I spent my week in Tokyo looking for something special, vital or moving. Only once I found it. The joy of fireworks. Not since childhood has my heart jumped so much. At the end of 90 minutes of color over the Edo River with million people on the bank, a gigantic finale in the pattern of brilliant, white hay filled the entire eye.

I wandered methodically over the history lessons of the Edo (Tokyo) Museum. Read all the limited English. Looked to understand something. Now what do I remember? That Tokyo was once a city of canals. That it had burned to the ground several times including the 80% destructive American bombing of 1945. Like the USA, it was a culture that had never been conquered. Media - woodblock printing, radio, television - was more often mentioned than manufacturing. The military protected Tokyo, but the economics propelled it.

Two exhibits caught the imagination. One was a meter square column of layered dirt, three meters high. The first meter showed typical archeological excavation with broken pottery and bronze tools. The next two meters were bands of one-foot thick layers without archeological evidence. I assumed it showed many ancient floods. No, the layers were the ashes of burned Tokyo, not ancient at all. In a few centuries, it was destroyed and rebuilt. Destroyed and rebuilt again. Every person experienced at least one total destruction. Generational tales would speak of many.

The second memory was the room of the present, looking like the room of the future. Five video monitors in "George Jetson" towers were labeled London, Paris, New York, Beijing and Seoul. An intriguing choice of cities, but choices were not as interesting as the images. The images were typical promotional tourism video of street life, subways, parks, markets, shops, etc, but the videos were timed to be all the same. Five subway trains emerging from a tunnel. Five street vendors make a sale. Five families wander in the park.

Instead of difference, the Japanese reflected on the sameness of the present world. In still photography, difference may emerge, but the rush of quick clips across five monitors produces a sense of horror. Horror of the truth. Horror of the pragmatic clarity of my host. "For real, we are one world. Get with the program."

More than other travels, Japan caused reflection on us Americans. First the Japanese are all truly HWP. We are fat. The Japanese dress for the occasion. We are slobs. The Japanese eat small portions of wonderfully prepared and beautifully presented food. We gorge. The Japanese have clean streets and not a single trash can. Our streets are filthy, even with trashcans abounding. The Japanese are better. We are adequate to get the job done.

This reflection on us is devoid of reflection on me. On previous trips, I have asked: maybe I would happier as an shepherd, flutist in the Andes? Do I harbor the same racial hatred as the South African secret police? Why can't I design like something like the Taj Mahal? Would I have joined Castro in Mexico or just waited on the sidelines? Like my trip to Japan, on these other travels I did not speak the language or stay long enough to understand. Just the same quick cultural glance of the tourist. But in Japan, not a single personal connection. Repeat, not a single doubt or introspection came to mind.

For years, Japanese magazines had filled by mind with images of contemporary Japanese architecture. I went to verify my intense jealousy of the creative freedom of the Japanese architect. I thought the Japanese to be a special people who are in love with buildings.

Instead, in just five minutes on the train to Tokyo, it's obvious the city is built by the same a-visual, careless, money hungry developers as every other modern place. I stare in disbelief. It's ugly. It's monotonous. It endlessly the same. A factory was a welcome visual relief. Metaphorically, I have called Seattle the City of Beige, but Tokyo literally is.

My wife and I went to visit and photograph the American expatriate and Japanese cultural critic, Donald Richie. From his 7^th story balcony overlooking the Ueno Park lily pod, he decried a tower of hanging ziggurats. To me, the design was OK and the kind of Japanese architectural experiment I hoped to find everywhere. He advised us to see the marvelous new Gallery of Horyuji Treasures by Yoshio Taniguchi the winning architect to design the addition to MOMA in New York. (We did. Shimmeringly dull.) My mention of expressionist Shin Takamatsu drew a cold silence.

In his 1999 book, "Tokyo", Richie stresses the different between the Western striving of timelessness and immortality and the Japanese philosophy of impermanence and transience. In a New York City way, he asserts "the now is important, but the now lies well within the framework of the accepted concept of permanence-within-continual-change. Tokyo's buildings are consequently always new and yet, in this sense, always the same. " (page 52).

He has lived 50 years in Tokyo but I did not feel an excess of the temporary. I witnessed that short, post-1945 buildings were being replaced by taller ones - typical of every major metropolis in the world. Tokyo was entirely destroyed in 1923 earthquake and 1945 fire bombing. Only two generations of buildings are standing: 1960s modernism and 1980s eclectic - periods universally condemned in today's architectural circles. For example, Seattle can not wait to have architects Rem Koolhaus replace the 1959 Main Library and Peter Bohlin replace the 1946 Seattle City Engineering Building and 1962 Municipal Building. As my Japanese hosts made clear at the Edo Museum, I saw similarity with East and West, not difference.

For the architectural tourist, the only way to find any buildings in Tokyo is through the book, The Architectural Map of Tokyo, 1994, TOTO Publishing. The city is divided into neighborhoods with numbered dots referring to photographs with English and Japanese text. The book is available at the TOTO bookstore and Gallery MA located at the Nogizaka stop on the Chiyoda subway line. The maps are in Japanese, but a good English language city map will allow the careful pilot to navigate to each building.

I walked and walked following the maps. I discovered the outstanding work of Shirai Seiti from the 1970s and Atelier U from the 1960's. Hiroshi Naito designed a marvelous museum for the blind that was beautiful to the eye. None of these architects were in the archives of Global Architecture bookstore and gallery. I accidentally found Toyo Ito's office on a Sunday afternoon. No one answered my knock at the door. Takamitzu Azuma designed a private, tiny concrete tower across the street from Mario Botta's Watari-um Museum. In the slick corporate realm, Kenzo Tange maintained the spirit of exploration more than Fumihiko Maki. Nigel Coates', "The Wall", and Tadao Ando's, "Collezione" were the most mature works provoking the enjoyment of re-examination. Makoto Sei Watanabe's Aoyama Technical College was the most outrageous structure: a space ship in the middle of the crash landing.

I feel I learned nothing, except that freedom comes from the individual. Only a few talented architects exist in Japan and only a few in the USA. Surprising to me as I returned from SeaTac Airport, Seattle bested Tokyo. Overall, Seattle's quality of design is better. Who would have ever thought that?

Glenn Weiss

August 1999

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