Decaying 'swamp city': the death of Showa and Tokyo

With the advent of information society in the 1960, followed by the architectural mega-structures of the 1980s, Tokyo saw the emergence of a new kind of urban consciousness, where space was no longer experienced as something that divided up objects, but rather became adhesive and glue-like. In response to this, the 1980s also saw a turn to semiotics and a boom in discourse on the city, as intellectuals sought to find the artefacts and so piece together the natural history of the new urban environment. This article explores the significance of both developments, suggesting how the creation of an urban wunderkammer points to the baroque decay of the city itself. This decay is prefigured, the article suggests, by the city's origins as a swampy wetland, its status as the capital for an emperor who is both archaic and mortal, and the postwar standardization of housing, which permitted a family two children but no more. However hard the city strives through continuous redevelopment to evade its own ruin, it remains condemned to decay and haunted by ghosts.