On the Trail of the Urban Nomad in the Tokyo of the 1980s

In the 1970s and 1980s, one fantasy promoted by certain architects, and by merchants and their advertisers, was that Tokyo’s young female office workers, whose lives revolved around constant rounds of work, commuting, and shopping, had become “urban nomads.” In her advertising posters placed in Tokyo commuter trains for the fashion department store chair Parco, the designer Ishioka Eiko invited the young women to recognize themselves in startling photographs of women from India or North Africa. The architect Itô Tôyô proposed elegant yurt-like structures constructed of steel tubing and perforated metal panels covered with several layers of richly patterned translucent textiles to house these young female “urban nomads” as they roamed through the city. In an oddly complimentary fable told by the acclaimed novelist Abe Kôbô, a middle-class urban dweller abandons his sheltered and privileged existence to inhabit a box. As startlingly different as these urban tales might seem, they emerged out of the shared perception that life in the contemporary Japanese city had become increasingly a life of constant movement, a life on the street.