Tokyo · 1912–1948 · materials
The city's survivors are not the things that refused to burn. They are the things nobody could turn into a weapon.
Everyone knows Tokyo burned in 1945. Fewer people notice that the city was sieved three times in twenty-two years — by an earthquake, by a war, and by a scrap-metal collection order — and that each sieve had a different mesh. Once you know what each one caught, you can look at almost any pre-war object in Tokyo and work out why it is still there.
In October 1944 the government came for the metal. Under the metal collection order, bronze statues, temple bells, railings and fences across the country were requisitioned and melted down for the war. This is why so many pedestals in Japanese parks look slightly too big for what is standing on them.
Twenty-one years earlier, the Great Kantō Earthquake had taken the wood — not by shaking it down, but by setting it alight. And in March and April 1945 the firebombing took most of what was left of the wooden city.
Three filters, three different materials. Put them together and the rule for what survives in Tokyo comes out almost mechanical.
Kamiya Bar has been selling its own spirit — Denki Bran, "electric brandy" — since 1882, and took its current name in April 1912. The building it still occupies went up in 1921, and it was the first reinforced-concrete structure in Asakusa.
Two years later the earthquake burned the district down around it. The building was registered as a national tangible cultural property in 2011. You can walk in and order the same drink at the same address, in a room that made a bet on concrete before anyone in the neighbourhood had a reason to.
Kanda Myōjin burned in the 1923 earthquake. When it was rebuilt in 1934, to a design by Itō Chūta, it was not rebuilt in wood. The new hall was steel-reinforced concrete, moulded into the traditional gongen-zukuri shape — a fireproof building dressed as a wooden one, which at the time was close to heresy.
It was registered as a national tangible cultural property in 2003. Stand close and knock on it, metaphorically: this is a shrine that survived the war because somebody, eleven years earlier, decided that authenticity was worth less than not burning down twice.
The reconstruction after 1923 produced a run of bridges over the Sumida river that are still the most confident pieces of engineering in Tokyo.
Eitai Bridge was completed on 20 December 1926. Kiyosu Bridge followed in March 1928 — 186.2 metres, and nicknamed "the flower of the reconstruction". They were designed as a pair and they still read as one.
Then, in June 1940, Kachidoki Bridge opened downstream: a double-leaf bascule bridge, 246 metres long and about 26 metres wide, with a 51.6-metre movable span — the largest in the country and, at the time, called the finest movable bridge in the East.
All three were designated Important Cultural Properties on 18 June 2007 — the first prefectural road bridges in Japan to be. Eitai was repaired the same year to a hundred-year target. They are not monuments. You drive over them.
Out in a residential part of Setagaya, two identical towers stand joined by a truss bridge, looking like something from a European hill town. They were completed in 1924, to a design by Nakajima Eiji, and they no longer supply water — the facility's function has been suspended and it is kept as an emergency reserve tank.
Which means they had every reason to be demolished and were not. Setagaya ward named them a local landscape asset in December 2002, and the Japan Society of Civil Engineers recognised them as a heritage structure in 2012. A neighbourhood decided to keep two obsolete towers because it liked looking at them.
The Hachikō statue outside Shibuya Station was first put up in 1934, by the sculptor Andō Teru. In October 1944 it was requisitioned under the metal collection order, melted down, and turned into parts for a locomotive.
In August 1948 a second statue was installed. It was made by Andō Takeshi — the first sculptor's son.
That pair is the whole argument of this article in two objects, a few kilometres apart, made in the same year. The most photographed statue in Tokyo is a post-war replacement of a pre-war statue, standing in the same spot, by the same family. Nobody standing in that crowd is told this, and there is no sign explaining it.
The red brick railway viaduct at Manseibashi was completed in 1912. Its station closed in 1943 and never reopened, but the 1912 staircase is still there and you can climb it, and the viaduct itself is still carrying Chūō line trains over your head while you do. Brick, again. It has now outlived the railway service it was built for by more than eighty years.
This is a walk about materials, which means a lot of it is standing on a pavement looking at a wall. There is no ticket, no exhibition, and no one to tell you any of this on site. If you need a destination rather than an idea, this will feel thin.
The two Komazawa towers and Hachikō are in different directions from everything else — Setagaya and Shibuya respectively — so a single day realistically covers Asakusa, Manseibashi, Kanda and the Sumida bridges, and leaves the other two for another time.
And the neat rule in the first diagram is a rule of thumb, not a law. Plenty of wooden buildings survived in places the fires never reached, and plenty of concrete came down for reasons that had nothing to do with either the earthquake or the war. Use it as a first question, not an answer.