Jorge Almazán + Studiolab, Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City (2022)
Most cities would be better if they were more like Tokyo. So why aren't they?
Japan was experiencing a tourism boom even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and when that period's restrictions were lifted, the gaijin floodgates opened wider than ever. Though this seems to have been a rather mixed blessing for the Japanese, it's surely benefited Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, which had the good fortune to be published in the middle of 2022. While most of Japan's recent first-time visitors were no doubt content to put together a few Instagram stories and check the Land of the Rising Sun off their "bucket list," one imagines the more urbanism-minded among them returning home inspired to understand what they saw and experienced of the day-to-day life of Japanese cities — and of no Japanese city more than Tokyo, foreign tourists' most common starting point.
It hardly needs saying that Tokyo is unlike any capital in the West, and it doesn't closely resemble any other Asian megacity either. Sheer scale contributes something to its difference — more than 14 million people live within the city proper, and 41 million in the metro area — but more so the sheer functionality it exhibits at that scale. At every level, from its efficient train networks to its countless eateries to its well-stocked convenience stores to its ever-present bottled-drink vending machines, Tokyo appears simply to "work" in a way Westerners no longer even expect from their own cities, even without an apparent guiding intelligence overseeing the process. The reasons behind that hold out enough interest that Emergent Tokyo's co-author Joe McReynolds, an American academic with a good deal of experience in Japan, has spoken of originally having intended to write a book called How Tokyo Works.
That was before he met Jorge Almazán, a Spanish architect practicing in Japan and a professor at Tokyo's Keio University, where he runs StudioLab, "a university-based collaboration platform that works as architecture design studio and research laboratory." StudioLab itself is credited alongside Almazán on the book's cover; so, in other contexts, is Naoki Saito, another StudioLab-affilated Keio professor. Emergent Tokyo is the fruit of their collaboration, and at first one may suspect too many cooks, a common disorder in this type of visually lavish crossover academic-popular architectural-urbanistic study. But while its voice may have come out sounding somewhat depersonalized, its prose is thoroughly readable, a quality never guaranteed in this subgenre.
I've gone back and forth in my mind about whether to take to task a certain over-reliance on the word foster, which has a technically objectionable tendency to vagueness, but also a feel I simply don't like. Regardless, its preponderance is understandable given the stated goal of Almazán, McReynolds, Saito, et al.: not just to explain Tokyo's distinctive and not-formally-designed urban characteristics, but to figure out how conditions could be set up to allow similar characteristics to emerge in other world cities. They do this by isolating and examining five environments either unique to Tokyo or manifest in unique way there: yokochō alleyways, zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, ankyo streets, and "dense low-rise neighborhoods."
Density must be among the qualities most widely and instinctively associated with Tokyo, but to foreign visitors, its low-rise neighborhoods come as more of a surprise, not least in the vastness of their sprawl. That's made especially clear by the view from the window of the Shinkansen, Japan's bullet train, which has been accused — not without reason — of turning huge swaths of the country into one big suburb of Tokyo over the past sixty years. But for most of the aforementioned 41 million greater Tokyoites, a built environment of closely packed (but not touching) one-, two-, and three-story buildings characterizes the city as they've long known it. "Although Tokyo has the image of a mega-city in the popular imagination," the authors write, "until recently high-rise buildings were few and far between."
"The majority of Tokyo’s daytime population lives in railway suburbs full of mundane apartment blocks and suburban tracts, much the same as can be found on the outskirts of many other cities." But do note the word railway: "These neighborhoods are not isolated, car-dependent suburbs. The population of these areas can easily access central Tokyo via convenient suburban railway connections." (As Taras Grescoe puts it in Straphanger's Tokyo chapter, "the real challenge is to find any development that is not transit-oriented.") And thanks to much less restrictive zoning laws than those in the United States, "even quiet residential lanes are sprinkled with idiosyncratic mom-and-pop businesses with homeowners living above them."
Despite living "next door," at least in a world-geographical sense, I haven't been to Tokyo for the better part of a decade now. This book has stoked my desire to get out there again, and not just to parts of town like Ikebukuro, Ebisu, and Shimokitazawa, but also to outer districts like Nishi-Ogikubo. There, after a ride west on the Chūō Line (that storied link to "some of the city's most cultured and bohemian residential suburbs"), one finds yanagi kōji, one of several yokochō intensely scrutinized in this book. Yokochō are "warrens of lively, micro-scale bars and restaurants centered around tiny alleys and backstreets," many of which evolved from informal clusters of black-market businesses that cropped up around train stations after the war; today, for their regulars, each one is "a third place full of third places."
If you want to visit a yokochō, the likes of TripAdvisor will gladly point you right to the most famous of them all: the Golden Gai in Shinjuku, another of Emergent Tokyo's objects of research. "The world's densest bar district," its six blocks contain more than 200 drinking establishments, most of them "highly idiosyncratic and creative" in the classic yokochō manner, "displaying the personal world of the owner through music, decoration, and other aesthetic choices." All are tiny, some with just enough room for the bartender and three or four stools. The book conveys their size with precision using not just photographs, but also numerous detailed diagrams of a selection of yokochō bars in cutaway, from the side, from above, and situated within their immediate urban contexts.
Writing as tourism in Japan was once again ramping up, the authors note that "foreigners are now as common as Japanese among Golden Gai's nighttime lanes, sparking fears that the intimate and countercultural character of the district could be lost." Thus far, their effect doesn't seem to have been devastating, thanks in part to the way a few conspicuously accessible bars lightning-rod the most undiscriminating tourists away from the rest. Regardless, in the Golden Gai or other yokochō, "the presence of foreigners who do not speak Japanese and possess only a limited understanding of Japanese social mores is often felt particularly deeply in such an intimate social environment."
Years ago, I struck up a conversation with an Englishman at a translation conference in the U.K. He told me a memorable story about the time his teenage daughter invited a friend from California to come visit her in London. Upon boarding one of those Routemaster-type double-decker buses, the Californian girl took one look at the narrow, curved stairway leading to the upper deck and said not "I've never seen that before," nor "That looks dangerous," but "Is that legal?" Versions of her remark, one of the most telling about the American mindset I could ever imagine, have no doubt been spoken by Western tourists upon first stepping into the richly atmospheric confines of a yokochō bar. And there, rhetorical though it may be, the question does have an answer: no, it's not legal, at least not in the U.S.
Many of the features documented in Emergent Tokyo have effectively been outlawed in American cities. Take zakkyo buildings, which I've long tried to describe to Westerners as "vertical streets," in that as you ascend through them, you pass an unpredictable variety of businesses. "While in most cities around the world a building's commercial uses are located on its ground floors along the street, these buildings accommodate commercial functions vertically on all levels," the authors write. "It is possible to find a restaurant, an internet café, a health clinic, a hostess club, and a language school in the same building, without any particular hierarchy or organizing principle."
Though they could hardly be more normal to a twenty-first-century Tokyoite, zakkyo buildings — and the neon signs that adorn their exteriors — have figured prominently in foreign depictions of the Japanese capital. The "emergent monument" that is the zakkyo lineup on the north side of Yasukuni Avenue has been featured in Lost in Translation, Kill Bill, and The Wolverine, suggesting that "its evocative power outstrips the few large-scale monuments, such as the Tokyo Skytree, that the city has intentionally produced." Nor were zakkyo buildings themselves the product of intention: the first generation consisted of architectural regulation-tailored "multi-tenant low-rent office buildings with a commercial ground level," which then underwent "gradual vertical colonization by incoming commercial enterprises." Simple "mixed-used" buildings have been a part of this century's much-discussed American urban revival (not least in the proliferating form of the unloved "5-over-1"), but I'm not prepared to call it a success until more commercial operations get up past the first floor.
Most U.S. cities hollowed out in the twentieth century can reflect on a more gloriously bustling urban past. But none had a canal system as elaborate as that of old Tokyo — or rather Edo, as it was then called. Much of it was filled in during Japan's own postwar modernization fervor, but certain traces remain for those who know how to see them: ankyo, for example, which are "former watercourses that have been covered over and turned into paths and roads." Usually winding and too narrow to accommodate motor vehicles, they would be considered practically useless in the context of most American cities, I suspect, and probably even looked on with suspicion for their potential to attract loiterers to the residential quarters through which they run. Even if nobody got mugged in such a tucked-away street, its presence would sooner or later generate one kind of lawsuit or another.
The public-private ambiguity of ankyo would be another source of discomfort, though in Japan it has facilitated formal and informal beautification efforts, as well as the installation of amenities uncommon on more major Tokyo streets. "The in-between status of many ankyo streets has enabled the residents who live among them to actively appropriate them for their own purposes," the authors write. "People expand their domestic realms into the small alleys (a practice sometimes referred to as afuredashi), much as one sees in the back alleys or roji of Tokyo's dense, low-rise neighborhoods." One element I associate with afuredashi is the potted plant, each and every one of which placed along an ankyo in Harajuku called Mozart-Brahms Lane as of February 2020 appears marked on a "street level analysis and visual sequence," which occupies a two-page spread.
The visual richness of Emergent Tokyo is worth underscoring. If you were to come across the book's Japanese translation, you could still learn quite a bit from it even if you can't read a word of Japanese. Not that every one of its photographs and diagrams is fully legible at a glance, especially the renderings of streets that incorporate more than one perspective in a Cubist-looking manner. (I'm sure there's a particular term for those, but I'm not yet avid enough a reader of architecture books to know it.) Not that Tokyo itself is fully legible at a glance either. Despite having been there about a dozen times over the past decade, my grasp of the city remains elementary. When I imagine the possibility of living in Japan in the future, somehow making a home in Tokyo — despite its obvious advantages — always seems far less plausible than doing so in a regional capital like Osaka or Sapporo.
Given my Italo Calvino-like preference for huge cities, Tokyo's size may not be the main reason I can't get a handle on it. Perhaps one simply has to live there, first getting to know one's chōme (the basic areal unit of a system of "mini towns," each with "its own local neighborhood associations and a cohesive character," much like the dong here in Korea), coming to understand it as a single cell within a much larger urban organism. Disquisitions on the nature of Tokyo tend to reach into other domains for their metaphors: not just biology (with particularly striking results from the Metabolist movement in Japanese architecture, which produced structures like Kurokawa Kisho's Nakagin Capsule Tower), but also chaos theory, at least when it was in vogue back in the eighties.
"Western architects and planners became enthralled with the city’s uncontrollable and fragmentary aspects, rejecting earlier modernist notions that one could ever truly control a city," the authors of Emergent Tokyo write of that era, when economic-bubble-era urban Japan was also growing like mad. "But Western writers generally don't treat Dallas or Los Angeles as exotic cities of chaos." I almost pulled a muscle raising an eyebrow at that assumption: I don't know much about Dallas, but "exotic city of chaos" practically sums up at least a couple generations of writing on Los Angeles. Regardless, being uniquely chaotic is just one of what Almazán, McReynolds and their collaborators identify as "two dominant myths perpetuated by much of the writing about Tokyo," the other being that "Tokyo is a mysterious city that can only be understood as a product of Japanese culture."
This brings to mind a lament from the plainspoken literary translator Jay Rubin's guidebook Making Sense of Japanese. Since that language's grammar doesn't absolutely require sentences to include subjects, he writes, "students are subtly encouraged to think that Japanese verbs just 'happen,' without subjects, deep within some Oriental fog." As I read through Emergent Tokyo, it became clear that the authors have taken it as a quasi-religious mission to blow that Oriental fog out of Tokyology. The text references the notion of Japanese culture having shaped the city with a surprising frequency and dismissiveness; toward the end, it comes around to the damnable nihonjinron, or works on "the theory of Japaneseness," which "can lead to a mistaken vision of Japanese cities as being mysterious, exotic, and unknowable to outsiders."
I admit to wondering, occasionally, quite how mistaken that vision is. Much or all of nihonjiron may indeed be claptrap, but what Emergent Tokyo transmits is less a determination that "Japaneseness" is not a major factor in the shaping of Japanese cities than a determination that it not be. It feels a bit like the declarations an expatriate friend of mine here in Seoul tends to make, usually after a few drinks, that there are no such things as countries or cultures. But while he always refuses to elaborate on what brought him to such an outlandish-sounding belief, this book's authors do, at one point, acknowledge a practical grounds for their position: "Pretending Tokyo is utterly different from Western cities quickly becomes an excuse to reject Tokyo's example as a comparison case or a source of practical wisdom."
This is the same phenomenon in action when a delegation from a U.S. city hall arrives in Latin America to try out a successful bus rapid transit system, heaps that system with praise, then turns right around and says, well, of course, it wouldn't work back home. I myself wrote a piece for Archinect a few years ago about how Tokyo provides the best model for Los Angeles' future development. Though its premise still seems true to me, broadly speaking, I suspect it must, in one quarter or another, have received the valid critique that I ignored the cultural dissimilarity — to put it mildly — between Los Angeles and Tokyo. A Los Angeles whose density and infrastructure even approximated Tokyo's would be an improvement on the city as it is today. But given the difference in those societies' attitudes toward the relationship between urban space and the individual, whether it would function anywhere near as well as Tokyo is another matter entirely.
On one of his early stays in Tokyo, David Sedaris simultaneously took on the formidable tasks of quitting smoking and learning the Japanese language. In a published diary entry from that time, he relates a conversation with his classmates:
I was in the school break room with Christophe-san yesterday, and the two of us got to talking about vending machines, not just the ones before us, but the ones outside as well. “Can you believe it?” he asked. “In the subway station, on the street, they just stand there, completely unmolested.”
“I know it,” I said.
Our Indonesian classmate came up, and after listening to us go on, he asked what the big deal was.
“In New York or Paris, these machines would be trashed,” I told him.
The Indonesian raised his eyebrows.
“He means destroyed,” Christophe said. “Persons would break the glass and cover everything with graffiti.”
The Indonesian student asked why, and we were hard put to explain.
“It’s something to do?” I offered.
“But you can read a newspaper,” the Indonesian said.
“Yes,” I explained, “but that wouldn’t satisfy your basic need to tear something apart.”
Eventually, he said, “Oh, OK,” the way I do when moving on seems more important than understanding. Then we all went back to class.
I reflected on our conversation after school, as I hurried down a skyway connecting two train stations. Windows flanked the moving sidewalks, and on their ledges sat potted flowers. No one had pulled the petals off. No one had thrown trash into the pots or dashed them to the floor. How different life looks when people behave themselves — the windows not barred, the walls not covered with graffiti-repellent paint. And those vending machines, right out in the open, lined up on the sidewalk like people waiting for a bus.
This, whatever it is, would be the aspect of Tokyo most difficult to replicate in other countries, even more so than all those urban train lines, yokochō, zakkyo, and ankyo. A lack of it is the reason American city-dwellers regard the spaces underneath elevated highways and train tracks, the subject of one of Emergent Tokyo's chapters, as no-go zones rather than as inviting sites of commercial and social life. What makes it possible — what fosters it, I daresay — is hardly to be found solely or even mainly in the structure of the built environment. Outside the cores of Tokyo and other major cities, the authors take care to remind us, "Japanese suburbia has the usual landscape of highways, drive-in franchises, and big-box shopping malls one sees across the world, with not a speck of exotic Japan in sight."
Yet crappy Japanese suburbia remains considerably more appealing than crappy American suburbia, a judgment confirmed by my friend and countryman Chris Arnade, who's made a career of walking twenty miles per day through the least glamorous parts of cities and countries around the world. Hardly an uncritical Japanophile, he's also written about his dissatisfactions with Japanese cities, which at some points overlap with common tourist complaints: the lack of garbage cans and benches on the street, the lackluster parks. Emergent Tokyo cites a few explanations for deficiencies of this kind — that the very concept of public space is "incompatible with Japanese society due to its Western origins," say, or that the Japanese "emphasize temporality, favoring less permanent architecture marked by periodic events and temporal change," unlike monument-oriented Westerners — only to cast them and their stench of nihonjinron aside.
Emergent Tokyo emphasizes that Tokyo continues to emerge, or at least to change, even today. In the twenty-twenties, its central struggle is between "the vast scale of the skyscraper as a triumph of economic efficiency, and the tiny scale of the dense low-rise neighborhood as a triumph of individual property rights." As an example of the former, the authors point to the now 22-year-old development Roppongi Hills, whose "isolated towers and intimidating luxury shopping spaces" stand as "a symbol of social segregation and the privatization of public space." For an example of the latter, I'd look not to a real place, but to the titular establishment of the much-loved Japanese television series Midnight Diner. Despite being fictional, that twelve-seat, mostly regular-frequented restaurant open between the hours of midnight and 7:00 A.M. could plausibly exist in the middle of Shinjuku. Considering why it couldn't elsewhere will be left as an exercise for the reader.
See also:
Donald Richie, Tokyo: A View of the City (1999)
Robert Fouser, Exploring Cities with Robert Fouser (로버트 파우저의 도시 탐구기) (2019)
In the Los Angeles Review of Books: Tokyo Junkie (Robert Whiting, 2021)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His current projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.