It should come as no surprise that the nation responsible for giving us Hello Kitty, tiny trees and the subway chin rest should also produce something as strange as Metabolist architecture.
In the 1950s, Japanese architects Kenzo Tange, Takashi Asada, Kisho Kurokawa and Kiyonori Kikutake, along with writer Noboru Kawazoe, devised a grand plan to build all over Tokyo Bay.
Tange presented the radical 'Plan for Tokyo, 1960: Towards a Structural Reorganisation' at the Tokyo World Design Conference. His vision was nothing if not futuristic; a utopian (some might say dystopian) scheme that would leave Tokyo Bay looking like a set from The Matrix.
And so began the Metabolist movement. Tange and his friends produced a manifesto to explain it: a bilingual pamphlet titled Metabolism 1960: The proposals for a New Urbanism. It was a move that recalled the classic manifestos of the 20th century, such as that by the Futurists who envisaged a world of sports cars, planes and industrial cities.
The Metabolists doubtlessly approved of the Futurists and their antipathy towards anything old. Both movements shared a vision of a brave new world where man was served by technology.
The Metabolists, emerging from a devastated post-war Japan, believed it was time to employ a flexible, changeable urban model. In other words, a Metabolist city could be taken apart and reassembled as required.