“The future city is ruins.”
– Arata Isozaki
Project Architect, "Plan for Tokyo"Tokyo has been spilling into the sea for 500 years. At the turn of the 17th century, there was no Ginza. No Marunouchi. Instead, there was an inlet of Tokyo Bay. The Hibiya Inlet was ringed with fishing boats and seaweed harvesters. But in the early 1600s, the Tokugawa Shogunate infilled the inlet. Later projects extended the land east of the Sumida River further into the bay. In the 20th century, the city gradually filled the bay with artificial islands. Today, many are residential. Some are industrial. The now-delayed Tokyo Olympics promised a worldwide debut for the bay area. The athletes village and most of the venues are on artificial islands.
But in Ota Ward, near the southern edge of Tokyo, there’s a different sort of artificial island. Here, there are no high-rise apartments, malls, or stadiums.
Just birds. Tons and tons of birds.
Near the end of the nineteenth century, the Tokugawa Shogunate collapsed after nearly 400 years of rule. The Tokugawa capital, Edo, was renamed Tokyo, and re-conceived as a national capital in the mold of the industrial countries of Europe and North America. As discussed in my videos on Hibiya Park and Kiba Park, government, banks, and big business set up shop in the areas just south of the Imperial Palace, whereas factories generally ended up east of the Sumida River.
But before long, the city decided that more river-adjacent land was needed to fuel its industrial growth. In the 1890s and early 1900s, the city built four islands across from Tsukiji. At the time, they were called Tsukishima No. 1, 2, 3, and 4.
The islands were filled with factories and warehouses. During the Russo-Japanese War, a ferry crossing was opened between Tsukiji and Tsukishima No. 2. The ferry was named “Kachidoki,” or “roar of victory,” to commemorate Japan’s victory over Russia at the Battle of Port Arthur. In 1940, the ferry was replaced by Kachidoki Bridge, the city’s first drawbridge (today, Tsukishima No. 2 and part of No.3 are called Kachidoki).
Meanwhile, to the south, the mainland was being extended into the bay to create 3 new industrial port areas: Takeshiba, Shibaura, and Higashi Shinagawa. The years between the early 1890s and the end of World War II mark Tokyo Bay’s “Industrial Period.” These decades overlap with Japan’s embrace of international trade, rapid industrialization, and imperialism. Tokyo found itself creating artificial islands to house factories and cargo ports.
The catastrophic end by World War II, which saw most of Tokyo destroyed by American firebombings, sowed the seeds of a a new utopian vision for Tokyo Bay. Between 1945 and 1960, Tokyo’s population nearly tripled: from 3.5 million to 10 million. In the late 1950s, the city government announced that it would encourage suburbanization to relieve the crowding.
In response, architect Tange Kenzo published his 1960 Plan for Tokyo. Whereas city planners had envisioned a constellation of satellite cities orbiting around Tokyo, Tange put forth a proposal that re-imagined Tokyo as a megastructure filled out with modular pieces: a vast network of highways, subways, and platforms stretching across Tokyo Bay from Ikebukuro in the northwest to Chiba Prefecture in the southeast. Tange argued that the megastructure could be expanded or contracted to accommodate population changes, and that the modules could be altered to reflect changes in technology and taste. His plan drew on the ideas of the Metabolist movement, which saw cities not as mechanical objects, but as dynamic organisms. This worldview was deeply informed by the 1923 Kanto Earthquake and the 1945 firebombings, which annihilated much of Tokyo twice within 22 years. In the words of Arata Isozaki, who worked on the Plan for Tokyo as a young architect in Tange’s studio:
Design, or architecture, becomes reality when it overlaps with its own extinction. The future city is ruins.
Tange's plan was never built, but we can see echoes of it in the highways and elevated trains that criss-cross the Tokyo Bay area today.
Between 1966 and 1970, Tokyo created several islands off the coast of Ota Ward. One island was meant to serve as a wholesale district. Plans were laid to move the city’s fish market there from Tsukiji. But the election of socialist governor Minobe Ryokichi in 1967 triggered a wave of environmental activism. In 1973, a citizen’s movement pressured Tokyo’s port authority to preserve and protect natural habits on the artificial islands. Their activism created a network of coastal parkland across the bay.
In 1978, plans for moving Tsukiji Market to the new island in Ota were scrapped. Instead, the port authority opened a small bird sanctuary called “Oi Seaside Park No. 7.” Five years later, activists launched a petition drive to expand the park. They collected 10,000 signatures. In 1989, the port authority opened an expanded bird sanctuary under a new name: The Tokyo Wild Bird Park.
The new park would be managed by the Wild Bird Society of Japan, with funding from the port authority. The Tokyo Wild Bird Park adopted the following mission statement:
Contribute to the restoration and conservation of Tokyo Bay’s inner wetland environments, and...provide a wide array of opportunities for everyday Tokyoites to encounter, learn about, and engage with the wetlands.
As its name suggests, the park places a special focus on preserving wetland habitats for migratory birds. By the 1970s and 80s, Tokyo Bay had lost many of its coastal wetlands. The bay sits at a half-way point along the north-south migratory paths of sandpipers and plovers. These migratory birds relied on Tokyo Bay’s wetlands as safe havens for eating and resting. Volunteers with the Wild Bird Society of Japan monitor the island’s wetlands, and undertake projects to make them more amenable for migratory birds. For example:to encourage little terns to build nests on the island, volunteers brought beach sand to the shoreline and played audio of their bird calls. Some volunteers plow the beaches to make it easier for birds to find food, while others cut down reed grasses before they can overtake the lagoons, where seagulls live. Volunteers also run exhibitions and educational programming, which have made the park Tokyo’s premiere bird watching spot.
In 1979, voters elected Suzuki Shunichi governor of Tokyo. Where Governor Minobe’s tenure was marked by progressive policies toward health care, the environment, and other quality of life issues, Suzuki was more concerned with solidifying Tokyo’s status as a global city friendly to international capital. To that end, he launched several public-private development projects. The biggest of these was the “Tokyo Waterfront Subcenter,” which began construction in 1989, just as the Tokyo Wild Bird Park was opening. The plan encompassed the artificial islands of Odaiba, Ariake, and Harumi. Tokyo built acres of shopping malls, a fleet of athletic stadiums, the Tokyo Big Sight convention center, And countless office buildings for big international corporations. Much of the bay area’s transportation infrastructure dates to this period too: the Rainbow Bridge, the Tokyo Port Tunnel, massive expressways, and elevated rail.
In the end, we’re left with something weirdly similar to Tange’s 1960 plan, at least on the surface. But it’s almost as if Tokyo only adopted Tange’s most short-sighted ideas–namely, his failure to imagine a post-car future. Save for the Yurikamome and Rinkai lines–which have a relatively short reach–transit in the bay area is completely reliant on automobiles. Since the development focused on office space, shopping malls, and stadia, nothing feels built to human scale. Walking the islands feels like being an ant. You scurry between super structures to the deafening roar of 4 lane highways.
Today, Suzuki’s vision for Tokyo Bay seems to have reached its apex in the form of the ultimate capitalist bonanza: The 2021 Olympic Games. The Tokyo Olympic Committee is headquartered in a tower complex on Harumi. A consortium of Japan’s wealthiest developers built the Olympic Athlete’s Village on a redeveloped segment of the same island. After the games, the developers will recoup their investment by marketing the apartments as luxury condos. Most of the competitions will happen at arenas scattered across Odaiba, Ariake, and the rest of the bay area. Sadly, because of the bay area’s poor transit, athletes will have to be bussed to every event. The former site of the Tsukiji fish market has been turned into a massive parking lot solely for storing and maintaining these buses.
In just a few short decades, it feels as though the vision of Tokyo Bay as a global capitalist playground has completely buried the environmental vision embodied by the Tokyo Port Wild Bird Park. If the Tokyo Olympics do end up happening, the bay area stands to gain even more notoriety.
In the 1970s and 80s, Tokyoites pressured their city and port authority to use artificial islands to restore natural habits damaged by the rapid growth of previous decades. Thereafter, real estate companies and their allies in government forced through a radically different vision: one devoted not to the public interest, but to real estate profits. In the words of urban critic Michael Sorkin, such public-private partnerships are always a “re-description of the public interest as the facilitation of private economic activity.”