Today’s Island dismantling (2022)

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With my son on the back of my bike, I cycle through the 'Today's Island' twice a day, in the morning and in the evening.

One day, a waste disposal truck pulls up alongside the house when there is no sign of people living in it. Then, the house demolition contractor starts coming. First the tatami mats, windows and walls are removed, then comes a small little excavator. Within a day or two the small wooden house is gone without a trace. What remains till the end are bath tubs covered with tiles and water pipes. When those too are removed, all that remains is a much smaller vacant lot than one might have imagined.

After a couple of months, the place starts to be filled with a brand new, inorganic house, and I can't clearly remember what used to be there, even though I used to look at it twice a day.

The memory of alleys barely wide enough for a person to pass, the shadows of houses that are always damp and full of mosquitoes, the smell of tanned leather in the air, the asphalt iridescent with the waste oil from the factories, the sky cut into squares; is dismantled in pieces and the whole picture cannot be traced in my memory.

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'Today's Island' is the area around Kyojima 3-chome, Sumida-ku, located in the east end of Tokyo, named by the artist. 'Kyojima' is a homonym for 'today' (Kyo) , and 'Island' (Jima). The area miraculously survived the Tokyo Air Raid during the second world war and once became the most densely populated area in Tokyo in the post-war era. In recent years, old buildings have been demolished and roads expanded due to disaster prevention urban planning and increasingly active property sale in the post-COVID rock-down.

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子を自転車の後ろに乗せて、一日二回、朝と夕方に「今日島」を走り抜ける。

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ある日、人の気配が消えた家に廃棄業者のトラックが横付けされる。 その次は家の解体業者が来始める。最初は、畳や窓や壁が取り払われて、その後に小さな小さなショベルカー。一日か二日で木造の小さな家は跡形もなくなる。最後まで残るのはタイルで覆われたお風呂の湯船と水道管。それも取り払われると、想像して いたよりずっと小さな空き地だけが残る。

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二、三ヶ月もするとそこには新品の新しい無機質な家で満たされ始め、かつてそこに何があったのか、毎日ながめていたのにはっきりと思い出すことはもうできない。

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人がやっと通れるぐらいの裏道と、いつもでも湿って蚊が多い家影、漂ってくるなめし革のにおいや、工場の廃棄油で虹色に光るアスファルト、四角く切り取られた空は断片に解体され、元の形を記憶の中でたどることはできない。

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※ 「今日島」とは、作家が名づけた東京都墨田区京島三丁目を中心とした地域。「明日には形を変える島。」

東京大空襲による焼失を奇跡的にのがれ、戦後は東京一の人工密集地となったが、近年は防災都市計画やポストコロナ時代の不動産景気や建物の老朽化による建物の建て壊しや道路拡張が進んでいる。

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