On a bike ride through Tokyo last month, I came face to face with the longest building I have ever seen in my life. This was Shirahige Higashi, a 1980s residential complex so gargantuan it registers more as infrastructure than as housing. Indeed that is its primary function: The line of 13-story towers, stretching almost a mile up the east bank of the Sumida River, north of the Tokyo SkyTree, is a firebreak. As such, it distinguishes itself from other modernist tower blocks with its ornament of fire prevention machinery, most conspicuously giant steel gates between the buildings, like stacked canal locks, and red water cannons peering out sentry-like from the third floor. There are 7,000 people who live in Shirahige Higashi’s apartments, but the park carved out between the firebreak and the Sumida River is an evacuation zone designed to hold 80,000.
The enemy at the gates is the next inferno, and in that sense, Shirahige Higashi is more than the aesthetic antithesis of the tangled neighborhoods that characterize Tokyo and many other Japanese cities. It’s a policy response to Japan’s narrow streets. East of the firebreak is one of those labyrinthine Tokyo neighborhoods that encapsulate the central paradox of the world’s largest city: That it can simultaneously be so big and so small, so loud and so quiet, multisensory overload on one block and pin-drop tranquility on the next.
I won’t try to explain the megacity, but I can take a stab at the peculiar and wonderful character of Japanese urban neighborhoods. It’s the narrow streets, stupid. They’re low-traffic zones by design, which makes them friendly to cyclists and pedestrians, and especially to seniors and kids. This also makes them really, really quiet. Street parking is impossible, which discourages car ownership by ending the public subsidy for car storage. That’s also part of these streets’ open aesthetic character, which is enhanced by the care of neighboring residents, who often adorn the fronts of their homes with potted plants. Finally, using less real estate for the street means these neighborhoods can have both lots of detached, single-family houses and the density to support local amenities, such as schools, shops, and transit. You can have your mochi and eat it too. (Longtime readers may remember I briefly discussed this design feature in a 2022 episode of 99 Percent Invisible.)
Some of these qualities are shared by narrow streets elsewhere in the world, of course—a hutong in Beijing, the casbah in Algiers, a medieval town center in Europe, Society Hill in Philadelphia. What’s interesting about Japan is that these narrow streets are not the unchanged inheritance of the pre-modern era. Most of them have taken shape since the Second World War, despite the fact that the Japanese authorities view them as a major fire risk, an impediment to traffic flow, and a barrier to high-density real estate development. In fact, the state has required streets to be wider than 12 feet since the 1930s.
Yet in the 1980s, when Tokyo built the Shirahige Higashi firebreak, 40 percent of homes in the entire country looked onto streets that were 12 feet wide or smaller!1 So the firebreak is a show of intent, but it’s also an admission of defeat: Widening streets in the adjacent neighborhood has proven too hard to systematically accomplish.
So why are the streets so narrow, anyway? The historical-deterministic explanation has to do with the relative absence of horses in Japanese urban areas and Tokugawa-era defense strategy, which was more focused on preventing easy access than enabling travel and commerce. More perplexing is that these narrow streets persisted through the 20th century, in built-up areas and beyond. It was not for Japanese planners’ lack of trying: After the Great Kanto Earthquake and ensuing fire, which burned down half the city, Tokyo did build Ginza Brick Town, a Western-style showcase with fireproof buildings lined up on wider streets. Planners plowed through the rubble a grid of arterial roads more than 60 feet wide, which today form the edges of Tokyo’s superblocks. For the first time, Tokyo streets had sidewalks! The effort and expense was justified by the need for firebreaks much more than in the U.S., where such streets were prioritized to ease the flow of automobile traffic. But traffic movement came into play later as well. You can see this traffic engineer wisdom reach its fullest expression west of Shinjuku, around the foreboding, world’s-tallest City Hall, designed by Kenzo Tange in 1991. Perpendicular streets run at different levels to avoid the need for stoplights, and pedestrians moving diagonally must climb and descend staircases at every turn.
In addition to the company of the Loeb Fellows, a GSD studio class, and assorted Japanese urbanists, I had two books in my Tokyo backpack: Andre Sorensen’s The Making of Urban Japan and Emergent Tokyo by Jorgé Almazan, Joe McReynolds, and Naoki Saito (credit to this blog post by Salim Furth). They played the roles of cartoon devil and angel on my shoulder respectively, with Sorensen constantly upbraiding the city’s governance and decrying its poor quality of life, while Almazan and co. ponder its mysteries with respect and awe. Sample Almazan: “a city of intimacy, resilience, and dynamism built from the bottom up.” Rebuttal Sorensen: “The Japanese urban resident is thus left with the worst of all worlds.” They were in constant dialog in my head.
Sorensen argues that Japanese city planning has always been weak compared to its American counterpart. This laissez-faire attitude is often praised in the context of Japan’s lax zoning regulations (small shops and offices are permitted everywhere) or its hyper-competent private train companies. But the narrow streets offer another example. In the postwar rush to rebuild, Japan made two decisions that laid the narrow-street future. First, land reform broke up the country’s big agricultural holdings into many tiny farms. Second, planners exempted developments of less than 1,000 square meters from land use review. The result was a wave of micro-developments, often in the form of a dozen or so houses clustered around a lane that ran off an existing street. Fragmented land ownership made it hard to build Levittowns in Japan, and developers of the resulting small plots wanted to maximize every square foot they had.
Meanwhile, to the extent that such garden suburbs already existed, they were undergoing a process of densification. Some combination of a postwar inheritance tax, tremendous urban growth, and no minimum lot sizes saw fewer, larger houses on larger lots torn down to make many smaller houses, packed in but not quite touching, like a box of chocolates. (A version of this house-splitting also took place around this time in neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights and Back Bay, albeit within buildings rather than between them; it never happened in American suburbs because of stringent zoning restrictions.) You can witness one such neighborhood evolution in this graphic from Emergent Tokyo:
Though the law required rebuilt houses have a four-foot setback from the center of the road, in practice, Almazan and co. write, “landowners are generally uninterested in living in a smaller house in the name of the public good, and they frequently use a variety of legal tactics and loopholes to resist the setback obligation and preserve their precious square meters.” It’s easy to categorize a new building as a renovation if it includes just a few original elements of what came before, leading to a Ship of Theseus principle in Japanese construction. It’s a domestic equivalent of the periodically renewed Ise Shrine. The sociologist Toshiya Yoshimi, who guided us through the Ueno Park area in Tokyo, pointed out the similarity between the Japanese word for building or manufacturing, tsukuru, and that for mending or repairing, tsukuroi.
I’m hesitant to lean too much on Japanese cultural qualities here: The narrow streets are a creature of policy (or lack thereof), not of some innate Japanese sense of what a street looks like. That said, there’s no doubt these streets—adorned with pockets of vacant space between buildings (one regulation that has succeeded)—create a different urban culture. Most obvious is the different culture of mobility. Paradoxically, the absence of sidewalks and street parking, two elements many U.S. planners use to protect pedestrians from cars, makes for super-careful drivers. For cyclists, of which there are many, especially in the flatter, more middle-class areas in Eastern Tokyo, these streets are always two-way. Kids run ahead of their parents, or simply walk home alone. There is little thru-traffic because the street grid is so complicated. The absence of by-right free street parking keeps car ownership low. And mass transit, shops, and restaurants are always close at hand, because—as developers and subdividers reasoned when these places were built—narrow streets allow for greater population density, even when everyone has their own detached house.
Needless to say, this hyper-density is also permitted by narrow streets in commercial areas. The most famous narrow streets in Japan are the privately owned alleys of Golden Gai, where some 200 bars are crammed into an area the size of a baseball diamond. The district is a bit of a tourist trap, but there are similarly vibrant alleys around train stations elsewhere in Tokyo, like Ameyoko, pictured below.
Then there is the culture of public space. These narrow streets blur traditional boundaries between private and public. Residents and shopkeepers take ownership over the public sphere, whether with potted plants, a morning sweep, or a rack of goods for sale. Strong neighborhood associations manage bigger issues. Personal objects spill out from the home in a practice of overflow or afuredashi, including children’s toys, tools, and drying laundry. For me, wandering in the lee of the firebreak tower block, the cumulative effect was one of architectural inversion, as if the utilitarian function of the American back yard had been relocated in miniature to this little asphalt strip.
And yet the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is determined to get rid of such places, and it is succeeding. Fireproofing is the chief rationale, but there are additional motivations. Japan has strong sunlight protections, and wider streets permit taller buildings. Politicians like shiny new developments over there, and Tokyo’s stock of six-plus-story apartment buildings has more than doubled in the last two decades. You can see a little bit of the thinking in the before-and-after images from government reports below (use the light-green building on the right of the bottom set to understand the changes):
It’s not really for me to say how the costs and benefits of this approach stack up. Sorensen is adamant that the existing fabric is a firetrap, since the buildings are almost all made of wood, even if they don’t look like it. Emergent Tokyo argues that high-rise development has problems of its own in disasters (broken elevators, power loss), and these traditional areas have strong mutual aid networks, which is what really counts when things go south. Perhaps these areas could be reformed without being demolished.
One word that stuck with me from Emergent Tokyo was nihonjinron: the “unique qualities make Japanese society difficult or impossible for outsiders to analyze and understand.” This belief in an innate Japanese difference is not only an exoticizing tendency of Western observers; it’s also a common thread in Japanese analyses of their own politics and culture, urban or otherwise. One way or another, its function is to discourage border-crossing inspiration and translation—to make the street between our proverbial houses so wide we can barely speak. We have much the same custom in New York: the feeling that New York is better than everywhere else, so there’s nothing to learn, except when it’s worse, in which case there is also nothing to learn because New York is just different. Newyorkjinron is alive and well in the city’s attempt to dispose of its garbage, for example.
What I hope this yarn about the dance between policy and street width shows, however, is that there is nothing innately Japanese about Tokyo’s narrow streets. It is mutable, in fact it is mutating as we speak. Here, Japan could maybe look to the United States, where the twin regulatory prerogatives of fire safety and traffic speed have shaped the environment far more than any homegrown vernacular urbanism. Our baseline residential streets are 50 feet wide (before setbacks!) while Japan’s (post-1990) streets are closer to 16 feet wide. We have required every apartment above a certain floor be accessible by two interior staircases, dividing our structures with long corridors, constraining our architectural output, and increasing housing costs. We have literally required that people live at greater distances from one another, and yet people wonder why everyone spends so much time alone. Perhaps six feet is a little narrow for a street, but there’s some middle ground. Fire trucks come in different sizes too.
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This is the first installment of Ground Floor, a new newsletter from Henry (pictured). Expect a sundry mix of personal writing, odd obsessions, news about my projects, and recommendations from around the web. Why Ground Floor? This is a continuation of an earlier newsletter, Frozen Music, that drew its title from Goethe’s famous description of architecture. It was awfully poetic, but the more prosaic “Ground Floor” is closer to my writing in both style and substance. The ground floor is the place where public space meets private property, and it’s the foundation that dictates the shape of the building above. Those two ideas—the negotiation of public and private interests, and the path dependency of our choices in the urban realm—are at the core of my interests. Stoops, storefronts, porches, gates, setbacks, floor plans, mechanical cores, revolving doors, security guards, doormen, lockboxes, flyers, utility meters, driveways: This is the stuff of the ground floor. Elevator, going down.
As for Frozen Music: I did not think to import its archives from TinyLetter before that site disappeared. I did manually rebuild a couple posts, because the room seemed so empty without any furniture, and to give new readers a flavor of what to expect. But Frozen Music was mainly a delivery vehicle for more substantive pieces of writing and podcasting that lived elsewhere, and so there is no great loss in its disappearance from the Internet.
Ground Floor’s logo is by Sam Lee, who also makes great music of the non-frozen variety.
Media recommendations
Defector’s coverage of Indian Wells, including the bee invasion.
Is America running out of electricity?
Slate’s oral history of Pitchfork.
The PBS American Experience on María Telkes, solar power pioneer.
The Atlantic’s Great American Novels. I’ve read 39 of them; others I’ve never heard of. Harper Lee was robbed.
The tricky math of New York City’s garbage disposal challenge.
Anand Gopal reports from Syria’s prison camp for ISIS supporters (and their victims).
What I’m reading
The Dean’s December by Saul Bellow
Architecture: From Pre-History to Climate Emergency by Barnabas Calder
This mindblowing statistic is relayed in Sorensen, 314.