Tokyo After the Next Ash

A Prologue to New Narratives and a New Era of Health

I have been spending the past few days based in the office district of central Tokyo, and with each passing year my impression that this is an unhealthy city grows stronger. Unhealthy is a word with many layers, but put simply I mean that nothing has changed in roughly the past ten years. The role Tokyo once played as Japan’s great metropolis was to transform itself faster than any other city in the world. To put it in extreme terms, the city you saw a year ago and the city you saw today were entirely different places. That was Tokyo’s greatest attraction through the 1990s.

This quality was unlike that of global cities such as New York or London, and it was inseparable from Tokyo’s history of being periodically reset. Even looking only at the last hundred years or so, the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923 and the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 both reduced the city to nothing. Each time, the city that had turned to ash was rebuilt within decades. Destruction and regeneration, over and over.

This quality of periodic forced reset is something that global cities like New York and London do not possess. Each time Tokyo was reset it was reborn as an entirely different city. But since the last reset, the 1945 firebombing, more than eighty years have passed without another. Like the Japanese population itself, now deep into a super-aged society, the city feels as though it has simply grown old. Everything has slowed down. The image is of a city that no longer knows where it is wandering in relation to the rest of the world.