As a consequence, Japanese cities often feel like the back lots of movie studios. The various sets, all of them quite large and seemingly permanent, are constructed, used and left standing There seems to be no reason for their arrangement. They were built for reasons of economy and convenience, and there is no unifying style because the uses of each were different. Though they look sturdy, they were not designed to last – and indeed they will not.The Western municipality which Tokyo most resembles is the only “city” the West erects in the knowledge that it is temporary: the international exposition, where massive buildings are thrown up, avenues are constructed, and vast crowds are accommodated, but only for a season.

The assumption is that all of this will shortly be pulled down. Building only for now, and only for show, architects are encouraged to be extreme. Tokyo is like an international expo which has remained standing.Tokyo lacks those architectural monuments which speak so eloquently of timelessness, of immortality, except, as we have seen, in the very concept of timeless impermanence that the Japanese city has incorporated into itself.Western visitors are thus presented with an anomaly when they visit a city such as Tokyo. They cannot detect the natural and organic shape of the city because structural logic has no place in such a form, yet they find an anthropomorphosed city in that the more-than-human is unstressed and the merely human is emphasised.Nor is Tokyo, despite its seeming modernity, a city that makes Western assumptions.

That one often cannot locate an address without outside (police, postman, local resident) help would indicate that it is not in any Western sense an efficient urban complex As D.J. Enright wisely remarked, though in another context, “Ambiguity interests the Japanese a good deal more than does logic.”Indeed, much is illogical and inefficient. Kurt Singer, speaking of the Japanese language, noticed that it is so rich in ambiguities that “nobody deplores the resulting measure of haziness. It is by higher degrees of clarity and precision that the Japanese would feel inconvenienced.”Donald Richie is the author of `Tokyo: a view of the city’ (Reaktion Books, pounds 14.95). AMONG THE many things Australian racing has been blessed with – high prize money and packed racecourses, for example – are a triumvirate of fine trainers: Colin Hayes, Tommy (T.J.) Smith and Bart Cummings. Colin Hayes saddled more than 5,000 winners during his 40-year career. He was Melbourne’s leading trainer for 13 successive seasons from 1977 to 1990, and trained his last winner in July 1990.
It was Hayes who the owner-breeder Robert Sangster turned to when he wanted to set up an operation in Australia in the early 1970s, equating Hayes’s abilities with those of the Irish training genius Vincent O’Brien.

He told me:I went to see his Lindsay Park operation in South Australia in the early 1970s and was struck immediately at how just like Vincent his gallops were on an incline and unlike the other Australian trainers who trained on the racecourses, which were also flat, his was a private operation.It was the ideal training ground for me and allied to his marketing ability and the fact he was such a forward thinking man he was the ideal partner. I would put Colin in the top ten of racing people worldwide in this century.In 1980 Hayes and Sangster captured the Holy Grail of Australian racing, the Melbourne Cup, with Beldale Ball. They are now partners in stud farms in New South Wales and Victoria although Lindsay Park remains the jewel in the crown.Lindsay Park was the perfect destination when Sangster and his Irish partner John Magnier started the then revolutionary idea of sending stallions from Coolmore Stud in Tipperary to Australia for the breeding season. Godswalk was the first stallion to alight in the 1970s, and he sired a sequence of champions. His success, and that of several other stallions from Coolmore, has led to nearly every major northern hemisphere breeder following suit.Hayes had a rare eye for a horse. In the early 1980s he ignored derisory comments to buy Rory’s Jester for just A$10,000 and turned him into a champion two-year-old and sire.He also enjoyed a lucrative relationship with the Maktoums, the ruling family of Dubai. This was cemented when he trained Hamdan al-Maktoum’s horse At Talaq, which had run fourth in the Derby.

After being sent to Hayes, he went on to win the 1986 Melbourne Cup For Sheikh Hamdan Hayes also bought Zabeel, for A$500,000. Zabeel was already a top-flight racehorse, but has become an even better stallion, establishing world records with his first three progeny.Hayes was born in 1924. His father was a boilermaker who died when he was nine, and none of his family had been involved in horseracing. Hayes established Lindsay Park in the Barossa Valley in South Australia in 1950 from nothing to become both a training and breeding establishment.Adrian Nicholl, a leading bloodstock agent, was just a green wannabe agent when he went to the sales in Australia in 1974. Hayes listened to him, gave him advice and from that moment on believed in the English-born Irish-based agent Nicholl told me:He was an incredibly easy guy to deal with. When I sat down with him and Peter Savill about sending the 1995 French Derby winner Celtic Swing to him there was no faffing around; we wrote out a three-line contract and that was that.Hayes belied the image of the parochial Australian by battling to set racing up in both Jakarta and Tehran before the Islamic revolution set in and spoiled his plans. It was mainly thanks too to his influence and lobbying that the Australian government gave large taxbreaks to encourage businessmen to invest in racing and breeding, thus providing Australian racing with a huge boom period in the 1980s.Despite undergoing major heart surgery in 1980, the year he was appointed OBE for services to racing, Hayes refused to give up training for another 10 years, producing another champion for Sangster in 1988 with the sprinting mare Special.