JAPAN’S most senior urban planning expert, who decries almost every city in his country as “hideous”, has devoted two years to drawing up a list of the nation’s most repulsive places.

Shigeru Itou’s damning report Ugly Japan is specifically designed to provoke national outcry, and, he hopes, become the centrepiece of a drive to make the country more beautiful. He has enlisted to his cause a panel of architecture gurus, designers, sculptors and Japan’s top civil engineers — his seniority and renown also grant him direct access to the highest ranks of government.

Within weeks of becoming Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi called on Mr Itou, an emeritus professor of Tokyo University, and put him in charge of a Cabinet office panel to study a “Japan beauty renaissance” to undo some of the monstrosities of the past 60 years. Professor Itou is careful not to single out particular buildings as ugly, believing that his report is only useful if it deals with “objective ugliness, not subjective dislikes”. He does, however, reserve a private judgment on the glittering steel and glass tower of Roppongi Hills, one of Tokyo’s most famous new landmarks and a structure which he thinks “resembles an old Russian woman’s backside”.

In an exclusive interview with The Times, Professor Itou revealed the contents of his forthcoming “list of the loathsome”, in which modern shopping centres and decrepit “love hotels” are lambasted along with ancient imperial gardens and tree-lined avenues in Hiroshima. But the ultimate accolade in the professor’s reverse tourist guide goes to the Nihombashi bridge in the heart of Tokyo. The ornate structure which was constructed in the 17th century, is charged with history and cultural significance — not only is it the point from which all distances to the capital are measured, but the commerce created by the bridge was what turned the old city of Edo into the country’s most important city. Unfortunately, urban planners preparing the city for the 1964 Olympic Games built an eight-lane motorway flyover just a few metres above this historic landmark, engulfing it with steel support pillars and denying the bridge any daylight at all.

“It was about showing that Japan was no longer poor. Beauty meant nothing to Japan then,” said Professor Itou. Having the ear of Mr Koizumi has evidently had an effect — after a meeting with the professor two days ago, the Prime Minister has asked for a study into moving the vast motorway and “opening Nihombashi to the sky so we can enjoy riverside walks”.

Runners-up in the 70-strong cavalcade of eyesores include a shopping arcade in the former coal mining town of Omuta, in which every shop has been boarded up, and a site in Yashio where Yakuza gangsters have muscled their way into a small residential street and established an industrial waste dump.

Near the top of the list is the valley of Kinugawa, a once stunning hot-spring town where, in the 19th century, the wealthiest city dwellers would escape the stench of the summer. In the booming 1970s scores of hotels were built astride the valley — immediately destroying its appeal. When everyone stopped visiting, the hotels went bust and now stand as crumbling testament to the awfulness of bubble-era construction.

BIGGEST EYESORES

1 Nihombashi Bridge and the flyover from hell

2 Kawaguchi Station the most chaotic bicycle park in Japan

3 Kinugawa the ghost town the bubble built

4 Omuta city the shopping arcade of a thousand bankruptcies

5 Hamarikyu Gardens built for an emperor, but collects all the flotsam in Tokyo Bay

6 Fuefuki discount shopping centre the most garish in all Japan

7 Utsunomiya station the nest of the loan sharks

8 Akasaka ghost house not a square inch without graffiti

9 Shibuya river where even the water rats fear to tread

10 Yashio the industrial dump next door

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