Phantoms lurk in the western district of Mejirodai, where a temple and graveyard once existed. Only the slope remains, but its name, Yureizaka (“Ghost Slope”) marks the place where apparitions are occasionally seen. The towering Sunshine 60 and City buildings in Ikebukuro, on the western stretch of the Yamanote line, were built on the grounds of the notorious Sugamo Prison. The authorities hanged their criminals here before the war, and then the Americans executed Japanese convicted of war crimes during the years of the occupation. Ghosts in full military regalia are said to stalk the corridors of the sixty-storey skyscraper.
When Kakuda Nobuaki, a martial arts master, was interviewed by a newspaper in the autumn of 2007, he asserted that “Ghosts are real, so I always protect myself. I carry good luck charms at all times. When I fly, I put a necklace on, but keep my most powerful amulet hidden as it might be too strong for others. It is a stone from the Emperor’s grave.”
Rituals, Cults and Portents
On a day in November 1990, 37,000 policemen were deployed to close off the normally busy streets of central Tokyo for the coronation of the new Emperor Akihito. The marionette personage of the emperor was dressed in a loose, dark brown dressing gown; on his head a black cap finished off with a three-foot tall plume added to the unreality of the costume drama. Beside him, the Empress Michiko, a slightly built woman, stood stock still under the oppressive weight of a sumptuous five-layered kimono. The imperial tableau stood on the Takamikura, a lacquered purple stage whose canopy held the figure of a golden phoenix, symbolizing Mount Takachiho, site of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami’s placement of her grandson, the first in an unbroken line of emperors descending from the goddess.
An even more extraordinary scene took place ten days later with the ritual known as Daijosai, the “great food-offering ceremony”. Having taken a purifying bath, the emperor walked along a carpet representing the bridge between heaven and earth. He then entered a bedchamber in the company of two women priests, where he made the first rice offering of the season to the Sun Goddess. Although the ceremony was conducted in the utmost secrecy, scholars agree about what happened next: the emperor lay on the bed and had simulated sexual intimacy with the Sun Goddess, before being reborn as a living god.
For most Japanese, these esoteric enthronement scenes might as well have been taking place on a different planet. What could have passed for scenes from the intergalactic court of some Japanese science fiction manga, were interpreted by some observers within the world’s most technologically advanced nation to symbolize a reversal of the renunciation of divine status taken by Hirohito in 1946 under duress from General MacArthur, and as an attempt to restore the imperial institution to its former glory and status.
In the winter of that same year, 1990, the writer Murakami Haruki witnessed an oddly unsettling sight not far from his Tokyo apartment:
Day after day strange music played from big lorries with sound-systems, while white-robed young men in oversized Asahara masks and elephant heads lined the pavement outside my local train station, waving and dancing some incomprehensible jig.
Nauseated by a sight reminiscent perhaps of the antics performed by the millenarian cults of the 1850s, the writer could never have imagined the horror and chaos that the Aum Shinrikyu (Sublime Truth Sect), a mix of Buddhism, Hinduism and apocalyptic cults, and its central figure, Asahara Shoko, would wreck on the Tokyo subway system five years later. Under the influence of their half-blind leader, educated young members of the cult, many from elite Japanese universities, dropped plastic bags of deadly liquid Sarin gas onto the floors of carriages on five subway lines during the busiest rush hour time. Before leaving the trains, they punctured the bags with the sharpened ends of their umbrellas. Of the 5,000 commuters who inhaled the gas, many suffered vomiting, convulsions, and in some cases blindness. Twelve passengers died as the emergency services, stretched and unprepared, tried to deal with the number of victims.
Murakami, whose 1997 book Underground consists of a series of interviews with the victims together with commentary and vivid portraits, was convinced that there were deep fault lines in Japanese society and historical precedents for the unchecked insanity of the attack. While researching the 1939 Namonhan Incident, an aggressive incursion by Japanese forces into Mongolia, Murakami noted:
The more I delved into the records, the more aghast I became at the recklessness, the sheer lunacy of the Imperial Army’s system of command. How had this pointless tragedy been passed over in the history books? Again, researching the Tokyo gas attack, I was struck by the fact that the closed, responsibility-evading ways of Japanese society were really not any different from how the Imperial Japanese Army operated at the time.
Hall of Dreams
Although corrupted by gain themselves, cults were partly a reaction to the febrile consumerism of the times. Sweeping political and economic reforms after the war had cleared the way for the adoption of a market driven modernization that existed in a vacuum without a great deal of reference to traditions, customs or aesthetics. It introduced among other things the phenomenon of the Japanese “salary man”, stereotypically a workaholic whose personal goals were material prosperity, comfort and security in a corporate world free from the restrains of historical and cultural heritage. The success of the economy depended upon the commitment of its participants, their willingness to embrace the prosperity offered by new ideas and technologies, to forego any reservations about the ill effects of progress.
Economic growth was a national phenomenon, but the majority of the financial and industrial centres were massed in the Tokyo area. A population standing at a little over one million at the end of the nineteenth century had exploded to thirty million in the greater Tokyo area by the 1980s. At its peak, before the hall of dreams dissolved, Japan was theoretically capable, according to Christopher Wood’s The Bubble Economy, to “buy the whole of America by selling off metropolitan Tokyo, or all of Canada by hawking the grounds of the Imperial Palace.”
The country that emerged into the early days of 1989, just months before the steam went out of the bubble economy, was second only in wealth to the United States, with financial assets of $7 trillion, roughly fourteen times that of Britain. A country that owned the four largest banks in the world, stood at the cutting edge of futuristic technologies, and whose industrial clout had made companies like Sony, Toyota, Mitsubishi and Fujitsu household names, still basked in its own superlatives.
Japan’s over-accelerated development accomplished what even the worst natural disasters had only partially succeeded in doing: to change forever the face of Tokyo. A society now accustomed to disposing of goods with unseemly haste applied the same practice to buildings. With building values only a small fraction of the asset value of land, offices and commercial complexes were reduced to advertising organs or consumer objects, remorselessly torn down and replaced as if they were film sets. Japanese construction firms, referred to as “the richest powerhouses of advanced technology in the world”, transformed the appearance of the city. Over half of its buildings today date from the 1980s.
It was inevitable that in a city flush with capital, where shopping for brand goods had become elevated to an art form, a novel like Tanaka Yasuo’s 1980 Nantonaku, Kurisutaru (“Somehow, Crystal”), should have appeared. As much a consumer lifestyle manual as novel, 400 notes accompanied the text, referring readers to detailed descriptions of chic Tokyo retail districts, brand clothes and accessory dealers, even to cafés and restaurants where the “crystal life” could be lived. Tanaka’s novel showed how the structure and formation of personality and identity had become increasingly dependent on the choice of districts in which consumption and social life were conducted.
Even Ayukawa Nobuo, a poet of immense integrity, much of whose work was concerned with war guilt and remembrance, felt compelled to address the hollow ring of the economic miracle and the insatiable urges it induced:
Fighting in the sordid world of profit and loss,
&nbs
p; your friends, good at mimicry, sing in chorus:
These are bad times.
They complain to a hostess in a lonely bar
that water doesn’t turn into wine,
that desire doesn’t turn into more
consumption.
The English-language work that best captures the mood of febrile 1980s consumerism is Donald Richie’s experimental novel Tokyo Nights. The antithesis of the 1940s Ginza captured in his journals, a place of fireblackened buildings and malnourished ghost-crowds, is the same district observed forty years later. Here is a metropolis wallowing in wealth. Strung with brand names and expensive baubles, the Ginza district represents a modern mega-city stiff with money and commodities. Those who remember that singular decade will recall the novelties of bars serving sushi rolled in gold leaf, of toilet lids finished in mink.
In the bubble years Nihonbashi was where much of the wealth was created, the Ginza, centre of the bubble era’s commodity fetishism, was where it was spent or squandered. Habitués of the district still remember a man walking around the Ginza each night with a suitcase stuffed with money. He would only hail a taxi home when he was satisfied the suitcase was empty. The Ginza has always been associated with a degree of opulence, even decadence. The Australian journalist Richard Hughes frequented the area in 1940, in the days before Japan became an ally of Germany. In Foreign Devil, his account of reporting from the Far East, he wrote about entering the Rheingold, a Ginza restaurant-bar run by a genial Bavarian expatriate, where “the Nazi community was drinking steins of good Japanese draught beer, with their arms around the waists of the bargirls. There was a piano behind the bar covered with a swastika flag.”
The Organic Maze
From the roof of one of its corporate monuments or culture towers and through the soft focus of humidity and pollution, Tokyo looks a little like a clay swamp, its surfaces and horizons choked with concrete ramps, construction piers and high-rise jetties. In a city where the longevity of buildings is measured not in epochs but decades, where architectural co-ordination is rarely sought, Tokyo often strikes the outsider as hardly a city at all in the western sense, but rather a metamorphic environment perpetually responding and adapting to change and the expediency of the moment.
A case might be made for calling Tokyo a Taoist city, conforming as it does to that philosophy’s doctrine of submission to constant flux and transformation. For a people less prone to agonizing over the disjunction between the old and the new, it is the ideal city. Comparing the megalopolis to European capitals and their depopulated cores, architect Ashihara Yoshinobu comments: “the heart of Tokyo - and most of Japan’s cities - remains vital. This is the result of a healthy - if somewhat hypermetabolism.” Ashihara, in a passage from his book The Hidden Order, extends his analogy between the architecture of Tokyo and living organisms that are capable of constant adjustment to changing usages. He writes of this fluid, self-regenerating city:
At first glance, Tokyo looks chaotic. But if we consider that there is an invisible order, a random-switch mechanism through which each level of the whole structure tolerates some haphazardness so as to respond to changes in the environment - rather like the action of genes in the development of a multicellular organism - then we begin to see an order in the city structure.
The fragmentation of Tokyo and its subsequent mutation into a number of internal cities with different functions began in the 1950s. This was when decentralization plans aimed at the transformation of the city into its present form were implemented by creating multiple centres like Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Shibuya Ueno, Kameido and finally, with space running out, artificial landfill islands in the bay.
Given the concentration of sub-cities and facilities contiguous with the circular Yamanote train line, the original urban design of Edo remains remarkably intact. Temples and sanctuaries erected according to Taoist dictates to protect the city against malign forces have survived, as has the division of the city into its high and low quarters. The emperor and his family continue to live in the imperial palace, the former site of Edo castle. Roland Barthes, in his Empire of Signs writes: “Tokyo presents this amazing paradox: it does have a centre, but this centre is empty... Every day, with their rapid, forceful motion, taxis speed by like bullets, avoiding this ring, whose low rooftops - visible forms of the invisible - conceal its sacred nothingness.” The core of the original citadel, a cobweb of roads, sunken expressways and overhead traffic lanes superimposed over the outer boundaries of the castle, is a visible legacy of Edo and its centre of power. Yet many of the clues to Edo’s original grid, the radials and energy lines of an ordained structure, have been erased by floods, fires, earthquakes, typhoons and air raids, visited upon the city with an almost Old Testament force. What has grown out of the countless reconstructions is an astonishing mishmash of structures. Right angles do not last long among the fluid lines and superimposed vistas of this polyglot cityscape, the planet’s largest concentration of steel and concrete.
The perception of what makes a city worth living in is fundamentally different from that of the West. Interest is aroused and attachments made to specific buildings or segments of the city, taken one by one. The city begins to make more sense when it is seen as a series of panels, only one or two of which can be taken in at any one time. This piecemeal vision of Tokyo is confirmed by Maki Fumihiko, who has noted that very few people “have a distinct image of today’s megalopolis in its entirety. The image that most residents have of the city is only a diagram... on which is plotted the knowledge of the very few parts of the city with which they are familiar.” Hiroshige emphasized the idea of picturesque sites that were autonomous rather than subordinate to a city whole in his woodblock series, One Hundred Famous Spots in Edo. Meisho Sugoroku was a popular Edoperiod game, where players moved around a board marked with famous places (meisho) in a way that made them feel they were travelling around the city. Each site was presented as a single point of interest. Connecting the points or filling in the spaces between was not required. In this kind of city, each building is enjoyed in its own right; integration is not sought. The result is a layered complexity that seems to go its own way, obeying organic rather than structural codes.
The freedoms offered by this flexibility have attracted prominent foreign architects: Josiah Conder in the Meiji period, Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1920s, Bruno Taut in the 1930s, Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand in the 1950s. A large number of renowned European and American architects worked in the city during the 1980s and 1990s, among them Peter Eisenman, Cesar Pelli, Hugh Stubbins, Steven Holl and Richard Rogers. Among designs for the twenty-first century, the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron’s Prada Aoyama Boutique is a fine example of design responding to the constrictions of space. The surface of this sixstorey, triangular chrysalis of light consists of diamond-shaped transparent glass panels that seems to function as optical devices, moving as the building is circled.
In his short story Jacob’s Tokyo Ladder Hino Keizo writes about a city that over-stimulates, where ensembles of buildings have the power to transmit messages and sensations. Hino’s story is firmly rooted in the architecture of Tokyo’s Marunouchi business district, its daylight rigidity of “massive parallelepipeds, constructed with absolute straight lines and planes” mutating via the uneasy perception of the story’s narrator into dark, organically active surfaces. There is one building, he observes, with “massive walls, all a dark taupe, making it look as if the whole edifice had been carved out of a mountain of volcanic rock.”
Surface Tensions
In submitting itself to repeated sessions of radical surgery, allowing the scalpel to slice away and dispose of its loose tissue, Tokyo’s remodelled surfaces always seem youthful, to have somehow escaped the ageing of European capitals. Despite its colossal building projects, however, Tokyo can seem inchoate, even incorporeal, a massive jellyfish of cement and light. At twilight, solid forms make way for liquid states, semiotic codes replacing the function of architecture, pixels
of light replacing concrete and glass. Electronic information flows across the city, giant screens, LED images and neon traceries, the paraphernalia of a cybernetic city replacing the old waterways of Edo as the medium of flux, of instant, virtual communication. At night, buildings recede into darkness as single, digitally alive blocks turn Tokyo into a flat, multi-dimensional screen, its surfaces acting as conductors for all the dreams, fantasies and yearnings of commercial messaging. In the shift towards an information-based economy, its buildings have become sounding boards, global-age transmitters. One can almost see on the surfaces of these buildings, the alternating currents of the economy.
Materials such as glass tubing, gleaming metallic adjuncts, raw concrete, oxidized aluminium plates, translucent screens, and fibre canopies are the order of the day, representing perhaps a new form of deconstructivism, or at least a disposition towards exterior surfaces that can be dismantled and replaced at will. This flexible system of choreographed space is achieved with high-tech materials like LC glass, perforated metal and stainless steel sheets. At their most successful, these new surfaces and the floating contraptions surrounding the core of the buildings create an illusion of depth and space. This tendency is visible in the use of lighter, nondurable, hi-tech industrial materials. The merits of insubstantiality are highly visible in the work of contemporary architects, whose constructions are routinely sheathed in floating membranes, perforated panels and light-reflecting surfaces. Maki Fumihiko has noted: “The days when there was an immutable style are past... any work of architecture that, in a sense, internalizes the city and functions on its surfaces as a mechanism of transmission will symbolize today’s image of the city.”
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 30