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The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction
Japan’s postwar urban imagination through the Metabolism architecture movement and visionary science fiction authors
The devastation of the Second World War gave rise to imaginations both utopian and apocalyptic. In Japan, a fascinating confluence of architects and science fiction writers took advantage of this space to begin remaking urban design. In The Metabolist Imagination, William O. Gardner explores the unique Metabolism movement, which allied with science fiction authors to foresee the global cities that would emerge in the postwar era.
This first comparative study of postwar Japanese architecture and science fiction builds on the resurgence of interest in Metabolist architecture while establishing new directions for exploration. Gardner focuses on how these innovators created unique versions of shared concepts—including futurity, megastructures, capsules, and cybercities—making lasting contributions that resonate with contemporary conversations around cyberpunk, climate change, anime, and more.
The Metabolist Imagination features original documentation of collaborations between giants of postwar Japanese art and architecture, such as the landmark 1970 Osaka Expo. It also provides the most sustained English-language discussion to date of the work of Komatsu Sakyo, considered one of the “big three” authors of postwar Japanese science fiction. These studies are underscored by Gardner’s insightful approach—treating architecture as a form of speculative fiction while positioning science fiction as an intervention into urban design—making it a necessary read for today’s visionaries.
The devastation of the Second World War gave rise to imaginations both utopian and apocalyptic. In Japan, a fascinating confluence of architects and science fiction writers took advantage of this space to begin remaking urban design. In The Metabolist Imagination, William O. Gardner explores the unique Metabolism movement, which allied with science fiction authors to foresee the global cities that would emerge in the postwar era.
This first comparative study of postwar Japanese architecture and science fiction builds on the resurgence of interest in Metabolist architecture while establishing new directions for exploration. Gardner focuses on how these innovators created unique versions of shared concepts—including futurity, megastructures, capsules, and cybercities—making lasting contributions that resonate with contemporary conversations around cyberpunk, climate change, anime, and more.
The Metabolist Imagination features original documentation of collaborations between giants of postwar Japanese art and architecture, such as the landmark 1970 Osaka Expo. It also provides the most sustained English-language discussion to date of the work of Komatsu Sakyo, considered one of the “big three” authors of postwar Japanese science fiction. These studies are underscored by Gardner’s insightful approach—treating architecture as a form of speculative fiction while positioning science fiction as an intervention into urban design—making it a necessary read for today’s visionaries.
224 pages, Paperback
Published April 14, 2020
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January 7, 2026
On the first floor of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City stands a white cubic room with minimalist design. It features a round window, a bed, a writing desk with a red typewriter on it, and a wall cabinet. The cube is one of the surviving artifacts of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, an iconic Metabolist architecture completed in 1972, two years after the renowned 1970 Osaka Expo regarded as the climax of the Metabolist movement. 140 capsule rooms were “plugged into” the Tower’s megastructure. The planned accommodation of heightened flexibility and mobility on a comparatively more permanent structure signified the coexistence and co-configuration of different scales of lifetimes: from the few months or years of use of interior items to the few decades of the capsule’s lifespan, from the decades-long human life to the recurring entropic cycles of a city’s building and destruction and rebuilding, or from a mere few seconds of a cell to millions of years of a star. The Metabolist attention to scale was a speculative narrative of bypassing “the chaos of dense streets, zoning regulations, and convoluted land ownership issues, seeking solutions outside of the existing urban framework. As was understood by the Metabolists, architecture, metaphysically, is about time.
The time that concerned the Japanese Metabolists was the High Growth Era in post-World War II years — or a “rent” in time, as SF novelist Komatsu Sakyō put it. 15 years after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and much of Nagoya, Tokyo, and other major Japanese cities were leveled, a small group of emerging Japanese architects who identified themselves as the Metabolists wrote the Metabolist Manifesto against the backdrop of Japan’s destruction and postwar reconstruction. Organizing themselves around the concept of “metabolism,” or Shinchintaisha (新陳代謝), the Metabolists interpreted architecture not as a complete static product, but rather as an organic agent in the city’s continuous process of growth, change, decay, and regeneration — perhaps relocation too — that fundamentally underpinned the vitality of urban past, present, and future. Here, the city itself is an organism as well. In their “metabolist imagination” was a combined view of the utopic and the apocalyptic. As in the vision of the architect Isozaki Arata, “all future cities are ruins.” But instead of seeing ruins as the grave of creation, the Metabolists turned ruins into a productive site where literary narrative and architecture converge in the critical spiritual appreciation of impermanence, a temporal loop in which the city is built, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, in the mixed forces of earthquake, climate change, sea level rise, warfare, nuclear leak, plague, and other natural and manmade calamities.
In his seminal study of the Metabolist movement and Japanese literature, William Gardner captures the coalescing of futuristic architecture and science/speculative fiction (SF). The Metabolist architects did not just see their job as designing a building, but in and through design they narrated their utopic-apocalyptic theory and story about the future in ruins. Iconic Metabolist designs included Tange Kenzō’s 1960 Tokyo Bay, Kikutake Kiyonori’s Marine City and Tower-Shaped Community in Shibuya, Kurokawa Kisho’s Helix City, Isozaki Atara’s City in the Air, and Kurokawa Kishō’s Nakagin Capsule Tower. While many of these designs remained on the paper due to various financial and political complications, as a whole they instigated imaginations of living in, building upon, and making sense of a world spinning in a dramatic, instantaneous, and devastating catastrophe show.
Resonating powerfully with the Metabolist movement’s planetary thinking were a number of their contemporaneous SF writers. One of the most prominent was Komatsu Sakyō. Komatsu published Virus: The Day of Resurrection (1964), The Japan Apache Tribe (1964), and Japan Sinks (1973), in the meantime becoming heavily involved in the planning and production of Theme Zone of the 1970 Osaka Expo. Different from his counterparts in Europe and North America who characterized the globalizing world as a self-balanced cohesion, Komatsu confronted the “geopolitical frictions [and] gaps in global connections.” The hyperconnectivity praised by other SF writers was seen by Komatsu through the lens of fragility and “sudden, catastrophic change” that he believed constituted global ecology. Like epidemics, the rapid and skippy emergence of connected phenomena might not have been adequately and systematically understood by the human mind before it is already affecting and permanently altering life everywhere.
Komatsu proposed a theory of “the space of ruins” that summarized his theory of both SF and the city. Gardner explains that “within this space, ‘things that happened’ (atta koto), ‘things that might happen’ (ari-eru koto), and ‘things that could never happen’ (ari-enai koto) are all equals. Furthermore, in the ‘non-Euclidean geometry’ governing the ‘space of ruins,’ the three temporalities of past, present, and future are only random points or segments placed at will on a line, and any segment of this line can be erased or superimposed with another.” Linear progress, in this light, is a technocratic illusion built upon forgetfulness and negligence. It is not always for the benefit of mankind and planet Earth.
The 1970 Osaka Expo was the turning point in the history of World’s Fairs where the exhibition shifted from displaying the “hardware” of design to the “software” to feature the advent of an “information society” and the developed world’s transition to a postindustrial economy. Not without controversy from within and beyond the planning committee, the Expo promoted the theme of “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” The motto reflected the state-sanctioned discourse of the prosperity brought by technological advancement in what some critics called an increasingly corporatized “construction state.” But the recent and ongoing traumas of war and displacement, from the atomic bombs to the Cold War in Korea and Vietnam, said the opposite was true. Even the designer of the Expo’s symbol, the Tower of the Sun, Okamoto Tarō, had a dissenting view. The winged tower has multiple faces: on its crown is a metallic birdlike “Golden Face” reigning high above, a cubist-inspired “Face of the Sun” at the core of the tower facing frontward toward the Expo park’s entrance, a menacing “Black Sun” facing the rear, and a “Subterranean Sun” at the underground exhibition area. The “primitivist, kitschy appearance” of the multi-faced tower unsettled the official attempt to homogenize and harmonize the implications of technology’s relationship with humanity.
The Expo was bookended by the redevelopment of two major commuter and commercial centers to the west of Tokyo — Shinjuku in the 1960s and Shibuya in the 1970s. Between these two projects, grassroots counterculture and protests against centralized state power and the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty became increasingly surveiled and monitored, while blatant consumerism took the upper hand. Some of this popular criticism from the left was also directed at the Expo and the cybernetic capsular lifestyle it displayed. For the first time in World’s Fairs’ history, the Osaka park experimented with a mediatized environment: large computers simulating and controlling lighting, sound, and other sensorial experiences while dashboards counted and channeled the flow of visitors across the site. Between the Expo park and real cities, between rehearsal and reality, the line of governing was blurred at best. It raised the anxiety of both a further atomized society that relinquished communal life and an unprecedented ubiquitous state power extending from land to sea, from public to domestic spaces, at the cost of individual and community autonomy.
Half a century after the height of the Metabolist movement and the first ever World’s Fair in Asia, the existence of time loops seems to be proved again. Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics in 1964 and Osaka held the World Expo in 1970. Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics in 2021, delayed a year by a global pandemic (a theme frequently explored in Japanese SF), and Osaka held the World Expo in 2025. Earthquake, tsunami, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, and multiple financial recessions in 1991 (end of the real estate bubble economy), 1997, and 2008 have constantly shaped the growth and decay cycles of Japanese economic, political, and technological production. Architecture has stories to tell, and stories are architectural space-times. They both are about futures, whether still being incubated or always already in ruins.
I stood next to the lonely surviving Nakagin capsule in MoMA, barely six months after my visit to both the Osaka Expo sites. Like the performance artist Yanobe Kenji, I could not help feeling the specter of a Metabolist future that was no more, regardless of its controversy. Yet, as a specter, Metabolist design can be resurrected in different fields of work. It remains an organic, undead metaphor for thinking about structure and scale in times of heightened, perpetuated precarity, in architecture, urban planning, education, social work, design and art, and many more. The Greek architect Lydia Kallipoliti and her colleagues are thinking of metabolism in the infrastructural circulation of food and resources. The frame-and-capsule structure from half a century ago carries on the viral and vital dynamics of the Japanese architecture revolution by giving intellectuals renewed, critical passion for being human in a cybernetic world, for coming to terms with building radical, translocal relations in fragments on the damaged planet, for embracing spheric and planetary imaginations despite, and because of, sectarianism across scales. The Black Sun on the back of Osaka’s Tower of the Sun shines on alternative paths to futures by excavating, relocating, and weaving into different productive fabrics the capsules of the past.
The time that concerned the Japanese Metabolists was the High Growth Era in post-World War II years — or a “rent” in time, as SF novelist Komatsu Sakyō put it. 15 years after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and much of Nagoya, Tokyo, and other major Japanese cities were leveled, a small group of emerging Japanese architects who identified themselves as the Metabolists wrote the Metabolist Manifesto against the backdrop of Japan’s destruction and postwar reconstruction. Organizing themselves around the concept of “metabolism,” or Shinchintaisha (新陳代謝), the Metabolists interpreted architecture not as a complete static product, but rather as an organic agent in the city’s continuous process of growth, change, decay, and regeneration — perhaps relocation too — that fundamentally underpinned the vitality of urban past, present, and future. Here, the city itself is an organism as well. In their “metabolist imagination” was a combined view of the utopic and the apocalyptic. As in the vision of the architect Isozaki Arata, “all future cities are ruins.” But instead of seeing ruins as the grave of creation, the Metabolists turned ruins into a productive site where literary narrative and architecture converge in the critical spiritual appreciation of impermanence, a temporal loop in which the city is built, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, in the mixed forces of earthquake, climate change, sea level rise, warfare, nuclear leak, plague, and other natural and manmade calamities.
In his seminal study of the Metabolist movement and Japanese literature, William Gardner captures the coalescing of futuristic architecture and science/speculative fiction (SF). The Metabolist architects did not just see their job as designing a building, but in and through design they narrated their utopic-apocalyptic theory and story about the future in ruins. Iconic Metabolist designs included Tange Kenzō’s 1960 Tokyo Bay, Kikutake Kiyonori’s Marine City and Tower-Shaped Community in Shibuya, Kurokawa Kisho’s Helix City, Isozaki Atara’s City in the Air, and Kurokawa Kishō’s Nakagin Capsule Tower. While many of these designs remained on the paper due to various financial and political complications, as a whole they instigated imaginations of living in, building upon, and making sense of a world spinning in a dramatic, instantaneous, and devastating catastrophe show.
Resonating powerfully with the Metabolist movement’s planetary thinking were a number of their contemporaneous SF writers. One of the most prominent was Komatsu Sakyō. Komatsu published Virus: The Day of Resurrection (1964), The Japan Apache Tribe (1964), and Japan Sinks (1973), in the meantime becoming heavily involved in the planning and production of Theme Zone of the 1970 Osaka Expo. Different from his counterparts in Europe and North America who characterized the globalizing world as a self-balanced cohesion, Komatsu confronted the “geopolitical frictions [and] gaps in global connections.” The hyperconnectivity praised by other SF writers was seen by Komatsu through the lens of fragility and “sudden, catastrophic change” that he believed constituted global ecology. Like epidemics, the rapid and skippy emergence of connected phenomena might not have been adequately and systematically understood by the human mind before it is already affecting and permanently altering life everywhere.
Komatsu proposed a theory of “the space of ruins” that summarized his theory of both SF and the city. Gardner explains that “within this space, ‘things that happened’ (atta koto), ‘things that might happen’ (ari-eru koto), and ‘things that could never happen’ (ari-enai koto) are all equals. Furthermore, in the ‘non-Euclidean geometry’ governing the ‘space of ruins,’ the three temporalities of past, present, and future are only random points or segments placed at will on a line, and any segment of this line can be erased or superimposed with another.” Linear progress, in this light, is a technocratic illusion built upon forgetfulness and negligence. It is not always for the benefit of mankind and planet Earth.
The 1970 Osaka Expo was the turning point in the history of World’s Fairs where the exhibition shifted from displaying the “hardware” of design to the “software” to feature the advent of an “information society” and the developed world’s transition to a postindustrial economy. Not without controversy from within and beyond the planning committee, the Expo promoted the theme of “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” The motto reflected the state-sanctioned discourse of the prosperity brought by technological advancement in what some critics called an increasingly corporatized “construction state.” But the recent and ongoing traumas of war and displacement, from the atomic bombs to the Cold War in Korea and Vietnam, said the opposite was true. Even the designer of the Expo’s symbol, the Tower of the Sun, Okamoto Tarō, had a dissenting view. The winged tower has multiple faces: on its crown is a metallic birdlike “Golden Face” reigning high above, a cubist-inspired “Face of the Sun” at the core of the tower facing frontward toward the Expo park’s entrance, a menacing “Black Sun” facing the rear, and a “Subterranean Sun” at the underground exhibition area. The “primitivist, kitschy appearance” of the multi-faced tower unsettled the official attempt to homogenize and harmonize the implications of technology’s relationship with humanity.
The Expo was bookended by the redevelopment of two major commuter and commercial centers to the west of Tokyo — Shinjuku in the 1960s and Shibuya in the 1970s. Between these two projects, grassroots counterculture and protests against centralized state power and the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty became increasingly surveiled and monitored, while blatant consumerism took the upper hand. Some of this popular criticism from the left was also directed at the Expo and the cybernetic capsular lifestyle it displayed. For the first time in World’s Fairs’ history, the Osaka park experimented with a mediatized environment: large computers simulating and controlling lighting, sound, and other sensorial experiences while dashboards counted and channeled the flow of visitors across the site. Between the Expo park and real cities, between rehearsal and reality, the line of governing was blurred at best. It raised the anxiety of both a further atomized society that relinquished communal life and an unprecedented ubiquitous state power extending from land to sea, from public to domestic spaces, at the cost of individual and community autonomy.
Half a century after the height of the Metabolist movement and the first ever World’s Fair in Asia, the existence of time loops seems to be proved again. Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics in 1964 and Osaka held the World Expo in 1970. Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics in 2021, delayed a year by a global pandemic (a theme frequently explored in Japanese SF), and Osaka held the World Expo in 2025. Earthquake, tsunami, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, and multiple financial recessions in 1991 (end of the real estate bubble economy), 1997, and 2008 have constantly shaped the growth and decay cycles of Japanese economic, political, and technological production. Architecture has stories to tell, and stories are architectural space-times. They both are about futures, whether still being incubated or always already in ruins.
I stood next to the lonely surviving Nakagin capsule in MoMA, barely six months after my visit to both the Osaka Expo sites. Like the performance artist Yanobe Kenji, I could not help feeling the specter of a Metabolist future that was no more, regardless of its controversy. Yet, as a specter, Metabolist design can be resurrected in different fields of work. It remains an organic, undead metaphor for thinking about structure and scale in times of heightened, perpetuated precarity, in architecture, urban planning, education, social work, design and art, and many more. The Greek architect Lydia Kallipoliti and her colleagues are thinking of metabolism in the infrastructural circulation of food and resources. The frame-and-capsule structure from half a century ago carries on the viral and vital dynamics of the Japanese architecture revolution by giving intellectuals renewed, critical passion for being human in a cybernetic world, for coming to terms with building radical, translocal relations in fragments on the damaged planet, for embracing spheric and planetary imaginations despite, and because of, sectarianism across scales. The Black Sun on the back of Osaka’s Tower of the Sun shines on alternative paths to futures by excavating, relocating, and weaving into different productive fabrics the capsules of the past.
May 7, 2021
A brilliant and concise work that examines several specific works of postwar Japanese SF and links them to the Metabolist proposals of the 1960s. Want to link mecha anime to Osaka '70's capsule constructions, or learn about the specific references in the opening scenes of Akira, or learn about nuclear anxieties in Japanese SF books that haven't been translated into English but Garder does a good job summarizing and contextualizing? This is a read for you!
March 28, 2024
A captivating exploration of Metabolism and its influence on Japanese science fiction, the 1970s Osaka Expo, iconic animation film such as Patlabor and Akira, as well as various multimedial arts. It devles into historical contexts, ideological frameworks, and incisive critiques to unravel one of postwar Japan's most intriguing and daring architectural movements. I'll definitely read it again.
March 19, 2025
some omissions i thought were odd (tsutomu nihei...) but informative and fun.
October 20, 2022
really good. this is the first time I've read a historical analysis of cyberpunk, specifically cyberpunk visions of the cityscape. really short and punchy, good writing.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews