Exploring the city with the baby of a visiting friend, one of our trips led us to Yebisu Garden Place in Ebisu. Built in the mid-90s, this is a city-within-the-city complex quite typical of Tokyo (think Roppongi Hills, Tokyo Midtown, etc.): A large hotel, an office tower, complemented by shopping as well as residential units. Yet, at the end of the ensemble, something rather unexpected: a French chateau.
The entrance to Tokyo’s Ueno Park is marked by two important post-war era buildings. Le Corbusier’s Museum of Western Art (read more here) brought the master’s distinct modernism to Japan and inspired many Japanese architects and urban planners. Across the promenade is Mayekawa’s impressive Tokyo Metropolitan Festival Hall. Himself a student in the French master’s Paris atelier before World War II, Mayekawa gave modernism a uniquely Japanese dimension.
Built explicitly to house a collection of artworks the French government returned to the Japanese people, the Museum of Western Art opened its doors in 1959. With it, the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier created his sole work in East Asia. His influence on Japanese architecture, however, was to be far greater than this rather small museum building in Ueno Park.
The second week of September 1964 saw more than 2,000 delegates from 103 countries come to Tokyo’s Hotel Okura to attend the first World Bank / IMF meetings ever held in East Asia. Back then, Japan was still a recipient of Bank loans and technical cooperation but was soon – and somewhat reluctantly – going to graduate from the ranks of recipient countries.
A pin commemorating the meetings (from World Bank archive)
A friend came and visited us here so posting has been a little sporadic as of late. We did a lot of sightseeing and filmed a few of the buildings I aim to showcase in the book project I’ve introduced on the blog before. I put some jazz music in for the mix (a Jimmy Giuffre song from 1958).
Factcheck update: Kasumigaseki Biru is 147m high and buildings were allowed a maximum height of 31m before 1963, when the Building Standard Law got a revision.
Economic Miracle from Ben Bansal on Vimeo.
Killing time before the Sumo tournament in next door’s Ryōgoku Kokugikan kicks off is best done in the Edo Museum. a monumental building designed by Kikutake in the early nineties. Apart from the beautiful and plentiful models of old Edo inside, I found the 20th century section especially interesting. Here, Japan’s post-war economic miracle is brought to life with three exhibits that were “sacred” in the 1950s: a TV, washing machine and refrigerator.
A good thirty minute ride on the Den-en-toshi Line westwards from Tokyo’s centre is Aobadai, a typical “bedroom community” for nearby Yokohama and Tokyo proper. Another twenty minute stroll up the road and you find two seminal housing developments from the late 60s and early 70s. Welcome to Sakuradai!
It’s become slightly en vogue to diss my hometown Berlin as of late. Having left almost exactly ten years ago, yet returning regularly, it’s been interesting watching the city from abroad and checking in to the hype once in a while.
Fernsehturm on foggy day
The Economist’s anonymity policy makes it somewhat difficult for individual journalists to rise to fame. It’s thus not surprising that the death of Norman Macrae in 2010 did not create more widespread coverage given that he spent his entire career with the weekly paper. With Macrae, though, the world lost one of its most formidable journalists that had a very special connection to Japan.
Fancy flying to Tokyo on Alitalia? Ad in Economist 1962
DuPont is a chemical industry conglomerate headquartered in the United States. It has its fingers in everything from agriculture to materials to electronics. It started a pioneering collaboration with BBC World News a few years ago when Horizons first aired. It is a BBC produced show about global sustainability challenges. It raises wider questions about ethics in journalism.