1.
One of my favourite places in Tokyo is the outdoor pool at Aqua Field Shiba Park. The facility occupies a corner of the large, wooded park that surrounds Zojoji Temple in the shadow of Tokyo Tower. There’s a 50-metre pool with two lanes set aside for laps and the rest for free swim, a children’s pool equipped with small waterslides and a sunbathing deck. Entry is only 600 yen, not even the price of a latte at Starbucks in New York.
All kinds of people show up at the pool during the three months when it is open, from July through September. (The rest of the year it is converted into a futsal field.) Young families splash around together. Preteens and teens meet up to have fun on their own. Many of the strongest lap swimmers are seniors, while people of all abilities come for various kinds of water therapy. There is always a mix of nationalities, so the ambient noise is layered with snippets of Chinese, English, Portuguese, Russian, and other languages, as well as exotically accented Japanese. For as long as I have been going, which is more than a decade now, the pool has been a low-key cruising ground. Groups of young gay men, usually so circumspect in mainstream Japanese society, stride up and down the length of the free-swim section. It is also a date spot for straight couples, who test the limits of public decency with their underwater embraces. Here and there, bikinied women of different shapes and sizes stretch out on the deck to sunbathe, as cohorts of leathery middle-aged men – whom I am convinced are mild-mannered office drones on the weekdays – cover themselves in little more than thongs for extreme tanning.
During the summer, I make it to the pool once or twice a week, whether to swim laps or play with my daughters. It feels like an urban oasis to me, a rare pleasure zone that is not regulated by consumption or commercialisation. It is hard to think of many other places in Tokyo as intersectional as this. Maybe Yoyogi Park, the city’s favourite picnic grounds, which has also served as a staging point for demonstrations? Or Ueno Park, the Meiji-era cultural campus that attracts throngs of tourists to its museums and zoo and is also home to the Tokyo University of the Arts as well as a substantial unhoused population? But it is relatively easy to distance yourself from someone in a park. The pool involves a higher degree of intimacy. With all the groups that use it, I am impressed that I have never witnessed any altercation or hateful act. In fact, everyone seems to share a loose sense of community.
If you go there, you can expect to see young people flirting or you may end up with a locker next to a foreigner, and you will have to accommodate the presence of children. Rather than cancelling each other out, these conditions establish a base level of tolerance that visitors tacitly accept upon entering; once enough people agree to that customary usage, it becomes self-sustaining.
To be sure, the pool is not an entirely inclusive space. Signs warn that the showers are for ‘showering only’, and frequent sweeps of the locker room by security guards have a homophobic undertone. The pool has attracted salacious coverage in blogs and on social media, and ‘concerned citizens’ have sent petitions to the municipal government to complain, in coded language, about the facility not being used as intended for health purposes. Every year, it feels like there are more warning signs. For my part, sweeping policies seek to ostracise members of the yakuza from mainstream society, meaning that I am not allowed in unless I wear a hot and cumbersome rash guard to cover the tattoos on my upper body. (This is one of the reasons I no longer go to traditional bathhouses.)
Tenuous though it may be, the pool is nevertheless an alternate model of commons in a city that is notorious for its lack of public space. Once, I happened to be there with my older daughter on the last day before it shut down for the year. At 5pm, when the announcement came over the PA system that it was time to close, everyone – the young and the old, the queer and the heteronormative – stood still, faced each other and started to applaud.
View of Tokyo Tower and Azabudai Hills, Tokyo. Photo by Andrew Maerkle.
2.
When I look up from the spot where I stretch after a swim, I have a clear view of the Mori JP Tower rising in the haze beyond Tokyo Tower on the other side of the park. The centrepiece of Mori Building Company’s latest development, Azabudai Hills, which opened in November 2023, the Mori JP Tower is a surprisingly demure building for one that is billed as the tallest in the land, at 325 metres high. In a sometimes-a-cigar-is-just-a-cigar kind of way, the tower barely even registers as a phallic symbol. The design by Pelli Clarke & Partners has an oddly squat, slightly bowed silhouette that seems content to fade into the background. It mirrors the look of the nearby Ark Hills Sengokuyama Mori Tower, completed in 2012, which I somehow never noticed before. At a loss for a more technical description of the tower during an earlier draft of this text, I hit upon the image of a suited salaryman. As it happens, the Japanese architecture community had already coined the term ‘business-suit building’ some years ago to refer to just this kind of situation: ‘high spec, no style’.
Yet I can’t help but see something else in the tower. The land that Azabudai Hills occupies used to be a sleepy neighbourhood of small homes. Where the tower now stands, there was a historic post office built in 1930 in distinctive yellow brick. My older daughter walked by the post office every day on her way to Azabu Elementary School, which abuts part of the sprawling, 8.1-hectare Azabudai Hills site. One of my daughter’s friends lived in a house down the hill from there. After school functions, the kids would scamper off to play in a small park around the corner.
All of that is gone now. Despite the promotional spin about it being a ‘modern urban village’, Azabudai Hills is, in effect, a gated community. Until construction work is completed on the residential block overlooking the school, there are essentially two main routes into the grounds from the street level: either passing through the monolithic Mori JP Tower or climbing a hill that leads up from Sakurada-dori on the backside of the site, which is lined with luxury shops ensconced in pods designed by Heatherwick Studio. The heavily manicured green space at the heart of the development is nestled in a plateau in between them. The harsh summer sun sweeps down the exposed sidewalk on the hill. The complex is really meant to be navigated indoors, where a pay-to-play logic reigns. At first, Heatherwick Studio’s pods – with their sloped, topographical forms lashed together by sand-coloured concrete webbing – invited fanciful associations with the cartoon dwellings of the Smurfs or Barbapapa, but now I realise that they bear resemblance to the collapsed fortifications in Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology (1958-65) photographs.
Still, it is not like the neighbourhood’s original residents were summarily dispossessed. As with the company’s other developments, such as Roppongi Hills, unveiled in 2003, and Ark Hills, which opened in 1986, Mori Building spent decades painstakingly buying up individual plots or convincing rights holders to convert their property into a unit with a comparable value in the new development. The press around Azabudai Hills has been pretty clean. Maybe it is irrational to feel antagonism towards a development when the land was acquired by fair trade, as it were.
Then again, money is its own coercive mechanism. Originally intended to redistribute wealth, Japan’s steep inheritance tax laws can charge survivors up to 55 per cent of the value of inherited assets, with the full amount to be paid up front. In central Tokyo, where, according to the latest annual survey by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the price of residential land currently goes for as much as USD 39,000 per square metre (and rising), few families have the means to keep their property intact. Identified by the architectural firm Atelier Bow-Wow in an eponymous book published in 2001, the ‘pet architecture’ phenomenon of eccentric buildings crammed into ridiculously small or contorted plots can be seen as one response to this situation.1 In recent years, it has felt like more people chose to sell the whole thing to developers. Even when a piece of land doesn’t end up consolidated into a massive project, plot after plot is being turned into tacky multistorey apartment towers.
Accelerating the metabolisation of the city by capital, the inheritance tax has had the unintended effect of concentrating property in corporate hands.
1 Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tsukamoto Architectural Lab and Atelier Bow-Wow, Pet Architecture Guide Book (Tokyo: World Photo Press, 2001).
Construction at the Fudanotsuji intersection, Tokyo. Photo by Andrew Maerkle.
3.
If the pool represents a somewhat idealised vision of how a simple, flexible programme with broad accessibility can become a vital communal meeting point, Azabudai Hills is a harbinger of where Tokyo really seems to be headed. The city is now in the midst of so-called ‘once-in-a-century redevelopment’, with 2030 being the year that many developers have circled on their calendars. A corridor stretching from Shinagawa Station in the south to Tokyo Station in the north has been turned into what amounts to one big construction site. Major hubs linking the city centre to the suburbs, namely Shinjuku and Shibuya, are also getting revamped.
The website of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Bureau of Urban Development, which devises urban planning policy and manages roadworks, railways, land readjustment, housing and other infrastructure, lists 60 redevelopment projects currently underway in the metropolitan area, with an additional 21 in the planning stages.2 The majority of these projects are corporate led. Supported by government subsidies, they promise to boost the efficiency of urban space, improve disaster preparedness by replacing aging buildings that are vulnerable to collapse or fire and make the city more globally competitive by attracting multinational corporations and expatriates. (It all looks convincing in a PowerPoint presentation. One of the slogans that Mori Building came up with for promoting the Roppongi Hills development loosely translates to ‘Hope in the sky. Green on the ground. Joy underground’.) Yet most of the projects take the form of cookie-cutter steel-and-glass towers combining retail, dining, office, housing and luxury hotel functions, sometimes with a school or an art space thrown in. The designs lack the sense of material play and variation that even many otherwise unremarkable high-rises from the early 21st century express. They are the architectural equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the Hollywood franchise reboot.
2 Shigaichi Saikaihatsu Jigyô ni Tsuite, Bureau of Urban Development, Tokyo Metropolitan Govern-ment, https://www.toshiseibi.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/bosai/sai-kai.htm. The current listing is dated 31 Oc-tober 2023.
3 ‘Sora ni kibô o. Chijô ni midori o. Chika ni yorokobi o’.
But who is it all for? In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, these developments embody the contradiction of architecture predicated on a growth economy being built under austerity conditions at a time when social indicators around the world are pointing to an inevitable era of degrowth. Office vacancy rates have shot up everywhere, while fertility continues to decline in developed countries. It’s hard not to see the construction as a desperate Potemkin scheme to keep big business afloat. Analysing the situation in London, Reinier de Graaf, an associate of the Dutch provocateur Rem Koolhaas, already saw it coming in 2015. In a polemic in Architectural Review, he argued that most architecture today offers no new ideas about how to make space liveable. Instead, it stands as a lacklustre monument to the capitalist imperative of producing cheaply and selling dear. ‘After the conservative revolution, the built environment and particularly housing acquired a fundamentally new role. From a means to provide shelter it becomes a means to generate financial returns’, De Graaf charges. ‘The logic of a building no longer primarily reflects its intended use but instead serves mostly to promote a “generic” desirability in economic terms’.
It is one thing when these developments take over reclaimed or repurposed land, like the Harumi Flag residential complex in Tokyo Bay (retrofitted from the Olympic Village of the 2020 Tokyo Games) or the former railway depot near Shinagawa Station, where the massive Takanawa Gateway City plan is now rising. It is another when they wipe out whole neighbourhoods or historic sites. Famously, the Dojunkai Aoyama Apartments - built in 1926-27 as some of the first modernist housing in Japan and later used as a seedbed for emerging fashion designers who set up shops and ateliers in the old apartment units – were replaced in 2005 by another Mori development, the Tadao Ando–designed Omotesando Hills. Long at the centre of discussions around preservation in Tokyo, Kisho Kurokawa’s Metabolist masterpiece, the Nakagin Capsule Tower, situated on the edges of the Ginza commercial district, is in the process of being demolished. Meanwhile, Shibuya’s Miyashita Park, formerly a haven for the area’s unhoused community, is now an insipid shopping mall and hotel complex; it opened in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The situation repeated itself in late 2022, when unhoused people were evicted from nearby Mitake Park to make way for yet another mixed-use development with residences targeting the creative class.
4 A 14 May 2024 report by the New York City Comptroller states that ‘Manhattan’s office vacancy rate has more than doubled from under 8% at the start of the pandemic to 16%’. The OECD report from June 2024 stated, on average, the total fertility rate of its member countries was 1.5 children per wom-an as of 2022, less than half the rate of 1960 and well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/06/society-at-a-glance-2024_08001b73.html.
5 Reinier de Graaf, ‘Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission’, The Architectural Review, 24 April 2024, https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/ar-chitecture-is-now-a-tool-of-capital-complicit-in-a-purpose-antithetical-to-its-social-mission.
In his book Kenchiku no Tokyo (Tokyo in Architecture), published in early 2020, the Japanese architecture critic Taro Igarashi refers to Tokyo’s relentless scrap-and-build cycle as an ‘invisible catastrophe’, likening its effects to the many earthquakes and fires that have periodically reshaped the city going back to the Edo period (1603-1867). The Tsukiji Market, built in 1935, would have made a great space for a cultural centre, he points out. Instead, it has been levelled for a development anchored by a new stadium. What’s more, Igarashi laments, Japan’s globally lauded architects are barely involved in the design of present-day Tokyo, as developers prefer to work with the in-house teams of the zenekon (derived from the English ‘general contractor’) – the conglomerates that run the construction business. All the major commissions for the likes of SANAA or Shigeru Ban come from regional cities or overseas. The closest thing to prestige architecture in Tokyo in recent decades has been the fashion boutiques clustered in Omotesando and Ginza, in which case the architect typically only handles the shell but not the interior.
Igarashi identifies the exact moment when architecture in Tokyo went all-in on today’s prevailing normcore aesthetic. In 2012, Zaha Hadid won the competition for the New National Stadium (now called Japan National Stadium), which would be the centrepiece of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and replace Mitsuo Katayama’s 1958 facility, the main venue of the city’s 1964 Games. Then public sentiment turned on her, with esteemed Japanese architects such as Fumihiko Maki and Toyo Ito leading the way. The design was too complex, costs were getting out of hand and the building would encroach on the outer gardens of Meiji Shrine. Adding to the scandal, a nearby public housing complex was slated for demolition, and its residents, many of them seniors who had lived their whole lives in the area, were designated for relocation.
6 Taro Igarashi, Kenchiku no Tokyo (Tokyo in Architecture) (Tokyo: Misuzu-shobo, 2020), 18. The Japa-nese word Igarashi uses, shinsai, refers specifically to a ‘catastrophic earthquake’.
7 Ibid., 167-68.
8 Ibid., 11, 112-13.
9 Ibid., 49, 103.
The government tore up the commission and launched another competition (the housing complex was demolished anyway). The conditions for entry included already having a zenekon lined up as a partner, all but excluding any non-Japanese architects. Hadid could not even put together a new proposal. If the protests and petitions that led to the scrapping of Hadid’s plan initially suggest a triumph of civil society, Igarashi contends that it was a matter of political expedience for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democratic Party, who was seeking to mollify the public after having just rammed a series of contentious policies through legislation.10 These included reinterpreting the ‘peace clause’ of the Japanese postwar constitution’s Article 9 to allow for a degree of remilitarisation.
This was in 2015, around the time De Graaf was composing his polemic. Hadid’s futuristic spaceship – or intergalactic yoni, as suggested by its sinewy, ridged flares enfolding a central oculus – was swapped for a hastily assembled design by Kengo Kuma that could have been picked out of a Muji catalogue; soon after, Hadid died of a heart attack. A new era of discreet and mediocre architecture was ushered in.
My one consolation, in a city where the value of a building is said to depreciate to zero within 15 years (it used to be 25), is that I am already looking forward to when the new developments are torn down.
4.
The original idea was straightforward enough. I was going to write about the guerrilla art group ChimtPom from Smappa!Group in relation to urban redevelopment in Tokyo. The group, formed in 2005 by five men and a mononymed ‘frontwoman’ Ellie, gained notoriety in the early 2000s for conducting stunt-like interventions into urban space. Since then, the artists have managed to keep inserting themselves into the public consciousness through a savvy feel for hot-button social issues. This is exemplified by their daring incursion into the area around TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to make videos and other works in the immediate aftermath of the March 2011 nuclear disaster, which they presented under the collective title Real Times (2011).
Over the past decade or so, ChimtPom have not just intervened into urban space, but they have also started to work with urban space itself as a kind of material. For the 2016 ‘scrap-and-build’ exhibition ‘So see you again tomorrow, too?’, the group took over a building in the Kabukicho nightlife and adult entertainment area that was scheduled for demolition, filling it with works and installations, and then leaving it all to be scrapped after the exhibition’s conclusion. Owned by the Kabukicho Shopping District Promotion Association, the building was made for the 1964 Olympics. ChimtPom framed the appropriation as a direct comment on urban redevelopment in the run-up to the 2020 Olympics, which they saw as an attempt to paper over the protracted recovery process in Fukushima. As a counterpart to the ‘scrapping’ of their works in Kabukicho, the group then used the detritus to reconstruct a road that formerly ran through the ramshackle space they had turned into a studio in Koenji, a bohemian neighbourhood a few stops up the JR Chuo Line from Shinjuku and Kabukicho. Spotlighting Tokyo’s legacy of ad hoc construction and squatters’ rights, which grew out of the city’s wartime devastation, the action presented ‘building’ as a matter of negotiation between public and private interests, customary usage and government regulations.
More recent projects combine an aspect of urban renewal with architectural preservation. In 2021, ChimtPom founded an alternative art space, Whitehouse, in the former studio and home of postwar-era Neo Dada artist Masunobu Yoshimura; the house was completed in 1957 as the first built project of architect Arata Isozaki. Now, they are preparing to launch a new alternative institution, the Kabukicho Art Center, in a garish brick, castle-like edifice, the Ohjo Building, which, like the Kabukicho Shopping District Promotion Association building, dates back to 1964. A fine example of Tokyo’s eccentric vernacular architecture, the Ohjo Building served as a classical music café, cabaret, karaoke hall and izakaya restaurant over the course of its life before briefly falling into disuse during the pandemic. It stands at the very heart of Kabukicho, next to the shrine that was established in 1913 when the original swampland was filled in, and it is surrounded by various sex establishments with colourful names such as Don Juan, Super Angel, Lucifer, and Strawberry Jam. An advance exhibition ChimtPom organised at the Ohjo Building in 2023, ‘Na-lucky’ attracted 18,000 visitors over the course of its six-week run.
What would Chim↑Pom’s projects tell me about the city? Something happened when I tried to start writing. My mind went blank. I was stuck in the old, pre-Olympic critical framework, where a single building could be a plausible stand-in for broader issues. But after all the social distancing and brain fog of the pandemic years, I was overwhelmed to learn the full scale of redevelopment taking place right now, with its myriad contending agencies and agendas. It was an Urashima Taro or Rip Van Winkle moment: it felt, indeed, as though I had been living in a bubble while the rest of the city had transformed around me. How could I begin to contextualise it? And, if I wanted to gain a new critical standpoint, how could I account for all the microhistories that every neighbourhood and site carries with it? It seemed impossible to wade through the intricate layers of culture, policy, capital, class, utility, aesthetics, messaging and dissemblance that play into how the city constantly forms and reforms itself.
I spoke with various members of Chim↑Pom and their associates, researched books and papers, poked through byzantine government databases, talked it out with friends. Unable to articulate the problem, I couldn’t even ask the right questions. Then, one day, when I was biking to the supermarket, I spotted a construction site along my path. As is typical, the site itself was screened from view by plastic white hoarding, but what caught my eye was the construction plan notice pasted in front of it. The large placard identified the project’s name, its intended programme, number of storeys, building area, total floor area, the expected date of completion, the commissioning entity, and other data. At the bottom of the placard was boilerplate stating that the notice had been posted in accordance with municipal regulations on the avoidance and resolution of disputes, followed by contact information anyone could reach out to if they had an issue with the project.
Every construction project has to post one of these notices, along with other permissions, somewhere on the perimeter of the site. People pass by them all the time without bothering to look at them. But I had just been reading about how adjustments to the Building Standards Law in the 1980s and ’90s, including the relaxation of slant plane restrictions limiting building heights in proportion to street width, had facilitated a boom in high-rise condominium construction in formerly low-to-mid-rise residential areas. I stopped to check out the specs. The plan was for a 14-storey condominium with 30 single-occupancy units and eight other units, designed to maximise returns. I took a photo as a record.
From then on, I started to document the construction plan notices whenever I passed a construction site. Since demolition sites also have to post a notice, I documented those, too. I didn’t have to try very hard to look for them. There’s a major development, Mita Garden Hills, going up right across from my apartment building, and another down the way, where the Koyamacho neighbourhood used to be. I came across a new construction site pretty much every time I left home. Within a month or two, and without straying very far from my immediate vicinity, I had documented more than 70 sites, ranging from the massive, multi-hectare corporate developments listed by the Bureau of Urban Development to modestly scaled private apartments nestled in quiet backstreets.
This documentation has become a kind of trainspotting for me, a way to register my own physical index of a problem that initially seemed so vague and formless as to elude conceptualisation. The seriality of the information in the notices cuts through the corporate spin. Yet, each notice has its own idiosyncratic details. Some are printed out, others are scrawled in permanent marker. Some are posted on the typical white hoarding, others on chain-link fences or makeshift supports that reveal glimpses of the site behind. Some are lit up at night, others left in the dark. Sunlight, shadows, reflections, raindrops, and other elements play across their surfaces.
To me, the notices stake out a liminal zone between presence and absence, writing and erasure. They both lock me out of my memories and recall them.
That’s where Hiroshi Oe’s Sanuki Kaikan was, with its trad-modern wood furniture by George Nakashima and beer garden in the summer.
This is where Super Deluxe used to be, in the basement, with its Pecha Kucha Nights. The last time I went was for a screening of Terre Thaemlitz’s multimedia manifesto critiquing the ideology of the nuclear family, Deproduction (2017). I was on the way home when my wife called to let me know we were having another baby.
There’s the site of the gloomy old Azabu Police Station, always with a guard clutching a long staff out front. I still use it as a landmark with taxi drivers.
Here we are at the void of the Nakagin Capsule Tower. I went inside once when one of the units was listed for rent. It was dilapidated and practically reeked of asbestos. I understood why some people felt it had to be torn down.
I should know this place. I’ve walked by it a thousand times.
Beyond memory, the notices are an ambivalent signifier of democratic government and the delicate interplay of rights and consent that sustain it. They gesture towards transparency, but, in a sleight of hand, simultaneously cloak any project in invisibility. All the construction simply blends into the city, until before you know it, there’s a building that looks as if it’s been there forever.
5.
Critics have been complaining about the development of Tokyo for as long as Tokyo has been Tokyo (which, admittedly, is not very long in the scheme of things). They say that the city is losing its heritage, that the people calling the shots lack foresight or reflection. Then, the next generation comes along and says the same thing about their version of the city. Tokyo, which has never followed a master plan, always seems to turn out fine in the end. It will probably do so again. Nobody is clamouring to restore the city of canals that once elicited comparisons to Venice. Nobody is calling for a return to the city of wood architecture that the American military so cruelly targeted in its fire-bombing campaigns during World War II. I have to keep reminding myself that the redevelopment zone is still a relative drop in the bucket of the metropolitan area, which administratively extends to the countryside, mountains, and sparsely populated islands. In a city this vast and internecine, it is impossible to account for everything that is going on.
While transformation is inevitable, I have yet to come across anyone who is genuinely excited about the new development projects. When I tracked down the parents of my daughter’s friend to ask about their experience with Azabudai Hills, they told me that they never wanted to leave their home. But over the years as first the local grocer and butcher closed shop and then the neighbouring buildings emptied out and demolition work started up, it became untenable to raise a child there. They sold to Mori and moved to another part of town. Even if they had traded for an apartment in the complex, they said, they still wouldn’t have been able to afford the maintenance fees and other costs, which are set for high-end budgets.
To that extent, Azabudai Hills can be read as a warning that if capital is allowed to dictate the metabolism of the city, we will end up witnessing the attrition of the mixed-class neighbourhoods, with their varying scales of buildings and businesses that give Tokyo its soul and support its creative industries, from cuisine to design and music to art. As space becomes increasingly monetised, the logic governing its use becomes more uniform. The effects can already be felt in the art world, where institutional programmes are under tremendous pressure to generate revenue or justify their activities in terms of economic impact. As with architectural style, the quality of the art no longer matters as long as it brings feet in the door. Anything challenging (or that takes time to appreciate) is finding itself marginalised in the very spaces that were set up for it.
Solutions are not going to come down from on high. Chim↑Pom – whose practice has developed in tension with the exclusionary tendencies of art in Japan, and whose spirit animal is the resilient super rat that has developed a resistance to poison – represents one approach, which is for local actors to take the initiative to activate space on their own before someone else does. The group does not get enough credit for the behind-the-scenes lobbying and networking they put into each project. Requiring liaising with the municipal government and fire department as well as local stakeholders, the ‘scrap-and-build’ exhibition of 2016 showed that the same people green-lighting developments can be convinced to support more outlandish proposals. Initiated in 2012, the group’s ongoing project installing artworks in homes and workspaces in the Fukushima exclusion zone, Don’t Follow the Wind, which remains inaccessible to the public, is proof that local communities are open to collaborating with artists to circumvent restrictive structures. Even Ellie’s over-the-top wedding celebration (later packaged as the 2014 work Love Is Over), which saw the newlyweds lead a march through the streets of Kabukicho with a police escort, involved getting authorities to sign off on a demonstration permit. If the content of their work can come across as ridiculous, the procedural aspects highlight the potential for hacking the existing social system to create unexpected effects.
In fact, since 2018, the residents of Koenji, where Chim↑Pom once had their studio, have organised a series of anti-gentrification parades opposing plans to widen one of the area’s main roads, which would pave the way for more high-rise condominiums that would, in turn, squeeze out existing communities. Plans to develop Meiji Jingu Gaien, the same area where the controversial National Stadium is located, have also been met with staunch community resistance, including petitions, lawsuits and statements from high-profile figures such as novelist Haruki Murakami and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto.
As elsewhere, artists and other creators walk a razor’s edge between reclaiming urban space and laying the foundation for gentrification. Complicating matters is that landlords have been happy to lend space to artists and cultural organisations in the dead time between decommissioning a property and demolishing it.
Chim↑Pom endure because the group have excelled at using strategies of détournement in these very conditions. The group’s recent projects point to the fleeting moments of transition where real estate can be turned into ‘surreal estate’ – and maybe, as is likely the case with the cruising scene at my seasonal pool, an inbuilt provisionality is what allows them to keep getting away with it. The challenge then is how to continue identifying such lacunae in the cycles of redevelopment and gradually stretch their limits further, until they start to take root and change the culture of the city.
In that light the Kabukicho Art Center makes sense as the next provocation in Chim↑Pom’s practice. The centre will serve a locality where, in the words of Chim↑Pom’s Ryuta Ushiro, the main industry is selling ‘situations, services, and bodies’ and the community is bound by an ethos of ‘accident caused by performative fluidity’. As the city’s largest pleasure zone, Kabukicho is a natural point of convergence between the powerful and the downtrodden, the well-off and the desperate, the local and the foreign. It’s a good starting point for a bottom-up art initiative. But can the Kabukicho Art Center avoid the traps of exclusion that so many institutions inevitably wrestle with, or will it end up as a clubhouse-like domain for Chim↑Pom? Nor should we forget, in all the talk about serving communities, that art has its own indeterminate and constantly evolving needs.
The problem of this contemporary moment in Tokyo’s development is not so much one of preservation as it is a contest over how to collectively imagine a better future in dialogue with the visions of the past. If I were to found my own art centre, I would look to the pool as a model, which might mean having no programme at all. Simply removing space, time, and attention from the regimes of commodification that increasingly govern daily life would be a sufficient curatorial gesture – an act of care and a cure – as well as one that could be replicated across the city at all kinds of scales and in sync with all kinds of temporalities. Each visitor would be free to enter their own mode of contemplation there, which could be as individual or communal as they like. Where there is no central public square in the first place, and socioeconomic forces are driving the population further toward atomisation, maybe the points of assembly themselves need to be more rhizomatic. The pool-as-commons teaches me that a public cannot be manufactured, because it has to be open to others who were never part of the plan in the first place.
11 Meaning ‘rerouting’ or ‘hijacking’ in French, ‘détournement’ involves using the strategies of the capi-talist economy, such as marketing and consumer branding, to satirize and critique these forms.
12 Ryuta Ushiro, as quoted in ‘From the Kabukicho Art Center Concept Committee’, HelloNaraku.com, https://www.hellonaraku.com/en/coment.