Culture News

Japan's vanishing buildings and 1860s Yokohama: a book and a photo project look back

Two pieces this week asked what Japan keeps and what it lets go. On October 24, The Japan Times reviewed Vanishing Japan by architect and writer Naomi Pollock, calling it a beautiful record of demolished architectural masterpieces and of Japan's penchant for constant rebuilding. Two days earlier, The Guardian published a gallery from photographer Giada Ripa's Yokohama project.

Ripa's work, The Guardian says, combines archive photography from the 1860s, a modern dominatrix, and the story of a relative who became a muse to 19th-century artists and intellectuals. Yokohama was one of the first ports opened to foreign trade in that decade, which makes it a natural setting for a project about past and present meeting.

Pollock's book takes the opposite route: rather than layering old images onto the present, it documents buildings that are already gone. The Japan Times review asks the question in its headline: what is lost when buildings fall?

How each outlet framed it

• The Japan Times — a book review: architecture as heritage, and a country that habitually tears down and rebuilds.
• The Guardian — an art photography gallery: Japan's past as a personal, family story told through archive images.

For readers, the two make a pair: one is a reference book on lost buildings, the other a visual essay that can be browsed online. Both treat change in Japan as something to record rather than to mourn outright.

What we don't know yet: neither piece lists which demolished buildings Pollock includes, or whether Ripa's Yokohama project will be shown in a gallery.