The City Planning and Urban Building Acts were introduced in 1919 as Japan turned towards the modernization of its cities. Since then, the Urban Building Act has been replaced by the Building Standards Act in 1950, and the New City Planning Act was implemented in 1968. However, these new acts emphasized the fireproofing of buildings and urban disaster prevention, and compared with single purpose regulations, a fundamental review of aggregated regulations was not carried out. As a result, building site and verification rules ran rampant, and the importance of landscaping and project licensing systems for whole blocks of land was not stressed. This led to the loss of the beautiful streetscapes which had existed from days gone by, and now all that remains are a few which have been preserved as tourist sites. Regulations and legislation governing cities have become an impenetrable jungle with no one being able to understand all their particulars. In what way do we need to reform the system in order to defeat the current status quo and bring back the beautiful Japanese streetscapes of the past? The hint lies within this report.