IN JAPAN

Hokitika Guardian, 9 November 1929, Page 8

IN JAPAN

PARADISE OF ARCHITECTS (By Sir Pcrcival Phillips). TOKYO, Aug. 22. Enter Tokyo in search of old Japan and what do you find? Streets like tne trenches of the old Western front; skyscrapers lifted astonishingly above the paper houses of the past; hoardings and holes in the ground nt every turn; piles of stone, brick and timber strewn this way and that along winding motor-car ways like the firts dirt roads of a mining camp; masons, steam drills, and nimble workmen poised precariously in mid-air; apartment houses more spacious than Queen Anne’s mansions planted on recent rice fields. A veritable Paradise of architects and the happy hunting ground of an army of plumbers.

This is Tokyo in the throes of reconstruction on mass' production lines. ■Nothing like it has ever been attempted by any other great city. It is as though a genie had suddenly been summoned to reclothe the capital in European dress, and to do, it almost overnight. The schemes of Kemal Pahsa at Angora and the laborious expansion of New Delhi seem pitiful in comparison. The Japanese have simply pulled up Tokyo by the roots and are planting a modern metropolis from seeds obtained largely in the United States. You may dislike the result—many foreigners do>—but you cannot help admiring the tremendous effort -it involves. I have heard some critics ask where the money is coming from. The answer interests only the Japanese and they are not worrying over it. The new heart of Tokyo is a faithful replica of American business communities. Wide streets are framed in towering office structures of plain but practical design. To walk through the long ground-floor arcades' of the Mariuowni phi 'building is like returning to Chicago or New York.

Batteries of high-speed lifts, controlled by a spectacled “despoteller,” carry’ the new type of Japanese business man to his suite of American offices on one of the upper floors. The click of Japanese typewriters echoes in the long corridors. Typists in short skirts and male clerks in white trousers and silk ties flit about in a serious way. Telephone bells are ringing on all sides. Japanese Big Business shows itself in gold spectacles and correct lounge jackets, putting through ideals with thin staccato dialogue that falls strangely on AVe,stern ears. It is rather pathetic to see country folk wander dazedly and with an air of helplessness through one of these unfamiliar hives of human activity. They slip-slop along in their wooden clogs, looking so old-fashioned in their kimonos, with their necks craned at the startling masses of steel and mortar above them, awed and strangely uncomfortable in such a Gargantuan setting. They paddle back to the normal level of one-storev houses with the feeling that 4i heavy nightmare has been lifted from their perplexed minds.

These new buildings are not shoddy imitations of European structures such as are found elsewhere in the East. They have solidity and permanence. Ttye magnificent Houses of Parliament now approaching completion on rising ground behind' Hibiya Park, would be al credit to any capital. The new railway stations of Tokyo and Yokohama, show a spcciousness and a commonsense perception of modern needs that put London’s archaic terminals to shame.

Not so lout? ago the jinricksha was the universal method of transport'-’-tion in Tokyo. To-dav the jinricksha is almost a curiosity. Taxicabs, larger and more powerful than those of London. swarm the broken streets, and their eo«t 'is verv reasonable. The <ts-minutes journey by electrotrain between Tokvo and Yokohama is a. revelation of the spirit of reconstruction. Automatic telephones will

soon he installed everywhere. Tramway services are being extended in all directions. It is all very wonderful, and doubtless inevitable, aijd yet—the friends of Japan who come here with memories of tne Tokyo of a quarter of a century ago fee! lost and not a little regretful of the charm, that has vanished*