metal clamps used on the pole to hold up all the cables.
Apparently the reason for all this is twofold. First, the concrete industry is extremely strong in Japan. In other words, lobbying. They have managed to convince their fellow politicians (by means of a combination of amakudari and pure money handouts, I would guess, rather than through the strength of reason), that cables hanging from concrete poles is safer than cables dug into the ground (!) since Japan has so many earthquakes. Second, there is a law regarding digging cables into the ground that require them to be put into tubes that would withstand a nuclear blast, because the japanese soil is “uniquely moist” and would corrode cables otherwise. Another one of the “Japan is different” arguments. Read “Dogs and Demons” by Alex Kerr for some more discussion around this, regardless of if you agree with his arguments or not. I’m all with him though.
This stuff just tends to get me fired up. I think partly because it aesthetically destroys something that could be really nice - the uniquely japanese design language that is so revered in Sweden feels like it is only present in the shinto shrines nowadays, and the same aesthetical destruction happens in many different guises all across Japan. And, it is maybe even more upsetting because the Japanese themselves have gotten so used to it that they barely register the ugliness that surrounds them.
Ignorance is bliss.