THE HIDDEN ORDER: Tokyo Through the Twentieth...

THE HIDDEN ORDER: Tokyo Through the Twentieth Century by Yoshinobu Ashihara, translated by Lynne E. Riggs (Kodansha: $6.95, illustrated). Ashihara contrasts Western and Japanese ideas about architecture in this graceful study, noting that Western builders emphasize the facade of a structure and arrange the rooms behind it as best they can. The Japanese regard a house as a large bedroom, a private space reserved for family members and intimate friends; their traditional architecture stresses the importance of making the interior spaces flow into the surrounding landscape, and pays little attention to the often asymmetrical exterior. These attitudes help explain many of the incongruities Western observers perceive in postwar Tokyo, where homes remain small and almost all formal entertaining is done in restaurants. Ashihara compares the hidden beauties of seemingly chaotic Tokyo to the complex patterns produced by fractal geometry, but he fails to persuade the reader that its amoeba-like sprawl represents a desirable prototype for 21st-Century cities.