tokyo, early winter.

lately gotten crisp here. just now there are yellow gingko leaves all over the streets.

last night i went to a yakitori-ya, essentially a skewered chicken dining bar. room for about 15 around a counter, a display case with neat rows of raw ingredients. a polished cypress wood counter. you sit, warm yourself with a hot steamed face towel, order some warm sake, and then are asked what grilled items you will have.

there is a sparely written menu on wooden plaques hanging on the wall. ominously, there are no prices.

you call out your order, specify if you would prefer the skewers seasoned with salt, or sauce - a thick blend of soy, sake, vinegar and sugar.

we have duck, toothsome rather than tender; coarsely-minced chicken meatballs; dark meat, white meat - but only faintly seared on the outside, with the middle still pink, and smeared with wasabi (to kill the salmonella...?) - cartilages, livers, gizzards (splayed and flattened), the cut near the backside, bunches of skin, the 'back-liver' (sekigimo, found at the crook of the back), and an unborn egg.

in the honored tradition of offal euphemisms, they don't call it that, of course. they call it chochin, which means lantern.

the gleaming half-formed orb of a yolk dangling off a skewer does in fact resemble a handheld lantern, the sort that i used to carry around at night in our garden during the mid-autumn festival. not to put too fine a point on it, it's all the best hits of poultry on a stick, a triple-flavored chicken lollipop. as well as the golden yolky globe, it also has the dark-marrowish meat and a dubiously white bit which looks like white meat but presumably includes some sort of chick-cawl as it's chewy and slightly crunchy.

we finish with rice topped with gently simmered chicken mincemeat, and a small cup of chicken soup laced with thin leek strands, sticky on the lips with collagen.

then there is this cafe, which i can only describe as New Romanticist industrial ruin. you enter a building that still houses an automobile servicing facility, climb the staircase whose corners are littered strategically with rusting ornaments and disused farming tools, stuffed with a sprig of dried herbs, or placed next to a small weathered clay vessel.

you can see the crumbling ramshackle wrought iron vaulting of the ceiling in a shade of sickly blue, reams of rust peeling luxuriously off the window frames, crud on the windows, tarnish worn smooth on the back of your chair. they've hung other assorted iron implements on the walls, evidently chosen for both their tectonic strength and weedy delicacy, monotone geometrical etchings, a handful of dead flowers placed just so next to a small anvil, a rusting horseshoe, a little twig of a vase.

we have soy and brown rice lattes laced with brown sugar, and a mealy green tea roll cake stuffed with sweet potato and red bean cream. the tableware, of course, has also only recently entered a state of delicate decay. you warm your hands on the rough stuccoed surface of the cup, you wipe your mouth with a plain flannel towelette carefully chosen for its rustic overtones. it comes on its own slightly tarnished aluminium tray.

the food, such as it is, is a blandly flavored still life. everything carefully (or is that carelessly?) arranged on gently bruised earthenware pottery: ten grain rice, organic miso soup with tofu, boiled vegetables with a sesame dip, simmered hijiki seaweed and dried beancurd strips with flakes of sea salt.

廃墟の魅力

there are relentless weeds in my yard some of which i've clipped the tops off of and placed in a small glass tealight holder as a wabi ornament. waking up early yesterday, biking bleary-eyed to the kyuu-kyuu for some extra bowls, milk, and carrots, we served brunch for three at ten-thirty. green chilli thepla, carrot sambar, dry potato curry, cucumber raita and chai, followed by carrot halva with shaved pistachios and vanilla ice cream. we sat on the floor on cushions in varying shades of faded blue, enjoying the drowsy lazing about of late summer.

later, the clouds muddling over into a thick woolliness, we walked up the meguro river to a studiedly dishevelled showa-era house with mustard walls, cracking wooden ceiling fixtures that exposed half an attic, midcentury office furniture and an intimate audience with the nestling cicadas thronging the neighboring trees. a view of the verandah stained with rain puddles and fraying white paint on the woodwork. cherry tree foliage overhanging a cobblestoned canal addling along at "my-pace". opatoca is a classic LOHAS cafe, modelled after equal parts of bali, okinawa, and southern france. the bakery downstairs huddles behind a weedy terrace threaded through with ivy and fig trees, offering red bean and edamame buns; the adjacent "bistro" is a converted hiraya that now channels scandinavian living rooms and london formica caffs. the upstairs portion where we were was too postmodern to trace a properly discernable lineage of interior design. it was overwhelmingly environmental, windows thrown open to the ebbing of the stream, the amble and shuffle of nakameguro hipsters, carelessly abandoned bicycles propped against rust-flecked railings. we sit, indulge 8-month old iroha who tries to eat my leather rabbit-shaped keyring, sip the iced tea laced with cloves, flip through araki nobuyoshi's showa-era tokyo photos and "sotokoto", a LOHAS-themed life catalog that tells you about bread collectives and environmental projects for fleeters.

it starts to sprinkle, and we head for an ivy-covered brown building a few bridges past the treehouse. we sip light-roast green tea and eat kinako-dusted hon-warabi with carved wooden sweet-forks. the soundtrack is joao gilberto's "white" album, which like all the other textures in the tearoom has been modulated to a certain shade of mellow. the view through the wide strip windows is streaked with rubber-sheathed electrical cables, a visual slight to the cherry leaves dancing in front of public housing units fronting the side of the canal. this is tokyo's trick, a serious urban planning lacuna that they've turned into an unexpected joy; puncutuating the mundane with the "wabi." the charm of this is evident but its source isn't, at least not immediately; until you realize that it's this thrown-together materialsness that makes a point of leftovers and rubbish, trashiness and beauty. ruins (and more generally, ruinedness) are doubly pathetic in tokyo, a city that lost so much first-order patina but made up for it with an understanding of how best to redeem that loss, and turn it into a kind of pastoral. so much of new york is merely grungy and unpleasant, whereas tokyo is aesthetically self-assured of its own controlled decay.

中夏の暑さ

the spring rains have stopped and we are in the full sweaty fetid bloom of summer. the thing with this time of year is that tokyo's postmodern acrylicky skyline is at its gaudy worst. there's the reflective glare bouncing off the polished vitrines in thirteen storey shopping centers, marble facades from the roman-style "mansions," layered industrial finishes in steel and aluminium gleaming fiercely against bauhaus concrete. yesterday was just such an overly exposed day. like some bad 70s film about parched californian suburbs (the graduate?), except this time the unsympathetic surfaces make the light saturation a nightmare. with my friend i ducked into a small fish restaurant hung with round paper lanterns, a polished concrete floor and reed mat back seating area laid with blue and white cushions and settled down for horse mackerel tartare with ginger and spring onions, chilled shellfish gelee with mushrooms, eggplant pickles, rice and miso soup drawn from tuna innards.

then it was off to the "old" downtown area, ginza, which used to be the parisian boulevard of the 30s with approximately the same atmosphere and social caliber and connotation. nowadays it is about as charming as fifth avenue. meaning, the european connection got lost in the years, and it is american in spirit with far more wearying density. i went to see a cai guo qiang exhibition, a chinese artist who studied art in japan and then went on to a charmingly traditional patron-artist relationship with shiseido cosmetics. while greying women in hats and lace gloves sit upstairs in the art deco cafe taking pound cakes and earl grey tea on fine bone china, cai's work downstairs in the gallery basically consists of various flammable chemical powders set aflame on japanese rice paper (previously treated to make it resistant to the flames, presumably), with the resulting flame trails leaving their trace of destruction behind. it's powerful stuff, quite "environmental" in the heidggerian sense...

the afternoon heat was more environmental than ever, as fat tourists in shorts and sun visors trampled around the pavement, feeling squelchy and wrinkled by lurid sunlight and all those glaring reflections. escape to the french-japanese institute, a nicely patinaed fifties corbusian building with a "double revolution" tower by junzo sakakura, one of several devoted corby disciples who gave the city its characteristic mid-century modern-brutal face after the tabula rasa of WWII (there is a lovingly obsessive retrospective of corby with mockups of studios and small commissions at the mori art museum at the moment). the refugee film festival is showing at the nichifutsu gakuin, and i went to a cambodian film by rithy panh, a little heavy on the moralizing flashbacks but capturing perfectly that note of fatalistic third-world wretched capital city squalor and the hopeless capering about of its inhabitants amid documentary-verity but stunningly picturesque slums, towering makeshift piles of apartments, light industry, workshops and nightclubs pulsing with square dance beats and too-bright strobe lights.

the day pulled to a sultry close with the sun setting behind streaky clouds, the sky a dark lavender. back in kichijoji, stooping beneath the noren languidly flapping in a light breeze and sliding back the wooden shuttered doors, we settled into a two-person counter for dashimaki (omelet made with fish and kelp stock for extra wetness, folded over itself like a bolt of cloth), braised pork belly slices in soy with mustard and shaved leek, megochi (flathead) tempura, and housemade "handbeaten" soba noodles, greyish white flecked with buckwheat.

新しいものに挑戦する雰囲気

Through the winding course of Zenpukuji river the grass grows fast and loose, the mud paths are merely suggested at by the contours of previous treadings, benches sit by themselves where they can be alone, the jungle gyms and polycarbonate animals have been washed out by spring rains. This is Suginami park style: the waterway is the thing, a functional drain more than a scenic riverbank. The plants and bushes are an afterthought, sprucing for a concrete and aluminium-railed canal. You pass azalea bushes, magnolias with petals sagging with raindrops, and late-season soumei yoshino cherry trees with bald pistils after their petals have been dashed to the ground. Hobby vegetable plots, fluttering laundry on poles, derelict bicycles propped against the shutters. A children's nursery and toy workshop called Rabbit House nestles next to wooden clapboard houses with disused gardens only carelessly tended.



Asagaya's public housing estate lies just off this canalside green, its common spaces overgrown with bushes and trees in no discernable pattern. Tended to only occasionally since the sixties, maybe. Grass in balding patches, a litter of potted shrubs in clay saucers that collect moss and rainwater. Rainstained and greying concrete with the block numbers traced out in small brown square tiles. And what a lot of light on tile there must be - 木漏れ日, the leaking of light through the trees - in this little pastoral-socialist hideaway.

タイムスリップできる喫茶店

It was like a walk-in diorama, a stage set from a Dickens novel with mouldering furniture and a forlorn man behind the counter polishing glasses. The bell tinkled lightly, door opening with a creak, a light drizzle, and the wind making the windows shudder. I'd read about it in one of the "mania" Tokyo neighborhood tokushuu's on Suginami ward. One of the few classical music kissaten that refuse to buckle, assiduously polishing its china and porcelain hangings, tending to the chintz decorations and maroon vinyl banquettes. Some of them have become just the sort of distraught hole that caters to pensioners who squander their time watching the crud harden on darkened windows, but Violon is aging with a kind of doomed graciousness. It is nice to know that there are some people who devote their resources to upholding this sort of thing. What does it enshrine exactly? A kind of marooned passion with nowhere to dock, a specific hang-up, obsolete, faintly ridiculous, and because of that fact all the more desperately preserved. I hadn't felt so much of a loaded sense of trespass for a long while. Museums seldom have that power anymore; whereas caves of dusty antiques do. Just as lavishness and polish is oppressive, well-tended age is awesome.

There was one other person in the audience, facing the altar. A collection of flower-bell gramophone horns, vacuum tubes and an orchestral pit of other dated sound equipment. The altar was lined with lace, some pastoral-themed porcelain (country lass, farmer's son with straw hat, capering round an orchard, etc), and a very large and excessive lamp. Grandfather clocks, hanging oil lamps, large chests.

Symbiosis; or Post Bubble Sprouts

Like most recent art spaces, Kisho Kurokawa's new National Art Center in Tokyo was designed as a place of public encounter, running in tune with a high profile cultural calendar. In its own little pocket in foreigner-friendly Roppongi, the NAC includes sprawling exhibition halls (the largest single museum space in Japan, in fact), a satellite branch of Paul Bocuse's high French cuisine, and an outpost of the heavily curated Tokyo "select" shop Cibone. Cibone typically sells a severely limited range of folktronica, artisanal stationery and other extraneous ingenuities. While the museum primes itself to become the showpiece of the cultural part of Roppongi (whereas the pimps, foreign hostesses and military R&R men can carry on frolicking all night in the seedy part), Kurokawa is moving on to other projects, including running for governor soon. He thinks the current one, Ishihara, is becoming a bit of a menace, clamoring to rearrange the city yet again in preparation for a possible second Tokyo Olympics in 2016.

Our newest public spaces are guilty of this betrayal: they are anything but democratic, frequently under the whim and directive of some ambitious technocrat with generous funding. This new cultural hub has its own exit from Nogizaka station; you are spirited effortlessly through a series of engineered tunnels, following the trail of illuminated signs that ensure you don't get lost or take the wrong exit. The polish is quite oppressive. It's got that whiff of expensive remodeling, the tyranny of a perfect refurbishment.



The new art space is complicit in advertising its own image/imagination. Four years ago, Minoru Mori's mixed-use Roppongi Hills complex (service apartments, modern art museum, international cuisine, lavish boutiques) was outdone only by the audaciousness of its ad campaign. Takashi Murakami got commissioned to design a series of cartoon posters featuring his terminally exuberant "Superflat" critters having a little romp around the playground of their "New Hills Lifestyle!". Kurokawa's NAC is its new accessory. (In about two weeks, though, Mitsui Fudosan, one of Japan's two or three national construction dynasties, is going to launch Tokyo Midtown, a similar development which will overwhelm even Mori's Hills.) Kurokawa and his contemporaries began championing an urban model of organic rogue-like contagion in the sixties, outcroppings of "Metabolic" architecture left to spawn itself throughout the city. Little of that extemporaneous spirit remains, unfortunately. Nowadays what makes the news are large tracts of land for well-funded projects, usually variations on the condominium complex theme, overseen by the singular utopian vision of a master planner.

If we must be crabby about development, let's at least acknowledge that it's been awhile since we've enjoyed so much outwardly benevolent patronage for Art, in the marbled lobbies of investment banks, as showpiece centers for ailing provincial towns. Much of it, however, tends to be programmatic assembly work that feeds off a fantasy narrative of work-and-play downtowns. Real estate brochurespeak for people who enjoy buying (into) packaged identities. Kurokawa used to be known as something of a maverick, junking traditional urban planning for messy, erratic development. Now he's switched to the more orderly model of "symbiosis". Does he mean a harmonious relationship between man and his shelter? In any case, it's quite a different ecology that comes to mind - a model of symbiotic power between corporations, developers, investors, advertising. Quite a world apart from the monstrous metabolic spasms of postwar Tokyo in the throes of rebuilding.

Despite this recent polish, Tokyo is a city that's managed to resist wholesale refurbishment, the look of uniform newness that Singapore loves. It's probably the last city - and certainly the only one in Asia - to have had the benefit of a relatively gradual transition to Western standards of modernity. Having fulfilled all its gleaming infrastructural ambitions forty years ago, Tokyo can now sit back and appraise its forty-year old patina. A good part of it has that dated look from the sixties, lots of concrete and municipal-hall modern. This is its "authentic." Large swathes of cobbled tile and concrete and aluminium in tofu blocks. Corrugated aluminium, polycarbonate screens, battered clapboards and weathered rain-stained cinderblocks. This unplanned jumble of cheap industrial bits and pieces. Littered with unpromising materials, Tokyo screams to be redesigned. Developers are starting with Roppongi. Some architects have been having different ideas, though. Atelier Bow Wow, currently the subject of an exhibition at Gallery Ma, appeals to a "practice of lively space: glocal detached house and micro public space." Bow Wow are a vigilante husband-and-wife team of post-materialist Situationist rogue agents who like firing up the suburbs, sprouting subtle interventions in post-bubble Tokyo.



After the moneyed fever of eighties development died down, clients became more sober and stopped demanding kitschy fiefdoms with Roman capitals and marble verandahs (Singapore unforunately hasn't quite outgrown this). WIth less money and more restraint, clients went in for modestly outfitted and compact boxes in prefabricated materials and plasticky finishes. This is the sort of place that goes unremarked, quietly commissioned by sympathetic clients, nestling anonymously in a sea of huddled one or two storey houses. Post-bubble, this is Tokyo's recessional wabi. Buildings are treated as independent allotments, micromanaged and rearranged as you like.



Back home in Singapore, I wonder when we will have the luxury of distributed development, anything at all, really, to contest the bland official line on global cultural renaissance urban downtown masterplans, etc. We're not alone in this, of course. It seems to be Asia's particular lot to have to face the ruinous effects of compressed modernization. It's difficult to escape the tyranny of regulated development and pre-integrated lifestyles, ambitiously assembled by government advisory boards and developers. The proliferation of chain stores and international franchises. Superbrands have turned most city centers into High Street corporations. We tend to get the cityscape we deserve. If nobody's going to stand firm and insist on more graceful aging and kinder environments, we can look forward to more and more arrogance and invasiveness.

Singapore has generally been on a bit of a tighter schedule than Tokyo. So many things torn down and trashed at one stroke, before they had the time to fray, crumble, crack and peel, in installments. Patina is one of the few things remaining to us that still resists being dematerialized, reduced to an image (I discount here the sort of urban quotidian-pastoral school of photography that fetishizes unkempt alleyways and their rusty pipes and crumbling brickwork). In Singapore, where we threw patina out the window at first and now clamor to get it back now that our surroundings are radiant and our infrastructure is spotless, the cause is even more hopeless. Is there some middle ground between toy-bright Chinatowns and cloistered playground waterfront Integrated Resorts and yachts and condominiums? If we haven't had the time to unfold gracefully, do we have an alternative to one-stroke corporate-funded refurbishment?

What is Singapore's authentic? Its native Gothic? If you disqualify HDB public housing stock, our foreign starchitect showpieces, and cheapened heritage conservation areas...Still, I can think of a couple of examples: SIT first-generation flats in Tiong Bahru or Queenstown, row shophouses in Joo Chiat or Yio Chu Kang, colonial bungalows in Seletar or Tanglin. Last There was a lovely short film that kicked off RESfest in Singapore last summer that knowingly captured our very own Tropicalia. An urban pastoral walk in the park, the film stock colored by heat-fatigue. The sepia tones shimmering with late-afternoon languor. A girl dawdles in a corner of Siglap: the forlorn coffee shop with cruddy windows, the Peranakan matriarch's ancestral terrace house and its garden overtaken by weeds, cycling aimlessly in a stranded carpark. Lots of shifting light on mosaic tile, homages to formica tabletops and melamine tableware.


　　
This is part of our "authentic," although no one with any pretentions to more glamorous stereotypes will care to admit it. At the moment, while everyone's preoccupied with visions of gleaming financial parks and zones of designated leisure, who's going to tend to our more humble hangouts? Already I think some of these "native" inspirations are being mined - look at Dempsey Road and Rochester Park's boondock-colonial backlanes being taken over by wine bars and villas-for-dinner. (The locals are taking back the colonial bungalows, moving back into the deserted plantation and having their own little version of Sunday bridge and tea-on-the-verandah.) In Tokyo there is a long and cherished vein of nostalgia that prizes the messy, meandering alleys of the old downtown (下町、shitamachi) as well as the forty year old shabbiness in areas that somehow escaped Bubble redevelopment. Magazines routinely memorialize derelict public housing compounds, time-warp shopping arcades, and the sort of department stores that we used to have (Tay Buan Guan, Oriental Emporium; fluorescent tubes and squeaky linoleum). It took Tokyo one boom-and-bust cycle to start reappraising itself. When our shiny showpiece New Downtown, plus all the waterfront condominiums and IRs finally get completed, maybe people will finally start catching on to the native Nanyang patina of our more neglected neighborhoods.

Curated cafes

Remaindered space is a particular Tokyo specialty. In boom-town Kichijoji, fifteen minutes west of Shinjuku, the city center is indistinguishable from any othey busy subcenter in the capital - Isetan, Marui, Tokyu, Kinokuniya, together with their phalanxes of service staff decked out in costumes that make everyone look like PanAm flight attendants from the seventies. What you don't expect in slick Kichijoji-central are the unkempt hideouts that nestle alongside the slick mall developments. Right in front of the north exit is Hamonika Yokochou (ハモニカ横町), a scrambled assortment of fishmongers, shops of mouldering pickles, 4-seater curry houses run by unrepentant "Indo-kei" types, donburi counters, auntie emporiums and "viking" smorgasbord standing cafe-bars. One of them serves "one-coin lunch." I clambered up the steep and clackety staircase without toppling over, sat myself in front of a five-seater bar on top of which a large casserole of niku-jaga and gyu-suji (meat and potatoes; beef tendons) simmered disconsolately. The stools were rickety and capped with red vinyl. For Y500, I got an hors d'oeuvre bento-box of a half crescent of odened daikon, cabbage salad, pickles and groundnuts, and then miso soup and a tuna and leek garlic saute. The lone window was cruddy, plastered over with band flyers, far-flung sake and shochu labels, one-off design exhibition postcards.

This is the scruffy chic that has made Tokyo's name for offhanded and cave-like dining options. But of course, Tokyo is also replete with the other extreme, hard to find so thick on the ground even somewhere like New York or London or Paris. I am talking, of course, about the Curated Cafe. The Curated Cafe is by no means unique in the Tokyo world of mass consumer happiness; there are legions of curated boutiques with historically accurate fetishes displayed like cabinets of curiosities; curated hair salons with vintage turntables that play infuriatingly well-chosen lounge exotica rarities; curated record shops with passionate agendas to push; etc etc. Beams, which celebrated its 30th anniversary recently, began scouring European craft fairs and flea markets, American heartland thrift stores before retro became retro. It probably invented the whole idea of the postmodern international emporium. It's now become something of an integrated empire of enlightened curatorship in art, fashion, music, and craft. It has the look and feel of a proselytizing bazaar, a kind of freemasonry of taste that nonetheless graciously welcomes new initiates who don't have the time to cultivate a personality, and then spend money agonizing over how to best externalize it. It tells you, what awfully mundane tastes you have. Look at your high street chain store threads and mass produced accessories. Come and peruse our precisely selected collections of artisanal wares, drop some cash and walk out a convert to a higher-order post-materialism (emphatically not the same as anti-materialism).

In Kichijoji, the best Curated Cafe I could find was Medewo and Dine, an "interior shop and cafe" in the Tokyu "Ura" backstreet area, but there are doubtless more stringently assembled ones in Daikanyama or Nakameguro. Medewo sells you food, espresso drinks (surprisingly good, actually) but also Freitag bags, graphic prints and Italian coffee equipment and tableware. The floor is unfinished cement, the tables are Formica and the chairs reconstructed from some mix of vinyl, PVC and Bauhaus stainless steel tubes. On the self-service reading shelf there's Classic Cafes, Adrian Maddox's loving monograph to the London formica Italian coffee bar (leatherette, Deco lettering, vitrolite and laminates), Medewo's acknowlegment, planted Nabokov-like on the premises for the astute "reader," of its historical references. This is one of the recombinant ones, taking various pokey inspirations from the sixties and stage-managed for an audience likely too young to fall for a coherent and thematically consistent reconstruction - of which there are plenty: zinc-barred and wicker-chaired French bistros and cafes in Azabu Juban or Daikanyama for example.

There is also, a ten minute walk from the station, A. K. Labo Patisserie, a two storey ivy-wound white clapboard house made out on the inside with beautifully worn dark wood floorboards and half-hearted Eames moulded plywood chairs. It's light and airy and the rotating art exhibitions have the same feeling - unretouched craft-fair sock monkeys, lovingly framed color pencil etchings, kitchen knitwork done by hobbyist housewives. The tarts have filigree filo and perfect crumbiness, the apple one with graceful juliennes, the chocolate Tigre gummy and sponge cakey at the same time. The bookshelf is casually stocked with Paris flea market and antique store guidebooks, LOHAS magazines with pastel photos of cycling in the park, baking quiche and shopping for tsukemono at the obaasan's pickle stall. French radio plays ethnic selections from its outer departements, like Henri Salvador or Guadeloupean beach bar sugarcane shimmy- let's sip curacao easy-listening. It also reports the latest traffic conditions on the Peripherique and counsels you to head on down to the Centre Pompidou for the last day of the Herge bande dessinee retrospective. It's just more pleasantly curated leisure time for the Japanese, but somewhat unnerving for me. If only because I get the niggling feeling that the Japanese do French better than the French do themselves.

City as Museum in Motion: Edo in Tokyo

The approach is innocuous. It's about a fifteen minute trek down a characterless thoroughfare that cuts straight through Koganei towards Kodaira. Just before you enter by the west entrance, lodged forlornly between the two high speed lanes of a busy intersection, there's the Tama Jousui Nature Walk, a scruffy path strewn with earth and roots, skimming something between a rivulet and a canal choked with water weeds and fallen branches. Then you enter Koganei park and are struck by the generous space, meandering cycle paths, dry patches of parched grass for picnics, the now-defunct locomotive commuter service lovingly erected as a monument behind latched gates. A little further on is a theme park for grownups.

There's a 1920s cosmetics store with a stonewashed facade and ionic columns carved out of its surface, a public bath with kitsch mosaics and original hand-dyed noren (flappy curtain-like drapes at the entrance), a Deco photo studio, Taisho period western homes with heavy oak and mahogany furniture, late Meiji farmhouses with thatched straw roofs, sagging eaves and a simulation brazier.

The Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum treads that treacherous sliver of a line between respectful preservation and joke museumification. It's like Siena or central Paris, afflicted with the brittle charm of intact history. The residents are publicly proud to live in an ancient tenement wearing its stains gracefully, but in secret they will tell you what a terrible drag it is to have to deal with creaky staircases, sagging plaster from the ceiling, the seasonal moulting of the paintwork. Koganei's mini Edo inherits this tradition of the museum city, without the pesky residents who actually live there. The actual preservation of the buildings in situ was passed over at first, and following their demolition, when Japan finally made its peace with reckless development and modernization, decided to exhume its defunct native architecture and reassemble it into a Legoland for posterity. As opposed to Singapore's facade treatment and adaptive reuse, Koganei decided it would not foist modernity on its pre-modern hardware. Little Edo accords history the respect it is believed to deserve. We will break decisively with this crumbling wood stock housing, remove it from the context of our everyday lives, and become curators of a dead tradition of craftmanship.

If preservation is difficult, it is difficult because it is wilful anachronism, against better practical judgment and modern-day expendiency. Architecture has this additional irony - it either becomes its own self-iconic museum, or disappears completely. Unlike most fine art, which bears being stuffed into a temple of modern museum-going culture for the believers, architecture is intensively localized and essentially unmoveable. Once dismantled, it has not much of an elsewhere to hide. Except, of course, in one fell stroke, in this sort of theme park setting, where it testifies to its own demise by archiving itself, in the nowhere and no-context of an "architectural museum". Refurbished with period furniture, tools, the clutter of daily routines, the architectural museum disguises its fradulence by branding itself a "real" simulation, of life as it authentically was back then. Accusations of kitsch are effectively negated, because architecture has no other chance to circulate. It insists that there is no other faithful archive.

The eastern side of the park is intended as a restaging of mercantile Edo, but in fact Meiji machiya (townhouses) and various provision shops, along with early Showa "kanban kenchiku" ("signboard architecture") angular shophouses (not unlike the Malayan Chinatown-colonial sort, with their narrow frontage, two- and three-storey construction, and Art Deco facade treatments) have been thrown into the mix, so that the visitor can straddle time and history more efficiently, saunter through a century of architectural history within the space of a weekend day trip. The archive, despite its sometimes lofty aims, is not incorruptible. Most museums aren't. Even the best and most faithful ones never fully recapture time-in-a-bottle. Most of our supposedly living cities are themselves archives-in-progress, haphazard accumulations of buildings out of phase with each other. If the city had the luxury of languid development (Rome), imperial decree (Nara), fascist renovation (Paris), or some combination of each, the residents count themselves lucky to inherit some of this strictly curated spirit. If, like Tokyo, none of this has survived to accompany it into the modern age, the archive is scrambled but intact. It will take some deciphering. Tokyo's archive has too many collections to be curated effectively. The exhibits come into their own. Some hoary and urban legendlike, others endlessly rebuilt and refurbished according to the fashion of the age, and yet others young upstarts trying to add color and new blood to a "historical" area.

The label "architectural museum" is fraudulent. It refutes the possibility of a living archive of architecture perpetually in variance with itself. It pretends to suggest that cities are in and of themselves incapable of preserving a core of history within a whirlwind of change. It is, at its base, against the proposition of art-as-life and vice versa. The living, user-friendliness of architecture as lifestyle.

Broadway...Bigness for the Masses!

Metabolism started in Tokyo, roughly contemporaneous with other experimentalists and theoretical urban cell-groups like the mid-sixties Archigram of "plug-in city" fame. The Metabolists rejected orderly town-square intimations of the city as outmoded, badly adapted to the reality of mass housing pressures and dwindling space in downtown areas. In Tokyo, postwar reconstruction and unprecedented urban growth, pre-Olympic infrastructural improvement, plus a newfound consciousness of design and planning issues - Japan hosted the World Design Conference in 1960 - all fed into architects' concern with densification and mass housing issues. Metabolism's heritage was Modernist, but had little patience for pure aesthetic reflections on space, light, and transparency; the self-contained detached Miesian glass box was an indulgence, and even Corbusian public housing was not quite radical enough. Too settled, too single-noted. Perhaps what was needed was a certain Dis-unity of habitation, expanding on the utopian promises of Modernism without too much of its hygienic order. After all, it wasn't everyone who could afford the sun-dappled Corbusian glass grove or the Miesian villa.

Kikutake Kiyonori, especially, was Metabolism's patron architect manqué - he made ambitious proposals for modular capsule structures snaking wildly over existing buildings, towered over residential neighborhoods, prancing like DNA helixes and spiralling out of control - most of which were bluntly rejected by the relevant authorities. Metabolism promised to be ad-hoc and spontaneous, an organic, contagious movement that mirrored runaway economic growth, thronging populations and densities, growing fungus-like to match demand and circumstance. Instead, it ran up against walls of building codes, sunlight ratio and height restrictions, and a scandalized public fresh from the thatched countrysides of Japan. As with other artistic manifestoes, this one flung itself far and wide, gaining favor far from its original intent and context. When head honcho Kurokawa Kishou visited Singapore in the 1960s, marvelling at People's Park Complex, Golden Mile Complex and Paul Rudolph's Concourse, he found himself in the awkwardly pleased position of an originator whose disciples had run away with the scripture and freestyled with it.

Back home in Tokyo, an early pioneer of the warren-like mixed-use Metabolist highrise was the "Broadway" building in Nakano, three stops and five minutes west of Shinjuku. Completed in 1961 by Miyada Keizaburo, it became one of the first suburban destination complexes, with one storey below ground and ten above. Miyada had studied in Washington and been impressed by the shopping malls, apartments and supermarkets of postwar America, and when he returned to Tokyo decided to incorporate these modern comforts into "mansions," a sort of condominium prototype, equipped cells for modern living, never more than a short way away from amenities and "connectors" like public corridors, atria, and plazas for dawdling and gossiping with one's neighbors. Broadway included restaurants, fish markets, clothing stores, rooftop gardens, an outdoor pool and a golf range - reproportioned to fit the scale of the vertical complex-as-city, of course.

Broadway is still possessed of that time-warp charm, marooned in the sixties with its linoleum floors, formica countertops, fluorescent tube lights, and distinctly claustrophobic corridors, bracing eager shoppers with the classic smell of mouldering merchandise. It even has glaring design defects that make it hell to navigate but which everyone's come to love anyway - from the ground level shopping street Sun Plaza you are whisked urgently up to the third floor; and then, as required: up one flight of stairs to the fourth, or down one flight to the second floor. Its tenants, unconsciously or not, have helped to memorialize the era of its conception in their own way by devoting themselves to the sale of vintage goods and pop culture ephemera from that time. Kanransha is a cinephile's poster closet from the swinging sixties (French new wave, Antonioni, Bergman, etc). Mandarake operates a large buyback and trade-in depot in manga ephemera. The weekend mobs are more Kowloon than Omotesando. They throng the basement food halls and huddle in hawker concession booths for greasy takoyaki, "soft cream," barrels overflowing with pungent pickles and dessicated fishes.

Something like how Golden Mile Complex turned - and some would say, degenerated - from a utopian drawing-board scheme into a noisy ethnic supermarket and loitering forum for foreign laborers, Broadway's messiness proves the accidental genius of "Metabolic" development, thriving long and clamorously, far from the blueprint of its original conception. Architects are guilty of this betrayal: they wish only good things for the "civitas" of our public spaces, humane interactions in places we can proudly call "commons," but whose vision of the public is this? Certainly not the public's.

With a vitality beyond any reasonable original expectations, Broadway is a classic exercise in hands-off dirty populism, a living instance of devices left to themselves, left to languish or flourish, as they will. One key difference, though. Because the Japanese practise an exceptionally obsessive gopherism, whatever their chosen consumerist fetish, this is no facile idol worship teen hell mall with posters and stickers and dangly cellphone accessories. It looks only like a barracks of so many cluttered bedrooms of people who stay in and watch too many videos, but you might stumble upon actual theatrical release Antonioni or Godard posters, dead stock tie-in merchandise for C-grade horror flicks like thermos flasks or red clasp-lunchboxes. There's a tiny outlet doing a roaring trade in antique sports watches with an accordingly swish interior (at sharp odds with the makeshift stockpiling of the first-generation nintendo game cartridge museum next door). For an instructive comparison, I recommend a visit to People's Park Complex (Zhen Zhu Fang), a similar complex with quite a different accumulation of objects. This will be the profitable subject of some other article, but in rough terms, it's Japanese curatorship and selectivity on the one hand, and Chinese pirated kitsch on the other.

Showa Modern 昭和モダン

Although never formally colonized, Japan has always been fertile nesting territory for Western cultural imports. The vogue for youkan (western houses) dates from Meiji, but it was only really during early Showa (1925 onward) that modernist architecture as such began to sink roots. Ever since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel was completed in 1923, Tokyo has cherished, if not actively fetishized, the industrial gleam of steel and glass, prizing their “negative” values like natural light and void space. Maybe that affinity was mirrored in its own native building traditions: the one storey hiraya, a wooden house constructed from timber joinery and sliding screens; the row house (nagaya) stretching deep into narrow back alleys (rojiura) despite an extremely narrow frontage (supposedly a legacy from feudal times when merchants, for whom this dwelling was principally constructed, were taxed on their property according to the width of this frontage along the main thoroughfare); the tea room, or sukiya, that opens out onto a “verandah” (engawa) overhanging the garden or doma (unfloored part of the house), the site of domestic urban-pastoral happiness, it seems - frothy matcha in tea bowls with Japanese sweets, sunning oneself while playing go, entertaining the house cat, etc.

Foreign architects working in Tokyo found warm reception for their open plan, well-lit interiors; conversely, Japanese repatriate architects returned to plant Parisian arcades and brick buildings all over the city. Wright’s assistant on the Imperial Hotel, the Czech-born Antonin Raymond, enjoys something of a mythic status as a pioneer of rational, angular modernism. In suburban Suginami ward, Raymond’s Tokyo Women’s Christian University nestles next to Zenpukuji park. The church façade is riddled with geometric ventiblocks that resemble a Moorish arabesque, or one of Wright’s Mayan-inspired suburban stone villas in Hollywood or Pasadena.

The record of Japanese product during the same period, however, was patchy. Mainstream Japanese modern before the war was essentially Bauhaus inspired-and-imitated. Apartment blocks were initially meant only for foreigners and Japanese repatriates; it introduced other curious and forward-looking youngsters, mobo and moga (modern boys and girls; essentially the Japanese generational equivalent of London’s Bright Young Things, or Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age dandies) to dosoku seikatsu – literally, life with shoes on. From wood, cinderblocks and rice paper, lounging on cushions and tatami, suddenly Tokyo’s moboga were capering around a living room in brogues and heels, perching on top of Bauhaus pipe chairs and sipping earl grey from English china. The love of “modern” interiors was uncritical and unchallenged, and at first the Japanese didn’t so much import Western architectural expertise as borrow the glamor of its associations. The defining curves and stylized lines of New York Art Deco were props on permanent loan for the living spaces of Asia’s first burgeoning middle class urban consumer society.

European mod cons seemed as if they were flown in direct and retrofitted. After much of wooden- and straw-roofed Tokyo was levelled by the earthquake in 1923, aspiring modernists were given a clean slate to work with. "Kanban kenchiku" (signboard architecture) grafted copper boards, slate or mortar onto flat facades of two-storey shophouses, leaving behind the more traditional joinery and protruding wooden beams (dashigeta) angling downwards from a sloping roof. The armored reinforcements were practical - copper plating was fireproof, and later shielded the building from shrapnel during WWII air raids - but there was always room for ornamentation. Art deco motifs and geometrical patterns were often carved or hammered directly into the copper plates.

From Paris, but with about a forty year time lag, the shopping arcades, or passages, suddenly materialized in central Tokyo. The first indoor arcade appeared in the Maru office building in 1923, in the Marunouchi/Hibiya district, historically faithful down to the mosaic floors, Art Nouveau arches and wrought iron rails and balustrades. This would mark the start of an enduring taste for Reform Club smoking-jacket chic : heavy lampshades, thick wooden panelling and so on. Even today, this sort of gentleman's club atmosphere lingers in the more sullen corners and musty basements of Marunouchi and Ginza, still cherished by retro hounds with a taste for boardroom gravitas.

It would take some time for modernism as such to be fully digested by the New Japanese architecture, though. Maekawa Kunio, together with Sakakura Junzo and Yoshimura Junzo, completed the somewhat textbook-Miesian International Culture House (kokusai bunka kaikan, not to be confused with the late 50s concrete concert and event hall in Ueno park called just bunka kaikan) in Roppongi, which even way back in 1923 already had the stirrings of a foreigner-friendly cosmopolitanism. Late in his career, Maekawa would find the balance that would earn him his reputation as a leading light of the New Japanese Modern, successfully marrying his Bauhaus leanings with traditional “authentic” Japanese traditions. His personal residence (1942), now dismantled and reincarnated in the open-air Edo-Tokyo architectural museum in Koganei city, is essentially a hiraya with more generous proportions and better natural light. It retains the free flow of space from the interior living room outward to the yard of the traditional Japanese residence, with an elegant concession to double-height ceilings, an open plan staircase, and a two-tiered graduated shouji (sliding wooden screen in a grid pattern) - rice-papered at ground level, transparent glass for the upper half. The result is one of those rare instances where Bauhaus box modern and the "New Japanese" fusion rid each component of its limitations. The Japanese house managed to shed its usual gloom, and the modern glass box shed a good deal of its dogma and acquired a newfound warmth of materials. I’ll let the picture speak for itself.