Wireless

My current job is collecting information on the built environment in Tokyo. In what kind of city do people live here? What kind of buildings? What kind of streets?

I cycle the whole city (already 2.000 km done) and I see the most crazy buildings.

And I also take pictures of what is happening between them.

And crazye buildings they certainly have here. This is a hotel and what you see here is the front indeed.

But also buildings that do have windows.

Architecture is not on a high level here. The government pays little attention to it, zoning plans are not very sophisticated and building codes are so strict and rigid that ugliness seems the only option. Not to mention the remaining space: the streets.

I wouldn’t care if anybody would remark on the above pictures that each one shows those ugly power lines. I would even appreciate it if you did. As it is undisputedly ugly all that technical wiring up there in the sky. And it hangs truly throughout Japan.

When you look up on any crossing you will see this.

How can this be? How can a civilised country look like this? Alex Kerr researched it for his book 'Dogs and Demons'. Here is a part of chapter 8.

Japan is the world’s only advanced country that does not bury telephone cables and electric lines. While a handful of neighbourhoods , such as the central Marunouchi business district of Tokyo, have succeeded in laying cables underground, these are mostly expensive showpieces. Even the most advanced new residential districts customarily do not bury cables, as I discovered when I was working on the Sumitomo Trust Bank/Trammell Crow project on Kobe’s Rokko Island in 1987. Kobe City touted the island – brand new landfill in the harbour – as a super modern, futuristic neighbourhood. With telephone poles. In the countryside, a “priority policy” dictates that until every large city has buried every one of its power lines, which the Construction Ministry is encouraging them not to do, no rural area can do the same with support from the central government.

Here, in a nutshell, is Japan’s bureaucratic dynamic at work. The first stage, the starting point after Japan’s defeat in World War II, is the poor people, strong state principle. Central planners considered the extra effort and the expense required to do such things as burying cables luxurious and wasteful, drawing needed resources away from industry.

The second stage, policy freeze, came in the early 1970s. Unaccustomed to burying cables, Japan’s bureaucrats came to believe that the nation shouldn’t, indeed couldn’t, bury them. They cooked up justifications for the policy, such as the added dangers in the event of earthquakes. (In fact, a nation that is likely to have frequent earthquakes should bury lines, as became clear in the Kobe quake of 1995. Toppled poles carrying live wires were one of the biggest dangers, blocking traffic and wreaking havoc with rescue efforts.) Another argument was that Japan had uniquely damp soil, which mad it harder to bury lines there than in other countries. (This belongs to the “Special Snow” school of thought, made famous when trade negotiators in the 1980s asserted that “Japanese snow is unsuitable for skis.”) The inner logic is that Japan’s uniqueness forbids it to bury cables. Since burying cables is not what Japan has done, it is un-Japanese to do so. The third stage is addiction. Making concrete and steel pylons has become a profitable cartelized business; meanwhile, utilities have a free hand to plan power grids without regard for the look of urban or rural neighbourhoods, for the inconvenience posed by poles jutting into narrow roads, or for anything else. And since the power companies have not learned the skill of efficient, safe, and well-designed cable laying and have never had to factor in the costs, today they simply cannot afford them. Meanwhile, the Construction Ministry, driven by the uniquely damp soil” ideology, has mandated protective coverings for underground cable strong enough to survive the apocalypse, making it the most expensive in the world.

[einde citaat/vertaling]

This is the business district Marunouchi. Indeed no lines on poles anymore. Great! In the centre you can see Tokyo station. It shows great resemblance with Amsterdam Central Station the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

In 1868 policies changed to joining the western world. Imitating western architecture was part of it. In the same period railways were introduced. That is why in Europe you can find many grand stations in Victorian style, the fashion of that time. And of course Tokyo station shouldn’t do for less.

This neighbourhood has its own particularities though. It is the direct surrounding of the Imperial Palace. Therefore you can still see Tokyo Station form the palace gardens. And it is probably why here attention is being paid to the appearance of the built environment. Apparently the idea is that this historical area shouldn’t be dominated by high rise (tatame), whereas the tremendous ground prices demand to do so (honne). And thus a probably typical Japanese solution: high rise with a base that looks like a nineteenth century building.