As I walk along Kobikochōnaka-dōri, moving from Kyōbashi to Higashi Ginza, a narrow, three-story building catches my attention. Its upper floors are clad in uniform brown brick, where two pairs of wood-framed sash windows, each adorned with a simple metal balconette, rest beneath a projecting cornice. These modest ornamental details are mildly darkened by the passage of time.
At ground level, the building offers a contradiction: its original brick siding is covered by vertically ridged, white-painted fibreboard. Beneath a vivid orange sign, two plain doors sit either side of an unframed window, their functionality entirely unembellished. Now housing an acupuncturist's studio, the shopfront’s improvised, contemporary clinical aesthetic seems intended as an advertisement.
It's just another late Shōwa-era prefabricated building in Tokyo, adapting to the realities of 2025. Yet, passing by and glancing back, an unexpected sight reveals itself. Where an adjacent structure must once have stood, there is now a coin-operated parking lot. The gap it leaves in the streetscape inadvertently exposes the hidden flank of the brown brick building. Through this opening, its structural truth is laid bare, and any illusion of genuine brick masonry swiftly crumbles.
The structure extends deeply into its plot, revealing itself as a kind of anatomical cross-section. It is a patchwork of corroded sheet metals in rust-brown, with surreal slabs of oxidised blue hammered and bolted in place. What stands here is a building at odds with the promise of its brick frontage, now understood to be merely a thin layer of pressed tile, masking the street-facing façade. It is an architectural expression of honne and tatemae.
Honne and Tatemae
In a keynote address to the Historical Design Research Council, Gondo Tomoyuki, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Tokyo, reflected on the notion of honne and tatemae within the realm of architecture:
If we were to say that architecture also has honne and tatemae, then construction methods and building practices could be considered closer to the honne side of things. The reasons why certain architectural elements or components take the form they do are often determined by factors such as cost, the skill level of craftsmen, or the unavailability of alternative materials. These kinds of honne, however, are rarely preserved in records.
Honne (本音) and tatemae (建前) describe the contrast between an individual’s true feelings or desires (honne) and the public façade or socially expected behaviour they present to the world (tatemae). The concept is often discussed in the context of nihonjinron (日本人論), a body of texts and theories that seek to articulate a perceived uniqueness of the Japanese national character.
Viewed critically, honne and tatemae can be seen as an oversimplification of Japanese cultural norms, whilst overlooking the universal interplay between private sentiment and public expression that takes shape, in varying forms, across all societies. Yet in daily life in Japan, the concept continues to ring true. Honne and tatemae remain indispensable shorthand for describing how social harmony is preserved through the management of expression.
The word tatemae (建前) is rooted in architecture. 建 (tate) means “to build” or “construct”, while 前 (mae) denotes “front” or “before”. In architectural practice, tatemae refers to the on-site assembly of a building’s main structural elements, such as raising pillars, beams, and roof framing. When the term began to describe patterns of human behaviour is uncertain, yet the shift preserves its core meaning: a front put up before what lies within.
本音 (honne) carries a naturally anthropomorphic quality. 本 (hon) conveys “true”, “origin”, or “real”, while 音 (ne) evokes “sound”, “tone”, or “voice”. In its retroactive application to architecture, Professor Gondo proposes:
Understanding why the buildings we live in every day came to look the way they do is a fundamental desire—and one that carries the excitement of discovery. The value of such knowledge doesn’t lie in its utility, but in the way it changes what we see. That, quite frankly, is the real honne.
For Gondo, honne embodies the underlying reasons why a building is the way it is. In his speech, he reflected on his experience interviewing developers and architects, observing how these reasons are sometimes concealed or reworded in more marketable terms. This concealment makes uncovering the true story of a building all the more compelling.
What, then, of the brown brick building’s honne and tatemae? What explains its cobbled-together form and incongruent frontage? Let’s find out.
One-Sided Display
In the brown brick building, we observe a familiar technique that aligns well with the characteristics of kanban kenchiku (看板建築), meaning ‘signboard architecture’. This style flourished in the 20th century, particularly after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. Builders would often invest in a smart, fire-proof façade, borrowing from one genre of Western design or another, which functioned both as frontage and as signage. Meanwhile, the structure behind was fashioned from timber or light-gauge steel.
On streets such as Kobikichōnaka-dōri, the sides of buildings were never expected to be seen. This semi-commercial lane was likely once a central shopping street, lined with narrow plots where properties, although technically detached, pressed closely against one another. Though some larger developments have since consolidated multiple plots, the street’s original nature endures. Accordingly, many side walls were left plain, their surfaces simply coated in lime or cement-based plaster.
When the time came for repairs and reinforcement, there was no need to fret about public presentation. The buildings' sides would be patched up with whatever was at hand to waterproof, insulate, or simply protect against deterioration over time. The brown brick building shows how these surface treatments tend to accumulate, each layer telling a story of adaptation rather than intentional design.
Material Memory
On the tatemae side, if a building has but one face to present, that face becomes everything. While the remainder of the structure is left untreated, all design investment—ornamentation, signage, tiling, and decorative flourishes—is focused on the façade. It is a response shaped by visibility, and it reveals much about the eclectic appearance of Tokyo’s commercial streets: owners are free to choose a façade and affix it like a sheet of urban wallpaper.
The choice of aesthetic is not always a whimsical one, though. Material carries memory, and in Ginza, there remains a particular affinity for brick. After the great fire of 1872, the Meiji government rebuilt the district in red brick—at once a statement of Western-style urban modernity and a measure against future fires. Over time, these structures vanished: some were dismantled due to structural failures, many were replaced after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, and the last were destroyed during World War II.
Reconstruction efforts favoured modern materials and designs, privileging speed over coherence and function over form. The work advanced urgently, fragmentarily, and with a certain emotional economy. Still, a brick-clad façade could evoke the prewar solidity that had been lost, even if the structure behind it was impermanent. What remains today is not brick itself, but the idea of brick—its visual and historical weight reproduced in veneer and cladding. And so began an era of façades with thin symbolic overlays.
Regulatory Façadism
All of this is connected, in part, to the practice of façadism—a phenomenon with a history in cities around the world. Unlike Japan’s post-war application of prefabricated veneers that echo history, façadism typically refers to a preservation method in which the façade of an old building is retained, while the rest is demolished and rebuilt anew.
Proponents suggest that façadism enables cities to preserve the character of historic streetscapes while adapting to contemporary needs. Critics, however, argue that it offers only a superficial gesture, eroding the integrity of the buildings it seeks to honour.
When I encounter façadism mid-construction on the streets of London—the centuries-old face of ornate stone standing alone, like a stage set—there is an undeniable sense of manipulation. It feels like a commercially motivated honne: a new development that maximises usable floor space while preserving a historic tatemae to cultivate cachet and marketability.
Façadism in the preservation sense is not absent from Tokyo. In my walking guide to Jimbochō¹, I highlighted the 1887 stationery store Bunpodo, where only the original Art Deco façade remains. Yet the motivations here go beyond commerciality. In this case, it was the authorities and neighbouring residents who insisted on the change, due to fears that the ageing structure might collapse in an earthquake.
Indeed, revisions to earthquake resistance regulations in 1981 and again following the 1995 Kobe earthquake have rendered many older buildings technically obsolete. Japan’s strict and continually evolving building codes ensure that newer structures are materially safer than their predecessors. Faced with this reality, owners and developers often choose to rebuild rather than retrofit, adopting a pragmatic approach to life in one of the world’s most earthquake-prone nations.
When constructing a new steel-framed building to meet the latest earthquake-resistant reinforced concrete standards, there is a near-universal method for evoking the appearance of classic construction materials: layering a façade. This holds whether it is preserved from an old building or, more often, fabricated anew as siding.
Scrap and Build
Within this environment, Japan’s "scrap and build" culture, now a byword in discussions of its cities, has firmly taken root. Although renovations and second-hand buying—"stock and renovate"—are slowly gaining popularity, buildings are still rarely regarded as permanent, despite growing concerns about environmental and economic issues. It is a perspective that, when considered over a long time horizon and with the inevitable end of all structures considered, carries a certain rationality.
It is the land, not the structures built upon it, that holds enduring value. Several forces converge to shape this perspective. Under Japanese tax law, buildings are classified as rapidly depreciating assets, with a standard usable life ranging from as short as 19 years for light steel construction to a maximum of 47 years for reinforced concrete. This financial framework incentivises demolition and rebuilding over long-term maintenance or costly restoration.
Heritage protections in Japan are also comparatively limited. Unless a structure is formally recognised as a cultural property, a designation afforded to only a small number of sites, there is little legal or social impetus to preserve it. When façades like Bunpodo’s endure, it is typically through private initiative, maintained at the owner’s discretion and expense rather than through systemic safeguarding. Traditional aesthetics are valued, but the preservation of individual buildings tends to give way to a broader reverence for the continuity of cultural life.
Urban Discernment
Nobody could have foreseen that the creation of a coin parking lot would reveal the brown brick building’s hidden side. Still, I would suggest that its tatemae is not so much a deceptive façade as an optimistic attempt to preserve the spirit of an earlier, simpler time on behalf of the neighbourhood, before disaster, war, and the onward march of technology rendered such aspirations fragile. Its honne, meanwhile, is shaped by complex realities: the constraints of positioning and plot size within the town plan, the need to economise during austere decades, and the influence of a deeply rooted scrap-and-build culture.
There is a common tendency to admire unfiltered expression—the belief that saying exactly what one thinks, at all times, is a sign of honesty or integrity. Yet I sometimes wonder whether this is less a virtue than a failure of discernment. The satisfaction of saying one’s piece often seems to prioritise the speaker’s emotional release over any consideration of how their words might shape the experience of others.
In the life of the city, as in social life, I am comfortable with a degree of tatemae. If every truth were plainly inscribed across a building’s face, perhaps Tokyo would lose some of the pleasure that comes with wandering its streets. And as Gondo suggests, uncovering a building’s honne carries excitement, turning each walk into an act of discovery, and the city itself into something infinitely more intriguing.
Until we meet in Tokyo,
AJ
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