To the Ueno Shita Dojunkai Apartments (GXR A16)

Head East from Ueno station and walk down the right back street near the city hall and you'll come across one building that stands out from everything around, even the old tin shacks and barely standing post-war shops.




At first it looks like just an odd brown apartment building, but almost immediately you're hit by an air of oldness. From the barely 4' walls around it to the low entryway, you can tell it was built in a different era.




Here is the front entrance of the Ueno Shita Apartments, one of the oldest concrete structures in the country.

As I mentioned in my post where I visited the Seika Dormitory, after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Japanese government needed desperately to build modern structures to house the booming population of Tokyo, and it needed to find safer accommodation than rows of wood and paper homes common at the time. Out of this need, came the Dojunkai Apartments (同潤会). Of course only a few were completed by the time WWII and the firebombing attacks came, destroying much of the city. What were built, however, survived the war and served as a template for the mass construction of concrete apartments throughout Japan.




Look close enough at the Ueno Shita Apartments, and they say you can see where a few bombs impacted into the building. But it survived. The Dojunkai were built to withstand earthquakes, and much like the old bridges built in New York, they went completely overboard in how thick they made the walls.



The design of each Dojunkai apartment showed some similarity, but they were also made as experimental designs of a new style of life in Japan... I think I found an old pamphlet explaining how happiness could be found in communal life.




All one building, interconnected. Each unit has its own open space around, though, in fact more space than you see in a lot of more modern, cramped crap housing units.




This (above) is probably my favorite picture in the set. The sun was just starting to set and you can see how the shadows grow up amongst the edges of the aprtment complex. Sadly, as the years have gone by and tenants aged, they found it hard to maintain all the buildings. Pipes breaking in a building built in the 20's is a hard issue to deal with. So over the past 20 years they've all been broken down and replaced with new, modern structures.

I read somewhere that the crew tearing down the Edogawa Apartments in Shinjuku (a massive Dojunkai complex torn down in 2003), were shocked at how thick some of the walls were, and frequently had to call in for bigger and heavier wrecking balls.




The picture above is of the back end of the Ueno Shita Apartments. I doubt if any other remnant of the prewar era remains in the area.




This view of Ueno Shita from the main road. You can see a massive shopping center looming up in the background.

Fortunately, as was posted out front of the apartment complex, there are people working to keep this last remnant of a different era intact. And people still do live there. But I'm not sure how long it can last. Everything in Japan seems to come and go so quickly, especially more modern constructions. And it's sad because in my opinion some deserve preservation as much as any old temple or cathedral. They tell the story of how we live the way we do.