00:00:01 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to the Nakagin Capsule Tower building that's being demolished this week. Currently it's not actually being demolished right now, but you can see right there they tried really hard to save the Nakagin Capsule Tower and it just wasn't to be. How you doing Keith? Welcome! A lot of people have been walking past the building taking pictures, paying homage to a building that's been here since 1972. This is actually the 50th anniversary of the Nakagin Capsule Tower and it's the end.

00:01:01 John Daub: I'm going to talk a little bit about why they couldn't save it, some of the challenges that they had. I just know there's about 140 of them and some of them are going to be saved and some of them are not. But in this episode I'm going to be walking around the Nakagin Capsule Tower building showing you what stands here today, April 6th, 2022, and maybe when you come to Japan you're going to see something completely different. It does look like Lego blocks, it really does. I've been here hundreds of times and never saw people standing in front of it texting and taking pictures like they are today. Hopefully the signal stays okay.

00:01:37 John Daub: I know that some people that were residing in there moved to this building here. There's a couple of new apartment buildings. Here's the back alley. Wow, it's in the sun here. You can see from the back side it's really not too thick of a building when you look at it from the typical angle from the front. It does look like it could be a much larger building but really from behind it's not as big as what you would think it is. There's only 140 capsules.

00:02:36 John Daub: You can see they're demolishing a lot of the buildings in the area. It's just because they are completely redoing this entire area and a lot of it has to do with earthquake proofing. I guess this was the back part of it. You can see they have ripped it down. Kisho Kurokawa designed this building. He designed it so it could be added to, meaning you could get more people, more capsules in here, make it even taller, make it bigger, and I guess the back side of it they couldn't hold on to it. Demolition really has started in the back here. That's so sad. When I see the bulldozer, I'm like oh my god. That's a bulldozer actually right there pulling down part of the building. Thermal cutter taking out the main rebar.

00:03:48 John Daub: Let me walk to the front door and show you what the sign says because I know that they did put signs out there telling you that you couldn't bring cameras inside. They want to discourage people from taking pictures in there. Now there's nobody there to stop you. There was a dorm in there for a long time and I know that people had bought it. Before the pandemic started I actually had access to film but I was going through a really bad change with the old channel management people and it was a very bad situation so it never came to fruition. One of the TV producers that I work with was a friend of a friend and had a capsule here who gave me permission to film but I just never could do it. Chris Broad has a very good video on his channel that you might want to check out if you want to see the inside of it.

00:04:45 John Daub: It looks like they have cameras here, nothing in English. They used to have a sign in English telling people no trespassing. The doors are probably locked, I'm not going to try it because I don't want to get arrested. There's the front sign to the Nakagin Capsule Tower building. It is end of an era. Let's go on the other side before I pull away and give you a far away view. A distant look at the tower. This wasn't all fenced in either, used to be able to walk underneath the tower here. You can't do that anymore.

00:05:51 John Daub: They had Airbnb here for a very long time and they had to stop doing it about a year ago right before I was going to film. They just started the Airbnb and the prices were like $30, $40 a night and they skyrocketed to about $300 to $400 a night just because the demand was so high. But now it's gone. Now there are 140 capsules here. Each one has its own owner. And that's what made this building pretty unique because the owner theoretically was able to take their capsule out and do whatever they wanted to recondition the capsule, to put it somewhere else, to use it for different purposes or move it back in. If you wanted to move floors you're supposed to be able to do it like Jenga. But like with all of these dream projects it's just impressive that it even was ever built.

00:06:55 John Daub: Would they ever do a replacement? Maybe. But the biggest problem for this was the cost to recondition it for earthquake proofing. They had actually raised about nine million yen, almost one hundred thousand dollars, to try to keep the building, to pay for the renovations. The problem was that when they looked at it realistically it was going to cost two to three billion yen, which is like 20 or 30 million dollars. That is an outrageous amount of money for this building when you could build an entirely new building. It would cost more to build and it would cost more to recondition this for earthquake proofing than it would for building a new building. Here's underneath the capsule, you can see it's just basically sitting on what looks like a metal grid there. And that doesn't look like it's going to last. That's 50-year-old metal work.

00:08:17 John Daub: I don't know how well conditioned it is for a Shindo 7 earthquake if we were to get a really big one. And I believe that they might have had some structural problems with the 2011 earthquake. The concrete, a lot of buildings in Japan are made of concrete. A lot of cracks come about. It does look like Jenga, doesn't it? Like you could just pull one out. That was the intention. 1970 they started construction. They completed it in 1972. It's been here ever since. A lot of these buildings in the area were not nearly as tall. So this was a much more impressive building back in the 1970s and 80s.

00:09:19 John Daub: Some of these capsules have like these lids to keep privacy so that the other capsule can't look into your capsule. So if you had a back capsule there was a little privacy lid there so you couldn't look in there. The back side is pretty unique. You can see some of the capsules just have trash in there. They became storage units. You can see the rusty Nakagin Capsule Tower sign on the top there. They put the nets here because if there's an earthquake they want to make sure that capsule doesn't fall onto the road right there, which it very well could do.

00:10:22 John Daub: I'm gonna go touch the building for you. This is cheesy, I know how cheesy it is but I'm a sentimental person. I'm touching this for you Tokyo Paul and getting what could be toxic stuff in my skin. Actually look, it's starting to, you can see the paint is starting to come off the building here. So it's not really the best maintained and you can see inside the maintenance shed here. They're no longer doing much maintenance for this building. They don't need to do any maintenance anymore. It's coming down. This is the work order here saying who's going to be doing the demolition. It was a good example of Japanese metabolism. Metabolism, that's the type of architecture.

00:11:55 John Daub: Across the street now I want to show you what it looks like from above here. This is maybe the best spot across the highway to see the entire building. The demolition date can happen anytime. I'll be making trips back here every now and then to see if I can get a video of them pulling it down. Metabolism was popular from the 1960s to the 1970s before that there was like this brutalist style that was very popular in the 1950s, 60s and 70s as well. What I really love about Japanese architecture is that from the post-World War II time they weren't about trying to be traditional. They thought outside the box and tried to find a new way to redefine what Japanese was.

00:13:32 John Daub: That's what I think is so unique about architecture after World War II and during the Meiji era you started to see more Western buildings coming about. You see it in using different types of materials but it wasn't until after World War II new buildings had to be slapped up pretty quickly and you get pretty creative. A lot of really big architects like Kisho Kurokawa had unique designs. If you look back in history for the 1964 Olympics you're going to see some amazing architectural designs for the future of Tokyo including like this really amazing grid pattern. They just envisioned a different kind of Tokyo that we have today.

00:14:28 John Daub: The Tokyo Skytree is a really great image of what we think of the future here in Japan. It has a very Japanese sleek style to it but it also looks very global. You can see its profile here with the other buildings that came about after this one was built. These look like some from the 1980s and 90s and then there's one from 1972. This is the Don Quixote in Ginza right there, Shimbashi Don Quixote. This is Shiodome which is a new site that was built in the year 2000, 2001. All these buildings were started popping up at the start of the new millennium and that building just over there where the dome is, just before it is the first, main Tokyo's main train station which was Shimbashi and that building still stands as a museum.

00:16:33 John Daub: It's just a shame that they couldn't find a way to preserve this one but you can kind of understand it. They're doing such a great job of keeping Tokyo really new. There's the Shinkansen (bullet train) going by. You have a really futuristic, clean, interesting city and when you look at the building here on this side the Nakagin Capsule Tower, it totally fits and it doesn't fit.

00:17:29 John Daub: Let's move on over to the stairway here, you get a more unobstructed video shot of it. There was a live streamer inside of one of the capsules who was living there renting, Kawaii Koe-chan I think, and she was doing music and had a little club inside of her capsule and of course she had to move out and she's in a building nearby. The best shot would be from a car driving past it and Peter von Gomm told me he used to ride his motorcycle down this highway and he really liked it because there's not a lot of traffic on it and he always got a nice view of the Nakagin Capsule Tower. This was in a couple of Hollywood movies I think it was in a scene in The Wolverine and it's been in a lot of TV dramas here in Japan. On the top says Nakagin which means like center silver.

00:19:10 John Daub: I did bring my 8K Sony A1 camera and we'll get some background shots of it as well today because it's a nice blue sky, the lighting's great. They do look like washing machines in there and you can see residents that live there would write signs and leave dolls, you would see figures and really neat things from the window with the zoom lens. Now almost everybody's moved out and the ones where you can see stuff in there it's just abandoned. Some of them are going to museums to preserve the metabolism architectural movement as an example. There's a core in the middle of it and that would be the stairway to get up. That one capsule seems to have a lot of new DIY windows there. The owner figured they're not going to be expanding and cut some holes and made his own windows.

00:20:34 John Daub: Each one has its own owners, 140 of them. The problem was threefold. One of them was that they couldn't get all 140 owners to agree on a route to go to preserve this. Each owner had their own opinion. The majority seemed like they were in the right direction, but there were just enough dissenting people. The second one was that the earthquake proofing would have cost 20 to 30 billion yen and they only raised like 9 million yen, which is well short of the entire cost to preserve it.

00:21:36 John Daub: The Imperial Hotel, which is one of the most world famous hotels in the world where the Queen of England stays when she comes here as well as Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were there on their honeymoon, that's going to be renovated for the next eight years. It's not going to reopen until 2030 and that's being renovated partially because they want to make sure that it's okay for really strong earthquakes and up to standard for the future. A lot of these older buildings are getting knocked down because Japan is an earthquake-prone country, so you have to have always increasing standards of buildings. That's why when a strong earthquake does hit, you don't see a lot of buildings that have collapsed and the ones that have are really old ones.

00:22:29 John Daub: Most people in earthquakes don't die from the actual earthquake. They die from fires that are related to the earthquake. The fires were the gas explosions and fires were the things that killed the most people in Kobe. People just didn't want to live in the apartments. They weren't renovated. What made these really unique when it opened in 1972 was that it had almost everything that you needed inside of there. The TV was encased in the capsule, which was a futuristic thing. The bathroom was really small and compact, which was kind of cool, but it's not very comfortable. A lot of the residents lived there for a while and then eventually as they made more money they didn't want to sell it because it was such a unique building, but they also didn't want to live there. So they ended up keeping it.

00:23:56 John Daub: Like most abandoned houses called akiya (空き家, vacant house), you can see some artists also drawing it because they know it's not going to be here much longer. There's an akiya problem. And one of the reasons is people don't want to sell or get rid of their possessions that they have and value. Japanese sometimes are like pack rats and they love to keep stuff. Some owners just never wanted to do anything with it. They left it as storage. They wanted to live their memories from when they started working and used this as their first apartment maybe. I haven't heard of any success stories of somebody moving their capsule to another location. So I'm not sure if Kisho Kurokawa's dream actually 100% came true. But getting this made is in itself an amazing feat. And to lose it is a real part of Japan's DNA, Tokyo's DNA. This building's loss is a loss to the city and to architecture.

00:25:48 John Daub: This highway was here I believe for the 1964 Olympics, the above-ground highway system. The Shiodome behind me was completely nothing here and was built and completed in 2000, 2001, about 20-21 years ago. You could prefabricate this and then stack it on. But isn't the concept pretty cool though? And I think it's starting to come back because I'm seeing on YouTube a lot of people with cargo containers that are making homes out of that. Maybe if it was larger and had bigger windows instead of round windows it would be more in demand. Cargo containers, I don't know how much more you could do to earthquake-proof it.

00:28:40 John Daub: I'm not looking at the chat. So if you have any questions, please ask away. What do you guys think? Are you sad that you're going to miss it? Were you hoping to stay there? Let me know in the chat right now. They couldn't turn it into a love hotel. They couldn't turn it into anything. You can't get 30 million dollars or more to preserve this. It's just too much money. Like Hatojuku Station, it's going to be torn down and then maybe they should rebuild it in a different area, Tokyo maybe? But just can't be here in the center of the city, the property is just too valuable.

00:30:04 John Daub: It is sad to lose it. Next week I'm going to Hokkaido so I'm not going to be here when they start ripping it down but I want to be here and see some of that so I will keep an eye on this. If they do have the bulldozers and cranes coming in here and it becomes a big deal I will come here live stream that too. For those joining us in the back of the Nakagin Capsule Tower building they've already started to tear it down so they have bulldozers, they're starting in the back and moving out to the front. A couple of museums are getting the capsules, a lot of them are architectural museums. A lot of the owners are selling them or getting money for them.

00:31:12 John Daub: I'd like to buy one and have Leo make it like Leo's room or something but we need to put it in a tree somewhere in Nagano, turn it into a treehouse or I don't know. These are supposed to be containers that you buy, you can have them in the city and then you put them on the back of a truck and take it out in the country and bring your capsule. If you've ever seen a Japanese parking garage it maybe works in the same way where you could push a button and the capsules all kind of move around. But I don't think the people who lived in the capsules wanted that kind of a system to always be moving like that movie The Cube. Have you ever seen that movie called The Cube from 1997 where they're trapped in these cubes of death and the cubes are constantly moving? That was a freaky movie, I remember renting it on VHS when I first moved to Japan.

00:32:44 John Daub: One last time and then we're going to return to the door. It is quite a windy day. I started the stream a little late because I had to set up the microphone. A lot of this could have to do because there is no tourism, maybe if some of the owners were making more money from Airbnb they'd have a chance but that stopped. We'll be back here again another time to see when they decide to move the capsules. I gotta come back to film some background video for a future episode on Japanese architecture. I wish I could fly a drone in central Tokyo but I know another YouTuber who tried to fly a drone in Roppongi. I told him not to, he did it anyways, within a minute he had police swarm the park, he ran and hid in a Starbucks and they caught him. They confiscated his drone and he was so apologetic. He never got his drone back. He was in the police station for over 12 or 13 hours. Do not fly a drone, you will get fined or prison time or worse, they can hold you up for up to two weeks.

00:35:32 John Daub: You can see the capsules through there's a good view of the English writing and you can see the eye in the Nakagin looks pretty neat, it's an arrow. Such a snazzy hotel, the Tokyo Station Hotel is a really snazzy place. I remember I was doing an interview for Yokohama Radio and the producers came to meet me for a pre-interview meeting and they bought me a pot of tea, it was thirty dollars. I gave a speech to the concierge association of Japan, about 90 concierges were there listening to what my feelings were on inbound tourism and I got to meet the concierge manager of that hotel. Maybe if there's some history there I can go in and cover it. We really do have to preserve some of this history.

00:37:20 John Daub: This neighborhood is my backyard, I don't live too far away. Ginza avenue would be in this direction here and there's the Don Quixote. If you've ever been in this one, 24 hours a day it's open, you can get a lot of junk food in there. I bought a bicycle there once and rode it to Kyoto. I'm dead serious, it's a true story. I got video of it so one day I'll show it to you. All right everybody, I hope that you enjoyed this. Rest in peace Nakagin Capsule Tower. We'll be back to see the demolition if there's more news from here I will be here to cover it. In Tokyo it's inevitable and it's always going to be part of Tokyo's DNA to consistently evolve. Buildings don't stay around forever. Planning to see Peter von Gomm tomorrow so bookmark this channel for tomorrow.