ON AMERICAN LINES

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 148, 19 December 1929, Page 15

ON AMERICAN LINES

REBUILDING TOKIO

PARADISE OF ARCHITECTS

Enter Tokio in search of old Japan, and what do you find?

Streets like tho trenches of the old "Western front; skyscrapers lifted astonishingly above the paper house of the past; hoardings and holes in the ground at every turn; piles of stone, brick, and timber strewn this way and that alone winding motor-car ways liko tho first dirt roads of a mining camp; masons steam drills, and nimble workmen poised precariously in mid-air; apartment houses more spacious than Queen Anne s mansions planted on recent rice holds. A veritable Paradise of architects and the happy hunting ground of an army of plumbers, writes a correspondent in the "Daily Mail." This is J-Okio in tho throes of reconstruction on mass production lines. Nothing like it has ever been attempted by any other great city. It is as though a geniei had suddenly been summoned to reclothe tho capital in European dress, and to do it almost overnight. The schemes of Kemal Pasha at Angora and tho laborious expansion of New Delhi seem pitiful in comparison. The Japanese have simply palled up Tokio by the roots and are planting a modern metropolis from seeds obtained largely in tho United States. You may dislike the result—many toreigners do—but you cannot help admiring the tremendous effort it involves. I have heard some critics ask where the money is coming from. The answer interests only the Japanese, and they_are not worrying over it. UP-TO-DATE IN EVERYTHING. The new heart of Tokio is a faithful replica of American business communities. Wide streets are framed in towering office structures of plain but practical design. To walk through the long ground-floor arcades of tho Marinoumchi building is like returning to Chicago or New York. Batteries of high-speed lifts, controlled by a spectacled "dispatcher," carry tho new type of Japanese business man to his suite of American offices on ono of the upper floors. The click of Japanese typewriters echoes in tho long corridors. Typists in short skirts and male clerks in white trousers and silk ties flit about in a serious way. Telephone bells are ringing on all sides. Japanese Big Business shows I itself in gold spectacles and correct lounge jackets, putting through deals with thin staccato dialogue that falls strangely on Western ears. It is rather pathetic to gee country folk wander dazedly and with an air of helplessness through one of these unfamiliar hives of human activity. They slip-slop along in their wooden clogs, looking so old-fashioned in their kimonos, with their necks craned at the startling masses of steel and mortar above them, awed and strangely uncomfortable in such a Gargantuan setting. They paddle back to the normal level of one-story houses with the feel-i ing that a heavy nightmare has : been ' lifted from their perplexed minds. WONDERrtTL BUILDINGS. | . These new buildings are not shoddy imitations of European structures such as are found elsewhere in tho East They have solidity and permanence' The magnificent Houses of Parliament" now approaching completion on rising ground behind Hibiya Park, would be a credit to any capital. The new railway stations of Tokio and Yokohama show a spaciousness and a com-mon-sense perception of modern needs that put London's archaic terminals to shame. Not so long ago the jinricksha was the universal method of transportation in Tokio. To-day the jinricksha is almost a curiosity. Taxicabs, larger and more powerful than those of London swarm the broken streets, and their cost is very reasonable. The 45-minute journey by electric tram between Tokio and Yokohama is a revelation of the " spirit of reconstruction. Automatic telephones will soon be installed everywhere. Tramway services are being extended in all directions. ■ . .

It is all very wonderful, and doubtless inevitable, and yet—the friends of PH? mVhf> come here with memories ot.the Tokio of a quarter of a century ago feel lost and not a little regretful ot the charm that has vanished.