Septembner 8, 2013
Warehouse Kawasaki: Hong Kong's Infamous Kowloon Walled City Repica Aracade
Years ago, Kawasaki's Nisshin-chō was known as a run-down neighborhood, full of day-laborers and flophouses—much like Osaksa's Nishinari area.
But post-gentrification, Nisshin-chō has lost a lot of its crappy charm. Gone are the dilapidated tenements. Look around and you'll find shiny, new homes and buildings stretching as far as the eye can see—hold on a second.
What the heck is this nasty, garbage building doing here? Is this a remnant from the neighborhood's seedy past?
No, this rusty giant is Anata no Warehouse, a five-story entertainment complex run by the GEO Corporation. Each one of their fourteen locations has a different motif and Kawasaki's warehouse is modeled after the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong.
Pass through giant steel door, prepare for jets of air to make you jump and a haunting entrance which instantly takes you off the streets of Kawasaki and into the cramped streets of Kowloon Walled City.
Photo by Lily Crossley-Baxter
Famed for its neon lights, shady businesses and maze-like alleys, it’s no wonder the city is the source of inspiration for many dystopian films including Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner.
Every detail—right down to the trash—was the subject of an exacting vetting process. Taishiro Hoshino, a set designer that worked on the project, writes that the team sent away to Hong Kong for authentic tin mailboxes and garbage. "The garbage left on the butcher’s tent and the tin roofs are also indispensable in reproducing Kowloon Walled City," he says. "I insisted on using the genuine article and asked my friend and her family in Hong Kong to send a box of their house garbage all the way to Japan."
The man behind the lifelike replica of the Walled City was Taishiro Hoshino, an art director with a background in kabuki theatre. He started the process by making intricate small-scale models, after which his talented team of craftsmen created almost every detail and nuance from scratch. Hoshino noted: “What we thought indispensable in order to reproduce and reconstruct the legendary Kowloon Walled City were those signs that fill up the entire City and the varieties of numberless poster on the walls without any spaces left between them. These things are not available in Tokyo of course, therefore there was nothing we could do but make everything from the beginning.”
All of the signs and posters have been painstakingly recreated from original source material found in old photos of the city and items collected in Hong Kong.
Even the city's reputation as a den of iniquity for prostitution, gambling, and drugs has been recreated
They also rummaged around for all kinds of memorabilia – Bruce Lee movie posters, old TVs, cheap Chinese chinaware, fluorescent signs, birdcages, electric fans, period calendars and so on – to flesh out the elaborate tableaux, like a sprawling set from an epic movie.
One of the key elements of the reconstruction was making everything look old and distressed. That was the genius of Hoshino’s specialist team of artists and painters, as he explained: “Each part of the wall is made in the finest detail, but more than that its finish is so dense and outstanding that it gives the sense of its smell and humidity by using our secret super ageing techniques.” // Go Back ☜
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