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Kyotoland by Stuart Isett
The first time I saw Kyoto I didn’t realize I’d seen it. Staring out of the air-tight windows of the bullet train, there was no end to the miles of factories and sterile, cookie-cutter housing projects that sprawl from Tokyo to Osaka, via Kyoto. I’d expected Kyoto to stand out from all this industrial and urban blight. I’d expected it to awaken my imagination and stimulate Orientalist fantasies. What I didn’t realize, sitting on the train that day, was that I couldn’t see ‘Kyoto’ because the city I had imagined from a thousand photographs doesn’t exist anymore.
Kyoto’s transformation has hardly been noticed outside of Japan and has caused little concern within. Since Japan’s economic bubble burst at the end of the 1980s all attention has been focused on Japan’s economic and political problems and few writers and even fewer photographers have attempted to document the cultural and social consequences of Japan’s rapid rise and subsequent crash.
From the moment you arrive in Kyoto your image of the city os chellenged. As you step out from train station and see the 150-meter high Kyoto Tower driven into the city’s center ,with its jarring and cartoon-like form, the visitor wonders where the ‘real’ Kyoto is hidden. The tower was meant to be a symbol of a new, modern and developed Kyoto. Built in 1964, city planners looked out over a city of traditional wood homes and tiled roofs and, like many cities in Japan, set about to destroy it. The tower still stands today, like a rusting space-age relic of Japan’s rush to modernity, a ‘symbolic stake through the heart’ as Kerr calls it. Like the rusting statues to Lenin and Marx scattered across the former Soviet Republics, the tower now sits rotting away like the system that spawned it, filled with crumbling exhibits, cheap fluorescent lighting and fading linoleum tiles. It is where any journey into Kyotoland must start.
