Kaihin Makuhari

It has been a beautiful day here in Chiba. Lovely blue skies with a fresh autumnal wind blowing. I ambled to a cheap restaurant for lunch and was impressed once again at the great value for money my lunch represented. Perhaps I should have taken a picture......

Despite my contentment, feelings of unease regarding Kaihin Makuhari are always close to the surface. I have come to 2 recent conclusions why I dislike the place so much:

1. The place is so contrived, I feel like a character in SimCity. Nothing has been left to chance with the result being an almost perfect reproduction of a town planner's brain fart. No charm, no excitement, no beauty. Although I have never been much a fan of the Japanese built environment, at least some of the older areas of Tokyo display some form of character or variery. Kaihin Makuhari reminds me of a long road in the Australian outback........constant monotony.2. Permanence. Simply put, there is none. One excuse for the parcity of visible history is the fact that many parts of Japan were levelled by American bombers during the closing stages of WWII. This is an excuse that doesn't sit well with me. In most parts of Japan, I have rarely seen buildings in excess of 30 years old. Another excuse is the number of destructive earthquakes in Japan, the world's most tectonically active country. However, if some wooden buildings in Kyoto or Nara can survive hundreds of years, their is no excuse not to have other architectural relics or treasures. There is good reason why Kaihin Makuhari does not possess old buildings - the area is on land mostly reclaimed from the sea. However, I do not believe any of the houses or office buildings will be here in 50 years time. Japan is a land of disposable buildings which are intentionally built with limited life-spans.

The lack of permanence or continuity doesn't sit well with me (or I suspect other people, even perhaps the Japanese). In Britain or other countries, I find it reassuring to know that not all things in life change at breakneck speed or immediately disappear. It is good to have a connection with the past and to know that the buildings you use and see today were once used by scores of previous generations. By the same degree, it is comforting to know that when we are all gone, many of the places we know today will survive unchanged.

That's one of the problems with Japan - the past is lost and the future will show no trace of your existence. Generations go their way with history confined to the life-spans of living people. The country is all the poorer for it.