Shuto No.7 Expressway & Tate river II

In Ozu Yazujiro's much-acclaimed 1953 film Tokyo Story an elderly couple travel from their sleepy rural town to the big smoke to see their children. In the director's cinematic meditation on time and change, Tokyo represents the disturbing encroachment of modernity into the traditional life of Japan; distorting human relations and distracting its inhabitants with gauche consumerism and the oppressive pace of city life. The film derives much of its power through the confluence of form and content in expressing a nostalgic longing for home, a trope that has been almost a continuous feature of Japanese literary and visual culture going back to early classical verse. From the middle of the 19th century, after western powers forced Japan into opening its borders, nostalgia became conflated with a rejection of foreign influence and industrialism. Modernisation was practically synonymous with westernisation.

Nine years after Tokyo Story was released. work began on creating the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, or 'Shuto'. The construction was part of Japan's physical and political post-war rehabilitation, being part of the infrastructure required for the 1964 Summer Olympics. Like much of Japan's 60s construction, the Shuto has not been refurbished, and its pillars rise out of Tokyo's ancient rivers like Ozymandias's trunkless legs of stone. Because they are not earthquake-proof, there is currently a plan to dismantle the expressways and rebuild them underground, which, among other benefits, is supposed to help with the 'preservation of Tokyo's scenic beauty'. Perhaps, though, a portion of the elevated expressway might be kept as an historical artefact for tourists to stroll on, as we do the Pont du Gard today. At the moment the expressway is not new or old enough to be proud of; not high-tech enough to show off, not quite decayed enough for real ruin lust.