The Okura seems to be an acceptable loss to Japan. It is not purely Japanese enough, nor purely Modernist enough, to be saved.

... I quickly learned that to those more familiar with the Japanese cityscape, the Okura’s impending destruction is anything but an anomaly. Eric Mumford, an architecture professor and the author of “Defining Urban Design,” told me in an email: “In East Asia, the mainstream attitude toward old buildings is more or less like ours about old clothes. The idea is that once something built gets old and worn, it loses value, becomes unsanitary, and should probably be replaced. Most of Toyko today only dates back to the 1980s for this reason. Really important buildings in Japan, (like, famously, the Ise Shrine,) are regularly rebuilt in the same form, but with new materials.”

Seng Kuan, an architectural historian at Washington University in St. Louis, who spends part of each year in Tokyo, wasn’t shocked either. “It hardly came as a surprise,” he said. “Tokyo has become a far more vertical city than even 10 years ago, spearheaded largely by Mori and Mitsubishi, two of Japan’s largest developers, so the economic pressure is enormous. Of course I am saddened by the loss, but frankly no more so than with any other episode of urban metabolism we see in a vibrant city like Tokyo.”

Really? Why tear down a hotel that’s not only unique but famous and popular, too? Since 1962, when it was completed, the Okura has been a favorite landing spot for stars and a watering hole for Japanese government officials and for the folks working at the American Embassy, across the street. Madonna, Michael Jackson and Harrison Ford all stayed at the Okura, and almost every post-1960s American president visited it. It has been the backdrop for some notable books and movies, too: In Ian Fleming’s novel “You Only Live Twice,” it’s where James Bond stays, and it figures in the opening scenes of Cary Grant’s last movie, “Walk Don’t Run.”

Hotel Okura
Hotel Okura © cnn

What in the world can explain Japan’s apathy — bordering on antipathy — toward the Okura? One possible reason, only hinted at, is that although the hotel was designed by Japanese architects and craftsmen, it might yet be construed in Japan as a touch Orientalist. That is, the Okura’s much-beloved harmony of Japanese and Modernist design might be read as blurring the difference between the two, making the East seem less foreign and, as Edward W. Said wrote in “Orientalism,” “less fearsome” to the West.

For whatever reason, the Okura seems to be an acceptable loss to Japan. It is not purely Japanese enough, nor purely Modernist enough, to be saved. It is not a temple, not a tree, not a neighborhood, not a monument, not new enough, not old enough. It’s only obvious if you see it in person that the Okura’s end would mean not just the end of a building, but also the end of an idea and the end of an atmosphere and a topography....