Category Archives: architecture

Kamakura in Autumn

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parasol

I went to Kamakura last Wednesday and it was pretty much the peak of the autumn colors. I can’t get used to how late autumn is in Tokyo. It’s mid December now and the reds, oranges and yellows are just now past the peak.

A History of Austerity
Kamakura was the capital of Japan during the Kamakura Period (1185-1333) when the Shogunate wrested control away from the Emperor and the former capital in Kyoto. During this time, the warrior class distinguished itself from the Shinto/Imperial priestly class by practicing Buddhism.

The austerity and fatalism of the warrior class developed a brand of Buddhism that favored austerity and fatalism, namely the various Zen sects. So the architecture of Kamakura reflects this, with all the temples and even the Shinto shrines designed and built very simply, without much decoration and almost no colors.

pointing

Kamakura is probably my favorite place in Japan. Maybe even more than Kyoto or Nara. Nearly all the temples are within walking distance from each other. And the city itself is still charming, with no tall modern buildings, yet none of the ugly old run-down post-war buildings that’s usually the alternative in those other cities.

It’s also only about an hour ride away by train from central Tokyo. And it’s never really been busy, so you can still get a nice spiritual experience, wandering around.

I wanted to visit some of the out of the way temples that I’ve never been able to visit. They’re accessible only after an hour hike in the forests surrounding the city. But according to the guidebooks the best places for autumn colors are the large major temples I’d already visited several times. Since I’d never been there in the fall, and I haven’t been there in over two years, I figured it would be a new experience regardless.

For the course that I followed click on this sentence. It’s a link to the Kamakura City site. They have over a dozen recommended walking courses depending on your mood or interests. I chose the one that started at Kita-Kamakura Station and ended in Kamakura Station, which hits the biggest of the Rinkai Zen temples. The whole trip lasted 4 hours even with a leisurely stroll, an amazake break, and a stop off for some udon. If you really want to make a day of it, I suggest you hop on the train and go further south another 2 stations and visit the Great Buddha, and the nearby Hasedera.

amazakeThe temples of Kamakura are ranked by importance. Number 1 is Kencho-ji. I highly recommend you do two things there:

  1. Climb the endless stairs up the back of the huge temple grounds up to Hansobo. The view is excellent, but the trek up there can be taxing for those not in shape. I really dig the statues of protective what I call ‘crowboys’ that line the stairs.
  2. A shorter climb, but no less taxing, is the staircase up to Bonsho, which is the historically important large bell on a hill off to the side of the temple grounds. The bell is nice, but the important thing is to sit down at the teahouse up there and sip amazake or green tea while looking at Mt. Fuji peer around the wooded hills.

For more pictures from Kamakura, from all my visits there, click on this sentence.

coins at the feet

St. Mary’s Cathedral

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St. Mary's Cathedral

Japan’s most important architect is the late Kenzo Tange. Previously I wrote about visiting one of his works, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. And I also wrote about one of his works being featured in an exhibit about architectural photography. I visited this structure, St. Mary’s Cathedral. Built in 1963, the cathedral, which is the seat of the Catholic Church in Japan, is a striking building, gleaming like a futuristic space station. The design is decades ahead of its time, using dramatic vaults that dip in the center. From the sky, you can see the traditional shape of the cross.

let there be light

While the exterior is lined with metal siding, the interior is bare concrete, presaging the current popularity of this look. The cavernous interior hearkens to the echoing spaces of traditional cathedrals. The spine of the vault consists of a long line of skylights. Inside there were numerous modern art elements such as the cubist baptismal.

baptismal

I like this quote that I found by Tange:

Architectural creation is a special form of comprehending reality….This understanding of reality which takes place through architectural creation requires that the anatomy of reality, its substantial and spiritual structure, be grasped as a whole…

— Kenzo Tange

Because the cathedral is far form any train or subway station, there was only a trickle of tourists on the grounds. When I was inside, there was no one. It was eerie. Outside, the bell tower is a sharp white needle that seems to disappear into the sky. It was a nice contrast to the billowy cathedral.

eaves and bell towers

Directions.

To get to the cathedral, take the Yamanote Line to Mejiro statioin. Turn right on the street in front of the station and walk for about 20 minutes. You can take a bus but I prefer walking. On the way I passed Gakushuin University, where the Japanese royal family attends, Tokyo Women’s University and the Kodansha Museum, which was closed on a Wednesday.

hobby horse

Near the cathedral I chanced upon the Humpty Café, which is a small cozy restaurant with lots of interesting objects throughout. The main theme appeared to be children’s books. The only dishes offered were curry. It was ok. The coffee was quite good though. Then across the street from the cathedral was a wholesale nursery and it was fun looking at a lot of very cheap plants, which I didn’t want to buy and carry back.

Other than that, there really isn’t much in the neighborhood. But if you want to see one of Tokyo’s most unique buildings, and experience a rare quiet religious moment, it’s well worth the trek.

An Art Deco Masterpiece

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teien

Before the Japanese emperor regained control of Japan in the mid-19th century, the Shogun exerted control over the warlords through a variety of means. The most important way was to require his lords and their families to live in Tokyo. This allowed the Shogun to keep an eye on them, keep their families hostage, and make them spend a lot of their resources keeping two households while traveling back and forth.

What’s this got to do with the museum I’m about to review? The Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum is located in Shirokane, the neighborhood where many of those lords lived. The museum itself is housed in the former Prince Asaka’s mansion, a lovely and inspired use of an historical building. Completed in 1933, the house is truly an art deco masterpiece. There are murals by Henri Rapin on the walls, gorgeous glass reliefs by Rene Lalique, decorative ironwork by Raymond Subes, and sculptures by Leon Blanchot, among others. It’s a spectacular venue. Every so often, the museum has a special exhibition of the mansion itself, opening all the rooms to the public.

Architectural Photography

teien exhibit

Most of the time, however, the main rooms of the mansion serve as galleries for other exhibits. The current exhibit is Remembrance of Places Past: Japanese Architectural Photography from the 19th to the 21st Century. This is an exhibit of Japanese photographers who’ve photographed architecture and western photographers who have photographed Japanese buildings.

Highlights include:

  • Early photographs of palaces around Tokyo. These were designed in Western styles by European and American architects, and includes the museum itself. These were built to try to rival Western imperial powers to prove that Japan was an equal to other world/European powers, according to the gallery explanation. Curious that they thought mimicry was the best path to this, instead of glorifying or innovating Japan’s unique architectural heritage.
  • Ito Chuta advocated such a development of native architecture. For his troubles he was asked by the Japanese government to go to Beijing and sketch and photograph the palaces there. He captured beautiful sepia photographs of the gates, processional staircases and sprawling courtyards. The best were his drawings of engraving details.
  • Pictures of the Aomori Art Museum. The all white building blends into the snows of Aomori. The low profile elicits comparisons to a Frank Lloyd Wright creation, if he were ever to design something arctic.
  • The Tokyo Archdiocese Cathedral photos captured the stunning use of light in its design and a roof vaulted in the classic form of a cross. I need to make a pilgrimage to this building.

The ticket price includes the sprawling garden which has nice sculptures, plenty of places to sit and relax, a pond, and a teahouse.

coffee and anko

And of course, what about the café? Café Sahsya Kanetanaka has big tables by the gift shop. It has the usual over-priced coffee, but this is offset by the stuffed leather chairs that were so comfy that the old man sitting at the next table was asleep. Later a young couple sat down at the table next to him and they also joined in the slumber.

The exhibit runs through the end of the month and is free with the Grutt Pass.

Climbing Shinjuku Peaks

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bridge of windows

I like to look at the big picture. And that’s why I love a great view. When I’m hiking I find myself gravitating towards the highest point in the area, whether it’s a peak or a ridge. It’s the same in cities. I look at a tall imposing building and I want to see what the view is like from there.

So the other day I made an overdue trek to what was (until last year) the tallest building in Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, designed by Kenzo Tange. I’ll just call it the Tokyo Met. For years, since I first moved to Tokyo, the Tokyo Met was on my list of places to visit. It was the tallest building and it was free to get up there. Whenever I had some extra time in Shinjuku, where the building is located, I’d make a casual effort to try to find it. But I’d always run out of time or just got lost in the maze of streets that make up Tokyo. None of my Japanese friends were interested in taking me there.

Finally I strategized, found out which of the gazillion exits I had to leave from Shinjuku Station and then charted out a route. It couldn’t be that hard to find the tallest building in the area and it really wasn’t. It’s pretty much a straight shot out of the station.

Pho Break

pho art

Of course, it’s the journey that’s interesting, not so much the end destination. And on the way I stopped off for lunch at a chic little eatery with Southeast Asian cuisine. Sorry forgot the name. It had the obligatory GQ head waiter with the tarento smile, and that all important drink bar. The neighborhood is all business. Black suits and company name tags hung from everyone’s neck. But in the restaurant I only saw young women, perhaps job-hunting, reading little anonymous books. In short, I was completely out of place. But the food was good and reasonable.

The Ripe Peach Building

glass pod

This area is the heart of the skyscraper district, and there were many interesting buildings around. One building stood out. It was still under construction but it looked like a terrible copy of the London Egg, with criss-crossing bands of gauze. But then I read the building description and found that it’s a future fashion and art design school. So the gauze made sense. I also liked the way the building is split open in the middle like a ripe peach.

The Peak

tree of knowledge

The Tokyo Met is a pair of towers that form a semi-circle around an expansive plaza lined with sculptures. I really liked the one that I call the Tree of Knowledge. And I liked the big open space of the plaza itself. It’s a shame though because there is no life there. No natural pedestrian traffic to really make it the kind of public gathering place where protests and celebrations and people watching can happen. There was nobody there except for one quasi-homeless person napping under one of the sculptures and some stray people hurriedly walking across the emptiness.

As I mentioned, getting to the observation deck of the building is free. It took about a minute on the elevator. You can go up the north or the south tower. I went up both, and the south tower is definitely the more interesting of the two. Because there were so many tall buildings nearby there wasn’t the feeling of being truly airborne like from Roppongi Hills. But you also don’t have to pay 1,000 yen either. The south tower had a very reasonable restaurant/café, and the north tower had a pretentious-looking restaurant/bar, but it too was reasonably priced.

On the day I was there the view was hazy, but I could still see faint outlines of distant mountains. Overall, I recommend going there because the whole complex and the interiors are designed in the art deco style, which I love. The art deco-ness is tempered with clean lines to make it more contemporary. It’s a beautiful building. Around the building, the area is lacking in vitality and general interest outside of architecture. So if you’re not a building or view fetishist like me, you’re better off in livelier neighborhoods.

view from the top

Museums Around the Palace

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late for the ball

Continuing my museums of Tokyo tour, I decided to venture near the Imperial Palace, at the very center of Tokyo. I visited the Science Museum and MOMAT (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), and made a short detour into the Imperial Palace Gardens.

Trotting Around the Palace Gardens

I ventured into the Palace Gardens with a little apprehension. It’s intimidating to approach it. There’s the busy road, the moat, the stone bridge, the imposing wall, the guards, barriers, and no signs of welcome, and no sign of people entering or exiting.

moatwater

Yet I decided to walk up to the gate house, and when no one stopped me I walked past the guards and finally saw a sign that said I was allowed to enter. There was no entrance fee but I was required to carry a thick plastic guest pass that I had to return upon exiting.

Inside were a scattering of foreigners wandering about, an opera house that a former emperor had built for his empress, vast lawns, more imposing stone walls, and gardens. But most surprising were the horse-drawn carriages and cavalry trotting around in Meiji Era uniforms. I think they were exercising the horses. There was a pick-up truck that tailed them in case the horses left behind their business. I’m assuming the carriages were for the royal family if they want to go from one palace to the next, or maybe from their tennis courts to the imperial outhouse.

A History of Bicycles

Before being transported in time to the Meiji Era, I stopped by the Science Museum and was transported to other time periods.

equine bicycle

There were a million little kids running around but they seemed to be concentrated in just a few of the galleries. The most popular were the robot exhibit and the mechanics exhibit. The exhibits were wildly uneven, ranging from high tech displays sponsored by big name corporations to shabby halls of interactive science experiments that looked like high school science fairs. What’s worse is that these exhibits were difficult to understand. Sure my Japanese is far from literate, but I heard lots of kids muttering, “nani kore?” “What is this?”

The highlight of the museum was the Plaza of Bicycles. It was a fantastic collection of bicycles from its early forms as wooden riding toys to the sleek whisps of space-age metal and rubber of today. I loved this exhibit. Click on the picture above for more bikes.

Self/Other

Just down the street from the Science Museum is the The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, or MOMAT. I didn’t get to check out the permanent exhibit. I only had time to look at the Self/Other special exhibit. This was a brilliantly themed collection, drawing in mostly Japanese artists and some Korean artists as well, to explore how the self is expressed in relation to the other. The museum passed out a collection of essays in English about each of the eight subthemes. Every museum should do this. It starts out slow, with nominally interesting pieces, but ends with some inspired videos. There are three highlights.

cont_546_4.jpgMultiple Personalities
The first is a photomontage by Tomoko Sawada called “ID400”. It consists of three panels of ID photos taken not in a studio but in the photo ID booth at her local train station. The public bathroom was her changing room.

For each of the 400 different IDs she made costume, hair and make-up changes, as well as tweaks in her facial expressions, resulting in identities ranging from vacuous teenager to prim office worker to sullen barfly.

In a medium (a photo booth) meant to capture an official identity, Sawada questions what that identity is, and shows how arbitrarily it can be displayed.

Claymation and Voyeurism
takamine_godblessamerica.jpg“God Bless America” is a time-lapse video filming the artist, Takamine Tadasu, and his assistant, while they eat, watch TV, sleep and copulate. In the center of their red living room is a huge mound of clay that they pound and carve into various creatures and characters, making it sing an old recording of “God Bless America” over and over again. I’m not sure what the political implications of this is, other than that the U.S. is a large presence in the every day life of a couple. Regardless of whatever message Tadasu was trying to convey, it was highly entertaining, mixing claymation and voyeurism to elicit a lot of laughter from the viewers around me.

Global Gazes
Kimsooja’s “Needle Woman” is an installation of four videos, one on each wall of a black room. She faces away from the camera while people walk past her on busy streets in four cities around the world: Cairo, Mexico City, Lagos, and London.cont_554_1.jpg

We never get to see the artist’s face. We only get to observe the gaze of the “other” reacting to her. The passers-by of each city had different reactions. On the one extreme were Londoners, who simply ignored her. They briskly walked past without a glance. In Mexico City, the pace was slower and the pedestrians similarly ignored her, but their gaze was downward or away, as if they were trying to not be involved in whatever this woman was doing. In Cairo, she attracted the attention of mostly young men who looked at her directly, talking or laughing, at her or amongst themselves, as they walked by. They were the most aggressive of the four city dwellers. In Lagos, the people also interacted with her but not aggressively. There was a large group of open, smiling children gathered in front of her. Women looked on in curiosity and sometimes stopped to observe her, probably with the same expression that Kimsooja gazed back at them.

I was fascinated to see how different cities gazed upon and interacted with someone doing nothing at all. She was, in fact, just standing and looking at them, making herself the faceless other.

H2
H2 Cafe We can’t close this museum review without a comment on the café. MOMAT’s café, H2, is a posh white affair with a wall of glass facing the Imperial Palace wall and moat. It looked like one of those places where shady art dealers meet. Snobby waiters, 500yen coffee, water served from green bottles, pretentious art photographs suspended on wire hovering above glass bowls of tropical fruit. In short, I loved it. Stop in and make sure not to tip the waiter.

Photo credits. All photos not credited to an artist in the text are by Wind.