On the bus ride from Narita Airport to the Hotel Okura in Tokyo last April, I noticed something peculiar and touching — rows upon rows of trees, gently propped up with wooden braces. What care these limbs get! What attention is paid to the crooked and the lame! I saw many such struts for many such trees throughout Japan — in parks, in cities, on sidewalks, on highways.

But after a while those wooden crutches began to grate, for there seemed to be a double standard at work. Trees in Japan get the kind of tenderness that some buildings, even irreplaceable ones, can only dream of. I was thinking in particular of the Okura, one of Tokyo’s architectural treasures, which has a date with the wrecking ball this September. Where is the love?

When our bus pulled up to the Okura, on a small hill in the Toranomon district, it was dusk, and the exterior of the hotel was almost surreally beautiful, with its several stories of blue grids set at a slight angle above the yellow glow from behind the geometric grillwork that frames the hotel’s entrance. The porters from the hotel bowed to the departing, empty bus, as if it were going on some strange and dangerous mission.

Inside the lobby, long, yellow, beehive-like lamps — they look like a hybrid of Japanese pendant lanterns and lighted geodesic domes — hung down over a double-height room, softly punctuated with round tables and chairs designed to look like plum blossoms. Suited men leaned in over the low tables; a few women moved about in kimonos. The scene was backlit by a grid of window screens. A map on the wall showed the time zones of various cities, among them Leningrad. It looked like 1962, except for the tourists taking selfies. Near the check-in desk was a grid of wooden mail-slots, some of which had real paper messages in them. How Japanese, how modern! Paper messages. Lanterns. Grids.