Misfits’ Guide to TOKYO #2

If Misfits’ Guide to TOKYO #1 was about my recommendations to see buildings that are probably going to be around for a long time to come, then this post is about those that I’m not so sure about so, if you’re in Tokyo and wanting to see some buildings, you might want to take a look at these. You never know. If the large Yamanote Line (the overground line circling inner Tokyo) centres of Shibuya, Shinjuku and Ikebukuro grew up around department stores owned by the train companies (Toyoko, Keiyo and Seibu, respectively) that brought suburban customers to them, then the next level has been for all these centres to be replaced by huge multilevel urban redevelopments. In addition to the historic nodes, it’s also been happening to other Yamanote Line stations such as Shinagawa, Osaki, Takenawa Gateway (formerly Takanawa), Tamachi and Shimbashi where I was staying when I wrote this. I didn’t do the entire circle line just to check.

I took the photo of demolition below left from the Outer (Clockwise) Yamanote Line platform at Shibuya station. The other photograph is looking back at the station where the office building in the middle was constructed above the operating station. The former Tokyo Department Store is demolished and substantial temporary walkways are built and relocated as required. At ground level, station users are re-routed in whatever the most convenient route happens to be for that stage of construction. It will be at least another couple of years of pain for commuters for whom the entire development is said to be for the benefit of.

Similar developments are also occurring around subway stations on lines that connect to the Yamanote Line – i.e. all of them. These seem to be landowner-led as entrances to new office towers open directly off newly-built underground passageways linking to new stations along newly-built subway lines. These developments are beasts. Riken Yamamoto has been highly critical¹ of this development model and has called out architects such as Kengo Kuma and Tadao Ando for contributing to it.

These next images are of Toranomon Hills which is a new station² on the Hibiya Line connected to Toranomon on the Ginza Line by a spectacularly long underground corridor (that, admittredly, has excellent bounce lighting and a refreshing absence of music and advertising). Having opened in 2020, Toranomono Hills³is the newest station on the Tokyo metro system. The entire overground complex of towers was developed by Mori Holdings. The surname of its late owner, Mori, still appears on many post-war buildings – Mori Building No. 42, Mori Building No. 43, etc. Nowadays, any place name followed by the word “Hills” usually denotes a Mori development. Roppongi Hills, Aazabudai Hills, Toranomon Hills, etc.

Some of the quasi-public spaces inside and outside are well done but Yamamoto is right when he says that these developments are creating two Tokyos that don’t intersect apart from on the trains that service the Tokyo at ground level, and the Tokyo high above it and, increasingly, below it as well for levels of shops are now appearing below the subway platform level. This has all been happening incrementally for the past 20 or so years, but it’s all a bit new to me. In some parts of town, walking at street level seems complicated and old fashioned. I’m suspicious.

Yamamoto is of course correct when he says that these developments divide Tokyo into two. As more of these appear, Tokyo will disappear for even the people in the towers. It was a cloudy morning in Tokyo and this was the view from my hotel window. Just off the right edge of the building in front is Tokyo Skytree, and just off the left edge is Budokan. This means that, on the other side of that building is Hibiya Park, the Imperial Palace, Tokyo Station, the Marunouchi CBD, Akihabara and Ueno Park. For many of the people in these tower clusters, Tokyo already exists only as view corridors. I mention this in passing as it is insignificant compared to the problem Yamamoto identified. Future Tokyo won’t look like what Isozaki imagined but will still be a different Tokyo of two halves.

What I find strange is the amount of construction in Tokyo going on in a country that no longer makes anything the world wants anymore, whose economy is now in its fourth “lost” decade, and whose population is generally immiserated. If all this can happen during an economic downturn then it suggests a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality still operates. This supersizing of retail and commercial opportunities at transport nodes is either the beginning of the future or the sunset phenomenon at the end of the past but, either way, no building is safe. I’d like the buildings below to remain for some time to come but can’t promise.

Athénée Français, 1964, Takamasa Yoshisaka (吉阪隆正)

You can find better images than these I took in in Tokyo’s 8th February blizzard of Athénée Français which is a cultural centre and French language school. Takamasa Yoshisaka⁴ (1917–1980) is one of those architects we never hear about but over 1950-1952 he worked in France at Le Corbusier’s atelier and, along with LC’s other two Japanese apprentices, Kunio Maekawa and Junzō Sakakura, was responsible for getting LC’s National Museum of Western Art built. There’s more to him than that but I think this building has aged very well both physically and aesthetically. I visited it out of nostalgia because, sometime around 1980, I had a reason to visit it a few times. Sunday 8 February it was closed, but it was mainly this street appearance with its three different volumes, textures and colours that I remember anyway. The triangular windows and even the colour scheme were pretty crazy for 1964 – a year in which everything else was secondary to Kenzo Tange and the noise of the Tokyo Olympics.

NOA Building, 1974 Sei-ichi Shirai (白井晟一)

Sei-ichi Shirai (1905-1983) is another architect that never found widespread appreciation⁵. The year 1974 was close to peak craziness for Japanese architecture and what I like most about this building is how seemingly irrational everything about it is yet the building still seems just right. Shirai is a very unusual architect in that he had a number of architectural motifs that he reworked again and again for successive clients and they (the motifs) usually combine circles upon circles, enclosure, solidity and texture into some symbolism we can’t decode. I think what I like about Shirai’s NOA Building is that it isn’t some enigmatic signifier that tries to mean everything to everybody. This building is very solidly symbolic of something – it’s just we don’t know what. We don’t have them like this anymore.

Shrai’s buildings aren’t cheap enigmatic signifiers meaning anything to anyone but, like I said, are strongly symbolic without giving anything away. Here are a few images of some other Shirai buildings so you can get an idea what I mean.

Kameki Tsuchiura House, 1935 Kameiki Tsuchiura (土浦亀城)

You’ll find here a bit more information here on Kameki Tsuchiura (1897–1996) and his wife and collaborator Nobuko. There’s also some interior images you can easily find online. The one on the left below is mine and as close as I could get. The house was recently relocated and restored in one of those Japanese restorations where every timber and element is numbered and scrutinized before being either repaired, reconditioned or replaced. I’m sure it looks and feels like it has just been built for, in a way, it has been. The house is open for visits but, because it’s in the very central Aoyama-itchome area, there’s an online booking system for limited tickets. However, I’m told by the architect who restored it, that all tickets are reserved within seconds and even he can’t obtain one. Fortunately, there’s a book.

I’m intrigued by that first step of the half flight of stairs up to the study and bedroom. It’s part of the wall and not the staircase. “To preserve the planarity of the wall” isn’t something you’d expect a natural Wrightophile to say, or even think of. You rarely see diagonal lines in Wright buildings so that metal handrail owes nothing to him.

Meguro Ward Offices, 1966 Tōgō Murano (村野藤吾)

This building was originally built for The Chiyoda Insurance Company but since 2006 has been the main building of Meguro Ward (/borough/municipality). Two of its three floors now have fields of desks and frontline counters facing seating areas for people waiting for their number to be called. The following three images are from this website that will tell you more about the building. I never managed to see anything in these photographs because they’re away from the daily operations of the building. There are tours but again, tickets are difficult to come by.

From outside the building, you can see Murano’s mastery of materials, whatever the material. In the case of this building, it’s prefabricated concrete window panels on a base and frame clad in two types of stone. In the first photos, did you notice that curve where the walls meet the ground? I never managed to see highlights such as that wonderful staircase (middle, above), but there was still much to appreciate in the more publicly accessible areas. Corridors have views of a pond, passageways linking buildings have different illumination and, even though the staircase (below, right( goes from a delivery bay to the basement, it nevertheless shows much evidence of care.

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