People waiting to be let into the mall to see that poop-shaped whatever store I mentioned earlier, while others mill in and around the nearby Symbol Promenade Park.
That long golden teardrop you see in the last slide is the “Flame of Freedom,” a gift from the French government.
“Waiting Room” x
“Tokyo Dream Park.”
More views of what remains of the K-Museum building and the very last of the roll of my last roll in Tokyo.
This whole area is reclaimed land like Hiroshima and meant to be a showcase of Tokyo’s dreams of the nineties, with its architectural monumentalism forming a sort of permanent Expo and representing the last of Japan’s late-bubble ambitions. The bubble had lasted from the mid-1980s to 1991, and was driven by cheap credit, financial deregulation, and a speculative frenzy that caused land and stock prices to skyrocket. Fueled by the Bank of Japan’s low interest rates and aggressive lending, corporations and individuals overinvested in real estate and equities, assuming prices would keep rising, and in turn, left us with these grand monuments to their techno-optimism. When the bubble burst in 1991, asset values collapsed, triggering a “Lost Decade” of economic stagnation, banking crises, and deflation.
Many of the buildings and public at the waterfront were completed in 1996 which must have felt like such a letdown for everyone working on them. I don’t think canceling the Expo here was such a crazy idea.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this building encapsulated our whole trip, from Osaka to Tokyo. It’s designed by Kenzo Tange, the same guy who designed Tokyo’s St Mary’s Cathedral, but also, the chief architect and planner for Osaka’s Expo 70, which centered on the theme “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.”
Tange was one of the founders of Metabolism, a Japanese avant-garde architectural movement from the 1960s that envisioned cities as organic, expandable, modular systems. By the 1990s, Metabolism as a formal movement had waned, but Tange still carried forward its ethos: structures that display infrastructure openly, suggesting flexibility, adaptability, and futurity. The Fuji Television building reflects this vison through its exposed steel truss systems, visible circulation routes, and modular office blocks, with the iconic spherical observation deck functioning almost like a plugged-in module, a concept he’d also explored in Osaka decades before.
Even though an Expo never happened here in 1996, the Fuji Television building sustains a thin thread between those two mega-events. In the 1990s, Tokyo’s high-tech waterfront redevelopment created a “living expo” filled with futuristic malls, entertainment centers, and experimental architecture, with Tange’s building becoming a flagship anchor of that vision, much like the Festival Plaza did at Expo 70. In this sense, the Fuji Broadcasting Center extends the logic of Expo architecture into an everyday urban environment, transforming what was once a temporary assemblage for innovation into a permanent stage for Japan’s future-facing identity.
We came here pretty early and watched the doors open in the malls around us, but even so, I can’t imagine that these vast empty spaces would ever be packed with people without the need for some sort of mega-event.
This was a very pleasant place to walk around, but it also felt a little surreal to be here. Everything was just a little bit too grand. And with its backstory, one that’s not unfamiliar to any city swept up in the neoliberal nightmares of the nineties, there was also a ghostly air to everything. Like Beirut Souks. Like parts of Dubai. The architects did a great job, but their monuments stand awkwardly in the harsh light of their social context.
And with that, we come our final morning in Tokyo.
This is just outside the Hamamatsucho Station where we took the rapid train to Haneda Airport. x
This was our train to the airport. A perfect way to say goodbye. x
And here we end these posts the way I started them: in the liminal space of transit, waiting to get back “home”—or whatever you want to call this holding pattern. x