Misfits’ Guide to TOKYO #1

August 17, 2025

A city like Tokyo is continually being rebuilt. I could list many things worth seeing but I couldn’t guarantee they’ll be there in ten years say. We can be fairly certain Meiji Shrine and Nijūbashi (the double bridge of the header photo) are keepers but for those you don’t need recommendations from me. There’s therefore a touch of history to these of mine and I’ve already made a start on Misfits’ Guide to TOKYO #2.

Tokyo Monorail

First up is Tokyo Monorail. The diagram says it all. The first terminal building at Haneda Airport opened in 1935 but only opened to commercial flights in 1955. Narita Airport opened in 1978 and operations were largely transferred there. Haneda Airport is now used for domestic/Korea/China business travel as well as for premium international carriers such as that Emirates, Qatar and JAL. Its attraction is its proximity to Tokyo and that proximity is enhanced by the Tokyo Monorail that opened in 1964 in time for the Tokyo Olympics. Rolling stock is being continually being updated for the bullet train and so is that for the Tokyo Monorail but it still seems wonderfully retro. The airport has three terminals but none of them are huge by today’s standards. I felt that passengers were checked in quickly and efficiently, perhaps to compensate for there not being the space to have them standing around in long queues. I don’t know, but Terminal 3 has a wonderful tonkatsu restaurant that’s an excellent reason for a monorail ride.

Palaceside Building (former Reader’s Digest Building)

The Reader’s Digest Headquarters was the first tall building built in Tokyo after the 31m height limit rule was rescinded in 1963. It opened in 1966.

The Kasumigaseki Building was completed in 1968 and, at 36 stories, was Japan’s tallest building for a long time. It still holds a place in people’s hearts and it was a custom (in the 1980s at least) to express the amount of beer drunk every summer as, say, 11.5 times the volume of the Kasumigseki Building with no more logic to it than us saying an area 300 times the size of Belgium.

Palaceside Building was designed by Nikken Sekkei’s Shōji Hayashi who also designed Ginza’s San-Ai Dream Center. The building is two strips of offices either side of a central corridor, with two drums containing elevators, stairs and toilets. Curiously, these drums were designed and added during construction and the only reason I can think of is to increase the amount of office space. If so, what I’d always thought of as design was merely a commercial vs. construction calculation. I like this building even more now I know that little piece of history. Every change to a brief doesn’t necessarily have to result in compromise. Making these functional spaces conceptually separate but compositionally integral was a good call by Shōji Hayashi.

The west entrance has a metal canopy while the east entrance is at half level with premium office and retail on the upper level and below a level of shops and restaurants for a busy lunchtime trade. The cylinders are white prefabricated concrete and the offices are glass and steel. Interior finishes are natural: marble, lacquered timber and polished timber. It’s aged well while retaining the design and craftsmanship of the best parts of the era. The stair down to the shopping level is interesting. It has cast aluminium treads suspended from stainless steel space frame balustrades to minimized the weight of the stair so no additional structure was needed.

Each drum has ten elevators arranged in a circle about eight meters in diameter. Buttons are on the two metal collumns. Stairs are directly ahead and behind the elevators either side are male and female toilets, beautifully lit and, because of the curvature, no screening doors are necessary. If you look at the drawing, you’ll see that the inner circle with the elevators and toilets is offset 400mm upwards. The only reason I can think of for doing this, is to make the entrance to the toilets ever so slightly wider so the washrooms’ corridors invitingly taper inwards ever so slightly. I can’t say I noticed, but I’m in awe of anyone who thought to do this. Even the stairs look inviting.

The building is now called Palaceside Building and overlooks the Imperial Palace. One day the Emperor came up to the roof to have a look. There’s a commemorative dias and plaques and I took this first image below from where the Emperor stood. The roof is clear because a deck is built above the air conditioning and other services.

On one corner of the building is a ceramic statue of a carrier pigeon. Carrier pigeons were used once to relay messages between Tokyo and Osaka.

I don’t know if the speaker outlet created by drilling holes in the ceiling timber strips (middle image, below) is original from 1966 or from a later refurbishment, but either way, it shows the level of respect this building generates. Wherever you look, you’ll see an attention to detail and craft characteristic of a time that is not the one we’re currently living in. Being inside this building is like being in some calm and rarefied world where nothing bad can happen. The design, construction and upkeep of this building are nothing short of amazing. I’ve never been a believer in architectural determinism but, when I’m inside this building, I want to live up to it.

Tokyo Station, Tatsuno Kingo, 1914

“Tatsuno Kingo was born in 1854 which was the year after Commodore Perry sailed in. Kingo went to London in 1880 and attended courses at the University of London, while working at the same time. At some stage he was taught at the Imperial College of Engineering by British architect Josiah Conder who had been brought to Japan to instruct Japanese architects in the ways of Western architecture. After that, he travelled in France and Italy, before returning to Tokyo to teach at the Imperial College of Engineering before becoming department head at University of Tokyo. In 1886 he began what would become the Architectural Institute of Japan. The organization was based upon the Royal Institute of British Architects and the group met regularly, sponsored lectures and produced Japan’s first architectural journal.” [W]

The reason I’m confident this building is going to stay is because it’s already had five levels of basement constructed beneath it, the most recent and lowest being B5 for the Narita Express. Chances are you’ll use the station if you visit Tokyo but, even if you don’t, the exterior of the station is well worth a look. Using the street level passageway to pass from the Marunouch (front) side on the west to the Yaesu side during rush hour is a challenge and even more challenging going the other way. About 4,000 trains per day either start or end journeys at Tokyo Station, shifting about half a million people.

Nihonbashi Bridge, Tatsuno Kingo, 1911

Now I mention Tatsuo Kingo, you could go see his Nihonbashi Bridge with its wingèd dragons, not too far away from Tokyo Station. The location of the bridge is used as the zero point to measure distances from Tokyo so, rather than the Imperial Palace that doesn’t need an address, you could say this bridge is the real centre of Tokyo.

Tokyo Olympic (Basketball) Stadium, Kenzo Tange, 1964

This building and I go back a long way. On page 155 of the February 1969 issue of Reader’s Digest was an article on Kenzo Tange that I must have seen sometime between then and the opening of Expo ’70. I remember reading how Kenzo Tange said the Matsushita Pavilion [the one that looks like a pagoda] was the only pavilion that annoyed him, and that he went on to say “Tradition is like a millstone around our necks. Our job is to smash it to pieces and reassemble it in a new way.” This of course is a very modernist thing to say but I remember it word-for-word – apart from maybe the word ‘job’ which could have been ‘duty’. Below is a montage of that page and a photo I took recently. You could say the two halves of this montage bookend my fascination with Japan and its architecture. Fifty five years on, the fascination is still there and the two stadia are in good repair. I think they’re going to stay. It’s amazing what you can find on the internet. I didn’t expect to mention Reader’s Digest twice in this post.

I don’t want to sully this post with petty gripes about the aesthetic poverty of AI-generated “solutions” but Tange and his engineer Yoshikatsu Tsuboi conceived of this building with only a slide rule to verify what they thought might be possible.

Tokyo Central Post Office, Tetsuro Yoshida 1935

That’s it in the distance in the first image below, right next to Tokyo Station on the Marunouchi side. I’m fairly confident it’s going to stay because this building has already had a new 40-storey building driven through it. The street level postal lobby is still operating much like how it was in 1935, but with added ATMs. It was designed by architect Tetsuro Yoshida. Post offices were a new building type in 1935 and, not being a traditional building type, many were designed by Japanese early modernist architects such as Yoshida and Mamoru Yamada.

House of Prince Asaka, Yōkichi Gondō, circa 1928

This residence is now the Tokyo Teien Metropolitan Art Museum a short walk from Meguro Station. It’s an example of peak French Art Deco in Tokyo and, when I visited, the house itself was the exhibition. The house and its gardens – a Japanese one and a European one – are lovely, as you’d expect.

Other Tokyo Toilets

Some less famous Tokyo toilets.

• • •

OUT-TAKES

I don’t know how long these ones will stay but if you’re in the area …

Tokyo Kabukicho Tower, Shimizu Corporation + Yuko Nagayama & Associates, 2023

This is a very strange thing and will probably stay albeit perhaps not always in its present form.The design is by Yuko Nagayama & Associates and I’m told she may have only been responsible for the exterior styling. I’m inclined to believe this because none of the surface features are intrinsic. Either way, Yuko Nagayama is the first female architect to have made such an impact on Tokyo’s skyline. From a distance I thought the ‘fading-out’ window frames were three-dimensional and a wonderfully shallow yet visually compelling thing to do but, closer up, I discovered the building has hidden shallows because those frames turned out to be a fritted pattern applied to the glazing. In a decade or so, this building may well be given another makeover, just as shopping malls tend to. Designing cosmetic masks for sensible structures might well be a new market for architects. Why should a client pay a premium for a designer architect who is only as good as their structural engineer anyway?

Yokosuka Museum of Art, Riken Yamamoto, 2007

Yokosuka isn’t Tokyo but the site of this art museum overlooks the Uruga Channel through which passes all shipping into and out of Tokyo Bay. The tip of the peninsula was a restricted area during wartime and, because of that, a lush forest still exists behind the museum that was kept low so as not to obstruct views of it from passing ships. If it’s not unbearably humid for you, you can walk the 3 or 4 kilometers from Shioiri Station and see how the sea meets the land. Speaking as a person from Perth, Australia, I was surprised to see how much I missed seeing the ocean.

The exhibition was comprehensive and many students were taking careful photographs of the models. Some of the early houses I hadn’t known about. Pre-orders were being accepted for a large monograph soon to be published. When visiting a city, it’s good to accidentally happen across buildings but it’s also good to sometimes go out of your way to see them.