I spent a few days in Ginza recently. I always enjoy walking the backstreets and alleys crowded with narrow miscellaneous-occupancy buildings—zakkyo biru—dating from the 1960s through the 1980s, each with a backlit directory sign listing tenants floor by floor. It’s become cliché that Tokyo annihilates its past. It still hurts me to think about the 2022 demolition of Nakagin Capsule Tower, which I visited four years beforehand. But so many zakkyo biru were built that plenty have survived, leaving a landscape of diverse small businesses, in contrast with Manhattan, which is now a sea of chain stores.
During my last half hour in Tokyo, I was on my way back to my hotel to pick up our luggage and head to the airport. I realized I should have been documenting the zakkyo biru, but having a camera in my hand, I still managed a brief survey, which follows. Jorge Almazán of Studiolab has already told the story of the zakkyo biru in Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, but his book explains the system of regulations, inheritance taxes, and zoning that made these buildings possible, not what’s actually in them.
With half an hour left, I didn’t have time for a survey of the architecture, but I could read the directories. Having Anthropic’s Claude in Japan was transformative—it allowed us to read daily specials, not just stale English-language menus—and it was equally indispensable here, letting me read the Japanese signs and look up the individual businesses on the web. A project that, just two years ago would have been unimaginable now just took a bit of time (and a lot of double-checking to catch hallucinations).
The Ginza Sazan Building on Hanatsubaki-dori consists of eight floors and one basement and, like most of these buildings, is served by a single elevator. This building has a horizontal directory alongside the more usual vertical format, the directories stacked like the buildings they index. This building contains a hookah bar in the basement, a FamilyMart at street level, a custom-order suit shop on the second floor, a yakiniku restaurant on the third, three floors of billiards and karaoke, Yasai no Ōsama (“King of Vegetables”) on the seventh, and Ginza Kani Matsu, a high end crab house on the eighth that is only open from November through March, during Matsuba (snow) crab season. Relatively low rents allow such extreme specialization to flourish in the zakkyo biru. Louis Kahn called the city “the place of availabilities … the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life,” for example, run a snow crab restaurant open for half the year.
Clad in olive-green glazed tile, the Ginza Church Hall Building stands on the site of a Methodist church, founded in 1890 and rebuilt three times. The last rebuilding incorporated the church into this eight-story commercial structure. The chapel, which can hold three hundred people and has a pipe organ, is on the third floor. On one side of this building, the church is clearly legible on the façade. On the other side, in the above photograph, it seems like a paradigmatic zakkyo biru. A bell tower on the corner acts as a hinge between these identities. The current directory includes the Fukuinkai English School, founded in 1885 by members of the Tokyo Gospel Society and at this location since the church opened, a branch of Lemon-sha—a well-known dealer of vintage Leica and Hasselblad cameras, MCM, a German luxury leather goods brand, a law office, and BDC Pilates, Japan’s first group reformer pilates studio. In the lobby, a vitrine displays scale models of the church’s previous incarnations beside a prize-winning sōsaku ningyō (creative doll) diorama by Nakamura Akako, recreating Georges de La Tour’s painting St. Joseph the Carpenter. The display is itself like a zakkyo biru, incommensurate objects next to each other, somehow cohering into one thing.
The Ginza Itō Building on Namiki-dori has eight floors and a basement. A red vending machine greets passersby, its attached trash bins one of the few places to discard anything on a Tokyo street (public trash cans were removed after the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack on the subway, their absence reinforced by a waste-sorting system that expects citizens to carry their garbage home). The entrance belies the high-end businesses inside. The directory reads, bottom to top: Ginza Shaving, a women’s facial shaving salon, in the basement, Aya, an eight-seat kaiseki—formal multi-course—restaurant on the first floor, Égoïste cuisine française, a nine-seat counter French restaurant on the second, Liebe, a hair salon and head spa on the third, Bar Four Seasons on the fourth, and Rakurai, a Taiwanese relaxation salon offering massage and foot reflexology on the fifth. The remaining three stories are mysteriously unlisted. The directory gives someone just enough to find a business they already know about, but nothing to someone who doesn’t know it. Where the flagship stores on Chuo-dori, such as Hermès and Rolex, treat the building as an advertisement, the zakkyo biru reduces information to a minimum.
The Ginza Avenue Building on Namiki-dori once again has eight floors, the optimal height in this area, determined by zoning rules that limit building height according to street width. Ginza Sanchome Bar, noted for its Showa-era atmosphere, is in the basement. A branch of the well-known pastry shop, Cafe Miyuki-kan occupies the first two floors, Brand Off, a luxury thrift store, the third, Ginza Avenue Orthodontics the fourth, and a law office on the sixth. A sign of a strawberry parfait replica advertises from the entrance—cream, fruit, and sugar stacked into a tower. The menu and the display of fake food is sweets piled upon sweets: parfaits, mont blanc, millefeuille. Chairs crowd the elevator landing for patrons waiting to be let into the cafe. Whether the seats are ever occupied is unimportant; they signify an abundance of patrons and echo the overflowing parfaits in the signage.
The New Center Building on Hanatsubaki-dori has six floors. Its street-level directory wraps around a pillar at the entrance. L’Odorante par Minoru Nakijin, a Franco-Japanese restaurant by a chef trained in Grasse (the perfume capital of France), is in the basement. Sushiya no Kanpachi, in Ginza since 1953, occupies the ground floor. Charcoal Grill Ginza Matsumoto is on the second, its lunch menu of Wagyu hamburger steak advertised on a lit board beside the entrance. The two restaurants define the building’s street presence, occupying a postmodern base inflected by traditional Japanese architecture. Above, the upper four floors rise as a white gridded facade, their tenants legible only from the directory. The third floor is between a hostess mini-club named Yukari, a magic bar called Tejinakkuru, and Bar Futara. Chikyūboshi, another French restaurant, this time run by a female chef, takes the fourth. Saburina serves steamed hot pot and teppanyaki on the fifth, and Nico-ginza-Tokyo, a South French gypsy music bar, occupies the sixth. Signage for Matsumoto spills out onto the street. English in zakkyo biru signage typically serves to perform cosmopolitanism for a Japanese clientele, but these signs are different, a bit more desperate in their attempt to lure passing tourists in.
Rem Koolhaas, writing about Manhattan in Delirious New York, called this the Culture of Congestion: the stacking of unrelated programs that speculative real estate produces when it builds vertically on small lots.
The Ginza Nishi Gobankan on Nishi Gobangai—West Fifth Street, a narrow back street running between Namiki-dori and Suzuran-dori—has six floors and two basements. Café de Luton, a kissaten whose owner collects antique clocks—five hundred at last count—and displays them among Art Nouveau antiques, occupies the second basement. On the sidewalk, two signs advertise the same kissaten: one by its French name, the other reading simply “coffee shop, basement two.” A small Pierrot in a red polka-dot suit balances on a silver ball atop one of the lanterns—the one piece of the owner’s collection that made it to street level. Sushi Karaku, an Edomae-style counter unique for serving wine pairings by a chef who is also a certified sommelier, is in the first. Eleventy, an Italian smart-luxury brand, takes the ground and second floors. Moisteane, a skincare salon, is the third. Sakura Travel, a discount airline ticket agency, the fourth. The upper two floors are offices.
Down the street, the Nishi Gobangai Building—named, like the Gobankan, after the street itself—announces its tenants through a silver signage cabinet at the entrance. The backlit panels read: Omatsuya, a charcoal-grilled ita-soba house on the seventh floor, Jukou, a kaiseki restaurant, the members-only Karankiku, and Ushi Goro Yakiniku & Wine Ginza. A folding stand of food photographs and a lunch-course board compete for the same two meters of pavement. Where the Gobankan directory is a clean vertical grid—each tenant assigned a row, at the Gobangai entrance every restaurant fights for visibility in a space barely wider than a doorway. Atelier Bow-Wow’s Made in Tokyo calls such objects at this scale “pet size”—between furniture and building, domesticated, not quite architecture, filling the last available opening. Bow-Wow called this condition “void phobia”—the urban compulsion to occupy every residual space.1
Next door to the Ginza Church Hall Building is the Ginza 111 Leisure Building, built in 2013 and named for a triple meaning: its 111-tsubo (about 370 square meters) footprint, a total investment of ¥11.1 billion, and three anchor facilities. When I took the photo, I didn’t realize that this entrance was a ruse, offering access to a nondescript, modern thirteen-story building, but that was the point. The developer built a building ten times the size of a typical zakkyo biru—giving this away through the name—but disguised it as one. The result is a perfect simulation of this typology: the functional entrance is a corridor of signage leading to mirror-glass elevator doors. There is no architecture, only a void with its backlit directories. Time Cafe—you rent time, drink all the coffee you want—fills the ground floor and basement. ALBUM, a hair salon that claims to be the most-booked in Japan, with over 400,000 Instagram followers, occupies the eighth and eleventh floors. A twenty-four-hour manga café with locked private rooms and showers, serving as a capsule hotel for anyone who missed the last train, is on the ninth floor. Two cosmetic surgery clinics—one specializing in rhinoplasty, the other in aesthetic dermatology—share the twelfth and thirteenth.
In the US, the Culture of Congestion is long gone and the city is no longer Kahn’s “place of availabilities.” For me, it is only a memory from my childhood in 1970s Chicago, and even then, it was nothing like the zakkyo biru, with their bars and restaurants mysteriously hidden throughout the structure. I have been harping on architecture having lost its sense of direction for some time, and the zakkyo biru isn’t great architecture. On the contrary, it is usually relatively anonymous infill material. In Japan, there is little love for it. Even the name is dismissive—zakkyo means miscellaneous occupancy, implying disorder. In their famous 2001 investigation of the city, Made in Tokyo, Atelier Bow-Wow spoke of “da-me architecture”—no-good architecture—buildings that give “priority to stubborn honesty in response to their surroundings and programmatic requirements, without insisting on architectural aesthetic and form.”2 Jorge Almazán, in Emergent Tokyo, notes that Japanese planners and critics have long treated these buildings as eyesores, symptoms of a city that failed to modernize properly.3
The biggest threat to the zakkyo biru is the iconic architecture that Koolhaas himself has aggressively promoted in this millennium, namely the luxury flagships lining Chuo-dori together with malls like Ginza Six. Structures like Maison Hermès, Chanel, Coach, Bottega Veneta, and Louis Vuitton are built icons—architecture reduced to a logo, enlarged to the scale of a building. None of these structures has any relationship to the architectural history of Ginza. They could stand on Fifth Avenue, in Polanco, or Dubai without altering a single detail. The ideal site for this sort of architecture isn’t even the city, it’s the duty-free zone; the flagship stores are Marc Augé’s non-places made architectural.4 In his last consequential essay, “Junkspace” (2002), Koolhaas described this as the terminal state, where branding and starchitecture replace the programmatic independence that congestion once produced.5 The Chanel building stacks a concert hall above a boutique above a gallery, but it is a simulation of the culture of congestion—it is a single organism simulating variety.
In contrast to the corporate strategy of junkspace, the zakkyo biru is the product of an accumulation of independent decisions, each floor a wager that a snow crab restaurant, a magic bar, or a vintage camera dealer will find its public. The flagship store knows its audience before it opens; the zakkyo biru discovers one. The flagship store exposes itself and demands passersby enter; the zakkyo biru seduces with mystery. The zakkyo biru directory lists a taxonomy of incommensurable things, each entry as precise and arbitrary as a listing in a Chinese encyclopedia.
- Atelier Bow-Wow (Momoyo Kaijima, Junzo Kuroda, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto), Made in Tokyo (Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, 2001), 24-25. ↩
- Atelier Bow-Wow, Made in Tokyo, 9. ↩
- Jorge Almazán, Joe McReynolds, Naoki Saito, and Studiolab, Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City (Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2022), 60–96. ↩
- Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). ↩
- Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 175–190. ↩