Japan’s Landmark Capsules Coming Down to Sit in Museums

Demolition teams start to take down the Nakagin Capsule Tower, an iconic structure designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa and built in 1972, in Tokyo's Ginza district on April 12, 2022. (AP)
Demolition teams start to take down the Nakagin Capsule Tower, an iconic structure designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa and built in 1972, in Tokyo's Ginza district on April 12, 2022. (AP)
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Japan’s Landmark Capsules Coming Down to Sit in Museums

Demolition teams start to take down the Nakagin Capsule Tower, an iconic structure designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa and built in 1972, in Tokyo's Ginza district on April 12, 2022. (AP)
Demolition teams start to take down the Nakagin Capsule Tower, an iconic structure designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa and built in 1972, in Tokyo's Ginza district on April 12, 2022. (AP)

Nakagin Capsule Tower, a building tucked away in a corner of downtown Tokyo that is made up of boxes stacked on top of each other, is an avant-garde honeycomb of science-fiction-era housing long admired as a masterpiece.

It’s now being demolished in a careful process that includes preserving some of its 140 capsules, to be shipped to museums around the world.

Preparations have been going on for months to clear the surrounding areas, for safely dismantling the landmark near Ginza. The first capsule will be removed in the next few weeks.

Built in 1972, the 13-floor building embodies the so-called "metabolism" vision of its architect Kisho Kurokawa: The idea that cities and buildings are always changing, reflecting life, in rhythm with the human body.

"No one exists divorced from the thoughts of those around him. All comes into existence through an assembly of causes. All things are interrelated. In accord with this principle, it is our aim to build an ideal world, step by step," Kurokawa wrote in his 1994 book, "Philosophy of Symbiosis."

Kurokawa died in 2007, at 73.

Although striking in appearance and concept, the building outlived modern construction guidelines and needed to be torn down.

Skyscrapers have popped up nearby, dwarfing Nakagin. A developer took over the property in 2021.

Tatsuyuki Maeda, who started using Nakagin as a second home in 2010, said he simply loved being in that 2.5 meter (8.2 foot) wide space, so tiny but cozy it felt like a child’s hideaway. And it got his creative juices going, he said.

"The view from that round window felt so good. At night, when cars sped by, their lights on the nearby freeway were pretty. And the cityscape was beautiful," Maeda said.

Appliances and shelves are built into the walls. A desk pops out in one section. In another is a Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder, state-of-the-art electronics of the 1970s that’s historical memorabilia now like the building itself.

Only about a third of Nakagin's residents lived there full-time in recent years. Most used it as offices and workspaces. They tended to be creative people, musicians, filmmakers and architects, as though it drew people sharing similar values.

Maeda, who does public relations work, owned 15 capsules, mainly to have a say in the building’s fate, and had rented some of them out. Residents would party together, he recalled.

He and others had been working together since 2014 to save Nakagin, first to prevent its destruction and rebuild it, but eventually to hand down its legacy as an artwork. The project raised money through crowd-funding and put out a book, complete with photos, in March, titled, "Nakagin Capsule Tower: The Last Record."

The preservation project calls for some of the capsules to allow for real-life living in a separate locale. Those in museums will be refinished by the Kurokawa architectural office, which went over the original designs to figure out how each box could be detached with minimal damage, a feat especially difficult in the crowded Ginza area.

Will Gardner, a Swarthmore College professor whose specialty is Japanese modernism, says the metabolist movement had its "moment" of recognition for its organic approach to Tokyo’s 20th Century urban-planning problems, such as over-crowding and a lack of infrastructure.

It was an era when Japan was rebuilding from the ruins of World War II, undergoing rapid economic growth, buzzing with creative energy and trying to define itself.

But metabolist designs did not win wide acceptance among real estate developers, construction companies or consumers, who all turned to more conservative prefabricated housing, said Gardner, who wrote "The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction."

"This was a generation of architects that came out in this era when everything had been destroyed. But at the same time there was a lot of dynamism, and the economy was on the rebound, and there seemed to be a moment when this big vision could really thrive," he said.

"For a lot of reasons, today’s Japan is very different."

Kurokawa was heavily influenced by Kenzo Tange, who designed the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, built for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. An art museum in Tokyo’s Roppongi that looks like a waving wall of glass, which opened in 2007, and the 1999 new wing of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam were designed by Kurokawa.

Nakagin was one of his early pieces. Its defiantly repetitive motif both celebrated and challenged mass production, appealing to individuals, especially those lost in conformist Japan.

Kurokawa developed the technology to install the units into a concrete core shaft with four high-tension bolts. The capsules were designed to be detachable and changed to new ones, or recycled, every 25 years.

That never happened.

Instead, after 50 years, the pieces are coming apart.

Kurokawa used to say that, long after his buildings were gone, his thinking would live on.

Kurokawa’s designs address sustainability and social accountability, said Tomohiro Fujisawa of Kisho Kurokawa Architect and Associates, issues that remain urgent today.

"The world maybe has finally caught up with him," Fujisawa said.



Palestinian Pottery Sees Revival in War-Ravaged Gaza

Displaced Palestinians walk past a wind and rain-damaged tent, following heavy rainfall north of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on November 24, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
Displaced Palestinians walk past a wind and rain-damaged tent, following heavy rainfall north of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on November 24, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
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Palestinian Pottery Sees Revival in War-Ravaged Gaza

Displaced Palestinians walk past a wind and rain-damaged tent, following heavy rainfall north of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on November 24, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
Displaced Palestinians walk past a wind and rain-damaged tent, following heavy rainfall north of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on November 24, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)

Traditional clay pottery is seeing a resurgence in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians are forced to find solutions for a shortage of plates and other crockery to eat from in the territory ravaged by more than a year of war.

"There is an unprecedented demand for plates as no supplies enter the Gaza Strip," 26-year-old potter Jafar Atallah said in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah.

The vast majority of the Palestinian territory's 2.4 million people have been displaced, often multiple times, by the war that began with Hamas's attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Fleeing bombs amid Israel's devastating retaliatory military offensive, which has destroyed large amounts of civilian infrastructure, everyday items like cups and bowls have often been lost, broken or left behind to perish.

With imports made increasingly difficult by Israeli restrictions and the dangers of delivering aid, Gazans have had to find resourceful ways to meet their needs since the war began.

- Bare-bones -

To keep up with demand, Atallah works non-stop, producing around 100 pieces a day, mainly bowls and cups, a stark contrast to the 1,500 units his factory in northern Gaza made before the war.

It is one of the numerous factories in Gaza to have shut down, with many destroyed during air strikes, inaccessible because of the fighting, or unable to operate because of materials and electricity shortages.

Today, Atallah works out of a bare-bones workshop set up under a thin blue plastic sheet.

He carefully shapes the clay into much-needed crockery, then leaves his terracotta creations to dry in the sun -- one of the few things Gaza still has plenty of.

Each object is sold for 10 shekels, the equivalent of $2.70 -- nearly five times what it was worth before the war led to widespread shortages and sent prices soaring.

Gazans have told AFP they are struggling to find all types of basic household goods.

"After 13 months of war, I went to the market to buy plates and cutlery, and all I could find was this clay pot," said Lora al-Turk, a 40-year-old mother living in a makeshift shelter in Nuseirat, a few kilometers (miles) from Deir al-Balah.

"I was forced to buy it to feed my children," she said, noting that the pot's price was now more than double what it was before the war.

- Old ways -

The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas's unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel's retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 44,176 people, most of them civilians, according to data from Hamas-run Gaza's health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

Following each Israeli army evacuation order, which generally precedes fighting and bombing, masses of people take to the roads, often on foot, carrying whatever they can manage.

But with each passing month and increasing waves of displacement, the loads they carry grow smaller.

Many Gazans now live in tents or other makeshift shelters, and some even on bare pavement.

The United Nations has warned about the threat of diseases in the often cramped and unsanitary conditions.

But for Gazans, finding inventive ways to cope with hardship is nothing new.

In this, the worst-ever Gaza war, people are using broken concrete from war-damaged buildings to build makeshift homes. With fuel and even firewood scarce, many rely on donkeys for transport. Century-old camping stoves are reconditioned and used for cooking.

Traditional pottery is another sign of a return to the old ways of living.