Name: Tokyo | Omotesando’s Hidden History, Dōjunkai Apartments (1927)
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T08:54:51.000Z
Duration: 12 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Welcome to Tokyo. That building right behind me is the, whatever's left of the Dojunkan apartment complex that was built in 1927.

It's the first earthquake-proof concrete building following the Great Kanto Earthquake that destroyed so much of Tokyo.

In 1926 and 1927, the Dojunkan company started to build a bunch of complexes around Tokyo in concrete, which would withstand the earthquakes that would come in Tokyo.

After a big one does occur, the cities usually react. This is what they did.

They built these really massive concrete apartment buildings that would be able to withstand strong earthquakes.

And the fires, which is what really destroyed Tokyo, not so much the earthquake as much as the fires that came after it.

Concrete, of course, is much better than wood, which is what they were made of back in the Taisho era and the early Showa era.

So, this building is all that remains. And in 2003 to 2006, they built what you see here, which is Omotesando Hills.

Tens of thousands of tourists walk by this every single day and don't actually realize the significance of Omotesando Hills.

Because all you see is a shopping center that nobody goes to.

Let's be honest, Omotesando Hills is not really a popular shopping mall. I'll show you what's inside there.

Let's look at some of the history, though. It really is fascinating.

So, I did go inside of the Omotesando Hills here. Let me play this video.

You can see the structure of the Omotesando Hills made of glass. Very modern.

The designer, Ando-san, is there. And actually, right there at the entrance of Omotesando Hills, back when they first built it,

I'm pretty sure there used to be a pillar that was remaining right there where that Chloe is.

There used to be a pillar from the old Dojukan apartment complex.

I guess they removed it. Another example of how they've minimalized the history of it.

Here's the backside of it, so you can get more of a feel. The trees, the old avenues of the backstreets of Omotesando.

There are actually, I believe, 38 high, super luxury apartments inside of here that are very minimalist, but they're very expensive, which makes them luxury.

Here's a walk through to the main avenue over there.

But it's still covered in ivy, the way that it was back in the Showa era.

So, you get kind of that feel on the backside of the Omotesando Hills, although that's a new building.

But you can see what's circled there, what was once a pillar, I guess they've taken it out.

Inside of Omotesando Hills, you can see, like, there's nobody. The first thing is that it's really nice inside.

But the second thing that you notice is, like, there's nobody inside shopping here.

I've been going in and out of Omotesando Hills for decades, and quite often, I don't see people in here buying anything.

So, I don't even know how the businesses stay in business.

And I heard that in the basement, they had some sort of photo display showing the history of Dojunkan and the apartment complex.

So, another example of how I think that they've really minimalized the history here.

Because the history really makes the city come alive.

I even asked the information ladies at the entrance of Omotesando Hills, and I said, are there any remnants of the old Dojunkan besides the wing right here?

And they said, nope, we don't know. I don't think they'd ever heard about that pillar.

I guess they removed it in the early 2000s.

I don't know, but it kind of rubbed me the wrong way knowing that all of the past, except for this wing here, is gone.

I want to show you a video I found on YouTube and kind of react to it.

This video is quite old, but it shows what Omotesando used to look like back in, I don't know, like 25 years ago.

There was that old building called Dojunkan.

I walked by it in my first four or five years living here in Tokyo, or living in Japan when I walked through Omotesando Hills.

This is the old site of what is now Omotesando Hills, covered in ivy.

I don't know if it was an ICE or not, but people still lived in there.

That's what it looked like from street level.

Today it looks very much different, like glass and steel.

I've got another section of the video here.

This video showed the top of Dojunkan, the old apartments.

You can feel that 1920s, 1930s Japan, the way that people were living here 25 years ago like this, which is crazy to me.

Because now it's all about money, luxury, designer goods, fashion.

Back then, it's where people lived, you know.

And this lady was 77 at the time, and she's talking about coming in here.

I'll see if I can link a description in here, but there's no English to it.

The street itself, including these trees, are the same.

But you can see the old Dojunkan apartment building, earthquake-proof, also covered in ivy.

It had kind of an almost abandoned feel, which I guess this is one reason why the city of Tokyo might have taken it out and turned it into Omotesando Hills.

But there was a lot of people that were against that, wanted to retain the old charm of Tokyo.

And now Omotesando Hills is like a shining example of modern Tokyo.

So for me, there's some history to it, and I kind of have a lot of respect.

You can see there's the great Kanto earthquake in 1923.

You can see the fire is really what destroyed most of this stuff.

The building's made of, like, mud and wood and things like that.

It looked real nice for 1927, doesn't it?

But it was made of cement, and people felt safe in here because you could see here's a resident from back then.

People didn't feel really safe for a long time after the great Kanto earthquake, so they really wanted to be in safer buildings.

So these earthquake buildings were very important.

And then when World War II hit, because this building was made of cement, not all of them were.

World War II did not destroy the Dojunkan here in Omotesando, the bombing of Tokyo.

Most of the stuff was completely destroyed, but Dojunkan remained because of that cement.

So a lot of the buildings that were reinforced during the great Kanto earthquake survived the fires.

More than the bombing were the fires of Tokyo as a result of the bombing.

There's a lot of history here, and today you can see Dojunkan, right?

Whatever is left of it is very much represented of the old structure.

I'm going to walk around it now. You can take a look at it.

There's a modern toilet right here in Omotesando, and the A1 and A2 exits of Omotesando subway station is in this direction.

Walking through the alley here, you can see the old ivy.

Crawling up this 100-year-old building in a couple of years.

It'll be celebrating 100 years, surviving the great Tohoku earthquake in 2011 as well. That was pretty strong.

There's the backside of it, and you can see the difference in the architectural style.

But at the time, Ando, who was the designer of Omotesando Hills, really wanted to find a way to protect it.

So it's between this is also part of the Omotesando Hills and that one is, so they made sure they kept part of it intact.

Because again, it was quite a significant building.

You can even see there's old soil from 19... Is that from 1927? I guess so.

And then you can see the steps here, also from 1927.

It's a little bit of the history replaced the Omotesando Hills.

It's used glass concrete and natural lighting from modern urban canyon.

I'm not a really big... It's a reinterpretation. I'm not a big fan of the Omotesando Hills here.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Tokyo | Omotesando’s Hidden History, Dōjunkai Apartments (1927)

stuff

approach

significant

structure