Shinjuku-dori looking to the west at Yotsuya station

            Saturday evening in early May. The tall buildings lining this road lead to Shinjuku maybe 1.5 or 2 km further west where even taller ones are clustered. At this hour the setting sun illuminates the smooth surfaces of this man-made canyon. Considering the desolation after repeated waves of hundreds of B-29 bombers, what now stands had to begin with clearing away the unusable remains of the bombardment (hauled away to the water's edge to form reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay in some cases, or filling in valley spaces elsewhere in the vicinity, perhaps). Then every stick of wood, or beam of steel and load of cement had to be sourced elsewhere on the islands or else it had to be imported from overseas by ship for the construction to begin. Unlike a thatch village in a mountain valley long generations ago where building materials came from what resources were within reach of human powered tools and animal powered transportation, for this post-war building frenzy most everything visible today came from somewhere else; the cumulative mass of civilization standing on the Tokyo grid had to be brought in, much like a company of actors setting up props and flats to form the theater for a time. Naturally the many companies and sub-contractors did this work for decades and it continues today when a building is razed, recycled or disposed of, and the resulting space is filled with something different. Even individual family tombstones only persist while there are descendants to look after them. When there is nobody to remember those gone, eventually the space is emptied for another line of people to rest awhile. The most active burial grounds in other countries also give the impression of eternal rest, but there, too, reuse/recycling the space is a logistical necessity, whether it is 100 or 200 years later, eventually the limited space is reclaimed and filled again.
   

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Taken in: 日本 / 東京都 / 東京 (show map)

Taken on: May 12, 2017

Tags:

canon sd1100is

tokyo

yotsuya

b-29

fire storm

reconstruction « less

Sets appears in: • japan2017summer-fall

Stats: 676 views

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