One Man Building Five Floors, Year 13: The Only Thing an Architect Can Express | Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round

"Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round" is a QDaily column by Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who writes in Chinese. A "second round" (nijikai) is the optional second gathering office workers move on to after the first bar — a looser setting where people talk more freely.

Profile of the interviewee:

Oka Keisuke, born in 1965 in Yanagawa, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. After junior high he went on to Ariake National College of Technology to study architecture. He worked at an architecture firm designing houses, then quit to make a pilgrimage to buildings all over Japan, run a gallery called "Oka Gallery," and operate a reinforced-concrete (RC) workshop called "Oka Doken." In 2003 his design for "Arimasutonbiru" was selected for the "SD Review[1]," and in 2005 he began building the concrete structure "Arimasutonbiru" in Minato Ward, Tokyo. He is the author of Baberu! (Chikuma Shobo, 2018).

Introduction:

Oka Keisuke, a Japanese architect now 53, bought 40 square meters of land in Mita, Minato Ward — some of the most expensive ground in Tokyo — and in 2005 started building his own house, "Arimasutonbiru," five floors counting the basement. He buys most of his materials at DIY stores, and apart from a concrete mixer he uses no heavy machinery. Aside from the occasional friend who lends a hand, he digs the earth, mixes the cement, builds the formwork and pours the concrete alone. He has kept this up for 13 years. Oka holds the water-cement ratio[2] of his concrete at 37 percent, and an expert once assured him Arimasutonbiru would last 200 years. The building's odd shape brings to mind Spain's Sagrada Família, which is how people came to call him "the Gaudí of Mita." Oka has a certain standing in Japan's architecture world and is now a name that comes up whenever contemporary Japanese architecture does, but not everyone admires him so readily — the developers least of all, and some of the neighbors around Arimasutonbiru. The day I interviewed him, Oka mentioned that a meeting with the developer about relocation was coming right afterward, and his mood was heavy.

Article:

The Developer's "Sweet Talk"

"It was early 2009. A few men in suits turned up out of nowhere, from the developer. They said the area was going through 'redevelopment'[3], and that if I agreed to move they would pay enough compensation. I simply didn't want to move. I asked a lawyer friend, and he told me that although no Japanese law lets a developer force residents out on the grounds of 'redevelopment,' hardly any resident who has run into a 'redevelopment' problem has managed to stay put. I was so anxious that I fell apart mentally."

"What the developer meant was that the problem with Arimasutonbiru is the part facing the street. Their 'redevelopment' plan called for a wider sidewalk, and widening it would eat into the space in front of Arimasutonbiru. I said that was fine — the ground floor could be open to everyone, a place to rest when you're tired of walking, in effect part of the sidewalk's public space. But they couldn't seem to accept that. We negotiated for several years. I never stopped building. By 2015 the two sides had more or less agreed: the concrete structure could be pulled back 5 meters by 'hikiya'[4], the method of moving a building whole, with the developer covering the costs. I had already given up plenty — Arimasutonbiru is a reinforced-concrete building, and digging any deeper underground would mean cutting some of the rebar, which weakens the whole structure. But they said, 'Leave it to us, you have nothing to worry about!' and I believed they meant it. Then, out of nowhere, their story changed a couple of years ago. The costs the developer was supposed to cover — they washed their hands of them, said they had 'never said any such thing.' Last summer (2017) they even told me to stop work for a year, with no living allowance during the stoppage. They never once considered how much a stoppage like that would cost me. We're still negotiating the hikiya. Things have improved a little, but I can't be too optimistic."

Over the years he has been building the house, Oka has drawn a monthly "salary" of 200,000 yen (about 12,000 yuan). The money comes from savings he and his wife have put in together. Mrs. Oka worked for an airline and took a lump-sum pension when she retired a few years ago; Oka has little in savings and has borrowed from his mother back home. He says materials run about 20,000 to 30,000 yen a month; when friends come to help he pays them and treats them to meals, and on top of that there is rent for the apartment nearby (split with his wife), utilities and the property tax on the land — around 4 million yen a year in all. Frugal enough, but after more than a decade it adds up to a real weight on the couple.

The Only Thing Architecture Can Express

"I never meant to spend this much time on it. At the start I thought the building would take three or four years. Measured purely by efficiency this approach is a bad bargain — my own scheduling had problems too, and the relocation fight really did drag things out. But what these years have given me is enough time to think about what architecture itself means. The reason I'm building Arimasutonbiru is that I wanted to express the joy of making something with your own hands. Today's society is enormously rich on one side — the things and the information around us already exceed what we need — but that environment has stripped people of the happiness that only comes from doing things yourself. In modern society we're allowed to consume, and little room is left to create anything. Through a self-build like Arimasutonbiru, I want to bring that joy back among us."

"These days, at work and in life alike, we are all too far from one another. An architect who draws the plans and never once goes to the site — that alone is not normal. Building procedure has become so standardized that you can put up a house by following the instructions, and that has taken away the pride and the curiosity carpenters used to have. And when I worked construction jobs I often saw two kinds of toilet on a site: the better one for the developer's staff, and the most basic one, the only one the workers were allowed to use. In a society like that, where do you go to find the pleasure of being alive?"

"I think architecture is also a form of self-expression for the architect. But unlike art, architecture is made for people's lives — in that it has something in common with craft. And because of that, there is one thing we architects must never express through a building: negative feeling — anger, sorrow, anguish, despair. For works of art, expressing those feelings is fine, and necessary. But a building keeps people company every minute of every day, and it is so big that once it is up it is not easy to change. The only thing we architects can express through architecture is one thing: hope."

In Japan a building site is usually walled off with barriers, but the site at Arimasutonbiru is close to naked — no fence, no wire mesh between the building and the people walking past, and all you have to do is turn your head to see Oka at work inside. Hijirizaka slope is busy, and when someone asks what he is doing he stops work and answers carefully. He knows what he is doing is not ordinary, and that boxing the site in and hiding it from view would only breed confusion and resentment, so from the start he chose to let people see. Even so, not everyone finds Arimasutonbiru easy on the eye. When Oka arrives in the morning to start work, he often finds plastic bottles or takeout containers on the ground, thrown in from outside.

"Once I couldn't stand it anymore and got into an argument with a man, asking him why he was dumping his trash. By the end of it he told me honestly how he felt. He lives nearby and passes my building every day going to and from work. He said not everyone gets to give their life to something they truly love. Not everyone likes their job. For people like him, a person like me, or a building that gives off so-called positive energy, is an enormous source of pain. That made me realize how much a building can do to people. Building this house here means taking their feelings seriously too. The same goes for the developer's employees I mentioned: I know they have no choice either — the company wants the building moved, and they have to obey. I like what I'm doing, that much is certain, but plenty of friends say I've aged fast these past few years. Can't be helped. There is a lot to face."

Chairman Mao Died, and My Father Went to China

Talking with Oka, he keeps bringing up friends' names — manga artists, musicians, dancers, artists, photographers, students, professors. Part of that sociability comes from his own character: plain, sincere, glad to help. And that character very likely comes from his father.

"My father was the eldest son of a poor farming family. Given the economics of the time he would normally have had to become a farmer after junior high, but his junior high teacher paid all his tuition, and that let him finish vocational school. After graduating he went to work for Kyushu Electric Power. New employees were assigned first to collections — if a household hadn't paid its electricity bill the month before, you went and pressed them for it. That job let him see what each household was really like. Many families kept up appearances outside and had nothing at home. One mother once asked him to wait one more month, because her son was sitting the college entrance exam and cutting the power now would affect the boy for the rest of his life. When he ran into cases like that, my father would pay out of his own pocket, and leave the family a little money to live on besides. But he explained none of this at home — he would just say he had lost the envelope with his wages in it. This happened more than once. My mother would end up sobbing, and I would get so angry I kicked him hard in the back. Many years later, at my father's funeral, we finally learned the truth. Quite a few people came with envelopes holding far more than an ordinary condolence gift, saying they had only made it through those years because of my father's help."

"Probably because he had seen so much of people's suffering, he came to believe in communism. He was later elected to several terms as a city councilor. I suspect his understanding of communism came less from theory than from passion and sympathy. In the 1960s and '70s he was branch chief of the Japan-China Friendship Association, running a branch in Kyushu. It was a small place, but he got to travel to China two or three times a year for friendly exchanges, and he made many friends there. We have a photo at home, taken in '76 I think, of my father weeping with his arms around Mao Zedong's coffin. It was that same passion that left him unable to keep up when opinion inside Japan about communism shifted. His other political friends steadied themselves by converting to a new position; my father couldn't. In the years before he died at 57, his mind and his body were both in poor shape. If he were still alive he would be 82 this year. His name was Oka Shoju — I imagine there are still people in China who remember him. I have never been to China myself; I'd like to go if I get the chance. Architecture or any other field, Japan and China have to talk to each other properly. Exchange is essential."

"I know a lot of foreigners have bought property in Japan in recent years. My advice is not to buy in one of those thirty- or forty-story towers. They may look fine now, but within ten years parts of them will certainly need repair, and a tower like that is simply not built for repair work — look at the elevators, they aren't even sized to carry construction materials in. Try to replace a bathtub or a toilet and you'll have trouble. Japan also has a lot of earthquakes, and seismic technology improves every year, so even a building completed this year will have out-of-date seismic technology within a few years, and its price will fall. And if the elevator stops working and there's a fire or a quake, where do you run to? High-rises are not really suited to human life. If you're going to live somewhere, pick a building of four or five floors at most, one you can climb on your own two feet. We Japanese have tried a lot of things in architecture and failed at plenty of them. Please learn from our failures, and don't repeat them."

Thirty Years Without Buying Clothes

Oka's days have settled into a fixed rhythm in recent years: he lives in a rented apartment near Arimasutonbiru, starts work at nine and stops at five. Safety comes first, so he doesn't wear himself out, but he has no fixed day off — he rests only when it rains or something urgent comes up.

"My hours are the easy kind, really. Most sites start at eight and go till five. A traditional carpenter might have you starting at seven in the morning and not stopping until six at night. When I get home, I usually sew while I drink."

A man sewing over a drink sounds a little odd, but Oka really is good with a needle: a pair of trousers he mended himself drew nonstop praise when he sat down for a conversation with Hiroshi Sugimoto.

"To put all my energy into the building, I haven't bought clothes in thirty years — everything I wear now was given to me by friends. I have plenty of T-shirts and shirts, but trousers that fit are hard to come by. So there are one or two pairs I keep wearing, and when they tear I mend them myself. I have a color-vision deficiency, so I can't really judge how they turn out, but everyone loves this pair of mine. In the evening I like a drink, and sewing while you drink quiets you down a great deal — you can go back over everything that happened during the day and put it in order, so you can start the next day fresh. Never mind building your own house; everyone could start with sewing at night. Picking up a needle and thread to mend your own clothes beats scrolling on your phone by a long way."

About the author:

Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who writes in Chinese, currently based in Beijing. She graduated from International Christian University in Japan with a degree in international relations. She studied in Chengdu, farmed in southern France, and worked as an economic-news editor in Taipei, Manila, Shanghai and elsewhere. She now writes full time, is the author of Four Seasons Bento and Tokyo Bookstores, and has served as an editorial reviewer for the "MUJI Light Meals" book series, among others.

Notes:

[1] SD Review: an architectural design award proposed by the architect Fumihiko Maki and hosted by Kajima Institute Publishing since 1982.

[2] Water-cement ratio: the ratio, by weight, of the water used in concrete to the cement used.

[3] Redevelopment (saikaihatsu): one of Japan's "urban regeneration" policies. Projects with a high degree of public benefit can apply for tax breaks and other subsidy programs.

[4] Hikiya: a technique for moving a building horizontally intact. It is generally used to relocate buildings under historical preservation.

Images provided by the author.