Tokyo: A Certain Style

Amazon.com Price: $10.00 (as of 05/12/2019 12:47 PST- Details)

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Description

Ah, think of the serene gardens, tatami mats, Zen-inspired decor, sliding doors, and shoji screens of the typical Japanese home. Think again. Tokyo: A Certain Style, the mini-sized decor book with a difference, shows how, for those living in some of the world s most expensive and densely packed metropolises, closet-sized apartments stacked to the ceiling with gadgetry and CDs are the norm. Photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki rode his scooter everywhere Tokyo snapping shots of how urban Japanese in reality live. Hundreds of photographs reveal the real Tokyo style: microapartments, mini and modular everything, rooms filled to the rafters with electronics, piles of books and clothes, clans of remote controls, collections of sundry objets all crammed into a space where every inch counts. Tsuzuki introduces each tiny crash pad with a brief text about who lives there, from artists and students to professionals and couples with children. His entertaining captions to the hundreds of photographs capture the spirit and ingenuity required to live in such small quarters. This fascinating, voyeuristic look at modern life comes in a chunky, pocket-sized format-the perfect coffee table book for people with in reality small apartments.
It’s common for Americans to stereotype the Japanese as conformist, rigidly organized, and immaculately tidy, but with Tokyo: A Certain Style Kyoichi Tsuzuki makes remarkable progress toward broadening those impressions. Tsuzuki photographed the very lived-in interiors of a large number of Tokyo houses and apartments, and then jammed his piles of pictures into the format of a short-of-stature book. The result is an engrossing look at the many ways people have adapted to Tokyo’s notoriously cramped living spaces. There are several common threads–indoor clotheslines are used to supplement or replace closet space in almost every home–but each dwelling brings out its owner’s personality. Some are breathtakingly cluttered, with bric-a-brac piled on electronic equipment and papers stacked on every flat surface, even as others show so little evidence of the debris of daily living that one feels certain sorcery should be involved. Most charming are the “design” elements that blow their own horns the owners’ little quirks: ingeniously improvised hooks and shelves, major appliances banished to the outdoors, and the extensive stuffed animal collection of a grown adult. Many photos simply boggle the mind with the sheer amount of stuff that may be crammed into incredibly small spaces, even as others highlight the bizarre beauty that is steadily achieved in compressed living. Highly recommended for dorm-bound college students or anyone who has ever groused about a lack of space. –Ali Davis

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