As previewed, NHK/BS Premium’s “New Fudoki of Japan: Metropolitan Expressway” aired October 30 and featured Palaceside Building.
Missed it? Don’t worry — there is a rerun: Friday, November 6, 8 a.m.
The program takes the expressway that symbolizes metropolitan Tokyo and, through lives and views tied to a road that changed the flow of people and goods, considers Tokyo’s past and future. It opens with a photographer captivated by the expressway, then after several stories, where the highway runs right beside a building with visible offices
our building appears as the prime example drivers remember.
Driving from Ikebukuro toward central Tokyo, Palaceside Building fills the view ahead＝photo upper right. Passing close beside it, you can even see people inside＝photo upper center.
The program highlights this closeness as “Human Crossroads — witnessing fleeting encounters born on an expressway everyone merely passes
through.”
Mainichi Building Co. President Tsuneo Haneda appears; cameras visit the fifth-floor president’s office＝photo lower right. The north side of the fifth floor faces Takebashi Junction — cars from Miyakezaka JCT toward Kandabashi JCT pass before your eyes. With that footage he speaks of a long relationship with the expressway — from joining The Mainichi Newspapers through retirement from the paper to the building, about forty years
to the present.
His closing words＝top photo: “I was happy to work where I could see (the expressway) out the window.”
As befits NHK, the program calls The Mainichi Newspapers a “major newspaper company” — apparently proper nouns are still basically off limits.