Relishing the New and the Old of Tokyo

The review of Peter Popham’s extraordinary essay on the Japanese style(s) of life, Tokyo: The City at the End of the World ($15.95), had led me to believe it was just another guidebook to the city’s remarkably diverse architecture. A bit better and more thoughtful, but a guidebook nonetheless, with all the intellectual limitations inherent in that genre.

Imagine my delight to discover that Leeds-educated lit major Popham has looked with a gaijin’s friendly eye at the chaos and exuberance of Tokyo’s built environment and “read” what is quite evident—once you have Popham for your tutor.

His eye is ecumenical too, as befits a man who took a one-year contract to teach English conversation because of a badly staged but still luminous Noh play by Yukio Mishima.

Now married to a Japanese reporter, he got up to speed in Nihongo in fewer than four years and now represents that curious phenomenon of the foreigner who is more interested in Japanese culture—and perhaps is a better guide—than most natives.

The book has a stunning framing device: It begins with the most explicit and harrowing analysis of the Tokyo region as seismic turf, “The City Abolished,” a 21-page marrow-chiller that only the bravest will dare attend to carefully, setting the stage for his thesis that Japan’s architecture is unique precisely because of its cherishing of ephemerality.

Prepared for the worst, Japanese architects are never hesitant to build something new in place of even the meritorious “ancient and revered.” While cultural energy in Europe and America focuses on saving and embellishing the older, better stock of buildings, Japanese architects feel a zing about doing well what might disappear tomorrow, giving them, paradoxically, a fresh chance to build anew.

Popham even derides the plight of young British architects, reducing their creativity to patching up old country houses while their counterparts in Japan literally shoot for the moon.

Perhaps the intellectual core of the book is a little morality play, featuring on the one hand the octogenarian speculator and super-builder Taikichiro Mori, whose dreary megablocks are fast effacing the funky little neighborhoods that give Tokyo the tastiness that Popham relishes here.

He’s an implausible “heavy” who has gone ever more traditional in dress and religious habits, the higher his profits and buildings have pushed up Tokyo’s skylines. Even he has to deal delicately with the realities of Tokyo residents’ rootedness, giving and taking, making deals with displaced store owners, keeping municipal government officials happy.

The everyman “hero” is actually a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Yoshitaro Muramatsu, who have lived in their two-story wooden house “in a formerly plebeian section of town, now called Minami-Aoyama 5-chome, ever since their marriage n 1941.”

Muramatsu started a tire business in front of his house when he got back from the war in Shanghai. Developers (not Mori) proposed to rear a housing development which would include Muramatsu’s plot.

But he wouldn’t budge: so now his rickety wooden house is eclipsed by the kind of superblock Popham despises. (See Ben Simmons’ fine photograph, one of over a score of brilliant pictures which illumine Popham’s prose in an exemplary way.)

Popham’s book is also sociologically astute, tracing the connections between the excruciatingly longer and longer commutes Tokyo’s moiling millions seem willing to put up with. Those with enough money are filling up the honeycombs in town.

There are humorous essays as well on the love hotels and capsule hotels—two ingenious, if offbeat, results of Tokyo’s crowdedness. And architecture proper, in the classic modern works like Kenzo Tange’s National Gymnasium at Yoyogi, are examined with loving, if skeptical, care: Tange’s 1960 dream plan (for extending a network of high-rises out over Tokyo Bay) comes in for some Jane Jacobs-type ridicule.

Corbusier’s grandiosity never found a fertile ground in Tokyo, where, instead, they ran the expressways in the air over the built-up city.

Popham ends his essay with an earthquake coda, his family’s reactions to the shuddering of September, 1984.

“Our kids snored through the whole performance. I turned off the light and went back to sleep.”

You won’t, when you read this original, fascinating probe of the most interesting city on earth. But it may generate some seismic shakings in your assumptions about what architecture should be and do. It did mine.

From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, March 16, 1988