Prisons, or palaces? If prisons, golden cages indeed. If palaces… castles in the air, maybe.
Ancient Japan built itself close to the ground. Other cultures reared high towers – to overawe enemies, to worship gods or, as in the Biblical Tower of Babel story, to defy God.
Japan’s architectural modesty is striking. It persisted into modern times. As recently as the turn of the century the current proliferation of tower mansions would have been hard to foresee – though the first apartment building to be so called dates to 1976.
Shukan Gendai (Nov 16-23) counts 1,641 nationwide – towering human nests soaring 30, 40, 50 and more stories upward, each housing hundreds or thousands of families. They are landscape-transforming obviously, society-transforming also in ways yet to be assessed. “Tawaman (tower mansion) heaven and hell” is Shukan Gendai’s title. To some it’s one, to others the other.
The higher you go, the greater the luxury, at dizzying cost. The suite the magazine ushers us into is on the 46th floor of an Osaka tawaman, the downtown core spread out below in a vast panorama of everything reduced to almost nothing. Inside, nothing desired but there’s a button to push for it, no fatigue too great for the fatigue-melting upholstery, 90 tsubo (roughly 300 square meters) of living space serviced by a private elevator and right there in front of you as you recline, feet on the coffee table after a hard day earning the money to pay for all this – what’s this, now? – your very own automobile, sports car more likely than not, parked reassuringly before your very eyes in its very living room and yours, in a compartment called – not “garage,” obviously – a “car gallery.”
Cost? In round figures, 2.5 billion yen, 27 million yen per tsubo. Oh, reader, that’s nothing. That’s Osaka, modest costwise compared to Tokyo, where prices run to 60 million yen per tsubo. Are tawaman pricing themselves out of the market? “I’ve thought at times maybe we developers were getting carried away,” Shukan Gendai hears from one developer – who now knows, however, that his fears were groundless, at least for now. The “tawaman boom” that had been expected to founder this year in what became known as “the 2024 problem” emerges triumphant at year’s end. For how long?
The tawaman built in 1976 in Saitama shares a name but little else with its third-generation offspring. It was 20 stories high and by no means luxurious, housing not the hyper-rich but the drably average. The Tokyo conurbation had everything in abundance except living space. Single-family dwellings spread way, way out into the suburbs. Where were young people streaming in from the country to live? Even farther out, often in cramped shabby apartments requiring long draining commutes to and from work.
There was nowhere to go but up. Developers bought out existing residences and built high-rises, tawaman prototypes but hardly the tawaman we know today.
Those first appeared circa 2000. Building code deregulation facilitated construction. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 subsided. IT millionaires, newly risen, sought housing to match their incomes. Here it was. Through the 1990s high-rises went up in Tokyo at an average rate of 10 a year; in 2000, 31 were built; in 2007, the peak year, 75. The slowdown since reflects declining population and limited space but not an end to the “tawaman boom” as supply and demand stoke each other, demand fed not only Japanese wealth but Chinese and South Korean too.
“Almost all foreign tawaman buyers are East Asians,” Shukan Gendai notes – almost all gravitating to the higher floors. Luxury and cost both rise with altitude, and so does status – not irrelevant, the magazine observes, to Confucian hierarchical thinking which remains influential to this day, though in a form to make Confucius himself, some 2,500 years dead, turn over in his grave. It was he, after all, who said of his favorite disciple, “A person of character is this Yan Hui! He has a bamboo bowl of rice to eat, a gourd of water to drink and a dirty little hovel in which to live. Other people would not be able to endure such hardship, yet for Hui it has no effect on his enjoyment. A person of character is this Yan Hui!”
But that’s by the way. What of tawaman life? Conventional housing affects only its occupants. Tawaman are different. Blight or grandeur is in the eye of the beholder, but it seems to be one or the other, much passion and little dispassion. A lot depends on whether you’re inside looking out or outside looking in. The real estate advisory site Uruhome conducted an informal poll of 500, 80 percent of whom (outsiders presumably) expressed negative views ranging from mild (“they look unpleasant to live in”) to surly (“nouveau riche,” “disgusting”).
Good settings for satire are tawaman. One scene Shukan Gendai cites from a novel circulating online features two tawaman residents meeting by chance at the entrance, one a woman of a lower floor (“the lower classes,” we might say in a different context) carrying an ordinary supermarket shopping bag, the other of a higher floor whose bag bespeaks higher things – chic, elegance, exclusiveness. The one smiles superciliously, the other cringes with embarrassment and slinks mortified away.
Is this serious? Fiction is only as realistic as its author wants it to be, and if the purpose is to amuse, realism goes begging. Lower-floor tawaman residents are easily found who deny any such feelings, either in themselves or in their neighbors, upper or lower. More important to them are the facilities open equally to all residents: playrooms for kids, party rooms for adults, spacious quiet comfortable lobbies for anyone who wants to work or study there, and the unfailing spic-and-span cleanliness maintained throughout the building by staff continually at work.
Tawaman may be what Shukan Gendai (Confucius and Yan Hui notwithstanding) calls them “the last dream of a stagnant Japan.” Or are they a budding nightmare? One who fears so is Kobe Mayor Kizo Hisamoto. Kobe is “tawaman city,” home to more than 70. Hisamoto, in office since 2013, for the past four years has been working to toughen standards governing their construction.
Short-term, he says, they are wonderful: They draw young families that enrich and invigorate the local society and economy – “but what,” he asks, his tone turning ominous, “of 30 and 40 years down the road?
“Tawaman house a rich and varied population” – varied as to economic status, ethnic origins and long-term intentions (those who stay and those who move on, residents and speculators). “Variety is good for a city,” says Hisamoto, “but not necessarily for a residence.” Will 1,000-odd families be able to agree on necessary maintenance and the funding required? Will the elegantly soaring tawaman of today end up hulking ruins in decades to come?
And what, he adds, thinking of the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake and the havoc it caused back in pre-tawaman-boom 1995, if disaster on a similar scale causes similar power outages? Can anyone imagine a 50-story fully automated tawaman without power? – for days, possibly weeks?
© Japan Today
8 Comments
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Mr Kipling
Each to his own but I much prefer to live in an individual house with garage and workshop for my toys in a nice area.
wallace
The Chinese are buying expensive apartments. I prefer a house with a garden.
Zaphod
The last thing I would want to live in is in one of these anonymous oversized concrete chicken batteries. They crush the soul and destroy cities. It does not matter what fancy decorations they put in them; brutalist architecture is anti-human.
Mocheake
No high-rises for me. No shared spaces. No walls touching the home next door. No elevators or upstairs and downstairs neighbors either. Cannot understand the allure.
factchecker
Vertical slums.
DanteKH
Very good article.
As mentioned, 75% of the tenants are ritch Chinese, Taiwanese or Korean "investors".
Those very expensive apartments are actually sold out before the building is even completed and are bought out by the mafia of Real Estate companies, which you guess, most of them are not even own by Japanese. A normal, average Tanaka, cannot even buy those apartments directly from the builder, but they have to pay up to 50% more to the Real Estate company who bought all of those.
One other intetesting thing, those apartments are indeed sold out to those East Asian foreign "investors", however, even if they are sold out, they keep them just as investments, not actually to live inside them.
N. Knight
Horrible. Stacked up in shoe boxes. Much happier up on my mountain in a 400sqm house with 3,000 SQM of land and a 120km view (on a very clear day), and a comprehensive wine cellar.
kohakuebisu
These should not be confused with homes for regular folks. If most of the new apartments being built in Tokyo are these, this should be remembered when a "price of new apartments" figure is being calculated and placed in newspaper headlines as if it represents the cost of housing to everyone. It doesn't mean the average person needs find 1.5 to 2 oku to buy a two bed in Tokyo. There are plenty of other options that are much cheaper.