Urban guerillas refurbish Central East Tokyo

East Tokyo, around the Sumida River and Tokyo Bay, is where throngs of men in suits gather in packs on weekday evenings, for after-work drinking sessions at Tokyo’s izakaya (essentially pubs with better food). There isn’t much else to do in this part of the city. People work, and get fed and watered after they’re done. It’s a two-sided economy. Meanwhile, across town in West Tokyo, there is a creative ghetto, centered in what some people still call the ‘high city’. It’s a corridor of fairly gentrified areas like Harajuku, Shibuya and Ebisu. There are cafes, design studios, and boutiques strewn up and down the Yamanote Line that connects these towns. Some of Tokyo’s more brazen and plasticky architecture, the fantastic concrete and cyberpunk towers that emerged out of a string of foreign commissions from the Bubble Eighties, mostly got built in the west of the city.

Photo: CET
This imbalance is responsible for a variety of problems in the capital, notably the long daily commutes that bridge the ‘bed-towns’ in the suburbs and the downtown commercial fortresses that suddenly empty at nightfall. There are entire stretches of the city that shut down after dark – with business done for the day, office denizens pile onto commuter trains for the long ride back to the suburbs. Space is always either overloaded or underutilized, crammed or deserted. Tokyo’s urban rhythms are extreme.

Photo: CET

A spirited group of artists, designers and architects working on a ten-day series of events and installations called Central East Tokyo (CET) are working to change that. From November 23 to December 2, artists and interns temporarily colonized derelict buildings in the Shin-Nihonbashi, Bakuracho and Kodemacho areas. They organized cleanup operations, put up installations and art-related events, in the buildings as well as the streets surrounding them, near the west bank of the Sumida River. In some cases the office buildings had been gutted of their former fixtures, leaving a fairly stark space which, although difficult to prepare for exhibition use, was ripe for reinhabitation precisely because it was completely unfurnished. The general atmosphere is something close to that of a post-apocalyptic hideout, decorated for parties with whatever could be cobbled together from mouldering supply stores, mixed up with fairly nifty technology and gadgets that just happened to be lying around at the time of the fallout.

Photo: CET

The inhabitants that took shelter in these ‘hideouts’ were diverse. Along with more conventional art, photo and video exhibits, there was Mitsubai Tokyo, a guerilla store in the style of Comme des Garcons, setting up a temporary serecto shoppu in an ex-office; a video game projected through the windows of one office building onto the ‘screen’ of the adjoining building’s façade; a Showa-era izakaya enlivened by video projections; ‘talk shows’ (when the Japanese say talk show, what they really mean is informal artist talk with Q&A after); and open studio tours. What they’ve done is a combination of underground art and guerilla urban renewal: like Santa’s elves spreading goodwill, they’ve done the community an unsolicited service by trying to re-style dormant space, recirculating life into a dead zone.

Photo: CET

Urban planners and architects often talk about mixed-use, without talk of maximizing it. If there is spatial variety without the extension of its applications throughout the day (and, as CET so rightly shows, night), you’ll still end up with urban deadweights. If we extrapolate the trend for refurbishing factories and warehouses into post-industrial playgrounds – brick-walled bars and exposed concrete-décor boutiques and that sort of thing – CET seem to have their finger on the Next Thing. Refurbished offices turned into leisure palaces and creative spaces; or at least two-timing office spaces that moonlight as nocturnal galleries and clubs. CET might just usher in a new vogue for ‘post-commercial’ interiors…

Photo: CET

CET sprang out of a loose collective of designers, artists and other creative professionals who got together under the name Tokyo Designers Block: Central East (TDB-CE) in 2003. They have kept this largely intern- and volunteer-driven program running up until this year, when they decided to focus specially on a ‘Night-Gallery-Street’ concept, with opening hours from 6pm to 10pm. It’s a temporary colonization by nightfall that tries to partly reverse the commercial exodus every night, when everyone scuttles home to the suburbs.

Tokyo may not have as much of a (visible) homeless problem, or street violence, but in this downtown area you feel that familiar sense of languishing infrastructure and depression, especially when it’s emptied of its daytime supply of busy office people. Morning and evening commuter rushes are in one sense an awesome sight, a visible representation of commercial activity; on the other hand, seeing this same area repopulated by ‘workers’ of a very different kind is a lesson in the workings (or should that be ‘playings’) of creative labor.

Photo: CET

Darryl is a translator in Japan and has a deep love for the built environment.