Ridgeline subscribers —

I randomly attended a little talk in Tokyo the other night and Sam Holden gave a short presentation on some of his work preserving sento bathhouses around Tokyo. It turns out Sam has a fabulous newsletter documenting his work, and you should absolutely subscribe: “Dispatches from Post-growth Japan.” I’ve been plowing through his archives these past couple days.

Sam writes frequently and eruditely about a lot of what I’ve light-touched upon in previous TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO pop-up newsletters (archives available to SPECIAL PROJECTS members): namely the shifting landscape of a city like Tokyo, and how best to balance change with “sensible nostalgia.”

About eight years ago I moved from Tokyo proper to Kamakura (what I often describe as “the Hudson Valley of Tokyo” to folks from NYC) — mainly for a change (I had clocked about 15 years in Tokyo by that point), but also because the trains back and forth are so easy, it felt hardly any different from, say, choosing to live in Kichijoji. Except I got a mountain hike behind my home, and ocean views a five-minute walk in the other direction. I was able to get a house, set up a proper studio, host editors and artists, and produce the books I’m now producing with much greater ease than I could in my tiny Tokyo apartments.

But I was back in Tokyo frequently (trains in Japan break the old adage of “easy, cheap, quick; pick two” — you get to pick all three). And two years ago, right about now, in the heart of the summer of 2022, I started those TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO pop-ups. Something was pulling me back. I love this city. There is no place in the world I know better. Show me a sliver-of-a-photo of a sliver-of-Tokyo and I can at least place the ku if not the nearby station. I have walked and biked a freakishly high percentage of its streets. I’m a member of The International House of Japan, and was spending one or two nights a week there. Finally, at the start of this year, through some fortuitous real-estate encounters, I set up a small writing studio smack in the center of the city and have been spending most of my time here, once again.

Which is my long-winded way of saying I’ve been thinking about Tokyo, being made to think about Tokyo by gazing upon Tokyo, once again. This city forces you to contend with nostalgia precisely because of all the change. And yet, the change, the building of housing in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s and ’00s, is why I could make this city my home (and could set up this current studio in this “old” building) — ample, affordable housing with very little compromise (relative to other megalopolises) was everywhere. What was there before the housing outside the shitamachi east side of the city? A hundred-and-fifty years ago: estates, mostly. Unbelievably large estates. You can check this yourself: download this app to overlay old maps atop new. Shibuya itself was the hinterlands of just a handful of landowners. Don’t chop up those homes, and you don’t get the Tokyo of today, you certainly don’t get the affordability of housing you have today.

But. These last ten years have brought a markedly different kind of development — replacing affordable danchi-style apartments with luxury tower apartments. Razing entire neighborhoods — vast swaths of small-scale housing and independently owned shops — in the name of Mori Building mega-developments littered with Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Rolex showrooms, capped by hyper-luxury apartments built with the intent, these days, of selling to ultra-wealthy non-Japanese. (The Hibiya Line now has a run of three stations, all of which sit below “Hills” — Roppongi Hills, Azabudai Hills, and Toranomon Hills; close your eyes, get off randomly, and try and figure out which one you’re in — this is the smooth-brain glaze of a developer with no imagination foisted upon us tax-paying denizens.)

So Sam’s focus on sento public bath houses is heartening and got me thinking more and more about “shared city commons.” He made a great point at his talk: the old neighborhoods that these developments replace had a kind of “porousness” to them that allowed easy flow / engagement from city folk. Monolithic blockages, these new developments have none of that. There are no relationships being formed, no histories being made. Sento, in comparison, are remarkable, small-scale operations, run by families, price-regulated by a governing body, available to all socio-economic strata of society. They are nothing if not relationships formed over decades. They’re miraculous. Public bathing is not unique to Japan, of course, but the tenor, the architectural style of, and art / tile / design within these commons are.

There’s sort of a problem though, in preserving these: We all now have showers at home. The community aspect was a corollary of a real solution to a real problem. Sento existed because they had to — folks wanted to / had to bathe. Even when I moved to Japan in 2000, some of my friends lived in apartments without baths. I was in awe. To go to a public bathing place several times a week? As your only way to get clean? What a thing. One friend lived in a 4.5-mat (12m²?) apartment in Ebisu — just steps from the station — for ¥40,000 / mo, and used the sento a few blocks down. I’d visit and we’d head to the bath to cook ourselves silly. Then grab some ice-cold beers from a convenience store and lounge on tatami while feeling alive from both directions of temperature — utterly baked on the outside and chilled internally.

I, sadly, never formed a deep relationship with a single sento. My apartments always had baths. And I didn’t really “get” baths until much later into my Japan-emigration history. I did, however, want desperately to move into that ¥40,000/mo place, but there were never any openings (and I don’t think the owner was keen on having a white guy move in). There was a romance to that space, that affordability of being, that communing with the local neighborhood, that my socio-economic history felt hugged by.

Not doing the sento thing is one of my great regrets about living in Tokyo for so long, and now public bath culture is on a kind of last leg. Sam reckons there are only about 400 left in the city (that number feels surprisingly high!), down from thousands at their peak. And of those remaining, like so many things Showa (kissa, jazz kissa, shokudo, etc.), their remaining days are numbered in years you can count on a hand or two. Many are sold in instantaneous fire sales when the owner suddenly drops dead. Café Ace in Kanda, a spectacular old kiss with hand-painted signs and oddly alluring nori-sandwiches suddenly closed up shop, not even giving anyone a chance to ask: Hey, can we take over for you?

Estate tax — that’s why they sell, why it all gets chopped up. Estate tax is why Tokyo is as Tokyo is today, but it’s also worth thinking about exceptions for shops that exist firmly in the community-building / community-hub space.

Sam notes:

Perhaps the disappearance of old ways of life is an unavoidable part of urban evolution, but this process assumes new meaning when extinction looms for the final specimen of some wondrous, endogenous form of architecture. The last reminders of an urban ecosystem that was once open and porous are pushed over the brink by the invasive species of uniform convenience stores, widened roads, and private spaces hidden behind concrete walls. Just a short walk down Hongo Hill to the west, the high-rises of a nearly complete redevelopment that has reaped tens of millions of dollars of public incentives loomed over the roofline of the inn. To the dispassionate administrator, the disappearance of sento and ryokan and the construction of apartment towers is just the natural functioning of urban land markets — there’s no need for the government to intervene due to nostalgic attachment to the past, especially when resident taxes are ballooning thanks to all the well-paid professionals moving in. Yet I have a hard time looking at all the gleaming new skyscrapers in Tokyo in 2021 and believing that people a few decades from now will be glad we poured public funds and social resources into building ever more houses and offices when the city was on the cusp of population decline, instead of preserving the dwindling cultural heritage that made this place unique and tied together its social fabric.

I like all these thoughts — and finding a balance between remembering why a city like Tokyo is unique, and working to preserve some aspects of that uniqueness, combined with moving it ever-forward is a tension unresolvable in any properly functioning city. (See San Francisco as an example of what happens when cities ossify, when building in most neighborhoods stops.)

All of this got me thinking about the singular, quintessential Tokyo commons that still has objective functional value today (and in fact, its value is ever-increasing), and that is: the Shinto shrine. Personally, I think the tax-free status of most religious institutions is borderline criminal in 2024, but it turns out that this weird loophole has kept these bastions of greenery, culture, matsuri, and community intact, and in fact, will keep them intact indefinitely. They truly are oases (and generate a hearty profit for the owners, further disincentivizing their removal). Especially as we feel these summer-hell days increasing (today, “real feel” of 41°C at 1 p.m.; humidity 85%; literally dangerous to move at length in direct sunlight), anything green should be protected with blood (or tax breaks). Shinto is also unique in that the veneration, the kami, the gods of the shrine, are very often natural — a rock, a tree, etc. So shrines are mostly outdoor spaces, many with parks for kids on the edges of their grounds.

I’ve written about shrine power — their green glory out in the middle of rice fields on the Kii Peninsula — in Things Become Other Things:

Today I saw a clustered burst of trees towering beyond the farmland — as sure a sign as any of a shrine. There aren’t many spots to rest along these roads. Few benches, fewer covered benches for a guy as white as me. I am eternally grateful for these shrines and their shade. Shrines, old places of community activity, where villager bond during seasonal festivals … As I made my way into the shrine’s inner grounds, the brightness of the open-sky farmland was replaced by the cool darkness of the canopy. Not only did the temperature drop, but the air itself seemed to thicken.

The power of such a place is even further amplified in an increasingly concrete Tokyo.

Temples can also fill this niche, but the “commonness” comes more naturally to the shrine — less formality, less tut-tut, more weirdness. Come on in, shrines say. Cut through on your way to somewhere else, we don’t mind.

In the end, central Tokyo is probably an overall lost cause. Shibuya Station has been redeveloped (with plans for more development — the razing Dogenzaka and more) within an inch of its life as a place of texture and curiosity. And the “Hills?” They’re only going to multiply. Fear not: You’ll always be within 100 meters of being able to purchase a $20,000 watch. As Sam points out, Tokyo is sort of a “post-growth” city in that while Tokyo itself is gaining population, the country on a whole is losing, and losing massively. A population loss of 850,000 in the last year alone, fifteen years of declines. It’s a valid concern to wonder what the investment in all this office and luxury housing will look like in twenty or thirty years. Developments planned in a different era, for a different future. “But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

The saving grace is that Tokyo has a distinct advantage over other cities in that it extends, effectively, infinitely in most directions that aren’t the ocean (and even there, we’ve added quite a bit in the last hundred years). And is ultra-connected by perfectly-functioning public transportation. So you’re seeing what used to be more centralized “cultural texture” move east and west — out to Kuramae, Kiyosumishirakawa, Gakugeidaigaku, Itabashi, and more; not unlike the Brooklyn migrations from a Duane-Reade-and-Citibank-infested Manhattan in the naughts and 2010s. But for me, one of the great joys is wandering the central neighborhoods of the city, those abutting the “Hills” and mega-developments, finding those rare streets still replete with homes and shops of a city that once was. Finding one of those four-hundred remaning baths. There are still common relationships to luxuriate in, even as the towers loom. And after Sam’s talk, I’ve got a few new sento on my to-visit list. Who knows for how long they’ll be around. Might as well take one last bath while the bathing’s to be had.

C