On NHK BS Premium, Fridays at 9 p.m.,
Palaceside Building will be featured. Broadcast is scheduled for October 30. The theme is the Metropolitan Expressway.
NHK’s website (http://www.nhk.or.jp/fudoki/) describes the program concept as follows:
“Landscapes every Japanese remembers. Rich culture nurtured over long history. Japanese who prayed to the gods for harvest and catch. Tracing local customs, nature, architecture, crafts, and food culture rooted in each place shows how deeply Japanese culture was built over the years… A full-scale travel documentary depicting beautiful local scenery, festivals, daily life, and people’s work across Japan.”
This episode takes the expressway that symbolizes metropolitan Tokyo’s character, and through lives and perspectives tied to a road that dramatically changed the flow of people and goods, considers Tokyo’s past and future. One segment is “Human Crossroads — witnessing fleeting encounters born on an expressway everyone merely passes through.”
“Human Crossroads” — well put. Palaceside Building stands close to the expressway; through full glass above the fifth floor, cars on the highway and people in the building meet at close range — close enough to read expressions. School-trip buses wave; countless brief encounters. Few buildings are so “intimate” with the expressway. Perhaps the building’s “transparency” without concrete walls makes it one drivers remember most in surveys — destined to be covered, you might say.
To show the building, the director visited many times; the crew filmed the expressway from the building office and roof, and recorded an interview with Mainichi Building Co. President Tsuneo Haneda
On the north side, renovation was underway and Mainichi Building offices were under scaffolding, but office work finished and scaffolding came down by October 12 — just in time for filming. Photo right shows rooftop shooting on sunny October 13.
If you have time, please watch.