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with kamide to kumade

coworker kamidesan is a shinjuku regular. shinjuku at night, with its neon jungle and seas of people, is probably the image you have in mind when you think of tokyo. kamide has a lot of images of shinjuku, as he likes to roam around there for hours, at night, with his camera, while waiting for the first train home. one day, he showed me a stack of letter size black and white pictures, mainly portraits, he had made in shinjuku over the course of a couple of years. an amazing collection, disturbing at times.



tonight he takes me and heinrich to hanazono jinja ("flower garden shrine") for the kumade festival. kumade ("bear hand") means rake (hark), used in this season to move dry leaves. for the festival, the rakes are decorated with flowers and objects refering to popular beliefs, and sold. with those special kumade you can collect luck and fortune instead of dry leaves. echt iets voor oma.
tonight is this year's third (and last) kumade festival at hanazono jinja. next year there'll be only one, and the year after two, then again three, and so on.



sets of stairs lead up to the 'flower garden' shrine, completely surrounded by shinjuku highrise. but japanese style high density design leaves not one square inch of the temple grounds underutilized. the amount of food stalls and people strolling around is staggering. and the lantern scaffolds manage to give the place a certain grandeur. the garden with the flowers might have disappeared, still it's a different world at the heart of shinjuku.





a decorated kumade and heinrich. heinrich is working for the german embassy. his one year long intensive language course was paid for by 'the german taxpayer'. he speaks japanese fluently, even understands the food vendors, and writes some kanji... che invidio!


the outside wall of the flower garden.

a warm wind blows me home - part of the summer atmosphere at the festival? twenty degrees at the end of november... feels like forty if you ask me. makes me think of the föhn in milan, the warm surprize allowing short sleeve outdoor breakfasts in december.



[seems like the föhn (scroll down for full definition) is a world wide phenomenon - and a powerful one, messing up winter olympics and creating polynyae]

the antidote

as long as it lasts - download "W" by BC400
four good reasons
> hyped on boombasticradio
> featuring SEG from Starflam, belgium's finest
> "in a world of Bullsh*t...people kicking fatness about the place with grins on their face... are all that matters"
> featuring W



>> antidote update
talking about belgium's finest... keekske just sent me the new zap mama, ancestry in progress, waarvoor dank! by far daulne's best, breathing streets and beats of new york. with (better than?) soul sister badu and ?uestlove. top-notch production by other members of the roots.
"marie, now you do american music?" - "no, I share"

drafts

some of you ask what's on the drafting board these days.
a couple of drafts, as always.

coming back from china, I worked on the shanghai headquarters for vanke, our chinese clients for the wuxi project. we presented them a first draft for a low-rise office complex, with large courtyards, based on traditional chinese siheyuan architecture.



while we're waiting for their comments, kobayashisan put me on a competition for a restaurant tower in tokyo. a set of simple but unusual requirements: ten restaurant spaces, each with a ceiling height of 7.5 meters (!), stacked on top of each other. on a relatively small plot, "210 tsubo of land" (210 tatami mats, ca 700 sqm) in akasaka, a downtown business district. apart from the lofty spaces not so unusual for tokyo, where ground floor locations for retail and restaurants and bars are scarce luxury.

feels great to work on a tall and slender building, urban design in three dimensions - four facades, elevator cores, public sky lobbies, tension structures - back to my vertical shopping mall graduation project in a way. zin in wat bijklussen eveline?

yesterday I finished a first study model, by virtue of its core and snake-like structure immediately dubbed by tsushimasan and kobayashisan as the 'yakitori building'. I think we got a concept.



the hong kong based developer initially invited cesar pelli, richard rogers, shigeru ban, and SOM. looks like they want a big name, something fancy. but since there's no fee for this first phase, SOM decided to chicken out, leaving a gap cunning double agent kobayashi managed to fill in. needless to say we're the baby duck in the bunch - even 'underdog' would sound like we've got a chance...
presentation on december 8th. looks like I'll miss rod's second wedding as well (dec4th/church/seoul)... bummer!



right on time for inspiration information, there's a tiny buckminster fuller exhibit in omotesando (second floor).

>>
meanwhile, in scandinavia, looks like tomo is enjoying her research project - "some of their eyes are really really blue like an advertisement of contact lenses "...

>>
en er is een vliegtuig van eastern china airlines neergestort in een bevroren meer bij baotou, door de standaard nogal klungelig gesitueerd "in het binnenland van Mongolië, in het noorden van China". in binnenmongolië dus.

century

yesterday after a phonecall during lunch, katosan hurried to catch a shinkansen to tottori. he will join his family there, as his great-grandmother (mother of mother of mother) is exchanging the temporal for the eternal...
born on december 18th 1904, she would have turned one hundred years old in a month. still she already celebrated her first century, a while ago, in presence of the local governor, kobayashisan told me. www confirmed that

the traditional way of counting age in Japan was different from what we do now. When a baby was born, its age was counted as one year old. People did not celebrate on their actual birthday; instead, everyone added one year on New Year's day. In an extreme case, when a baby was born on December 31st, he was considered two years old on New Year's day when he was only two days old.

strange you never find this in life expectancy studies...

onsen

even though tokyo can compete with legoland for the world's most exciting theme park, still it’s always a good idea to just sit back on one of the trains, fall asleep, and wake up at the other end of the line, in the middle of japan’s fairy tale backcountry.
especially on a day like today, with blue skies, and two girls leaving the country soon.



last weekend in japan for anouk, a san francisco friend of taiwanese columbia classmate anderson. she’s been crossing japan from north to south during the past month, and has three more months of traveling in asia ahead... anouk kluyskens by the way, (like brother pieter) born in gent in 75, from two flemish parents who emigrated to montreal when she was three.
and tomo’s flying out on tuesday, joining jan gehl’s public space research lab in copenhagen for a month.



nikkō, two hours north of tokyo, is famous for its temples and for kō-yō, the fall foliage season, when the maple trees on the surrounding hills turn bright red and yellow. colorful leaves have almost disappeared though, along with most of the tourists, and we decide to skip the town and its temples alltogether in favor of a hike up to yumoto onsen village. so we end up having the fresh air, the wooden boardwalk and the volcanic scenery most of the time for ourselves.




yumoto at the other end of the mirror

two lakes, three waterfalls and a marshy wetland later, we arrive at yumoto. the sulphur is hanging in the streets of the town. so how can we resist to a traditional dip in a real outdoor onsen? the japanese are serious about bathing, especially about their ‘onsen’, natural hot springs in volcanic areas. even in our shabby ‘hole in the ground’, everyone dutyfully respects the (un)dresscode, the cold and hot water cycles, the obligatory chat with the fellow males, the salty green tea afterwards.
a superb ritual - great to get something in return for all those earthquakes lately...



body sinks willingly into a greenish vinaigrette of 69°C, mind on sulphur sails off to vals, ranong, damascus, idaho, istanbul.