Tokyo Skywalker he entire facade of the new buildings seemed to ripple, to crawl slightly . . .” Idoru, William Gibson
In Gibson’s sci-fi novel Idoru, skyscrapers in the West Shinjuku district of Tokyo are hatched from an organic building substance that seems, in the eyes of the story’s main character, to move “like osmosis or the sequential contraction of some sea creature’s pulps.” Tokyo, with its natural propensity to shed old skins, would no doubt be the ideal place to test a material like that. Tokyo is, after all, the supreme example of a metamorphic environment, perpetually responding and adapting to change and the expediency of the moment, the city akin to an immense whiteboard, one whose surface can be erased and replaced at any moment with an entirely new set of features.
West Shinjuku and its wilder sibling to the east, are a good example of what, in Japanese eyes, makes a city worth living in, a building worth the attention. Interest is aroused and attachments made to specific buildings or segments of the city, taken one by one, and assessed for their style, form and charm. Tokyo in fact, begins to make a lot more sense when it is seen as a series of panels, only one or two of which can be taken in at any one time. This piecemeal vision of the city is confirmed by architect Fumihiko Maki, who has noted that very few people “have a distinct image of today‘s megalopolis in its entirety. The image that most residents have of the city is only a diagram . . . on which is plotted the knowledge of the very few parts of the city with which they are familiar.” In this kind of city, each building is enjoyed in its own right; integration is not sought.
At Shinjuku, the familiar pattern of interlocking villages abruptly changes, as the sprawling, overlapping mass of Tokyo expands into an almost complete city, replete with large open spaces, railheads, and department stores.
Split by railway lines into two separate components, two sub-cities, the more civic, windy avenues on the West side, are dominated by commerce and a taste for experimental architecture. This western sector represents the antithesis in many ways of writer Mark Girouard’s description of East Shinjuku as a “townscape of dirty concrete and material resembling cardboard, already turning tatty after a life of ten or twenty years.”

An older city lurks behind Shinjuku’s more contemporary one, still faintly visible through the glittering transparency of the new. When permission was granted in 1698 to five brothel owners from the pleasure quarter of Yoshiwara to open a new post station on the Koshu Kaido, providing a respite for travelers planning to link up the next day with the Tokaido Road, they opted for the rather literal name Shinjuku, meaning “New Lodgings.” Because of riotous behavior in its brothels, the post town was closed down in 1718, but was presently back in business. By the middle of the 18th century Shinjuku had over 50 inns, and several times that number of “rice serving” girls to cater for the carnal needs of travelers. The mildly disreputable image that parts of Shinjuku still bear, was established early on.

West Shinjuku’s sounder bedrock, its relative geological stability, was put to the test in the 1923 earthquake when its buildings were virtually the only part of the city to survive intact. On May 25, 1945, a single day of massively wanton destruction, the whole of Shinjuku, save the solitary Isetan building, was destroyed in an air raid. A premonition of civilian plight was sensed by the French correspondent of Le Monde, Robert Guillain, who wrote, “The raids had still to begin, and yet, night after night, an obsession gripped the city plunged into darkness by the blackout . . . Tokyo was a giant village of wooden boards, and it knew it.”
When the land to the west of the station became available later on for redevelopment, it represented a unique planning opportunity. Shinjuku’s star began to rise again in the 1960s and ‘70s as corporations and other financial organizations began to move into West Shinjuku, creating in the following two decades Tokyo’s only genuine skyscraper district. The buildings occupy land used until the 1960s, by the Yodobashi water purification plant. The 47-story Keio Plaza Hotel, built on a corner of the former reservoir in 1971, was Shinjuku’s first skyscraper.
Like the structures in Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities, a spider-web of “ropes and chains and catwalks,” suspended in the air, Shinjuku knows that its edifices are not built to last forever, but in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (the Tocho), the city has tried to defy the power of time and geology. The Tocho, a Tange Kenzo design, stands in the middle of a grove of skyscrapers that have been described as everything from a miniature Manhattan, to a row of urban grave markers. Both of the building’s twin 48-story towers have observation rooms on their 45th floors. High-speed elevators whisk you up to the sky lounges in 55 seconds flat. The views from the top are superlative, a panorama that stretches, on a clear day, from Mount Fuji to the hills of the Boso Peninsula in Chiba Prefecture. The interplay of surfaces and textures on the exterior of the building, like the crisscross, wicker-ware patterns seen in folk basketry, is somehow very Japanese. Tange claimed that his inspiration came from the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, others see the surfaces as an integrated-circuit board.
The building has its detractors however, especially among architects and the Japanese press corps, offended by what they perceive to be totalitarian overtones. When the building was unveiled, tabloid journalists were quick to exploit rumors that the governor’s 7th-floor office, centrally positioned to overlook the plaza, came with an adjoining, luxury shower room finished in marble. An authoritarian building, or a building with authority? The partially-oval, European-style plaza, with its statues and columns would surely have pleased Mussolini.
The plaza, as architect Noriyuki Tajima has written, “acts like the pit of a theater, in which public officials can be glimpsed striding to and from meetings.” Described elsewhere as a “cathedral of the state,” factotums of that state, 13,000 bureaucrats in all, work here.
One block south, the older NS Building, a multi-colored tower with a 30-story interior glass atrium, can be safely passed over in favor of another Tange signature building, the post-modernist, 52-story Shinjuku Park Tower, located a little south of the rather disappointing Shinjuku Central Park. The three stylish, linked towers, with their luminous glass pyramids, house the luxurious Park Hyatt Hotel, the British store Conrans, and a number of floors devoted to interior design and architecture, including the first-rate Living Design Centre Ozae. Visitors with surplus energy can take a ten minute stroll west of the tower to Tokyo Opera City, a 54-floor complex of shops, offices and restaurants. One of the main attractions here is the NTT Intercommunication Center, an interactive, high-tech exhibition space, with an electronic library and Internet cafe.

Return the way you came, passed the Tocho to Chuo-dori, turn right and immediately on the left is the Sumitomo Building, another West Shinjuku landmark. The central core of this six-sided construction has a well that stretches from the fourth to 52nd floor. A free observatory on the 51st floor offers fine views over the backstreets of East Shinjuku. the right side as it were, of Shinjuku’s brain. Compared to the solid clutter of the East side, West Shinjuku still feels the more embryonic part of the city.
Current Issue Film Review CD Reviews Tokyo Faces Horror scope Letter from the Editor Greater Tokyo Classifieds Photo Clinic Events Calendar