The calm of a meticulously maintained garden creates a tranquil retreat from worldly cares. Wide city streets and boulevards, many now canopied by trees, reflect a basic sense of civic order and control.  Village hamlets nestle quietly against surrounding hillsides.  Even busy toll roads, often elevated and cut off from their surroundings by high sound barriers, move traffic efficiently and effectively towards final destinations.

Why, then, the chaos of roadside culture along crowded thoroughfares choked with cars, buses and trucks going nowhere?  Why the proliferation of poorly-constructed and badly-designed roadside structures with their gravel parking lots and huge, garish neon signs?  Why the trash and dust and abandoned or neglected buildings?

In 1996 when I lived in Hikone on the outskirts of Kyoto for six months, I had a choice of routes along which to bike into town. 

One took me along the edges of rice fields among greenhouses wherein vegetables were being grown for market; in the distance I could see several jagged mountain ranges; as I rode along I waved to farmers in their fields; and, finally, I peddled through a small, quiet neighborhood of well-cared-for homes. 

The alternative took me along a crowded road by a Lawsons convenience store, a pachinko (vertical pinball) parlor, a busy gas station, a liquor store, a local bank branch, several restaurants, lots of vending machines (including one that dispensed pornographic magazines), a disco, empty fields littered with trash and lots of blinking neon signs and large advertising billboards.

Guess which route I preferred!  But I still haven't figured out exactly what originally went wrong in the historical process of building up Japan's "road culture".  Was it the introduction of the automobile that affected things so dramatically?  Was it the lack of effective zoning?  Or do the Japanese see all this clutter and chaos as visually interesting?  I have no idea.

All I do know is that, when stuck in a long and slow-moving stream of motor vehicles crawling through mile after mile of roadside clutter, I prefer to close my eyes, engage in a bit of Zen meditation  and leave the driving to someone else.