Video
暗渠、”ankyo” means streets or areas where there used to be waterways in Japanese. There are many of them in Tokyo. A lot of these buried rivers became promenades, some are used as sewage lines while others were just covered and water eventually dried out. In Japanese, “ankyo” also refers to streets that resulted from putting a lid on the waterways as many of the old “ankyo” were made in that way.
Prior to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the government created many “ankyo” by burying the waterways because many of the small creeks and rivers in Tokyo became dirty ditches and smelled badly. The residents complained. The government wanted to hide these bad images and smells from international visitors, so they covered these waterways and turned them into promenades. That was one of the reasons, and Tokyo needed more land space to create streets and highways.
I asked my mother to make Origami boxes using the printed images of my photographs. The outside images show “ankyo” streets—streets where rivers and waterways once existed in Tokyo. As you open the box, images of running water from Ochiaigawa River and Sumidagawa River appear.