WORDS Robert Silke PHOTO Supplied
Weaving together Surrealism, Modernism, bathing and the iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower, architect Robert Silke tells the story of a trip to Tokyo for our new series called VISI Voices.
Our first trip to Japan is now a surreal and dreamlike memory, a frail and ephemeral record of events, subtly evermore corrupted by fantasy each time I should dream of Tokyo.
Our brain is a far-from-reliable storage medium, and studies indicate that we are constantly rewriting our own memories, compressing multiple characters into one, and casting ourselves as heroes in our own narratives. Six years on, our Japanese trip seems to have been a dreamworld of ¥7 000 outsized cherries, petting cafés stocked with Valium- drugged cats, iris-enlarging contact lenses, and spindly, futuristic micro-towers with only one fire escape.
Out of a haze of cherry-blossom and matcha ice-cream cones, flickering neon lights, and obsessively gridded bathroom wall tiles, my most abiding memories are the onsen (traditional hot-water-spring baths), super-sento (theme park baths), and my personal pilgrimage to the condemned Nakagin Capsule Tower building – where I was able to get inside a time capsule micro-apartment.
As a modern architect, I wanted to go to Japan because it seems to be the most modern place in the world, and also the most ancient. To understand Tokyo – and to understand Modernism – is to understand cleanliness. Modernism (white with “clean lines”) is all about hygiene. Before Modernism, buildings barely had bathrooms or kitchens. Today, it seems they only have bathrooms and kitchens. In addition to its memorable robo-douche commode, our 15m2 Shinjuku hotel room had a bath and a separate shower – because, to the Japanese, bathing without showering first is filthy and savage, while showering without bathing is joyless and savage.
The 10m2 capsules of Nakagin Tower didn’t even have kitchens, but of course had both showers and baths – at least on paper. A Metabolist building wears its innards on the outside (like the hi- tech Lloyd’s of London), but Nakagin’s Metabolism was running still. By the time we’d made it to Kisho Kurokawa’s 1972 tower of Babel, the hot-water reticulation had collapsed and the remaining residents were queuing in their dressing gowns for the porta-shower that was erected by the body corporate on the sidewalk outside.
But the Japanese (like the ancient Romans) are okay with bathing in front of others – public bathhouses are a backbone of social cohesion. Men young and old (and, separately, women young and old) use the bathhouse as a social condenser. With no clothes or jewellery, all men are equal; even tattoos are strictly forbidden. While the tattoo ban is often attributed to a fear of the underworld, there is a more fundamental issue: tattoos undermine the anonymity and egalitarianism of the bathhouse. The young are there to reassure the old of continuity; the old are there as a memento mori to the young. There is no status in the bathhouse, and a man in a bathhouse is no more naked than a bison subsumed into the herd.
The Japanese bathhouse is all about the ritual of cleanliness. You are issued with fresh slippers, used solely for the purpose of walking to the lavatory without contaminating your feet or (more importantly) the baths themselves. And they keep close track of where you go in those slippers. (Contrast that with the river of filth through which you wade barefoot to get to and from the showers of your average local gym.) But bathhouse culture is now said to be a dying pastime even in Japan (something attributed to the declining population), and the Nakagin Capsule Tower was demolished – or disassembled, rather – in April 2022. The Japanese seem to have no sentimentality for the built environment; most buildings are regarded as disposable.
It is said that the great earthquake cities – those located on tectonic fault lines, such as San Francisco and Tokyo – are imbued with a sense of ephemerality and impending doom: cities on the precipice of deadly renewal. When we finally get back to Japan, we may well find nothing of what we remember. | robertsilke.com
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