chronofile: fujimi fire stairs

this ain't no cheap photoshop, but twenty four degrees on december fifth. for real.
tokyo’s not on the equator (35ºN), only a little closer than rome and new york. last week had been pretty cold actually – up to the point I got me some pairs of socks with separate toe compartments (a new sensation). but there he was again, superbly scheduled on a lazy sunday morning, the föhn, gusting down at 74 km per hour from the slopes of fuji and hakkone.
amazing how a surprize like this – a summer day in winter – makes your body wave like the bandy bandy snake, walk out the door and forget about deadlines.

last week kobayashi invited me to sit in a review of an urban design class, as a guest critic. next to me was professor jinnai, who turned out to be a friend of both grahame shane and bernardo secchi… il piccolo mondo. the students (exchange students from washington university) were asked to investigate the history of specific sites in tokyo and make urban design proposals. while commenting on the way they translated their initial observations into design ideas, I learned a lot about the invisible structures of tokyo, since the students eagerly used jinnai’s very revealing black and white drawings in their analyses.
just to tell you that street patterns of a lot of neighborhoods (even ginza’s) and samurai hilltop mansions of edo (tokyo before it became tō kyō, “eastern capital”) were laid out according to mount fuji view corridors. hills that slope to the west were often called fujimi zaka, “fuji view hill”. a mountain to look at, not to climb, remember?

to the left an edo period view of of the fudo temple grounds and the hills around fudōmae, and to the right an 18th century view of fuji as seen from one of those hills, by hiroshige (both images from jinnai's "ethnic tokyo").

so why not trying to catch a glimpse of fuji today? sunday afternoon dérives around fudōmae had taken me to hilltops before, to rise a little above narrow tokyo, to catch a stretch of horizon in a city lacking large river banks or monumental boulevards. with mixed success, as the hills are no longer a match for the surrounding highrise… and skies were never chrystal clear as today.

so this time I start walking up fire escape stairs of residential buildings, a lot of which have no locks nor doors - inviting upward extensions of the sidewalk. each roof terrace offers nice views – people like high places. crisp light on roofscapes, even stronger warm gusts through my dreads - but no clear views of fujisan. always a taller structure in the way, always another staircase to climb…