Japanese love Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City
Tokyo exhibition of photos from a 1992 book about the notorious high-rise slum - one of three published in Japan before any appeared in Chinese - the latest example of a Japanese fascination with Kowloon Walled City, writes Violet Law
In 2009, a video-game arcade that recreated the milieu of the notorious Kowloon Walled City opened in a suburban Tokyo warehouse. Artefacts salvaged nearly a decade after the demolition of the notorious housing estate - postboxes, frayed posters, fluorescent signboards, birdcages, electric fans, period calendars - lent the arcade an air of authenticity.
Lok Fu, corner of Kowloon that encapsulates Hong Kong’s history
And it seems the Japanese cannot get enough of our most famous den of iniquity; since the early 1990s, three books about the walled city have been published in the language, documenting nearly a century of lawless existence. (This is astounding considering the first Chinese-language book about the estate came out only last year, by Joint Publishing, and that was a translation of the expanded English photography book , by Greg Girard and Ian Lambot.)
How Kowloon Walled City survived attempts to knock it down for almost a century
In one, titled , a complete cross-sectional map on a five-page spread was published by a team that styled itself the Kowloon City Explorers. Led by cultural anthropologist Hiroaki Kani during his brief stint at Chinese University, in the 1990s, the explorers were a group of Japanese architects, engineers and city planners who traced the walled city's development from its origins, in 1898.
Along with those who remained of the estimated 40,000 residents, photographer Shintaro Nakamura was there to bear witness to the last days of the labyrinthine concrete slum before its complete demolition, in spring 1994. His portfolio resulted in , a photography book in colour.
Arcade brings Kowloon Walled City back from the dead … in Japan
Alas, all of the titles are out of print, as a visit to the flagship Kinokuniya Bookstore, in Shinjuku, reveals. Even copies of , a book of black-and-white pictures shot in 1992 by Ryuji Miyamoto, cannot be found at second-hand bookstores.
Once reviled, Kowloon Walled City is now regarded as an example of 'organic design'
Nevertheless, people in the Japanese capital seeking to indulge their fascination with an estate that, in the words of , "fostered not only crime and claustrophobia but also enduring bonds among its people and interest from architecture and sociology buffs the world over", can do so at Shinagawa's Canon Gallery S, where 50 photos from the Miyamoto book will be exhibited until July 4.
