NORITAKA MINAMI

1,
The Nakagin Capsule Tower was completed in 1972, the year that with the arrest of Japanese Red Army members, marked the end of the New Left’s political legitimacy.[1] People began to shun the Left not only for its violent tactics but because, one could argue, its utopian goals had already been accomplished through other means. After the financially successful Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and the Osaka World Exposition Fair in 1970, a nation that had been in tatters less than thirty years ago seemed to have reached its economic endgame. The disparity between rich and poor that remained very much in place was replaced by the myth that the “postwar” had ended in 1956, and the dialectics of East and West that occupied the core of Japanese modernism appeared to have evened out. Some intellectuals began to disengage from contradictions that were once concealed by the war and attended more closely and favorably to yet another means of managing the national population: peace and economic growth.

9,
As class struggle was replaced by unstoppable economic growth that ostensibly benefitted every member of the society, the location of political agency shifted to consumers and businessmen. This shift in worldview would induce in the architect Kisho Kurokawa an imagination that these detachable, mobile, and renewable capsules would accommodate the nomadic urban dwellers, or homo movens, who no longer required a stable living space. Displacing the conventional idea that buildings are meant to last, Kurokawa proposed an idea that one’s living space ought to be easily swapped out with the first signs of wear and tear. Single individuals unbound to the older familial structure were embedded in a network of colleagues and friends. This emerging demographic required only basic amenities that permeated their abstract and smooth space: a twin bed, a television, a shelf, a window, a bathroom, and a foldout desk. Other needs, assumed the architect, would be provided by the city of Tokyo.

But this was merely a projected image, a very specific ideological portrayal of human psychology.[2] One would immediately notice upon entering one of the units that the cabinets and fold out desk are made of plywood painted white. These were products aimed for mass production, made as cheaply and simply as possible using the Keynesian industrial model. After all, these units were images meant to circulate in the media. One has to wonder – a point that Noritaka Minami makes – whether the rectangular room with a lens-like circular window was meant to be inhabited or simply to be photographed.

7,
Perhaps every age presents humans with a shape that perfectly embodies their worldview. In the case of these pods, the corresponding form turns out not to be the prefect circle that Leonardo Da Vinci once drew around his Vitruvian Man but a rectangular capsule within which the user reproduces one’s own means of labor, for the sake of one’s own body, one’s ego, albeit merely as an image mediated by the media. The aim was not the daring adventure into the dark unknown but the never-ending perpetuation of one’s conditioning through deft usage of functional amenities and procurement of separate yet uniform space. Dreams dreamt here were not a fulfilling expansion of an individual’s imagination or becoming but interior design that stabilized a subject among an array of products and superficial options. The notion of ambitious dwelling belonged not to man but to commerce, state, economy and architecture while each person was set to a specific psychological level maintained and kept through adequate amount of stimuli. Cozy, protective, yet claustrophobic, the complex affect of which the building yields has an origin in its troubling past.
Metabolism, an architectural collective to which Kurokawa belonged, was partly founded on a need for a more effective means of sheltering people. Earlier in the 1950s, the architect Shirai Seiichi proposed an inward and subterranean monument to the ground zero in Hiroshima (the bid eventually went to Tange Kenzō), and the ensuing Cold War led Kawazoe Noboru, another member of the collective, to posit a sanctuary that would shield its inhabitants from nuclear disaster.[3] And a few more mnemonic strands may be added here: capsules were once designed, in the 1930s, to house arctic explorers in inclement weather[4]. In Manchuria during the war, a similar architectural model functioned as a weapon to displace the natives by quickly settling the Japanese. [5] These ostensibly antithetical values of sheltering and aggression constitute the ambivalent history that stands behind the tower.
This strong desire to draw a line between inside and outside would likely position the tower building squarely within the domain of modernism. But this fantasy of the inside would continue to remain firmly within the story of residential architecture in Japan. The architect Tadao Ando’s buildings often exhibit an extreme form of interiority. Toyo Ito’s first residential house designed for his sister who had recently lost her husband was a monument to their mourning within which no walls were erected to provide maximal private comfort, so that she and her children could live in a single, continuous space. Must one fault these architects for turning inward, the theoretical tendency of which seems to reinforce the topos of the modern bourgeois subject? But isn’t architecture also a narrative of the inside, the projection of an internal dream? And doesn’t this domestic imagination forge its own rhythm and spatial logic, as Gaston Bachelard suggests in The Poetics of Space, which eventually ventures out into the world and perhaps change it?

2,
It was prior to the building of this structure that shotokubaizō, or the increase in the standard of living, was employed as a powerful argument of the state. Yet the very promise of a better life was ironically an extension of the economic system that was initially put in place to fund Japan’s total war in the 1930s and the 1940s.[6] Nor was this all. To establish a more economically robust country, the state centralized its power, enervating local governments’ ability to deal with their immediate needs. The nuclear power plant in Fukushima commissioned in 1971, for instance, was one result of this disparity. As Kurokawa celebrated homo movens, the rights of those who live and occupy their land (mainly farmers) were constantly being undermined. In the 1970s, the people of Sanrizuka were displaced to make room for Narita Airport. The virtue was to move (and fly) and thus, to settle or to stay was punished and criminalized.[7]

1,
If the immediate postwar was a moment of potential revolution after years of political pressure from the militarist state, from the perspective of capital, it was a fulfillment of Japan’s financial destiny. This tower was partly an expression of emancipation and capitalism, accommodation and exploitation, awkwardly waltzing to a strange political tune called architecture. Hence, a peculiar yet familiar construction of logic became possible: urban planning that required massive financial backing would usher in a classless society prophesized as the end of history. This building was a temporal loop of present and future. Constantly updating itself, the tower discarded the past. Composed of countable and interchangeable segments like the modern clock and calendar, the architectural design was emblematic of pure time-management.[8] Despite this ambitious task Kurokawa set for the building, his appropriation of the deterritorialized flows of information and money proved to be not a catalyst but merely a reflection of a society that had already made homo economicus the ideal representative of the neoliberal order.

9,
Walter Benjamin called the extreme formalization of time in sequential order the “empty time” of capital or modern development. Gone was the time that pushed a growing past against the future and offered a present that constantly altered the implication of the past for the future.[9] Unfastening the historical weight of its belligerent past, Japan latched onto a tempting offer that securely pushed it toward a gentle stupor. However, the city of Tokyo did not comport with Kurokawa’s proposition. The tower is now more an anomaly than a prototype, a curiosity more than a norm. Its lack of success was partly because the very notion of freedom ultimately proved to be disingenuous, too controlling. Or did it simply misread the parameter of neoliberal subjectivity? Either way, it now occupies that in-between space of obsolescence and novelty, oscillating between the future that has yet to arrive and the future that never arrived. Perhaps the only movement it manages to trace now is its own disappearance, which is not at all different from other forms of life and man-made facilities that eventually fall apart.

7,
The building has deteriorated considerably since 1972, but it has also accrued the marks of passing time it once sought to banish. Noritaka Minami explores the temporality of its life as an object and demonstrates that the tower, like everything else in life, is subject to entropy. Immobilized as photographic prints, the obsolete dreams and hopes acquire material dimensions as the structure ruminates on the uncertain future of a possible demolition that it was never supposed to face.

Ironically, what it has lost in reality, it has gained in theoretical existence. Minami exchanges the mobility that Kurokawa promised for the dialectical movement between past and future that photography captures so effectively. In these still images, Metabolism waits for legibility in a different historical moment. This photographer has filled the empty time of the tower with a delayed “that which will have arrived,” a qualitatively different future than the one the architect envisioned.

2,
This building has no future, yet retains a futurity that doubles as underfunded preservation. These vessels are filled with everyday objects that do not comport with homogeneous time. Each pod accrues time on its own terms, projecting and simulating different futures and pasts. The uniform sense of time and space may still remain visible in the regulative aesthetics of the structure but separate lives that inhabit these spaces are incommensurable. These trace swerves of everyday practice are evidence of time’s unpredictable behavior that the tower strangely left out of its calculus. The folds of the bed sheet, a suit worn everyday to work hanging by a circular window, overstuffed cabinets, disheveled desk, rooms filled to the brim with things, objects stacked up in the hallway; empty rooms, gutted rooms, moldy rooms, crowded rooms. There is also a room with a projector, perhaps used as a private viewing station to take a break from Tokyo’s incessant commotion. The neatly organized time appears to be completely occupied by personal things gathered there through a series of decisions and micro-decisions that may or may not comport with what is deemed economically rational. Subjects are missing from these photographs, yet objects prove to be effective marks of daily imaginations and aspirations. Though the rate of decay varies from room to room, a single entropic horizon is assumed, the consistency of which cannot be made analogous to the homogenous sense of time Kurokawa championed.

1,
A shot: of a coming world that is neatly organized and sanitized. A counter shot: of a chaotic mess, a world inundated with trash. A shot: of a coming world in which the past is forgotten. A counter shot: of a world in which the past becomes more threatening by the day. There is one particular photograph that embodies this ambivalent splicing. The tower stands in the center as the city continues to grow around and without it. The building is left behind by the very city that gave it its logic. Yet these photographs by Minami induce a different and truer movement that oscillates between imaginative projection into the future and obstinate accumulation of the past, rendering false the economic and psychological mobility the tower was designed to demonstrate. These emulsified things are indices of repetitive and intensive time – 1, 9, 7, 2, 1, 9, 7, 2, 1…


Bibiliography
[1] Fujihata Yuriko, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 184-188.
[2] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Picador, 2010).
[3] Kawazoe Noboru, “Busshitsu to ningen,” 45-47, Metabolism/1969 (Tokyo: Bijutsu shuppan-sha, 1960).
[4] Tokyokawa Saikatsu, “Kanrei kyojō kenkyū to nankyoku shōwa kichi: Asada Takashi no kapuseru kenchiku genron,” 235-241, Metaborizumu no mirai toshi (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum, 2011).
[5] Yatsuka Hajime, Mettaborizumu nekusasu (Tokyo: Ohmsha, 2012), 31.
[6] Yoshimi Shunya, Banpaku to sengo nihon (Tokyo: Kōdansha gakujutsu bunko, 2011), 33-38.
[7] Markus Nornes, Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shunsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
[8] Benedict Anderson, The Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 2006).
[9] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 389-400, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings volume 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 2003).