20世紀日本から消えた建築の五つの驚異

In the decades after suffering widespread urban devastation at the end of the first world war – and onwards, all the way through to the 1990s – Japan embarked on one of the most dramatic building booms in modern history. During these decades, an unprecedented number of large buildings – city halls, theatres, museums, sports centres, schools, hotels and department stores – were erected as societal recovery and renewed economic might saw the country join a global push towards fresh, modernist thinking. 

As Japan rebuilt, neighbourhoods once razed became fertile grounds for architectural experimentation as developers sought to make buildings that suited modern lifestyles. But in a country as earthquake-prone as Japan – where the concept of impermanence is woven into the very fabric of society via the traditional Buddhist beliefs held by many of its citizens – changing aesthetics, social needs and seismic standards have also ensured that just as many masterworks would later be scrapped, replaced or rebuilt.

“Buildings come down with such regularity that I now have an endangered species list,” says architect Naomi Pollock, the author of Vanishing Japan, an upcoming book from Thames & Hudson. The publication celebrates structural marvels from Northern Sapporo down to coastal Okinawa. Among them are such ubiquitous designs as the Nakagin Capsule Tower, which once housed 140 cantilevered and porthole-windowed spacest-block-9-pod apartments; the original 1960s Hotel Okura, featured in the James Bond outing You Only Live Twice; and creations by award-winning architects famous for everything from international landmarks to kooky public toilets.

Though the works collated in Vanishing Japan couldn’t defy their inevitable extinction in a country repeatedly subjected to both natural and manmade destruction, the book offers a fascinating glimpse into an all-too-brief existence defined by growth, optimism, and even bold one-upmanship. To mark its release, Pollock selects five gone-but-not-forgotten highlights of her research below.

Idemitsu Apollo Gas Stations [Lead image]

In 1956, Japan was on the cusp of a scintillating automobile revolution. “The war was barely in the rear-view mirror,” says Pollock, “and as people became more affluent, they began buying cars.” The same year, Idemitsu Kosan – one of Japan’s largest petroleum companies – would commission the building of dozens of unique gas stations by leading designers, in a move that was “emblematic of that forward momentum, communicating in tiny buildings that the future was going to be exciting.”

One of those architects was Junzo Sakakura, who had previously risen to studio chief at Swiss-French architecture icon Le Corbusier’s studio in France in the 30s. “He did many sculptural concrete buildings [that bore] the imprints of working with Le Corbusier,” says Pollock – but sadly, many of his great works, like Hashima City Hall, the grand original West Plaza of Shinjuku Station, and even the first toll booth designs on Japan’s highways, have been demolished or substantially altered with the changing times.

Sakakura’s Idemitsu Gas Stations suffered the same fate as car dimensions and gas technologies evolved over the decades thereafter. Now, the mushroom-like circular roofs over Ikebukuro station, and the shard-like angles at the Namba site, exist only as memories of a future imagined from a mid-century vantage – though the red-and-white colour scheme and stylised logo of the Greek god Apollo, still found at contemporary ‘apollostations’ today, serve as a reminder of these imaginative roots. 

Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium

“89 of the buildings profiled in this book were torn down by the time it was finished,” says Pollock. “The 90th is hanging in life support.”

In Vanishing Japan, Pollock describes Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium as a “ship-shaped masterpiece [that] looks more like Noah’s Ark than a municipal gym” – and indeed, its future undulates much like the curves of its saddle-shaped roof. Over a decade since its closure following a structural inspection in 2014, the local government has now marked the concrete structure for demolition in September 2026 – sparking protests and preservation campaigns from around the world.

Designer Kenzo Tange is “perhaps the most important architect to come out of the immediate post-war period” in Japan, says Pollock. He was the man responsible for the reconstruction of Hiroshima – including the creation of the city’s powerful Peace Memorial Park – after its atomic bombing in 1945. The Yoyogi National Gymnasium in Tokyo, completed in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, meanwhile, was described as “among the most beautiful buildings of the 20th century” when Tange received the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1987.

“I feel very passionate about this one,” says Pollock, of the site in Kagawa. “If it were built today, architecture aficionados from all over the world would be flocking to see it. What an astounding impression it must have made when it came out of the ground in 1964.”

Sony Building, Tokyo

“For a long time,” says Pollock, “Sony was really the company that we associated the most with cutting-edge technological developments.” The Japanese corporation had set the world alight with the first dual-band transistor radio in 1957, and the portable Sony Walkman would prove no less revolutionary when it debuted in 1979, selling hundreds of millions of units in the decades thereafter. 

In 1966, the electronics manufacturer would wow Tokyo’s flashy Ginza shopping district with the opening of a similarly innovative retail building at the edge of the busy Sukiyabashi Crossing. It was designed by Yoshinobu Asihara, architect of the iconic concrete Olympic Park Control Tower and Park in Komazawa, and stood for 51 years before being demolished in 2017.

“This intersection still has a lot of large neon signs, which are a little bit disorderly, as neon tends to be in Japan,” says Pollock. “But the Sony Building had this gridded design, with the Sony logo at the top, so from the street it was striking. And it had this remarkable elevator shaft covered in beautiful moving lights” – the result of some 2,300 cathode-ray tube TVs. 

Inside, it was essentially a showroom for Sony products. “You’d go up to the top, and then move through each floor to see all the latest TVs and other products,” says Pollock. The innovative design saw shoppers spiralling down 27 storeys of continuous retail space. The same format was later borrowed for Shibuya’s famous Tokyu Hands department store – which, sadly, is also due to close in November 2026.

Naha Tower Building

Among the southernmost islands in the Japanese archipelago, Okinawa is often described as the Hawaii of Japan – defined by its blazing heat, subtropical beaches, turquoise waters and blustery typhoons. 

Its indigenous culture was an inspiration for the low-slung, two-storey Naha Civic Hall, another “vanished” project by Okinawa-born architect Nobuyoshi Kinjo that has been closed since 2016 for safety concerns. The same city’s Tower Building, though, is modernist through-and-through, with a black cubic base and a top-heavy drum. It became an overnight sensation upon opening in 1973, says Pollock, adding flair and sophistication to the downtown area.

“The white drum on top had observation decks and even a revolving restaurant,” Pollock continues. “The architect’s son remembered going there with his parents – by the time you’d finished your meal, you’d seen 360 degrees of Naha. And that was super exciting for the locals, for whom the future looked so rosy.”

Chofu Police Box, Tokyo

In Tokyo, one of the safest cities in the world, the role of the police is to keep misbehaviour to a minimum – but it’s also to help the people, says Pollock. And so, in 1983, the National Police Agency started inviting emerging architects to design “tiny two-man police stations” — with police boxes intended to be “fun and friendly” points of daily contact with the community. “You could ask anything – from ‘where can I get a cup of coffee?’, or ‘I lost my bike key, what do I do now?’,” says Pollock. “It was a campaign to improve strength in the relationship between the police and the people. And they enlisted architecture to do that.” 

Chofu Police Box’s architect was Kazuyo Sejima – recipient of the Pritzker Prize in 2010, and more recently recognisable as the designer of the Sumida Hokusai Museum, home of woodblock-print works by the artist most famous for The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Years prior, this skinny and minimalist two-storey police building, incorporating polished concrete, a glass roof and a cylindrical void, “was such a contrast to the tall buildings, tons of signage and train station hub outside, in the suburbs,” says Pollock. “It stood out by virtue of being small and extremely elegant.”

Though Chofu Police Box was demolished in 2008 to make way for local railway expansion, there are still plenty of inspiring police box designs out there in the wider Tokyo metropolis. “There’s one in Ueno Park that looks like a spaceship, and another in the middle of Shibuya that comes together like an eagle’s beak where the road splits,” says Pollock. “My favourite is opposite the moat, connected to the Asahi newspaper building. It’s a cylindrical building with a kind of cap sitting on top – an architectural version of a policeman’s hat.”

Vanishing Japan: Modern Architecture, Gone But Not Forgotten, published by Thames & Hudson, is out 20 August.

In the decades after suffering widespread urban devastation at the end of the first world war – and onwards, all the way through to the 1990s – Japan embarked on one of the most dramatic building booms in modern history. During these decades, an unprecedented number of large buildings – city halls, theatres, museums, sports centres, schools, hotels and department stores – were erected as societal recovery and renewed economic might saw the country join a global push towards fresh, modernist thinking. 

As Japan rebuilt, neighbourhoods once razed became fertile grounds for architectural experimentation as developers sought to make buildings that suited modern lifestyles. But in a country as earthquake-prone as Japan – where the concept of impermanence is woven into the very fabric of society via the traditional Buddhist beliefs held by many of its citizens – changing aesthetics, social needs and seismic standards have also ensured that just as many masterworks would later be scrapped, replaced or rebuilt.

“Buildings come down with such regularity that I now have an endangered species list,” says architect Naomi Pollock, the author of Vanishing Japan, an upcoming book from Thames & Hudson. The publication celebrates structural marvels from Northern Sapporo down to coastal Okinawa. Among them are such ubiquitous designs as the Nakagin Capsule Tower, which once housed 140 cantilevered and porthole-windowed spacest-block-9-pod apartments; the original 1960s Hotel Okura, featured in the James Bond outing You Only Live Twice; and creations by award-winning architects famous for everything from international landmarks to kooky public toilets.

Though the works collated in Vanishing Japan couldn’t defy their inevitable extinction in a country repeatedly subjected to both natural and manmade destruction, the book offers a fascinating glimpse into an all-too-brief existence defined by growth, optimism, and even bold one-upmanship. To mark its release, Pollock selects five gone-but-not-forgotten highlights of her research below.

Idemitsu Apollo Gas Stations [Lead image]

In 1956, Japan was on the cusp of a scintillating automobile revolution. “The war was barely in the rear-view mirror,” says Pollock, “and as people became more affluent, they began buying cars.” The same year, Idemitsu Kosan – one of Japan’s largest petroleum companies – would commission the building of dozens of unique gas stations by leading designers, in a move that was “emblematic of that forward momentum, communicating in tiny buildings that the future was going to be exciting.”

One of those architects was Junzo Sakakura, who had previously risen to studio chief at Swiss-French architecture icon Le Corbusier’s studio in France in the 30s. “He did many sculptural concrete buildings [that bore] the imprints of working with Le Corbusier,” says Pollock – but sadly, many of his great works, like Hashima City Hall, the grand original West Plaza of Shinjuku Station, and even the first toll booth designs on Japan’s highways, have been demolished or substantially altered with the changing times.

Sakakura’s Idemitsu Gas Stations suffered the same fate as car dimensions and gas technologies evolved over the decades thereafter. Now, the mushroom-like circular roofs over Ikebukuro station, and the shard-like angles at the Namba site, exist only as memories of a future imagined from a mid-century vantage – though the red-and-white colour scheme and stylised logo of the Greek god Apollo, still found at contemporary ‘apollostations’ today, serve as a reminder of these imaginative roots. 

Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium

“89 of the buildings profiled in this book were torn down by the time it was finished,” says Pollock. “The 90th is hanging in life support.”

In Vanishing Japan, Pollock describes Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium as a “ship-shaped masterpiece [that] looks more like Noah’s Ark than a municipal gym” – and indeed, its future undulates much like the curves of its saddle-shaped roof. Over a decade since its closure following a structural inspection in 2014, the local government has now marked the concrete structure for demolition in September 2026 – sparking protests and preservation campaigns from around the world.

Designer Kenzo Tange is “perhaps the most important architect to come out of the immediate post-war period” in Japan, says Pollock. He was the man responsible for the reconstruction of Hiroshima – including the creation of the city’s powerful Peace Memorial Park – after its atomic bombing in 1945. The Yoyogi National Gymnasium in Tokyo, completed in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, meanwhile, was described as “among the most beautiful buildings of the 20th century” when Tange received the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1987.

“I feel very passionate about this one,” says Pollock, of the site in Kagawa. “If it were built today, architecture aficionados from all over the world would be flocking to see it. What an astounding impression it must have made when it came out of the ground in 1964.”

Sony Building, Tokyo

“For a long time,” says Pollock, “Sony was really the company that we associated the most with cutting-edge technological developments.” The Japanese corporation had set the world alight with the first dual-band transistor radio in 1957, and the portable Sony Walkman would prove no less revolutionary when it debuted in 1979, selling hundreds of millions of units in the decades thereafter. 

In 1966, the electronics manufacturer would wow Tokyo’s flashy Ginza shopping district with the opening of a similarly innovative retail building at the edge of the busy Sukiyabashi Crossing. It was designed by Yoshinobu Asihara, architect of the iconic concrete Olympic Park Control Tower and Park in Komazawa, and stood for 51 years before being demolished in 2017.

“This intersection still has a lot of large neon signs, which are a little bit disorderly, as neon tends to be in Japan,” says Pollock. “But the Sony Building had this gridded design, with the Sony logo at the top, so from the street it was striking. And it had this remarkable elevator shaft covered in beautiful moving lights” – the result of some 2,300 cathode-ray tube TVs. 

Inside, it was essentially a showroom for Sony products. “You’d go up to the top, and then move through each floor to see all the latest TVs and other products,” says Pollock. The innovative design saw shoppers spiralling down 27 storeys of continuous retail space. The same format was later borrowed for Shibuya’s famous Tokyu Hands department store – which, sadly, is also due to close in November 2026.

Naha Tower Building

Among the southernmost islands in the Japanese archipelago, Okinawa is often described as the Hawaii of Japan – defined by its blazing heat, subtropical beaches, turquoise waters and blustery typhoons. 

Its indigenous culture was an inspiration for the low-slung, two-storey Naha Civic Hall, another “vanished” project by Okinawa-born architect Nobuyoshi Kinjo that has been closed since 2016 for safety concerns. The same city’s Tower Building, though, is modernist through-and-through, with a black cubic base and a top-heavy drum. It became an overnight sensation upon opening in 1973, says Pollock, adding flair and sophistication to the downtown area.

“The white drum on top had observation decks and even a revolving restaurant,” Pollock continues. “The architect’s son remembered going there with his parents – by the time you’d finished your meal, you’d seen 360 degrees of Naha. And that was super exciting for the locals, for whom the future looked so rosy.”

Chofu Police Box, Tokyo

In Tokyo, one of the safest cities in the world, the role of the police is to keep misbehaviour to a minimum – but it’s also to help the people, says Pollock. And so, in 1983, the National Police Agency started inviting emerging architects to design “tiny two-man police stations” — with police boxes intended to be “fun and friendly” points of daily contact with the community. “You could ask anything – from ‘where can I get a cup of coffee?’, or ‘I lost my bike key, what do I do now?’,” says Pollock. “It was a campaign to improve strength in the relationship between the police and the people. And they enlisted architecture to do that.” 

Chofu Police Box’s architect was Kazuyo Sejima – recipient of the Pritzker Prize in 2010, and more recently recognisable as the designer of the Sumida Hokusai Museum, home of woodblock-print works by the artist most famous for The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Years prior, this skinny and minimalist two-storey police building, incorporating polished concrete, a glass roof and a cylindrical void, “was such a contrast to the tall buildings, tons of signage and train station hub outside, in the suburbs,” says Pollock. “It stood out by virtue of being small and extremely elegant.”

Though Chofu Police Box was demolished in 2008 to make way for local railway expansion, there are still plenty of inspiring police box designs out there in the wider Tokyo metropolis. “There’s one in Ueno Park that looks like a spaceship, and another in the middle of Shibuya that comes together like an eagle’s beak where the road splits,” says Pollock. “My favourite is opposite the moat, connected to the Asahi newspaper building. It’s a cylindrical building with a kind of cap sitting on top – an architectural version of a policeman’s hat.”

Vanishing Japan: Modern Architecture, Gone But Not Forgotten, published by Thames & Hudson, is out 20 August.