Tokyo Façade Frivolity

The curve of a closed eyelid, the outline of a nose, an unmistakable set of lips: enough to discern the outline of a singer, covering, along with the notes floating up from her mouth, almost all of a multistory building in Akasaka. Halfway across Tokyo, a family of turtles somehow scales the vertical wall of an apartment building in Shinjuku West. The two façades may have little in common otherwise, but both are exceptional in their respective environments — touches of whimsy in neighborhoods best known for their relative seriousness and severity, where staid office suites, the official aura of embassies, and sometimes too tastefully-restrained hotels combine to form a neutral cityscape deferential to the business conducted therein.

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A Day Around the Yamanote Line

Tokyo doesn’t really have a single discernible center. Most of the metropolis’ characteristic clusters of lighted advertisements and overloaded sidewalks — Akihabara, Ikebukuro, Shinagawa, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ueno, and (at Tokyo Station) Ginza — are strung together along the circular Yamanote Line, a Japan Railways loop that calls at the city’s busiest nodes. This necklace of light and activity effectively constitutes Tokyo’s peculiarly polycentric core.

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When the Streets Were Swept by Hand

In most cities of the developed world, mechanical street sweepers are a fact of life. Even New York’s carless commuters are fluent in strategies to use on “alternate-side parking days,” when the scheduled passing of a street sweeper forces all of a block’s parked cars to one side of the street. It’s easy to forget that, before these behemoth, motorized sponges began scrubbing the streets en masse, even the widest boulevards were cleaned by hand. This street sweeper in 1910 New York would have his work cut out for him after his beat — Fifth Avenue — was considerably widened that year. Although the mechanical sweeper had debuted in 1840s Manchester, it took nearly a century to catch on almost everywhere else.

Of course, street cleaners — some wielding handmade brooms — are a common sight in the poorer countries of the so-called Global South. But old photos of individual sweepers toiling to keep dry the rain-soaked streets of currently presently, hypermodern Tokyo come as a bit of a shock. The photo above, from the collection of the Dutch Naational Archief, is dated “circa 1930,” though some commenters think it might have been taken even later, perhaps in the immediate postwar era. Almost nothing here is recognizable as contemporary Tokyo — except maybe the electronics store in the background. Many of the street sweepers are wearing conical hats typical of agricultural field laborers, and some are even sporting a mino, a traditional form of raincoat made from straw.

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Two Stories Over Tokyo

Tokyo defines concrete jungle: over 2,000 square kilometers of closely-packed, largely monochrome buildings set amid a tangle of clogged, winding roads, elevated highways, rail lines, and telephone wires. For many who are lost amid the ceaseless forward march of its sidewalks and churning perambulations in the corridors of its vast train stations, cafes perched several stories above the street — often, to further their escapist appeal, sporting French or Italian themes — offer rare opportunities to step back from the city’s omnipresent crowds and inexorable movement.

As much as they are respites from urban intensity, these perches also provide the best means to gain some perspective on the unwieldy metropolis. Their patrons may appear trapped in tiny windows when viewed from the street below, but they offer a scattered audience cheap, upper-balcony tickets to the spectacle of the city — itself snarled, not just in traffic, but anxiety and routine.

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Look Behind You

Naka-Meguro, Tokyo

Waiting to Cross the Street

Shinjuku, Tokyo

Robson Street, Vancouver

East Village, New York

Public Sex and Peeping Toms

Kohei Yoshiyuki was walking through a Tokyo park one night in the early 1970s when he noticed people having sex in the bushes. Then he noticed people spying on the people having sex. That must have been when he decided to get his camera. Using infrared film and flash, Yoshiyuki followed and surreptitiously photographed the voyeurs who were peeping on copulating couples.

“My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real ‘voyeur’ like them,” he said recently. “But I think, in a way, the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer.”

Yoshiyuki’s photos were first exhibited at a Tokyo gallery in 1979, and published in a book the following year, but only now have they been collected in a new English book, The Park. The photos been getting quite a lot of attention because, as Philip Gefter notes in the New York Times, they raise questions not only of voyeurism but of surveillance, which is of particular concern in this age of omnipresent CCTV and Great Firewalls.

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Tokyo Hypnosis

Tokyo is trippy enough, but Chris Jongkind’s videos of its vast rail network takes its surreality to another level entirely. The right adjective here would be “serpentine” as we watch trains slide effortlessly through the urban underbrush of the world’s largest city.

For what it’s worth, Jongkind’s photos are even better.

Naoya Hatakeyama’s Urban Illusions

Tobu World Square’s model of New York. Photo by Naoya Hatakeyama

When I was a kid, my grandparents would take me on vacation to Victoria, BC. The highlight of the trip—for me, at least—was always a visit to Miniature World, an odd little museum tucked into the north wing of the Empress Hotel. There, I would race past dozens of dollhouses, castles and spaceships to the museum’s centrepiece, a giant model railroad. I liked it not for the trains, but for the cities: tiny recreations of everything from Victoria to Halifax, strung along the tracks like beads on a necklace.

My curiosity with models was revived last month by Naoya Hatakeyama’s exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Scales, which runs until February 3, 2008. Hatakeyama, a Japanese photographer whose work has dealt in large part with the relationship between nature and cities, was asked by the CCA in 2003 to turn his lens to three different scale models of New York and Tokyo. In the twenty-four photos that came out of the project, Hatakeyama questions, with curiosity and humour, the relationship between architecture, photography and our perceptions of reality.

Two of the models depict New York. One, found in the Windows of the World theme park in Shenzhen, China, is a strange, cartoonish vision of the city, a dilapidated landscape of crooked, colourful buildings. The model seems haphazardly constructed, like the set of a cheap disaster movie. In one photo, an approach to the Brooklyn Bridge abruptly ends in mid-air. The bridge itself is cracked and disjointed, cars scattered across it as if there had been a massive earthquake.

New York in Shenzhen’s Windows of the World

In sharp contrast to this is the model of New York found in Japan’s Tobu World Square—as detailed and realistic as Windows of the World is abstract. If you didn’t look too closely, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was the real New York. Hatakeyama, shooting in black and white, has created the illusion of reality, evoking the strongly-shadowed, iconic Manhattan of the imagination, or at least in the famous early twentieth century photos of Alfred Stieglitz.

The point here, however, is not to fool us, but to give us subtle hints that we are, in fact, looking at a model, an idealized vision of New York. Despite the cars and pedestrians on the streets, even the graffiti painstakingly drawn on the walls, there is a strange lifelessness about these buildings, their windows empty like dead eyes. In one shot, the side wall of the Plaza Hotel is inexplicably blank. In another, we see a ballcap-wearing man looming between skyscrapers like some bizarrely mundane giant.

Hatakeyama’s photos of the third model, an aerial view of a huge and incredibly detailed rendition of Tokyo, are presented as a black-and-white triptych. It’s hard to tell that the city depicted is not, in fact, the real thing.

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In Tokyo, New Clothes Let You Wear the City

Today’s New York Times includes an article on the efforts of Aya Tsukioka, an “experimental fashion designer,” to allay Japan’s growing fears about street crime by creating a new line of clothes and accessories that double as urban camouflage. In a moment of panic, you can transform your dress into a vending machine, your backpack into a fire hydrant, and your purse into a manhole cover. The idea is for the people who wear these clothes to hide in plain sight when they feel threatened, evading their would-be attacker.

Of course, that wouldn’t be likely to happen — I’m sure most muggers would be able to spot the difference between a real vending machine and a fabric one with two feet sticking out underneath. “Ms. Tsukioka said she realized that her ideas might be a bit fanciful. But she said Japan’s willingness to indulge the imagination was one of its cultural strengths,” reports Martin Fackler in the Times. “The fact that such ideas were greeted with straight faces, or even appeared at all, underscores Japanese society’s fondness for oddball ideas and inventions. In fact, Japan produces so many unusual inventions that it even has a word for them: chindogu, or ‘queer tools.’”

What strikes me about Tsukioka’s designs is her eye for the city’s details. At first glance, her vending machine skirt really does look like a vending machine; her manhole purse might not fool anyone paying attention, but it could certainly pass for the real thing in the eyes of a hurried passerby. The Times article goes on about Japan’s willingness to accept oddball inventions, which might explain why it is such a technologically innovative society. But it doesn’t really touch on the relationship between urban dwellers and their surroundings. After all, in a city like Tokyo, what is there to blend in with but the pieces of street furniture that are ubiqutious?

Photos by Torin Boyd for the New York Times

Finding the Light in Tokyo

On my last trip to Tokyo I could not help but remember how important it was when living there to choose an apartment with sufficient light — something I now take for granted since I moved to Los Angeles. When I first moved to Tokyo, I looked at an apartment in the building on the left, on the second floor, the second apartment in. The balcony, which is barely visible, provided the only real source of light. Needless to say, I did not take that apartment.

But other buildings do more to maximize natural light. In the photo below, which I took from my hotel room on a recent visit to the city, note how the taller buildings have a graduated set back as the floors go up, thereby increasing the amount of light available to those on lower floors. I am not sure if this set back is mandated by planning codes and, if it is, whether that has always been the case.

Filling Tokyo Space with Tiny Houses

When he wrote earlier this year about the “two faces” of Tokyo, our contributor Siqi Zhu noted that, in Japan’s capital, “weak eminent domain laws have resulted in years of piecemeal development and an incredibly fine-grained urban fabric.” This is unlike many other cities in the developed world where government agencies eagerly expropriate land for vast new building projects. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, vast swaths of urban landscape were razed in Canada and the United States to make way for utopian housing complexes, stadiums and office blocks. The same thing is happening throughout China today.

In Japan, though, urban neighbourhoods remain eclectic patchworks of individually-developed houses and apartment buildings. Even in the middle of Tokyo, the world’s largest city, the backstreets of many retail and residential districts retain a cluttered, hodgepodge quality. Naturally, this jumbled pattern of development has left some odd-shaped spaces between buildings—spaces that are attracting attention from people who want an affordable home in the heart of the city. Enter the kyo-sho-jutaku, or microhome: houses built on parcels of land that, in some cases, are as small as 250 square feet, about the size of a single room in many North American dwellings.

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Typographic Tokyo

Korean snack stand in Tokyo. Photo by Yohei Morita

My wife and I lived in Tokyo from 1992 till 1998. We spent a week here in 2000 and I am now back here for a week in 2007. It is a tantalising experience—it seems familiar in so many ways and yet subtly different, like a Star Trek teleportation that did not quite fully work!

Before, as a foreigner in Tokyo, I rarely drew as much attention as I did when I travelled outside Tokyo. This time, though, I am really struck by how many people here have grown up used to seeing foreigners. We no longer seem to be an issue. People no longer express surprise at a white person speaking Japanese—it is simply seen as the common language of communication, much as French is in Montreal.

I have been particularly struck as to how I now see signs in both Chinese and Korean. Over and over, I have been told that co-hosting the soccer world cup with Korea broke the ice between the two historic rivals. Noticeable Chinese and Korean investment in and around Tokyo may also be part of it.

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One City, Two Faces: Roppongi Hills

The geography of Tokyo can be read into as a metaphor for its social stratification. There are the lowly pockets of Shitamachi, or the Low City, that lie on the literally low flood plains closer to the shore and the rivers. West of here are the few rarified districts of the Yamanote, a name that means “hand of the mountain” and aptly denotes the area’s hillier terrain. Away from here, the city stretches out in all directions in an unending sprawl of glass and concrete blandness, inhabited by the quiet, industrious, dignified, conformist, white-shirt -and-dark-suit-wearing Japanese middle class of lore—this is a city middle-class to its core.

One can find subtle signs (if he looks hard enough) as the train roars past Tsukiji, westwards and uphill. A platoon of well-dressed middle-aged men with indistinguishable faces get on at Hibiya station, epicentre of the central government bureaucracy; the ladies start to look more expensive, respectable, demure. Unmistakably, many of them are bound for Roppongi Hills.

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