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Focus features two in-depth reviews each month of fine art, architecture and design exhibitions and events at art museums, galleries and alternative spaces around Japan. The contributors are non-Japanese art critics living in Japan. |
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Centennial Celebration at Tokyo Station Gallery
Susan Rogers Chikuba |
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The Marunouchi side of Tokyo's gateway terminal turned 100 in December, a milestone marked throughout the building and with an omnibus retrospective at Tokyo Station Gallery. Left: Photo by Susan Rogers Chikuba; Right: Tokyo Station and the Beauty woodblock print by Shuho Yamakawa, 1942, The Railway Museum |
If you've passed through Tokyo Station even briefly over the past few months, you know that centennial celebrations are underway -- there are banners, posters, and commemorative foods and souvenirs everywhere. The iconic red-brick building on the station's west side opened to the public in December 1914, and the current exhibition at Tokyo Station Gallery leaves no brick unturned in its thoroughgoing review of the building's life since then.
An illustration of Tokyo Station by Hatsusaburo Yoshida from a popular 1924 travel guide, Tokyo Station Gallery |
In fact the exhibits, curated by gallery director Akira Tomita, go back even farther, illumining the late-1800s urban planning debates that eventually led to the decision for the station's construction and the hiring of architect Kingo Tatsuno. Tatsuno came on board after Franz Balzer, the architect who drew up the first plans and elevation schemes for the building, was dismissed. It's an interesting footnote of history: directly facing the Imperial Palace, the new central terminal was from the outset conceived as both a gateway to the city and a monument for international prestige. Balzer, a German, envisioned a station that reflected Japanese traditions of status as seen in Edo-period architecture, but the Meiji government, wanting something modern, hired a Japanese to deliver a "more suitable" Renaissance style.
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A telling sample of Meiji-era architecture, this collage of Kingo Tatsuno's major works brought together in one fictional setting was painted by Keiji Goto in 1916 and presented to Tatsuno by his students to mark his 60th birthday. The white building in the center is the head office of the Bank of Japan, still standing in Nihonbashi; Tokyo Station is seen in the background at right. Tatsuno Family private collection |
A dominant figure in the Meiji architectural world, Tatsuno taught many aspiring architects at the Tokyo Imperial University Technical College, now the University of Tokyo Faculty of Engineering. When completed, his three-story station building spanned 335 meters in length, an unprecedented size for a Western-style structure in Japan at the time. Some 11,000 wooden piles and 3,157 tons of steel went into its foundation alone; in addition to nearly nine million structural bricks, some 940,000 decorative ones were used. With granite ticket counters and octagonal rotundas at either end capped by vaulted domes sheathed in copper plating, it spoke boldly of a new kind of architecture for a nation and capital bent on modernization.
One delight of this museum's exhibitions is enjoying how the building itself is a showcase of history.
Photos by Susan Rogers Chikuba |
There's plenty on display, and for architecture buffs especially there are countless treats, among them original blueprints; Tatsuno's sketchbooks from his travels; a carpentered segment of a timber truss recovered from the five-year restoration begun in 2007; and an impressive trio of dioramas showing the station and surrounding Marunouchi district in 1:500 scale as they appeared at the 50-year intervals of 1914, 1964, and 2014. These were created with painstaking accuracy by architectural students from three separate universities, who pored over archival blueprints for every building that stood in the area. The 1914 diorama includes even the tiny octagonal police box (now an exhibit at Meiji-Mura in Aichi Prefecture) that once stood outside the south dome it echoes in form.
An entire room is given over to a fascinating 1:200 model by yet another group of students, led by Keisuke Tamura of the Department of Environmental Design at Showa Women's University. This work, suspended from the ceiling, recreates the labyrinth of stairwells and passages linking all of the rail and subway platforms on the Marunouchi side today, as seen from underground. "In fact the subterranean network extends even farther in two directions all the way to Otemachi and Higashi-Ginza," Tamura notes in the accompanying caption. This mole's-eye view, literally placing one at the station's underbelly, is an impressive counterpart to the bird's-eye perspectives offered by the dioramas. Together these exhibits show why those who run the terminal call it Tokyo Station City. Thirty-six times the size of Tokyo Dome, and sprawling both above and below ground as it serves 1.1 million ticketholders daily, it really is a metropolis unto itself.
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Tokyo Station by Koshiro Onchi, 1931, woodblock print, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
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Still other displays recount the many roles the station building has played in the public consciousness over the years through literature, film, painting, photography, manga, and current events -- including two assassinations and the inaugural run of the Hikari bullet train in 1964. The latter achievement marked the station's 50th year with real hoopla, linking Tokyo and Osaka in just four hours. (Today's Nozomi cars make the trip in two-and-a-half, and the experimental Maglev trains are projected to shave the time to one hour by 2045. Will we ever slow down?) Lovers of Japanese literature will appreciate the mini-anthology of 23 excerpts -- evocative sentences, really -- from novels and essays in which the station has been the setting for some memorable scenes.
Having withstood the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 with no casualties, and bounced back into service just two days after a 1945 firebomb destroyed its two domes and top floor, the red-brick building faced what may have been its greatest threat in the postwar years, when it was an oft-debated target for the wrecking ball amid shortsighted development schemes. Thankfully the structure prevailed, leaving this capital with a distinguished piece of its architectural legacy intact. Far from a mere transit point, today it's an attraction in its own right, with a mind-boggling array of food and shopping options located within the ticket gates. One can only imagine what the next 100 years will bring.
Sights of Tokyo: The Foreground of Tokyo Station, 1920, lithograph, Tokyo Station Gallery |
Hardcore rail enthusiasts and history buffs should take note of two concurrent shows marking the centennial. The Railway Museum in Saitama looks in depth at the urban planning that led to Tokyo Station's creation, introducing the engineers, architects, and builders behind the project. And the Railway History Exhibition Hall, Old Shimbashi Station, examines how shopping, daytrips, and other early-Taisho entertainments boomed upon Tokyo Station's opening in 1914. (Some things never change!) These exhibitions run through February 16 and March 22 respectively.
Photographs are published by permission of Tokyo Station Gallery and East Japan Railway Company.
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Susan Rogers Chikuba
Susan Rogers Chikuba, a Tokyo-based writer, editor and translator, has been following popular culture, architecture and design in Japan for 25 years. She covers the country's travel, real estate, hospitality and culinary scenes for domestic and international publications. |
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