Jonathan Reynolds
Associate Professor of Japanese Architecture and Photography
Barnard College/Columbia University
“The Young Female Urban Nomads ”: Imagined Migration through Tokyo in the Days before the Bubble Burst”
Friday, April 9, 4-6 pm
CWAC 156
Abstract
At the height of Japan’s economic bubble in the late 1970s and 1980s, certain architects, and merchants and their advertisers promoted a fantasy that Tokyo’s young female office workers, whose lives revolved around constant rounds of work, commuting and shopping, had become “urban nomads.” In her advertising posters placed in Tokyo commuter trains for the fashion department store chair Parco, the designer Ishioka Eiko invited young women to recognize themselves in startling photographs of “nomadic” women from India or north Africa. The architect Itô Tôyô proposed elegant yurt-like structures constructed of steel tubing and perforated metal panels covered with several layers of richly patterned translucent textiles for the use of these young “female urban nomads” as they roamed through the city. In an oddly complimentary fable told by the acclaimed novelist Abe Kobo, a middle class urban dweller abandoned his sheltered and privileged existence to inhabit a cardboard box in the streets. As startlingly different as these urban tales appear to be, they emerged out of the shared perception that life in the contemporary Japanese city had increasingly become a life of constant movement, a life on the street.
