William O. Gardner's The Metabolist Imagination is a thrilling new contribution that disentangles Japan's complex 1960s and 1970s from the vantage of interdisciplinary insight. Drawing on the interwoven ideologies embedded in architectural theory, science fiction, and urban and environmental studies, the book ushers the reader through the trailblazing labors of the Metabolist group, an avant-garde clique that reimagined the possibilities of Japan's future urban landscape amid a period of seemingly miraculous postwar economic growth.

While the philosophies and nomenclature of Metabolism are scarcely known outside of small communities of architects and scholars, the group's impact on Japan's postmodern cityscape is visually impeccable and unmistakable for its signature futuristic style. Thus, Gardner's introduction of the fruits of Metabolist labor in both architecture and futuristic imaginings to North American Asian studies scholarly circles is welcome and of notable significance as a pathfinder. With visual illustrations of masterpieces such as Tange Kenzō's Yoyogi National Gymnasium (1964) and Kurokawa Kishō's Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972), Gardner meticulously documents the theoretical principles embraced by the Metabolist group for urban planning for decades and centuries to come.

One of the most innovative concepts developed by the group, Gardner notes, was its visionary image of the city freed from “the ‘totalitarian’ domination of the megastructure” (p. 16). Unlike a city laden with humongous edifices that are permanently affixed to their original structures with no space for modification, Metabolism envisaged the city as a fundamentally organic and mutable body that continuously transformed its structure, with various speculative and anticipatory extramaterial factors, including the ebb and surge of population and developments in infrastructure, such as networked systems in communications technology. The positing of the city as an ephemeral body in constant mutation stemmed at least in part from a number of geographical and historical conditions that Japan had experienced—for example, “frequent destruction by fires, earthquakes, and other natural as well as anthropogenic disasters” (p. 4)—that accustomed the country to constantly rebuilding its cities. This theoretical underpinning was reflected in the Metabolist group's most noticeable architectural stylistic innovation, the featuring of “capsules,” units that could flexibly and adaptively be added, replaced, and eliminated in the megastructure of a building.

In the 1960s, the urban planning proposed by the Metabolist group was not merely an insular idea spawned by Japan's fascination with futurism. In reality, the Metabolist discourses were highly dialogic with other emerging neologies and concepts in Western countries. Such vocabularies include geographer Jean Gottmann's term megalopolis, applied to describe the continuous stretch of urban and suburban regions encompassing Boston to Washington, D.C., and Constantinos Doxiadis's idea of the ecumenopolis, a “continuous system” of the world that comprised a single planetary city. According to Gardner, these concepts influenced the Metabolist's megastructural visions of cities as organic bodies, but the Metabolists were no less connected with the political agenda of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, which aspired to develop the economy by a drastic restructuring of transportation and industrial infrastructures. Repeatedly emphasized in various terms was the possibility of a “cybernetics environment,” in which the presence of (to borrow the terminology of architect Isozaki Arata) “increasing fluidity, flux, and media noise” (p. 111) governs the operation of urban landscape. Such an image resonates with his other conception of cities as inherent ruins whose inception already imagines their ephemeral fate, to be abandoned and rediscovered due to constant migration, exodus, growth, and economic decay. This conception marks cities as always in transit, playing a receptacle role for ceaseless media input and flows of energy and information. Then, according to Gardner's analysis, this valence of the dematerialization of Japanese cities constitutes the simulacra of codes and signs embedded in the urban landscape.

Gardner's painstaking tracing of the Metabolist labor is a novel contribution to material cultural studies of the 1960s and 1970s, enhanced in particular by its daring interdisciplinarity. Above all, Gardner's explications of discourses on architectural futurism through science fiction comprises his tour de force. What stands out the most is his reading of science fiction novelist Komatsu Sakyō, whose work sets forth multifarious scenarios for Japan's catastrophic future. The most strikingly pertinent to our contemporary world (if not only to Japan) is Sakyō's novel Virus: The Day of Resurrection (1964). As though offering a prognosis for the ongoing threat of COVID-19 in 2021, the novel predicts “the geopolitical frictions, the gaps in global connections, and a global ecology that is fragile and subject to sudden, catastrophic change” (p. 73). It is almost goosebumps-inducing to learn that more than fifty-five years ago, Japanese science fiction foresaw the “failure of multiple interlocking safety systems” built around complex social infrastructures and communication networks (p. 76) that troubles much of the world of today.

Another notable component of The Metabolist Imagination is its careful documentation of the Osaka Expo of the 1970s. Gardner situates the government-sponsored first World Fair in Asia not only as a showcasing event intended to advertise the postwar redevelopment of economy and infrastructure enhanced by techno-informatics, but also as an environmentally concerned site of experimentation vis-à-vis the event's official slogan, “Progress and Harmony of Mankind.” However, Gardner does not remain ensconced in utopic contentment. The chapter titled “Liquid Cities,” for example, unpacks the nature of the Festival Plaza, a conspicuous feature of the expo, as a technologically controlled site of surveillance and harbinger of an ominous, Orwellian future for mankind.

In the larger landscape of postwar Japanese studies, the foremost strength of The Metabolist Imagination lies in its lucidly drawn single thread—the genealogy of futuristic enterprises from the 1960s onward—through Metabolist architecture, Komatsu Sakyō's science fiction novels, the Osaka Expo, and later engagements with the group's legacy in popular cultural productions. Shaded by the dominance of popular culture (e.g., anime and manga), the post-high-growth phase of the late 1960s through the early 1970s was previously a niche subject, a somewhat vacuum phase of postwar history that had yet to receive sufficient and widespread academic attention outside of economics, history, or political science. Therefore, Gardner's scrupulous chronicling of the group's futuristic projects provides an undoubtedly long-awaited introduction, giving readers a solid foundation for understanding how self-reflexively Japan envisioned the decades and centuries to come amid explosive economic, industrial, and infrastructural growth. Simultaneously, the book implicitly reclaims the scientific ambition of postmodern Japan—the country eclipsed by other East Asian technocrat nations over the past few decades—and its agile ability to incubate the architectural future by means of local wisdom.

Originally conceived as individual articles, each chapter in the book constitutes a unified worldview, one constantly signaling the presence of a dystopic future behind technological advancements. Last but not least, the book boasts the visually handsome outlook of the group as well. The front cover, featuring Kurokawa's iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower, and the generous twelve pages of color illustrations should appeal to a wide readership beyond academic connoisseurs of architecture.