going back to japan from korea, i did not book my return flight to tokyo like everyone else. instead, i took advantage of the opportunity to conveniently (and cheaply) reposition myself to miyazaki prefecture in kyushu, the southern reaches of japan. there aren’t really any big attractions to entice the run-of-the-mill tourist in far-flung miyazaki, one of japan’s poorest and most remote prefectures, but it did have something i’ve wanted to visit ever since i heard of it: the Phoenix Seagaia Ocean Tower.
the period in japanese history that fascinates me most is 1986-1991, the years of the japanese asset price bubble, a manic era of reckless financial speculation and runaway capitalist excess that puts our own eighties to shame. unlike us, in the end they got their comeuppance, the bubble era concluding with a collapse of such biblical proportions that the japanese economy has been in recovery ever since, the Nikkei 225 stock index only managing to top its prelapsarian peaks last year, thirty-five years later. thanks to the building boom it helped fuel, the bubble economy left remnants across the entire country, to the extent that present-day japan sometimes feels like it's built in the ruins of a great lost civilization, i think that feeling is why there's basically an entire "cozy apocalypse" manga microgenre.
the bubble era's most striking remains are the huge decaying monuments it left scattered in remote corners of the country, the fruits of overly-optimistic tourism development schemes financed by irresponsible lending. one of the biggest (and most financially disastrous) of them all was the Phoenix Seagaia megaresort project, a billion dollar bubble endeavor to turn miyazaki's coastal windbreak forest into a global tourist destination. the resort’s centerpiece was the Ocean Tower, a forty-five story skyscraper hotel that’s been called “the world’s loneliest skyscraper”, as there are no other buildings even close to that height for at least a hundred miles in every direction. somehow, that isn’t even the most outrageous part of the Seagaia project, that honor goes to the Ocean Tower’s sidekick, the Ocean Dome, a gigantic indoor waterpark that earned half a dozen guinness world records including “world’s largest simulated beach”, only half a kilometer away from the real thing (though like most of japan’s coastline, it is of course covered in concrete).
if you want the whole rundown on Phoenix Seagaia, you can read all about it at the source that first introduced me to it, this post on the vintage blog "spike japan". perhaps there are some out there who have wondered about my “blogging inspirations”, well that blog is one of the biggest, when i first discovered it i couldn’t tear myself away until i’d read every post, its content is the perfect intersection of half a dozen of my interests like japan, dubious tourist destinations, financial scandal, eerie businesses in the middle of nowhere that are nearly abandoned, and so on. out of the many decaying places he visits, Phoenix Seagaia especially stuck with me, and despite the Ocean Dome having been demolished in 2017 (somehow the fact that it was technically possible for me to have visited it fills me with inexplicable regret), the Ocean Tower is still standing and accepting bookings to this day. what's more, it's significantly cheaper both in yen and dollars than it was back in spike's day, he paid ¥19,200/$230 back then whereas i paid ¥11,340/$77 today (note that the dollar-to-yen exchange rate was a lot worse back then too).
at incheon airport in korea, i made it onto my flight to miyazaki alright as the very last one to board (they can board a plane very fast in korea), despite the asiana airlines gate agents giving me a bit of a hard time for apaprently having the wrong boarding pass (it got me through security with no issue though) and they didn't let me bring my coffee onboard ("this hot beverage is too large to bring on board sir", what, are they worried i'll throw it on somebody as a weapon?). astonishingly, onboard the flight they served almost an entire standard heated-tin airplane meal on a tray, definitely the shortest and cheapest flight i've ever seen that on. upon arriving in miyazaki, the japanese customs guy decided to actually root around in my bag a while, though he may have just been making an excuse to chat with the miraculous slightly japanese-speaking foreigner a bit longer. i was the last in line so nobody was being held up behind me, it ended up being the longest conversation in japanese i'd had during the trip so far, maybe i was finally coming out of my shell.
luckily, transportation into downtown miyazaki from the airport isn’t difficult because it’s served by a short railroad spur line. they even took IC cards, i tried to reload mine at the ticket machine but it got rejected, i thought maybe the machine was just incompatible with my card, later i learned from a station attendant in shimonoseki that my card was disabled because I forgot to tap out of the keisei line going to narita airport, something only a keisei employee in tokyo could resolve. the real problem was going to be getting from downtown miyazaki to Seagaia, which didn’t really have any convenient public transit connections. however, on the Seagaia website, i discovered that they offered a free once-daily shuttle in the afternoon from miyazaki station to the Ocean Tower, all I had to do was a kill a few hours around the station until it arrived.
i walked around the malls at the station, seeing what arcade rhythm games the GiGO outpost in miyazaki had to offer. after i exhausted the direct vicinity of the station i widened my wandering perimeter to include a nearby science museum, where a troop of elementary schoolers filed past a rocket of some sort they had stationed out front. a full circuit around the station later, i decided it was too hot for any further rambling and posted up at a shaded bench outside the station to blatantly read a book that reading in public in the US probably would have led to an arrest for “performative reading”. as the shuttle arrival time grew close i migrated over to where it was supposed to stop, though i still had some doubts whether the bus would actually come. around the station there was no solid physical proof corroborating its existence, no timetable posted to a noticeboard or anything, all i had to go on was a webpage that for all i knew could have been a fossilized digital relic on the seagaia website from fifteen years ago.
against all odds, a bus clearly branded "Phoenix Seagaia” pulled up right on time for all of four passengers, and the driver gladly accepted my bag for storage underneath without asking to see a hotel reservation or anything, after all who would POSSIBLY try to con a free ride to Phoenix Seagaia (me, probably). the Ocean Tower came into view almost immediately after we got away from the taller buildings surrounding the station...
when we reached the outskirts of the city, we soon found ourselves on a dedicated parkway through the coastal forest to Phoenix Seagaia. along the way, i noticed that the “Tom Watson” golf course that had been shuttered back during spike's day seemed open again, a good number of cars parked in its lot.
so many years after spike documented its decline, i expected to find the Ocean Tower almost abandoned, in terminal disrepair and on the brink of joining the Ocean Dome. surprisingly, it wasn’t like that at all, on the inside the Ocean Tower was basically indistinguishable from other japanese resorts of its caliber. it didn't feel shabby or rundown at all, the main public areas were maintained to the point that it could have easily passed muster as a luxury resort anywhere else in the world. it was lively, too, in contrast to the high-class vibes the interior decor gave off it seemed to be going through something of a second life as a family resort, the hallways were filled with families with screaming children and some of the copious square footage had been repurposed to set up activities for kids, it seems that they didn't end up going down the casino route spike had mentioned. even at that rate, though, it's probably still be another century before they would manage to earn out the extravagant construction costs.
is this "the backrooms"at reception they handled my appearance surprisingly well, despite being possibly the only white man to visit since spike ten years ago, judging based off all the other hotel guests i saw. they put me in a room on the eighteenth floor, i thought "good of them to put me in a high one" (little did i know at the time that was not even halfway up). my room was at the end of the hallway, then when i opened up the door i was faced with a concerning additional hallway, but when i opened the door at the end of it the room i found myself in was magnificent, easily the kind of "luxury" hotel room that would 5x the price absolute minimum back in the US.
even being "only" on the eighteenth floor, the view was incredible, though somehow the constant shrieks of the children playing in the pool down below could still reach me up there. the clearing in the coastal forest formerly occupied by the ocean dome had been repurposed for rugby fields (pitches?), though the ocean dome's huge parking structure had been preserved at the edge. the golf courses nestled amidst the trees all seemed to be in active use, 
golfers were the other main group of guests at the resort besides families. when it grew dark, massive lights clicked on for evening rugby practice and night golf. suddenly, around 8pm the lights all turned off for about 15 minutes for a huge summer fireworks show designed specifically to be viewed from rooms in the tower, i was practically level with the height of the fireworks as they exploded. to top it all off, there was of course an attached bathhouse, which i visited just before retiring for the night. overall, a wonderful experience, especially after two nights at this miserable cramped guesthouse in seoul.
i can't help but wonder, though... the ocean tower is just so huge that even enough guests to make the common areas seem lively wouldn't even be close to filling the tower... i can't imagine there are ever enough guests to justify its size... surely somewhere within the tower there have to be entire floors they've chosen to abandon because it wasn't worth the upkeep... my one regret is not having enough time or energy to conduct a thorough investigation...
II. washboarded by the ogre
after visiting seagaia i had no idea what i was going to do next, as i said in the previous section i don't think there are really any major tourist attractions around miyazaki. luckily, i was bailed out at the last second by google maps, sometimes it will spotlight notable local attractions with a little picture bubble and one of them caught my eye, a little island just off the coast south of miyazaki surrounded by the most unreal rock formations i’ve ever seen, as good an excuse as anything to go anywhere. it was easily accessible from a nearby train station too, though planning my jaunt out there was a little bit frustrating because it was one of those rural stations that doesn’t have close to the same frequency of service you get in more populated areas, funnily enough the train station probably still has like three times more frequent train service than every major city on the US west coast.
at miyazaki station, the train going in the direction of aoshima waiting at the platform was a single-carriage ワンマン (one-man) train, which meant for the first time on this trip i was really getting out there. taking the single-carriage train feels more like a bus than anything not just due to the size and the increased bumpiness of the ride, but also because the payment/fare system is identical to most japanese buses, upon boarding you pick up a little ticket indicating where you got on, then when you get off you pay at a cash box up front manned by the driver. we were, of course, venturing outside the region of IC card compatibility, as many printed or handwritten signs posted within miyazaki station warned. it felt retro, especially because of the old metal fans rotating mechanically up above, but i’m not really sure how you’d improve the experience, in fact the fans felt like the cooled the carriage better than whatever they use on the shinkansen, which always feels slightly stuffy to me.
aoshima station was a classic rural japanese train station one step above the most barebones “platform with a sign” type, perhaps its status as a tourist spot had earned it a little station house with an open-air waiting room. it was even equipped with an installation of rusting coin lockers, which ate 200 yen without properly locking when i foolishly tried to use one, probably dodged a bullet there because who knows if i would have been able to get it open again if it did lock. the little town between the station and the island had the typical japanese tourist town layout where there’s an obvious path leading right to the main attraction, lined with restaurants and souvenir shops and ice cream stands.
the island itself looked completely unassuming, at high tide you might never suspect that it’s actually resting on top of a much larger and ABSOLUTELY insane rock formation. it’s almost indescribable, the most i’m able to muster about it is “it ruled”, so for the first time on the trip i busted out the expensive camera everyone is always nagging me to use (i was not the one who bought it btw):
well, according to signs posted around the area they call the rock formation "the ogre's washboard" (or possibly "devil's", nobody can agree on how exactly to translate "oni". what i can say for certain is if that rock formation was on the coast near me back home they would be calling it "the devil's washboard" for sure), after looking up a picture of a washboard i must admit that does describe the rock pattern pretty accurately. i couldn't get enough of it, it seemed too straight, too rigid, too regular to possibly be natural, it would have almost been more believable if they had said it was the result of an industrial accident, like some sort of coastal concrete coating catastrophe. it’s almost as if it's a weak point in the fabric of the universe laying bare its hidden underlying structure, secretly everything is quantized and aligned to straight lines like in minecraft.
i'm not surprised they put a shrine on the island, it is clearly a place of great spiritual energy, i would feel the need to pay tribute to it too. the vast majority of the visitors to the island (all domestic tourists) would cross the bridge over to the island, take the short path over to visit the shrine, then turn around and go back the way they came. there was a longer path you could take that went around the perimeter of the island but nobody took it even though it really isn't that far, so when i went down it i ended up having the entire backside of the island to myself, it's also one of the most impressive parts where the rock formations extend out the furthest. i spent a long time clambering around the rocks snapping pictures, trying to get pictures that only contained rocks. it was a little difficult because i had a bulky backpack and some of the rocks were slippery, during high tide they get covered in water and hadn’t yet dried out in the sun completely. i was also especially careful because i really did not want to fall while holding an expensive camera (even though I had not been the one who paid for it).
it wasn't too long before i needed a break, the weight of my backpack plus the oppressive heat and humidity (maybe that was why nobody wanted to walk around the whole island) were a major drag on my stamina. out on the rocks behind the island, the only source of shade and a (non-slanted) flat surface was this little white-tiled lighthouse. it had a ladder that said climbing was forbidden but there was no injunction against sitting up against it, so i went over to the shaded side opposite the island, set down my backpack, and sat down. it was a wonderful seating location, the side of the lighthouse was angled perfectly for sitting against, there was a light breeze, and i could watch the waves break against the rocks. after taking off my backpack i noticed that my shirt had become utterly soaked in sweat almost without me realizing it, since i was pretty much hidden from view from the island i took it off and laid it out on the nearby rocks in the sun to dry.
i probably could have stayed there for hours, but i still wanted to get something to eat before getting on an earlyish train out before the three hour gap in the middle of the afternoon with no service. what really prompted me to leave though was seeing this guy on the island pull up on a scooter and start walking out on the rocks in my general direction, i was worried he might be a representative of the japanese coast guard sent to investigate reports of a suspicious individual lounging around on critical coastal infrastructure. i rushed to put my shirt back on and found it to be surprisingly dry, even though it had only been out for like fifteen minutes. by that point i was pretty tired of taking pictures, but as i walked away from the lighthouse i pulled the camera back out and started snapping some more in order to play up the "innocent tourist" act. the problem was, in putting my guard up against the intruder i let it down elsewhere, and in short order i ended up slipping on a rock and wiping out spectacularly.
i wasn't too worse for wear after falling, i landed pretty well and only skinned my knee with something that looked more like a friction burn than a deep wound, what i was really worried about was the EXPENSIVE CAMERA THAT HAD FLOWN OUT OF MY HANDS ONTO ROCKS LITERALLY THE FIRST TIME I PULLED IT OUT THE ENTIRE TRIP. the camera had landed nearby and seemed ok, though the battery compartment had come open and released the battery. when i put the battery back in the door wouldn't stay closed anymore, it had already been a bit loose before but i guess now it was completely broken, not super concerning because it was something that a little tape could fix. i turned the camera on and it seemed to work fine... except it said "NO MEMORY CARD", i opened the battery compartment again and sure enough, the micro sd card and ONLY the micro sd card had flown out of the full-size sd card adapter it had been in. i got down on my knees and started desperately scouring the vicinity for it, it would have all been for nothing if i lost all the pictures on it. it proved surprisingly hard to find despite being a completely inorganic object amidst the rocks, mostly because the damn thing is just so tiny, but i found it after a few minutes. as i got up, i caught a glimpse of the scooter guy, turns out it was just some random japanese boomer going fishing on the edge of the rocks in a completely different direction.
nursing my wounds and trying to get away from the island before the ogre could attack me any further, i made a beeline down the trail back to mainland without trying to appreciate the rocks any further, i was satisfied with the tribute i had paid them now that they had spilled my blood. back in the little town, i stopped in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that had rave reviews online and ordered the regional specialty, chicken nanban. apparently it's just another spin on karaage (fried chicken), the spin being that they come covered in a sort of tartar sauce. the restaurant was run by a single middle-aged lady and had a grand total of seven seats, four at one table and then three along a counter, though they could have gotten more in if a bunch of space hadn't been taken up by a children's play area.
when the meal arrived i started off with the pickles, and from the explosion of flavor in just that first tiny bite i knew i was really in for something, those pickles were SPECTACULAR and so was the rest of the dish. i almost regret going there because it's ruined restaurants for the rest of this trip, i've become obsessed with trying to find another meal that good (and cheap... it was only a thousand yen, $6.80) and keep failing... it was so good that i even got over my fear of speaking japanese in order to pay my respects to the chef. we started chatting, she asked what brought me to miyazaki, i turned around and looked out the window where phoenix seagaia was still barely visible in the distance from aoshima, and answered honestly "i wanted to visit the world's loneliest skyscraper..."this response elicted some minor laughter
anyways, that was pretty close to the ideal day i envisioned for this trip: spontaneously decide to go somewhere i just found out about, it's in the middle of nowhere and there's barely anybody there except some japanese tourists, an incident occurs that turns the excursion into ripe fodder for a blog post, and i have a great cheap meal in a soulful local joint. if only i was able to replicate that formula more consistently...
III. Theoretical Modern Hospitality
if you spend enough time in japan, it's hard to avoid noticing the flashy black and red APAor is it ΛPΛ? hotel towers outside every notable train station. passing by them on the street, their lobby decor also draws attention, chandeliers and other luxe shiny surfaces in that sort of "japanese glintzy" aesthetic that's somehow simultaneously both classy and tacky. i always wondered what it was like in one of those places, the truth is until this trip i had never stayed in a japanese business hotel (or frankly any japanese hotel), rejecting them out of hand due to cost and booking everything exclusively through airbnb or hostelworld, where hotels don't even show up. thus, "stay in a business hotel" ended up on my bucket list for this trip, along with some other essential japan experiences (e.g. saizeriya) i had missed out on during prior trips.
after that initial impression of APA, i never suspected that it was actually largely a budget hotel chain, which i discovered when i opened up booking.com and and saw that a room at the APA hotel in beppu, my next stop in kyushu, was $35 a night. meanwhile, in the US it's a cause for celebration if i manage to book a merely "acceptable" hotel for a hair under $100 a night, even budget chains in the middle of nowhere during the offseason want a criminal amount of money now. you basically have to spend $100 a night minimum if you don't want to stay somewhere dangerous or disgusting like Joe's Roach Motel (Color TV!), in fact even if i saw a hotel for $35 a night in the US i wouldn't risk booking it, you probably aren't leaving any place in that price range in one piece.
anyways, for $35 a night APAenglish tagline: "You'll be back." ...am i imagining it or does that sound slightly ominous? is probably the BEST lodging experience you can have at that price in the entire world, even elsewhere in japan i paid similar prices to stay in much worse places, like the dormitory in Satoshi's Stuffy Snorin' Guesthouse. the room was admittedly cramped, more or less one step above a capsule hotel but significantly more comfortable, you have a door and walls, your own bathroom, your own AC unit, and a TV that takes up most of one wall. honestly, the small size almost makes the room feel cozy, and i'm certainly willing to give up a lot of square footage if it makes the price go down, unfortunately in the US there's probably bullshit laws that say hotel rooms have to be a certain size otherwise they're considered "unfit for occupation".
every inch of the room is also crammed with thoughtful design (like a business class airline seat) e.g. a convenient hdmi port beside the bed to hook your laptop up to the tv, and there's enough amenities to rival luxury resorts in the US ("APA" supposedly stands for "Always Pleasant Amenity"). in touristy areas they're very accommodating to tourists, they had a whole "english" setting for their in-room tv entertainment that would play enormously cheesy ads for various cultural activities, or PSAs about proper etiquette. some APAs come with a little more than others, i stayed at one in nagoya later with a full rooftop public path (indoor and outdoor pools, sauna, cold bath) included for free.
i mean you have to admit stuff like this is a little funny
doing a little research before my stay, i had a peek at the google reviews and people universally agreed APA was excellent, the ONLY complaint anyone ever had is that the founder/CEO is a nutso far-right political extremist who shoves political tracts into every room like they're the Bible. part of the reason that APA is so cheap seems to be that they're boycotted by chinese tourists, who make up the biggest proportion of foreign tourists in japan. of course, that didn't do much to discourage me, in fact finding out about that made me want to stay there even more, i HAD to see what that looked like. i'm sure the political stuff is all very serious if you're from the area, but thanks to the distance i can't help but view foreign political issues as a big joke, a source of light entertainment. maybe there's a lesson of some sort in there...
sure enough, when i got to my room its meager square footage had a shelf furnished with a micro-library of "literature". first up was the memoir/autobiography of founder/CEO toshio motoya motto: "if you chase two hares, you will catch both of them" (it might sound cooler in japanese). one of the hares is business success, the other hare is his right-wing political organizing, which all things considered is fairly innocuous, egomaniac CEOs are always trying to shill their life story. it starts with a collection of pictures of him looking cool when he was young, then some of him meeting famous figures like fidel castro when he became a bigshot (he seemed very proud of that meeting in particular), and then in the more recent pictures he's looking pretty old and a little ghoulish. i didn't really read the rest so i dunno, it might just be full of political rants, but i skipped to the end where the climax is the 2016 opening of APA's first US hotel in... woodbridge, new jerseynew bucket list location added, based on how much it's brought up elsewhere too that seems to have been a big deal for motoya. i guess as a businessman you haven't really "made it" until you've proved you can do business in the US, the holy land of capitalism. it seems that APA hasn't expanded at all in the US since then, though they did purchase a small chain of hotels called "Coast Hotels" mostly in washington/B.C. that some floundering japanese investment firm had offloaded.
the next book was also pretty innocuous, a self-help book titled something like "successive luck" by motoya's wife fumikocatchphrase: "i'm the company president!". motoya seems to be a big wife guy, they're almost always photographed together and he's basically made her the face of the company, her face being literally plastered on a bunch of APA-branded products like the bottled water in the room, or on the APA HQ building.
the room of course had the latest issue of APA's in-house magazine "Apple Town" (interesting name), approximately half an ad for the chain (including a pictorial catalog of every single location) and half a thinly-veiled soapbox for the motoya's political views. motoya seems especially keen on this one guy, "patriotic essayist" fuji seiji, and the whole magazine seems like it's just being used to platform him. fuji seiji has at least one political essay in every issue, plus a "wise quotation" rendered in elegant calligraphy. there was a brief biography of fuji seiji on the reverse side of the quotation, it was oddly vague and didn't have any academic qualifications or anything besides that he'd been reading extensively about politics since high school, that he had "visited 81 countries" and met with many important political figures like fidel castro, and that his team did well in an australian boat race once. accompanying the biography was a blurry picture of a cool guy wearing aviators that looked vaguely familiar.
has anyone ever actually paid 800 yen (tax inclusive) for this?the last two books in the room were pretty similar, they were both collections of fuji seiji's essays from Apple Town, the covers bearing pictures of APA hotel facades. i really wanted to see what fuji seiji had to say, unfortunately my japanese vocabulary is highly specialized and not well-suited for far-right political tracts (the most i know is "GHQ"). then, i turned them over and discovered that they were also translated into english, the back cover (from the japanese perspective) being the english version's front cover, bearing the translated title "Theoretical Modern History XI: The Real History of Japan". it was hot off the presses, collecting fuji seiji's Apple Town essays from 2024-2025. it opens with a bunch of pictures of fuji seiji at political events, he seems to appear at most of them accompanied by motoya's wife fumiko, they must all be on very good terms. the introduction served as a good primer on his political views, paraphrased as follows:
The Japanese history you have learned is all wrong, I am here to finally set the record straight. The GHQ emasculated the Japanese people after the war, stripped them of their pride to make them weak and pitiful, we need to Make Japan Great Again. I am an expert on politics and diplomacy because I have met Fidel Castro and been to 81 countries, here's what I learned: 1) Japan is the best country in the world for tourism, it has the best sights, the best food, the best hospitality, the best service, the best hygiene, etc., you should come to Japan and stay at APA Hotels and Resorts, and 2) Not a single country I've been to acknowledges the existence of comfort women or the completely made-up "Nanjing Massacre"
i flipped through the essays in the collection, what i noticed was that most of them seemed pretty light on original content, seiji mostly quoted at length from other sources without adding much commentary besides "here's an excerpt from an essay I agree with..." or "in my opinion, so-and-so put it best when he wrote...", it was similar to how on reddit people used to reply "This." to posts they agreed with. the hottest take he offered was in an essay titled "Japan Fought for a World of Racial Equality", where seiji argued not only that the Japanese Empire was Woke because their real goal was to decolonize east asia, but that if you think about it that means that japan actually WON the pacific war because east asia was largely decolonized afterwards. i'm not sure what the relevance was but somehow most of the essay was a lengthy excerpt from some wartime letter seiji dug up, written by a japanese colonel "in a cave 20 feet underground" just before he was killed and addressed to "the American people". oddly, there were also some non-political essays in the collection, mostly regarding how APA was going to crush its competition in the hotel industry...
IV. a sliver of sphere
it's not unusual for there to be observation towers in japanese tourist destinations like the famous onsen resort town of beppu, what is unusual is that beppu is blessed with not one but TWO observation towers. there's the classic "beppu tower" in the traditional eiffel-inspired wireframe style (other notable examples: tokyo tower, tsuutenkaku, sapporo tower), and then there's the lesser-known "global tower" designed by one of japan's star modern architects, arata isozaki. global tower is actually just one component of a larger development called "b-con plaza", a conference center built thanks to the no-questions-asked infinite money spigot during the bubble economy that inspired every podunk japanese town to try and reinvent itself as a cultural hotspot by spending lavishly on some shiny new civic building like a concert hall or art museum. although he was a hot commodity at the time and probably fielding commission requests for all sorts of bubble-inspired fantasies, isozaki deigned to lend his touch to the project because he was a native of the area.
personally, i think global tower is a severely underappreciated work in his oeuvre, it seems to have been completely overshadowed by his other tower project (art tower mito) and rarely gets anything more than an entry in a list of "complete works". i was taken with it the first time i managed to finally dig up a picture, it looks like no other observation tower i've ever seen, two narrow concrete cylinders (one with the elevator, the other presumably containing stairs) supporting a huge curved metal sail. at the top, there's a "rare" open-air observation deck jutting straight out like a diving board. the concept, isozaki said, is that it's supposed to be a small section of the surface of a giant imaginary sphere with a radius of 1km, centered on the middle of beppu park 500m away. i guess isozaki has a thing for giant solids, his better-known tower project "art tower mito" is supposed to be a stack of tetrahedra arranged to form something called a "boerdijk-coxeter helix" (when is someone with a normal last name finally going to discover something in math?).
funnily enough, as i passed by the conference center that was supposed to be the "main" part of the complex it appeared to be in the midst of an extended closure for roof repairs, whereas the sideshow at the back, global tower, was open for business. i paid 300 yen for admission at a little booth at the base, then waited what felt like forever in front of these neat curved elevator doors that looked like they could have been from a sci-fi video game or something. i have to admit, i was ready for global tower to be pretty rundown, instead it looks like it's barely aged a day besides the dated architecture style. it's got to take some pretty intense maintenance, polishing the metal, powerwashing the concrete to remove stains, keeping cracks free of weeds. it only looks like they've let go a bit with all this tall grass at the base, though it did look sort of cool and there's a good chance it was cultivated intentionally. maybe most impressively, they managed to restrain themselves and avoid plastering the whole place in printed signs like they do all over in japan, a years-long buildup of printed signs is an essential part of japanese shabbiness. the weird thing is that there was barely anybody there, it was like they were keeping it in impeccable condition just for the principle of it, then again i could just be unintentionally coming to these places during the off-season.
from the observation deck, the other beppu tower was visible down by the coast and looked quite puny, global tower was not only taller and cooler but also had a height advantage because it was built further up the hillside. you were also supposed to be able to see the steam coming off the famous "hells" of beppu, i had my doubts about that because it was so hot and humid, but sure enough off in the distance you could still see some steaming columns. what captivated my attention the most from the top of the tower, though, was this building that was actually just across the street:
it's a regal old brick building that according to google maps is some kind of geothermal laboratory, i really wonder what goes on in there. it rests on quite a bit of land, pretty unusual for japan, and as i watched a car drive up and park right in front i wondered why they had dirt roads leading up to it and cars parked on grass. then, there's the tennis court, why does a geothermal lab need an adjacent tennis court? maybe it doesn't and that's why it's all overgrown from lack of use, then again it still seems like it would be completely playable and the net looks like quite taut, maybe it is still being actively used? overall, it seems like it could be an interesting setting for... something?