Redevelopment and its discontents
On a gorgeous September day in 2017, myself and hundreds of my fellow excited suburbanites assembled on the pristine pavement of a square between a pair of glistening glass-and-steel buildings to see the future of our slice of Tokyo. Following a ten-year urban renewal project, the entirety of Chofu Station had been moved underground. On its former site railway operator, real estate and retail conglomerate, and all-round western Tokyo power broker Keio had erected Trie Chofu, a commercial complex and grand entrance to the neighborhood, composed of three structures packed with shops, restaurants, and cafes where one, according to Keio, would be able to enjoy a “near-to-nature, relaxed lifestyle characteristic of Chofu.”
When the speeches and tape-cutting formalities had concluded and this shining light of a shopping mall was finally opened, we locals streamed through its doors in exuberant but orderly fashion. Clutching assorted leaflets and coupons that were being handed out at the entrance, we dispersed to absorb the marvels of retail and hospitality awaiting inside. We rode the spotless escalators and browsed the brightly lit boutiques with the enthusiasm of a kid trying out a new toy.
But around an hour later, when I had completed my round of the premises and stepped back out into the September sunshine, I did so with roundly curbed enthusiasm. On the inside as well as out, Trie looked, felt—even smelled—the same as every other new mall in Tokyo. You had your Seijo Ishii and your Starbucks, a dozen generic ladies’ fashion shops, and midscale chain eateries both obvious (Heijoen) and obscured (that is, independent in appearance but run by a hospitality conglomerate). In contrast, there was nothing to orient the visitor—excuse me, the consumer—to their wider whereabouts; not one thread to tie the complex to the neighborhood it professed to represent.
The disappointment shouldn’t have come as a surprise. On an abstract level, I was well aware of the homogenizing impact of redevelopment in Tokyo, and of the dynamic through which it squeezes and dislodges small businesses by replacing layered, diverse urban landscapes with hulking multiuse complexes in which the conditions for renting commercial space are downright hostile to independent shop and restaurant owners. Nonetheless, my experience at the Trie opening served to bring theory and practice together in a visceral way.
Since then, I’ve watched the same forces at play all over the city, most notably in Shibuya, Shimokitazawa, and all along the waterfront. And there’s plenty more of the same to come. If you somehow haven’t noticed, Tokyo is in the throes of a construction glut, one that’s producing some of the largest structures ever seen in Japan: the main skyscraper at Azabudai Hills, opened last year, is the tallest building in the country, but its short reign will end when the Tokyo Torch tower near Tokyo Station is completed in 2027.
In a burst of clairvoyance, developers and city planners are proclaiming this real-estate stampede a “once in a hundred years” undertaking, and media across the political spectrum appear to have swallowed said slogan whole. In developer-speak, the centurial remaking of Tokyo “increases urban vitality” and “creates new culture” while making the city prettier, safer, and, bizarrely, more attractive to “foreigners.”
In reality, when redevelopment takes place where people live and work—places that are already “vital” and have “culture”—the process more often than not amounts to taking a skyscraper-sized shit on the existing community, with the bulk of the feces landing on those groups without the leverage (i.e. a land title and/or political clients) required to make developers notice them. Raw considerations of profit and power are one part of the dilemma; basic respect for the social fabric of a neighborhood is another, in the sense of it usually being sorely lacking. Many of the people remaking entire sections of the city simply don’t seem to care much for the places they’re being paid to “redevelop.” A few years ago, when I interviewed one of the big boss men in charge of the Takanawa Gateway project for a (well-paid) puff piece, I asked him to highlight a few favorite places to eat and drink in the area. The guy, failing to come up with the name of a single local business, said he “hadn’t had the opportunity to spend much time [there].”
I’m not saying that tearing down old buildings and replacing them with new (and often objectively better) ones is a bad thing per se. Change has been the only constant throughout the history of modern Tokyo, a city that’s always being rebuilt and reimagined due to reasons too numerous to outline here (read this instead). As a rule of thumb, I’d recommend avoiding deep attachment to physical elements of this, or any, city; “It feels foolish to believe in any place, knowing that it might do away with your most cherished corners in the name of its growth,” as Hanif Abdurraqib writes about Columbus, Ohio.
I also recognize that redevelopment can result in spectacular success when the community involved desires it and has a say in the course it takes. This was the case with Azabudai Hills, a true neighborhood of the twenty-first century that has replaced as well as incorporated the largely elderly local community whose structure, as explained here, dated to the immediate post-WWII period; a village within the city that had reached a dead end and where residents were consequently more than happy to welcome Mori Building as their new overlord.
But, at the risk of donning my Captain Obvious cavalier hat, the scrap-and-build juggernaut does real damage when it ignores (or willfully crushes) living communities in its insatiable desire to turn the city into a shopping mall. Sometimes the machine ought to be stopped. In other cases it can be coopted, or reimagined. Let’s take a brief look at each of those three options.
As far as ways to prevent malicious redevelopment go, citizens taking a democratic stand against it often seems like the obvious road to take. In Tokyo, Koenji is the model case for residents banding together to protect their community from destructive construction; the neighborhood’s sustained action against the building of a planned new thoroughfare that would split the place in two and level several blocks full of small, independent businesses in the name of disaster safety and smoother traffic has forced the metro government on the defensive. Tocho’s plan to start building the road in 2025 now looks unrealistic, especially following the 2022 election of Satoko Kishimoto as mayor of Suginami. Kishimoto has made clear her opposition to redevelopment in Koenji in general and to the road scheme in particular.
Of course, effectively blocking projects backed by big money and platoons of metro bureaucrats requires an exceptional level of organization and commitment at the neighborhood level—something that Koenji has but many other places in the city lack.
In some pockets of the city where redevelopment is a foregone conclusion, existing indie businesses and local culture live on, often in altered form, through mutually beneficial arrangements with the developer. I’ll call this the Tokyu model, since it’s been a conspicuous feature of the ongoing Tokyu Land-led transformation of Shibuya and Harajuku. Rightly concerned about its glistening monoliths’ impact on local culture—and, by extension, its own reputation and bottom line—Tokyu’s policy has been to coax beloved Shibuya eateries, bars, and other businesses displaced by all the bulldozing to continue life inside the company’s new towers.
Under this model—which I had hoped to see reflected in Trie Chofu—prospective tenants deemed by the landlord (the perfect term here) to contribute “cultural value” are presented with favorable lease provisions that allow them to survive, even thrive, within one of Tokyu’s numerous vertical wonders. The obvious catch is that not all independent shops and restaurants driven out of their old premises will be deemed cultured enough to inhabit the new Shibuya.
What if that didn’t have to be the case? What if corporate cultural arbitrage could be ignored? Could a piece of the city be rebuilt, made more disaster-resistant and ordered, without doing away with its character and shafting its people? Sure it could; it’s been done before. In the late 1960s, the Tokyo metro government led an ambitious redevelopment project on the western side of Shinbashi Station that replaced dozens of narrow alleys as well as the local “market”—a labyrinthine cluster of a shopping area that had its roots in a postwar black market—with the Shinbashi Ekimae and New Shinbashi Buildings.
Ownership of the commercial space in these buildings was divided up according to an agreement involving all former occupants of the land the structures stand on, resulting in a vast number of stakeholders. This system has endured unchanged, and even today the New Shinbashi Building alone has more than 300 “section owners,” each with the freedom to manage, rent or sell their property as they please. The result is a delightful hodgepodge of tiny bars, old-school canteens, massage parlors, and shady fortune-tellers’ closet-sized offices; ordered chaos beyond the control of any one entity.
With more than half a century of vigorous use under their belts, the two Shinbashi landmarks are in pretty bad shape—leaky pipes, cracks in the walls, questionable impromptu wiring—a state that inevitably raises the specter of redevelopment. But since any decision to replace either building requires the consent of all its part-owners, no actionable agreement appears to have been reached yet.
And even when the New Shinbashi Building eventually makes way for a Newer Shinbashi Building, its remarkable ownership structure will, by all accounts, live on largely unchanged, providing a solid foundation for the next generation to keep the neighborhood weird—all thanks to a bit of inspired ’60s public policy.
I wonder if the urban planners at the metro government ever look back at the legacy left by their predecessors in places like Shinbashi. Do they ever imagine what the city might be like if they engaged in some actual administration, instead of outsourcing their responsibilities to real-estate conglomerates?
Quick Hits
Takes on Tokyo news
Poster children
Since thoughtful discussion of electoral politics lies near the bottom of this newsletter’s list of priorities, I won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty of the ongoing Tokyo gubernatorial race. On the other hand, this election, just like the previous one, is looking fascinating from a purely observational perspective, not least thanks to the profuse number of weird aspirants for the city’s top job.
On June 20, the metro government’s administrative commission responsible for vetting candidates announced the 56 (!) names on the final list of hopefuls. In addition to the two with any chance of winning—incumbent Yuriko Koike and the more-or-less-unified left’s Renho—the lineup includes some real luminaries. Toshio Tamogami, former ASDF chief of staff, convicted briber, and favorite of the foam-mouthed and aggressively online right wing, is running again. Shinji Ishimaru, the mayor of a Hiroshima Prefecture city with a population equivalent to that of a couple Toyosu condo towers whose platform basically consists of throwing more Tokyo tax money at the rest of the country’s problems, is somehow being treated as a serious candidate.
Actually, I guess Ishimaru does qualify as consequential in comparison to the likes of idiot YouTuber turned politics cosplayer Ryu Hezuma; poster artist extraordinaire Teruki Goto; serial candidate Setsuo Yamaguchi, who is an enthusiastic proponent of rebuilding Edo Castle; and Mitsuki Kimiya, who in what can only be called an unlikely twist is pushing a mind-melting conspiracy theory about global debt forgiveness formulated in a trailer in Shelton, WA in the early 2000s.
Much has been made of the unprecedented number of contenders, which is more than double the previous record of 22 (from the 2020 election). Does the proliferation of pseudo-candidates empowered by the laughably low participation fee to abuse the city’s marquee showcase of democracy for the purpose of conducting personal and organizational publicity blitzes suggest a flaw in the system? Yes. Should something be done about it? Probably. Is the circus likely to pack up anytime soon? Nope.
Tax farce for cow parts
As an able and willing taxpayer, I was, to put it mildly, pretty pissed to learn that in the fiscal year ended April 2024, a total of ¥67,5 billion in tax revenue was stolen from Tokyo’s coffers. Making matters worse is that said heist was perpetrated by my fellow metropolitan residents, who were in turn strong-armed to do so by none other than the national government.
The real culprit here is of course the “hometown tax” (furusato nozei), an arrangement often and fittingly described as a “scheme.” Since 2008, when lawmakers in their limitless wisdom allowed people to essentially divert a significant portion of their local tax payments from their place of residence to whatever municipality elsewhere in the country offered the juiciest wagyu in return for such a fake donation, Tokyo has lost around ¥300 billion to the boonies.
Sure, the missing revenue isn’t exactly what precludes us from having nice things; ¥67,5 billion sounds like a big deal but only amounts to some 0.8 percent of the metro government’s fiscal 2024 budget. Rather, my quixotic (?) gripe is with the very existence of a system that turns paying taxes into shopping, not only allowing but encouraging people to buy melons, booze, watches, and trading cards with money they under any sane system of taxation would owe their local government—in return for, you know, enjoying nice publicly funded perks like free healthcare for their kids, timely garbage collection, and pothole-free streets.
Don’t Miss
“Kimiyo Mishima: Memories for the Future” at the Nerima Art Museum
If you’ve been to Tennozu Isle, chances are you’ve laid eyes on a certain 2.5-meter-tall trash can filled with oversized cardboard waste fabricated out of clay. Sitting in front of the local Toyoko Inn hotel, this artwork by Kimiyo Mishima catches the eye not only with its size and vivid colors, but with its loneliness, too: other receptacles of garbage are all but absent in the once industrial but now artfully gentrified area.
The lone Tennozu trash can and its meaning squatted in a corner of my brain as I strolled through the Nerima Art Museum’s Kimiyo Mishima: Memories for the Future. A retrospective of Mishima’s work spanning seven decades, the exhibition makes for a comprehensive but digestible introduction to an artist with an unyielding interest in the things we discard.
Mishima was born in 1932 in Juso, Osaka, growing up and going to school in the city. Her art teacher encouraged her to pursue painting, and she began her career in the early ’50s as a Nihonga painter. Unable to afford a steady supply of the mineral pigments and ink used in that tradition, she started experimenting with collages instead, pasting magazine and newspaper pages, advertising flyers, and silkscreen prints onto her canvases. This formative period is covered at the museum in a downstairs gallery that serves as a prelude to Mishima’s ’70s embrace of printed matter and ceramics; a turn toward reproducing the minutiae of daily life with fired clay.
The playful objects she started making in vast numbers—“breakable” newspapers rendered in all manner of pottery-like forms, as well as fruit boxes, bundles of comic books, soda cans, and so on—fill the upstairs galleries. All these painstaking replicas of readily disposable things are replete with text, and the exhibition leans into interpreting Mishima’s core oeuvre as a response to environmental destruction and sensory overload in the artist’s lifetime. Her remade trash is framed as commentary on and concern with how our refuse inherits the Earth, as well as a reaction to the eruption of the modern-day information volcano with the rise of mass media and the internet.
I found these arguments thoroughly reasonable, but couldn’t let go of the Tennozu trash can—smaller versions of which are on display at the retrospective—because I was struck by how the gaudy aesthetic and paradoxical placement of the piece says something about the contemporary city.
In footage played at the exhibition, Mishima is interviewed in her native Juso, a working-class neighborhood on the Yodo River, adjacent to a traditional red light district. She walks among weathered homes and makeshift storehouses built out of corrugated metal sheets, past untended yards littered with piles of rotting newspapers. She looks out at the river, along which the blue tarps covering the cardboard dwellings of unhoused Osakans flutter in the wind, explaining how trash as a motif came naturally to her, “because it’s all around us.”
Except it really isn’t; not anymore, not here in Tokyo. Of course, cityscapes akin to those in Juso that inspired Mishima remain common in the capital, especially in its eastern and northern parts, but these results of spontaneous expansion and contraction—life, you might call it—are slowly but surely giving way to a sanitized version of the city. There’s no room for urban imperfection in the vicinity of a Mori Building or waterfront condo tower.
Concurrently, and especially in those same parts of the city, garbage is vanishing from our sight. There’s very little litter and even fewer functional trash cans on the streets. In most new buildings, garbage disposal takes place entirely removed from the public gaze. Part of the visible lack of trash is due to the small but steady annual decrease in the amount of it produced by Tokyoites, and much of what we discard nowadays is incinerated or recycled anyway. Few would dispute that having less decaying crap out in the open is a Good Thing, as it is for many reasons, most of them olfactory, sanitary, or environmental.
All that said, the erasure of the byproduct of organized human existence from our consciousness does have its sinister side. The out of sight, out of mind approach obscures how much trash still ends up in nature—from where it makes its way into us—impeding efforts to reduce waste on a society-wide level. Meanwhile, in a publicity push with disturbing, totalitarian-ass undertones, spotless streets are being packaged as a cultural peculiarity and selling point for Tokyo. In this context, Kimiyo Mishima’s trash cans, intended as light-hearted reminders of the things we leave behind, take on a darkly ironic quality.
“Kimiyo Mishima: Memories for the Future” is on until July 7.
The Local
Korai, Shinjuku
In my suburban bubble, ramen is a necessary condition of dadhood. Just like I was often made to admit in grade school, I haven’t done the math, but would bet that around a fourth of my local interactions with fellow fathers involve the now world-famous noodle dish. Everyday moments together—at the playground, in the preschool drop-off line—are filled with ramen talk; discussions of favorite shops and styles, new trends. We text each other ramen-related news and recommendations. And of course, we eat ramen together, but only once a month because we’re all responsible adults concerned about cholesterol.
There’s arguably never been a better time to be a ramen eater in Tokyo, what with the literally countless shops across the city serving up every acceptable and unacceptable variety of the dish. A new eatery run by some young, dedicated, and determined noodle artist opens up somewhere in the metropolis seemingly every other day. Convenience stores and supermarkets carry dozens of kinds of instant ramen, from classic Cup Noodles to the sinus-clearing spectacle that is Mouko Tanmen Nakamoto. Tokyo may boast a culinary variety unmatched by any other place on Earth, but the capital runs on ramen; its animal-derived grease is what keeps the engine of this city humming around the clock.
But even amidst this abundance, my fellow dads and I frequently circle back in our conversations to a critically endangered style of ramen provision. We mourn the demise of the yatai stall, that compact kitchen on wheels that helped power ramen to the pinnacle of cheap urban eats after the cart was popularized in the ruined city following the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. Yatai proliferated in the black markets of the immediate postwar period and entrenched themselves in Tokyo’s cultural fabric during the heady ’60s and ’70s.
The beginning of the end for ramen yatai dawned in the mid-2000s, when then-governor and ever-entertaining gaffe artist Shintaro Ishihara ordered his Kabukicho-centered crackdown on, um, insufficiently licensed businesses. The city labeled yatai a threat to public order, health, and hygiene, making it all but impossible for mobile food vendors to acquire the permits necessary to stay in business. By the late aughts, Tokyo’s once formidable fleet of ramen yatai had been reduced to a handful of ragtag crews that played a nightly game of cat-and-mouse with the police around stations including Shinagawa, Shinjuku, Ueno, and Gotanda.
Those twilight years were when I, a broke but adventurous (and frequently drunk) college student, developed an affection for the simple after-dark pleasure of slurping a bowl of orthodox Tokyo-style chuka soba on a rickety bench set up next to a yatai parked by a bustling transport hub. Savoring the hot, clear chicken broth, flavored with a punchy soy sauce-based seasoning, before digging into the thin, curly noodles and toppings—spinach, menma, scallion slices, char siu, half a boiled egg, and the obligatory naruto—became a meditative experience, one powerful enough to shut out the cacophony of the adjacent station.
Today, to the best of my knowledge, that experience can only be replicated in one place in all of Tokyo: under the Sobu Line tracks at Iidabashi. The guy behind Yukitora, the last ramen yatai in the city, sets up his stall and lights his little red lantern there on a highly irregular basis (Saturday nights after 9 p.m. are your best bet).
Yukitora’s proprietor deserves all the credit in the city for his tenacious preservation of culinary-cultural heritage, and I wish I could say I love his ramen. Unfortunately, after trying it twice, I don’t: the soup tastes a bit flat, and the toppings department shows a distinct lack of spinach and naruto.
Just as I’d accepted the sad fact that delicious ramen served out of a cart has become a relic—a new item in my melancholy binder of Tokyo nostalgia, to be filed alongside entries such as Kichijoji’s Baus Theater, Nathan’s hot dogs, and all-orange Chuo Line livery—one of my ramen-loving dad friends texted me. “I’ve found a joint you’ll like. It’s called Korai, in Shinjuku. Sit-down place, but the ramen is pure yatai.”
Pure yatai? I didn’t care that this spot wasn’t an actual stall. If it could reproduce the taste I was after, I could just close my eyes and pretend I was sitting outside, sweat dripping down my nose and into the soup on a damp summer night.
Conveniently located just off Otakibashi-dori, Korai is run by an eponymous noodle factory and is apparently the spiritual successor of a long-gone Nakano ramen eatery opened in 1953. Trivia aside, the shop’s standard chuka soba (¥460!) ticks all my boxes and will henceforth be my go-to vehicle for yatai ramen dreams. Fellow dad, I’m forever in your debt.
Open 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., closed Sundays and holidays, 2nd Saturdays. Google Map
Way Back When
Isetan, Shinjuku, 41 years ago
Heads turned inside the crowded department store as the party of three — a slender, elegantly dressed woman followed by a pair of broad-shouldered men lugging half a dozen shopping bags —made their way toward the establishment’s front doors. Stepping out into the cloudy but warm Monday afternoon, the woman strode across the sidewalk in front of Isetan Shinjuku and hailed a taxi.
Her companions, weighed down by their baggage, had only taken a few steps from the store’s entrance when the doors of a car parked nearby were flung open. Three remarkably large and intimidating men, one of them heavily bearded and clutching a glistening saber, rushed out onto the street and yelled something at the duo with the shopping bags.
The older and stronger-looking of the two looked over at the approaching ruffians and encouraged his partner to ignore them. “Let’s just keep walking,” he said. They shuffled toward the cab waiting by the curb and saw the woman already in the back seat, gesturing worriedly.
Her concern was warranted. With the two still several paces from the car, the saber-wielding fellow let out a scream, charged the larger man, and sucker-punched him in the back of the head, causing him to fall and hit his forehead on a guardrail.
Antonio Inoki was down, but not out. Suddenly finding himself in the thick of what seemed like a bona fide street fight, the pro wrestler got up and tore into his assailant, landing a weighty punch before getting tackled into a bus stop pole by the swordsman’s partners. The three thugs then finished the job by throwing Inoki onto the cab he had expected to ride home in.
Bloodied and his shirt ripped to shreds, the star fighter was unable to put up any additional resistance. Nor did he have to, as the approaching sound of police sirens drove the attackers on the run. As they sped away from the scene, a curious crowd gathered around Inoki, his wife, the actress Mitsuko Baisho, and his brother Keisuke — the former two instantly recognizable celebrities —who had seemingly just become the victims of a senseless act of random violence.
When Antonio Inoki was attacked by fellow pro wrestlers Tiger Jeet Singh (the one with the saber ), Bill White, and Jacques Rougeau in front of Isetan Shinjuku on November 5, 1973, he was already one of the most popular fighters in Japan, having founded his own promotion (New Japan Pro-Wrestling aka NJPW) the year before.
Although Inoki did not suffer any serious injuries and was able to give a defiant interview to sports reporters at his Roppongi home on the evening of the incident, Shinjuku police sought to launch an investigation into the brawl. NJPW, however, refused to file a complaint against Singh because he was under contract with them, and ended up issuing a statement of apology to the police instead.
Inoki and Singh’s next meeting was in the ring. Eight days after the fight at Isetan, the rivals faced off in front of a full house in Sapporo. Their bloody bout became an instant classic. With Singh as the ultimate heel and Inoki adopting a more intense, “all-out” style of grappling, NJPW flourished, eventually growing into Japan’s premier pro wrestling promotion.
In a 2006 magazine interview, Inoki admitted that the Isetan brawl had been a promotional stunt and that he had proposed it to Singh personally.