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PRINT AND FRAME DETAILS
Printing
Printed on Canson Platine Fibre Rag 310gsm Paper Stock
Borders
All prints come with a 25mm (+) white border for easy framing
Framing
Frames include a white matte and black, white or raw oak finish
ShipPING
Free Australia wide shipping via ASG, frames arrive ready to hang
INFO
Tokyo Tower opened on 23 December 1958 and for a while it was the tallest freestanding tower in the world. At 332.9 metres it edged out the Eiffel Tower by about 9 metres, which was very much the point.
Post-war Japan was after a symbol of its recovery, and NHK had started television broadcasting in 1953. Rather than let dozens of transmission masts sprout up all over the city, the government backed one enormous tower that could reach the whole Kanto region. Hisakichi Maeda originally wanted it taller than the Empire State Building. Money and materials said no, so the final height was set by how far the signal actually needed to travel, roughly 150 kilometres.
Tachu Naito designed it, looking straight at Paris for inspiration. He reckoned it could handle an earthquake twice the intensity of the 1923 Great Kanto quake and winds up to 220 km/h. Takenaka Corporation broke ground in June 1957 with at least 400 workers on site every day, many of them tobi, the traditional Japanese high-rise crews. About a third of the steel came from scrapped US tanks damaged in the Korean War.
Here's the part I love. Despite being taller than the Eiffel Tower it weighs around 4,000 tonnes, some 3,300 tonnes lighter, because it's a far thinner and simpler structure. The orange and white paint isn't a style choice either, it's aviation law, and the whole thing gets repainted in a job that takes about a year.
Tokyo Tower was a photo stop on one of my more relaxed days of photography whilst in Tokyo. After an early morning stop at the Reiyukai Shakaden temple around the corner I took the short walk to the base of the Tower.
Tokyo Tower is one of the most photographed structures in Tokyo, which is exactly the problem. Finding something different is a challenge, as is with many places in Japan. So after a brief stint of experimentation with compositions directly under the tower trying my best to create some minimalist compositions I decided to depart and find a street view of the Tower itself.
I decided to walk down one of the main surrounding streets eventually arriving at Akabane Bridge where the view of the Tower I was seeking came into view. Arriving at a 35mm focal length I shifted my lens up to capture the tower in full whilst keeping the bustling morning streets of Tokyo in view. I sat there for quite some time photographing different moments of pedestrian activity, eventually arriving at this!
Mario Circuit
Tokyo tower rising over Minato City, Tokyo
