Demolition started this week on the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, an iconic but increasingly disheveled piece of 1970s architecture that was a darling of the architectural scene and a must-see for tourists.
A years-long campaign to save the Nakagin failed, but instead of mourning its passing, it should be celebrated as a symbol of the Japanese capital’s constant urban rebirth that is not only one of its inherent charms, but also a key reason that it works so well.
Just as the phoenix is born from the ashes of its predecessor, a new Tokyo is rising from the detritus of post-World War II projects like the capsule tower.
An innovative but flawed building designed in the 1970s by late Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, Nakagin was composed of a series of independent pods intended to be replaceable. Kurokawa was the leading light of an architectural scene known as metabolism, which pictured buildings that would change organically, with aging pods popped out for new ones.
Replacement never happened and Nakagin fell into such disrepair that it has not had central hot water for more than a decade.
Its demolition would be a “bitter loss,” architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote more than a decade ago, arguing that “the way we treat our cultural patrimony is a fair measure of how enlightened we are as a society.”
Japan brooks no such sentimentality. Perhaps the holiest site in Shinto, the 1,300-year-old Ise Grand Shrine, is knocked down and rebuilt every 20 years, after all. To be in Tokyo is to live among this constant renewal and upheaval.
The more familiar example might be the Hotel Okura, a symbol of Japanese modernist design featured in the James Bond novel You Only Live Twice and demolished in 2015 in defiance of an international outcry. Perhaps because it reopened just months before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down tourism to Japan, few have noticed that the Okura’s impressive US$1 billion replacement ably preserves the atmosphere of the original, while being superior in almost every measurable way.
And it is not just a matter of aesthetic preference. Tokyo’s enthusiasm for building helps keep housing plentiful and relatively affordable. In the past decade, Tokyo has added five to 10 times the new housing units that New York City has each year. Until recently, it was adding more in most years than all of England, a country with more than four times Tokyo’s population.
Japan has gradually loosened regulation around apartment building over decades, including a deregulation in 1997 aimed at supporting real-estate developers still reeling from the collapse of the 1980s bubble economy and its over-inflated property prices. That made it much easier to build large-scale, high-rise condominiums known here as “tower mansions.” Their development has boosted the housing stock, and began to tempt people back from the suburbs into the city center.
So, while Japan’s population overall is declining, Tokyo’s is still growing, albeit slowly.
As a result, Tokyo is perhaps one of few major metropolitan areas in the world where a middle-class, dual-income family can afford to buy a new downtown apartment with a relatively minimum fuss. Prices have been buoyed recently by a rise in these “power couples” — where each partner earns at least ￥7 million (US$56,000) a year — because of a surge in the number of women employed as full-time workers over the past decade. And while apartment prices are finally back above the bubble-era high watermark, they have risen only one-third in the past decade from a post-financial crisis slump.
Housing certainly is not seen as the long-term sure-fire investment it is expected to be elsewhere — young couples in Japan do not talk about getting on the property ladder — but neither has property become the political crisis it is in London, New Zealand or Ireland.
While wages might scarcely be rising, urban renewal is a boost to quality of life. Tokyo is transforming its landscape in a building frenzy.
Marunouchi, the financial district home to the offices of companies including Bloomberg, is unrecognizable from just 30 years ago, thanks to a public-private partnership that has restored the redbrick facade of the historic 108-year-old Tokyo Station while surrounding it with gleaming glass skyscrapers. These new buildings are more environmentally friendly and more accessible — essential not just for disabled people, but also for Japan’s rapidly aging population — as well as being less vulnerable to the natural disasters that strike Tokyo from above and below.
Areas such as trendy Shibuya, home to the Scramble Crossing, are undergoing a “once in a century” reconstruction, which involves razing and rebuilding one of world’s busiest train stations. The reconstruction also includes an anti-flooding water storage facility capable of holding 4,000m3 of water, vital during the “guerrilla rainstorms” which increasingly strike the country.
In the post-bubble years, Japan was criticized for over-spending on construction to prop up the economy, typified by “bridges to nowhere” and other rural boondoggles.
However, it is now one reason that its infrastructure is so durable, able to withstand disasters like 2019 Super Typhoon Hagibis, which struck Tokyo head-on, dealing US$15 billion of economic damage, but just 121 deaths.
All this means that in Tokyo, you cannot get too attached.
I am mentally steeling myself for the day that the backstreets of Shibuya’s Dogenzaka 2-chome, a ramshackle but distinctive district of love hotels, dive bars and most recently, trendy craft beer joints that is just meters from some of the most expensive real estate in the world, joins the list of areas to be bulldozed. For those who will mourn the capsule tower, remember that metabolism saw buildings as regenerative.
And while that has not happened in a literal sense with the Nakagin itself, that spirit lives on through Tokyo’s constant destruction and reconstruction.
Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg News senior editor covering Japan. He previously led the breaking news team in North Asia and was deputy head of the Tokyo bureau.
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