TOKYO VERTIGO: Megacity Sex And Semiology

By Stephen Barber

In TOKYO VERTIGO, Stephen Barber explores the most mesmerising and precarious of all contemporary world cities: Tokyo: the megalopolis, in extremis. Barber probes the multiple ways in which Tokyo projects and hides itself, focusing upon its filmic, photographic and media cultures as well as its extraordinary urban history of destruction, unrest and reconfiguration. Dividing his analysis into three parts, the author first interrogates the disparate urban 'zones' of Tokyo, from the image-screen constellated districts of Shinjuku and Shibuya to the desolate peripheries where the megalopolis falls apart, then examines Tokyo's sexual and media cultures, through which the city's compulsive fascinations and obsessions exert their power. Finally, the book looks at the ways in which European culture collides with Tokyo's urban formations, often generating unprecedented, hybrid images and texts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elektron Ebooks
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781909923430

Stephen Barber

Stephen Barber is Professor of Global Affairs at Regent’s University London, Senior Fellow at the Global Policy Institute, Board Member of the International Public Management Network, and Visiting Professor at the University of Cagliari.

Book preview

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PART ONE

TOKYO URBAN: FRAGMENTS FROM THE ZONES OF THE MEGALOPOLIS

SHINJUKU

The megalopolis of Tokyo dangles by a thread of silk, above an engulfing urban abyss of its own calamities and obsessions, and spins, in ecstasy and bliss, humiliation and servitude, faster and faster.

Shinjuku, the pre-eminent Tokyo-zone of immense image-screen towers and minuscule sex bars, was the city’s burning heart of revolution in the 1960s, when groups of rioters – enraged by the American military presence in Japan at the time of the Vietnam war – set out from the district to storm the parliament building, and gangs of dissidents and nihilists lived in the square outside the railway station. All through the 1960s, Shinjuku was on fire with sex and revolution. Its avenues became glaring dream playgrounds of lust and experimentation. Those dreams absorbed and transformed European cultures of protest, along with European street-performance art and urban filmmaking, and reinvented them as violent hallucinations. Tokyo had never seen anything like it. But then, at the start of the 1970s, when Shinjuku began to be redeveloped into a virulently expanding vertical terrain of business towers and multi-storeyed concrete sex-club complexes – an urban spaceship blinking with a host of divine red lights as it blasted off every night – the rebels, artists and revolutionaries unaccountably moved out and headed for the western suburbs, or vanished into terrorism. On one of the plazas where those dissidents had lived, an immense new department store was built, and named the ‘studio Alta’. It eventually grew a kind of perverse tv-eye that came to dominate the entire vision of Tokyo: a huge digitised screen that incessantly pulsed out cascades of images. In time, a new, younger population arrived to inhabit the studio Alta and the plaza outside it, under the gaze of that convulsive eye, and learned how to congregate, to consume, to pout there. The dissidents who moved out to the western suburbs, hoping to start new communities there, grew grim-faced and embittered when they realised that they had been delusional in vacating Shinjuku for those supposedly more liberated suburbs, since Tokyo in fact has no suburbs, no end to its visual grip, as any journey outwards will show: it is without end, infinite zero.

In Japanese travel books in which writers doggedly walk the entire length of the country, crossing intervening seas, from the northern tip of Hokkaido to the southernmost islands below Okinawa, they meet, at their ultimate destination, a decrepit old man who tells them that, try as they might, walk as they will, they will never understand what they have seen, ever. It is all a mystery, opaque from end to end. But the district of Shinjuku takes the least tangible fragment of an instant to understand, to any momentary, transient eye. It cracks itself open, intimately and willingly, for its viewer’s first glance. The sensorium and the irises go blank in ultimate, burning chaos at Shinjuku, then undergo a blinding urban revelation. It is the antithesis of enigma. Your senses spin into the abyss, and you understand shinjuku. It takes a millisecond torn from an instant for the megalopolis to transmit itself, an ecstatic void moment in time, before Tokyo’s ineradicable seizure takes hold.

From the summits of the great towers of western Shinjuku, the sprawling surface skin of Tokyo appears as a livid and intractable animal-hide, multiply scarred and riven, illuminated at night, with welts of office complexes and housing blocks stretched to the point of tearing across the skyline, abruptly punctuated here and there by red-and-white garbage incineration chimneys exhaling carcinogenic vapour into the already toxic atmosphere. The air looks so thick and dense from that height that, in an emergency, you could take bites from it and eat fragments of Tokyo. The megalopolis has no thin air, except when consciousness is lost, and you start to fall.

At the summit of the vastly elevated twin towers of the metropolitan government building – a construction architecturally designed to spin like a top in the event of a severe earthquake – the public observation spaces form two clamped-open, staring eyes, like a dual-lens film projector from the very origins of cinema. The vision of Tokyo expands unstoppably in every direction. It forms a breathing, self-sufficient terrain that appears conceived to stamp out and overrule the human, like that of the endless glacial mountain ranges and frozen lakes of eastern siberia which you see from a cross-Russia Aeroflot flight heading towards stalin’s extermination-city of magadan – except that the ground in Tokyo is burning and nothing can cool it: wave upon wave of ferro-concrete, with multi-decked highway overpasses serving as the raised spines of the prickly hot beast that is Tokyo. The infinite dispersal of the megalopolis across space possesses a punitive aura, instantly imposed in its intricacy upon whoever is compelled to look. Tokyo has no geography that can be fixed, no map that can hold it: any sensitised guide-book of the megalopolis is instantly transmutated into an anti-guide book, a compendium of terminal urban disorientation, and becomes all the more essential for that prescient ocular scrambling. The eye has to accelerate to try to catch the urban contours, then spins and careers headlong to the ground. Tokyo glares far too vividly for capture.

At the entrance points to the towers’ elevators, the immaculately uniformed elevator girls wait to initiate you into an act of rapid descent. And when you descend through endlessly disintegrating urban space – forty-seven floors, multiplied infinitely by that sensation of falling – from the observatories into the vast, disciplined marble halls of the metropolitan building, you can believe that Tokyo must be perfect, after all. It is luminous, miraculous. The city has no need of geography to exist, no need of an eye. Nothing could be more perfect than Tokyo.

Up above the heads of the ground-level figures seething at night through the vast bar districts of eastern Shinjuku, the sky is a dense chaos of wiring, every road junction a collision of lines coming careering from every direction, enmeshed and entangled. It is as though shinjuku has been ineptly sutured together, the stitching unable to penetrate the wounded body of the megalopolis and so hanging laxly from the addled skin.

Shinjuku is a site of imminent transformation, layered with its rapidly supplanted past existences. In the early 1960s, in Tokyo, the young architect Arata Isozaki, who closely collaborated with that era’s choreographers, musicians and visual artists, was imagining cities that could form great amalgams of their multiply ruined pasts, with new buildings designed explicitly to highlight and exacerbate the presence of those historical strata of devastation. He started to make photomontages of the ruins of the A-bombed 1945 city of Hiroshima, with images of his own contemporary designs for buildings embedded into the images of the decimated buildings. Isozaki commented, ‘The city of the future lies in ruins.’ Every building had to form an incitation for the human figures who viewed or inhabited it. But such imagined cities of ashes, ruins and steel were never identical to Tokyo, whose tangible ruins of previous incarnations no longer existed to be resuscitated and built within – they had been seismically destroyed in the great earthquake of 1923, then incinerated in the firebombings of 1945, and finally pulped by the headlong consumer culture installed in Tokyo from the time of the postwar American Occupation. From that point onwards, Tokyo locked into its own ecstatic rhythm of proliferation, growing ever vaster and more intricate with each spasm. It expanded for a few years in one visual form, then abruptly cancelled that architectural variant, proliferated again, cancelled itself again – pulsating with the shock waves of reinvention whose sensations generated the visual core of the megalopolis.

Very few of Isozaki’s original ruin-inspired buildings were ever constructed in Tokyo. The megalopolis proved to be too intractable in its own unique, uncompromising velocity, requiring more friable and erasable materials, and annulled all attempts to perform experiments on itself: Tokyo preferred the precarious apparitions of Kenzo Tange’s succession of towers, which came to screen shinjuku from the west like ferocious, irregular battlements. One afternoon, in an art museum, I watched Isozaki – now a suave old man of eighty or more – standing over an immense black-and-white aerial photograph of Tokyo, lain horizontally on a wooden