The Death and Resurrection of Kyoto

Kyoto Journal 27 “The Death and Resurrection of Kyoto” was our second issue dedicated to Kyoto City itself. We addressed town planning, historic preservation, and the ways in which Kyoto was changing. It included a special bi-lingual section of ideas submitted by readers entitled “60 Ways to Make Kyoto a Better Place.” The cover was a visual commentary on the perceived destruction of old Kyoto. At the time, the Hotel Okura was a symbol of the wave of high-rise buildings that, then and now, genericizes the city. Because it had controversially ignored Kyoto’s height-limit laws during construction, it sparked a furor among Kyoto residents. Temples put up signs stating that guests of the hotel were not welcome. 

Working late nights in Manhattan with a then cutting-edge image software, James Heaton and Andy Muselli pieced together this digital collage of the hotel as a gravestone for the city of Kyoto. They “engraved” the birth and death dates of the city, 794-1994, on the façade of the tombstone/hotel. Today, 30 years later, the most difficult preservation challenge facing Kyoto is overtourism.