the tower

mount fuji is supposed to be visible from tokyo on clear days, in southwestern direction. but during those previous two months I could never catch a glimpse of japan’s highest. most japanese I met have never climbed it. “it’s a mountain to look at, not to climb"...



shinjuku station, tokyo, saturday night, around 7pm. it has been raining the whole day, most of japan is covered by the wet tail of a typhoon. but we don’t have much of a choice – the seventeen huts along the six hours hiking trail close after august, so this weekend is our last chance. coworker katosan and and his girlfriend maki join us. from shinjuku, a bus takes us directly to gō gō-me (“the fifth station”), halfway up the volcano, in the dark. just like most hikers we choose to climb fujisan at night, to reach the summit for the classic sunrise. I’ll be on top of mount fuji before having seen it. no one of us has ever hiked at night before. we’re all excited. it’s around ten thirty when we leave the last vending machines behind.


fifth station vending machines

after a while, we switch off our headlights, and let our eyes adjust to the night. pure magic. dark outlines of measureless valleys and slopes, veiled in mist, fresh smell of wet trees and rock, silence, only a light drizzle.

climbing out of the forest, we get a wider lens on the situation. looking back, the lights of other climber’s torches resemble a line of fireflies trailing up the volcano scree. and up, way up, the lights of the huts suggest something huge. impossible to get an idea of depth or height. very hard to describe.





up there

heavy “how did they get those up here” steel bearing walls and stabilizing structures shape the highway to heaven. here and there, steps are cut out of the rock, or handrails are provided. the higher we get, the more fujisan feels like a man made structure, like the steps up to a shrine for giants. reminds me of the tower, one of schuiten’s “obscure cities”, based on breugel’s tower of bable. as opposed to breugel, who presents the tower as a gigantic structure in the distance, schuiten takes us inside and tells the story of giovanni batista, a lonely maintainer of a tiny part of the tower. batista only knows his little world, suspended between abyss and towering heights. he sends regular reports to his superiors on the upper levels, and awaits a visit from them. up to a certain day, when he decides to leave his sector and find out what’s going on above. don’t remember if batista finally made it to the top, but I definately remember the dark and overwhelming power of the unknown ‘up there’.

these are the things one thinks about during the first couple of hours.
but gradually air gets thinner, heads lighter, rains heavier. the path changes from a relatively gently climbing dirt road to a steap staircase of sharp lava rocks. and gets more crowded - you'll never walk alone on mount fuji. tomo loses balance once but holds on.
our ridiculously thin raincoats are no match for the rain. we get completely soaked. another hour or so later, I can only think of the freezing cold, of the next rock to place my foot on, and of the freezing cold.


hiking buddies katosan and makisan

I’ll never forget tomo’s face in my headlight as we’re trying to think straight and decide what to do, under the dripping awning of a hut. superpale, eyes and lips purple, shaking. sure mine looked exactly the same. but we’re lucky. unlike all the previous huts, this one has some empty beds. decision is made very quickly. staying up for the rest of the night in this apocalypse is not an acceptable alternative to a wooden roof, a bunk bed, a sleeping bag, and a dry t-shirt...

sunday morning, 7am, check out time. we slowly realize where we are. eighth station, at 3100m, still at least two hours from the top. it’s still raining, even more... intensity. the air is brighter, of course, but the visibility is hardly better than on the way up. not much of a sunrise we missed.






soon we start the descent. a little demanding for my brandnew right ankle ligaments. agile samurai katosan skips down the path. with a decent eighth station raincoat and my feet wrapped in plastic bags it’s easier to forget the rain though. incredible how badly prepared we were for this trip.


fujinautes trailing back to the fifth station

but no excuses. we're defeated by fujisan. back home, I realize I still haven’t even seen the mountain. revenge next year.

wesley

wesley willis died one year ago.
recording artist of more than 50 albums, chicago cityscape artist, rock ‘n’ roll working class dog to the max, ridiculed by the howard sterns of this world, loved like a milkshake by the others. introduced to me by transam bike buddy justin as a “thug”, and since then occupying a special place in my pantheon.

“His songs are simultaneously disturbing, hilarious, blunt, and intoxicating. Wesley's sheer excitement and unaffected honesty about every cultural phenomenon, from a city bus ride to McDonald's, coupled with a refreshingly wacky sense of humor, define his music as truly individual.”

wesley’s page (with free mp3s) at alternative tentacles records
wesley willis lyrics
wesley willis tribute “Loved Like a Milkshake”
wesley willis paintings

a night in ginza

tokyo international forum, designed by rafael viñoly, a ten years old bubble economy fantasy. again a clear concept at work: a giant glassy wedge of public nothingness, with vertiginous overpasses (gloriously empty), combined with a high density complex of meeting rooms and auditoriums and related facilities (hyperfull). all of this crammed into one of tokyo’s busiest shopping districts, but very fluently connected to all the different levels of the surrounding city. from around, the roof structure looks like a giant whale skeleton..



just a couple of steps from viñoly’s whale, robata (“near the fireplace”) is known as one of tokyo’s most atmospheric restaurants. indeed, the wood of the interior and the staff all seem to be aromatized by the steaming dishes. was all of japan like this a hundred years ago? is this real?



robata is organized as an open kitchen, big wooden bowls full of delicacies displayed around it. but don’t get me started on food guys. tokyo food is worth a serparate blog, with two postings a day.



yurakucho (“fun town”) has tons of small yakitori restaurants under the train tracks. feels a lot like bangkok. close but opposite to ginza, high end long established shopping district, rather dead at night according to tokyo’s standards.



around midnight, a ginza pachinko (slot machine paradise) closes for the day. customers in white shirts queuing all around the coffee bar to cash their fortune.

kashi 911

moore - "I won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival"
bush - "I lost Best Actor"
"in newspapers, on television, on the radio, in magazines - don't believe what you're told about bush. go see this movie"
"for all the japanese who believe in freedom"
kashi 911 official website

get ready for the republican convention in new york and download cleaned up high res graffiti templates of bush and moore!

lofts in translation

corey (left) and alex (right) in a nutshell: graduated from mArch columbia in may, infamous from the NY architectural league housing exhibition (remember spending half a day along that huge timeline running through the whole show, well that’s alex and corey), now on asian travels with a kinne scholarship. ‘capitalizing’ on their new york housing experience, they’re comparing SOHO units in beijing and tokyo. SOHO stands for ‘Small Office at HOme’, a popular apartment typology for emerging economies and capsular societies. or for hiding mistresses and drugs and yakuza monkey fights, as they are finding out... lofts in translation. kinne deluxe actually – while setting up contacts in asia, they were offered a job for june and july in chengdou, central china. after japan, they’re going back to new york (eyes to the ground, slightly sighing), to start working with the league on the publication of their timeline.



but yesterday no capitalizing, just some beeru and grilled delicacies in the shibuya yakitori places, next to the train tracks, hardly big enough for two new york giants.
great talks, familiar sounds, strikingly parallel experiences - in suspension between new york and asia and housing projects in china...

la strada

pieter asked me to “keep my eyes open” for possible business plans in tokyo. an interesting perspective – I don’t really look at the world through business glasses. of course, everything already exists here. maybe more so than anywhere else. still the margin seems large enough for initiative – I see a lot of relatively young people setting up their own business. a couple of stains for example, especially in daykanyama and nakameguro, trendy neighborhoods around the office.
for a while I thought a good take out pizzeria could be something to start with for pieter. preferably around the office. tomo agreed, as long as he would capitalize on his "wild" (sic) physical assets... but the other day, pizzeria "la strada" landed right outside our front door, its small sign saying “fresh hand made pizza, please allow ten minutes for preparing”.


45°C where katosan is walking


300°C where the pizzaman is working


check out the details... two pizzas are ready, neatly wrapped in customized bags

and... the pizza was delicious, without mayonaise, unlike most of its japanese nephews. but don’t give up hopes pieter - from krista and fara I know competition is good for a business.

on a bus ride to immigration, I talked to an australian guy who set up business in tokyo a couple of years ago. he’s selling fresh dutch cookies, mainly to hotels and restaurant buffets.
he confirmed that strong concepts and good products go a long way here.



jan's guide to tokyo business
> choose a specific concept (a parisian bakery, a leuven bar, an upper east side chocolate house, an milanese risotteria) and make no compromises
> don’t translate, even if the result is completely cryptical to most of your potential customers
> invest in design to construct your concept on a couple of square meters

hanabi

this morning heavy summer rains passed through the city, and temperature dropped to 28.5°C. a row of 40 consecutive manatsubi ("real summer days", with maximum temperatures higher than 30°C) has been brought to an end. still a record in the history of the empire.


seaside skyscraper
tokyo gets hotter every year, according to long term inhabitant kobayashi. and the statistics seem to prove him right (1995 held the previous record, with 37 manatsubi). there's very few green holes in tokyo's huge concrete and asphalt slab. air conditioners heat up the outside air. and chunky skyscrapers at the seaside (one by 'green architect' rogers by the way) prevent ocean winds to come in. add this up and you get 'tokyo heat island'. but today no complaints...

update! kijk eens daar, de standaard leest mee, of "my name is kobayashi. I work for de standaard" hotspot tokyo!



wakisan, next to tomo, in yukata
on saturday, we went firework spotting from wakisans balcony. some of you might recognize my mojito mixing shirt - unfortunately no fresh mint in town so no mojitos, and no tokyo budina launching event. made pineapple cocktails instead... hanabi ("flower fire") festivals are big here, almost every weekend you can hear mute explosions in the distance, and tons of excitement closer by. and the one of saturday was apparently tokyo's biggest. yachts lining up in the canal below, trains packed, with girls in yukata, boyfriends in... shorts.


this one goes out my buddy rod and his spanking new wife gladys, fireworks couple to the max, married in new york a couple of hours before this spectacle was unleashed over tokyo bay.

backdoor to buddha

daibutsu, kamakura, 750 years old

styrofoam stories

we work a lot with models here. the model room is one of the busiest corners of the office, and I guess this is the case in a lot of japanese architecture firms. real study models, in all sizes and scales, a constant third dimension check. at a certain time, I was cruising at an average of a model a day.



for most talks, we sit around a model, and discuss with knife and glue, casting different options directly in styrofoam and cardboard. from these modified/mutilated models, plans are composed – unusual (for me) but fresh to work in this direction. design happens in three dimensions here, not on drawings, let alone on computer screens.


tiny spaces big model
apartment typologies are simulated on a scale of 1 to 20, more or less the scale of the barbie house.



picture taken from within the model




big spaces tiny model
urban design decisions are made on 1 to 500 scale models – like the one you can see on the top picture.
also useful for quick but effective renderings – close-up pictures of the model, add photoshop sky and inhabitants, done.







compare with more time consuming renderings (drawings, based on a digital 3d model, rendered with 3dsmax and photoshop).

meeting

another meeting last night. a little longer than the previous one, 5:30pm through 11:45pm this time, but more food, less opinions so more decisions, and wet-type tissue.

the business card

it was unavoidable, and kind of urgent. a couple of times, I had failed to offer something in return of a skillfully presented business card. even failed to say something.
so, time to make me a company business card, my first one ever. kobayashisan insisted on giving me both a name in japanese characters (purely phonetic), and a set of chinese kanjis, adding meaning to the sounds. finding a phonetic equivalent for alien sounds like the double e, ‘kn’ and ‘gt’ of my unpronouncable last name was only a minor obstacle for the flexible japanese language. “ja nu lin ku ni hu to” might look a little off, yet pronounced by a random japanese it sounds surprisingly close to the original. much closer than any french ever got.




agitation in the office with the selection of ‘my’ chinese characters. multiple chinese characters correspond with each sound, so combinations are endless. everybody in the office took a break to shoot, kobayashisan refereeing professionally. at a certain point, both ‘agony’ and ‘disease’ were in the running (everyone cracking up), but the kanjis that finally made it say ‘arrow’ ‘open sky, peaceful’ ‘wheel’ ‘country’ ‘man’. the guy from the country of the bike shoots an arrow to the open sky.



“yoroshiku onegai shimasu” accompanies business card exchange, equivalent of “nice to meet you”. also acceptable is a simple “jan desu”, “I am jan”. “jan desu” could also be translated as “this is jan”. kind of prefer to think of this last interpretation, while offering my card, with both hands, text rightly directed, bowing.



couple of days ago, antonio from torino joined the firm...

fudōmae

stress on the ‘o’. love it when the voice in the train announces my stop. fudoooomae – only one stop ‘outisde’ of the yamanote line, the circular trainline that somehow defines central tokyo. still, shinjuku and shibuya, tokyo’s times square districts, are only a couple of stops away.
like a lot of tokyo neigborhoods, fudōmae hides – on the backside of the big expressways and traintracks – a labyrinth of tiny alleys, small shops, restaurants, lowrise residences, old trees, and here and there a temple or a shrine, hardly visible at the end of a long set of steps. on top of that, fudōmae has retained a certain rural feel to it. a great place to live – fort greene of tokyo... maybe east village.


people lining up at the neighborhood’s favorite eel place




old and young and motorbikes

fudōmae means “in front of the fudo”. the fudo, “he who doesn’t move, he who doesn't change his mind”, is a mythical knight who protects the neighborhood from evil spirits. a friendly guy, easier to approach than a temple or a shrine, even though he doesn’t move and looks kind of angry.




today a festival lured us into the fudo grounds. a drummer on a tower, dotted with lanterns, the elderly women of the neighborhood performing dances around the tower, kids joining in. tomo told me the dances were originally performed to entertain the farmers during the lazy hot and humid days of the summer season, before harvesting work starts in september. the movements of the women, neatly dressed in black yukata, resemble different types of field work. foodstalls serving octopus on skewers, the “isn’t it hot today” speech of the local mayor, strolling families, chriping criquets, happy faces, no cellphones. hard to imagine we’re in tokyo, only a couple of stops from sinjuku.