Obsolescent Masculinity
Noritaka Minami, A905 I, 2018. From the series 1972.
Like a time-capsule, the photographs of the interiors of the Nakagin Capsule Tower units – shot by Noritaka Minami over the course of many years – transport me back in time to the Tokyo of the 1970s, where I spent my childhood. More immediately, they take me slightly less further back, to a time eight years ago when I rented a unit in Tower B.
On a suffocatingly humid day in July 2014, I rented capsule B907 on Airbnb from someone who said they had been active in the preservation movement for the Tower. I had been following the controversy over the Tower’s fate – which was, at the time, still up for debate – and found the arguments for its demolition as compelling as those for its preservation as a cultural monument. These duelling arguments are writ large in Minami’s photographs, which were taken from the early 2010s onwards and show the Tower’s capsules in an array of conditions. Some show units left to decay from water damage and neglect, while others capture those that had been diligently repaired and maintained by their owners. Back in 2014, I was struck by this disparity between the building’s futuristic aspirations and aesthetics, and the nostalgia that surrounded the preservation movement. With either preservation or demolition imminent, I was keen to witness the Tower firsthand before it reached the next phase of life.
Noritaka Minami, Facade, 2021. From the series 1972.
Following the unit owner’s instructions on Airbnb, I walked past the security guard at the front desk to retrieve the room key from a stainless-steel mailbox in the lobby. Riding the elevator with its bare lightbulbs, which emitted a blue glow on the stained grey carpet, the neglected state of the Tower became palpable. From the elevator landing, I spiralled up a few short flights of stairs, passing by doors covered with peeling paint, and makeshift plastic sheets and tubes that the residents had installed as drainage to divert the leaking water that plagued the two interconnected towers.
I turned the key to unit B907. In contrast to the dim stairways, reminiscent of neglected public housing towers built in post-war Tokyo, the unit’s interior struck me for its brightness. The cabinets had been recently painted white, and the original Sanyo mini refrigerator and fold-out desk were still intact. The host had written on the whiteboard that the bathroom had no hot water, and the shower and tub could not be used. The toilet flushed feebly. The rented unit exuded impressions of a bachelor pad – it may or may not have been wiped clean after the previous guest, with the towels perhaps freshly washed, but certainly not crisp.
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The Nagakin Capsule Tower opened in 1972 as one of a few built works by the Metabolists, a group of avant-garde Japanese architects who sought to develop a mode of non-Western modern architecture, basing their visions on the Japanese ideals of constant renewal and eternal adaptation. In the Metabolist spirit of continual growth, the architect Kisho Kurokawa designed the Nakagin Capsule Tower with a plan for its individual living units to be replaced every 25 to 35 years, while its concrete cores were estimated to last for more than 60 years. Now, 50 years since the Tower’s completion in 1972, none of the capsules have ever been replaced, and the building suffers from significant structural and cosmetic deterioration.
Noritaka Minami, A905 II, 2018. From the series 1972.
Kurokawa designed these capsules for a “homo-moven”, an elite businessman who would occupy the unit as a temporary residence and office in central Tokyo, allowing him to eliminate as much as 90 minutes of daily commuting time from his main home in Tokyo’s outskirts. The capsule was designed to be basic; the man’s other needs, including socialising and meals, could be fulfilled by the city. Like a well-appointed business hotel that could be purchased by individuals, or by companies for use by their employees, the building offered amenities including secretarial and housekeeping services. In the Tower’s deluxe units, built-in Sony colour televisions and stereos offered the latest in entertainment technology. The Tower has never provided cooking facilities. Instead, it has always housed food services on the ground floor. A café initially occupied this space, and later it was replaced by a convenience store that served bento boxes. Abundant eateries and pubs pack the streets and narrow allies surrounding Shimbashi Station a few blocks away.
“I was struck by the disparity between the building’s futuristic aspirations and aesthetics, and the nostalgia surrounding the preservation movement.”
There was a remarkable absence of women in the building during my stay. When I asked Minami if he had also noticed this during his visits there to photograph the building, he explained to me that even though women constituted around a fifth of the occupants, they were more reluctant than men to have a stranger enter and photograph their capsule. Even today, despite the deteriorating physical environment and the changed roles of women in Japanese society, the Tower remains largely a world of men, isolated in their capsules.
Noritaka Minami, A806, 2021. From the series 1972.
The Japanese masculinity of the 1970s emanates from the Tower’s original sales brochure published by its developer, Nakagin, and the promotional video produced by Taisei Construction Company. The video shows the architects – wearing pressed business suits and with cigarettes in their hands – presenting their visionary ideas of capsule living and novel construction methods: precast concrete panels and metal capsules, the latter fabricated by makers of the same shipping containers that travel the world for global commerce. These images remind me of my childhood on the west side of Tokyo, with a father who commuted in a dark suit, carrying a matching leather briefcase. Fathers of our generation came home after dinners and drinks with colleagues. I only knew of these salarymen’s working lives from photographs of their company gatherings and retreats, which consisted almost entirely of men – with the exception of a few female administrative assistants.
“The masculine ideals of the 1970s have reached obsolescence alongside the building.”
It was around the time of the Nakagin Capsule Tower’s completion that my father traveled to the US for the first time, to visit the headquarters of the 3M Company. He came back inspired to move his family there and, a decade later, he did. These were the decades of unbridled ambition and exponential economic growth in Japan; the world of men who rebuilt the country following the devastations of World War II. Metabolist architecture, which grew out of accommodating an unexpected surge in population across cities and the countryside, mirrors the wider population and economic boom in Japan. The Nakagin Capsule Tower is an embodiment of the far-reaching aspirations and utopian visions of Japanese men of this era, which have yet to return since the economic bubble began to burst in the late 1980s. Along with the fading ambitions and confidence of the men who built it and were its target market, the Tower has heavily deteriorated both physically and symbolically. Perhaps more significantly, the masculine ideals of the 1970s have reached obsolescence alongside the building. Compared to their fathers, the newer generation of Japanese men are generally thought to be less ambitious. There is a term for these men, “herbivore men” or “grass-eater men”, coined by the writer Maki Fukasawa. In both professional and romantic relations, these man are seen to lack the assertion and proactivity associated with traditional Japanese masculinity – a description sometimes applied pejoratively, but with which many self-identify. If they do choose to marry, more Japanese men now expect a home life in which they will share domestic chores as well as earning power with women – although surveys suggest they still lag behind men of other countries in time spent performing housework.
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As with most works of modern architecture, the Nakagin Capsule Tower has been iconised through the highly stylised photographs that were taken at the time of its completion. For nearly its first four decades, the Tower was publicised globally through these images from the 1970s, when it stood as the tallest building in a neighbourhood still populated with pre-war wooden low-rise buildings. Kurokawa, the youngest founding member of the Metabolists, was an outspoken public intellectual and a dapper cultural ambassador. He commanded the attention of the mainstream media and frequently appeared in weekly journals and women’s lifestyle magazines. On television, he addressed the public with his images and stories of Metabolist architecture and modern ways to live, work, and play. It was only decades later, around 2010 (the year that Minami first photographed the Tower), that images of deteriorating, water-damaged capsules began to alarm the architecture community worldwide. Suddenly, the Tower’s fate seemed precarious.
Noritaka Minami, A503 I, 2021. From the series 1972.
While architects, students, and Airbnb travellers started to broadcast the deteriorating condition of the Tower on blogs and websites, Minami’s photographs seized upon the quotidian details of the everyday work and diversions of its residents, who appear ambivalent or nonchalant about the preservation controversy. Minami stayed in the Tower 10 times between 2012 and 2021, sometimes for as long as six weeks in one go, building up relationships over the course of the decade – after all, he depended on the generosity and trust of the preservation activists and their network of residents to enter the intimate interiors of their capsules. Minami’s work unearthed the everyday lives within an iconic building; realities that stand in stark contrast to the architecture of spectacle and myths portrayed in the media and architecture publications.
“The impression that the units were mass-produced like cars is inaccurate. Minami’s images reveal handcrafted details.”
The capsules were stylised by design, always appearing as if a stage set for photography. Every capsule is 10sqm and has the same circular window, which serves as a datum and a constant backdrop for every interior photograph. Kurokawa drew an analogy to a camera whenever he described this glass oculus, which originally included a circular, folded-paper shade that opened and closed radially. In the 1993 documentary Kisho Kurokawa: From Metabolism to Symbiosis, the architect says that the oculus was “designed to have a mechanism resembling the shutter of a camera.” The window is visible from every point in the unit – except when one is in the bathroom. In the capsule I rented, with the paper shades long gone, I could not escape the eyes of neighbours who could see in through the oculus – a lack of privacy that I found intrusive and unsettling.
Noritaka Minami, A503 II, 2021. From the series 1972.
Besides resembling a pinhole camera, the capsule’s interior finishes amplify the short-lived, set-like quality that underscores the building’s overall impermanence. The capsules were manufactured by metal fabricators at Daimaru who typically built shipping containers – an apt symbol for a live-work capsule that Kurokawa envisioned as a mobile living unit which, in a near future, could also transport the human. In fact, in his ‘Capsule Declaration’ of 1969, he calls a variety of vehicles, ranging across the traditional Japanese palanquin to train cars and aircraft carriers, “capsules”. While the futuristic appearance of the capsules’ built-in cabinets with their modern electronics suggests a materiality of plastic or metal, the interior cladding and cabinets were, in fact, built by carpenters in plywood – a practical, affordable material with a relatively short lifespan that suited the planned obsolescence of the replaceable capsules. Indeed, the general impression that the units were mass produced like cars is inaccurate. Minami’s images reveal handcrafted details, such as the radius of rounded corners, that vary from one unit to another according to each carpenter. The photographs also show that the wood interior made the capsules prone to mould and deterioration from Tokyo’s humidity, exacerbated by poor plumbing design which ran pipes horizontally underneath each capsule.
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Minami’s photographs chart not only the building’s state of neglect and deterioration, but also the different ways in which each capsule and the artefacts inside reflect the idiosyncrasies and characters of each occupant. Before preservation activists amplified their efforts around 2013, the Tower’s occupants could be categorised into three groups: those who were there for practical purposes, including its convenient location; those who had no other choice but to rent a unit in a dilapidated tower; and those who took an interest in its historical significance. The most intriguing unit interiors are not those that attempt to restore the original conditions, or the ones furnished with minimalist décor, but those of the first two types of occupants.
Noritaka Minami, A503 II, 2017. From the series 1972.
One of the units Minami photographed belonged to a fish broker. Unlike the owners of units who chose to furnish their spaces with Rem Koolhaas books, iMacs, or mid-century modern furniture, the fish broker does not appear to have been concerned with his capsule’s aesthetics. He has replaced the built-in cabinets with a large utilitarian desk and metal wire shelving from which headphones and work-related papers hang. Behind the desk are folded blankets and activewear atop a bed covered in a fabric featuring teddy bear and apple patterns, over which hang a few more casual garments, a helmet, and belts. A poster of saltwater fish and a map of Tokyo Metro crowd the wall. I wondered if the trader chose the Tower for its proximity to the Tsukiji fish market, but Minami said it was picked for its access to public transportation and Ginza’s nightlife. In a 2017 photograph of unit B506, which appears abandoned, a cut-out map of Japan covers the unit door. On the dust-covered cabinet is a white construction worker helmet. Was this a temporary home for a construction worker who migrated across the Japanese archipelago? Like a detective’s crime-scene photographs, Minami’s shots leave only fragmentary clues about the lives lived by the recent homo-movens; artefacts left in the nearly abandoned Tower seem to belie the business-suit masculinity the architect and his client projected at the building’s completion.
“I could not bear the heat, humidity and lack of privacy; the fluorescent light from the adjacent expressway; and the deprivation of basic human comforts.”
Just prior to the pandemic, a foreign investor expressed interest in buying the Tower to preserve it, but these plans ultimately fell through. Now, in 2022, the capsules will be disassembled over the coming months and distributed to museums around the world or turned into rental units, and the owner will demolish the concrete cores and erect a new building on the plot. That the capsules will travel the world as Kurokawa imagined, but through having reached obsolescence, is an irony. I wonder about the capsules shipped across the world: will they be cleaned and restored to their original state? When Rachel Whiteread cast the interior of an East London row house as an act of protest at their demolition, the ashes left in the cast chimney of House (1993) marked the lives once lived within its wall. Similarly, the capsules as they stand – with their leaking ceilings, dusty umbrellas, and exposed asbestos – convey more of the realities and subjectivities experienced by the Tower and its occupants than a restored capsule ever could.
Noritaka Minami, Bridge, 2021. From the series 1972.
In her book Maintenance Architecture, the architect Hilary Sample writes that architects have treated the maintenance of buildings with indifference, and that contemporary culture privileges architecture in its original form over the lived experience of it. In the case of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, for a variety of reasons (including a lack of funds and difficulties in accessing the capsules with a crane to replace them), the developers neglected to maintain and replace the units. Without systematic maintenance, including unit replacements, the capsules could not evolve to match changing work cultures, gender roles, and domestic lives. At a moment when the building’s demolition is now inevitable, Minami’s photographs capture the lived experience of a tower that has reached obsolescence both physically and as a symbol of masculine dreams.
The night of my stay in unit B907, I could not bear the heat, humidity and lack of privacy; the glaring fluorescent light from the adjacent elevated expressway; and the deprivation of basic human comforts we have come to expect – hot water, a functioning shower, and a sense of safety for a woman traveling alone. At 2am, I searched online for a room at a Marriott a few blocks east and escaped down a stairway that appeared abandoned and unsafe, and out past the front desk, now unmanned after-hours. The next day, at 6am, I returned to the Tower to photograph it in daylight and return the key.
Words Aki Ishida
Photographs Noritaka Minami
This article was originally published in Disegno #32. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.