The Palace Side Building, completed in 1966
was the reason given for the demolition of Antonin Raymond’s original building on this site. It was a low, long block. I’ve only seen it in black-and-white pictures. It stood for ten years. Raymond was commissioned to build the Japanese Village at Dugway Proving Grounds, but, more importantly, he had been granted the land beside the Imperial Palace as a favor from the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. Some kind of local intellectual pride was at stake, Hayashi Shoji seems to be saying in his interview. Perhaps, like many other stories about Tokyo, this was about competition between real
write to you to propose that we stage, in a series of photographs, recreations of several scenes from Shinoda Masahiro’s The Petrified Forest (1973), with you in the role played by Ninomiya Sayoko. I thought about it the other day, watching a woman in a white uniform like Ninomiya Sayoko wears in the film, coming up the stairs. I want to watch it again and see if the location of the barbershop has changed. At the very least, I’ll take a picture of you climbing those peculiar stairs, glancing back, eyes in the reflection of the polished floor, your exquisite
ice-cold noodles out of a golden bowl. The arcade and the basement halls are the only places bright enough to feel alive. That must be why he lingers there. Except for the restaurants after the lunch rush, taking too long to pay the bill, there’s nowhere else to sit idle. Upstairs, and in the stairwells, lit by mixture of power-saving LEDs and late winter sunshine through the slit windows, the very air seems gray. That was why the rooftop was left half-green, with long benches, the art salvaged from Raymond’s building. But if he went up there, I couldn’t find
could dream in those years of the entire city remade in the same style. The crumbling blocks in Marunouchi could be knocked down, just as quickly as the slums of East Tokyo were cleared away. I feel like I’m in a spaceship. I want to step out of history. I was so disappointed when I went into the first floor public bathrooms and found that the urinals had not been conserved. Not even the blocky mid-nineties numbers remained from prior renovations. In their place were angular, narrow plastic-sided tubes. They would have looked at home in one of the Minato
