On the bus ride from Narita Airport to the Hotel Okura in Tokyo last April, I noticed something peculiar and touching — rows upon rows of trees, gently propped up with wooden braces. What care these limbs get! What attention is paid to the crooked and the lame! I saw many such struts for many such trees throughout Japan — in parks, in cities, on sidewalks, on highways.
But after a while those wooden crutches began to grate, for there seemed to be a double standard at work. Trees in Japan get the kind of tenderness that some buildings, even irreplaceable ones, can only dream of. I was thinking in particular of the Okura, one of Tokyo’s architectural treasures, which has a date with the wrecking ball this September. Where is the love?
When our bus pulled up to the Okura, on a small hill in the Toranomon district, it was dusk, and the exterior of the hotel was almost surreally beautiful, with its several stories of blue grids set at a slight angle above the yellow glow from behind the geometric grillwork that frames the hotel’s entrance. The porters from the hotel bowed to the departing, empty bus, as if it were going on some strange and dangerous mission.
Inside the lobby, long, yellow, beehive-like lamps — they look like a hybrid of Japanese pendant lanterns and lighted geodesic domes — hung down over a double-height room, softly punctuated with round tables and chairs designed to look like plum blossoms. Suited men leaned in over the low tables; a few women moved about in kimonos. The scene was backlit by a grid of window screens. A map on the wall showed the time zones of various cities, among them Leningrad. It looked like 1962, except for the tourists taking selfies. Near the check-in desk was a grid of wooden mail-slots, some of which had real paper messages in them. How Japanese, how modern! Paper messages. Lanterns. Grids.
The Hotel Okura, built in 1962 in time for the 1964 Olympics, is slated to be torn down in September to make way for a bigger, fancier Okura, in time for the 2020 Olympics. (The less-good, less-famous southern wing of the old Okura, added in 1973, will be allowed to stay.) The replacement will be two towers with hotel rooms, retail and office space. To add Oedipal insult to injury, the architect for the new Okura is Yoshio Taniguchi, the designer of the most recent addition to MoMA in New York and the son of one of the architects of the midcentury Okura, Yoshiro Taniguchi.
To an outsider like me, this is almost incomprehensible. Isn’t Japan known for revering the old? Isn’t it home to Horyu-ji, the Buddhist temple in Nara Prefecture that includes some of the oldest timber-frame structures in the world? How could this happen here?
I quickly learned that to those more familiar with the Japanese cityscape, the Okura’s impending destruction is anything but an anomaly. Eric Mumford, an architecture professor and the author of “Defining Urban Design,” told me in an email: “In East Asia, the mainstream attitude toward old buildings is more or less like ours about old clothes. The idea is that once something built gets old and worn, it loses value, becomes unsanitary, and should probably be replaced. Most of Tokyo today only dates back to the 1980s for this reason. Really important buildings in Japan, (like, famously, the Ise Shrine,) are regularly rebuilt in the same form, but with new materials.”
Seng Kuan, an architectural historian at Washington University in St. Louis, who spends part of each year in Tokyo, wasn’t shocked either. “It hardly came as a surprise,” he said. “Tokyo has become a far more vertical city than even 10 years ago, spearheaded largely by Mori and Mitsubishi, two of Japan’s largest developers, so the economic pressure is enormous. Of course I am saddened by the loss, but frankly no more so than with any other episode of urban metabolism we see in a vibrant city like Tokyo.”
Really? Why tear down a hotel that’s not only unique but famous and popular, too? Since 1962, when it was completed, the Okura has been a favorite landing spot for stars and a watering hole for Japanese government officials and for the folks working at the American Embassy, across the street. Madonna, Michael Jackson and Harrison Ford all stayed at the Okura, and almost every post-1960s American president visited it. It has been the backdrop for some notable books and movies, too: In Ian Fleming’s novel “You Only Live Twice,” it’s where James Bond stays, and it figures in the opening scenes of Cary Grant’s last movie, “Walk Don’t Run.”
The Okura is an unrepeatable hybrid — Japanese yet worldly Modernist, with a character all its own and yet completely of its time. It went up during a fragile moment in Japan’s history, when the country was still rebuilding after World War II, but no longer under American occupation. “I’ve always found the modern/Japanese character of this hotel very moving. It’s both traditional and forward looking, culturally specific but very international,” said Cherie Wendelken, a historian of Japanese architecture. Now, though, that unreplicable moment in building form must make way for a new Okura designed around the thought of maximizing profits.
There is hue and there is cry. Monocle magazine has an online petition to “Save the Okura,” and Tomas Maier, the creative director of Bottega Veneta, the luxury goods company, has urged people who love the Okura to take selfies and post them on Instagram under the hashtag#mymomentatokura. And Docomomo, an international group for preserving modern architecture, has highlighted the Okura’s plight.
But even in Japan — or rather especially in Japan — the protesters’ battle cry is almost inaudible, as if absorbed by the Okura’s thick carpeting. “I hope they succeed, but I would be shocked if they did,” Mr. Kuan said. “Most of the rooms in the Okura have become very tired, and simply cannot compete with the far glitzier newcomers to Tokyo’s luxury hotel scene like Peninsula and Aman.”
Besides, he added, “there are more important and interesting battles out there, such as Zaha Hadid’s Olympic stadium,” which is supposed to replace the Modernist stadium designed by Mitsuo Katayama for the 1964 Olympics. The new stadium, monstrously huge and weirdly shaped, is expected to cost $1.37 billion. It’s also expected to ruin the neighborhood.
This is not the first time Japan has destroyed a Modernist work of architecture. Kenzo Tange’s Akasaka Prince Hotel, built in 1982, was recently demolished. And before that, there was the demolition that’s now known as “Japan’s Penn Station Moment” — in 1968 Frank Lloyd Wright’s grand, sprawling, Mayan-inspired Imperial Hotel, which opened in 1923, was razed to make way for a corporate monstrosity, which still stands. (Japan doesn’t hide such losses. Indeed, it memorializes them. A small chunk of Wright’s old Imperial sits like a tombstone just behind the lobby of the new Imperial.)
Although certain Modernist structures in Japan have escaped such a fate — the Hiroshima World Peace Memorial Cathedral (1953, by Murano), the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (1955, by Tange) and the National Museum of Western Art (1959, by Le Corbusier) — the Okura is not on the lucky list of cultural properties worthy of preservation.
What in the world can explain Japan’s apathy — bordering on antipathy — toward the Okura? One possible reason, only hinted at, is that although the hotel was designed by Japanese architects and craftsmen, it might yet be construed in Japan as a touch Orientalist. That is, the Okura’s much-beloved harmony of Japanese and Modernist design might be read as blurring the difference between the two, making the East seem less foreign and, as Edward W. Said wrote in “Orientalism,” “less fearsome” to the West.
For whatever reason, the Okura seems to be an acceptable loss to Japan. It is not purely Japanese enough, nor purely Modernist enough, to be saved. It is not a temple, not a tree, not a neighborhood, not a monument, not new enough, not old enough. It’s only obvious if you see it in person that the Okura’s end would mean not just the end of a building, but also the end of an idea and the end of an atmosphere and a topography.
There will never be this particular hush again in the middle of Tokyo. You will have to have been there to know what you will soon miss. If nothing is done, by summer’s end the last guests will leave and the last porter will bow the last bus out.
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