The National Diet Building

No, it has nothing to do with calorie control or losing weight, not even in the current global financial straitjacket - but has everything in common with the U.S. Congress and British Parliament, both of which have been adapted, to some degree, into the system of government here.

We’re talking about the Diet of Japan (locally known as Kokkai 国会), which like its British, American and Australian equivalents includes two legislature: the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors.

They meet in the National Diet Building (Kokkai-gijidō 国会議事堂) in Chiyoda-ku, fairly close to the Imperial Palace and right next to Nagatacho and Kokkai-gijidō-mae stations on the Tokyo Metro.

As of August 31, 2009, the place has been rather shaky thanks to the electoral overthrow of the Liberal Democratic Party - which had ruled virtually continuously since its inception in 1955.

The "new" government (formed by the similarly named Democratic Party of Japan) is a thing most Japanese are still trying to get accustomed to as they've already churned through two prime ministers - Yukio Hatoyama, and the current incumbent Naoto Kan.

But the rocky political road has been pretty much continuous since Junichiro Koizumi served five years in office up to September 2006; since then there've been five PMs.


Perhaps it all has to do with the hidden side of the diet building - the fact that this is also the place that Princess Hinoto lives beneath in the CLAMP manga classic, X - which was made into an anime movie by director Rintaro in 1996 and later ran as a Madhouse TV title thanks to Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Ninja Scroll).

There’s more to the National Diet Building, however, than its laid-to-waste fate in a couple of Godzilla movies and in the 2006 disaster flick Japan Sinks.

The structure itself has a far-flung history and international input that began with initial designs by German architects in the 1880s, right up to its completion as a finished structure in 1936 - to a plan by public competition winner, Watanabe Fukuzo, some input from fellow winner Takeuchi Shinshichi, and a nod in the direction of the original Germanicic concepts.

It’s a majestic building, with the lofty architectural ideals supported by stained glass, flowing drapes, and marble throughout.

Suiting the reputed punctuality of both Germany and Japan, who shared a hand in the design, there’s a tour of the building every 60 minutes - right on the dot.

The HAL 9000 Building

Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower (モード学園コクーンタワ) is a relatively new building in Shinjuku that I've been passing nearby for months on the way to work, but I only got around to taking some happy snaps of the place the other day.

Better known to me as the HAL 9000 building because it houses HAL Tokyo, a special technology and design college (and it just looks so darned "designer modern", like something that'd be right at home in 2001), the Cocoon Tower was actually completed 2 years ago, designed by Tange Associates, the company set up by famous architect Kenzo Tange.

As far as facts and figures go, the 204-metre-tall (669 ft), 50-storey tower is apparently the second-tallest educational building in the world. I think the highest building I set foot in at Melbourne University clocked in at five storeys, which is a wee bit shorter.


Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower is currently the 17th-tallest building in Tokyo - and it won the Kewpie Doll when it was awarded the 2008 Skyscraper of the Year by Emporis.com.

It certainly gets this wayward blog's nominations as well.

While it does stick out like a sore thumb directly outside the West Exit of Shinjuku JR Station, it's the kind of aching digit you're more than happy to put up with.

I guess we could throw in the old punchline here about suffering for art.

And speaking of HAL 9000, here he is for a bit of nostalgia's sake.

The Asahi Building

You can't complain about the location - on the banks of the Sumida River, a short walk from Sensoji, Tokyo's biggest temple district, and the hugely popular Asakusa tourist area; you may even see a geisha or two, if you're exceptionally provident.

And the product is virtually a trademark - if you've ever dabbled with Japanese beer, you would've brushed up against (or at least guzzled a few drops of) the silver-shrouded contents of Asahi Super Dry, without doubt Japan's most famous international amber fluid.

Almost as famous is the commercial HQ for the Asahi company itself.

Known quite simply as the Asahi Building (not to be confused with the TV Asahi building in Roppongi Hills), it was completed in 1989 at the height of Japan's excessive bubble economy to replace Asahi's old offices. Some of the building's harsher critics have suggested that French designer Philippe Starck had had one Super Dry too many when he finished the design for the monolith, which is constructed from super-expensive black granite and capped by his trademark gilded flame, an icon apparently weighing in at 300 tons.

And confusion reigns supreme in this city as to what the symbol really represents - is it a firework that reflects the nearby Sumida River's annual hanabi (fireworks) festivities? Is it an overturned post-modern glass of beer? Is it a golden radish or turnip? Or is it - as popularly espoused around the traps of Tokyo - just a humongous blob of excrement that'd do Godzilla proud?

Others see it in a warmer light - the windows are tinted yellow, apart from the top few floors, where the windows appear white... mmm... beer...

Throw Away Tokyo Pt. 2

As a bit of an addendum to the last entry in this rambling blog thingy, I'm actually pursuing a strain of thought instead of the usual mad intent on erraticism. (is that even a real word? If not, it should be.)

I can't really take credit, however, for sticking to the theme - that belongs to my mate Lee, a fellow expat (from Canada) living here in Tokyo. He saw my rant on the postmodern buildings and responded in kind.

"Did you ever see this poor old building in Ueno? It was demolished about two years ago. It was barely 10 years old," he said in an e-mail I got the other day via Facebook.

"I'll tell you a short story," he continued in follow-up repartee.

"When I first came to Japan I lived with a friend of mine in eastern Saitama for a month before I started working at Nova. From her place I would take the Joban Line to get into Tokyo, and at a certain point on the line between Minami-Senju and Mikawashima stations I could just barely make out the top of that building for fractions of a second through the cracks in other buildings as the train went along.

"After several trips, I was able to see enough of the building to realize it actually had a crazy triangle shape on the top. I became captivated with it and would always look for it as I took the train, trying to figure out what this weird building was, but at the time I was not familiar with the layout of Tokyo and had no clue where it was or how to find it. For me at the time, it was just one of those weird mysteries that made Tokyo more interesting.

"Now it's gone."

Tokyo's Postmodern Purge

One of my preferred sci-fi flicks from the early ‘50s is The Thing from Another World, with James Arness menacing a crew of American military trapped on an
Arctic base. The direction, while credited to Christian Nyby, smacked more of Howard Hawks’ style — and while Hawks is listed in the credits just as a producer, people do have their doubts.

Anyway, my lasting memory of the movie is the final paranoid riposte, “Watch the skies, everywhere! Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!”, and the truth is that in Tokyo, you really do always have to look heavenward.

It’s a lesson I thought I’d learned after I first arrived in this city and cottoned on that some of the coolest cafes and record shops are tucked away on the sixth or seventh floors of inconsequential skyscrapers.

But I think a recurrent crick in the neck negated Ned Scott’s warning in recent years, and my gaze had fallen back to ground-floor level—that is, until I stumbled across an article, in the oft indispensable, Tokyo-based English language lifestyle magazine, Metropolis, that reported on buildings slated to be condemned in this self-reinventing city of flux.

As it was, I already knew about Minoru Takeyama.

He’s one of Japan’s more famous architects, a Waseda and Harvard graduate, as well as a professor, author, and innovatory thinker; the man even worked at one stage in the early ‘60s with Arne Jacobsen, deviser of the seriously pricey Series 7 chair.

Takeyama is best known here for the landmark Ichi-maru-kyu (109) building in Shibuya, erected in the late ‘70s — but a decade before, in his mid 30s, he’d conjured up a couple of far more iconic towers in Kabukicho, a few minutes’ walk from Shinjuku Station, and thereby created some of the earliest examples of Japanese architectural postmodernism.


It’s these, rather than the 109, that give Takeyama kudos in architectural circles in the West, and what I didn’t know was that I’d passed these buildings by on several occasions, without ever noticing. It wasn’t until the Metropolis piece that I got the heads-up, realized my error, and started watching the skies again.

Once you do raise your eyes from the garish thrall of the surrounding men’s host clubs, you get to see the pop art colors of Nibankan (Number Two Building, 1970, above), which looks like Roy Lichtenstein had a hand in the palette, and the monochrome, superbly Gigantor-styled Ichibankan (Number One Building, 1969, pictured at the end of this article).

Both buildings have, however, seen far better days.

They’re now bereft of tenants (Ichibankan completely so) and in disrepair, while the owners — apparently love hotel and business accommodation operators, Sankei Hotel — act suitably indifferent.

“The buildings are in a terrible state,” Takeyama told me for this article, which was recently published in Geek Monthly over in the US. “My understanding is that the my client sold the ownership to an entertaining company rather recently. I have no contact with the new owner, and just wish that they preserve the buildings.”

One senses Sankei are biding their time, and the buidings themselves are just waiting to be demolished — as is the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Ginza (below), right near Shinbashi.

A mesmerizing structure that deigns to juggle some 140 boxes (modified containers that vary in size, depending on the source material you check, but around 4 x 2.5 meters), stacked at angles on 14 tottering floors, this was the first ‘capsule hotel’ per se — designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa, and constructed between 1970-72.


Kurokawa had previously helped to found the Japanese Metabolism Movement in 1959, an architectural group equally philosophical in tone, with an eye on technological advances; they envisaged a futurist city whose principle structures would be flexible and encourage an organic growth potential.

Ten years later, Kurokawa apparently conceived of the Nakagin Capsule Tower while abiding by the maxim of “metabolism, exchangeability, and recyclability”.

Truth is, though, that I’m not quite sure what two of these ideas entail, nor how they relate to this rather cool building that’s slowly crumbling away due to overt lack of maintenance.

Apparently the designer was into the idea of replacing the capsules where necessary (hence the ‘exchangeability’, which is the bit I’m blessedly able to nut out), but nobody’s ever bothered to follow through, and the structure is now quite visibly on its last legs.

Ironically, while the Nakagin Capsule Tower was originally under construction, Minoru Takeyama was busy setting up the group ArchiteXt (long before the founders of Excite started using the same moniker—sans the big ‘X’ — for their new-fangled Internet portal in 1994) — to counter the Metabolist ideals that Kurokawa espoused; they instead they cited equally dizzying concepts like contradiction, discontinuity, individualism, and pluralism.

The fate of both divergent schools of thought seems to have been pretty much the same.

Like Ichibankan and Nibankan, the Nakagin Capsule Tower is overdue for demolition, in this case due to reported fears of use of asbestos in the construction, as well as concerns that it’s not an earthquake-proof building.

Coupled with the costs of making structures seismically-sound and attractive to an aging clientele forever interested in things new, developers in Tokyo place precedence on the wrecking ball rather than on landmark properties that’re getting a wee bit long in the tooth.

You get the impression that all three buildings are blocking the path of funkier, newfangled residential crystal palaces — while the government certainly hasn’t wasted a lot of time considering notions like artistic architectural heritage and its preservation for future generations.

It’s an impression that Takeyama agrees with 100%, and he also stresses local ignorance. “Both of my buildings are recognized among foreign architects, but not known domestically in Japan,” he says.

So, when this combination mindset takes its natural course, I might as well ditch the sage advice from The Thing from Another World, and stop watching those skies after all.