It was of little surprise that the only parts of the Minato Miura complex which Vince approved of had been there for some time, like the Maritime Museum and the Cosmo Clock ferris wheel. The rest made him shudder. He wasn't exactly opposed to town planning in principle. In fact, whenever he raised his finger towards the ceiling, he was always proposing some planning, municipal or otherwise. But what planning?
It seemed that Yokohama had always been planned. Tokyo just grew and rotted in much the same way as a rain forest, but Yokohama was a place that had always originated in someone's mind. It had always been borne by intellectual necessity. Vince could appreciate this in a totally different way from that in which he loved Tokyo's chaos and life force. The houses existed in Tokyo, because people needed somewhere to live. It had a ramshackle effect that always implied that its cultural roots were with the folk who lived in these houses. But in Yokohama, the architecture seemed to be imposed and nowhere was this more true than in the Minato Miura 21 project.
The most obvious of these was the Landmark Tower, which had gone up and become Japan's tallest building before Vince had even realised it was being constructed. In itself, like the Shinjuku skyscrapers, the Tower had some aesthetic appeal. While others had complained that they were eye sores, he had been able to defend such structures as Shintocho for its multi-planar effect and the Sumitomo building for its triangular effect and the big hole in the middle, like a giant block of Toblerone on its end. However, whenever he talked to anyone with engineering background, he was forced to admit that a triangle was not the best shape for a sky scraper and that a hollow building or one with 40 foot high ceilings on some floors was hardly very economical in terms of space.
The Landmark Tower also had some glamour and undoubtedly wasted its fair share of space, but, unlike the buildings in the Shinjuku sky scraper district, it stood alone on the horizon blocking out a fair slice of the view of the harbour, relating to nothing around it and nothing else relating to it. Similarly, the only thing attractive about the New Grand Hotel was the ferris wheel almost as high and within rock throwing range.
Vince had mixed feelings about the New Grand and this may have led him to remark in mixed company that the building looked like a banana.
"What?" Connie had given him one of her vastly superior looks. "It's nothing like a banana. It's more like a segment of cantaloupe with the seeds left in it."
The entire group erupted into a discussion about the most appropriate metaphor for the New Grand Hotel. The spinnaker of a yacht. A bottle of shampoo or conditioner. An up-ended bamboo shoot. An apple corer. The tip of a sewing machine needle. A wet sumie paint brush. Anything but a banana, although one very kind Japanese woman admitted that she had seen chocolate coated bananas that looked similar, but they were brown not white. Vince was receiving telephone calls for months afterwards about the New Grand.
"It's a pen nib," a husky, muffled voice would state baldly at 2 o'clock in the morning as if daring him to contradict it.
"What?"
"A pen nib!"
"A pen nib?"
"That's right!"
"What's this about a pen nib?"
"The New Grand Hotel! What else?"
"It looks nothing like a pen nib!"
"Well, have you seen the new range of Sheaffers?"
"No, but ..."
"Well, it looks more like a Sheaffer nib than a banana, I'll tell you that."
The calls were always anonymous and Vince couldn't help wondering what sort of pervert would call in the wee wee hours of the morning to tell him that the New Grand Hotel looked like a pen nib. It was far easier, he sighed, to understand the guys who rang up and wanted to have telephone sex with Connie, although neither he nor Connie ever actually knew how to have sex on the telephone. He supposed it would have to be oral sex unless you vaselined the receiver.
As for the Pacifico International complex, he discovered that it was nothing but a huge warehouse that exhibited anything that someone would pay to have exhibited. Vince didn't have anything to exhibit, but he went along once and after some haggling they gave him a special green tag, which meant that he had educational interest in the exhibition. There were other colours for professionals, businessmen, students, tradespeople and sight seers. In his entire time in the complex, looking at makeshift water sculptures, he didn't see anyone else with a green tag or, for that matter, anything that looked at all educational. There was, however, a lot of it.
Vince visited the Yokohama Metropolitan Museum of Art just once too, and there was a lot of that as well. The occasion was the Joan Miro exhibition and Vince had already seen one Miro exhibition in Tokyo, not to mention a wealth of his work at the Hakone Open Air Art Museum. He actually liked a lot of Miro's work, but had discovered that, as with so many of these exhibitions, there was an overkill of hundreds of works and it was just too much culture to digest in one sitting.
Vince didn't know how the average Japanese art lover did it. They would peer at the title of the painting and its date on a little plaque to the side, then step back so as to appreciate the canvas more fully. They would then gaze at the painting for as long as it took a look of sublime appreciation and understanding to envelope their face, as if they had suddenly become as one with the picture. They would then sigh silently, obviously reluctant to tear their eyes away and repeat the same process for the next canvas. Vince began to wonder if this were art appreciation or just sheer boredom after he noticed that a number of art lovers with the same range of expressions at the original canvases of Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers and Haddon Sunblum's Coca Cola Santa Claus exhibition.
Vince was all too aware that they found his kind of art appreciation a damned nuisance. He liked to get close up to the canvas so that he could see each and every brush stroke and smell the paint. If he had been less scrupulous, he would have run his fingers over the canvas, poked his tongue out and tasted it, and no doubt would have been evicted from the gallery for doing so. But imagine what Giotto or Raphael would taste like, he thought. Stale, perhaps. At Japanese exhibitions, he would start with the subject matter, but after the fiftieth canvas he was looking only at the materials. With Miro, after the 30th. Oisseau, he couldn't see how any of the Japanese art lovers, or for that matter Miro himself, could be looking at the subject matter.
The Yokohama Museum of Art had an observation tower with a window as two dimensional as any of the paintings downstairs. It gave a perfect 180 degree view of Yokohama and its port. It had to. After all, the rest of the view was blocked out by the Landmark Tower across the road.