The end of this big project is a good moment to look back on what we’ve accomplished over the past decade, where our organization and public baths are at today, and how our role as urbanists could evolve in the years ahead. I think we have the expertise, vision, and network needed to make more positive interventions in Tokyo’s urban future—if only we could figure out ways to tap into deeper financial resources. If you can offer advice on how we might take steps towards creating a sento fund, which I talk about in the last section, or just forward this email to someone else who loves baths and could help us in the next stage, I would truly appreciate your input.

I’ll begin with the exhibition. This year, we borrowed the coin laundries at Toshima-yu, an old sento near Ōji, where we distributed our sento newspapers and held a photo exhibition. The wonderful street performers of Chindon! Azumaya walked the neighborhood to promote for us, drawing children out of the alleys with their music. The coin laundry followed our previous exhibitions at Inari-yu Nagaya (a former tenement) and the shuttered liquor shop Echigo-ya last year, finishing out a trilogy of sento-adjacent spaces.

I also co-led a walking tour between five of the baths we researched, sharing local stories and explaining the role of baths and shopping streets in neighborhood history and the formation of the city.

For the finale, we also took over the lobby of city hall to display all 22 newspapers that we created over three years. In a space with lots of foot traffic, older residents especially were drawn to the memory maps that record the neighborhood businesses that once existed around each bathhouse.

Mostly thanks to my colleagues’ hard work, we’ve created a collection of oral histories and visual artifacts that is one of the best documentary archives of the role of sento in 20th century Tokyo life, and what they still mean to residents and local communities. We hope to edit the results into book form by next year (we’d also love to do some exhibitions overseas—please invite us!).

So how did we get here, and what can we do in the next stage?

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2014-2019: Identifying and documenting a crisis

Sento & Neighborhood’s story so far can be divided into three phases. The first began around 2014, which happened to be the year I moved to Hongo, in Bunkyo Ward. At the time my colleague Haruka Kuryu had started documenting the rapid disappearance of Bunkyo’s traditional sento, and Masaya Sammonji was living in a bath-less apartment as a student and going to the same sento as me. Between 2014-2015, we watched up close as four of the ward’s temple-like miya-zukuri sento were closed, destroyed, and replaced by parking lots and private condominiums. Observing the sudden loss of these common spaces, it was apparent that the destruction of some of the city’s finest architectural heritage also meant the unraveling of the remaining social fabric of neighborhoods.

The closures in 2014-2015 were followed by another wave amid the pandemic, when the other two bathhouses I frequented in my student days were destroyed. The 11 baths that existed in Bunkyo when I arrived have dwindled to just five.

Over the years, we’ve visited and documented dozens of baths on the verge of destruction, some of which are listed on our website. On Monday, we were down in Yokohama to document Naka-no-yu, a magnificent sento that will disappear in a few months.

The loss of sento is constant and never ending. There were more than 700 baths in Tokyo in 2013, the year before I arrived. This year, the number is likely to fall below 400, and I expect just 200 or so to survive into the mid-2030s. Seeing a sento in its final moments and knowing that the city will be poorer in its wake is a gut-wrenching experience every time. Haruka’s passion to try to stop what can feel inevitable has kept us all in motion, and sometimes, it pays off.

2019-2022: Building Inari-yu Nagaya

After the demoralizing experience of watching many of Bunkyo’s sento be torn apart, we started exploring neighboring Kita Ward, where 30 baths still existed at the time (now down to 22). That’s when we met Inari-yu.

We offered to help the owners register the bathhouse as a tangible cultural property, and soon afterward, were chosen for World Monuments Fund’s 2020 Watch List. By securing several hundred thousand dollars of funding from overseas, we were able to create a unique project structure in collaboration with the owners, which allowed us to conduct repairs on the bathhouse structure, and completely restore the abandoned tenement next door into a new community gathering space that extends the function of the bathhouse as a neighborhood commons. We now have run Inari-yu Nagaya for more than three years, and watched it become a beloved part of the community.

2023-2026: Researching sento and neighborhood networks

As construction wrapped up, we were also thinking about how to extend our work to other sento and more broadly share our message. That led us to collaborate with the Kita Ward government on our three-year My Sento & Neighborhood project, during which we refined a local research methodology and applied it to a large enough sample of baths to firmly grasp both the historical context of sento in the 20th century, as well as the present challenges of bathhouse owners and communities.

We also began receiving more media attention and awards. In 2024, our Inari-yu project won UNESCO’s highest award for cultural heritage conservation in Asia & the Pacific, from among more than 50 nominated projects—quite a gratifying outcome for a grassroots team of part-time urbanists.

This year, we were also chosen for an award from the national government (P.25) for community-building initiatives—the only organization chosen from a major metropolitan area. While community commons and architectural conservation are often celebrated in the shrinking regions, Tokyo needs them too, now more than ever. In our small way, we’re fighting against the sacrifice of the city’s social fabric and cultural heritage for short-term economic development.

Broader society does seem to be slowly realizing that the extinction of bathhouses would represent an irreplaceable loss. In 2025, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government designated four traditional bathhouses as cultural heritage for the first time. Haruka joined the governor of Tokyo for the announcement and launch of a new promotional campaign. What made this move unusual for the government is the explicit focus on the historic and cultural value of “Tokyo-style sento,” the temple-like baths of which there are now fewer than 100 left (the Tokyo website is a good resource for finding these baths). Hopefully, this momentum can lead to a few more escaping destruction.

2026-: A Sento fund?

Over the course of a decade, we identified our problem, built a model case, and refined our approach. We did this while hardly paying ourselves, and if we stopped today, I would take pride in what we’ve accomplished. But it’s also true that Inari-yu would have survived to the next generation even without us, and while documenting and sharing the stories of local bathhouses is meaningful and fulfilling task, it doesn’t stop Tokyo’s sento from disappearing. We don’t have another decade to put together a solution.

So what should we do next? The ideal next step would be to create a sento fund. While there are growing numbers of young entrepreneurs, creative owners, and outside companies that are creating new models for sento preservation across Japan, I think there is a niche for our organization to fill in focusing on historic baths in Tokyo that have exceptional architectural and urban value. Some of these are so integral to their neighborhoods that I can hardly imagine Tokyo without them, but have nobody waiting in the wings to carry them on.

In the course of our documentation and outreach work, we develop relationships with the families who run these baths. In the next few years, or even the next few months, it is increasingly likely that some will face closure and potential sale to developers.

Before that moment comes, we need to be able to credibly say to owners: when you are ready to close, do not quietly sell to a developer because they’re the only ones who have the money. Call us and give us a little time to try to put together a solution. We are working within our networks in Tokyo to take promising steps in this direction, but I’m not sure if we’ll get there in time. The real estate value of some of the baths we are most concerned about could be upwards of $5 million. Actually stepping in to preserve these places would require a step change from anything we’ve done so far.

There are paths to making sento into sustainable businesses, or more ambitiously into the heart of a community-oriented local development scheme that could include housing, accommodations, or other profitable elements (for a rural example of this kind of project, visit Gose Sento Hotel in Nara). In some neighborhoods, perhaps a community trust could be established that would pool capital from local companies, residents, and outsiders who want to have an ownership stake and role in preserving the sento. The main reason these sorts of things never get tried is because Tokyo real estate turns over too fast, and bathhouse owners usually sell to a developer before they announce closure. By that time, it’s too late to come up with any alternative. We’ve seen that pattern play out too many times to count, and we’re ready to write a different story.

Sento are at the heart of a human-scale city that is quickly disappearing. They can also be the starting point for creating better urban future. I want to look back a decade from now and know that a few of Tokyo’s sento are still here holding their neighborhoods together, because we did what was necessary in this moment, when it could still be done.

“Small business” and “micro-entrepreneur” sound on the surface like synonyms. But the difference tells us something about how the question of scale—at which we live life, and the economy is organized—relates to our society’s present convulsions.

For the last eight years, I’ve been involved in starting and running a small business (a renovated cafe and one-room hotel) in Tokyo. In that span, I’ve seen it change from a quiet space with a small stable of local regulars, to a spot that shows up in influencer videos and fills up first thing in the morning with tourists who type “coffee” into Google Maps and sort by rating. Yet even with the greater mediation of technology, it remains a place where it is possible to engage meaningfully with the people who walk through the door, by nature of its scale, its physicality, and the connection of its story to the city around it.

The value of small businesses can be described in many ways, but I think about them in terms of relationships and rootedness—they contribute to lifeworlds in which it is possible to form durable attachments. They make the very idea of place possible.

For the past three years, my non-profit organization Sento & Neighborhood has been recording and mapping memories of mostly vanished local worlds that once filled neighborhoods around public baths. In our workshops, small businesses are the vocabulary by which older residents describe their neighborhoods and the human webs that connected them. To walk down mostly shuttered streets, once filled with dense, coherent networks of green grocers, butchers, tofu and soba shops, is to weigh in their absence the profound erosion of the city’s social fabric. This erosion is also evident in the way most Tokyo residents today talk about their neighborhoods—not as places with human definition but merely as coordinates in space—15 minutes to Marunouchi, convenient to shopping, located in an area with rising real estate value, et cetera.

The decline of Tokyo’s small business ecosystems was brought about by supermarkets, real estate redevelopment, rapid transit, and other forces that tilted the playing field towards larger scale. Silicon Valley, at least until recently, had little to do with it. But digital services now sit at the center of the paradigm that has displaced local life—the city of one-click same-day delivery, algorithmic recommendations, and private spaces full of people staring at screens. Technology has relentlessly sped everything up, while amplifying trends of atomization and marketization.

It is in that context that I found myself thinking about the following comment by Anthropic’s Jack Clark on Ezra Klein’s podcast, in which he was asked to speculate on what kind of jobs might arise in a post-AI world where big firms slash white-collar jobs en masse:

One thing is just the phenomenon of the micro-entrepreneur. I mean, there are lots and lots of ways that you can start businesses online now, which are just made massively easier by having the A.I. systems do it for you […] if you’re a person with a clear idea and a clear vision of something to do a business in, it’s now the best time ever to start a business.

The reflex to talk about how AI empowers the little guy is unsurprising. It taps into Silicon Valley’s origin story of garage startups, and is certainly more reassuring than the notion that a handful of companies are amassing enormous power on a planetary scale.

But if now’s the best time to start a business, why’d they all disappear? The reason, of course, is that “micro-entrepreneurship” in Silicon Valley speak does not mean building something at a local scale to serve your neighbors. These days, it more often means launching an online storefront, using a chatbot to create a brand identity, and paying a manufacturer in China to ship directly to customers captured from an algorithmically selected audience on social media. This ideal is taken to its logical extreme by the AI billionaires, who make bets in their group chat about when the first one-man, billion-dollar business will be created (pity on that lonely soul).

The micro-entrepreneur is a solitary figure: a founder pitted against abstract market competition, or much less glamorously, an influencer (or podcaster/Substacker) hustling day and night to stay on the algorithm’s good side. They are valorized for different reasons than small businesses. Startups are supposed to scale; they are lauded for driving innovation and destroying bloated incumbents—in other words, for keeping the economy in a constant state of flux. Durability is the enemy of progress and growth. Meanwhile, much of the lasting value accrues to the platforms.

And so it is that we find ourselves in the late-stage AI bubble, when the promise of “AGI” has been delayed to an indeterminate future and the tech world has decided that the interim solution to our problems—and their multi-trillion dollar expenses—is…more apps. Lately, alongside one micro-entrepreneur’s ads of an extremely buff AI-generated older Asian man pitching a taichi workout guide for over-50 dads, YouTube has been serving me promotions for vibe coding startups that promise me that I can now create anything I want just by thinking about it. The smallest inconvenience, the slightest pang of boredom or yearning for companionship, is now a problem to be solved by a bespoke piece of software.

These tools are surely useful in certain context, but what happens to life when everything is in a constant state of flux, when everything is made “easy”? What LLMs have given us in the digital realm is a removal of friction. And now we are also waking up to the value of the friction we have lost: the meaningful rewards derived from effort and attention, the ability to form durable attachments and knowledge, and importantly, the legibility of a world that is not overrun by meaningless symbols and artifacts.

What keeps the onrush of slop at bay in the physical world—and what makes us appreciate a small business owner who shows up everyday—is the far greater friction involved. Yet according to tech utopians, after swarms of agents swallow the internet, AI is coming for the physical world, too. “The robots will actually make so many robots and A.I. that they will actually saturate all human needs,” claims Elon. “You won’t be able to even think of something to ask the robot for at a certain point. Like there would be such an abundance of goods and services.” However implausible, it should be obvious that in such a scenario meaningless symbols and artifacts would quickly proliferate to drown out what remains of the human world.

We should all know from our experience of the last two decades where this AI hype is leading us—further into a digital morass that has left us more isolated and unfulfilled. The AI salesmen know we know this, and thus lean harder upon faith in the singularity or other flavors of utopianism to reassure us that something better and more abundant is just over the horizon. The digital drudgery will finally end, the bullshit jobs will melt away, and humanity will be liberated to pursue art, creativity, order our robots around, and perhaps invest our time in forming durable attachments again.

But if a more human future and richer cities do arise in a post-AI world, they will come through cultural and political movements to disengage from digital technology, and sustained efforts to create networks in the real world. Protecting and cultivating the common spaces within our cities, uncommodified human relations in our lives, and unmediated realms inside our minds is a process that should be difficult and full of friction. If it’s easy, we’re not doing it right.

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Nagasaki, one of my favorite cities in Japan, appears at #17 on this year’s New York Times’ 52 Places to Go List. In his newsletter explaining why he chose Nagasaki (following previous picks of Morioka, Yamaguchi, and Toyama), Craig Mod also mentions that I had something to do with it landing there:

I’ve been to Nagasaki five or six times over the last twelve years, and it’s always felt like a special place, but it wasn’t until I was having coffee with Sam Holden a few years ago, that his passion (he’s a verifiable Nagasaki (and Onomichi) maniac), for the city inspired me to take an even deeper look. So I went back, and it was, indeed, great.

Needless to say, as a “verifiable Nagasaki maniac” I think the city deserves more attention from discerning travelers. I first went to Nagasaki a month after I moved to Tokyo in 2014, and have been back about every other year since. In 2024, Craig and I were chatting about his New York Times power, and knowing the sorts of places he likes to highlight (mid-size, somewhat out-of-the-way cities), I put in a good word for Nagasaki. So, hooray!

Despite being #17 on the list, two of my favorite spots in the city, the 800-year-old camphor tree at Daitokuji and the classic kissaten Fujio, show up in the first line of the NYT’s announcement of the list on Instagram. Are Americans so Japan-obsessed that the editors look at a list of the entire planet and just reflexively put them at the very top??

A quick aside before I get to Nagasaki—I am an advocate for camphor tourism: you should also visit this 600-year-old in Tokyo, this 900-year-old in Onomichi, this 2,600-year-old on Omishima, this 2,100-year-old in Atami, these 1,000-year-olds in Osaka and Nagoya, and this 700-year-old that endures at the middle of a railway platform (lovingly illustrated by Patrick Lydon). Sit down for a while, look up at their grandeur, read with them. Pray to them. A place always feels more magical after paying respects to one of the ancients.1

What makes Nagasaki special

Nagasaki’s charms are rooted in its geography and history. Nagasaki is very hilly, and as a general rule, hillside cities are among the most interesting places in Japan. Uneven topography preserves local distinction and human scale, while flat cities often suffer from the homogenizing effects of car-oriented sprawl and large-scale development. I have written about my love for Japan’s hillside communities here:

The urban area of Nagasaki (pop. 390,000) is centered on the valleys of the Urakami River and Nakashima River that feed into Nagasaki Harbor, and reaches high into the surrounding hills (while some hillsides are Onomichi-like areas where houses stand on narrow alleys with no car access, many are accessible by roads and buses and even diagonal elevators).

A contour map reveals just how little flat land there is, and how the streetcar system (white lines) provides a comprehensive network connecting the valley floors. On the streets, you’ll notice hardly anyone rides bicycles because it’s more logical to rely on the streetcars and walk or take motorized transport uphill (below you can also see the city’s primary industry across the harbor—those blue rectangles are the dry docks of the Mitsubishi shipyard, which has been around since the Meiji era).

Nagasaki’s growth has long been constrained by its mountainous topography and remoteness in far-western Japan. Over the past 70 years, the prefecture has had one of the fastest rates of population decline as people move to Tokyo, Osaka and Kyushu’s increasingly unipolar center in Fukuoka. While the city is somewhat insulated by its role as the prefectural capital, its population has declined by more than 100,000 since the 1970s. Many of the hillside areas are emptying out—I wrote about exploring one area of abandoned houses with a group of local akiya activists during a visit in 2015.

Even so, Nagasaki feels lively, in part because in an age of shrinking cities, its challenging topography also works to its benefit by concentrating urban vitality in a small, walkable center. Shrinking municipalities across Japan have tried to implement “compact city” strategies to maintain vitality in the face of not just population decline, but also the car-oriented suburbs, shopping malls and large-scale roadside retail that have hollowed out downtowns and shuttered shopping streets. Nagasaki is a natural compact city, with a bustling shopping arcade in Hamamachi, an active nightlife district in Shianbashi, and a contiguous urban fabric with relatively few parking lots.

Geography is also why Nagasaki has such an interesting history—the natural harbor in a distant corner of the country was a good place to isolate contact between Japan and the outside world during Japan’s era of closure from the 17th and 19th centuries. Dutch traders established an outpost on Dejima, an island just off the shore, while a Chinese quarter (Tojin-yashiki) existed nearby. Today, Dejima’s buildings have been reconstructed and contain good exhibits that convey this episode of global history. Later, when the country finally opened under Western pressure in the 1850s, Nagasaki was chosen as one of the five ports open to foreign ships. The heritage of this second era of Western influence is most concentrated in Minami Yamate, the old foreign quarter on the hillside overlooking the harbor. The 1864 Oura Cathedral, Japan’s oldest church building, has several memorials to Christians who were persecuted and kept the faith in hiding before Japan’s re-opening (go to the Goto Islands off the coast to explore the World Heritage churches built by in “Kakure-Christian” communities).

Craig begins his recommendation with a call to contemplate the city’s atomic bombing at a time when nuclear weapons are again a menace. Nagasaki’s destruction at the end of World War II is surely the event that looms largest in the eyes of the world, but the city has always received a fraction of the focus directed at the city that was erased three days before it.

Largely, this is a function of Hiroshima’s misfortune of being first, along with its proximity to other tourist destinations, and the powerful visual symbolism of the A-Bomb Dome. Hiroshima is a great city that I visit every year, but I noticed when I took my dad there last October that the sheer volume of tourists (many probably there because the dome and Miyajima are all over social media) feels somewhat incongruous with quiet contemplation of humankind’s self-destruction. Visiting Nagasaki’s park, museum and memorial, which are located outside of the center of the city, is just as valid a choice if you want to grapple with the horror of the atomic bombings, even if people online might not immediately recognize your pictures (at the end of the war, Nagasaki did have an atomic ruin that matched Hiroshima’s Dome in its visceral symbolism. The ruins of Urakami Cathedral, which in a twist of fate was right next to the off-target hypocenter, were demolished in the 1950s and rebuilt).

Some remnants of the original cathedral were moved to the Peace Park, and smaller remains such as the one-legged Torii Gate at Sanno Shrine have been preserved. Sanno Shrine is also home to two beautiful camphors that miraculously survived the bombing to return to their original vigor. The Nagasaki Kusunoki Project has mapped 50 camphors and other trees in the area that survived the blast. Spend a quiet morning at the museum and memorial, and then walk through the city in search of some of these survivors.

Some recommendations if you go

Stay
There are lots of ordinary hotels, but if you want a taste of what hillside neighborhoods are like, Sakayado is an architect-led effort to create accommodations in a cluster of old, less accessible homes a short (uphill) walk from the Sofukuji tram stop.

Another comfortable option is ksnowki, a small two-room renovated hotel and cafe opened by a young woman and her family, who once ran a sento nearby called—complete coincidence—Kusunoki-yu (Camphor Bath)!2

If I were looking for a fancier place to stay, I would choose Hotel Indigo Nagasaki, which opened in 2024 in a renovated 1898 red-brick convent and orphanage in the middle of the Western Quarter in Minami Yamate.

What to eat and do
Be sure to eat a bowl of champon, the Nagasaki speciality of creamy soup with chewy noodles that was created with Chinese influence in the 19th century. This local cafeteria on the edge of the Edo-era Chinese quarter (different from the modern Chinatown) is a good place to try it. Squeeze into a little gyoza shop for a quick plate with the local salarymen or a canalside stall for oden or ramen. Fujio is a great kissa coffee; Nagasaki also has plenty of third wave coffee and a nice old-school English teahouse, too.

Go out in the old Showa-era drinking quarter of Shianbashi (“Deliberation Bridge”), where men were said to consider whether to cross into the pleasure quarter of Maruyama (home to the retro police box). I’ve been to a some great little izakaya, sushi and oden places here, but perhaps I’ll leave you to try your luck (save some room for a closer of onigiri at the end of the night). Shianbashi won’t be around forever as many of the buildings stand over a buried river and don’t meet code, but for now, the vibes remain excellent.

If you’ve been to Hiroshima and are expecting the historical rupture of 1945 to be similarly total, you will be surprised by how much of the historical landscape remains, and not just in Dejima or Minami-Yamate. The temples of Teramachi-dori at the foot of the hills make for a great walk. Start at Yasaka Shrine and Sofukuji Temple, with its Ming-style architecture and this most exquisite tsukijibei wall.

As you walk, wander up the steep slopes into the hillside cemeteries and temple grounds. Then head across the river and up the grand staircase of Suwa Shrine (along with Yasaka Shrine, one of the locations of the annual Kunchi Festival), maybe stop for udon or sweets near the top. Return along the Nakashima River, crossing the many graceful stone bridges, including the city’s icon of Megane-bashi, dating from 1634.

For books, visit Hitoyasumi Book Store or Books Leiden. For gifts, go to Tatematsuru on the Edomachi Shotengai just outside Dejima. For textiles and ceramics, visit List or coffee & clayworks Kasa.

Wander the hills in search of cats, go see what’s growing on some of the community farm patches that my friend Hirayama has started on vacant hillside land. Go to an exhibition at the prefectural art museum, then grab a beer on a terrace at Dejima Wharf and watch the sunset across the harbor. Rent a car and go ceramics hunting in Arita (be sure to drop by my friend Sanae’s wonderful tea shop).

Kunchi Festival
If you can, visit during Nagasaki Kunchi, the great festival that began in 1634 and takes place every October. Seven neighborhoods each have floats reflecting their local culture (or in the case of Chinatown, a dragon dance), and parade through the streets before gathering on the shrine grounds where they perform in front of spectators (then pull their floats straight down the stairs!).

Every seven years, each neighborhood takes its turn as the “odori-cho” (踊り町) and helms the festivities with a special performance. I owe my love of Nagasaki to my former classmate and roommate Kyohei, who grew up in Edomachi, the neighborhood just outside Dejima whose float is a Dutch galleon (alongside a smaller yellow one for the adorable children). When their turn came in 2019 and he was a leader of the float pullers, he invited me down to watch on the shrine grounds, where they arrive after making their way through the streets to spin the ship at high speed while percussionists bang their instruments on board.

Someday I’ll write more about Kyohei (now a member of city council) and my other Nagasaki friends who take so much pride in their home and have over the years shaped how I think about post-growth cities. For now, I hope some of you will take a few days for a visit. Nagasaki’s slow pace, small scale, and quiet beauty are an antidote to overtourism.

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Happy New Year! Yesterday I woke up around 5:45 and biked through the near-freezing cold to Inari-yu Nagaya to serve amazake, a sweet rice drink, to about 60 of our neighbors after hatsuyu, the first morning bath of the year. In many ways, it’s my favorite day at the Nagaya—all the local folks basking in their post-bath warmth, no money being exchanged, just good vibes. It reminds me of why it’s worth building and sustaining an urban commons.

When I explain that I work on preserving sento, people in Tokyo sometimes respond by sharing that they love saunas. The distinction may appear to be about whether you prefer steam or hot water, but public baths and saunas function in very different ways within the city.1

Saunas were on my mind recently due to a terrible tragedy that occurred on December 15 at a sauna in Akasaka, just down the street from Tokyo Little House. A husband and wife in their mid-30s died after becoming trapped inside a private sauna room where a fire broke out. The news reported several glaring safety issues—the sauna door had a knob instead of being always pushable, and the management had apparently never turned on the SOS receiver in the office. The owners are now being investigated for negligence.

The day after the tragedy, my barber mentioned a detail that I hadn’t heard on the evening news. The sauna in question was a luxury establishment that cost ¥19,000 ($120) per visit and had a top monthly membership fee of ¥390,000—$2,500, or more than the average take-home pay for a Tokyo worker in their early 30s.

In contrast, every sento in Tokyo will cost you ¥550—public baths are the last service still subject to price controls that are intended to ensure universal access. It is not hard to guess which style of operation is more aligned with the ways of the modern city. For the last five years or so, the media has regularly covered the sauna boom as a growing youth consumer trend. One popular site lists around 200 in Tokyo, which means they are closing in on sento, whose numbers have dwindled from around 2,800 in the 1960s to a little more than 400 today. A search for sauna shows at least ten in Akasaka, which hasn’t had a sento since the 1980s (the distinction is lost on Google Maps, where they appear with the same symbol).

Akasaka is the kind of Tokyo neighborhood where one would expect a high concentration of saunas: lots of young, highly paid workers in media, finance, and other industries putting in long hours at the office and hanging out near their workplaces till late at night. It is also at the center of a consumer culture in Minato Ward that prizes luxury and exclusivity—sure enough, Minato’s saunas are the most expensive in Tokyo, averaging ¥6,375 per visit. Tokyo’s saunas thus adhere to the logic of other categories of consumer services in the city, differentiated by price and features to appeal to particular market segments.

Someone with a different idea of what makes a good city may read this and think, what’s the problem? Sophisticated markets offering an array of consumer choices are a sign of a rich society, we’ve replaced what used to be a necessary inconvenience with a variety of better options. Sauna and “super sento” spas often have a range of services—cold baths, cool-off rooms with fancy massage chairs, private spaces, and post-sauna food and drinks—that simple sento do not. Surely, most of the tenement dwellers who occupied the city when the sento were built would trade the living conditions of their city for the modern city in a heartbeat.

Yet the triumph of saunas and other market-driven spaces is what makes sento and other surviving commons so valuable in modern Tokyo. Sento are convivial community spaces where we don’t just purchase rejuvenation, but shed the acquired attributes of our consumer choices to be naked among our neighbors—everyone from small children still learning the rules of life to the old and feeble.2

I have nothing against saunas, nor people who have different consumer habits from me. But I am interested in how Japanese sauna culture—and the global wellness industry in general—seems to be complementary to burnout culture. Here is how the sauna where the tragedy occurred describes itself on its website.

In a fully private space, a moment of perfection for you alone
A healing place for people who battle in solitude.
We have distilled that wish into the ultimate sauna for those who are busy, and mentally and physically exhausted.
Appreciate a moment of luxury just for you.

Society is presented as a dystopian battlefield of overwork and isolation; the luxury sauna is the antidote, accessible to those who have put in the hours and earned enough money to purchase momentary escape. Burnout and rejuvenate, rinse and repeat. The key word in Japanese sauna culture is “totonou,” a verb that means to become ordered, and in this context refers to cycling between the sauna and cold bath or outside air to achieve the desired effect of mental and physical rejuvenation. My own urbanist notion of “totonou” is less individual and bodily than communal and social. I draw energy from feeling myself as dividual, part of the circular social rhythms at the sento, and opening myself to experience the neighborhood in between bath and home.

In this day and age, creating a new establishment in the city usually means answering the market, and so the city shifts more and more towards touristic and consumptive modes of organizing space. I simply believe that a healthy city also needs other forms of social bonds, and trying to protect the sento that remain and cultivate an urban culture that values and sustains them is one way of putting energy towards that end. Perhaps one day the winds will change, but in the short-term at least, our task is mostly playing defense.

The tragedy at the private sauna brought to mind another incident that happened a year ago. An elderly woman who bathes at Inari-yu every day didn’t show up at the usual hour. The concerned bathhouse owner later walked over to her house to figure out what was the matter. Calling out, a faint response came from inside. She was sick with the flu, and couldn’t get up to unlock the door. The fire department was called, entered the house through a second-floor window and took her to the hospital for treatment.

Yesterday, she came to the Nagaya with her friend after bathing. It was too crowded inside for her to bring in her walker, so I took a chair and a hot cup of amazake outside for her. “The bath was much busier than usual, like the old days,” she said as she carefully lowered herself to sit. Across the alley, the hair salon where she and her friends used to gather had become a new house in 2025. Heading into a new year and an uncertain future for human relations, I felt thankful to the city for the chance to be part of a place, and to do something nice for my neighbors.

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Future histories of these unreal times will need to include a paragraph on The Line. It was the ultimate embodiment of the spirit of our age, when crypto grifters co-opt nation states, billionaire boys fling their toy rockets to the heavens, and tech CEOs predict data centers will soon smother the Earth. Somewhere out in the Saudi Arabian desert, a mad prince with a bottomless sovereign wealth fund actually carved a 150-km gash in the sand, and exclaimed that he would build a 500-meter tall, mirror-glass-clad linear city and fill it with 9 million people.

Well, surprise: earlier this month, the FT ran a brutal piece by Alison Killing full of quotes from insiders rushing to escape the blast radius of a project imploding from its own engineering and financial hubris.

When construction began three years ago, The Line was meant to be a symbol of unstoppable momentum: transformative urban living without traditional streets or cars, powered by renewables, running uninterrupted from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Hejaz mountains. It would be the centrepiece of Neom, the futuristic metropolis through which Prince Mohammed intended to prove the scale of his ambition as Saudi Arabia aims to transition from oil to a digital economy.

“They say in a lot of projects that happen in Saudi Arabia, it can’t be done, this is very ambitious,” said Prince Mohammed, known as MBS, in a Discovery Channel documentary about The Line that first aired in July 2023. “They can keep saying that. And we can keep proving them wrong.”

But as the designs advanced, his dream collided with reality. The Line’s own architects began to question whether the structure could ever be built as imagined. Costs ballooned, timelines slipped and the foreign investment that Riyadh had banked on failed to materialise.

Today, with at least $50bn spent, the desert is pock-marked with piling, and deep trenches stretch across the landscape.

If your algorithm is calibrated anything like mine, you’ve probably seen Neom ads plastered across the internet over the past few years. If you are part of the reality-based community, you also may have wondered about a few minor details, such as where the nine million residents would come from, how they would source 60% of the world’s steel output or more than the planet’s entire production of cladding, or—please excuse my paltry imagination—how a line could possibly be a more geometrically efficient shape for a city than a circle.

The cornucopia of fanciful development projects announced under MBS, which are rapidly bankrupting the Saudi investment fund, are easier to understand when you realize that to a large degree, they are engagement farming masquerading as urban design. Are you an up-and-coming, extremely online autocrat who wants the world to know that your kingdom is going to be the next big thing? The netizens of planet earth have a hard time looking away from hubris so breathtaking that it can be seen from space.

Thus untold treasure has been squandered according to a digitally-driven circular logic: try to bend the rules of physical reality to resemble eye-catching video-game worlds, in an effort to capture more attention in virtual spaces. Top-notch architecture, design, engineering and public relations firms were happy to play along for a fat payday, while the project’s mouthpieces went to Davos to sell the bright future being built in Saudi Arabia before the world’s assembled elites. Silicon Valley oligarchs, fed up with the civic process and high on their own supply, looked on in envy as they plotted their own desert utopias and grew convinced that progress was more compatible with autocracy than democracy. Now all this fantasizing has turned out to be a gust of hot desert air.

Most of the professionals involved will slink away to work on new projects elsewhere. But next time you open the Times and see Michio Kaku extolling the wonders of parallel universes, remember that in this one, he was happy to do sponcon for a scheme so obviously flawed that it should discredit the predictive powers of any futurologist willing to associate with it.

Perhaps the path to credulity about Neom was paved by the fact that an extremely absurd, superlative city has already risen from the Arabian sands. Dubai is an instant metropolis that revels in its own fakeness, and is always pushing the envelope of financial possibility. Couldn’t The Line similarly defy its critics?

“There is the idea of a city, and the city itself, too great to be held in the mind,” observed the writer George Saunders after visiting Dubai two decades ago. Despite its ostentatious artificiality, Saunders was surprised to discover Dubai was just an another ordinary city full of chatty taxi drivers, shady businessmen, and desperate strivers. “No place works any different than any other place, really, beyond mere details. The universal human laws—need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain—are constant, predictable, reliable, universal.”

Sheer physical and financial impossibility may have killed The Line, but it was always doomed by the assumption that universal human laws could be tossed aside and people would thrive in a sci-fi prison sandwiched between two panes of glass, as if trapped inside their phones. Put vast financial resources in the hands of a dictator addicted to virtual worlds, and he can raise battalions of marketing consultants, Hollywood art directors and Western thought leaders to stoke his ego, and armies of migrant laborers to sink piles into the desert. But invent the future of cities he cannot. The Line’s demise begs the question of what other grand schemes in this age of unreal promises may soon unravel.

We just wrapped up our 38th week of construction at Labyrinth House. This month also marks five years since we started, which pencils out to about a sixth of the last half-decade of my life spent rebuilding these houses in Onomichi. I’m writing this in the Shinkansen on the way back to Tokyo, and this is the first time in a week I’m looking at a screen and touching a keyboard for more than a few minutes. Instead, I’ve been staring at walls and working with water—mixing plaster and dirt, washing trowels, squeezing sponges, scrubbing columns and floors, mostly ignoring the painful fissures spreading across my fingers.

Last night around two a.m., as if in a dream, the sensory memory of my fingertips burbled up from my subconscious to submerge the whole world. The clouds brimmed over and began to shower Onomichi with something short of a deluge but much more than a drizzle—unbroken, steady precipitation that, hour after hour into the late afternoon, soaked the world as thoroughly as the sponge floating in my plastering bucket.

I’m a light sleeper. Back in Tokyo, I scarcely hear the rain at night through the thick windows, but here, the sound is immersive. I breathe in the thickened air as the pitter-patter quickens. My mind drifts outside. I think about the roof.

I think about the droplets slipping their celestial moorings and making first impact, the angle of their bounce, how gravity parabolically pulls them earthward again and they collide with others to form rivulets down the rusted chutes of the corrugated iron and the jagged cascade of the ceramic tiles. I follow the streams as they converge in corners, splash into the gutters, sluice down the drainpipes to the garden, and dribble down the stairs towards the stone culvert in the alley, or behind the house into the concrete ditch we dug to the narrow and steep flume that carries the water straight down the hill and into the sea.

I know this roof. I know its logic (and lack thereof), how its weight is conveyed from trusses through columns and across beams down to the foundation stones and into the ground. I know its weak points—the rough edges we’ll get to someday, the spots where the water is still squeezing its way in, eating away at the structure, the parts that will have to be torn open in five or ten years. I know it’s still hiding secrets from me.

I know this roof because I’ve climbed through its rafters and scrambled on its surfaces. I’ve stuck straightedges through beams that crumble like loafs of dry bread.

I’ve sniffed the moldy air of abandonment in the room where I now rest, and torn out its rain-soaked ceiling boards. I’ve hung tarps from the living room ceiling before rainy season to protect stacks of lumber from the water pouring in from gaping holes above.

I’ve marveled at how the roofs in Onomichi spawn smaller roofs, which spawn still smaller roofs that grow together like mushroom caps in the crevasses between buildings.

I’ve pulled down the broken roof tiles, shoveled off the dirt and tree bark membrane beneath. I’ve heard decades crunch in rotted wood underfoot and at the end of my crowbar, and splinted the stumps of rafters long since left for dead with freshly cut cedar.

I’ve peeled away roofs and observed as new configurations of space and light reveal themselves. I’ve watched the late afternoon sun pierce for a brief moment into a kitchen still deep in my imagination.

I’ve wrestled five-meter beams up the hill around narrow corners to hold up new roofs. I’ve laid out fresh tiles on top and seen the shadows of the sweet olive tree dance on the floor through the glass-tile skylights.

I’ve built a hidden attic between the oozing mud walls, and felt a flurry of butterflies as I ascend “up near the roof where all thoughts are clear”—to a space of dreams and rationality, a place where the carpenter’s solid geometry keeps us safe from the sun and the rain we fear, as Gaston Bachelard wrote.

Beneath this roof, I’ve walked the same route at night from my futon to the bathroom downstairs for three years, except now there are walls and floors and light and a toilet where not too long ago there was only mud and darkness and a hole in the ground.

I’ve done this alongside some of the best people I’ve encountered in my time on earth.

As the rain comes down outside, the bedroom is warmed by their bodies lying near me, comrades who’ve been with me since day one and some whom we’ve just met—architects and students who come for a few days or a few weeks to lend their labor because they’re inspired by what we’re making and how we’re doing it. They fill the house beneath this roof with home-cooked meals and conversation, the late-night clatter of mahjong tiles and Super Nintendo battles with the kids from next door. They sleep through the rain better than I do.

We’ve done this all in an age in thrall to fascists and techlords, when the people and systems with the most power are hellbent on sapping the world of meaning and convincing us that laws and knowledge, human creativity, locality and physicality no longer matter. The practice of building this house is as much an act of resistance towards this descent into unreality as the descent of our shrinking community into ruination. At two a.m., I lie awake in the warmth of my futon and think about the roof over my head that keeps me dry as the world outside precipitates. A roof feels meaningful. It feels real. Some days, this roof is all that I need.

About a year ago we launched our crowdfunding campaign to finish phase two of Labyrinth House. Many of you contributed, and I owe you all much gratitude and another update. I also want to explain how subscriptions to this newsletter will work this year (hint: there are cat calendars involved).

In the past year, we’ve done nine weeks of construction (more than the 2023-2024 season) and are now about 90% done—the kitchen, bathroom, electrical, and most interiors are complete. In December, we’ll build the earthen floor in the shop space and continue working on the bath. Last week, we also cleared out the warehouse that is going to be phase three, the library and archive. I’d like to record a walk-through video before the end of the year to show the current state (in the meantime, check out the updates on Instagram).

Substack subscriptions

Some of you contributed to Labyrinth House by subscribing to me on Substack, which means the platform will likely auto-renew your annual subscription in coming weeks. Last year, I considered all subscriptions as contributions to our project rather than payment for my writing. If you don’t want the subscription to renew, please turn of the paid subscription and by all means keep reading my work.

If you do re-subscribe at $50 (or newly subscribe, including the people who have subscribed since the crowdfunding campaign finished), I will send you a 2026 Onomichi cat calendar. Our 2025 calendar was a big hit, and I’ve enjoyed seeing the pages being turned in friends’ and neighbors’ spaces throughout the year.

Subscribers at any amount above $80 will get a cat calendar and a tea towel. If you already got a Labyrinth House towel (designed by Lili Mossbauer) last year, I will send one from Sento & Neighborhood (towel and logo designed by me), and part of your subscription will go to filling the coffers of my non-profit bathhouse preservation organization. If you don’t need the gifts and just want to subscribe, let me know.

Same as last year, the calendar photos are all taken by Tacchan, an Onomichi native who has been cooking meals for the Labyrinth House crew since 2021. I wrote a few months ago about how the city is alive, an idea that comes to mind with Tacchan. There is a whole society of cats in Onomichi with its own dynamics, a half-dozen of whom live around our house. We know them by certain names, while up the hill they’re known by others. In those early pandemic days, Tacchan was not working, and took daily walks for his hobby of cat photography. He passed by our house often, and one day he walked in. He wanted to help and said he knew how to cook. He arrived at just the right moment, when we needed someone to fill our bellies and sustain our stupid enthusiasm for each other and seeing these houses live on into the future. This was Onomichi living through our non-human neighbors and an urban environment built over generations, to bring us together in the same place.

Going forward, I have no idea how this subscription economy will evolve (or for that matter this increasingly slop-infested platform), but in the short-term, earning some income here would certainly motivate me to focus more of my time on writing. I’ve always earned my income as a translator, so for better or worse, my writing has never felt like something I should be doing. For the past five years, it’s always taken a back seat to building my projects and earning a living (plus extra to pay for Labyrinth House), but as this project nears completion, my desire is shifting towards putting things in words. I have essays gestating on Tokyo, on culture and tourism, on neighborhood life and urbanism. I want to tell stories about Labyrinth House. I have a seven-part exploration of diverging futures in the islands south of Onomichi plotted out. I want to write all that and much more, and would be pleased if you want to support that. But also, I would love to put a cat calendar in the mail to you. Thanks as always for reading, and hope you’re staying dry amid the rain.

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With two days in the city, I also wanted to get outside of the central zone where most of the tourism boom and real estate investment is unfolding, and see how the current process of urban development interfaces with spreading desolation in the city’s post-growth areas. Walking and biking across the southwestern fringe of the city center (Taisho, Nishinari, Suminoe wards), I passed through many shuttered streets like the one below, where the expo flags stick out like something from far away.

The spillover of the tourist boom into these areas is sometimes referred to as “gentrification,”1 but this feels like an imprecise term to describe a process that is less organic (bottom-up social displacement) or bureaucratic (top-down urban renewal) than algorithmic.

Outside the bubble

Osaka’s top-line demographic situation looks strong: in 2024, it recorded the largest population increase of any city nationwide (21,387) and has added more than 200,000 residents since 2000 after decades of hollowing out. However, this influx has been concentrated in the six central wards popular with condominium developers, and coincided with the Kansai region’s population stagnation and now decline. Last year, Osaka also had the greatest natural decrease (deaths minus births) in Japan, and most areas of the city are losing population at an accelerating rate. Nishinari Ward has seen the greatest drop—its population of a little more than 100,000 has already declined 30% since 2000 and more than half from its 1960s peak, and could roughly halve again by 2050.

I stayed in Kamagasaki, an area of Nishinari known in the 20th century as one of the largest slums in Japan. As it so happens, the first time Osaka held an expo—not in 1970, but in 1903—an unsightly slum in the Nihombashi area blighted the main road from the city center to the expo grounds on the outskirts of Tennoji. To shield visitors from this unpleasant urban reality, the city cleared the slum, and displaced day laborers and other residents moved across the railroad tracks south of the expo venue, to what was then fields along the road to Wakayama. By 1970, 30-40,000 day laborers and dockworkers lived in Kamagasaki’s flophouses, and its hiring sites filled the 20,000-man daily workforce at the construction site for that year’s expo.2

Long stigmatized, the neighborhood has been passed over by redevelopment and remains home to many elderly ex-laborers. Their former professions are now the realm of non-Japanese workers, and the area’s foreign population has more than doubled in the past decade to around 10%—Chinese and Vietnamese are heard in the alleys, while African migrants congregate at night along the main street and in the entries of old apartment blocks. Abandoned and collapsing buildings are common. I peeked into the broken window of one building with a buckled facade, and spotted a stack of molding futon amid the detritus. But as one itinerant population fades out, another is taking its place—up and down the same street, the fresh facades of short-term rentals (below, Airbnbs) are now springing up thanks to that all-purpose tool of neoliberal governance known as the “special strategic zone.”

Osaka became a special strategic zone for short-term rentals in 2014, which relaxed various rules about Airbnb development and operation. The number has soared post-pandemic in the run-up to the expo. There are now around 7,000 short-term properties registered in the city under the “special zone” law—at least 1,700 of which are in Nishinari—along with many thousands more regulated under two other laws. News stories about residents getting pushed out, whole areas getting bought up by Chinese capital, or huge apartment conversions pursued without any explanation to neighbors have contributed to a sense that things have gotten out of control. The city has now frozen new approvals.

Market mechanisms have unsurprisingly led to widespread Airbnb development in Nishinari, where the real estate is a bargain for an area so close to the city’s main attractions. Foreign tourists are not entirely new here—backpackers have been showing up in the old doya-gai (flophouse) districts of Tokyo and Osaka since the mid-2000s in search of cheap accommodations. In Kamagasaki, the non-profit Cocoroom3 has long operated a guesthouse alongside a cafe and art space, where they serve meals to the community twice a day and travelers interact with Kamagasaki residents, including the homeless (their website’s lovely advice: “You might get into an awkward situation at times. If you do, just breathe deeply and be generous”). Some of the elderly locals at Cocoroom have even been known to take travelers along to hospital visits and funerals for their friends.4

Cocoroom is a special example, but until recently, entering into such an urban context as a tourist entailed a certain degree of agency and communication. Needless to say, this is not the experience of those who now arrive passively through algorithmic sorting and expect a frictionless experience that merely satisfies a balance of proximity to attractions and cost performance.

An Airbnb Experience

I figured I should see what the tourist experience is like. Before going to Osaka, I downloaded Airbnb and zoomed into Nishinari, then pinched further, to the area of Kamagasaki just to the east of the highway overpass. Pins popped up where they probably shouldn’t be—in the middle of Tobita Shinchi, Japan’s most brazen brothel district, where hundreds of sex workers sit on cushions in brightly-lit rooms lining the streets.5

I booked a bland listing for the decent price of ¥11,000. Reviews were mostly five-star one-liners about the “clean room and super friendly host,” mixed with occasional three-star reviews alluding to the presence of certain, erm, insalubrious activities next door. My super-friendly host immediately got in touch with an AI-generated message explaining the automated keypad check-in (after check-out, they appeared in my inbox again to remind me that if I liked the room, I should only give a five-star rating—that is how AirBnb works). The 8-story concrete building, built in 2023 by a local real estate company, looked like an ordinary apartment block, but was all short-term rentals and unconvincingly branded as a “hotel.” It stood next to a wooden brothel on the far southern edge of Tobita Shinchi, with the most direct route to the station and tourist areas straight through the middle.

En route to the sento (slums had lots of baths!), I felt like I heard more English from the madams sitting in the brothel entryways than the other time I walked through the area with a friend in 2015, although my memory is vague. I am more certain that last time there was no English announcement playing over the speakers at the public toilets near the entrance—Welcome to Tobita Shinchi. We hope to make your time in Japan extra special! or something like that. In another sign of the times, a posted notice explained that a new, higher price has been instituted for foreign customers, of whom a fair number (and surely some gawkers) were walking the streets.6

The next day, I explored the neighborhood. The area’s original housing stock is primarily low-rise wooden row houses lining narrow alleyways.

Airbnbs can be easily spotted by the signs posted near the doors. They were indeed everywhere, along dying shopping streets and in back alleys on either side of aging tenements. It seemed that most new construction in the neighborhood was Airbnbs. Branding was barebones—“Joy Inn,” “Edo Inn” (yes, in Osaka), “Green Inn,” printed on curtains alongside logos that appeared AI-generated. A frenzy was clearly underway to convert local space into something that interfaces with a global economy that runs on tourist consumption and financial speculation.

One under-construction project with around 20 black three-story units filled a plot next to a rusting and overgrown tenement with Abeno Harukas, the city’s tallest building, looming behind. When I passed by a second time in the evening, one door was propped open, and three men who looked to be the developer, owner, and contractor came outside, discussing details in Chinese.

I had imagined the Airbnbs would be concentrated in the north of Kamagasaki, close to the tourist sites and transit, but when I biked through more distant Tenga Chaya to the south, it was the same story—Airbnb signs everywhere, new properties going up with Chinese-speaking developers outside, interspersed with rusting structures, vacant lots, and barely surviving local shops. I found an entire block of Airbnbs adjacent to one tram stop—four single-family properties, next to a sizable apartment block that had also been converted.

When I posted some images on Instagram, an old friend who is now a public school teacher in Osaka messaged me. Her colleague used to live in Tenga Chaya, and not too long ago the landlord slipped a paper in his mailbox: the entire building will be converted to Airbnbs. If you leave now, we will pay ¥200,000. A few months later the real estate folks came knocking. They bumped up their offer to half a million after he protested. Ah, the small indignities that must be inflicted to strip mine the city for a quick profit! At 65% occupancy, an Airbnb in Nishinari should pull in upwards of ¥3 million a year, far more than a public school teacher pays in rent.

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The “Run-ri” connection

While local real estate owners are certainly taking advantage of the tourism boom to cash in, notably about 45% of special-zone Airbnbs in Osaka are owned by Chinese investors. This capital influx is part of a post-pandemic trend known as “Run-ri” (潤日): wealthy mainlanders weary of instability at home who are seeking to relocate their assets and families to Japan. When I got off the Shinkansen in Osaka, I bought a copy of Masutomo Takehiro’s best-seller on the phenomenon, the main arguments of which are shared in the post below. The trend is having very significant local effects on parts of Tokyo, Kansai, Hokkaido and other places spotlighted by real estate consultants and influencers on Chinese social media.

Japan Optimist

潤日Run Ri - Escaping from China to Japan

Japan has become an immigration superpower. Over the past 18 months, every day approximately 1,200 non-Japanese received a work or residence visa; the total number of non-Japanese residents have shot up from a little more than half-a-million when I arrived here in 1986 to 3.5 million now. Approximately one-third of the total and new arrivals are Chinese…

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10 months ago · 48 likes · 8 comments · Jesper Koll

Philip Brasor explains how the Osaka Airbnbs fit into the Run-ri immigration game:

When a Chinese person buys a property with the intention of making it into a minpaku [Airbnb], the Chinese person then registers themself as a business owner in Japan, even if they remain in China. They then hire a management agent to run the property; or, if they bought the property from a developer, the developer will manage it. Farther down the line, the Chinese owner may move to Japan after attaining a business owner’s visa, which requires only ¥5 million in capital [raised to ¥30 million=$200,000 this month]. They can then live in Japan, along with their family, indefinitely as long as they are registered as a business owner. Even farther down the line they can apply for permanent residency.

Many of the multi-unit developments I saw going up all over Kamagasaki are being used to secure visas, with owners then buying nice condos elsewhere in cash.7

One of the areas on the Run-ri radar is Bunkyo Ward—where I live in Tokyo. Bunkyo’s Chinese population has gone up from around 5,000 to 9,000 since 2022, accounting for more than half of the ward’s total growth, as Run-ri families snap up properties and spike prices near the four elementary schools seen as stepping stones to the University of Tokyo, which is located in Bunkyo. In a recent piece in the FT, Leo Lewis quotes a Chinese woman in Bunkyo who appears to adore everything about the neighborhood—except that lately “there are too many Chinese around” because of all the real estate influencers. Walking beneath the gingko leaves on the University of Tokyo campus is one of my favorite seasonal pleasures, but last year it was unlike I’d ever seen: rows of tour buses and black cars dropping off tourists outside the gates, while every few steps under the trees, young people appeared to be filming TikTok reels.

The Chinese real estate frenzy in Bunkyo and the Airbnb-ification of Nishinari are two facets of the same economic imbalance: local places at the disruptive confluence of algorithmic amplification, hyper-mobility, and global-scale wealth inequality. While the instrumentalization of urban space for financial speculation is nothing new, the post-pandemic rush to convert cities into objects of touristic consumption or tools of wealth preservation unfolds in digital spaces largely invisible to local residents—making the impacts feel even more arbitrary and invasive.

Local lifeworlds and “city rot”

But I digress—back to Osaka. After a day of Airbnb hunting, I was ready to find some locals. I ducked into a little eatery a few hundred meters down the arcade, hidden behind a waist-length purple curtain amid a stretch of lonely karaoke bars with Chinese onesan asking me to come in for a drink.

If you’ve ever seen Midnight Diner on Netflix, this place had similar vibes. Behind the U-shaped counter, the gentle-mannered master seemed to know most of the people there—an elderly couple, whom he passed an extra bag of food on their way out the door, a few middle-aged ladies who noticed my kakuuchi t-shirt and started listing off areas I should visit, and the young Chinese man next to me who had moved to Japan when he was two (When I returned the next evening, the master greeted me with a hearty Osaka “maido!”—welcome back!) Salarymen and a local hustler sat near the door nursing tobacco. I decoded the scribbles on the blackboard and ordered a draft beer and four dishes before finishing off the meal with a perfect egg-drop & plum rice porridge cooked in a steel pot. The bill was $15.

This, my friends, was Osaka bliss—delicious food, friendly people, low prices. The image of the city that tourists encounter online (hey ChatGPT, why should I visit Osaka? Osaka is worth visiting for its vibrant street food culture, friendly locals, and a perfect blend of modern energy and historic charm) is certainly rooted in reality. Do any tourists ever wander in here? I asked the master. He tilted his head as he sliced my sashimi. Every once in a while, but not too often.

Outside the doors though, there were plenty of tourists, surely staying in places like mine deeper in the neighborhood. Italian families with elderly parents in tow, young American couples, and German otaku emerged in groups from the dark alleyways and followed the light of their phones north through the gauntlet of karaoke bars. Those who didn’t give in to the temptation of the FamilyMart near the metro stop continued past the homeless encampment under the railroad tracks and onward into the salvation of Shinsekai: large picture menus of kushi-katsu and sushi in the supersaturated glow of a retro amusement park, originally built on the grounds of the 1903 expo—better known as that place from Instagram.

Reality these days mimics social media, and what stands out about mass tourism lately is how many people treat the cities they visit as an IRL extension of their feeds. I do not think we should meekly assign blame for this shift in the urban experience to an amorphous force called “technology,” as if there has been no agency behind the mutating relationship between physical reality and its digital twin. No, let’s be frank: it is the consequence of profit-maximizing decisions, mostly made in San Francisco since the 2010s, related to how symbols appear on maps and visual fragments get served to us as we scroll. Now we have to live in a mixed-up world where treasured small businesses get ruined overnight, travelers thoughtlessly book places next to brothels and still leave five-star reviews because meh 🤷‍♂️, and teachers get shoved out of their homes so folks who happen to have a stronger currency can enjoy an authentic experience of scarfing down re-heated takoyaki and those viral egg sandwiches next to the trash bins in front of 7-11.8 I’m sorry, but what the fuck is this?

What I don’t think it is is “gentrification,” at least not in the sense that most people understand the term—as a cycle of urban regeneration where the depressed arcade starts to fill with establishments catering to the newcomers, the urban fabric is re-stitched with new patches of cultural texture, and three or four stages later people look around at the hipsters selling overpriced art and doughnuts beneath fancy flats and go gee, this place sure got rich and sophisticated! The Airbnb-ification of Nishinari feels more like the city being picked over to extract value from the fading vibes of Japan’s postwar glory. Unfortunately, that trick only works once.

As Kyoto University philosopher Masatake Shinohara has written, the urban future will be shaped more by forces of ruination than development or renewal, a reality that our habitual language and mental models are ill-suited to describe and understand. We need new concepts (like “technofeudalism”) to describe how mass tourism and global flows of capital fit into the post-growth urban process. Airbnb-ification does not transform ruination into renewal, but introduces a different sort of disintegrative force. Perhaps we can borrow from recent discourse on “IRL” cultural manifestations of online brain rot and call this process “city rot”—local lifeworlds are not being renewed, but rather overwritten in befuddling ways by spaces that are textureless, devoid of meaning, or meme-ified, and tie the city’s fate to the arbitrary circulation of images online. What happens when the next disruption arrives—another pandemic, a stock-market collapse that crimps international travel, a change in the algorithm—and the tide goes out, leaving these spaces marooned in the shells of neighborhoods where local life has long since washed away? There must be a better way forward for the post-growth city than this.

Tokyo is drizzly and cool, a perfect season for quiet evening walks in the back streets. More to come soon on Labyrinth House, on Tokyo, on the expo…stay tuned.

Like Giancotti, my approach to the language was centered on maniacal kanji acquisition. Each day during classes, I scribbled characters from a small learner’s dictionary into notebook after notebook at my desk. I tried to learn about ten per day, and review what I recently learned. By the end of the year, I had become literate enough to read and write about 1,800 characters and thus comprehend a decent amount of the written word.

Besides my notebooks and texts, my most valuable tool was an electronic dictionary, or denshi jisho. By the early 2000s, these little pocket-sized gadgets had become standard-issue items for Japanese high school students, and for good reason: previously, a serious student needed not just a kanji dictionary, but also bulky Japanese, Japanese-English, and English-Japanese dictionaries.

I got rid of my denshi jisho sometime in college in the early 2010s, replacing it with a dictionary app on my iPhone with all the same content. Recently, after growing tired of the endless distractions that co-inhabit the screen while using it to read a difficult Japanese novel, I re-acquired my old electronic dictionary for about a thousand yen on Mercari. Mine was a mid-range model in 2006, original retail price of ¥36,000 ($300), with an aluminum and plastic clamshell enclosing a little pocket sized keyboard and monochrome screen that turns on almost instantly.

As a learning tool, this device has just the right amount of cognitive friction. To look up an unfamiliar kanji, let’s say 茎, you would first enter the number of strokes in the radical, in this case the three lines on top representing grass. After finding the right one, enter the remaining number of strokes, 5, to narrow down the results to the entry in the kanji dictionary that reveals the readings: kuki or kei.

The real step change of a denshi jisho was the ability to “jump” to the J-E dictionary for the English definition (“stalk”), or follow my tutor’s advice and go straight to the Japanese dictionary definition: “one of the basic nourishing organs of tall plants, along with roots and leaves…” The recursive process of searching and jumping reinforced literacy, not just because you had to trace a character in your mind to count strokes, but due to constant exposure to related kanji and words.

This cognitive exercise has been steadily eliminated by the convenience of technology that has come since. Some of the more advanced dictionaries in 2006 already had stylus input, obviating the need for radical-based lookup. Then came OCR scanners and smartphone apps that could effortlessly recognize characters without the need to reproduce them. Finally, where we have arrived today: copy-paste into the chatbot prompt, the blackhole into which literacy goes to die. Mystery in, meaning out.

Friends tell me a well-prompted AI can be a great language tutor. In my intermittent forays into Chinese, I’ve used grammar textbooks and readers as I did with Japanese, but also appreciate the functionality of an app that integrates text with audio and dictionary. Playing around with ChatGPT, I see it can generate informative answers and convenient vocabulary lists for any inquiry. Then again, I learned Japanese in ten months; I’ve been dabbling in Chinese for a decade and still don’t speak it. I get a little hit of dopamine from feeling like I learned some Chinese, and then…I go do other stuff on the internet. 學得很好！Granted, I was more motivated and disciplined then, but if the question is not are these tools useful?, but whether I would prefer to learn Japanese in today’s technological environment instead of twenty years ago, the answer is an unequivocal no.

2006 technology—or rather its limits—let me tap into that now elusive substance of solitude. I had hardly any direct access to English information beyond a ten-minute rebroadcast of the BBC during breakfast, and thus no escape besides trying to read and communicate with the world around me. This solitude was not unpleasant, it made that year feel valuable and distinctive in a way that time had never felt before.

Like my siblings who went abroad five and eight years before me, I stayed in touch with home through short internet sessions on public computers, postcards, and a very occasional call. A month before I went back to Denver, I remember loading the NYT homepage on the PC in the station waiting room and seeing Steve Jobs holding up the first iPhone. By five or eight years after me, that degree of immersion was rendered functionally impossible by social media and smartphones.

I imagine the modern-day exchange experience feels less like the distinctive block of time I enjoyed, and more like how the rest of life is now—stuck between a frictionless digital world of familiar or irresistible information in an endless stream, everywhere, all at once, and a social world where individuals aren’t making friction with others at all: public spaces full of people facing their phones or with podcasts in their ears, teens no longer throwing parties or hanging out as much, the list goes on.

Of course, the implication of today’s digital technologies, especially generative AI, is that multilingualism is obsolete. The just-announced Google Pixel phone claims to offer live interpretation of phone calls, suggesting a future in which language learning is a hobby for parasocial consumption of subcultural content rather than a social means of communicating with other humans.

As mainstream culture becomes post-literate, it seems likely that learning foreign languages and cultures will also become one aspect of cultural resistance to pervasive tech mediation of our lives. So alongside the trend of people downgrading to dumbphones, I invite you to join my denshi jisho revival. The potential for humanizing experiences—reading foreign novels, mastering languages, forming relationships across cultural divides—still remains, we just have to be more maniacal about keeping technology at a healthy distance.

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In related reading, I appreciated this article about the impact of AI on translators. I happen to earn about 75% of my income from translation in a niche that has so far been economically unaffected, but clearly that is not the case for many of the people whose experiences are gathered here. As Merchant observes, while machine translation is nothing new and has not surpassed humans, recent AI hype has created a permission structure to start cutting human translators out of the process. There will surely be more translated content than ever before, but in translation as in immersion and culture at large, I have a hard time believing that’s an improvement.

Blood in the Machine

AI Killed My Job: Translators

In July 2025, Microsoft researchers published a study that aimed to quantify the “AI applicability” of various occupations. In other words, it was an attempt to calculate which jobs generative AI could do best. At the very top of the list: Translators and interpreters. The paper itself was strange (historians and passenger attendants took the second and…

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8 months ago · 108 likes · 13 comments · Brian Merchant

Where does mind stop and world begin? Not at skull and skin, that’s for sure.

Life is as much undergone as done. We are constitutionally in the midst.

—Robert MacFarlane, Is A River Alive?

Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive? asks what would it mean for our understanding of the natural world and our relationship to it if we saw rivers not just as ecosystems containing life, but as truly alive. In beautifully animistic prose, Macfarlane ventures to the frontier of the rights of nature movement, where rivers are treated as subjective entities that think, feel and are endowed with legal protections. The book also inspires a related thought experiment: is a city alive?

Like many good books, I encountered this one not through a screen, but in a particular place: arranged on a table among stacks of other books, at a storied bookstore near old universities in a city with enough readers to sustain many such bookstores. While I was in New York, I wandered into bookstores every few days and often let the shelves choose for me. On that day, the words on the cover spoke to me and I was in and out of the Strand in all of five minutes.

One of the consistent themes throughout Is a River Alive? is that life is a collaboration between the self and the world. Here is Macfarlane describing the moments before he descends a rapid in northern Quebec that nearly swallows him:

Then in a snap I realize it’s too much, too dangerous, I’ll need to line or portage my boat past this, and I turn to tell Danny, and then with a second snap the grey light of the overcast sun is flicked off as a cloud clears it, and the rocks and my eyes are flooded instead with bright-gold light, and the sudden warmth of that light takes the decision for me - for at the moment of choice, the business of choosing is almost always all done - and so I nod a yes, let’s do it at Wayne and Danny, and we walk back to the boats as if to an execution.

Reading such signs can be just as much a part of the practice of urban life, to sometimes surrender intention and let the streets pull you in unknown directions, to recognize the city acts upon the self as much as the other way around. I was reminded of times I’ve come across spaces on the verge of destruction during walks around Tokyo, talked my way inside, and felt drawn to save a particular piece of wood or object, and then a short time later, for that object to reveal its intention to be reused in a particular way in one of my renovation projects. There’s no enchantment in chalking these things up to random chance; I prefer see the objects or the city as possessing a spirit, and myself as their agent to carry some fragment of urban memory into the future.

I explored the idea of urban life as a collaboration with the world most clearly in my review of Perfect Days, a piece that originally went out to a few hundred subscribers but has in the past few months has racked up hundreds of likes through the vagaries of the algorithm.

“To be urban is to be analog,” I wrote in that piece, by which I meant that urban subjectivity should be rooted in an awareness of the self as interwoven with the environment and other people. Our ability to feel that way is being undone by material changes in urban space, and the way that digital technology increasingly mediates and shapes how we move through and inhabit urban places.

This is also why in my own projects in the city, I am preoccupied with the urban commons, a concept that exists not so much as a physical reality as a relation between people and their environment. As commons are encroached upon, as the city is rebuilt into spaces of prescribed function, the urban experience becomes shallow and passive, and the same death spiral Macfarlane sees in nature sets in: You raze the forest, you lose the cloud and the rain. You lose the rain and cloud, you kill the river. You kill the river — and all life leaves. This is why the destruction of Tokyo’s bathhouses has always felt to me like the killing of the city itself.

Although the ecological and moral stakes may seem lower, in a better world urban commons would be protected alongside rivers and other ecosystems from the state and market forces that objectify and extract value from them (see Lefebvre and Harvey). The city’s aliveness does not simply equate to superficial measures of economic activity or density of use, in the way that an Ecuadorian cloud forest is profoundly more alive than a eucalyptus plantation, or how the cascade of one of Macfarlane’s sentences is animate in a way that a chatbot’s limp string of regurgitated tokens never will be. Unfortunately, just as the natural world and human culture are being degraded, so too does much contemporary development relentlessly extract what remains of the city’s life-force in the pursuit of narrower purposes.

In Japan, we are blessed with another clear piece of evidence of the city’s aliveness: festivals. Which is a better mental model for explaining how locally rooted rituals and cultural traditions persist across centuries and generations: that people animate the city, or that the city animates its people? At least when I participate or am immersed in streets that overflow with sudden vitality, it makes me feel like Macfarlane’s young son when asked to weigh in on the adults’ debate over the life of rivers—why ask such a silly question? of course a city is alive.

The great thing about a festival is how, for a limited moment, it reveals latent possibilities of human sociality, and opens a portal onto another way the city can be. Festivals are thrilling because they suggest there are indeed escapes from the deadening of the city, and answers to the problem Macfarlane identifies: somehow we need to find new kinds of imagining, new ways of being that will leave us less alone in this world…our aliveness, as well as all life that lies beyond the human, is at stake in this.

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Since I last lived here from 2012-2014, NYC has built at least 479 miles of bike lanes and 180 miles of protected bike lanes all over Manhattan and parts of the outer boroughs. Even so, only around 2% of trips in NYC are by bike. There is a stark difference in the “modal split” of NYC and Tokyo’s 23 wards:1

Tokyoites bicycle at a rate more than six times that of New Yorkers. This may sound outrageous to a visitor who has wandered around near one of Tokyo’s mega-stations or along major boulevards, where bikes are few and far between amid the thick hordes of transit commuters and vehicles. But venture into the neighborhoods, especially the somewhat less transit-dense inner ring suburbs, and they’re everywhere. Sit down on the right corner and you might see the same person jump on their bike five times in a day. Many Tokyoites use bikes like Americans use cars: to run any errand more than a five minute walk. There are various factors behind this style of bike use. The ease of using a bike with a simple lock, parked in front of your door with no fear of theft, is certainly a big one, as are calm drivers and the existence of large underground bike storage facilities in activity centers.

Here, I’d like to explain the role of urban scale and layout in supporting higher bike usage, using maps of Manhattan and my central Tokyo neighborhood. First, let’s look at Midtown Manhattan’s iconic grid of 100-foot wide avenues and 60-foot wide streets with Central Park (north) on the right. Bike lanes are in green.

At the same scale, here’s my neighborhood in Tokyo’s Bunkyo Ward (oriented city center at bottom), which has a population density of around 25,000/sq km, roughly the same as Manhattan. There are only a few bike lanes.

Instead of bike lanes, let’s color the Tokyo map by car traffic: red is high traffic (at least 20 cars per light change), orange medium (10-20) and yellow low (1~10). These roads are part of the city-wide road network and are where ~90% of the moving cars are. There are sidewalks and a few have bike lanes like the one above.

Almost every other street is between 4 and 6 meters (12-20 ft) wide—1/4 to 1/3 of the width of a Manhattan street—while some older streets are even narrower. Drivers must obey a maze of one-way restrictions from which pedestrians and bikes are exempt. Unsurprisingly, almost all the low-speed cars that venture into this unwelcoming geometry are local residents headed to and from off-street parking, or small delivery vehicles. These back streets are where the bikes roam.

If New York is a city sized for cars with a network of bike lanes shoehorned in, Tokyo is the opposite: a marshland of pedestrian and bicycle-scaled paths with a network of wider channels for cars dredged through it. The mostly car-free area I live in, bounded by mid-to-high-traffic arteries, would stretch from 1st to 9th avenues, and from 50th to 59th streets:

The green lines on the inlaid map above are typical routes I take when riding my bike through the neighborhood. Although not immediately obvious on a map, these routes are mostly old Edo-era roads (center) or buried streams (the squiggly line on the left). In other words, Tokyo has a latent network of ancient “desire lines”: paths that directly link activity centers (former villages) or flow with the contours of the land. This pre-automobile geography is a big reason why nearly one out of seven trips in modern-day Tokyo is on a bike.

Tokyo has its shortcomings, too. Mental maps of the tangled streets tend to extend only a few kilometers, so on longer distance rides, it’s usually easiest to follow the car-filled arterials, which often means riding either on the sidewalk or in mixed traffic. This is where New York has a leg up on Tokyo—I recently rode 15 kilometers from Midtown to Brooklyn, and 95% of the route was on bike lanes. But how many New Yorkers would regularly bike so far? Bicycles excel at intra-neighborhood transport; crosstown journeys are what good transit is for.

This post is just a simple comparison of two urban contexts I’m familiar with. In the end, Tokyo’s very different street geometry means it’s not the best model for NYC.2 Paris, which just voted to pedestrianize 500 more of its streets, and other European cities are probably better guides to where American cities should go (NYC urbanists have imagined car-lite New York in visions like 25x25 or this cool NYT feature).3 But Tokyo shows that the most liveable and bikeable neighborhoods are ones where cars hardly factor into the equation. That is something I’m looking forward to going home to.

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As you can imagine, I really wanted to be there as the space we’ve built takes its first steps in the world, but alas, I am still in the U.S. for a few more weeks. By all accounts, it went wonderfully, with people responding to the space in just the ways we hoped.

For the last 4 1/2 years, life has flowed around the rhythms of Labyrinth House construction: six to eight times a year between October and July, I leave behind Tokyo for a week to fully immerse myself in construction and communal living.

The space is inscribed with memories tied to seasons: a foundation poured in the freezing cold of winter, materials carried uphill in the sticky heat of early summer, bonfires and evening beers enjoyed on the engawa in the cool winds of springtime. By the fifth rotation around the sun, the chronology blurs together—I’d have to pause for a moment to remember what we did in spring 2023 versus spring 2022. But always constant through the changing seasons has been the sense of momentum, the anticipation of a dreamed-of space slowly coming into focus but still far out of reach.

That’s all to say the notion that this place we’re building might someday be complete is sort of strange. Labyrinth House will never really be finished finished—after the current stage, we’ve got a library to build, and another house to restore after that, and by the time that’s all done—2030, perhaps?—many of the houses around us will need new hands to nurture and maintain them, and the structures we’ve rebuilt will surely need repair and updates. The labyrinth can go on forever.

But the milestone we’ve been closing in on for the last year, the opening of our community store and common space, is a big one. After crowdfunding last fall, we did eight weeks of construction in the winter and spring. We installed plumbing and hardwood floors, plastered walls, built kitchen cabinets, laid tatami, and called in electricians to hook us up to the grid. Sadly, I missed the last few weeks of work and the pre-opening itself, but there is still much to do this summer and fall: build the bath, finish walls and the dirt floor, get our food license, stock our shop, landscape the garden. We’ll have a grand opening event this winter.

Creating a new commons is not just a question of building a space out of physical materials. It is a process of constructing affective bonds and a sense of belonging, opening many hearts to a place, and through that place, to others.

I like David Harvey’s definition of a commons the best: an unstable and malleable social relation between a group of people and the physical environment crucial to their livelihood. This relation shall be collective and non-commodified.

A commons exists intersubjectively. When each member feels agency and ownership, and is motivated by intrinsic and overlapping desires, we’re able to spin something up outside the market that can last over the long term. Nobody on our team is employing anyone else. Such a thing is so rare and precious in a world that is relentlessly restructured around money and commodified experiences, brands, and services.

In that sense, after twenty weeks at the helm, perhaps this was a good moment for me to put my egotistical envy (“I wanted to do that part!”) aside, and watch our team with pride as the unstable social relation molds into new configurations. At each stage of the project, different people have stepped up and sustained us. In my absence, Fu took over the reins of construction. He’s exceptionally creative, and the closest I have to a younger brother in Japan. Just 18 when we first walked up the hill together in the fall of 2020. Still hadn’t used a circular saw. Now he can (and does) build houses from scratch.

Wataru was also a crucial player these past few months. He came to visit last spring and liked what we are doing, so he packed up his stuff in Kobe and moved to town. No job, no guarantees. He quickly befriended the grandmas on his part of the hill, bought a bike, and borrowed an abandoned patch of farmland that he restored into a vegetable patch. His harvest sold out at the opening. He’s going to help run the space, and is attracted to the idea of being a “new peasant”—forging a livelihood out of many pursuits on the edge of the post-growth economy.

Paisen and Sera, Sato and Tacchan, Yu and Lili, Sho and Aki, my dear Shoko and many others—Labyrinth House exists in the minds of those who’ve created it. Together we’ve built something enduring, something that grows deeper and more substantial with every season, and that will come to mean things to many more in the months, years and decades ahead.

A big thank you again to all the supporters who read my writing here and donated generously to our crowdfunding campaign. When a half-million yen electrician’s bill comes due, or the AC installers spring a $400 fee on us for having to climb the hill (haggled that one down a bit), it is immensely reassuring to know not only that there’s money in the bank, but that there are other people out there who want to see this unordinary thing we’re creating come into being. You’re part of making this commons, too. Eventually, I will tell the story in full.

NYC transit is only so-so. Sure, it’s fabulous by American standards, but what a low bar that is. Among the features New York’s system lacks that are now commonplace elsewhere: through-running regional trains, platform screen doors, air-conditioned stations, express airport connections, and integration with true high-speed rail, not to mention the three basics of good transit: reliability, frequency, and comprehensiveness. So, as Americans are prone to grumble online, why can’t we have nice things?

Living in New York for a few months inspired me to re-read Jake Berman’s The Lost Subways of North America, a beautiful collection of maps and essays that details the transit systems that once existed in more than twenty North American cities. The book reveals how America’s underwhelming transit today is the result of decisions made in the middle of the last century. The story is well-known, but remains one of the great self-inflicted tragedies of American history:

In the decades after World War II, the United States spent immense amounts of money bulldozing its cities to optimize them for the car. This happened because of a complex combination of circumstances […]: the United States’ tremendous postwar prosperity, subsidized suburban growth, the bad reputations of privately owned transit companies, the strength of the automobile lobby, racial strife, and the rush to rid cities of “blight” that characterized the spirit of the age. No matter what the specific pressures were in a city, the end result was usually the same. American cities shredded their cores so that suburbanites could drive downtown as quickly as possible.1

America chose to annihilate its cities to accommodate a new technological paradigm of its own invention—the automobile, expressways, and endless suburban housing. Imagine a different history, where just a tad more of the social surplus was consistently invested in transit over the past 75 years. New York could easily have built a system to rival cities in Asia or Europe. Rather than rip out their bones, cities across the country could have incrementally improved their rail systems: interurban railways would gradually become grade-separated, high-capacity lines through densified suburbs, interlining with subways built below old streetcar routes.

This incremental process is how modern-day Tokyo’s abundance of transit and housing was built. Colin Marshall points out the deep similarity between Los Angeles and Tokyo that I also feel whenever I visit: both are microcosmic, multi-nodal, infinite sprawls. If LA had not dismantled the Pacific Electric Railway, which Berman notes was once the largest electric urban railway network in the world, Southland would have surely evolved to be more like Tokyo today in form, feeling, and density.2

City by city, Berman also outlines the many thwarted visions for new transit to replace what was torn out (New York took earlier stabs at its still-unfinished 2nd Avenue Subway in the 1920s, 1950s, and 1970s). Today, transit-futurist visions of America live on in the imaginations of transit advocates, whose beautifully designed maps are a natural accompaniment to Berman’s book. futureNYCSubway includes not just the 2nd Avenue Subway, but many other essential additions, such as an L train that turns up 10th Avenue to the Upper West Side and another line down 125th and onward to LaGuardia and Flushing in Queens, not to mention numerous outer borough extensions. Seattle Subway envisions a true transit metropolis, far beyond the city’s already ambitious rail construction plans. And if you’re interested in what a Tokyo-fied LA would look like, go no further than Nick Andert’s meticulous videos on YouTube. 3

The promise of endless space on a vast continent probably made some embrace of the car inevitable, and as suggested above, there were a myriad of reasons why things turned out as they did when urban America went to pieces. Nonetheless, more and better transit has always existed as one possible future in America. In most places and at most times, it has simply been a future we have chosen not to build.

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While I wait for the subways to arrive, I refresh the Times to read about the latest assault on the institutions of American life. All those Biden-era plans to upgrade Amtrak and shift our cities towards sustainable transport have been cast aide with the Ancien Régime. But efforts to claw back rail funding and congestion pricing approval are merely the tip of the iceberg—the hollowing out of the civil service and the IRS’s ability to collect taxes is an attempt to salt the earth upon which future state capacity could be built. I can’t help but see parallels with the suicide of American cities a few generations before, with the ascendent tech reactionaries cast in the conspiratorial role of the oil, tire and car companies that bought up the streetcars and ripped out the rails.

The chief instigator of the American state’s immolation also happens to have monumentally bad ideas about transit. Musk has offered up two techno-futurist ideas for how we should get around, neither of which are real: the Hyperloop is in fact 200-year-old vaporware, while the Boring Company’s harebrained vision of cars in tubes is, to borrow Henry Grabar’s words, “a bona fide new idea that is so evidently a downgrade in transportation and mobility it’s no surprise no one thought of it before. A car! On a track! Underground!”4

Of course, Musk’s proposals are not made in good faith.5 The shiny object of unworkable sci-fi technology is designed to arouse his fanboys and gullible local TV news producers, thereby undermining public faith in the much slower process of implementing actual solutions. This trolling increases the likelihood that America stumbles by default into his preferred future: one in which fleets of his own autonomous vehicles are the only viable option, and the state is shunted into the passive role of providing the pavement upon which he profits.

Such a vision of transportation is grotesquely inequitable and exclusionary, but in Musk’s case it seems to arise from something deeper than your run-of-the-mill oligarch’s hatred of providing nice things to the poor. He appears incapable of accommodating transit in his worldview because rails are an old technology, and incremental innovation is not worthy of the attention of a world-historical disruptor who deals in humanoid robots, spaceships, and AI.

Artificial intelligence is often compared to the automobile in descriptions of the far-reaching impacts of its adoption on our way of life and economy. In both cases, a zealous vanguard of the technological revolution justifies destructive behavior in the name of clearing the way for the future. They present a new tech paradigm as an unstoppable force of nature, where our choice is not among possible futures, but the speed of adaptation to inevitable change. Modern-day Muskites shrug at the evisceration of essential agencies out of a belief that most bureaucratic roles will soon be taken over by AI. Their smug confidence was probably shared by earlier vandals who looked up at the splendor of Penn Station, and thought, nah, won’t be needing this anymore.

Musk has company: some (not all) of the Silicon Valley technologists who have restyled themselves as urbanists believe the city is not worth building unless it can be a full-stack startup. Rather than muster political or venture capital to fix the Muni or connect high speed rail to the Bay, these visionaries are looking for the fastest exit to AI-run charter cities in the desert.6

Like the automobile, AI will come to all countries eventually, but I doubt many will preemptively torch their bureaucracies in anticipation of its arrival, just as few countries sacrificed their cities to the car as much as America did. Our transit deficit should be a reminder that when powerful people tell us to get onboard with a narrative of inevitable technological change, the appropriate question, to paraphrase Neil Postman, is not what the new technology does, but what it undoes—what other futures are foreclosed by accelerating towards one vision of progress.

In the not too distant future, a new generation of Americans may travel abroad to countries that have preserved the state capacity and social consensus to effectively provision public goods like physical infrastructure accessible to all, universal health care and education, and government services administered by competent and respected human beings. Like TikTok-ers taking their first ride on the Shinkansen, they will wonder aloud to their followers back home, why can’t we have nice things, too?

It’s now been seven years since my colleagues and I turned their old family home in Akasaka into Tokyo Little House, and six months since we renovated and expanded our cafe and history gallery focused on the postwar ruins and occupation of Tokyo.

Akasaka is not the first neighborhood that comes to mind if asked where to find “Tokyo history.” But a lot of history has happened here, going all the way back to when it was laid out as a compact commercial quarter1 just outside the gates of the new castle in Edo. The closest liquor store to TLH set up shop in 1624. The names of metro stops (“Tameike” / Reservoir) and boulevards (“Sotobori” / Outer Moat) immortalize waterside scenery, long since lost beneath the deluge of concrete, that inspired 19th and 20th century woodblock prints.

Before the war, Akasaka was an army town where officers consorted with geisha. In 1936, fascist insurrectionists stormed out of their barracks (now, of all things, a Harry Potter theater) and raced past where our house stands en route to the Prime Minister’s office and ministries. Their coup failed but war broke out the next year, and in 1945 the area was wiped out by B-29s in a major raid in late May. A carpenter who had been digging air raid shelters built Tokyo Little House in the ruins three years later.

By the 1960s, Akasaka had become Tokyo’s most cosmopolitan district—nightclubs like the New Latin Quarter and Copacabana, once just a few doors down from us, attracted heads of state and legendary international performers. In the other direction, the city’s premier cabaret, the Mikado, employed hundreds of women as dancers, many of whom bathed at the sento next door that my colleagues’ grandmother also went to. The bathhouse and club are long gone, but the surrounding Korean town still has a glitzy bubble-vintage vibe. My favorite 24-hour restaurant across the street has been serving the same Seolleongtang ox tail soup and sides since 1954.

Wander a little bit farther and you’ll bump into the security perimeter around the American Embassy. Over the past few years, Ambassador Rahm Emanuel became a regular at our cafe. He’d stop by for a coffee during the workday with security detail in tow; later he began showing up even more frequently on his own in the evenings, to listen to my colleagues’ daughter practice violin after the cafe closed.

The ambassador’s visits to our cafe were an interesting wrinkle in the history of the neighborhood, particularly now that his ambassadorship seems likely to mark the end of the long era during which America exercised varying degrees of suzerainty over Japan. We made our cafe in part because, while two million people visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum last year, no public museum commemorates the similarly deadly razing of Tokyo.2 Historiographical disagreements and fiscal pressure are cited as reasons behind the Tokyo government’s decision in 1999 to abandon plans for a Hiroshima-like museum, but one has to wonder if a desire to avoid causing discomfort to the Americans may have been another factor. While the first use of atomic weapons can be memorialized as a universal human tragedy and become a totem of the wish for peace and the dangers of technological progress, it is harder to understand the firebombings as anything other than a specific atrocity committed by one group of people upon another. If you want to get a sense of the events of 1945, come to our cafe, order a coffee and pull one of the many volumes off the shelf I built out of old boxes plucked from across the city. Or if you’re visiting Tokyo, stay upstairs.

The episode re-posted below was the last time I saw the cardboard grandpa. On our New Year’s card this year, he sits near the ambassador amid past and present faces, part of the story of our Little House that has endured in the heart of Tokyo, from the ruins of American conquest to the twilight of American hegemony.3

The cardboard grandpa

A visitor from another world brings me the most extraordinary gift

“It is also what comes in the wake of war and its fire: a city in ruins, the burnt-out shell of a metropolis. Its creatures have hatched out of the debris, and now they survive by the sheer tenacity with which they came into the world and by which they cling to life.”
—Jun Ishikawa, “The Jesus of the Ruins” (1946)

Marebito (noun): an ancient Japanese word used by folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi; a god who visits from the eternal world across the sea, bringing people gifts of spiritual knowledge and happiness before departing.

Five years ago, we opened Tokyo Little House, a little cafe in a 75-year old house that stands on Tamachi Street in Akasaka. It’s a busy district surrounded on all sides by glass skyscrapers, a stone’s throw from parliament and the prime minister’s office. Each day around noon, our street fills up with gaggles of television producers and expat investment bankers, political operatives and copywriters strolling during their lunch break. If you peek in our window, you’ll see pictures of the fields of ruins that still stretched across Tokyo when Little House was built. We like to think of it as a window open to the past that endures against the odds at the heart of the city.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at our window counter and chatting with a visitor when I spotted a familiar figure sauntering down the sidewalk across the street. It was the cardboard grandpa, hunched forward with eyes straight ahead, hands clasped behind his back and mouth slightly agape. I hadn’t seen him in two years. Caught up in my conversation, I pointed him out to Ai, who was running the shop and went out to say hello. He stopped and turned, and I watched as his delightful smile spread across his face, and his neck bobbed up and down as he nodded in conversation. Lately my back has been hurting and I don’t get out as much, he told her before continuing on his way. I’ll come back again soon.

When we were renovating the house in the fall of 2017, the cardboard grandpa pushed his cart down the street every few days, always from west to east. The busy world would seem to part at his presence, paying him no mind, yet never blocking his path. Every few buildings, he would stop and fetch another parcel left for him. While can collectors are sometimes seen trundling down Tokyo side streets, cardboard pickers are rarer; a kilo of cardboard will only fetch you around ¥2-5 (2-4 cents) at a recycler.

We began to talk with him, and like others on the street, came to rely on him. We tied up our cardboard and left it in a crack between our house and the building next door, and every few days he would return. We never learned each other’s names. Eventually, he told us he had to take a break from his work for a stay in the hospital. I think he returned for some time after that, but then around the start of the pandemic, he stopped coming to collect cardboard altogether.

Yesterday, I was running the cafe for the first time in a few weeks. We did brisker-than-usual business in the morning, as travelers stopped by after checking out of their hotels, and some Singaporean visitors became enthralled with our collection of old maps. As the post-lunch rush picked up around one p.m., I was tidying up the counter when I saw the cardboard grandpa out the window, this time walking straight toward me and waving. I hurried outside to say hello.

I brought you a fish! His grin widened. Is the young lady here?

He held out a white plastic bag. I untwisted it to find a large, freshly-gutted red snapper inside, its moist red and silver scales glistening. Please grill it in your garden and eat it together! Stunned, I thanked him and asked him to wait while I went inside to put the fish in the fridge and make him some iced tea. He sat down, but a moment later disappeared from view. Returning outside, I found him leaning on the post next to the sidewalk. I don’t want to take your customers’ seats. Not to worry, I told him, and he sat down again and drank his tea. I asked him where he bought such a magnificent fish.

He had gone by bus from his home in Yotsuya to Tsukiji, the neighborhood that was once home to Tokyo’s legendary fish market. Yotsuya is just one metro stop to the west of Akasaka, but in order to get home, he would walk east to take the Shibuya-bound bus to Nishi-Azabu, then transfer to the Shinjuku-bound bus, to make use of his free senior bus pass.

A new group of customers walked into the cafe, pulling me back inside. There was still so much I wanted to ask, but he got up to go, so I asked him if I could take the photo above. I thanked him and bowed as he turned and walked down the street.

The cardboard grandpa once told us about being born in Akihabara, and losing his home at the end of the war. The air raid that erased Akihabara and the eastern half of the city happened on March 10, 1945—78 years ago today. 279 low-flying B-29s swooped over the city at midnight, raining 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs and unleashing a “violent blaze that roared and hurled itself like a flamethrower down the streets, as countless belongings and futons were reduced to so many tumbling embers in a river of fire,” in the words of one photographer who witnessed the hell-scape.4 100,000 people died. My visitor recalled walking through the ruins from Akihabara to Nerima, some 15 kilometers away on the city’s northwestern edge, where he found a place to stay. In 1954, he moved to Yotsuya, where he’s lived ever since. For many years, he worked at a building in front of the American Embassy. That’s how he came to be a part of Akasaka, and ended up staying another twenty years collecting cardboard.

There are moments when people, places or objects that I encounter seem to reveal glimpses of the city’s soul. It’s almost as if that grandpa walked here straight from the ruins, my colleague said when I told him about it. His way of moving through the world more closely resembles the people walking through the photos in our cafe than in the street outside the window. In his time, a fresh fish bought in Tsukiji, grilled on a brazier behind the house, was surely a pleasure of the highest order. Elsewhere in Japan such a gesture would move me, but in Akasaka, in 2023, surrounded by the towers of capitalism indifferent to history, it felt like a miracle.

In the evening, I closed up shop, stopped at the supermarket in the subway station, and stood in the automated checkout lane with other commuters to buy some mirin, sake and soy sauce. I carried the fish home in my backpack, and my skillful partner simmered it until the flesh soaked up the flavor and fell off the bone. We gave thanks to a marebito who had come bearing a gift and left behind a revelation of something more.

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Labyrinth House phase two nearing completion

Our fundraising campaign for Labyrinth House has gone great! We reached our end-of-year goal, which is incredible and gives us enough money to finish the second stage that contains our community store and common space. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed. If you haven’t yet but are inspired to contribute, my collaborators and I still hope to raise another million yen this year for phase three, which will be a two-story library and local archive space built inside the partially-collapsed storehouse. You can read about the project and contribute below:

So how’s the construction going? Last week we really got started on interior finishes, and we’re trying to reach a state of semi-completion next month—that means electricity flowing, kitchen finished, floors oiled and tatamis installed. Here’s some photos from week #32:

On the final day, we got a brand new toilet (with water!), which feels pretty epochal after living for several years in the construction site. Our electricians are finishing up wiring and we should get a hookup in a few weeks.

This is my fifth renovation project since 2017, and all that experience has finally made me relatively competent at anticipating what comes next, managing the flow of the project, and ironing out details before they turn into snags. In my weeks off in Tokyo, I mull over design, draw detailed plans in Sketchup and Affinity Designer when necessary, and scour websites for materials—mostly Rakuten, Amazon, and construction supply shop Monotaro. As we get into finishes, I am also buying a lot of tiles and fixtures from Toolbox, which is more expensive but nicer quality, and they have a Tokyo showroom so I don’t have to buy things sight unseen.

As anyone who’s managed a renovation project knows, doing all this takes a huge amount of attention, in addition to the weeks of actual construction. “You’re thinking about your house again!” my wife moans whenever I start gazing into the distance in the run-up to a construction week. Usually, I’m guilty as charged.

On a typical day of construction, we have 3-5 people working on the site, and I run around assigning tasks according to ability and teaching people new things if they’re unfamiliar. I brainstorm with the experienced members like Fu about how to construct something, search for info online, and run to the home center to pick up materials. On days with lots of people on site, I try to choose some carpentry for myself that I won’t get grumpy about being interrupted every ten minutes with questions. When its just me and a couple of the core members, I choose things that require more focus. While I’ve got my head full with construction details, other members are thinking about food, stepping away to prepare lunch or dinner and keep us all going. It’s a great system.

With semi-completion just around the corner, it will be the first time in four years that a big part of mind is not occupied with an ongoing renovation project. Sure, my mosaic tile mural in the bath and other less important things will remain to be completed in the fall, but I am already excited by the thought of having more headspace to devote to writing and other pursuits.

“My Sento & Neighborhood” exhibition

Sento & Neighborhood will be holding our second annual exhibition of our field research into the public baths of Kita Ward, running from February 21-March 4 in an abandoned kakuuchi next to the historic Iwa-no-yu public bath.

Exhibition period: 2/21-3/4, 15:00-20:00, closed Wednesday-Friday.
Location: Old Echigoya Liquor Shop, 31-1 Iwabuchicho, Kita-ku, Tokyo

On February 21 (Friday), Tanaka Mizuki, one of the last painters of sento wall murals, will repaint the Mt. Fuji mural at Iwa-no-yu with a public audience from one to six p.m. A very rare opportunity to see this process!

This year my colleagues documented eight baths and local neighborhoods in the Akabane and Iwabuchi areas in the far northern reaches of the city. I joined in when I could for interviews of the bath owners, visits to local businesses, and workshops with the bathhouse regulars, who tend to be among the most knowledgable people about neighborhood history. We publish a newspaper about each bath and its neighborhood, and make postcards of a few of the surrounding shops. My multi-talented colleague Mari Okamoto distills the workshop results into “Memory Maps” of each bathhouse neighborhood. Here’s the map for Heiwa-yu, a lovely bath in Oji-Kamiya. It sits smack-dab in the middle of what used to be a village along an Edo-era highway, so there were a ton of shops around it until just a few decades ago. All the solid pink dots are now closed, only a couple of hair salons remain.

People have great memories, and trade personal stories about childhood shenanigans and quirky storekeepers, like the smoky fishmonger on the corner that wrapped grilled mackerel in newspaper, the rice shop that had an unusual vending machine that sold (often double-yolk) eggs, and the tiny ferry boat that was one of the last to cross the Sumida River into the 1960s, before a bridge was built and the old boat pilot used his government payout to buy nearby plot of land.

The neighborhoods in their stories, of course, are almost entirely gone—shops shuttered, old buildings torn down for sterile prefab boxes with carports, once-bustling streets mostly empty as people opt to live in private and digital worlds instead. We’re doing ethnography of the past, trying to preserve a record of the landscapes that baths were once a part of. There’s real curiosity and pleasure in unlocking all the local history stored in the archives of individual lives, and sadness and anger, too. For me, this sadness is more than just nostalgic attachment to the old, it stems from a recognition that the physical city that has replaced these social worlds curtails our ability to connect locally with others, that our neighborhoods are no longer rich human mosaics, but to many people, nothing more than a coordinate of their private realm on a wider map. Our society seems to be reaching peak disassociation from the local bonds that have always kept us rooted. Digging into the baths and neighborhoods that remain in living memory can help us imagine what sort of spaces and cultures we ought to create in the future, if we want to turn the tide toward a more humanistic urbanism.

For two weeks, at least, we’ll open up one of the old neighborhood spaces, and share a bit of our worldview. Come take a look, get a set of our newspapers, and soak in a bath that is truly of its local place.

Appearance on Tokyo podcast

My dear friend Noah Sneider, who writes for the Economist in Tokyo, recently reported a podcast on Tokyo urbanism and kindly invited me to be a part of the show. We took a walk around my neighborhood, stopping at local shops, visited Inari-yu and Tokyo Little House, and talked about the sort of stuff I just wrote above.

Unfortunately, the podcast is paywalled, but if you have an Economist subscription, please listen below! Noah has an interesting family connection to Tokyo and really understands the city. You can find the podcast on the Economist website here, or Apple Podcasts here.

Here’s the link to the announcement, with Inari-yu atop a list of eight projects in China, Thailand, India, and New Zealand that were recognized from a pool of 52 applicants. Receiving the top award was not what I had in mind when I rushed to the central post office in Tokyo at 9 PM on a Sunday in pouring rain to send the application to Bangkok, but sometimes just going for it pays off!

My own theory of how to build Sento & Neighborhood as an organization has always been 1) succeed on a local scale, 2) earn recognition on a global scale, and 3) build partnerships that unlock the capital we need to make a wider impact. If we miss our chance in the second half of this decade, a lot of the public baths we want to save will be gone. I have always been optimistic that we would achieve each of these steps, and this award makes me feel that if we play our cards right in 2025, that third step might be within reach.1

In the meantime, we’ve been continuing our fieldwork and documentation of more than 20 baths in Kita Ward, Tokyo. Ten days ago we did our seventh community workshop of the year at Iwa-no-yu, a miraculous bath that has endured in Iwabuchi, an old neighborhood on the northern edge of Tokyo.

There’s a feeling of wonder that comes when emerging out of the subway 25 minutes from the urban core to find places like this, with an owner who still chucks logs into the boiler and has kept the original tiles and fittings intact; where the clientele seems to be entirely local, and when we put out the call, shows up on foot or bicycle to tell us about the neighborhood and play a little harmonica tune:

It’s definitely a sento I recommend you visit if you’re into Showa-era things. Better yet, come to our annual exhibition in February, which we’ll be holding at the shuttered liquor shop on the corner, seen in the video above. Perhaps you read my post a few months ago about “kakuuchi” watering holes—well, this place was the real deal: a little establishment next to the bath where the locals would stand around crates at the entrance and enjoy drinks together in the evenings. The old guys who joined our workshop told me what it was like when the products were stored in big jugs and barrels, and people would come with empty glass bottles to get fill-ups 180 milliliters at a time. There was sake, of course, but also soy sauce and vinegar, while the most popular drink was cheap shochu. It closed down about five years ago, but the space still survives untouched, right next to the bathhouse. We’re hoping an exhibition there might get the wheels turning to open the space up again.

Labyrinth House fundraising making progress!

I’m heading down to Onomichi tomorrow for another week of Labyrinth House construction. We’ve announced our crowdfunding on social media and in Japanese and we’re about two-thirds of the way to our goal, largely on the strength of medium and large donations from my readers and other supporters overseas. Thank you! Here’s the English announcement if you missed it:

I’ve sent our tenugui towel design and Onomichi cat calendar to the printers. I’m optimistic that we can reach our target with a lot of small donations as I get these cute gifts out the door. I set up some simple credit card checkout pages, so contributing is simple and takes two minutes. Just donate below and then reply to this email with your address and I’ll send some gifts in the mail for you at the end of the year.2

You can also contribute via PayPal, bank transfer, or Wise or subscribe via Substack, which counts as a project contribution:

My collaborator Yu Ohtani explained our motivations in a post earlier this month (my translation):

Onomichi has seen more and more businesses open that cater to tourists. But seemingly in inverse proportion to that energy, shops serving local residents have been closing down, and houses are being abandoned. The beautiful tourist spaces shroud the fact that spaces of everyday life are hollowing out. As a resident, this feels like a serious situation, and it’s clear we need new infrastructure that supports community life.

Usually when you start a shop, the first question is “how are you going to earn a profit?” We can’t compete with chain stores, but if we only sell items with higher profit margins, we’d no longer be serving everyday needs.

So we’ve decided from the start to try making a shop that doesn’t earn a profit. A place where the neighborhood gets together for tea, kids can buy candy, young people come up with their own events, visitors from overseas serve food from their home countries or help the neighbors with grocery shopping while they stay, or the temple priest can share local history. Many possibilities arise if we don’t care about earning a profit. People with money will contribute money, people with time will give time, and people with ideas will try out their ideas. Labyrinth House is an experiment to see if we can create such a place.

尾道は近年、観光客をターゲットとしたお店が次々と生まれています。が、その賑わいと反比例するようにひっそりと閉店していく地域のお店たち。そして空き家になる家々。キラキラと盛り上がる観光空間の裏でスカスカになる生活空間。一人の住人として「これはまずい！地域の生活と文化を支えるインフラが必要だ！」と感じていました。

しかし「お店」となると「どうやって儲けるの？」という話に普通はなるわけです。チェーン店の真似なんかできない。でも付加価値のある単価の高いものばかり揃えても生活から離れてしまう。

そこで私達はハナから「儲からない店」をつくってみよう、と思っています。町内の人々があつまってお茶会をしたり、子どもたちが駄菓子屋をやったり、若者が自分でイベントを企画したり、外国から訪ねてくる人が自国の料理を振る舞ったり、泊まる期間は近所の人たちの買い物を手伝ったり、お寺の住職さんが地域の歴史を話してくれたり。「儲ける」ことを前提としなければ、豊かな可能性がたくさん見えてくる。お金がある人がお金を出し、時間がある人が時間を出し、アイディアがあるひとがアイディアを試してみる。そんな形で近所の「お店」を作れないだろうか。そんな実験なのです。

A fun part of my work is that each of my projects has a different scheme: we partnered with a foundation for Inari-yu, but crowdfunding fits with the concept of Labyrinth House. We’re building a new urban commons with volunteer labor and a deep well of passion, so we’re appealing to our friends and supporters for help. We’d be grateful and honored if you send some love our way! I’d be happy to send some cat-induced smiles your way in return.

It’s often said that Japan is four-fifths mountains, and the remaining one-fifth is where all the cities, farms, and people are. Of course, in actuality cities and mountains overlap; urbanization crawls up the slopes, depositing oddly shaped houses and other structures into the folds of the landscape. Streets dwindle into paths, and paths swell into stairs. Ever since we started building Labyrinth House on the hillside in Onomichi, 150 steps above the nearest road, I’ve been traveling around the country a few times a year in search of other hillside projects and communities, which are home to some of the most interesting urbanists anywhere in Japan. These places have much in common as well as many differences—a perfect topic for a summit!1

Slopes connect us to the urban past

When walking in urban Japan, it helps to have a few ground rules. Craig Mod swears by the “ippon ura,” or one street back from the main road, as a sure-fire way to find more interesting scenery, people, and history. My sento walking tour is a case in point—the bland and unpleasant four-lane boulevard in my neighborhood was built in the 20th century, but the parallel shopping street is quiet and human-scale, has existed since Edo times, and is full of familiar faces.

Here’s another tip: wherever you walk, seek out changes in elevation. The paths that follow the contours of the land, or confront them head-on, are almost always more rewarding to walk than those on flat ground. Keep a topographic map handy as you navigate. If you plan on doing a lot of walking in Tokyo, download Tokyo Jisou Maps (iOS | Android), not just so you can peel back the historical layers of development, but also to reference the shape of the city’s valleys and hills.

But don’t credit me—this is pretty basic knowledge among Japan’s city-walkers. The Suribachi Gakkai group has put out a whole series of topographic guides to urban exploration, which is also the theme of one of my favorite TV shows. Scholars have also written much on Tokyo’s slopes. Hidenobu Jinnai’s classic Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology explains how these areas developed unique social and spatial characteristics as transitional zones between the highland residences of the elites and the lowland commoner districts of Edo. More evocatively, Shinichi Nakazawa’s Earth Diver argues that the distribution of the city’s religious sites and red-light districts near modern-day slopes has deep roots in the ancient coastline once inhabited by prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

Here is sociologist Shunya Yoshimi (my graduate advisor) writing about the meaning of slopes earlier this year:

Cities are composed of more than just present layers; strata from different eras accumulate atop one other. But where land is flat and development is simple, old layers are easily destroyed and the landscape becomes smothered by new high-rises. Such erasure of historical traces deprives us of the opportunity to encounter the past. Contrast this with areas where the topography is more complex, which retain a stubborn ability to withstand forces such as large-scale redevelopment, wartime bombardment, or the construction of urban planning roads, which can only be described as acts of neighborhood destruction. In short, valleys and uneven ground are where urban memory remains. (吉見俊哉、「下り坂について：街歩きの文明論」『ユリイカ』2024年6月、pp. 250-252)2

Slopes enliven the present

But you don’t need to listen to a bunch of scholars to grasp why slopes are interesting. Just look at this spot we walked past on a summit-organized tour of the Kobe hills:

Can you think of another developed world city where you can see such a visually stimulating juxtaposition of wealth, eras, and topographic conditions? Or for that matter, any place on flat land in a Japanese city? You might not think it’s beautiful, but it’s undeniably interesting in an age when monotony pervades both mainstream culture and our built environment. If walking is food for the mind and body, then the constant surprises, contradictions, and variety found on Japan’s slopes are a nutritious meal.

There are also great distinctions between Japan’s hillside cities. With proper roads and infrastructure and a mixture of nouveau riche mansions and modest housing, Kobe’s slopes are closest in character to Yokohama’s. But they’re quite different from the akiya-filled hillsides of Onomichi or Kure or Yokosuka.3 The hills above cities like Nagasaki or Hakodate or Atami occupy different positions relative to urban centers than small fishing ports like Saikazaki or Manazuru. All are excellent places to wander.

On slopes, you can find all the traits of good urban design arrived at organically: human scale, architectural diversity, proximity to transit, affordable housing, active lifestyles, encounters with neighbors, and places so quiet that meowing cats often wake us in the morning. The small town of Manazuru has codified a municipal design code inspired by Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, which values patterns such as the narrow paths between houses and the spots at bends in the road or the bottom of stairs where people stop and chat like pools along streams.

Today, the value of slopes extends beyond just vernacular charm. As Yoshimi suggests above, capitalist development has a hard time penetrating into uneven topography, sparing hillsides from some of the forces that have driven much our urban environment towards homogenous, interchangeable architecture and ways of life. Different forms of life endure higher up, through the tenacity of residents like the elderly woman behind Labyrinth House who cleans the gutter along our path every morning.

Over the years, residents have emptied out of these places because the alternative found below is so much more convenient. But the active commitment demanded by hillside life also attracts a much smaller but recognizable countercurrent: newcomers (and returnees) who are turned off by the erosion of local places by thoughtless consumerism, the hectic rhythms of big-city life, and modernity’s relentless erasure of the past. Slopes thus become sites of creativity and experimentation that takes forms like the patchwork of hillside urban farms pioneered by a friend in Nagasaki, the slow style of four-days-a-week shops and cafes of our neighbors in Onomichi, or little community gathering places and creative businesses focused on uncovering local culture and history.

Shioya Project, the creative folks who worked with the city of Kobe to stage the summit, is a great example of the sort of urbanists who plant their flags in hillside communities. Their home base is Shioya, a little fishing port squeezed between the hills and Osaka Bay that is now surrounded by Kobe’s urban sprawl. I haven’t visited yet, but after seeing their work, it’s now on my 2025 hillside travel list.

The project maintains an old Western-style home where they host various cultural events. They walk the heck out of the city, making maps and uncovering local history and culture and distilling it into new forms. Like other urbanists in post-growth communities, they curate a sense of what makes Shioya and Kobe special—their whole practice is an extended argument for why this little local place should continue to exist.

Downhill in the post-growth future

Slopes are where I go to get distance from the present-oriented commotion of Tokyo and search for things that root our urban existence in the past. But they are also places to think about the future of abandonment and aging that is already upon us—half of the houses on our hillside in Onomichi are empty, and half of our neighbors are elderly.

The novelist Shinji Ishii, who participated in the “Slopes & Culture” panel at the summit, drew an interesting parallel between slopes and literature. The source of all drama, he pointed out, is difference—yes, between elevations, but also rich and poor, good and evil, male and female, tradition and modernity, past and present, city and countryside. It is in the transitory space in between where narrative unfolds, and no good story continues in an endless ascent.

This reminded me of another passage of Yoshimi’s essay: when we climb up slopes, our minds are preoccupied with the obstacles before us, and the anticipation of cresting the hill. It is only upon starting to descend that our attention can turn towards the wider landscapes around us, which often hide a rich collection of surprises. When we focus on this previously unseen scenery, other systems of value reveal themselves, and our way of seeing the world is transformed.

He continues:

In fact, I am certain that [this rule of walking] also applies to life, and lately I’ve started to believe the same can be said of civilization, too. In short, the people alive in any civilization may enjoy greater cultural fulfillment during the phase of long, gradual decline than during the period of upward growth and development. This undoubtedly has great significance for the question of where Japan should go in the future.

Down on the flat land in Tokyo, they are still scraping the city clean and erecting skyscrapers, grasping for a little more growth. The future looks different from up in the hills. The narrative doesn’t end, it changes—there is still much to do and look forward to on the way down. Recognizing the moment we’re in is the first step in thinking about the places and cultures that ought to be saved and created anew.

Telling an interesting story about where you come from really means talking about who you are now and how you’ve changed, so I took the opportunity to explain how I went from feeling at home here:

To building a home here:

I started from the beginning: the urban form of Washington Park, the south Denver neighborhood where I grew up. The straight-as-a-go-board street grid, framed by mature oak trees; the City Beautiful-inspired public parks and civic architecture; Old South Gaylord, the little one-block shopping street at the former transit stop in this early-20th century streetcar suburb. From my earliest days, I’d walk the two blocks down there, often with my older sister and her friends, to go to the Soda Rock, a little vintage diner with black-and-white checkered floor tiles and round bar stools that sold bubble gum and pop rocks out of a glass case for a dime or a quarter. An American dagashi-ya! Talking about this in the Japanese context made me realize this wasn’t so different from the old shopping streets I seek out in Japan, and that of all the places I could have been born in America, my neighborhood was the kind where a kid might grow up interested in local communities and urban design.

The reporter asked for a picture, so I chose this shot of my sister Sarah and I in front of our house on Halloween in 1990:

I thought newspaper readers would surely love the very American Halloween scene, but I picked this particular frame because you can see the neighborhood behind us. The bungalows neatly constrained by zoning laws to the centers of their respective plots, the front lawns, the sidewalks, the rows of street trees, the asphalt wide enough to park two cars and pass in both directions—the same as every residential street stretching endlessly in the four cardinal directions! Looking at the photo with the reporter while sitting at the low table in Inari-yu Nagaya, a mere 12 feet away from the house across the narrow alleyway outside the window, this sense of scale feels remarkable and strange in a way that I don’t think most Americans fully appreciate. America is huge! Even urban America is spread out like homesteads on the midwestern plains. You say you have a housing crisis? I could fit a whole Tokyo neighborhood into the space between the evens and the odds on South York Street, complete with a yokocho and bathhouse for good measure.2

I went to middle school in Capitol Hill, and would walk a mile down mildly iffy 13th Avenue to the central library after school to pull maps of Denver’s cow town days from the drawers in the map room. Just as I was becoming fully politically awake, I also grew fixated on urban development. I spent lots of time at the LoDo Tattered Cover and bought books on New Urbanist planning. In 2004, I was distraught by Bush’s reelection, but Denver also passed a transit expansion program, and I dreamt of my city’s transformation into a transit metropolis as I traversed the city by public bus and bike, having disavowed learning to drive (I was an original transit-oriented teen).

At the time, I thought of urbanism mostly in terms of physical infrastructure and tall buildings. I don’t think I was particularly focused on the social or cultural aspects of neighborhood life, and there wasn’t much organic, bottom-up change taking place in strictly zoned areas like Wash Park beyond individual property owners popping tops and maxing out the allowable volumes of their private realms. I imagined becoming a planner and helping to create dense new neighborhoods from scratch along the coming transit lines. In another life, I’d be working on building out RiNo or the River Mile right now.

Coming to Japan

I went to Niigata the same month I turned sixteen. I remember getting my placement packet from AFS in the mail, and opening it up and seeing the city’s name for the first time. I pulled up its page on Wikipedia, and got a jolt of excitement from the aerial photo of the Shinano River emptying into the Sea of Japan. A port city!

There were a few ways in which I think I was extraordinarily lucky with my exchange experience, but the urban environment was one. There were 14 exchange students in the Niigata region my year, and they all lived somewhere out in the suburbs or some of the neighboring towns. Fatefully, I got placed with retired host parents who took an exchange student once and only once, and lived in the oldest corner of Niigata from where I could explore the whole city by foot and bicycle.

Coming to urban Japan was a shock to the system. I wish people could still experience the same degree of disorientation. There were no urbanist YouTubers prowling Tokyo streets, no Japan influencers turning cameras on their daily lives, no Substacks pontificating about the post-growth future. My knowledge of what street-level Japan looked like was mostly informed by the glimpses I saw in Lost in Translation as a 13-year-old. That scene at the end when Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson melt into the crowds of West Shinjuku made my skin tingle in the dark of the Esquire Theater on Downing Street. As the credits rolled I remember thinking, well, that settles it, I’m going to Tokyo!

The environment felt so foreign at the beginning. AFS held a nationwide orientation at the Olympic Youth Center in Yoyogi, with a view of the same Lost in Translation skyscrapers in Shinjuku out the classroom window. I remember my first walk beyond the gates, when a counsellor took some of us out for an excursion across a pedestrian bridge to a 7-11 on a little shopping street in Sangubashi. No sidewalks. Tiny delivery trucks. Pedestrians and bikes going every which way. No street names. No architectural coherence or uniform scale.

Once in Niigata, I initially found the old city similarly confounding. I would walk in one direction for a while and get utterly lost trying to find my way home, looping back again and again until I noticed the turn I had missed.

At the beginning, I don’t think I quite appreciated Niigata on its own terms. The cityscape wasn’t anything like Denver. There weren’t many parks or street trees. I may have even thought that Niigata was somehow less urban than Denver, despite being more walkable, bike-able, compact, and transit-oriented than Denver likely ever will be. After all, it only had two skyscrapers! Denver had forty or fifty. There weren’t big restaurants with patio seating full of young people. The shopping streets near my house were full of little shops selling unfamiliar things amid lots of rusting shutters, and most of the people were elderly. As a high schooler just learning Japanese, most of the neighborhood common spaces, like the bathhouse that was on the corner across from my bus stop (no longer), were too intimidating to enter.

My perspective changed one discovery at a time. I remember one day in the summer, I was hanging out with my Costa Rican buddy Alejandro, who lived a few hours away in Murakami. We were exploring my neighborhood when we stumbled upon a little alley lined by prewar nagaya that was narrower than I’d ever seen before. We ventured in and were astounded to find a whole web of alleys. Niigata had filled in its prewar canals and modernized its traditional landscape in the often bland manner that prefectural capitals do, but beneath the surface, the old city was still full of lots of human-scaled places.

My sense of aesthetics and what makes a great city changed gradually, and not entirely in that first year in Niigata. I was still years away from developing my current frame of mind. But over the years, I came to see beauty not in tidy, planned streetscapes, but in the vernacular forms and organic spaces of local Japanese neighborhoods. In 2014, I moved to Tokyo and lived on $1,000 per month, talking my way into a bunk bed at a share house in the heart of the city, where my monthly rent was $150, utilities included. A few of my nine Japanese housemates helped point me toward interesting cultural trends, art and activism in the urban and rural margins, and I used all the money I saved on rent to travel and learn, eventually encountering public baths, vacant spaces, and post-growth communities like Onomichi.

But that is another story. A decade later, I’m now much more a part of this place than Denver or America. It’s nice to take a look back, appreciate the people and places that made me, and see the threads that I’ve been holding onto from the beginning.

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Where do our architectural desires come from? Take, for example, my desire to create a 35,000-tile bathhouse-style mosaic of Onomichi on the wall of the bath at Labyrinth House, complete with a view of the illuminated stone wall outside. Once the thought popped into my mind, I couldn’t really un-think it. The vision became an end that could justify occasional drudgery. Sure, you might be crawling through the dust under the floor right now, I’d tell myself, but someday you’re gonna be sticking tiles on that wall. I had the mosaic vision around two years ago, when the bath looked like this:

I had recently acquired a panoramic drawing of Onomichi from 1934, which came in a sleeve with the most lovely sketch of the central hillside. It reminded me of the landscape murals that began to be painted on the walls of Tokyo bathhouses in the early 20th century, anchoring these intimate spaces in a larger urban cosmology just as the actual views of Mt Fuji and Mt Tsukuba inscribed in Edo/Tokyo’s layout were being obscured by tall buildings.

I tell you of my dream bath in order to share something about our philosophy of building Labyrinth House. The architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander, best known for his seminal A Pattern Language, wrote a lesser-known volume in 2010 about the construction of a school campus in suburban Tokyo that bears the delightfully grandiose title The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth. A friend gave it to me a few years ago, sensing that my work had something to do with what Alexander calls the “struggle between two world-systems”:

In SYSTEM-A, creation and production are organic in character, and are governed by human judgments that emanate from the underlying wholeness of situations, conditions, and surroundings. This is the primary driving force of every action, and every decision. […]

In SYSTEM-B, the production process is thought of as mechanical. What matters in system-B are regulations, procedures, categories, money, efficiency, and profit: all the machinery designed to make society run smoothly, as if society itself was working as a great machine. The production process is rarely context-sensitive. Wholeness is left out. (Alexander, p. 49).

Alexander writes like Wendell Berry, framing the production of the built environment as an endeavor weighted with much larger spiritual and ecological stakes (“If we smell the dust of a crumbling society, we need to face up to our necessary task, to rebuild our civilization, and to do it well”).

When exactly did architecture become something external to ourselves, mediated by high priests of engineering, finance, and marketing? “One might say, at first blush, that system-B is the product of industrialization, and came from that origin,” writes Alexander. Indeed, there were no “architects” in Japan before the introduction of Western architecture. Of course there were people deeply engaged in the conception and design of buildings, but typically this creative process unfolded as part of the relationship between the carpenter or master builder and their client (seshu). Iconic examples of pre-modern Japanese architecture are usually credited to the seshu, such as 16th century Tai-an tearoom (tea master Sen no Rikyu), or the 12th century reconstruction of Nara’s Todai-ji temple (the monk Chōgen). The emergence of the architect as the most prominent player in the production of space is rather unusual within the broad sweep of world history.1

But Alexander goes on to suggest that “this change in human consciousness is only partially entangled with the industrialization that started in the 18th century”:

It is a much older, broader process, which has taken thousands of years; and over that long span of time has been responsible for the gradual evolution of the human self […] Artists, builders, farmers, and creators were once able to rely on their instincts about materials, location, physical structures […] now as the modern era has unfolded, people’s instincts are more often shaped by external sources — fashion magazines, telling people what they should think about housing, food clothes, accessories, cars — all focused on selling goods. The inner voices, also now shaped by these exterior forces, have therefore become less reliable in terms of well-being, less capable of discerning wholeness, and ultimately less good for the land (p.70).

My experiences have taught me an appreciation for the distinction between system-A and system-B. Traditional building methods bring me closer in spirit to the spaces I’m building, the world at large, the state of being alive, than relying on industrially manufactured materials.

“I don’t care for fads of eco-this or permaculture whatnot,” the craftsman who taught me to build and plaster walls at Inari-yu Nagaya once told me as we worked, “but I care if my materials feel dishonest.” There is nothing dishonest about an earthen wall, solid down to the bamboo lattice at its core, built with materials from the hills and fields outside, smelling of fermenting straw, shaped and cured over weeks and months.

I felt the same way last month, when I went up to traditional carpenter Dylan Iwakuni’s farmhouse in Saitama to help build some walls in his garden. I spent the day stacking heavy river stones, trying to find just the right arrangement of natural shapes to create a sturdy foundation. Others went into the forest to cut and split bamboo, chiseled stone, or shaped the mud holding together the reused roof tiles. The result, made from natural materials and a huge amount of labor, is stupefyingly beautiful:

At Labyrinth House, we have used fewer traditional building methods, and more metal fasteners, styrofoam insulation, drywall and glue than my heart may have liked. Mostly this is a matter of expediency: we only gather for a week at a time, and if we were chiseling tenons for every beam, we would never finish. Of course, we could have gone completely in the other direction of a prefab shower and rough DIY aesthetic and finished long ago. We’re trying to strike a balance between artistry and practicality, living within the limitations of our budgets and time while reaching for something that delights our hearts. We do plan to use some traditional methods: we’ll make the floor of our shop space with a tataki mixture of earth, lime, and bitten, and and we’ve saved old roof tiles to eventually build some dirt walls in the garden like at Dylan’s house. Both will be festive occasions.

But in a broader sense, Labyrinth House is all about practicing architecture as part of system-A: producing space in a manner that springs from context and surroundings, from the malleable social relations that are as much a part of building a place as any wall or pipe. The project thus feels part and parcel of the daily rhythms of waking, grinding coffee and gathering in the garden for morning stretches, sharing home-cooked meals and beer, and pulling out our futon to sleep at night. Over months and years, life can be measured in the visible and invisible structures that hold a place together.

One feature of Japan’s post-growth future could be a renewed flourishing of system-A: the abundance of vacant buildings has lowered financial barriers to DIY projects, and the declining population has put pressure on many building trades, forcing the wider opening of once-closed professions and communities to women, outsiders, semi-pros and amateurs. New channels of knowledge propagation and networks of practitioners lead to what Shuichi Matsumura terms a “democratization of architecture,” after a postwar era in which industrialized processes came to dominate. Sure, system-B will still be churning out mass-produced space and selling us new desires, or achieving futuristic marvels through extraordinarily complex divisions of labor. But for those who want to take leave of this system and try something different, the potential is there. A lot of young Japanese architects and activists are looking at their surroundings and choosing system-A.

How to build a mosaic tile mural

So what about that bath? Obviously, I’m not going figure out the details until everything else is finished next year, but I’ve read some blog posts and have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done once the space itself has been constructed.

First, I pixellate the image so that each pixel corresponds to a centimeter-wide tile plus grout lines (so around 200 h x 200 w). Then I need to simplify the picture into about 12-15 colors, and and make tons of minor adjustments, one pixel at a time, eventually recoloring the whole picture like the pagoda in the red box below:

The tiles will need to be assembled into sheets before being glued to the wall. This summer I went down to Shibuya and borrowed a laser cutter to cut a few tile trays from acrylic sheets. It was the first time I had ever had the need for one of those things, but they’re pretty cool! (I’m not a luddite—technology in the service of craft!).

Once the design is finished on my computer, I’ll print it out on A4 paper, lay the trays on top, arrange the tiles one by one, then tape them on the front to create 20x20 sheets that are ready to hang. Of course, that’s just my best guess for how to do it. If you have any experience with mosaic art, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Ever since I became seshu for the second house, my Labyrinth House friends tease me when I insist on taking the more complicated yet purer road. Once we’re done with everything else, Yu says, we’ll need to hold a grand finale—bring everyone together for a weeklong festival of tile arrangement to make Sam’s bath come true. That sentiment is what feels truest about Labyrinth House.

※ Donations & crowdfunding gifts ※

Our Labyrinth House team is raising funds for our renovation project in Onomichi, to finish the phase two community general store, and get ready for the phase three library. The goal is to raise ¥2 million before the end of 2024 (we are about halfway there!). Whether or not you contribute, I hope you’ll read the project explainer below and follow along with interest. Click through to the page below to make one-time contributions & see the gifts we will send to supporters.

What are you building?

We have been building Labyrinth House for the past four years in Onomichi, a small port city in Hiroshima Prefecture. Labyrinth House is a complex of several early-20th century houses on the beautiful hillside at the center of town, which we received for free and have been designing and completely rebuilding almost entirely with our own skills and money (see before and after photos at the page linked to above).

This month we will gather for our 30th week of construction, and expect to finish the second house in early 2025. Labyrinth House is envisioned as a community commons centered on a general store, event/rest space, occasional cafe, library, and mid-/long-term residence. We want to create a place that can support the current community and brings new people and energy onto the hillside in the future. Here’s the plan for the house that we’re building now:

In addition to the community general store (explained below), we’ve designed the space to allow for large social gatherings, screenings and talk events, exhibitions, and other public uses. The low-floored space connected to the garden will be left open most days, creating a small urban commons where visitors can wander in to rest along one of the main routes up the hill. On weekends, members will run cafes out of the kitchen. The second-floor will provide residential space for people involved in the community functions, and serve as an entry point for people migrating to Onomichi.

In the third stage of the project, my collaborator Akihiro Yamamoto will transform our warehouse into a library and local archive. The warehouse’s termite-devastated structure and collapsing earthen walls will be supported from the inside by a complex staircase & bookshelf structure, which will gradually fill up with books salvaged from abandoned houses around Onomichi or donated by residents. The Labyrinth Library will become a repository not only for books, but also history and culture that is disappearing as Onomichi grows older and decays. If we meet our ¥2 million goal, additional money will go toward this phase.

Where is Labyrinth House?

Labyrinth House [Map] is in Onomichi, four hours west of Tokyo next to the Seto Inland Sea. Beloved of writers and film directors in the 20th century, today foreign tourists flock to Onomichi for its beautiful scenery and townscape of cat-filled lanes and lovely renovated cafes.

When I first visited in 2015, I was enchanted by the charming atmosphere, but also the possibilities I saw for producing a different kind of urban space. Onomichi was just the sort of town I had moved across the world in search of: at the time, I was researching the use of vacant spaces in post-growth cities, and had heard stories from activists around Japan of Onomichi and its car-free hillside, where houses cannot be rebuilt, many are abandoned, and real estate is worthless. It has all the problems and potential of post-growth Japan, squeezed into the most human-scale environment you can imagine.

The hillside

Labyrinth House sits right at the middle of this central hillside, a ten minute walk from the station. Climb 150 steps through temple grounds, past some empty houses but also a few cafes, cute shops selling handmade items, and a tiny bakery, and you’ll find the main house standing at a crossroads frequented by a few of our local cats.

To understand this place, consider the following rule of halves: the population of the central districts of Onomichi has declined by roughly half since the 1990s. Only about half of the houses in our vicinity are occupied, half of those are home to elderly residents, and half of those are single-person households. Onomichi, like much of Japan, could thus be said to have a half-life of around a single generation. As people disappear, many buildings slowly return to nature, unless they can change hands and be renovated, re-occupied or reused for other purposes.

The city government and private capital are not committed to preserving the hillside. Yet this landscape is also vital to Onomichi’s identity. Ensuring that it doesn’t disappear in the 21st century largely depends on the efforts and energy of new migrants and local activists, including the local non-profit Onomichi Akiya Saisei Project.1 Labyrinth House is our contribution to preserving this landscape and building a sustainable future for the community.

When were these houses built? When did you get them?

The two-unit row house on the higher end of our land was recorded on the property registry in 1919. It’s on this 1934 drawing, before the main house was built.

The main house on the corner was built in 1937, according to the plaque we found in the rafters. The thick-walled warehouse of unknown age sits between the houses. Many (often ill-advised) additions and structural alterations followed, and eventually the three structures came to touch each other. We plan to connect everything together inside—hence the name Labyrinth House.

The houses, with all their furniture, belongings, and tons of books still inside, came into our possession after torrential rains in 2018 damaged our house and many others on the hillside. The original owners had not lived there for several decades, and after the disaster, their children realized the houses had become a serious liability. Demolition on the hillside is prohibitively expensive, so giving them to us for free was the better option.

My friend Yu Ohtani moved into the main house in 2019. We started renovation of that house in the fall of 2020, and quickly discovered severe rain and termite damage that meant a full structural retrofit was necessary if we wanted to make it last. We legally received the deed in 2021,2 and completed renovating the first house in 2022. Yu lives there now, and the house occasionally hosts talk events and performances.

At that point, we considered taking a break—we were exhausted, and Yu was out of money, but we had developed a special bond and were having the time of our lives. How could we stop!? I convinced the team we should keep going, and decided to pay the cost of renovating the second house. Since then, we’ve maintained a routine of six weeks of construction per year, and now the end (of phase two) is nearly in sight!

Why a general store and community commons?

If earning a return was our primary concern, turning the houses into short-term rentals for foreign tourists would be the smartest option. While I hope to generate enough cash flow to pay the utilities and repair expenses down the road, we are motivated by a desire to do something different—to explore the potential for a space more directly connected to local life.

Tourism sustains places like Onomichi economically, but we feel that something vital will be disappear if the hillside loses what’s left of its residential culture. See the map below: there are more than 50 cafes and sweets shops within a 400 meter radius of our house, yet no supermarkets or convenience stores.

That means all those elderly people in the neighborhood have to walk down several hundred stairs and more than a kilometer to the big supermarket to buy anything. A few years ago, Yu polled the local residents about what they would like in the community, and the most common response was a general store. The older locals still remember when this was part of daily life. In fact, there was once a grocery next door to our house! It was prominent enough to be drawn on this location scouting map for the legendary Yasujiro Ozu film Tokyo Story in 1952:

We can even catch a glimpse of this store on the corner in this shot from the 1982 Nobuhiko Obayashi film Tenkōsei.

The house with the fence at the end is Labyrinth House!

Of course, Onomichi has changed. The hillside is no longer crawling with high school students; today it’s mostly old people and tourists snapping photos of cats like our boy Shiro above. So what would a general store that serves the needs of the community today and in the future look like?

Well, we don’t know! Most days the shop space will be open for residents to come in, take what they want, and leave some coins or scan a QR code to pay. Perhaps we will start a system to purchase perishable groceries and goods a few times a month, or let people borrow tools for renovations. On the weekends we’ll host events or serve food and drink in our garden. We’re building Labyrinth House to be a flexible common space like what I’ve created at Inari-yu Nagaya, so it can evolve as we grasp what the community wants and as new collaborators join the project or stay upstairs. Exhibitions and summits will be held. It will be an experimental platform to try to provide new value to the local neighborhood and cultivate connections with other activists across Japan.

Who are your collaborators?

Our core team has been together from the start. Yu and I got to know each other in 2015 over an academic interest in post-growth cities and bottom-up forms of urbanism. He moved to Onomichi after a decade of activism in Leipzig. Akihiro Yamamoto, our construction leader and an award-winning artist, came to Onomichi for college and became one of the most skilled renovators in the city. Then there’s Fu, who showed up for week #1 as an 18 year old who had decided not to go to college. Instead, he’s been learning traditional building techniques, making furniture and art, and becoming part of communities like ours as he has wandered the country for the past four years. Sato-san is a part-time ninja, bartender, and occasional ninja-bartender with a cozy bar in Onomichi’s nightlife district.

Other essential members joined later. After we finish construction, we enjoy feasts prepared by Tacchan, an Onomichi-born chef who wandered onto the site one day when he was between jobs in 2021 and now plans to run a weekend cafe once Labyrinth House is finished. Sho, a pro carpenter from Shinagawa in Tokyo, often hops on the 7:30 AM Shinkansen with me to help when he has time in his schedule, while Wataru moved to Onomichi this year for Labyrinth House after working at a grassroots community space in Osaka.

Beyond this main cast, we’ve had many travelers, young architects, students, friends and others pitch in for a day or a week over the past four years. The beautiful thing about a project like this is the fluidity, how an ever-changing community can be held together around the common task of building and sharing meals together, day after day.

How are you guys building this?

I’m not an architect, nor are any of my collaborators. I use a Sketchup model to think through the design, and draw detailed plans for small sections. But for the most part, we refine the design as we demolish and rebuild.

Knowledge of all kinds trickles down from experienced members to others on the site. As a kid I did DIY projects with my dad, but I picked up most of my skills building Tokyo Little House, Inari-yu Nagaya, and Labyrinth House. When new folks join in for a week, we do our best to expose them to new tasks. We make mistakes and improve. Now on the second house, we’re doing a lot more difficult things than we did the first time around. When we don’t feel confident to make a particular decision, we call up an architect friend who gives us advice, or ask Google.

The most exhausting part of the project is carrying all our building materials up hundreds of stairs. On delivery days we call on local friends for reinforcements. We all eat meals together in the living room of the main house, and sleep together on the second floor of the under-construction house (during the main house construction, we borrowed another vacant house nearby). A project like this is as much about constructing a social community as it is about building a structure.

The first house cost a little more than ¥4 million to renovate. Expenses for the second house have so far have been about ¥3.4 million ($22,400), mostly out of my pocket, along with another ¥2 million or so of related expenses (mostly transport & tools). I’m doing fine as a freelance translator, but it’s still quite a bit of money for me. I think we need about ¥2 million more to finish the second house, and still more to complete the library. I hope you will consider helping us turn this dream into reality!

Final word

Thanks for reading! I hope you visit sometime. I will write more about Labyrinth House in coming weeks, and am eager to kick off a series of essays about the islands south of Onomichi. Week #30 of Labyrinth House begins November 18—please follow along on Instagram! Remember, instructions for how to contribute on this page! 👇

For now, it made sense to roll everything into this site by adding some static pages that appear in the navigation bar at the top of the homepage. There’s now an About page with an up-to-date bio, as well as a Projects page that introduces my four ongoing projects, with links to related posts. If you subscribed to my writing but are confused about all the projects I reference, start here. There’s also a Translation page and a Tokyo tours page about the two historical tours that I can offer in Tokyo (group tours on 10/26 and 11/16 are now both full, sign up for future info here).

Raising money to finish Labyrinth House

I came down to Onomichi on Thursday for another week of construction at Labyrinth House, the 29th since we began in 2020. Going into our fifth year, we’re finally within reach of completing the second phase, which includes our experimental community general store, common space for exhibitions or cafes, and living space. This week we’re working on plumbing, ventilation, and finishing walls and infrastructure before we move on to plastering and interiors.

Six to eight times a year, we come together for a week, sleep on the floor above the worksite, share meals and conversation, and build. The project has been sustained by the mutual trust and affection shared by a core team that’s now like a family, as well as a constant stream of fresh energy from young architects, artists, travelers, scholars and others who come nearly every time to help. We do just about everything ourselves, but we still need money for materials and food. So we’re going to have a crowdfunding campaign to help us get over the finish line.

Right now, my accounting sheet for construction of the second house lists expenses of ¥3,296,216 ($22,081 in today’s very low exchange rate, but it feels more like $30,000). Some receipts have surely been lost, and I would estimate I’ve spent another ¥2 million on purchasing tools and traveling down to Onomichi on the Shinkansen. So far, we have received ¥1.23 million in donations from friends and family for the second house. The rest has come out of my pocket.

One way of looking at this is wow, this is really cheap! We got several houses for free and are restoring them for only a few million yen each (the front house, completed in 2022, cost about ¥4.5 million). It’s the real akiya dream! On the other hand, this is actually a pretty significant amount of money for me!

Will I someday earn back the investment? A lot of people in America hear what I’m doing and ask if Labyrinth House is an “investment property” or if we’re going to “flip it.” These concepts simply aren’t relevant in our context. The whole point of this project—the curiosity that brought me back to Japan a decade ago and that keeps us all motivated to carry heavy materials up the hill week after week after week—is to explore the possibilities of how we can use urban space when buildings are no longer real estate assets. What we’re doing is closer to a form of communal play than labor, more art than business. In other words, I don’t want to make money on this. Sure, I want to have enough cash flow to pay the utilities and maintenance expenses down the road, but once we’re done, we’re not going to be optimizing for income, but for uses and opportunities that we think make the community a richer place.

Campaign details to come next week

For this campaign, we are hoping to raise ¥2 million, which should allow us to nearly complete the second house, including all the necessary equipment. If we exceed that amount, any additional funds will go toward stage three: a labyrinthine library that my collaborator, artist Akihiro Yamamoto, has imagined in the ruins of our warehouse.

Later this week, I will send out a newsletter explaining the project’s purpose and progress, and the campaign returns we will send out to supporters (be sure to get your Onomichi cat calendars, original tenugui hand towels, and more!), and instructions for how to make direct, one-time contributions.

Over the past few months, some readers have also been pledging subscriptions through Substack. I really appreciate this sign that you value my writing! I don’t plan on putting up a paywall, but I also recognize that supporting me through this platform may be easiest for some readers, so I will also turn on subscriptions and send out returns to those supporters as well. I do have a lot more planned for this space going forward, including more essays on Labyrinth House and akiya, and a six-part series on the islands south of Onomichi. My immediate goal is to start posting about once a week. Every dollar I can raise for the crowdfunding is more time that I can spend sharing through writing instead of having to overburden myself with translation projects.

All my career choices and projects since coming to Tokyo a decade ago have involved leaps of faith, but few seemed as clear to me as Labyrinth House, despite having no organization, prestige, or income attached to it. I wasn’t going to miss the chance to renovate a couple of beautiful houses in my favorite town, with a community of the best kind of people who share a vision for a new urban commons. We’ll finish it no matter what, but I would be honored to have your support as we reach the end of construction and the next exciting stage begins.