Do Tradition and Technology Harmonise in Techtopian Tokyo? - Ryan Myers

Cambridge Design Research Studio

An Investigation into the Technological Urban Landscape of Japan Ryan Myers

Do Tradition and Technology Harmonise in Techtopian Tokyo?

Do Tradition and Technology Harmonise in Techtopian Tokyo?

An Investigation into the Technological Urban Landscape of Japan

Ryan Myers

Hughes Hall College University of Cambridge Supervisor: Dr Ingrid Schröder A design thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the M.Phil Examination in Architecture & Urban Design (2020-22) Word count: 4961 excluding bibliography 26th March 2021

Abstract The failure of research parks to create a successful environment of innovation and integrate into the Japanese landscape is emblematic of the dual vision of the modern endemic to Japan. A successful alternative will synthesize both past and future and revitalise the relationship between the city, the workplace, and the home.

Japan’s historical socio-political complexities have created a dichotomy to the existing conception of modernisation.

Japan embraces and epitomizes the global definition of modernity—high tech megacities and leading technological research. Parallel to this, the stories Japan tells itself about its technological affluence—that the nation arose from the restoration of imperialism during the Meiji period—reveal deep attachments to remnants of a feudal past. This ongoing internal conflict of conception can be viewed as a direct result of Japan’s desire for a national identity. The complexity and construction associated with the yearning for an identity resulted in a significant transition towards the technological advancement of the nation, as a result the erection of research and development parks has bloomed.

This thesis speculates as to the possibility of an alternative to the current workplace model—one that is inherently Western in typology and under-serves the needs of the contemporary Japanese population, by considering a new form of urbanism formulated from the morphology and intention of the research park. This new form would critique the city’s present structure, which is closed and centripetal, with the ambition of creating a linear architectural system, which would be open and capable of any amount of expansion or reduction. The new typological approach speculates the establishment of this morphology in the urban fabric of Tokyo juxtaposing the isolated condition often associated with this typology. In turn, it will create an architectural framework which revitalises the complex relationship between the city, the workplace, and the home by the formation of a synthesis between the dwelling and the place of work.

8 Modernity Metamorphosis 14 A Lens for Modernity 22 Evolution of the Homescape 26 Conclusion 29 List of Figures 30 Bibliography

Contents

6 Introduction

Introduction This pilot thesis investigates the twenty-first century transition of Japan through the lens of the workplace, as an embodiment of the country’s pursuit of modernisation and technological advancement. This pivotal moment of unprecedented social and economic change in Japan offers a moment for reflection on contemporary work culture and design.

Japanese working culture is a reflection of its societal context; collective and hierarchical. The resulting workplace atmosphere is fragmented and pressurised. The generational gaps that are evident between management and the typical white-collar worker is better known as the social stigma of the salaryman. Employees are frowned upon or side-lined when taking individualistic actions such as taking a sick day or vacation, so much so that just over half the Japanese workforce take the paid leave to which they were entitled.1 It is not uncommon to find this same workforce sleeping, or passed out on public transport, making their beds in the street gutters, or even under their office desks, stranded or exhausted from working extensively and consistently late. The boundaries between the personal and the professional are blurred, hierarchical pressure lends itself to Nomikai (drinking gatherings)—deemed as central events to foster a positive and harmonious work environment. Whilst such events serve as a lubricant to break down barriers in the corporate hierarchy, they further exacerbate this blurring of boundaries. From this continual blurring, many of the workforce become both mentally and physically overwhelmed, the notion of Karoshi, the deterioration of one’s health to the point of becoming permanently unable to work or dead is a worryingly frequent occurrence in this culture.2 The stress and anxiety caused by such rigorous professional commitments and pressures become ‘embodied by individuals in everyday life, and gets played out in, and across, the intermeshing physical and emotional scapes of the home, the workplace, the street, and other public spaces, and, ultimately the emotion-scape of the nation.’3 As such, the immediate experience of the city for many becomes isolated and narrow, bound to the limited networks their professional lives allow to them.

Subsequently, a correlation can be drawn between this unsympathetic work culture, the declining birth-rate, and the economic stagnation Japan is currently experiencing. According to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research’s population projections, Japan is becoming an aging society, and the population is projected to continually fall over the long term. The total population is estimated at 116.6 million in 2030 and 88 million in 2065.4 The deterioration of the socio-economic environment of urban centres is a significant influence on these projections.

With many migrating to urban centres to seek higher education and prosperous jobs, they become unconsciously complicit to the aforementioned issues. Kato states, ‘the concentration of people in the Tokyo metropolitan area caused by migration from local regions results in higher population densities and lower fertility, and it is possible that this population migration will bring about a further decline in fertility in Japan as a whole.’5 Therefore, based on these demographic realities we need to reconsider the way in which we dwell and work within the urban environment.

This research project reimagines the workplace through a design driven framework to regenerate and innovate the socio-economic structure of the Japanese urban environment. By employing a series of design studies that use the morphology of research and development parks to create a new form of landscape urbanism that analyses the current attitude of Tokyo, it denounces the notion that the metropolis cannot be self-sufficient and sustainable without demolishing itself to make way for the future. It contrasts the dominant narrative of demolition as the means of revitalization that manifests in the global capitalist agenda. Rather, aligning itself with the traditional Japanese ideals of Kintsugi; the art of repair, this project deploys an additive architecture that utilises existing infrastructures of the city to create a cohesive and fluid landscape; not merely a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, an architectural system of spaces functioning and evolving to the needs of society.6 This serves to highlight the challenges associated with the transitioning socio-economic climate and develops a rhetoric for further exploration through the design of the urban dwelling and working environments.

Demetriou, Danielle, ‘How the Japanese Are Putting an End to Extreme Work Weeks’,(2020) Kanai, Atsuko, ‘“Karoshi (Work to Death)” in Japan’, Journal of Business Ethics, 84.2 (2008), pg. 209 3 Dasgupta, Romit, ‘Emotional Spaces and Places of Salaryman Anxiety in Tokyo Sonata’, Japanese Studies, 31.3 (2011), pg. 373–86 4 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS), Social Security in Japan (2019 edition), IPSS Research Report No.85 (2019) 5 Kato, Hisakazu, ‘Declining Population and the Revitalization of Local Regions in Japan’, Meiji Journal of Political Science and Economic, 3 (2014), pg. 25–35 6 Jackson, Peter, and Susan Smith, Exploring Social Geography. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984) 1 2

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[Fig.1] Typical network of the urban dweller

Modernity Metamorphosis

[Fig.2] Panoramic view of Tokyo’s landscape prior to modernisation circa, 1952

[Fig.3] Panoramic view of Tokyo’s contemporary landscape following the modernisation of the nation, circa 2012

Japan has preserved its traditions despite embracing the influences and trends of both global- and westernisation, but with the current unprecedented social and economic changes, the nation finds itself in an internal conflict of identity.

The constantly evolving and shifting political, social, and economic ideologies surrounding the role of technology and modernisation further exacerbates this conflict of identity. Reflecting upon Japanese history, a series of foreign influences dating back to the dissolution of the feudal political system and reinstatement of imperialism led to a rapid period of modernisation spanning across the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Most notably, Japan’s defeat and occupation by the United States at the end of the Second World War (1945-1952). Under this occupation, the United States began the process of severing and disestablishing the remnants of feudalism and imperialism by reforming the pre-existing hierarchy of society, from denouncing the current political system and influence of the emperor to the dismantlement of the capitalist grip of the zaibatsu industrial and financial conglomerates, only to later to revert these actions with the Reverse Course policy.7 Following the end of the post-war occupation and the exit of the United States from Japan, many of the translated social and political visions of democracy, free speech, gender equality and standards of living remained engrained in the minds of the new generation of both white- and blue-collar workers, students, and animators.8 With the resulting void of governance, the Liberal Democratic Party was established. The conservative party moved swiftly to denounce many of the American incorporated policies as un-Japanese. The party began consolidating its position by increasing state and police influence, altering worker rights, rescinding the right to strike for public sector workers, and reforming the educational curriculum to reflect more conservative and traditional Japanese values.9 This complex history of ‘occupation policy and politics, with its interplay of surrender and restoration, reform and recovery, sovereignty and subordination’10 amplified the collision between the two ideologies of tradition and modernisation. The consistent alterations of authority, rights and social hierarchy brought constant changes to Japan’s conception of modernisation. These variable conceptions of modernisation brought by this continual change, has mutated the nation’s urbanism and social structure, resulting in a conflict of identity between the deeply rooted tradition and emerging technological modernisation at a national scale. This convoluted perspective of modernisation has manifested as an architectural form, the Technopolis, an expression of the nation’s desire and pursuit for an identity of technological advancement. With the resulting urban social landscapes throughout Japan becoming ‘vivid portraits of communication and assimilation that involve intensive negotiation of vexed realities oscillating between tradition and innovation, and between orthodoxy and pragmatism’.11

Schaller, Michael, The American Occupation of Japan: the Origins of the Cold War in Asia / Michael Schaller. (New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) 8 Gerteis, Christopher, and Timothy S. George, Japan Since 1945 : from Postwar to Post-Bubble (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) pg. 17 9 Sugimoto, Yoshio, Quantitative Characteristics of Popular Disturbances in Post-Occupation Japan (1952–1960), The Journal of Asian Studies, 37.2 (1978), pg. 273–91 10 Miller, Alice Lyman, and Richard Wich, Becoming Asia : Change and Continuity in Asian International Relations Since World War II, 2020 11 Basurto, Grace L. González, ‘Tsukuba Science City: Between the Creation of Innovative Milieu and the Erasure of Furusato Memory’, RCAPS Occasional Paper 07, 3 (2007) 7

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[Fig.4] Student demonstration in Tokyo, circa 1963

The Technopolis is a spatial concentration of technological development and innovation. Through the government Technopolis programme, the Technopole projects were designed on the premise of cross fertilisation, the promotion of innovation through collaboration between academics, researchers, and manufacturers. These projects accumulated a variety of programmes from high technological activities, research facilities, corporations, and universities into one cohesive and fluent environment. To produce a synergy which generates ideological and technological innovations.12 The Japanese Technopolis is modelled on Silicon Valley, the global centre for advanced technology and innovation.

Projects in the Tokyo metropolitan area (Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Atsugi) or Tsukuba Science City are comparable to these Californian models—but no one example has achieved the status of “Japan’s Silicon Valley”. The ambition of the Technopolis plan can be defined as a “strategy to achieve two goals – knowledge intensification and heightening of value added of industrial structure (creative nation-building based on high technology), and regional development headed for the 21st century – by introducing high technology industry into culture, tradition and ‘town building’ which is harmonious with ‘industry’ (complex of high technology industry) ‘academic centres’ (research institutes and experimental institutes) and ‘community facilities’ (fertile and pleasant living environment)”.13 It is an attempt to create a national economic basis for industry policy to create a socio-economic landscape fertile for the development and stable growth of high technological sectors.

The original Technopolis plan (1980) was proposed by a series of academics led by Professor Takemochi Ishii, under the commission of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI).14 The intention was to construct only a handful of model Technopoles throughout Japan which would serve as economic experiments, however the resulting plan was highly attractive to the prefectural governments spanning across the nation, as contradictory policies traced back to the post-war occupational complexities had resulted in a lack of support for struggling regional economies and developments.15 In turn, many Technopoles were constructed across the nation, as forty out of the forty-seven Japanese prefectural governments put in bids for the Technopolis programme.16 Consequently, since 1983 twentyfive prefectures throughout Japan have been designated as sites for Technopoles.17 However, as the population of advanced technological industries and research and development parks increased, the resources in which these entities flourish from; human and industrial potential, became scarce resulting in a plateau of economic prosperity.

Thus, the Technopolis is reliant on its ties to urban centres for a continual influx of human and industrial capital. This thesis poses the question: Could the distance from the periphery to urban core be reduced or completely collapsed?

Through my design, I interrogate the resultant produced landscape and its potential to become the foundation for a framework which organically revitalises and connects Japanese society and the Japanese archipelago through the medium of architecture.

Benko, Georges, ‘Technopoles, High-Tech Industries and Regional Development: A Critical Review’, GeoJournal, 51.3 (2000), pg. 157–67 Yazawa, Shujiro, ‘The Technopolis Program In Japan’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, 22.1 (1990), pg. 7–18 14 Masser, Ian, ‘Technology and Regional Development Policy: A Review of Japan’s Technopolis Programme’, Regional Studies, 24.1 (1990), pg. 41–53 15 Yazawa, pg. 10 16 Castells, Manuel, and Peter Hall, Technopoles of the World : the Making of Twenty-First-Century Industrial Complexes (London ; New York: Routledge, 1994) pg.117 17 Masser, pg.42 12 13

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[Fig.5] Map illustration of Technopolis distribution (1990)

A Lens for Modernity The Japanese government is determined to inject all facets of society with modern technologies and other infrastructure to promote innovation.18 A fixation of the success of foreign technological clusters has limited the parameters of technological innovation in Japan. The state Technopolis program incorporates themes of identity and control characteristic of the Western typology of innovation it seeks to emulate. What is the environment produced from this emulation, and how does this environment determine the behaviour of its inhabitants? Can it successfully manifest a harmony between tradition and technology? To understand this, a close examination of three case studies spanning a range of scales and time frames is required.

In 1963, the Japanese central government approved the Tsukuba district located in the Ibaraki prefecture as the location for Japan’s first Technopolis. Situated approximately 60 kilometres northeast of central Tokyo, the proposed site of the city spanned an area of approximately 28,400 hectares.19 The original area of land which the highly urbanized development now inhabits, was once home to a series of vernacular communities and towns. A natural and rural landscape embedded with mountains, marshes, red pine forests, and traditional clusters of linear villages were surrounded by flourishing orchards.20 These spaces were populated by farmers, rice paddies, mosquitoes and wild dogs, an environment far from the comforts to which Tokyo’s middle-class researchers and their families are now accustomed.21 The development of the Tsukuba Technopolis has severely altered this landscape, mirroring the social amenities and infrastructures found in the metropolises of The Taiheiyo Belt; high rise residential complexes, izakayas (informal bars), museums, public parks and hospitals are all rooted in this new urban landscape. Despite this attempt to reproduce a similar social landscape to those found on the Taiheiyo Belt, many of the researchers invited to work in Tsukuba refused to live there. Those who did chose to move and become residents complained about the socially artificial and sterile landscape to which they had moved to.22 Although, as Manuel Castells argues “the construction of such privileged secluded places is intended to signify a certain distance from the day-to-day conflicts and petty interests of society at large, potentially enabling scientists and scholars to pursue their endeavour, both detached from –and independent of– mundane material concerns”.23 Yet, this materialised ultra-modernist high-tech city centred on laboratories and research exchange fails to consider its own emotion-scape. The forced development of Tsukuba epitomises the absorption of rural landscapes into the modern, a process resulting in a socioeconomic experiment which perpetuates Japan’s convoluted perspective of innovation and economic prosperity. The absence of an organic culture has risen from this absorption of surrounding towns and villages by erasing traces of the past cultures and communities and replacing it with the artificial ultra-modernist high-tech.24 The clustering of research institutions has succeeded in promoting collaboration among local researchers in Tsukuba, which was unachievable when these individuals were fragmented across Tokyo.25 But it has also created an environment where native dwellers of the landscape are alienated and isolated, whilst also failing to create an new social landscape of its own for incoming researchers.

Edgington, David W., ‘New Strategies for Technology Development in Japanese Cities and Regions’, The Town Planning Review, 60.1 (1989), 1–27 pg.23 Lee, Huey Yi, ‘Lessons from Science City Projects and Their Success Factors’, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002 pg. 41 20 Rasidi, Mohd Hisyam, and Oloruntoba Kayode, The Role of Built Environment in Developing Sustainable High Tech Parks: Establishment of Physical Development and Knowledge Community Needs, Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology (2013) Vol. 53 No.3 21 Dearing, James W., and University of Oxford. Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, Growing a Japanese Science City : Communication in Scientific Research (London: Routledge, 1995) 22 Ibid, pg. 67 23 Castells, pg. 39 24 Basurto, pg. 16 25 Castells, pg. 73 18 19

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Introduction The premise for this pilot thesis is to investigate the modern transition of Japan in the twenty-first century through the lens of the workplace, as an embodiment of the country’s pursuit of modernisation and technological advancement.

This pivotal moment of unprecedented social and economic change in Japan, offers a moment for reflection on contemporary work culture and design.

Japanese working culture is a reflection of its societal context; collective and hierarchical. The resulting workplace atmosphere is fragmented and pressurised. The generational gaps that are evident between management and the typical white-collar worker is better known as the social stigma of the salaryman. Employees are frowned upon or side-lined if they take individualistic actions such as taking a sick day or vacation, so much so that only just over half the Japanese workforce decided to take the paid leave to which they were entitled.1 It is not uncommon to find this same workforce sleeping, or passed out on public transport, making their beds in the street gutters, or even under their office desks due to being stranded or exhausted from working extensively and consistently late. The boundaries between personal and professional are blurred, hierarchical pressure lends itself to Nomikai (drinking gatherings), deemed as central events to foster a positive and harmonious work environment. Whilst such events serve as a lubricant to break down barriers in the corporate hierarchy, they further exacerbate this blurring of boundaries.

From this continual blurring, many of the workforce become both mentally and physically overwhelmed, the notion of Karoshi, the deterioration of one’s health to the point of becoming permanently unable to work or dead is a worryingly often occurrence in this culture.2 The stress and anxiety caused by such rigorous professional commitments and pressures become ‘embodied by individuals in everyday life, and gets played out in, and across, the intermeshing physical and emotional scapes of the home, the workplace, the street, and other public spaces, and, ultimately the emotion-scape of the nation’.3 As such, the immediate experience of the city for many becomes isolated and narrow, bound to the limited networks their professional lives allow to them.

Subsequently, a correlation can be drawn between this unsympathetic work culture, with the declining birth-rate, and the economic stagnation Japan is currently experiencing. According to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research’s population projections, Japan is becoming an aging society, and the population is projected to continually fall over the long term. The total population is estimated at 116.6 million in 2030 and 88 million in 2065.4 The deterioration of the socio-economic environment of urban centres is a significant influence on these projections.

With many migrating to urban centres to seek higher education and prosperous jobs, they become unconsciously complicit to the aforementioned issues. Kato states, ‘the concentration of people in the Tokyo metropolitan area caused by migration from local regions results in higher population densities and lower fertility, and it is possible that this population migration will bring about a further decline in fertility in Japan as a whole.’5 Therefore, based on these demographic realities we need to reconsider the way in which we dwell and work within the urban environment.

This research project reimagines the workplace through a design driven framework to regenerate and innovate the socio-economic structure of the Japanese urban environment. By employing a series of design studies that use the morphology of research and development institutions to create a new form of landscape urbanism that analyses the current attitude of Tokyo, denouncing the notion that the metropolis cannot be self-sufficient and sustainable without demolishing itself to make way for the future. It contrasts the dominant narrative of demolition as the means of revitalization that manifests in the global capitalist agenda. Rather, aligning itself with the traditional Japanese ideals of Kintsugi; the art of repair, deploying an additive architecture that utilises existing infrastructures of the city to create a cohesive and fluid landscape; not merely a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, an architectural system of spaces functioning and evolving to the needs of society.6 Demetriou, Danielle, ‘How the Japanese Are Putting an End to Extreme Work Weeks’ Kanai, Atsuko, ‘“Karoshi (Work to Death)” in Japan’, Journal of Business Ethics, 84.2 (2008), pg. 209 3 Dasgupta, Romit, ‘Emotional Spaces and Places of Salaryman Anxiety in Tokyo Sonata’, Japanese Studies, 31.3 (2011), pg. 373–86 4 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS), Social Security in Japan (2019 edition), IPSS Research Report No.85 (2019) 5 Kato, Hisakazu, ‘Declining Population and the Revitalization of Local Regions in Japan’, Meiji Journal of Political Science and Economic, 3 (2014), pg. 25–3 6 Jackson, Peter, and Susan Smith, Exploring Social Geography. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984) [Fig.6] View across the Technopolis landscape 1 2

[Fig.7] The experience in the isolated landscape

Despite the failure of this incorporation of a top-down city scale Technopolis into a rural landscape, more contemporary examples have been successful in implementing the principles of the Technopolis on a more immediate scale in the urban fabric. The Kanagawa Institute of Technology is a modern university located in Atsugi, Kanagawa Prefecture in the suburbs of Tokyo and was established in 1963. The original built landscape of the campus followed many of the mistakes typical of the Technopolis, most notably its isolation of the social landscape from the external suburban community with intimidating thresholds and boundaries. The campus is in the process of being revitalised, in collaboration with Japanese architect Jun’ya Ishigami. A series of new spaces and architectural interventions are being introduced that promote the values that the city scale Technopolis of Tsukuba failed to achieve. A workshop space has been constructed adjacent to the central courtyard of the campus. The building reflects traditional Japanese architectural principles whilst fulfilling contemporary spatial needs. Utilising the surrounding landscape as the backdrop for the interior which embraces an ephemeral lightness, the slender columns resemble the stalks of trees and bamboo. Whilst these columns are structural, they are also an instrument of spatial organisation that creates communal zones within the larger open space, but their non-restrictive nature provides a flexibility to suit the changing needs of the users.

In the same year the workshop construction was completed, Ishigami began creating a versatile plaza that would neighbour and complement the new workshop. The plaza follows the same fusion of traditional and contemporary principles exhibited in its neighbour. A semi-enclosed void sliced by sprawling skylights that frame the natural beauty of the sky and beams of sunlight. The space is intended to be experiential and flexible, allowing students, researchers, and the community alike to use it for varying events and festivals. This fluid space contrasts the static nature of the existing built landscape of the campus which lacks a space that brings people together as a place of reflection, relaxation, and socialisation. Whilst these architectural interventions do not suggest a new form of urbanism on the scale of Technopolis. They encapsulate a harmonious relationship between the traditional and technological that instils local cultural and social landscapes with the new. These case studies serve to highlight the issues in enforcing an artificial top-down approach to new forms of urbanism and suggest that a more successful methodology is to be developed, one which will employ intricate interventions to form a cohesion between the new and the old. I argue that the successful development of such a methodology will incorporate the lessons learned from the study of another typology: the homescape.

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[Fig.8] Interior of the KAIT workshop

[Fig.9] Teenagers basking in the sun of the KAIT plaza

[Fig.10] View into the KAIT plaza

The Evolution of the Homescape Simultaneously to the development of the Technopolis and the new technological and socio-political advancements surrounding it, the urban homescape was irrevocably altered. The contemporary Japanese family now exists in a framework of social expectations generated from both the real and imagined homescape. This set of expectations was built upon the post-war lifestyle of the salaryman, which was considered modern in the past growing urban economy. Young Japanese men and women were particularly attracted to this lifestyle due to the associated job security and transparency of benefits and pay. Families sacrificed the presence of the working husband for this stability, which allowed wives to comfortably raise children in urban housing complexes. The corporate world exploited this fragmented family model to establish its own agenda of the corporate family, in which men were isolated from the domestic material concerns, sole responsibility for which fell on the wife.26 The internal dimension of the homescape consists of many familiar spaces; the kitchen, bathroom and most importantly the cha no ma, or living room. It is here where the tatami mat room became the space of socialisation and sovereignty from the outside world—where the family would come together around the kotatsu (heated table often positioned centrally in the room) to share their thoughts and converse. The cha no ma is evocative of the very dualistic vision of the modern discussed. Since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, it has been invaded by technology; the aperture of the television—disrupting the traditional family hierarchy which still plays along the periphery. Interest in conversation collapsed, as the spatial hierarchy of the cha no ma was reconfigured from the central kotatsu to the optical orbit of the television. Adults and children alike struggle to stay in reality in the face of high capturing media; television, anime, and manga. The traditional family hierarchy is slowly fading—replaced by the individualistic framework of the contemporary urban landscape.27 Additionally, the programmatic nature of the home has changed, the separation between the entities of work and the home arising from the globalised perception of modern living.

Yet Japan remains paradoxical, where traces of imperialism and feudalism remain engraved into the urban fabric of the modern Japanese metropolis. Initial perceptions of the global city of Tokyo generate little correlation with the notion of domesticated labour. However, the city’s salaryman crowds, chaotic crossings, sprawling infrastructure networks and “high-rise neon streetscapes conceal an inner world where home-based work has been accommodated for centuries with little interruption”.28 This narrative of traditional structure, disruption, and adaptation plays out simultaneously in the living room and in the workplace.

Prior to globalisation, the Japanese feudal city was built upon the domestication of labour. Just as the family hierarchy produced the living room, this division of labour manifested itself in distinct physical typologies of space. Hollis identifies these architectural typologies which this domesticated labour manifested in, the ‘buke-yashiki’ or ‘spread-out houses’ reserved for the upper classes of society, the ‘machiya’ in which merchants and servicemen dwelled and conducted commerce within, and the ‘nagaya’ the spatial symbiosis of workshop and dwelling for artists and craftsmen. The ‘buke-yashiki’ are a series of fragmented buildings enclosed by a perimeter wall. Often inhabited by large families or nobles, they would contain both homes and workplaces for those who served them. The ‘machiya’ manifests as a narrow yet extensive townhouse, a multigenerational enterprise. The residential and commercial programmes are separated both vertically and horizontally with services such as restaurants or workshops predominantly inhabiting the forefront of the ground level, whilst the upper level and rear of the ground level was reserved for privacy of the occupant’s dwelling mediated through an internal courtyard garden. Lastly, the ‘nagaya’ a capsule-like structure which were often found embedded in the voids and intermediate spaces of the urban fabric. These capsule structures would gather and accumulate into one cohesive building, sharing access cores and circulation arteries.29

Imamura, Anne E, ‘Family Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture, ed. by Yoshio Sugimoto, Cambridge Companions to Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 76–91 27 Suzuki, Akira, Do Android Crows Fly over the Skies of an Electronic Tokyo? : The Interactive Urban Landscape of Japan (Architectural Association, 2001).

28 Holliss, Frances, Beyond Live/work : the Architecture of Home-Based Work / Frances Holliss, 2015 pg. 30 29 Ibid pg.31 26

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[Fig.11] Family gathered around the kotatsu in front of their television, circa 1959

Although deriving from pre-industrial feudalism, many of these traditional typologies can continue to be found within the contemporary city of Tokyo, albeit in an evolved form and adapted to the contemporary needs of society. Whilst the natural material palette of wood, paper, straw, earth, and stone has been replaced by concrete and metallic compositions, the concept of the machiya; the house being nature itself, remains embodied in contemporary Japanese architecture.30 The spirit of nagaya has been reproduced by the post-war collective of the Metabolists who created their own ideas of capsulation and collecting dwelling. The enclosed sites of the former buke-yashiki are now hosts to varying public programmes such as university campuses, sport complexes, national institutions, and foreign embassies. These moments of intersection between traditional typologies and the densely populated neighbourhoods of the city are the architectural legacy of domesticated labor.31 Hollis argues that it is the flexibility of Japanese policy and governance, which blinds itself to the Western idea of separation between the dwelling and the place of work that facilitates and encourages the development of domesticated labour. Planning policy allows 49 per cent of any dwelling to act as a place of work, even in the most conservative and residential administrative entities of special wards and municipalities in Tokyo. Furthermore, property taxation for both commercial and residential property is charged by ward. The rate of both is equal, but billed to a different governmental body. There is therefore no legal or logistic opposition to the prospect of domesticating labour.32 However, it would be disingenuous to not emphasize the influence of technology. Where remote work was previously deemed impossible, it is now reality on a global scale.

We have gained the ability to communicate and collaborate with others freely from the home or anywhere for that matter, escaping the confinements of the built fabric, transcending borders and thresholds. Therefore, this thesis is interested in building upon these contemporary conditions of the homescape, in relationship to the workplace and evolving family structure to develop a synthesis of dwelling and workplace.

Jurgenhake, B., ‘The Qualities of the Machiya: An Architectural Research of a Traditional House in Japan’, 23rd Conference of the European Network for Housing Research ENHR, 5-8 July 2011 pg.6 31 Holliss, pg.33 32 Ibid, pg.164 30

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[Fig.12] Atelier Bow-Wow’s contemporary Machiya

Conclusion The socio-economic conditions of Japan have become increasingly predicated on the export of its identity as a technological leader, including a variety of cultural productions such as anime and manga, creating a perceived global image that is fetishized and consumed by what Hiroki Azuma entitles the ‘database animals’.33 The accumulation of technological advancements, urban migration pressures, declining birth-rate, increasing environmental challenges and, most recently, a global pandemic are fundamentally altering the urban landscape in which we work and dwell.

The contemporary conditions of living and working typologies, their spatial hierarchies, and their relationships to the urban and rural needs to be rigorously re-examined. By acknowledging the influence of a collective national history, one whose feudal traces are still intimately felt in the workplace and at home, architecture can attempt to bridge the void between past, present, and future. The sense of place and its significance to its dwellers relies upon the fragile balance between living in the global metropolis and preserving local cultural and social landscapes. The pursuit of economic prosperity through modernisation has a direct impact in cultural expression, often resulting in a collision between technology and tradition, which erases and replaces local communities and culture with a system of dualisms, blending nothingness and holism into the urban landscape. Although culture cannot be reduced to mere landmarks and dwellings, urban revitalisation must be inclusive and preserve the pre-existing social landscape.

Therefore, revitalisation requires recovering the meaning of landscape as the fusion of human and nature beyond modernity. As above all else, the landscape is an unvarnished etching of the past and present realities that represent the values and social conditions associated with a culture that has sculpted the environment.34 The design component of this research project uses the morphology of the research park and the historical aspects of working culture in Japan as the basis for a new urban landscape, which highlights the challenges faced in Japan’s unprecedented socio-economic transition and tension of identity. The design process will employ a tailored methodology which explores the relationship between technology and tradition—as the Japanese conception of modernity has been influenced by self-representation through various media, this methodology will seek to interrogate those forms of visual philosophy. Through contemporary production and visualisation techniques such as lidar-scanning, 3D animation, film making, digital illustration, and rendering traditional mediums such as block prints, Ukiyo paintings and manga are reimagined as a method of aesthetic exploration in this project. These instruments are central to conducting spatial, ephemeral, and emotional analysis and exploration, rooted in both cultural comprehension and speculative thinking throughout the research project. In the anticipation of further research, this proposed framework hopes to provide an alternative perspective and start a dialogue on the ways in which we work, dwell, and collaborate in the urban landscape.

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Azuma, Hiroki., Jonathan. Abel, and Shion. Kono, Otaku Japan’s Database Animals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) Mather, Karan, Iijima, Karan, Pradyumna P., and Iijima, Shigerur, Japanese Landscapes : Where Land & Culture Merge, 1998

[Fig.13] Regenerated Shotengai lidar-scan

[Fig.14] proposal exploration lidar-scan

List of Figures Cover Image - Kinu / Kanagawa, Japan photo blog [Photograph]

Source: <https://kinuphoto.tumblr.com/post/180171955168> [acessed 01/03/2021] Fig.1 - Authors own illustration Fig.2 - Japangasm blog post, Before and After – From Hiroshige to Modern Tokyo [Photograph] Source: <https://japangasm.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/from-hiroshige-to-modern-tokyo/> [accessed 10/03/2021] Fig.3 - Japangasm blog post, Before and After – From Hiroshige to Modern Tokyo [Photograph] Source: <https://japangasm.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/from-hiroshige-to-modern-tokyo/> [accessed 12/03/2021] Fig.4 - Jacoby, Claude, Student demonstration in front of a train station in Tokyo, 1963. [Photograph] Source: < https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/student-demonstration-against-nuclearwappons-in-front-of-a-news-photo/551343383 [accessed 12/03/2021] Fig.5 - Reproduced from: Sasaki, M., and G. McCormack, Japan, Australia and the Multifunctionpolis, Bonsai Australia Banzai: Multifunctionpolis and the Making of a Special Relationship with Japan (Pluto Press Leichhardt, 1991) Fig.6 - Ibaraki Prefectural Office, Tsukuba Science City [Photograph] Source: <https://grandtourofswitzerland.jp/cms/1957/?lang=jp> [accessed 12/03/2021] Fig.7 - Authors own illustration Fig.8 - Gruntz, Lukas, Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop, 2008. [Photograph] Source: <https://architecturetokyo.wordpress.com/2017/07/07/2008-kanagawa-institute-oftechnology-workshop-junya-ishigami/> [accessed 12/03/2021] Fig.9 - Junya Ishigami + Associates, KAIT Plaza [Photograph] Source: < https://www.dezeen.com/2021/02/15/junya-ishigami-semi-outdoor-plaza-kanagawa -institute-of-technology/> [accessed 12/03/2021] Fig.10 - Junya Ishigami + Associates, KAIT Plaza [Photograph] Source: < https://www.dezeen.com/2021/02/15/junya-ishigami-semi-outdoor-plaza-kanagawa -institute-of-technology/> [accessed 12/03/2021] Fig.11 - Author unknown, Family portrait [Photograph] Source: <https://places.branipick.com/living-room-of-my-distant-relatives-in-saitama-march-1959/> [accessed 12/03/2021] Fig.12 - Oka, Manual, Frontage, Split Machiya [Photograph] Source: <http://www.manueloka.com/albums/split-machiya/content/frontage/> [accessed 12/03/2021] Fig.13 - Authors own illustration Fig.14 - Authors own illustration

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