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"The Sea We Would Like to See"
Tokyo Totem: A Subjective Guide to Tokyo, eds. Edwin Gardner and Christiaan Fruneaux, Flick Studio and Monnik, Tokyo and Amsterdam, Japan and the Netherlands, 2015
In this essay I ride the Odakyū main line south-west from Shinjuku to its last stop at Odawara, watching Tokyo thin into pitched-roof sprawl before it finally meets open Pacific. Then I pivot east, back along the bay, hunting the shoreline that modern Tokyo hides: Edo-era cannon islands, bubble-era resort landfills, the Metabolists’ floating “Marine City,” Expo ’70’s Aquapolis. Each stratum shows a capital that blesses, exploits, and fears the sea in equal measure. Threading those episodes with my own field notes of awe and unease, I ask whether a warming Pacific might yet revive Kikutake’s nomadic, modular utopias—so a post-terrestrial Tokyo can draw its boundary lines on water, not land.
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