Reviewing as a Caring and Creative Practice: Zooming into Made in Tokyo

Abstract

Nearly twenty years after its initial release, Kaijima, Kuroda and Tsukamoto’s architectural guidebook Made in Tokyo remains a unique cultural and visual contribution to our global architectural textual archive. The authors offer readers accessible and sharply unique observations into Tokyo’s vast urban megascape through generating and implementing a creative and caring reviewing practice. As a result, Made in Tokyo encapsulates the art of guiding; it directs and encourages us to embed enthusiasm and sheer love into the multiple ways in which we write and represent the built environment.

Keywords:

• Guidebook
• reviewing
• Tokyo
• care
• creative practice

Notes

1 All Japanese names in the main text will be written in the Japanese format – family name, given name.

2 Momoyo Kaijima, Junzo Kuroda, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Made in Tokyo: Guidebook (Tokyo: Kaijima Institute Publishing Co. Ltd, 2001), 009.

3 The disciplinary categories present within the city clearly extend beyond these examples. In the book, the authors also reference agriculture and advertising.

4 In simple terms, meshwork is used in reference to Manuel DeLanda’s insight into Deleuze and Guattari’s Assemblage theory, whereby parts are capable of meshing together to form a network. See Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 2005) and Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

5 Kaijima, Kuroda, Tsukamoto, Made in Tokyo, 009.

6 Ibid., 018.

7 Cambridge Dictionary, “Curate Definition,” Available online: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/curate (accessed June 12, 2019).

8 Raoul Bunschoten, Hoshino Takuro and Hélène Binet, Urban Flotsam: Stirring the City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001), 27.

9 Kaijima, Kuroda, Tsukamoto, Made in Tokyo, 015.

10 Cambridge Dictionary, “Guidebook Definition,” Available online: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/guidebook (accessed June 14 2019).

11 Benjamin Lucca Laquinto, “Fear of a Lonely Planet: Author Anxieties and the Mainstreaming of a Guidebook,” Current Issues in Tourism 14, no. 8 (2011): 707.  

12 For an in-depth trajectory of the architectural guidebook see C. Herndon, “The History of the Architectural Guidebook and the Development of an Architectural Information System” (Ph.D. diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007).

13 Obvious examples are those which derive from colonial rule. For detailed research into this area see: Brian McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2006); Georgia Daskalaki, ““Aphrodite’s Realm”: Representations of Tourist Landscapes in Postcolonial Cyprus as Symbols of Modernization,” Architectural Histories 5, no.1 (2017), doi:10.5334/ah.198. Other related work includes: Zeynep Çelik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” Assemblage, no.17 (1992), doi: 10.2307/3171225.

14 John A. Powell and Stephen Menendian, “The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging,” Othering and Belonging, Issue 1 (2016), Available online: http://www.otheringandbelonging.org/the-problem-of-othering/ (accessed July 8, 2019).

15 Examples include: Julian Worrall and Erez Golani Solomon, 21st Century Tokyo: A Guide to Contemporary Architecture (Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd, 2010); Ulf Meyer, Tokyo: Architectural Guide (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2017); Martin Kunz, Tokyo (Architecture and Design Guides) (Kempen: teNeues Publishing, 2004); Livio Sacchi and Franco Purini, Tokyo: City and Architecture (Milan: Skira Editore, 2005).

16 Kaijima, Kuroda, Tsukamoto, Made in Tokyo, 010.

17 Notable examples within the discipline of architecture include: Kim Trogal, “Caring: Making Commons, Making Connections,” in The Social Production of Architecture, ed. D. Petrescu and K. Trogal (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2016); Meike Schalk, “Taking Care of Public Space,” ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly 13, no. 2 (2009): 141–150; Andrea Phillips and Markus Miessen, ed. Caring Culture – Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012).

18 Examples include: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

19 Carol Gilligan, “Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the Conversation about Differences,” Journal of Social Philosophy 45, no.1 (2014): 104.

20 Nel Noddings, “The Language of Care Ethics,” Knowledge Quest 40, no. 5 (2012): 53.

21 Trogal, “Caring: Making Commons, Making Connections”, 159.

22 Kaijima, Kuroda, Tsukamoto, Made in Tokyo, 018.

23 Ibid., 019.

24 Ibid., 090.

25 Ibid., 023.

26 Ibid., 088.

27 Ibid., 054.

28 Ibid.

29 Kaijima, Kuroda, Tsukamoto, Made in Tokyo, 054. Pachinko is a Japanese arcade game, frequently used for gambling.

30 Ibid., 138.

31 Ibid., 024.

32 Ibid., 020.

33 Ibid., 028.

34 Momoyo Kaijima, Laurent Stalder and Yu Iseki, Architectural Ethnography (Tokyo: TOTO Publishing, 2018), 064.

35 Kaijima, Kuroda, Tsukamoto, Made in Tokyo, 022.

36 Lys Villalba, “Made in Tokyo: 15th Year Update,” Available online: https://www.lysvillalba.net/Made-in-Tokyo-15th-Year-Update (accessed July 14, 2019).

37 Lys Villalba (researcher and architect), in discussion with the author, July 2019.

38 See Architectural Ethnography - Japanese Pavilion Venice Biennale, 2018, Momoyo Kaijima, Laurent Stalder, Yu Iseki (Tokyo: TOTO, 2018).

39 Noddings, Caring, 46–48.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cathryn Klasto

Cathryn Klasto is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her current research is exploring feminist sensory creative practice in relation to housing design in contemporary Tokyo. Scholarly interests include the philosophy of art and architecture, material narratives and spatial identities.