This is a follow-up to an article I wrote on July 10th about the strange concrete building in Otemachi that I had walked past for years without ever understanding what it was.
In my head I called it the Dark Tower. It sits among all the polished glass towers looking slightly menacing and completely uninterested in fitting in. Eventually I discovered that it was basically a telecom hub, which explained the lack of windows, the heavy concrete and the general appearance of a building designed to survive something.
I thought that was the end of the story.
But last week I walked past it again and noticed there is now a crane next to it.
I have no idea what this means, and I should probably make that very clear. It could simply be maintenance or equipment being replaced. Given what the building does, there are presumably some fairly substantial pieces of machinery inside that occasionally need to be moved around.
But my immediate thought was: they’re going to tear down the Dark Tower.
Which made me unexpectedly sad.
Tokyo has a way of doing this. You walk past a building for years and it becomes part of your mental map of the city without you ever really thinking about it. Then one day there are barriers around it, then scaffolding, then a crane, and before long there’s a hole where it used to be. A few years later there is a beautiful new glass tower in its place and you struggle to remember exactly what was there before.
Otemachi seems particularly good at this. The whole area is constantly renewing itself, and almost everything new is taller, shinier and more welcoming than whatever it replaced. There will probably be a nice plaza, some trees and somewhere selling very expensive coffee.
The Dark Tower is the opposite of all of that.
It doesn’t want you to come inside. It doesn’t care whether you like it. It just sits on an incredibly valuable piece of central Tokyo looking like a concrete fortress, quietly doing something that all the much prettier buildings around it depend on.
So perhaps the crane means absolutely nothing. Maybe they are just replacing some enormous piece of telecom equipment and in a few weeks it will disappear, leaving the Dark Tower exactly as it was, silently keeping Otemachi connected and refusing to explain itself.
I hope so.
Tokyo has more than enough beautiful glass towers. I think it deserves at least one building that looks capable of keeping the internet running through the apocalypse.
For now, the Dark Tower is still there.
But I took a photo.
Just in case.
