“The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings. It might be imagined that the houses, great and small, which vie roof against proud roof in the capital remain unchanged from one generation to the next, but when we examine whether this is true, how few of the houses that were there of old. Some were burnt last year and only since rebuilt; great houses have crumbled into hovels and those who dwell in them have fallen no less. The city is the same, the people are as numerous as ever, but of those I used to know, a bare one or two in twenty remain. They die in the morning, they are born in the evening, like foam on the water.”

These are the words of Kamo no Chōmei in his essay An Account of My Hut, written in 1212. In the 800-odd years that have passed since then many others have commented on the ephemerally of architecture and built spaces in Japan. A Japanese city as made of “constantly changing appearances, all marvelous but none tangible,” wrote Angela Carter in 1974 (A Souvenir of Japan). “Even buildings one had taken for substantial had a trick of disappearing overnight. One morning, we woke to find the house next door reduced to nothing but a heap of sticks and a pile of newspapers neatly tied with string, left out for the garbage collector.”

The traditional Japanese home was built to be adaptable. The shoji sliding doors and byōbu folding screens allowed rooms to be interchangeable, beds were folded away during the day, and tatami flooring was rearranged and regularly replaced. Other flexible spacial markers were the wooden lattice windows at the entrance, and the fabric noren curtains or bamboo sudare blinds that were hung in doorways or between sections of the house. All were adjustable and often entirely removable, depending on season and occasion.

According to the architect Kisho Kurokawa, Japan’s long history of destruction from wars and natural disasters (fires, floods and earthquakes having wiped out entire cities on several occasions) has given the Japanese “an uncertainty about existence, a lack of faith in the visible, a suspicion of the eternal.” The seasons in Japan are also very clearly marked and changes through the year are dramatic, so buildings were to exist in harmony with nature and its whims.

Each of the Nakagin Tower’s 140 capsules – which included built-in furniture and appliances like reel-to-reel tape decks and calculators (the future!) – were assembled in a factory in 1972 and transported to Tokyo in trucks.

Kurokawa was a founding member of the 1960s Metabolist architecture movement that arose in the wake of Japan’s post war housing crisis and put forward designs for adaptable, growing and interchangeable plug-in megastructures. Like the metabolic processes of living creatures, their proposed buildings and cities would be able to maintain their basic structures while renewing their material makeup, like Chōmei’s flowing river. Notions of fixed form and function were obsolete, plasticity was the only way forward.

Kurokawa died in 2007, the year he had built the structure of the Anaheim University Kisho Kurokawa Green Institute, ran for governor of Tokyo and, although not elected, successfully established the local Green Party. Around the same time, it was decided his iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo would go under the wrecking ball.

The tower’s capsules were supposed to be routinely replaced and rearranged (potentially even taken away on holidays with their owners), but instead they had remained fixed and fallen victim to decrepitude, with leaks and rotting rendering many of them uninhabitable. The building’s management also cited concerns over asbestos and, most importantly for them, the tower’s inefficient use of land in the high-value suburb of Ginza.

Before he died, Kurokawa pleaded to let the Nakagin office/residential block express its fundamental design feature of flexibility and have the units unplugged and updated. He received widespread support from the international architecture community but was unable to save the building from imminent demolition. The world’s first large-scale modular structure and a rare example of built Metabolist architecture, the Capsule Tower is still standing today – but only thanks to Japan’s current financial malaise.

Top photos by Tomio Ohashi, others by Amelia Groom.

At the turn on the new millennium, when Japan was still suffering the grave effects of the burst bubble and budgets for the arts had been cut to near oblivion, a man named Yusaku Imamura was asked to advise the financially ruined Tokyo Metropolitan Government on what their cultural policy should be.

A forward thinker whose charisma has helped him to push radical ideas within Japan’s rigid policy structure for many years now, he told them to stop focusing on museums or commercial bodies for the arts. What Japan needed, he said, was to build a platform for young artists, because at the time the only option for someone fresh out of art school wanting to show their work was to rent a commercial gallery space for upwards of $US3000 a week.

“I told them what was missing was a body,” he recalls. “Japan had a big head – with research institutions and museums – and it had feet to run with, in the form of commercial funding for the arts; but there was no point adding head or feet when there was no body, no base structure for supporting emerging artists at the start of the careers.”

With virtually no budget to work with, Imamura and the then-Tokyo Governor, Shintaro Ishihara, turned the large corridor of the City Hall into a space for young artists to show their work to new audiences for free; it was called Tokyo Wonder Wall and continues to this day under the direction of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

That was 2000, and nine years down the track Mr. Imamura – whose background is in architecture – has found himself director of the ever-expanding Tokyo Wonder Site, which now has three venues across Tokyo. With the Hongo site established in 2001 as a site for showcasing emerging artists, the second TWS site was opened in Shibuya three years later with more of a focus on international or mid-career artists, and in 2006 the Aoyama premises were opened in an abandoned university building which had been empty for two years.

This became the site for the residency programs (which are open not just to visual artists but to performers, musicians, writers, designers, researchers and curators from Japan and around the world) and artist studios, currently only open to the public on designated open days or for occasional special performances, workshops and events.

Mr. Imamura is in the unique position of not only being in charge of Tokyo Wonder Site but also being Counsellor on Special Issues to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and his ideas have always extended far beyond just fostering experimentation in the arts. His sights are on the city of Tokyo as a whole, and he continues to work closely with local communities to shape the future of their metropolis.

One of the biggest themes that come up in conversation with him is the need to bring art away from the galleries and museums, and into public city spaces. In a similar spirit to the initial Tokyo Wonder Wall project at the City Hall, in 2005 Tokyo Wonder Site worked with the local government and a major department store to set up Shinjuku Art Infinity. At the intersection of Shinjuku-dori and Meiji-dori, one of the busiest shopping strips in Tokyo, 70 metres of wall that ran along the scaffolding of a construction site was turned into a constantly evolving display of work by emerging artists for a period of three years.

Clearly Imamura’s ideas about the city are completely integrated with the way he runs Tokyo Wonder Site. He even talks about TWS with the metaphor of city planning: “I always say when I am trying to explain or justify our activities to people that Tokyo Wonder Site is the civil engineer, not the architect. We build roads to facilitate movement and plazas to provide meeting places, rather than the final destination.” With the focus on ideas, experimentation and exchange rather than tangible results, he has had a few hurdles to cross in convincing people that what TWS is doing is worthwhile. “To use another analogy,” he says, “I tell them we are not about getting the flower, we’re about planting the seed.”

But that’s not to say there hasn’t been a consistent array of early flowers to be found amongst the germination. A glance over the plethora of artists who have had their work shown at Tokyo Wonder Site gives and idea of the breadth and standard of ideas that are developed there, and the organisation is structured to provide continued support at various stages of an artist’s career, rather than just a one-off chance to have a studio space or hold an exhibition. For example, many artists who have work included in the open-application TWS-Emerging program at the Hongo site then go on to do a residency at the Aoyama premises and/or hold a larger show at the Shibuya site somewhere down the track.

Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo

Another recurring theme for Imamura is the importance of exchange and collaboration in all areas. “Japanese people are often too shy to team up and join forces,” he says, “but I think collaboration is the most important keyword in this era.”

Indeed, much of the success of Tokyo Wonder Site is to be attributed to the way the organisation has worked with everybody from young artists to local communities, government bodies, the corporate sector and foreign embassies to create new networks and meeting points.

Tokyo, as we know, is a city without a single centre, and Imamura is currently working on connecting its various disparate creative clusters through cross collaborations and co productions. “I want to turns points into lines and lines into a surface,” he says. “There are so many interesting small scale things happening in Tokyo, and I feel that if we facilitate more cross overs, even more interesting things will happen.”

The first four images are from the young photographer Shintaro Yamanaka’s beautifully displayed show, Marginal Images, at TWS Hongo in October 2009. Showing simultaneously were two other Japanese artists in their 20s; Azusa Saito, who paints fluffy sheepish friends on wood with her deft and delicate touch, and Kei Kaiya who also works with wood, carving impossibly fine formations which appear to hover above the ground weightlessly (see above).

For over 250 years Japan was completely shut off from the rest of the world whilst under the military dictatorship of Tokugawa Shogunate. 2009 marks 150 years since the country first opened up to foreign trade at the Port of Yokohama, and the City of Yokohama has been using the anniversary to implement various new urban development initiatives under its Creative City Yokohama initiative.

Over the last decade this urban renewal project that is under the guidance of several different local government bodies (including the “Yokohama Creativity Centre”) has made Yokohama, a historical port city just 40 minutes out of Tokyo, home to some of Japan’s most exciting cultural events and young artistic communities.

While Yokohama’s cultural appeal had previously come primarily from the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as several theatres and concert halls, it was not considered to have much creative output of its own, nor did it provide any support for young artists.

From the outset, Creative City Yokohama had an agenda to increase local arts related activities, attract creative industries and tourism, exploit the city’s existing cultural resources, promote social interaction in the city space and preserve the city’s architectural legacy by finding ways to revitalise its historic buildings.

The most significant thing to come out of the ongoing project has been BankART1929, a contemporary art organisation and school that initially opened in 2004 with the support of the local government in two abandoned city bank buildings and is now enjoying a new base in the enormous defunct warehouse of the Japanese shipping company NYK (see last image below), with several offshoot facilities around town.

Rooftop Paradise at BankART1929. Photo by Kazuto Imura.

Kamakura Sumiko, Associate professor of Tokyo University of the Arts and one of the advisers for Creative City Yokohama in the early stages, recalled in a public talk earlier this year that the establishment of BankART was less about encouraging appreciation of the arts than about improving the overall quality of life in the city, and making it more attractive to visitors.

“’Arts for art’s sake’, that conceited slogan coined at the end of the 19^th century, encapsulated the prevalent wish for a breakdown in social mores,” he said. “Art was not considered as having a social function, or of having any value other than its intrinsic worth. Our hope, on the other hand, was that the arts and culture should play a more active role in society, and that society should be more art-like.”

Rather than existing as something separate to daily life in the city, BankART was to be focused on integrating contemporary art with the local communities and wider society. Some of their earliest shows included Food and Contemporary Art and Art and Natural Disasters, making evident their desire to incorporate things from all facets of life into contemporary art. An integral part of their set up is also their fantastic café/bar space on the ground floor, which boasts an impressive program of events and where drinks are super cheap and the doors are open late into the night, ensuring they cater to a local clientele rather than just tourists.

Besides BankART, other points of interest in Yokohama include Steep Slope Studios an interesting new space offering many artist residencies, and ZAIM which is located in a converted historic building downtown and plays host to workshops, performances, exhibitions, lectures and other cultural events.

At the more grassroots end of things, the Voin Pahoin collective have been opening their apartment to the public once a month for the last few years, providing a different artist each time with a “one day residency” where they can do whatever they want with the domestic space. With an emphasis on eating, drinking and social interaction, their hospitable makeshift salon has become a cornerstone for the local arts community.

Meanwhile, The City of Yokohama recently embarked on an extensive urban renewal project in the notorious black-market and red-light district of Koganecho, which has now been completely transformed into a cluster of affordable artist studios, gallery spaces and the like. The area is also home to the much loved Shichoshitsu (meaning ‘listening booth’), a café/bar where visitors are free to explore the broad music collection comprising over 10,000 albums, and enjoy regular live performances and screenings.

With the third Yokohama Triennale having taken place late last year, and the city is now also playing host to a new major festival called CREAM, which confirms the people of Yokohama’s unique skill at instigating innovative new uses of existing city spaces. With BankART1929 and the Shinko Pier forming the main venues, the art and media festival is spread around with various satellite exhibitions taking place in the aforementioned Koganecho district, and even the polar bear house of the city zoo (see my review of the festival here).

As if taking cue from Charles Landry’s argument in The Creative City that medium sized cities are better placed than metropolises to use their cultural assets to create new opportunities, Yokohama – which for many years was considered little more than a dormitory city for Tokyo – has used its existing assets in intelligent and innovative ways to establish itself as one of Japan’s most exciting new hubs for contemporary art.

SHIMURABROS. and Taro Izumi’s mixed-media installation at the Polar Bear House in the Nogeyama Zoological Garden for CREAM 2009.

‘Even buildings one had taken for substantial had a trick of disappearing overnight. One morning, we woke to find the house next door reduced to nothing but a heap of sticks and a pile of newspapers neatly tied with string, left out for the garbage collector.’

So wrote Angela Carter in A Souvenir From Japan. She was fascinated with the ephemerally of things in Tokyo, which she described as a city of ‘constantly changing appearances, all marvellous but none tangible.’

This phenomenon that so fascinated the British author might be accounted for by the fact that the Japanese conceive space in a more flexible way. The uniquely Japanese spacial concept of ‘ma’ emphasises the void space between things in both art and life. Based on the idea of experiential space as opposed to three-dimensional space, the word ‘ma’ suggests interval and it considers space in relation to time.

Since the Middle Ages, tatami straw mats (measuring 1.8×0.9m) have been used in Japan to cover the floor of a room, thereby denoting the size and dimensions of the space; and along with the interior divisions of the home, such as paper screens, they can be moved at will so the space and light can constantly adapt.

A similar flexibility is found in the public domain too – the street in Japan is a temporary space defined by activity, where makeshift shops and restaurants are built along the sidewalk so they transform from day to day, and can disappear completely overnight.

Mirroring these ideas in their design theory and cutting edge architecture, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Alelier Bow-wow seek to explore the social use and function of space within urban environments.

Their buildings are often devoid of internal dividers so rooms are separated only by staggered levels and staircases, remaining connected and visible to each other. Space exists as a continuum; as you navigate your way around the rooms change in gradual and flexible ways, without strong dividers between them.

Referring to their work as ‘da-me’ (‘no good’) architecture, Atelier Bow-wow focus on disregarded city spaces and coined the phrase ‘pet architecture’ for the miniature ad hoc buildings that are squeezed into leftover and forgotten gaps of space in the densely developed areas of Tokyo (catalogued by them in their book Pet Architecture).

While they weren’t initially familiar with the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s theories of the social production of space, they say they have since been introduced to his ideas and feel a strong affinity to them.

For their Recycling Tokyo project they proposed the concept of recycling be applied to spaces and cities in the same way it is applied to products. They looked at Tokyo as being comprised of various pieces – such as car parks, buildings and alleyways – and suggested imaginative re-uses of them (like turning buildings into sundials or cutting footbridges in half to make observation points). Encouraging multi-purpose architecture and space, they seek to reveal new possibilities for the city; ones that would usually be overlooked.

Watch Yoshiharu Tsukamoto talking about Atelier Bow-wow’s innovative use of space for their custom built ‘micro house’ here and see some other examples of their work below.