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Metabolism and Cold War architecture

Hyunjung Cho & Chunghoon Shin

To cite this article: Hyunjung Cho & Chunghoon Shin (2014) Metabolism and Cold War
architecture, The Journal of Architecture, 19:5, 623-644, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2014.965186

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 623

The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 19
Number 5

Metabolism and Cold War

architecture

Hyunjung Cho, Chunghoon Shin Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
[KAIST]; Department of Art History and Archaeology,
Seoul National University, Korea
(Authors’ e-mail addresses: ustay76@gmail.com;
chshin31@gmail.com)

In May, 1960, the Metabolist Group made a stunning debut at the World Design Conference
held in Tokyo by presenting visionary proposals for future cities. Metabolism has long been
understood within what Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co have called an ‘international
concept of utopia’ of the 1960s. Metabolism’s vision of the future, however, does not neatly
fit into a singular category of modernist utopia. For Japanese architects who witnessed the
devastation of war in their teens, it seemed nearly impossible to imagine a technology-
driven future without considering the mass destruction of the urban environment, the inevi-
table consequence of the very embrace of technology that post-war Japan sought as a means
to brighten its future. This article situates Metabolism within Japan’s specific post-war con-
dition, which was closely tied to global Cold War geopolitics. The Cold War framework
allows us to examine the dual sensibility of promise and peril inherent in Metabolism’s
theory and design.

Metabolism revisited dualism, best illustrated in terms of the coexistence

In May, 1960, Metabolism made a stunning debut at
the World Design Conference held in Tokyo by pre-
senting a bilingual manifesto titled Metabolism
1960: Proposals for a New Urbanism.1 The Metabo-
list group, consisting of the young architects Kiyonori
Kikutake, Kishō Kurokawa, Fumihiko Maki, Masato
Ō taka and the critic Noboru Kawazoe, surprised
the world with their bold suggestions for future
cities—cities on the sea or spiralling across the sky.
The objective of this paper is to interpret the Meta-
bolists’ futurist designs as a product of crisis rather
than of confidence and optimism towards a technol-
ogy-driven future. I propose that Metabolism can be
read as an architectural embodiment of Cold War
of ‘dream world and catastrophe’.2 If optimism for
technological innovation and post-war economic
growth formed an integral part of the Metabolists’
designs, traumatic memories of wartime destruction
and anxiety about imminent nuclear catastrophe
were also clearly part of their work.
Metabolism has long been understood within what
Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co have called an
‘international concept of utopia’ of the 1960s.3 One
of the most influential presentations of Metabolism
was Reyner Banham’s Megastructure: Urban Futures
of the Recent Past, published in 1976.4 In this book,
Banham characterised Metabolism as an Asian
branch of the Western megastructure movement by

# 2014 RIBA Enterprises 1360-2365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2014.965186

 624
Metabolism and Cold
War architecture
Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin
emphasising its combination of mega-scale infrastruc-
ture and individual modular units. Following
Banham’s framework, the vast majority of research
conducted in the English-speaking world tended to
examine Metabolism in tandem with its European
counterparts, such as the British group Archigram
and the French Spatial Urbanists, within the
Western tradition of utopian architecture.5
Such an emphasis on the ‘international contem-
poraneity’ of the Metabolist movement, however,
runs the risk of overlooking the specific post-war
conditions to which the group’s work responded.
The first attempt to situate Metabolism within
Japan’s domestic context was Hajime Yatsuka’s
and Hideki Yoshimatsu’s seminal book written in
Japanese in 1997.6 Based on this foundational
study, Zhongjie Lin published the first English mono-
graph on Metabolism in 2010 in which he traced the
evolution of the Metabolist movement from the late
1950s to 1970 against the backdrop of Japan’s
changing social, political and urban landscape.7
Lin’s study explored the utopian dimension of the
Metabolist projects by focusing on their less-dis-
cussed socialist concern for egalitarian communities
built on public artificial land.
If the above-mentioned studies tended to view
Metabolist design as an architectural response to
Japan’s phoenix-like recovery and urban expansion,
Cherie Wendelken tried to consider Metabolism in
conjunction with the country’s psychological and
cultural crisis. In her 2000 essay, Wendelken
claimed that the spirit of Metabolism was rooted in
concerns far removed from technological optimism
over new possibilities; rather, she argued, it was ‘a
form of cultural nihilism that developed out of the
trauma of defeat in war followed by occupation’.8
For her, Metabolism grappled with the ‘meanings
out of the erasure of memory and the loss of iden-
tity’ by coming to terms with the recurring trauma
of wartime destruction and ruin.9
Wendelken’s argument is supported by a series of
recent interviews with the surviving Metabolists and
their collaborators conducted by Rem Koolhaas and
Hans Ulrich Olbrist, which were compiled into a
volume entitled Project Japan (2011). Koolhaas and
Olbrist proposed that the dire situation of Japan
during the war and the immediate post-war years
led these Japanese visionaries to conceive a radical
makeover of the built environment as distinct from
the West. Here, the country’s defeat in war and
the atomic devastation were deployed as a psycho-
analytic archetype that served to formulate what
Koolhaas and Olbrist called ‘a post-Western aes-
thetic’, a unique identity of Metabolism. In a
similar vein, the major Metabolism retrospective
entitled The City of the Future held at Mori
Museum (2011) put on a display of colonial urban
planning and ruins of war as an incubator for the
Metabolist movement.
This study is built on this recent scholarship that
draws attention to war trauma as an integral
element of the Metabolists’ urban imaginary.
However, overemphasis on the original moment of
trauma carries the danger of preventing us from
looking at the complex dynamics of war narratives
in post-war Japanese society. Trauma and memory
studies inform us that the meanings and impacts
of the nation’s traumatic memories were not static,
but rather developed within the shifting terrain of
the sociopolitical, cultural and intellectual discourse

of post-war Japan. Moreover, although the trau-
matic war memories played out across the political
spectrum, they were often organised along a left-
right divide, which separated the conservative state
from the liberal activists.10 In this essay, I will argue
that Metabolism’s futurist visions were deeply infil-
trated by traumatic war memories that were intrinsi-
cally intertwined with changing Cold War
geopolitics. To this end, this essay attempts to recup-
erate the marginalised voices of the group that
spoke of the fear and anxiety provoked by these
memories, and thereby demonstrates that Metab-
olism was far from an homogeneous group but in
fact was a collective of diverse and even contradic-
tory voices in terms of the members’ historical con-
sciousness and political orientation, as well as their
design approach. Metabolism was as much a part
of a broader cultural and intellectual programme
to formulate a new identity for post-war Japan as
it was an architectural movement. I will examine
four undervalued episodes in the group’s founding
and development: the special issue of Shinkenchiku
on the theme of ‘Ten Years after the Atomic Bomb’
published in 1955; Noboru Kawazoe’s concept of
metabolism in the 1960 manifesto; the issue of sur-
vival in Metabolism’s canonical megastructure; and
the capsule as a fallout shelter in the work of
Kishō Kurokawa around 1970.
‘Ten Years after the Atomic Bomb’ in the 1955
Shinkenchiku Special Issue
In August, 1955, the architectural journal Shin-
kenchiku brought out a special issue with the subti-
tle ‘Ten Years after the Atomic Bomb: Japanese
Architecture and Architects’.11 This issue merits
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close reading because it prefigures later interdisci-
plinary exchanges among the Metabolist group.
The main contributors to the Shinkenchiku special
issue soon became the key figures of the Metabolist
movement; the then chief editor of this leading
architectural journal was Noboru Kawazoe, a self-
pronounced Marxist critic who provided a theoreti-
cal framework for Metabolism. The guest editor of
this issue, who was invited by Kawazoe, was the
architect and planner Takashi Asada. Asada was
known as an influential leader and practical promo-
ter of the Metabolist movement.12 The key interlo-
cutor of the main featured article, entitled ‘The
Atomic Bomb Age and Architecture’, was the
nuclear physicist Mitsuo Taketani. His physical
theory of the three stages of matter—the stage of
phenomenon, of the actual condition, and of sub-
stance—would have a strong influence on Metab-
olism’s theory, particularly Kiyonori Kikutake’s
three stages of the design process—‘ka’ (image)/
‘kata’ (technique)/‘katachi’ (phenomenon)—as
articulated in his later publications and designs.13
The Shinkenchiku issue put forth an urgent call to
formulate a new post-war identity for Japanese
architecture. On the occasion of the tenth anniver-
sary of the end of the war, the editorial board of
Shinkenchiku attempted to look back on the
course that Japanese architecture had followed for
the previous ten years. The issue begins with a
four-page spread of an illustrated chronology of
Japanese architecture from 1945 to 1955. The
chronology features a compelling image of a mush-
room cloud at the beginning, as if the nuclear blast
was the original moment of post-war Japanese
architecture, and it ends with the recently completed
 626
Metabolism and Cold
War architecture
Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park by Kenzō Tange, an
iconic building representing the successful rehabili-
tation of the nation.
The Shinkenchiku special issue resonated with the
idea that ‘the post-war era is over’, an official
declaration made in an economic white paper in
1956. This famous phrase proudly announced that
the war and its devastating effects had now
become history and that the country had entered a
new phase of rapid economic growth. However, at
the same time, this issue can be read as an effort
to confront the fundamental but hidden violence
on which Japanese architecture was grounded. The
illustrated chronology of Japanese architecture is fol-
lowed by an intensive conversation between Asada
and Taketani on the theme of ‘The Atomic Bomb
Age and Architecture’.14 The alarming title of the
dialogue was deliberately chosen because, as
Asada and Taketani noted, contemporary society
could not be described as the ‘Atomic Age’, charac-
terised by the peaceful use of nuclear energy, but as
the ‘Atomic Bomb Age’, infiltrated by the impending
threat of mass nuclear annihilation. Both Asada and
Taketani had experienced the catastrophic effect of
the atomic bomb personally: Asada through his
involvement in the rescue operation in Hiroshima
immediately after the bombing and Taketani
through his work on the wartime government
project to develop nuclear weapons.
During this conversation, Asada called for respon-
sibility and engagement on the part of architects as a
way of overcoming the age of the atomic bomb and
constructing a new civilisation of the atomic age.15
His choice of words, such as responsibility and
engagement, reflected Existentialism, notably that
of Jean Paul Sartre and his compatriots, which was
prevalent in post-war intellectual circles.16 Accord-
ing to Kawazoe’s recollection, Existentialism was so
pervasive in post-war society that it was almost
impossible not to feel its touch, although he did
not explicitly connect his architectural philosophy
with Existentialism.17 Existentialism was historically
specific to the Second World War and the Cold
War because it addressed the ontological anxiety
in the face of uncertainty, death and the profound
pessimism of the post-Hiroshima and post-Holocaust
era. In post-war Japan, many left-leaning intellec-
tuals turned away from orthodox Marxism to Exis-
tentialism because its faith in subjective will and
individual freedom offered hope with which to
cope with the post-war reversal of the Japanese
value system concomitant with the unconditional
surrender.18
Here, it is worth pointing out that it was an unpre-
cedented move to feature a vivid image of the
atomic bomb and critical comments on nuclear
issues in the pages of a major architectural journal.
Nuclear tragedy was a taboo topic in the early
post-war years. It was not until the termination of
the U.S. Occupation in 1952 that repressed mem-
ories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began to surface
in the popular consciousness. Around the mid-
1950s, however, Japanese society was engulfed in
nationwide anti-nuclear sentiments that were trig-
gered by the so-called Lucky Dragon incident of
1954 in which Japanese fishermen were exposed
to radioactive fallout as a result of a U.S. hydrogen
bomb test.19 Appearing a few months after the
Lucky Dragon incident, Toho Studio released the
soon-to-be renowned monster film Godzilla: The

King of the Monsters, the first of more than twenty
Godzilla films. The opening scene of Godzilla pre-
sents a series of ominous explosions that sink Japa-
nese fishing boats. According to the film scholar
Noriega Chon, Godzilla can be identified with
1954 Japan itself as a ‘transitional monster caught
between the imperial past and the post-war indus-
trial future, aroused by United States H-bomb
tests’.20
Such growing concern over the prospect of
nuclear calamity was reflected in the 1955 issue
of Shinkenchiku. Its editorial direction was clearly
distinguishable from the unbridled optimism over
the nuclear energy future formulated by the
power elites of both Japan and the U.S. This
upbeat rhetoric was intended to divert attention
from the mass casualties in Japan’s recent history,
as well as from the continuing Cold War threat
of nuclear annihilation. However, an emphasis on
the catastrophic effects of the nuclear blasts also
requires a critical reconsideration because Japan’s
unique nuclear experience has been key to the
formulation of its pacifist national identity as an
innocent war victim.21 Such victim consciousness
(higaisha ishiki) often served as a prerequisite to
what the historian Carol Gluck has called the
‘mythic sense of starting over’, the official narrative
of post-war Japan that was founded on historical
amnesia about its imperial legacy.22 In this
regard, the victim-oriented presentation in Shin-
kenchiku can be criticised for overlooking the fact
that Japan’s military aggression against its Asian
neighbours laid the groundwork for the destruc-
tion of Japanese cities. In other words, its endea-
vour to establish an authentic narrative of
627
The Journal
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Number 5
Japanese architecture in conjunction with nuclear
disaster failed to address critical issues of war
responsibility and imperial legacy in the field of
architecture.
Noboru Kawazoe’s concept of Metabolism in
the 1960 Metabolism Manifesto
The task of formulating a legitimate post-war iden-
tity for Japanese architecture was taken up by the
Metabolist movement. In 1958, as soon as Asada
took the position of executive director of the
World Design Conference, he decided to organise
an architectural group that represented a new
experiment in Japanese architecture. With the help
of Kawazoe, Asada invited the future Metabolists
to intellectual gatherings he held in a Japanese-
style inn, called Ryū getsuryokan (meaning Willow
and Moon Inn), in which diverse eminent figures
from the arts and sciences gathered and shared
their opinions on a variety of topics concerning
human civilisation, without disciplinary parochialism.
Just two years later the group launched its official
debut at the World Design Conference in 1960, a
global event attended by some two hundred and
fifty designers and architects from twenty-seven
countries. Metabolism’s spectacular debut at this
international conference signalled the celebratory
reacceptance of Japanese architecture by the inter-
national community after a long, bleak period of
isolation. The Metabolists presented a bilingual
manifesto titled Metabolism 1960: Proposals for a
New Urbanism.23 Using the biological term ‘metab-
olism’ (shinchintaisha), which evoked growth and
change in living organisms, the Metabolists
proposed the idea of flexibility and renewability in
 628
Metabolism and Cold
War architecture
Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin
architecture and urbanism as a reaction against rigid
rationalism.
Since the manifesto targeted mainly those outside
Japan, it tactically invoked the exotic flavour of Japa-
nese tradition in order to reach a broader inter-
national audience. As the architectural historian
Florian Urban has pointed out, the Metabolists
often relied on ‘elusive language that is clad with
the mystery of an inexplicable and untranslatable
culture’.24 For example, Kurokawa inserted
Chinese characters and traditional motifs such as a
bamboo tree into his scheme for a ‘Wall City’. Kuro-
kawa was most eager to translate global interest in
megastrutures into the language of Japanese
culture and tradition in his later English-language
publications.25 For him, Metabolism’s emphasis on
temporality and changeability was informed by Bud-
dhist teachings about the ever-changing cycle as
well as vernacular wooden buildings in which indi-
vidual elements could be selectively removed and
repaired. Undoubtedly, the Metabolist movement
took over the renewed awareness of Japanese tra-
dition from the so-called ‘Japan tradition debate’
(Nihon dentō ronsō ) of the mid-1950s, a collective
effort to redefine the tradition in order to establish
a legitimate national identity for post-war Japan.26
However, while the protagonists of the tradition
debate of the 1950s wanted to overcome the
overly refined aesthetic of ‘Japonica’ prevalent in
the West by drawing on the prehistoric Jō mon
culture, the Metabolists’ reference to traditional
motifs was intended to cater for the Oriental fanta-
sies of foreign audiences.
Despite its showcase of fantastic future cities pro-
moted by the languages of Japanese tradition, the
manifesto reflected the oppositional spirit of con-
temporary Japan of 1960, a time when society was
shaken by intense political conflict over the
renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. This was
an unequal treaty that assigned Japan a strategic
role as a military base and thus a bulwark against
Communism in the Far East under U.S. nuclear hege-
mony. In opposition to the ratification of the treaty
forced by the conservative LDP (Liberal Democratic
Party) regime, leftists and liberals participated in
massive political demonstrations, criticising the
deceptive nature of post-war democracy and econ-
omic prosperity. Popular opposition to the treaty
was informed by the deep aversion to war, militarism
and nuclear weapons shaped by the Japanese
experience of the Second World War. Therefore,
the memories of the war were a crucial ingredient
in the grassroots opposition to the treaty.27
The participation of Metabolism in the World
Design Conference in May, 1960, a government-
sponsored event held amid anti-government pro-
tests, appeared apolitical at best or conformist at
worst.28 However, the Metabolist manifesto made
both explicit and implicit references to the wartime
destruction and subsequent Cold War nuclear
anxiety that was aligned with the oppositional
spirit of the time. In the introduction to the mani-
festo, Kawazoe explained the meaning of the
name selected for the group:
Metabolism is the name of the group, in which each
member proposes future designs of our coming
world through his concrete designs and illustrations.
We regard human society as a vital process—a con-
tinuous development from atom to nebula.
The reason why we use such a biological word,

metabolism, is that, we believe, design and technol-
ogy should be a denotation of human vitality.29
Drawing on the biological concept, Kawazoe
showed that architecture shared the ability of living
organisms to keep growing, transforming and repro-
ducing in response to their environments.
The idea of metabolism, however, was as much
about a celebration of growth and expansion as it
was about destruction and decay. Kawazoe pointed
to Shō mei Tō matsu’s Asphalt, a black and white
photograph submitted to the aborted second issue
of the Metabolism journal of 1961, as ‘one of the
best illustrations of the metabolic process occurring
in an urban setting’ (Fig. 1).30 Although Tō matsu
was not an official member of the Metabolist
629
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 19
Number 5
group, he involved himself in this architectural move- Figure 1. Shō mei
ment from the very beginning by contributing two Tō matsu, Asphalt;
gelatin silver print, 1960
images for the 1960 manifesto, one of a nebula
(photograph: Tō matsu
and the other of the ocean. Not long after his collab- Shō mei; Collection:
oration with Metabolism, he undertook a well-known Tokyo Metropolitan
documentary series addressing the victims of the Museum of
Nagasaki bomb.31 In Asphalt, the photographer pic- Photography).
tures wet asphalt imprinted with everyday junk
items, such as pins, nails, coils and pieces of razor,
as a trace of the ever-growing Japanese cities
during the construction boom of the 1960s. Here,
the essence of the Japanese city is not captured by
the fixed façade of a newly built skyscraper but by
fluid industrial materials that reflected the constant
process of construction and destruction.
Asphalt can be read as a twin image of Tō matsu’s
1959 photograph entitled Ise Bay Typhoon in which
he captured odds and ends embedded in mud to
document the severe damage to Japanese villages
and cities caused by the natural disaster that took
place in the Ise Bay area in 1959 (Fig. 2). The Ise Bay
Typhoon and subsequent flooding were one of the
most destructive natural disasters in Japanese
history, with more than 5,000 people killed and
about 1.5 million people left homeless. Such exten-
sive damage was a huge blow to Japanese economic
recovery after the war, and it allowed the Japanese
people to think critically about the vulnerability of
their post-war success. A similarity between Ise Bay
Typhoon and Asphalt seems to suggest that life and
growth are the flipside of death and decay, which
echoes the principle of metabolic transformation.
Kawazoe’s emphasis on the metabolic cycle from
construction to destruction was deeply embedded in
Japan’s specific post-Hiroshima condition. His two
 630

Metabolism and Cold

War architecture
Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin

Figure 2. Shō mei

Tō matsu, Ise Bay
Typhoon; gelatin silver
print, 1959
(photograph: Tō matsu
Shō mei; Collection:
Tokyo Metropolitan
Museum of
Photography).

essays published in the manifesto entitled ‘Material
and Man’ and ‘My Dream 50 Years Hence’ require
special attention not only because he provided the
theoretical framework of the group but also
because his words referred to the recurring mem-
ories of the nation’s wartime destruction and the
growing fear of nuclear catastrophe. Kawazoe’s
first essay, ‘Material and Man’, began with the
ominous prospect of nuclear catastrophe:
Everything will come to an end if a nuclear
war covers all the earth with radioactivity. No one
on earth wishes it, but arguments among the
best brains of the world are always based on the
possibility of a nuclear war. … these people use
similar logic when they threaten the public by
saying that the next war will bring the destruction
of mankind, for this approach simply arouses a
general feeling of anxiety all over the world.32
This text is saturated with anxiety and fear over the
prospect of nuclear catastrophe. Nevertheless,
Kawazoe was hardly pessimistic. He believed that
even if all of mankind were wiped out by radioactive
fallout, the ruins of many cities and villages would be
left as evidence of our high civilisation. Kawazoe
argued that only architects and designers could main-
tain optimism in times of crisis because they were the
ones who create things that remain long after
mankind disappears.33 The critic’s optimism resided
in his belief in the endless process of ‘metabolism’.
This essay ends with a declaration of metabolic trans-
formation: ‘We hope to create something which,
even in destruction, will cause a subsequent new cre-
ation. This “something” must be found in the form of
the cities we are going to make—cities constantly
undergoing the process of metabolism.’34
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If Kawazoe’s ‘Material and Man’ comments on
nuclear calamity and the metabolic regeneration of
post-war Japan, his second essay, ‘My Dream 50
Years Hence’, allows us a glimpse of what the
post-apocalyptic world might look like. Originally
published in the architectural journal Kenchiku
bunka in 1959, ‘My Dream 50 Years Hence’ is com-
prised of three paragraphs, ‘I want to be a Kai’ [sea
shell], ‘I want to be a Kami’ [god], ‘I want to be Kabi’
[bacterium].35
I want to be a Kai [seashell]
I am a seashell. All day long, I do nothing but
opening and shutting my shell. It is really a won-
derful world for lazy boys. Soon everything will
be done by machines. Only [sic] work we have
to do will be dreaming. Suddenly I think of a won-
derful plan.
I want to be a Kami [god]
I hear the voice from heaven. I am a prophet or
perhaps a god himself. I give orders to the archi-
tectural world to make a ‘universal architec-
ture’—architecture of four dimensions which
[sic] drawings have to be cubic. Who will be
an architect? Masato Ō taka? Kiyonori Kikutake?
Or Kishō Kurokawa? I am sure I am the one
who can grasp precisely a four-dimensional
space. I deserve to be a god.
I want to be Kabi [bacterium]
Mad, dogmatic, and fantastic are the adjectives
put on me. It is not a good thing to be a god.
Perhaps I stick too much to ‘myself’. I have to
throw away self-consciousness and fuse into
mankind as its mere particle. I have to attain a
state of perfect selflessness. Now I am a cell of
 632
Metabolism and Cold
War architecture
Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin
bacteria which is constantly propagating itself.
Several generations hence, the extreme progress
in communication will enable everyone to take a
brain wave receiver with him which conveys
directly and exactly what other people think and
feel to him and vice versa. What I think will be
known by all people. This means that the self-con-
sciousness of the individual will be lost and the will
of mankind will remain. I will be the same as the
will of bacteria. The only difference will be
men’s capacity to dream a magnificent dream.36
In this essay, ‘I’ is transformed from an ever-dream-
ing, lazy seashell to an omnipotent architect God
to a constantly self-propagating bacterium.
This riddle-like essay cannot be understood
outside of Kawazoe’s expansive vision of human civi-
lisation and history. The fate of architecture envi-
sioned in ‘My Dream 50 Years Hence’ was further
articulated in Kawazoe’s book The Death of Archi-
tecture (1960), published only five months after
the Metabolism manifesto.37 Kawazoe employed
the metaphor of death in order to think about a
totally new concept of architecture in a post-indus-
trial society. In his prospectus, architecture in the
conventional sense—a fixed monument symbolising
the authority of a ruling class—would increasingly
give way to a flexible network system. Drawing on
the Marxist principle of social evolution through
class struggle, the critic described a proletarian
utopia in which working-class people would be liber-
ated from the burden of labour and enjoy more
leisure. The rapid development of new technology
would enable people to spread all over the world
like ‘free birds’ instead of living together in big
cities. In the future, ordinary people could build
their own houses using their increased leisure
hours and thus the privileged role of professional
architects would come to an end.
When Kawazoe’s The Death of Architecture was
published, Kenzō Tange expressed his displeasure
with the provocative metaphor of death employed by
Kawazoe.38 Tange was the state architect
who designed a number of significant buildings that
represented post-war Japan, such as the Hiroshima
Peace Memorial Park(1949–1954), the Tokyo Metropo-
litan Government Office (1952–1957) and the Plan for
Tokyo 1960 (1961). By about 1960, Tange had already
achieved international acclaim for his adept combi-
nation of traditional Japanese motifs and updated mod-
ernist elements and he wielded strong influence over
the young Metabolists, some of whom, including
Maki and Kurokawa, came from his laboratory at
Tokyo University. The architectural historian Hajime
Yatsuka highlights Tange’s crucial role as an inspirer
cum promoter of the group by describing the Metabo-
lists as ‘satellites circling the planet called Tange’.39 In a
review of The Death of Architecture, however, Tange
criticised the biological determinism that was inscribed
in Metabolism’s fatalistic organic metaphor.40 Consid-
ering Tange’s enthusiasm for the profession’s construc-
tive role in rebuilding a devastated county, it was not
surprising that Tange regarded Kawazoe’s contempla-
tion of architectural oblivion, reminiscent of the
wartime destruction of Japanese cities, as negative
and unproductive thinking.
Megastructure as survival architecture
Kawazoe’s concern with death and regeneration was
largely incorporated into Metabolism’s design
approach. The chaotic urban expansion of the

1960s justified the international popularity of the
megastructure, a single large structure encasing all
or some functions of a city that would impose an
order on ever-growing cities. The visionary proposals
published in the 1960 Metabolism manifesto and sub-
sequent projects demonstrated the members’
common interest in the megastructure, and its aim
to build a total environment with the latest technol-
ogy. For instance, if Kikutake’s ‘Marine City’ is a
giant floating deck onto which high-rise towers
would be built, or under which underwater towers
would be connected, Kurokawa’s ‘Agricultural City’
and ‘Wall City’ are massive artificial land forms built
on elevated platforms conflated with massive infra-
structure that includes roads, monorails, water ser-
vices and electrical equipment (Fig. 3). While the
proposals of Kikutake and Kurokawa were provoca-
tive futuristic designs, Ō taka and Maki’s ‘Group
Form’ was a rather practical urban redevelopment
plan for the Shinjuku area in Tokyo to transform it
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from a site of water purification plants into a business Figure 3. Kishō
and entertainment district by means of artificial land. Kurokawa, Wall City,
sketch (courtesy of
The essence of Metabolism’s visionary projects,
Kishō Kurokawa
though overshadowed by their fantastic graphic Architect & Associates).
quality and emphasis on international contemporane-
ity, lies in the group’s technocratic ambition to recon-
struct cities in accordance with Japan’s rapid post-
industrial shift, which was characterised by the
growing demand for building sites and fluidity in
metropolitan areas. The Metabolist visionary drawings
were greatly indebted to Tange’s A Plan for Tokyo,
1960 (1961), a groundbreaking plan conceived as a
solution to the urban sprawl of Tokyo (Fig. 4).41 This
featured massive artificial land forms floating over
the Tokyo Bay and an ever-growing linear axis inte-
grated with a three-dimensional transport system.
According to the critic Akira Asada, these works took
for granted ‘the possibility of infinite growth based
on the assumption of the linear progress of time’.42
The promotion of the megastructure, however,
was not motivated simply by optimism over unrest-
rained economic growth and technological inno-
vation, a familiar narrative of the megastructure.
Rather, it was a Malthusian crisis that drove the
Metabolists to try to build a technology-driven
megastructure in hitherto uninhabitable areas,
such as the sea and sky. Japan’s geographical con-
dition as an island country made the looming popu-
lation crisis look more threatening. Commentators
pointed out that the idea of a floating city or under-
water habitat stemmed from the pessimistic premise
that ‘population growth may force communities into
the sea in the future’.43 In this sense, Kikutake’s
floating tower was once compared to a ‘cramped
 634
Metabolism and Cold
War architecture
Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin
Figure 4. Kenzō Tange,
A Plan for Tokyo, 1960;
1961 (photograph:
Kawasumi Akio;
courtesy of Tange
associates).
beehive or a bird’s nest’, the last place on earth in
which anyone would want to live.44
The Metabolists’ anxiety over the impending crisis
was given concrete shape by the destruction and
death caused by a series of natural disasters that
struck the archipelago. In 1961, Kikutake proposed
a redevelopment project for the Koto district,
Tokyo’s lowland area plagued by flooding during
the rainy seasons and after typhoons. Persistent flood-
ing of this area was partly caused by the relentless
removal of soil for construction purposes during the
construction boom.45 In order to prevent annual
flooding, he proposed a lattice-shaped foundation
on which residential towers would be built. Each
block measured 200×200 metres and would have
been capable of holding a 20-storey building. About
this project, Kawazoe commented ‘Even if the earth
sinks, this building will still “float” on its broad foun-
dation.’46 Likewise, Kurokawa’s ‘Agricultural City’
was specifically designed as a response to the 1959
Ise Bay Typhoon. Kurokawa’s family, which then
lived in the coastal area of Nagoya, the area most
affected by this typhoon, had to take refuge on the
second floor of the house for days during that event.
Inspired by this horrifying experience, Kurokawa pro-
posed an elevated platform on which a rural commu-
nity could be built four metres above the ground (Fig.
5). The platform not only served as high-tech multi-
functional infrastructure but also functioned as an
artificial hill in case of flooding.
Metabolism’s imagination of disaster was dramati-
cally described in Kawazoe’s short story ‘The Last Day
of the Great Tokyo’, published in the January, 1961,
issue of the architectural journal Kenchiku bunka.47
In this story, the breakdown of the metabolic order
finally caused global warming, leading to a rise in
sea level, with the Japanese archipelago eventually
disappearing under the sea. Metabolists’ drawings,
such as Kikutake’s ‘Marine City’ and Kurokawa’s
‘Wall City,’ were inserted as illustrations of survival
architecture, like Noah’s Ark for the Flood. Rather
than conclude the story with a catastrophic ending,
Kawazoe envisioned the world after the calamity by
anticipating the reappearance of the sunken metro-
polis in the distant future. For him, the catastrophic
‘end’ served as messianic impetus for a new start.
Kawazoe’s fiction seemed to anticipate the popular-
ity of the post-apocalyptic genre in post-war popular
culture and literature. In particular, Kawazoe’s story
about a sinking island reappeared in the best-selling

1973 novel Japan Sinks [‘Nippon chinbotsu’], written
by the renowned science fiction writer Sakyō
Kō matsu.48 It is worth pointing out that Kō matsu
was close to Kawazoe and they co-founded the
Japan Society for Future Research [‘Nihon miraigak-
kai’] in 1968 in order to predict and prepare for the
coming society.49 Kawazoe retrospectively claimed
that the theme of Japan Sinks re-presented the trau-
matic memories of Japan’s recent war. He recalled
that ‘Kō matsu and I had a vivid image of the end of
the world in that we both belonged to the generation
that witnessed the destruction of Japanese cities and
the collapse of imperial Japan.’50 In their narratives,
the nation’s traumatic war experience was replaced
by the threat of natural disaster because, as the histor-
ian John Dower has observed, the destructiveness of
the atomic bombs was so awesome that many Japa-
nese regarded them—much like the calamitous loss
of the war itself—almost as if they were a natural dis-
aster.51 These apocalyptic narratives, produced in the
era of rapid economic growth, served as a warning
that the endless progress and development promised
by the official government narrative might not be sus-
tainable.
Capsule, Utopian home or Dystopian shelter?
Over the course of the decade, the Metabolists’
attention shifted from grand megastructures to indi-
vidual capsules, although they still maintained their
interest in megastructure as a way of ‘framing’.
The capsule is a prefabricated living unit inserted
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into a megastructure; each part of the capsule is Figure 5. Kishō
mass-produced at a factory and transported to the Kurokawa, ‘Agricultural
City’; sketch published
remote construction site, where it is plugged into a
in Metabolism/1960:
large frame (Fig. 6). The capsule developed as an The Proposal for New
iconic design of Metabolism and flourished at the Urbanism (courtesy of
1970 World Exposition in Osaka as seen in the Kishō Kurokawa
various capsule pavilions, such as Kikutake’s Expo Architect & Associates).
Tower and Kurokawa’s Takara Beautilion.
The capsule represented the Metabolists’ efforts
to propose a new model of architecture in line
with the growing interest in futurology. Beginning
in the late 1960s, there was intensive discussion of
the coming society, which was variously described
as the ‘postindustrial’, ’consumer’, and ‘information
society’.52 In his 1969 essay entitled ‘Capsule Declara-
tion’, Kurokawa points out that the capsule denotes a
‘qualitative change in the meaning of a building’ by
calling into question the very nature of a dwelling.53
He claims that the capsule is a new dwelling unit
for Homo Movense, a term coined by Kurokawa
himself to express the importance of mobility as the
distinguishing characteristic of contemporary human-
kind.54 A year later, Kurokawa presented a paper
entitled ‘Homo-Movense and Metabolism in the
Multi-Channel Society’ at the International Future
Research Conference held in Kyoto in April, 1970.55
In the conference paper, he stresses mobility as a
new value for humanity in a multi-channel society,
an information-oriented, elastic society in which flexi-
bility and diversity would be encouraged within some
degree of order.56
According to the historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki,
the increasing emphasis on a post-industrial,
information society in the 1960s and 1970s was
not a natural outcome determined by a sort of
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Metabolism and Cold

War architecture
Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin

Figure 6. Kishō
Kurokawa, ‘Nakagin
Capsule Tower’:
construction view, 1972
(photograph: Tomio
Ohashi; courtesy of
Kishō Kurokawa
Architect & Associates)
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Figure 7. Kishō
Kurokawa, ‘Nakagin
Capsule Tower’: interior
view, 1972
(photograph: Tomio
Ohashi; courtesy of
Kishō Kurokawa
Architect & Associates)

inherent teleology of technology itself, but a However, before the ideological dimensions of
planned policy response designed to restructure the information society were fully understood, the
Japanese industry in favour of the interests of pol- potentiality of the new society gained credibility
itically and economically privileged groups.57 among various disciplines. The capsule demon-
 638
Metabolism and Cold
War architecture
Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin
strates Metabolism’s fascination with the coming
society. It proudly displays the consumerist lifestyle
and ideal domesticity of the post-industrial society.
For example, Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower
(1972) features the latest home amenities and
domestic appliances as if to compensate for the
claustrophobia that might be experienced in this
miniature space (Fig. 7). As the cultural anthropol-
ogist Marilyn Ivy has pointed out, home appliances
symbolised the ‘object of desire, the sign of
middle-class inclusion, and the unparalleled com-
modity fetish’ for Japanese society in an era of
economic growth.58 The idealised image of domes-
ticity that was often associated with the post-war
dream of ‘my home’ functioned as propaganda
for capitalism in the shadow of the Communist
threat during the Cold War.59
Yet, Kurokawa’s prospectus for an informatised
world was neither fully utopian nor naively optimistic.
He regarded Japan’s rapid social transformation into
informatisation as both a blessing for its ability to
foster individual liberation and a curse for its dehuma-
nising and surveillance aspects. In his 1969 essay
‘Capsule Declaration’, Kurokawa wrote ‘Just as an
astronaut is protected by a perfect shelter from
solar winds and cosmic rays, individuals should be
protected by capsules in which they can reject infor-
mation they do not need and in which they are shel-
tered from information they do not want, thereby
allowing an individual to recover his subjectivity and
independence.’60 As a space capsule provides phys-
ical security for astronauts in the dangerous environ-
ment of outer space, so the capsule defends the
privacy and individuality of its residents against the
flood of information from the outside world.
Although rarely discussed, the essence of the
capsule lies in its defensive mechanism. The architec-
tural historian Thomas Leslie argues that the origin
of the post-war capsule design can be found in aero-
space developments, such as spaceships—contain-
ers for astronauts—and the military fighter cockpit,
with its extremely efficient use of space and defen-
sive function.61 Kurokawa’s aforementioned essay
‘Capsule Declaration’ clearly manifested the space-
age survival rhetoric of the capsule:
The capsule is cyborg architecture. Man, machine,
and space build a new organic body which trans-
cends confrontation … The word ‘capsule’ usually
conjures up either a capsule containing medicine
or the living quarters of an astronaut. The
capsule referred to here is a capsule without
which what is contained in it would be perfectly
meaningless. For example, a spaceship is such a
capsule. The capsule which protects the astronaut
from space or from very high temperatures or
other hazards differs in essence from containers
such as coffee cups in that it creates an environ-
ment peculiar to itself. A rupture in the capsule,
however small, would instantly upset the internal
equilibrium and destroy the strictly controlled
environment in it. Such a device and the life in it
depend on each other for their existence and
survival.62
Like a spaceship or space capsule, the capsule pre-
sents a highly controlled environment which can
protect the inhabitant from the dangers outside. It
is conceived of as an architectural equivalent of the
survival pod used to explore outer space.
The dual nature of capsule as a fancy model house
on the one hand and a defensive shelter on the other

hand corresponds to that of Cold War fall-out
shelters. During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S.
government encouraged its citizens to construct
private fall-out shelters whilst initiating a public
shelter programme as well, although fall-out shelters
were never put into practical use.63 Undoubtedly,
the fall-out shelter boom in the heyday of the Cold
War was the outcome of the widely shared terror
and survival concerns during the nuclear arms
race between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Yet, as the
French Situationist Guy Debord has pointed out,
the fall-out shelter was also the ‘creation of a new
consumable commodity in affluent society’ that
was associated with the emergence of the suburban
nuclear family and the increase in do-it-yourself
home improvement hobbies.64 Indeed, each unit
was well stocked with various consumer items
necessary for refuge life, such as tinned food,
medical supplies and battery-powered wirelesses,
surplus goods brought into being by post-war
affluence.
In Japan, there was no such a thing as a fall-out
shelter boom partly because Japan was not a direct
target for potential Soviet missile attacks. The
capsule motif, however, sporadically appeared in
post-war Japanese art and culture. For instance,
Akira Kurosawa’s 1955 film Record of Living Being
is about a man who is obsessed to the point of para-
noia with the possibility of impending nuclear exter-
mination and goes insane. The protagonist, named
Nakajima, tries in vain to construct a nuclear under-
ground shelter in order to avoid being killed by a
nuclear bomb. If Kurosawa’s film is a tragic depiction
of Japan’s struggle with the spectre of the atomic
bombs, the Hi Red Center’s performance Shelter
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The Journal
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Plan (1964) is a satire of the nuclear peril that per-
vaded the Cold War age. In January, 1964, the Hi
Red Center invited world-famous Fluxus artists
including Nam Jun Paik, Yoko Ono, Shigeko
Kubota and Mieko Shiomi to the Imperial Hotel
and staged a collaborative performance. The per-
formance featured the measuring of various body
parts, height, weight, volume and even the
amount of water that one could hold in one’s
mouth, in order to produce a custom-made shelter
for each guest artist.65 This exaggerated process of
measuring can be read as a mockery of a micro-
power operating on the level of bodies and everyday
lives in the name of security (or surveillance).
Although this custom-made shelter is a luxury
item, an object of desire, which can be owned by
only the privileged, it is likened to a tiny coffin that
would imprison people in a highly-controlled,
isolated space, protecting them against the dangers
of storms, heat, cold and noise as well as nuclear
attack.66
Such survivalist rhetoric was not restricted to
Japanese Metabolism but also applied to its
Western counterparts.67 For instance, Archigram’s
design shared a survivalist tactic with Metabolism’s
capsule. As the architectural historian Simon Sadler
has pointed out, Archigram’s inflatable living
pod was conceived as ‘an architectural equivalent
of survival pods’, adequate against ‘impending
environmental threats due to nuclear warfare, over-
population, and pollution’.68 However, their capsule
architecture did not follow the same path as that of
counter-cultural activism of the 1960s as seen in Ant
Farm’s inflatable survival pod.69 Metabolism and
Archigram seemed to be less interested in aligning
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Metabolism and Cold
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Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin
with the radical environmental movement or social
activism of counter-culture than in retreating to
private comfort and affluence in their self-sufficient
havens.
Entering the 1970s, Japanese society was signifi-
cantly affected by a series of unfavourable circum-
stances, such as the oil shock, the environmental
crisis and an economic recession. Facing such sub-
stantial threats, the coexistence of utopian premise
and apocalyptic anxiety, two pillars that supported
post-war architectural culture, seemed to be shat-
tered. The timing of this coincided with the end of
modernist practices, architecture that was defined
by the progressive goal of coming to terms with the
war legacy. The modernist movement was super-
seded by the growing dominance of post-modernism,
a trend which placed its emphasis on such elements
as historical style, local diversity, ornamentation, and
popular and playful expressions. The nation’s econ-
omic decline and the rise of post-modernism prohib-
ited the Metabolists from realising their visionary
designs in actual urban areas. As soon as the 1970
Osaka World Exposition ended, the Metabolist move-
ment lost its vitality and its members pursued their
own solo careers while doing overseas projects or
working for commercial enterprises.
*****
This study has attempted to revise a dominant narra-
tive of the post-war architecture of Japan and else-
where—the triumph of modern architecture, built
on technological optimism and utopian aspirations.
This is a simplified narrative that obscures the dual
sensibility of promise and peril in the Cold War era.
If technological optimism and utopian visions consti-
tute one chapter of post-war architectural culture,
the paranoia of the post-nuclear era also forms a
crucial part of its modernist project. Thus, long
before the new trend called post-modernism
emerged as the dominant style in the 1970s, the
canonical presentation of modern architecture was
constantly being reexamined and revised by
drawing on concerns that emerged directly out of
the specific sociopolitical conditions of the post-
war years.
If one could not write poetry after Auschwitz, as
Theodor Adorno postulated, then how could one
continue to design architecture and build a city
after Hiroshima and Nagasaki? This is the question
that the Metabolists ultimately tried to tackle. They
doubted that technology would bring a better
world into being and challenged the modernist
faith in linear progress. Rather, they found hope in
the ceaseless cycle of metabolism and post-apoca-
lyptic regeneration. Metabolism offered insight into
how to regenerate architecture and the city whilst
embracing mass destruction and existential anxiety.
This insight has been recently revisited by Japanese
architects and planners undertaking reconstruction
after the 3.11 Northeastern Japan disasters.
Notes and references
1. Noboru Kawazoe, ed., Metabolism 1960: Proposals for
a New Urbanism (Tokyo, Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1960).
2. David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, who were curators of a
ground-breaking exhibition on the Cold War culture
held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2008
state: ‘Nothing could be more polarized than the
visions of “dream world” and “catastrophe” which
structured Cold War modernity.’ See David Crowley,

Jane Pavitt, Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970
(London, V & A Publishing, 2008), p. 14.
3. Manfredo Tafuri, Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architec-
ture [1976] (New York, H.N. Abrams, 1979),
pp. 357–563.
4. Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the
Recent Past (New York, Harper & Row, 1976),
pp. 45–57.
5. This scholarship includes Robin Boyd, New Directions
in Japanese Architecture (New York, George Braziller,
1968), pp. 16–25; George R. Collins, Visionary Draw-
ings of Architecture and Planning: 20th Century
through the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT
Press, 1979), pp. 48–61; Sarah Deyong, ‘Memories
of the Urban Future: Rise and Fall of the Megastruc-
ture’, in The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary
Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Col-
lection, Terence Riley, ed. (New York, Museum of
Modern Art, 2002); Sabrina Ley, Markus Richter,
eds, Megastructure Reloaded: Visionary Architecture
and Urban Design of the Sixties Reflected by Contem-
porary Artists (Stuttgart, Hatje Cantz publishers,
2008).
6. Hajime Yatsuka, Hideki Yoshimatsu, Metaborizumu:
1960 nendai nihon no kenchiku avuangiyarudo
[‘Metabolism: Architectural Avant-gardes of the
1960s’] (Tokyo, INAX publisher, 1997).
7. Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Move-
ment: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan (London, Rou-
tledge, 2010).
8. Cherie Wendelken, ‘Putting Metabolism Back in Place’,
in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar
Architectural Culture, Sarah Williams Goldhagen,
Réjean Legault, eds (Cambridge, London, The MIT
Press, 2000), p. 281.
9. Ibid.
10. The scholarship includes Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima
Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (Ber-
641
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keley, Los Angeles, London, University of California
Press, 1999); Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memories:
Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture 1945–
1970 (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2000);
Ann Sherif, Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and
the Law (New York, Columbia University Press,
2009); Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social
Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge, London,
Harvard University Press, 2006).
11. Shinkenchiku, vol.10 (August, 1955).
12. Asada’s significant role as an inspirer cum promoter
of Metabolism has been largely overlooked in the
vast majority of research conducted in the English
language. But Japanese scholars have begun to
discuss the relationship between Asada and Metab-
olism. See Akira Asada, ‘Before and After Metab-
olism’, Anyhow (Tokyo, NTT Shuppan, 2000),
pp. 293–301; H. Yatsuka, H. Yoshimatsu, Metabori-
zumu, op. cit, pp. 12–15; Noi Sawaragi, Sensō to
banpaku [‘World Wars and World Fairs’] (Tokyo,
Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2005), pp.16–34, 268–287;
Makoto Kikuchi, ‘Kū kan no kaihatsu, kankyō no
seigyo: 1960 nendai no Asada to kō sō kaikin kyū jin
kō tochi, kyokuchi kenchiku’ [’Space Development
and Environmental Control: Takashi Asada and the
High Rise City, Artificial Land, and Extreme Architec-
ture in the 1960s’], 10+1, no. 50 (Final Issue, 2008),
pp. 96–113.
13. Kiyonori Kikutake, Kiyonori Kikutake: Tradition to
Utopia (Milan, L’ArcaEdizioni, 1997), p. 13.
14. Takashi Asada, Mitsuo Taketani, ‘Genbakujidai to
kenchiku’ [‘Architecture in the Atomic Era’], Shin-
kenchiku, vol. 10 (August, 1955), pp. 77–86.
15. Ibid.
16. For a detailed discussion of Sartre’s influence in post-
war Japanese literary circles, see Douglas Slaymaker,
‘Sartre’s Fiction in Postwar Japan’, in Confluences:
Postwar Japan and France, Douglas Slaymaker, ed.
 642
Metabolism and Cold
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Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin
(Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan,
2002), pp. 86–109.
17. Noboru Kawazoe, interviewed by the Author, 2nd
December, 2008.
18. Kuno Osamu, Shunsuke Tsurumi, Gendainihon no
shisō [‘Contemporary Japanese Thoughts’] (Tokyo,
Iwanami shinsho, 1961), pp. 184–211.
19. For the Bikini incident, see Ann Sherif, ‘Thermo-
nuclear Weapons and Tuna: Testing, Protest, and
Knowledge in Japan’, in De-Centering Cold War
History: Local and Global Change, Jadwiga E. Pieper
Mooney, Fabio Lanza, eds (New York, Routledge,
2013), pp. 15–30.
20. Norierga Chon, ‘Godzilla and Japanese Nightmare:
When Them! Is U.S.’, Cinema Journal, 27, no. 1
(Autumn, 1987), p. 68.
21. For the historical inquiry into the emergence of victim
consciousness in post-war Japan, see, James J. Orr,
The Victim as Hero (Honolulu, University of Hawai’i
Press, 2001).
22. Carol Gluck, ‘The ‘Long Postwar’: Japan and Germany in
Common and in Contrast’, in Legacies and Ambiguities,
Ernestine Schlant, Thomas Rimer, eds (Washington, D.
C. , Baltimore, The Woodrow Wilson Center Press,
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 64–67.
23. This manifesto is the only occasion when the Metabolists
collectively demonstrated their theory and design under
the heading ‘Metabolism’, although there was a futile
attempt to publish a second issue in 1961 by including
works by the designers Kenji Ekuan and Kiyoshi
Awazu, the photographer Shō mei Tō matsu, the painter
Manabe Hiromi, and Takashi Asada, who was not
directly involved in the 1960 publication. In 1965, there
was another futile publication project, motivated by the
discovery of the limitations which the practical appli-
cation of the Metabolist theory had revealed. See,
Kishō Kurokawa (Noriaki Kurokawa), Metabolism in
Architecture (Boulder, Westview Press, 1977), pp. 43–
45; Noboru Kawazoe, Masato Ō taka, eds, Metabori-
zumu to metaborisutotachi [‘Metabolism and Metabo-
lists’] (Tokyo, Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, 2005).
24. Florian Urban, ‘Japanese Occidentalism and the Emer-
gence of Postmodern Architecture’, Journal of Archi-
tectural Education, 65 (March, 2012), pp. 89–102.
25. Kishō Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture (Boulder,
Westview Press, 1997); Kishō Kurokawa, From
Metabolism Symbiosis (London, Academy Edition,
1992).
26. For discussion of the ‘tradition’ debate, see, Jonathan
Reynolds, Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japa-
nese Modernist Architecture (Berkeley, University of
California Press, 2001), pp. 196–221; Jonathan
M. Reynolds, ‘Ise Shrine and a Modernist Construction
of Japanese Tradition’, Art Bulletin, vol. LXXXIII, no. 2
(June, 2001), pp. 316–341; Yasushi Zenno, ‘Finding
Mononoke at Ise Shrine: Kenzō Tange’s Search for
Proto-Japanese Architecture’, Round 01 Jewels:
Selected Writings on Modern Architecture from Asia,
Yasushi Zenno, Jagan Shah, eds. (Osaka, Acetate
010, 2006), pp. 104–117; Cherie Wendelken, ‘Aes-
thetics and Reconstruction: Japanese Architectural
Culture in the 1950s’, in Rebuilding Urban Japan
After 1945, Carola Hein, Jeffry M. Diefendorf, eds.
(New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 199–204;
Hyunjung Cho, ‘Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and
the Making of Japanese Postwar Architecture’,
Journal of Architectural Education, 66 (December,
2012), pp. 72–83.
27. For the role of war memories in anti-treaty protests, see,
Y. Igarashi, Bodies of Memories, op. cit., pp. 131–143.
28. The sponsors of the World Design Conference included
the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI),
the Agency of Patents, the Foreign Ministry and JETRO,
the governmental agency for exports.
29. N. Kawazoe, ed., Metabolism 1960, op. cit., p. 5.
30. Kikan Obayashi, 48 (Special Issue, 2001), p. 44.

31. For Shō mei Tō matsu’s career and work, see, Leo Rubin-
fien, ed., Shō mei Tō matsu: Skin of the Nation (New
Haven, Yale University Press, 2004); Linda Hoaglund,
‘Interview with Shō mei Tō matsu’, Positions (Winter,
1997), pp. 835–862.
32. N. Kawazoe, ed., Metabolism 1960, op. cit., p. 48.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., p. 49.
35. ‘My Dream 50 Years Hence’ was originally written as a
response to a survey about ‘My Dream 20 Years Hence’,
published in the May, 1959, issue of Kenchiku bunka.
36. N. Kawazoe, ed., Metabolism 1960, op. cit.,
pp. 50–51. This essay follows the English translation
published in the manifesto (the translator is
unknown). But scholars have raised questions about
the original translation. For instance, Gunter Nitschke
translated kai as mussel, kami as God and kabi as
germ, while Cherie Wendelken translated kai as sea-
shell, kami as spirit and kabi as mould or micro-organ-
ism. See, Gunter Nitschke, ‘Tokyo 1964: Olympic
Planning/Dream Planning’, Architectural Design
(October, 1964), pp. 485–524; Cherie Wendelken,
‘Putting Metabolism Back in Place’, in Anxious Mod-
ernisms, op. cit., p. 286. In my view, Wendelken’s
translation makes the most sense in the given context.
37. Noboru Kawazoe, Kenchiku no metsubō [‘The Death
of Architecture’] (Tokyo, Gendaishichō -sha, 1960).
38. Noboru Kawazoe interview with Hiroshi Naito, INAX
REPORT, no. 175 (July, 2008), p. 35.
39. H. Yatsuka, H. Yoshimatsu, Metaborizumu, op. cit,
pp. 36–43.
40. Kenzō Tange, ‘Kenchiku no metsubō ni kotoyosete’
[‘On the Death of Architecture’], Kindai kenchiku,
vol.15 (January, 1961), p. 13.
41. Kenzō Tange, A Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Toward a Struc-
tural Reorganization (Tokyo, Shinkenchiku-sha, 1961).
42. Akira Asada, Arata Isozaki, ‘From Molar Metabolism to
Molecular Metabolism’, in Anyhow, Cynthia C. David-
643
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 19
Number 5
son, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1998),
p. 65.
43. Ada Louise Huxtable, ‘The Architect as a Prophet’,
New York Times (2nd October, 1961).
44. Ibid.
45. Noboru Kawazoe, ‘A New Tokyo: In, On, or Above the
Sea?’, This is Japan, no. 9 (1962), pp. 62–64.
46. Ibid., p. 62.
47. Noboru Kawazoe, ‘Dai Tō kyō saigō no hi’ [‘The Last
Day of Tokyo’], Kenchiku bunka, vol. 16, no. 171
(January, 1961), pp. 5–12.
48. For more discussion of disaster narratives in post-war
Japanese literature, see, Thomas Schnellächer, ‘Has
the Empire Sunk Yet?— The Pacific in Japanese
Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 29
(2002), pp. 389–393; Susan Napier, ‘Panic Sites: The
Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to
Akira’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 19:2 (Summer,
1993), pp. 327–351.
49. The Japan Association for Future Studies was based on
the Future Research Group founded in 1966 by the
sociologist Hidetoshi Katō , the anthropologist Tadao
Umesao, the economist Yū jirō Hayashi, Kawazoe and
Kō matsu: key members of the theme committee for
the 1970 Osaka World Exposition.
50. N. Kawazoe interview with H. Naito, INAX REPORT, op.
cit., p. 31.
51. John Dower, ‘The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis
in Japanese Memory’, in Hiroshima in History and
Memory, Michael J. Hogan, ed. (Cambridge,
New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 119.
52. In the 1960s, a number of government proposals and
government-sponsored think-tank reports outlined
the technocratic vision of the ‘informatisation’
(‘jō hō ka’) of society: see, Tessa Morris-Suzuki,
Beyond Computopia: Information, Automation and
Democracy in Japan (London, New York, Kegan Paul
International, 1988).
 644
Metabolism and Cold
War architecture
Hyunjung Cho,
Chunghoon Shin
53. K. Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, op. cit.,
p. 83.
54. Ibid., pp. 76–80.
55. In April, 1970, the Japan Society of Futurology held an
international future research conference in Kyoto,
with more than two hundred participants from
around the world, that gauged the impact of techno-
logical progress on future society. Japanese futurists
presented the idea of a ‘multi-channel society’, a
vision of a high-tech society to which existing societal
institutions should adapt. The Japan Society of Futurol-
ogy published three volumes based on the panel pre-
sentations of the Kyoto Conference: Japan Society of
Futurology, Challenges from the Future, vols 1–3
(Tokyo, Kodan-sha, 1970).
56. Kishō Kurokawa, ‘Homo-Movense and Metabolism in
the Multi-Channel Society’, in Challenges from the
Future, edited by the Japan Society of Futurology,
vol. 1(Tokyo, Kodan-sha, 1970), pp. 357–370.
57. T. Morris-Suzuki, Beyond Computopia, op. cit.,
pp. 6–24.
58. Marilyn Ivy, ‘Formations of Mass Culture’, Postwar
Japan as History, Andrew Gordon, ed. (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London, University of California Press,
1993), p. 249.
59. Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge,
Mass., The MIT Press, 2007), p. 12.
60. K. Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, op. cit.,
p. 82.
61. Thomas Leslie, ‘Just What is it that Makes Capsule
Homes So Different, So Appealing?’, Space and
Culture, vol. 9, no. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 181–182.
62. K. Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, op. cit., p. 75.
63. For more discussion of the U.S. shelter boom, see, David
Monteyne, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in
the Cold War (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minne-
sota Press, 2011); Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Under-
ground: Fallout Shelter and American Culture
(New York, New York University Press, 2004).
64. Guy Debord, ‘The Geopolitics of Hibernation’, in The
Situationists and the City, Tom McDonough, ed.,
transl. (New York, London, Verso, 2010), p. 201 [orig-
inally published in Internationale Situationiste, no. 7
(April, 1962), pp. 3–10]; Sarah A. Lichtman, ‘Do-It-
Yourself Security: Safety, Gender, and the Home
Fallout Shelter in Cold War America’, Journal of
Design History, 19 (1) (2006), pp. 39–55.
65. The Hi Red Center consisted of the experimental artists
Genpei Akasegawa, Jirō Takamatsu and Natsuyuki
Nakanishi. For Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan, see,
Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese
Women Artists in New York (New Jersey, Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 2005), p. 169.
66. Marilyn Ivy, ‘Formations of Mass Culture’, Postwar Japan
as History, Andrew Gordon, ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
University of California Press, 1993), p. 249.
67. Recent scholarship tends to reassess post-war architec-
tural culture in terms of the perils immanent in the Cold
War years: see David Crowley, Jane Pavitt eds, Cold War
Modern, op. cit.; Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adven-
tures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (New York,
Princeton Architectural Press, 2002); Beatriz Colomina,
Annmarie Brenna, Jeannie Kim, eds, Cold War Hot
Houses: Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to
Playboy (New York, Princeton Architectural Press,
2004); Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War, op. cit.
68. For more discussion of Archigram’s survival design, see,
Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Archi-
tecture (Cambridge, Mass., London, The MIT Press,
2005), pp. 108–111.
69. For Ant Farm’s architectural activism, see, Felicity
D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After
Modernism (Cambridge, Mass., London, The MIT
Press, 2007), pp. 209–246.