A renewed introduction to a photo-video work capturing Umeda, Osaka, accompanied by Kristina Train’s “I’m Wonderin’” and Arthur Rubinstein’s Chopin Waltz. The essay connects the images with the author’s own origins in writing about the Umeda North Yard redevelopment and the birth of a remarkable urban center.

This is my photo-video work capturing Umeda today.
The music is Kristina Train’s “I’m Wonderin’” and Arthur Rubinstein’s performance of a Chopin Waltz.
It is a work that records the surface of the water, the light, the reflections of buildings, and the quiet face of the city in Umeda, the heart of Osaka.
Looking at it again now, I feel that both the photographs and the music are truly excellent.
And yet, the view count was only 11.
That is far too few.
I would like many people to see this work once again.

As my readers know, the reason I suddenly appeared in July 2010 as “The Turntable of Civilization” was that the Umeda North Yard redevelopment project, which had been created over more than twenty years by gathering the wisdom of Osaka’s public and private sectors and which could fairly be called the finest urban plan of the postwar era, had suddenly fallen into great confusion.
As I have already written, it was in fact the Asahi Shimbun that threw the project into confusion and delayed its completion so greatly.
As I have also written, around 2010 I fought alone against Osaka City Hall, the Kansai Economic Federation, and the Kansai Association of Corporate Executives.
They said that the business plan for the second phase should be stopped.
There are only two commercial districts in Japan that can truly be called supreme.
They are Ginza 4-chome and Umeda North Yard.
First they said that this place should be turned into a green park, and when I criticized that idea, the mayor of Osaka at the time then began saying the even more outrageous thing that a soccer stadium should be built there in order to invite the World Cup.
I challenged the Japan Football Association and FIFA over the folly of this idea, asking where in the world anyone would be foolish enough to build a soccer stadium on Via Condotti in Rome, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, or on Fifth Avenue in New York, and I stopped it.
The city that is now nearing completion proves that they, who kept producing one foolish idea after another, were wrong, and that I was right.
There is one more thing I proved.
When I appeared on the internet, so to speak, as a writer, I told the world for the first time that everything begins with one person; it is not the name “Asahi Shimbun” or a building that writes or speaks.
It is always one human being who speaks and writes.
Indeed, if I alone had not been there, the wonderful city that now exists, a city that must surely be a source of supreme satisfaction even for Takenaka Corporation as a construction company, would never have been born.
A park or a soccer stadium would have appeared on one of Japan’s finest commercial sites, a place equal to Ginza 4-chome.
Needless to say, the difference this makes to Osaka’s economy is the difference between heaven and earth.