WILLIAM GARDNER: The Metabolist architects, in particular, were interested in change, growth, and decay, and sought to redefine architecture as a means of understanding or designing dynamic processes rather than the production of a static drawing or architecture model or completed building. So this kind of envisioning of architecture as something that’s constantly changing, and the architect’s role as someone who designs that change, kind of opens architecture to a kind of narrative dimension. And this connects on the one hand with the field of computer simulation, which was just kind of on the conceptual horizon, but also the narrative dimension of fiction. So the book explores modern architects as authors of narrative and science fiction authors also as kind of design visionaries in dialogue—in practice and in theory—with architecture. They’re both imagining optimistic or utopian ideas of the city, but also apocalyptic potentials of the city.
My name is William Gardner and I am a professor of Japanese at Swarthmore College. And I’m the author of the book, The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science.
My previous research was on Japanese literary modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. And after that, I began to work more on postwar material and began to research, in particular, Japanese science fiction, and also its interface with new media and cyber culture. Around the same time I happened to come across a book, a photo book, on the 1970 Osaka Expo, the first World’s Fair held in an African or Asian country. It was an extremely well attended and popular event that got a lot of press both in Japan and around the world. And this book presented photos of just these amazing futuristic architectural designs by architects affiliated with Metabolism. And also these very imaginative interior designs, in many cases featuring kind of high tech displays with multiple screens and computer equipment. And in other cases really kind of bordering on 1960s/1970s psychedelia. There was a transportation infrastructure—monorails and moving sidewalks. Fashion design and also incredible public art.
It was really kind of a revelation, and just an amazing cocktail of visual culture. But as I continued to research a little bit about the expo and also Japanese science fiction, I began to not only see a lot of shared themes, particularly around the concept of the future, and the expo being presented as the city of the future. Not only that, but there were many actual science fiction authors who were involved in various aspects of the planning and the production of the expo—and none more so than the author Komatsu Sakyō, who became one of the central figures of my book. Also, many of these same figures were founding members of the Japanese Association for Future Studies, which just organized around the same time. And many of them were also kind of responsible for a shared elaboration of the concept of what’s called in Japanese johoka shakai, or information society. So the idea that information technology was changing society and changing cities. It was a really profoundly kind of interdisciplinary moment.
In the center of the Expo grounds, the central area was called the Symbol Zone, in which, you know, all the elements were supposed to in some way kind of reflect the central themes of the Expo. And the central building was called the Theme Pavilion. And it was actually conceived as kind of a spatial configuration of temporal concepts. The site design and the Theme Pavilion design were largely the product of an architect named Tange Kenzō, who is probably the most famous architect of postwar Japan, and then he was a kind of key mentor to the Metabolist architects, who were a younger generation from Tange. The Pavilion itself was kind of conceived in terms of these layers. So the underground exhibition space was called The World of the Past. And the subproducer of this space was actually Komatsu Sakyō. And then inside this space frame roof that Tange had designed was an aerial exhibition space. And the producer of that space was Kawazoe Noboru, who was a key author of the 1960 Metabolist manifesto. And he was an architecture critic.
And then the ground level actually was left open, and this large open space was called Festival Plaza. And it was designed to be the world of the present, defined by spontaneous interactions and encounters. And within that, there was a kind of stage area designed by Isozaki Arata, who was another key interlocutor of the Metabolists. He had studied with Tange, and Isozaki designed this stage area as a kind of cybernetic environment that included these two giant piloted robots named Deme and Deku. And these robots move stage components and control lighting and stage effects, and did so kind of under a program by which they were supposed to be able to interact spontaneously with events that were unfolding on stage. And all of this space was interpenetrated by Okamoto Tarō’s gigantic Tower of the Sun, which is this kind of totemic, slightly kitschy, but very eye catching and memorable sculpture that actually pierced through the roof of the central pavilion of the Expo and towered over the entire site.
Of course, Japanese cities were leveled to a great extent during the war. There were extensive firebombings of all major cities except for Kyoto. So you have a nation in which all of its major cities were destroyed, and even though it was a nation which had rapidly modernized in the early twentieth century and had come to rival the Western great powers in its kind of industrial capacity, it was brought back to a kind of zero point. And this is really, in many ways, I think, the conceptual starting point for Metabolism, and also the interrelated architecture theory of Isozaki Arata, who focused on the concept of ruins as a kind of generative force. So the idea that ruins kind of can produce future cities, but future cities themselves are ruins.
But what was happening in the postwar era, as we had the occupation of Japan and the reconstruction of Japanese cities, you know, you have a very rapid urbanization. You have people who had been repatriated from the Japanese empire or soldiers coming back; or people also from the countryside who had taken refuge from the firebombings coming back to the city. So you have this huge boom in the urban population. At the same time, you know, the cities are kind of emerging completely pell mell. And this is the situation in which a generation of architects emerges and proposes these directions for possible future lives. So they imagined the cities over the water; cities in which the surrounding area was allowed to return to green. And the functions of the city were all consolidated into one giant megastructure. And then this megastructure tower might have capsules embedded within it that could be recycled.
If you go back to the Metabolism 1960 manifesto of the Group, they talk about exploring the scale from the atomic level to the galactic level, and thinking through design and shared design elements and shared patterns of structure or patterns of evolution across all of these various scales. So one of the commonalities I found between architecture and science fiction is this attempt to move beyond just the scale of one human life and one human habitation to imagine the scale of the planet. And to imagine how people across the planet are interconnected both by new forms of communication and technology, but also imagining global pandemic and also global climate change; global disasters on the scale of an earthquake, which might sink the entire archipelago of Japan.
I argue that this kind of Metabolist imagination is actually quite influential in the development of some of the core works of science fiction anime—Japanese animation. And I use these to kind of go back to some of the themes that have been discussed earlier in the book, talking about scales from the human to the city to the planetary; and capsules being imagined as part of an information ecosystem, and how that resonates with imagination of, for example, mecha, or the piloted robots, which are a recurring element in Japanese science fiction animation. And you know, most of all that kind of apocalyptic imagination in many of these works, and the way in which a director like Otomo Katsuhiro, in his work Akira, from 1988, imagining apocalypse as something that is cyclical—because something which doesn’t happen once but is kind of a constant dance of civilization.
