The City Rebuilt

In 1923, Tokyo stopped being Tokyo. The Great Kanto earthquake came through in September and destroyed the city so completely that most of it was just rubble. Two million people, most of them living in wooden buildings, and suddenly the buildings were gone. A hundred thousand dead. A million and a half homeless. That’s not a tragedy that happened to the city—that’s the city ceasing to exist.

But then it came back. A few decades later, Tokyo was Tokyo again, rebuilt from scratch into something different. Not the same city, because you can’t rebuild a city exactly the way it was. You build the next version of it. The people who lived in the wooden buildings are gone, and their Tokyo is gone, and we call the new thing by the same name.

This kept happening. Tokyo rebuilt after the earthquake, and then it rebuilt again during the war, and kept rebuilding each time something knocked it down. The city sits on fault lines, so the ground keeps reminding it that nothing is permanent. You can look at modern Tokyo—all the neon and glass and hypermodernity—and underneath it is the memory of complete erasure. Not old memory. Recent memory. The grandparents of people alive now experienced that destruction.

There’s something about cities that makes them keep going even when they’ve had every reason to stop. Tokyo became Tokyo again after being erased, and it stayed Tokyo, and it grew into something bigger, and it sits there waiting for the next earthquake that will probably happen in a few decades. That’s just what cities do. They disappear and come back as themselves.

I think about this when I think about making things—about design, about building something you know will probably be destroyed or changed or have to be rebuilt. You build anyway. That’s what people do. That’s what cities do. They collapse and get rebuilt because staying fallen isn’t an option.