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Kojo Yakei:

If you go on a kojo yakei tour, you might expect most of your fellow passengers to be nerdy engineers, but the reality couldn’t be more different. The dominant demographic is often young couples out on dates. They are joined by men and women of all ages, but young urbanites seem to be in the majority. They haven’t come to wonder at the marvellous efficiency of modern industry, or to educate themselves about the their country’s industrial base. Kojo yakei is all about aesthetics – admiring industry for how it looks – as unintended works of public art. No one really cares about what the plants make or how they work – you don’t need to know any of that in order to be seduced by their functional allure. Kojo yakei places us in an totally alien environment, where we experience sights, sounds, and even smells, that are a world away from ordinary life, but also just a short distance from the centres of Japan’s big cities.