One Man, Five Floors, 13 Years In: A “Purely Handmade” Building Meant to Last 200 Years | Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round

“Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round” is QDaily's column by the Japanese Chinese-language writer Yoshii Shinobu. We begin with the first-class architect[1] Oka Keisuke; this is part one. A nijikai, or “second round,” is the second stage of a night out for Japanese office workers — optional, after the first bar, and the point at which the talk loosens up.

Concrete buildings in Japan bring Tadao Ando to mind. The careful design behind his plain, spare style has earned him the nickname “the poet of concrete.” Oka Keisuke, an architect who turns 53 this year, has been building a concrete structure called Arimasutonbiru in Mita, Minato Ward, Tokyo, since the end of November 2005 — one floor below ground, four above, its outer walls lumpy and pitted, punched with windows of every shape, geometric figures surfacing out of the concrete. If Ando writes poems in concrete, Oka's building might be called a dance set hard in it. The place calls up Spain's Sagrada Família, which is how people came to nickname him “the Gaudí of Mita.”

Google Maps already files Arimasutonbiru under “tourist attraction,” which is fair enough. Oka was still out eating when I arrived, so I spent half an hour in the shade of a shrine across the street, watching. Plenty of people really do stop here and tilt their heads back at the building; some take photos, some push their heads through the gate for a look inside. An elderly couple came up the slope and asked me whether it was going to be a café. No, I said — this is a house that the architect Oka Keisuke designed and is building single-handed; the ground floor will be a Scandinavian homewares shop run by his wife, and they will live on the floors above.

The old man asked me, “How long has he been at it?” Thirteen years already, I said.

His wife sighed: “I hope we're still alive when it's finished.”

You will be, I told her. Oka says another three years.

There's a Job Called Architect

“Ah, sorry to keep you waiting. Come in.” The couple had just left when Oka came back and greeted me.

A rough wooden gate, waist-high, stands at the entrance to Arimasutonbiru. I pushed it open and stepped through. It was early summer, the sun fierce, close to thirty degrees Celsius outside, and the moment I was inside it turned cool. The floor, walls and stairs are all concrete and carry real weight, but because no space is a tidy rectangle — everything is straight lines, curves and waves together — none of it presses down on you. Inside it feels a little like a cave, like being taken into a safe secret base.

Run into him anywhere else and you would struggle to connect him with this rich corner of Tokyo. He is an extremely modest, plain, unflappable man from Kyushu. Just after he turned two he was found to have heart disease, and survived only after surgery. Oka loved drawing as a child and dreamed, naturally, of becoming a painter, but in elementary school he was found to have a color-vision defect and had to give that up. So how did he end up on the architect's road?

“Architect came to me later. Before that I wanted to be a carpenter, someone who builds houses. My father worked at Kyushu Electric Power, which provided staff housing, and the five of us — my parents, me, my older sister and my younger sister — lived in a pretty broken-down little place. The year I started middle school we finally moved into an ikkodate, a detached house, a very traditional Japanese building that took a year and a half to finish. All through it I went to play with the workmen after school, learning from them to plane wood and fit timber together. I thought construction workers were so cool. In my second year of middle school I announced I wanted to be a carpenter. My mother didn't argue. She just told me to go to the site and try carrying a post on my own. If I could lift it, she said, she would let me become a carpenter.”

As it turned out, he could not lift the post however he tried. Because of his heart condition he was still thin then, nothing like a body built for hard labor. Oka ran home in tears. One look and his mother knew what had happened, but she had no intention of letting her son give up so easily.

“My mother said she'd known all along I didn't have the strength. Then she told me there was another job that suited me: not hauling posts like the master carpenters, but working out where each room goes, how the walls and the roof should be built — a job called 'architect.' I was so happy. I locked on to it at once and ran to the library to look it up. The books said that to become an architect you had to pass a licensing exam, and you could only sit it if you had graduated in architecture from a university or a kōsen[3].”

Over his five years at the kōsen Oka did learn the basics of architecture, and he fell for the buildings of Le Corbusier and Gaudí. Design assignments came due several times a year and left him plenty of room for his imagination: a house in his first year, a kindergarten in his second, a library in his third, an office block in his fourth, and for his final-year graduation project, a large public building. Oka liked taking these on, but he began to feel he was up against a limit.

“School teaches you the physical rules, the theory and the building codes, and that's roughly enough to make you a building designer. But I always felt that staying in school wasn't enough to make a real architect. After graduating I went to work in the design department of a construction company, and inside two years something felt wrong again. I was drawing plans for houses and small apartment buildings, and I heard the clients liked them, but I just sat in a room drawing on my own. I never met a client. I never once set foot on a site. I didn't even have time to look at photographs of what my drawings had turned into. Carry on like that and I would never become an architect. After a bit over two years, once I had some savings, I quit.”

Rock Bottom, and a Flight Attendant

After quitting, Oka cycled back to his hometown in Kyushu, went through twenty years of architecture magazines in his old kōsen's library, and drew up a “list of buildings I want to see.” When the season was right he strapped a tent to his bike and rode around Japan looking at them: the Nageiredō at Sanbutsuji in Tottori Prefecture, Hōryūji in Nara Prefecture, the Water Temple at Honpukuji on Awaji Island in Hyōgo Prefecture (designed by Tadao Ando), the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art, also in Hyōgo, the Nakijin Village Community Hall in Okinawa. When he found a building he liked he would stay for hours, sometimes overnight, drawing it in his sketchbook. This pilgrimage took at least two months of every year; the rest of the time he traded notes with others in the trade or took construction jobs. He worked on the site of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building[4] too, mostly making concrete formwork[5]. This was the peak of Japan's bubble economy, when even an ordinary laborer could earn good money.

The good times did not last. Just as Oka felt he had finally got hold of what he called “architecture that was truly my own,” he ran into the two hardest things in his life.

“The heaviest blow was my teacher Kurata Yasuo[6] dying of illness. He was extremely hard on me — once, at the Takayama School of Architecture[7], every other teacher liked my design and he alone was unhappy, and he told me off for it. But the rest of the time he doted on me, and he told me that to be an architect you can't only do architecture; you have to know about things outside it. Later I 'happened to meet' the dance master Waguri Yukio[8] and studied dance under him for a year. Thinking about it properly afterwards, the timing was too neat to be chance — Kurata must have arranged it. After he died I lost my bearings again; I didn't know how to go on feeling my way through architecture.”

“My body went wrong as well. Around thirty I noticed my hands shaking for no reason and no strength anywhere in me. The day after working on a site was the worst: my head felt scooped out, and I'd forget how to take the subway. I would stand in the station a long time wondering what a ticket even was, how you buy one. I had no idea what was happening to me. I saw several doctors before they worked out it was a chemical allergy. I'd been driving myself too hard on site, especially on formwork — the timber is coated with heavy doses of chemicals to make it waterproof and durable, and I had been breathing all of it in. While I was ill I couldn't do anything at all; standing in the doorway of a bookshop was enough to make me feel bad, because the ink and glue in books contain chemicals too. That was how far the allergy had gone, and even so the doctors told me my case was mild — plenty of construction workers react far worse.”

At the time he lived in the Kōenji district of Tokyo, still known today as one of the city's “chaotic zones,” full of every kind of person. Oka was easy to like, and even when he was short of money he was never short of friends. One evening, out drinking with a group, he met a woman.

“I asked her what she did and she said she was a flight attendant. I assumed a flight attendant would be haughty and hard to deal with, but she turned out to be easy to talk to, and gentle. Think about it: I'd lost my teacher and my health was bad. And then along comes a woman who's good to me — what was I supposed to do? So we got married. That was 1999. When I was young I'd decided I would never marry, that I'd give my whole life to architecture. So when I decided to marry, I was actually planning to give up architecture and do something else.”

And it was this marriage that opened the road back to architecture for Oka.

Knocking 76% Off Prime Tokyo Land!

“A few months after the wedding my wife asked me one day: you work in architecture, can you design a house? Of course, I said, I passed the first-class architect exam. Then she asked whether I could actually build a house. Of course, I said, I worked on sites for a long time, I have the experience. I was rather pleased — just when I'd lost all my confidence, here was someone valuing me again. Then my wife said: wonderful, let's buy some land and you can build our house. How could I refuse at that point? All I could do was thump my chest and say of course, it's nothing to me. (Laughs)”

They looked at plenty of places around Tokyo — talks would break down, or a plot would nearly be snapped up by someone else — before settling on one in the Mita area, all of 12 tsubo, about 40 square meters.

Mita is part of Minato Ward, one of the 23 special wards at the center of Tokyo, right on Tokyo Bay. It holds prestigious schools such as Keio University along with many foreign embassies; the ward also takes in upmarket residential streets like Azabu and Shirokane, the smart shopping districts of Aoyama and Roppongi, the tourist waterfront of Odaiba, and large mixed-use complexes: Roppongi Hills, Tokyo Midtown and Shiodome SIO-SITE. Arimasutonbiru stands halfway up a slope called Hijirizaka (zaka means slope), five or six minutes' walk from Mita subway station, opposite the century-old Friends Girls School[9].

In an area as expensive as Mita, the broker's opening price for the 40-square-meter plot was 65 million yen (about 3.75 million yuan).

“The agent wanted that much up front and there was nothing I could do, so I left. Later I went to look at the land myself. Forty square meters really is small, and there's a cliff behind it, so the fence marking the boundary had to sit two meters inside the actual line, which made the plot look smaller still. A lot that small doesn't interest most construction companies either, because getting materials in and working the site are both hard. But I'm someone who can build by hand: however small the space, I can find a way to put up a house. I was sure that land wasn't going to sell to anyone else, so there was no need to hurry. A few days later I told the agent I'd buy it, but the price had to come down to 14 million yen. Cutting it that far left the man speechless, and of course he refused. But land in that bad a state had finally found a buyer, and I reckoned he'd go and talk it over with the owner. I waited half a year, then called on him again, and sure enough he remembered me. I said I could go up 10 percent, and we settled at 15.5 million yen. That works out at 400,000 yen a square meter. We bought the land in September 2000, my wife and I splitting the cost. The average land price in Minato Ward then was 1.87 million yen a square meter, and by 2015 it was 2.9 million — so however you look at it, we got it remarkably cheap.”

Building Like Dance, by Improvisation: Arimasutonbiru

“As for the building itself, I'd seen self-built places like Sawada Apartments[10], so I already had it in mind that I should build my own house myself, and that I should enjoy building it. When you enjoy the work of your own hands, whatever comes out of it carries a certain charm. So I came up with the '70-centimeter self-build method': keep the concrete forms to 70 centimeters, a size my two hands can manage, and build the house with as few tools as possible. Cast one block of concrete, then the next, and decide where it goes and what shape it takes on the spot, by improvisation. It's like dance — you stand on your own past and express your present self.”

There is more behind his stubborn attachment to concrete[11] than admiration for masters like Le Corbusier. Buildings in Mita are packed unusually tight, and strict fire regulations mean any timber has to be wrapped completely in fireproof material, which inevitably carries a heavy chemical load. Because of his own sensitivity, Oka mixes his own concrete: cement from a DIY store, aggregate from a Japanese supplier he trusts, the materials mixed by machine in the basement. He builds forms from ordinary boards and agricultural plastic sheeting, then pours the mix into them to set.

“Only by mixing it myself can I guarantee the quality of the building. Concrete came to Japan from the West in the Meiji era, and back then it was made carefully and it was very strong, which is why the concrete buildings of that period are all still usable today. But the quality has shifted since; put simply, more and more water goes in. Add too much water and the strength drops, and it degrades faster too. Japanese regulations put the legal service life of a concrete building at fifty years, but I have seen with my own eyes on site people adding a little too much water, and I don't know whether buildings like that will hold up that long.”

“When people build houses in Japan they generally use nama concrete — ready-mixed concrete mixed somewhere else — and when it leaves the plant the ratio of cement to water is usually close to 60 percent. But I wanted less water than that. Dams are said to have a service life of at least 100 years, and the concrete used to build dams has a water ratio of about 37 percent, so I decided to borrow that figure. Less water means more viscosity, so mixing it and getting it into the forms takes far more effort, and the materials cost more too — but the building you get is much stronger and lasts much longer. An expert once told me this building could stand for at least 200 years. I didn't quite believe it at first, but then came the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, when Arimasutonbiru was two stories along. I certainly felt it, but the structure wasn't affected at all. That was when I started to believe him: when Tokyo greets the 23rd century, Arimasutonbiru will still be here.” (To be continued in part two of the Oka Keisuke interview.)

About the Author:

Yoshii Shinobu is a Japanese writer who works in Chinese and now lives in Beijing. She graduated in international relations from International Christian University in Japan. She has studied in Chengdu, farmed in the south of France, and worked as an economics news editor in Taipei, Manila, Shanghai and elsewhere. She now writes full time; her books include 《四季便当》 (Bento Through the Seasons) and 《东京本屋》 (Tokyo Bookstores), and she has edited and proofread the “MUJI Light Cooking” series.

About the Interviewee:

Oka Keisuke was born in 1965 in Yanagawa, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. After middle school he went on to Ariake National College of Technology to study architecture. He then worked at a construction company designing houses; after leaving, he set out on his tour of buildings across Japan, and went on to run the Oka Gallery and Oka Doken, an RC (reinforced concrete) works. In 2003 his design for Arimasutonbiru was selected for the SD Review[2]; in 2005 he began building the concrete structure Arimasutonbiru in Minato Ward, Tokyo. He is the author of 《Baberu！》 (Chikuma Shobo, 2018).

Notes:

[1] First-class architect: a Japanese national qualification; the license is issued by the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.

[2] SD Review: a design award proposed by the architect Fumihiko Maki and run by Kajima Institute Publishing since 1982.

[3] Kōsen: short for kōtō senmon gakkō (national college of technology), roughly equivalent to a Chinese vocational college. It takes middle-school graduates, runs a five-year course, and awards an “associate degree” on graduation.

[4] The seat of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, in Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku Ward. Designed by Kenzo Tange, completed in 1990.

[5] Formwork: the molds that shape poured concrete, made from boards on site.

[6] Kurata Yasuo (1927–2000): a well-known architect of the Showa era, a graduate of the architecture department of the University of Tokyo's Second Faculty of Engineering.

[7] A private school Kurata Yasuo founded in 1972, in the mountains of Hida City, Gifu Prefecture.

[8] Waguri Yukio (1952–2017): a dancer and direct disciple of Tatsumi Hijikata.

[9] Friends Girls School: its name comes from the word “friend”; its school building was designed by Hiroshi Ōe (1913–1989) and completed in 1968.

[10] An apartment building in Kōchi Prefecture, self-built by the Sawada couple in the 1970s.

[11] Concrete: made mainly of cement (a powdered binder that sets with water) and water, hardening through the hydration reaction between the two.

Images provided by the author, Yoshii Shinobu.