Showa Retro and Chuo Line Charm
Much of Tokyo came of age (and has since been fairly stranded) in the postwar years of capital-rebuilding. While Americans basked in their suburban deckchairs amid the hissing of summer lawns, one ear tuned to the TV jingles celebrating Hoover vacuums, Miracle Whip, FireKing dishwasher-safe glassware and frozen fish fingers, 1950s Tokyo staggered to get back on its feet. People queued at all hours for foreign provisions at the Ame Yokochou in Ueno, cheap public housing projects (danchi) were erected. In the runup to the 1964 Olympics, Tokyo paved and bulldozed its way to the staggeringly well-connected train, subway and tram network that now riddles the city, raised ambitious Metabolist cellular housing projects like Kurosawa Kishou's Nakagin Capsule Tower, invested in some seriously elegant modernist concrete that has since patinized beautifully. The Olympic park in Komazawa is a radiant example of Showa regeneration-era concrete (although elsewhere, more modest budgets might have urged the cheaper and more wabi cinderblocks...) It's less a park and more a sort of triumphalist playground, left over from a time when Tokyo was convinced that it was going to catch up with the west at last. Ueno park is another mature showpiece of Showa modernism in richly hued concrete, with both Corbusier's Museum of Western Art and Maekawa Kunio's Bunka Kaikan.
Tokyo has been drifting westward throughout Showa, with the result that much of the Chuo line (a suburban commuter rail system running west from Shinjuku toward major Tama area cities like Kokubunji, Tachikawa and Hachioji) is now celebrated as a largely intact timewarp commune of public housing, crusty public baths on their last dregs, mid-century western-styled luxury geshuku (lodging houses) with mantelpieces and other aristo trappings [the one on the right, "Seikou Lodging" nestles in residential Ogikubo and survives as a JR ryoukan], coffee shops, "western sweet parlors," and jazz bars of the first generation, at a time when chintz, vinyl chairs and floral antimacassars were still in fashion (of course, in some circles they still are. A lot of period deadstock interior trophies and vintage mid-century "classics" have somehow pooled and accumulated in this city). For the dedicated student of urban textures, this is ground zero for Showa retro. Tokyo has no "New Yorker" that I know of, but a magazine similarly named, called "Tokyo Jin," is telling in its differences; no high-profile verbal portrait of cultural celebrities or postcolonialish short fiction with yet another minoritarian take on exile and dishabitation. Tokyo Jin is a local interest paper that interviews cafeteria operators and night wardens, runs features on derelict public housing danchi projects in obscure greying neighborhoods, lovingly photographs instances of pokey bars owned by wiry-haired women with seven cats and a large collection of snow globes. The key difference of course is that this is a "local" paper for a megalopolis of thirty million people. One issue might feature the "magic of the Chuo line," but will also run a story on the classic "western" (youshoku) cafeterias in Ginza or Marunouchi that specialize in beef stew or mixed fry (and charge prices commensurate with the accumulated weight of their historical glamor), plus an article on a much-loved local community center cafeteria-cum-soup kitchen in Chiba. Reading it, one feels the overwhelming heartlandership of the reporting, a housewifish concern for the little details and harmonious neighborly relations, the importance of shopping local, the evils of globalism and development, and so on.
As hippies and various communards fled central Tokyo in the 60's, they slunk progressively further west on the chuo line; first to Nakano, then to Koenji (manga artists, vintage used goods warehouses and Tokyo's most packed outdoor summer dance festival), then to Asagaya, which still enjoys something of a reputation for literary types. Nakano now has approximately the electric atmosphere that Shinjuku did in the 60s when people in tweed blazers packed "live houses," smoke Gauloises and drank whisky in a room only slightly larger than a closet. Nakano is also famous for the shopping center "Broadway" with all mod cons of the modernist mixed use complex, finished in cheap formica and linoleum; harshly-lit and warren-like with that classic smell of mouldering merchandise. Golden Mile or People's Park Complex; maybe one of the period Kowloon teen-malls too. It specializes in pop culture and especially manga ephemera, and operates a large buyback and trade-in depot. Again, because the Japanese practise an exceptionally obsessive gopherism, whatever their chosen consumerist fetish, this is no facile J-pop 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). As I walked past a small video arcade lovingly restocked with coin-op machines from the glorious eighties, I saw a Street Fighter machine and succumbed fully and completely.
Next in the series: Japanese magazines, "select shops," and the tyranny of curatorship
Tokyo has been drifting westward throughout Showa, with the result that much of the Chuo line (a suburban commuter rail system running west from Shinjuku toward major Tama area cities like Kokubunji, Tachikawa and Hachioji) is now celebrated as a largely intact timewarp commune of public housing, crusty public baths on their last dregs, mid-century western-styled luxury geshuku (lodging houses) with mantelpieces and other aristo trappings [the one on the right, "Seikou Lodging" nestles in residential Ogikubo and survives as a JR ryoukan], coffee shops, "western sweet parlors," and jazz bars of the first generation, at a time when chintz, vinyl chairs and floral antimacassars were still in fashion (of course, in some circles they still are. A lot of period deadstock interior trophies and vintage mid-century "classics" have somehow pooled and accumulated in this city). For the dedicated student of urban textures, this is ground zero for Showa retro. Tokyo has no "New Yorker" that I know of, but a magazine similarly named, called "Tokyo Jin," is telling in its differences; no high-profile verbal portrait of cultural celebrities or postcolonialish short fiction with yet another minoritarian take on exile and dishabitation. Tokyo Jin is a local interest paper that interviews cafeteria operators and night wardens, runs features on derelict public housing danchi projects in obscure greying neighborhoods, lovingly photographs instances of pokey bars owned by wiry-haired women with seven cats and a large collection of snow globes. The key difference of course is that this is a "local" paper for a megalopolis of thirty million people. One issue might feature the "magic of the Chuo line," but will also run a story on the classic "western" (youshoku) cafeterias in Ginza or Marunouchi that specialize in beef stew or mixed fry (and charge prices commensurate with the accumulated weight of their historical glamor), plus an article on a much-loved local community center cafeteria-cum-soup kitchen in Chiba. Reading it, one feels the overwhelming heartlandership of the reporting, a housewifish concern for the little details and harmonious neighborly relations, the importance of shopping local, the evils of globalism and development, and so on.
As hippies and various communards fled central Tokyo in the 60's, they slunk progressively further west on the chuo line; first to Nakano, then to Koenji (manga artists, vintage used goods warehouses and Tokyo's most packed outdoor summer dance festival), then to Asagaya, which still enjoys something of a reputation for literary types. Nakano now has approximately the electric atmosphere that Shinjuku did in the 60s when people in tweed blazers packed "live houses," smoke Gauloises and drank whisky in a room only slightly larger than a closet. Nakano is also famous for the shopping center "Broadway" with all mod cons of the modernist mixed use complex, finished in cheap formica and linoleum; harshly-lit and warren-like with that classic smell of mouldering merchandise. Golden Mile or People's Park Complex; maybe one of the period Kowloon teen-malls too. It specializes in pop culture and especially manga ephemera, and operates a large buyback and trade-in depot. Again, because the Japanese practise an exceptionally obsessive gopherism, whatever their chosen consumerist fetish, this is no facile J-pop 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). As I walked past a small video arcade lovingly restocked with coin-op machines from the glorious eighties, I saw a Street Fighter machine and succumbed fully and completely.
Next in the series: Japanese magazines, "select shops," and the tyranny of curatorship
posted by D at 21:20
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