2015-12-31

Grand Front Osaka, created through more than twenty years of cooperation between Osaka’s public and private sectors, demonstrated the success of the North Yard redevelopment plan.
Citing Kenichi Ohmae’s discussion of the Asahi Shimbun’s Nakanoshima Festival Tower and the reported increase in its floor-area ratio from 1,000 percent to 1,600 percent, this article questions the extraordinary structure through which one newspaper company came to shape Japanese public opinion.

2015-12-31
It is no exaggeration to say that Grand Front Osaka was the finest urban-development project undertaken in postwar Japan, because it was created by bringing together the wisdom of Osaka’s public and private sectors over more than twenty years.
This has been demonstrated by the fact that, even more than a year after its completion, around 400,000 people continued to gather at Grand Front Osaka every weekend.
At the same time, as my readers have long known, this also proved with absolute certainty that my arguments concerning the North Yard—which had compelled me, reluctantly, to appear publicly in this way—were entirely correct.
I recently wrote that I had suddenly realized the truth behind why the North Yard project had begun to fall into confusion without the citizens of Osaka knowing anything about it.
What led me to this realization was an article on floor-area ratios written by Kenichi Ohmae in the monthly magazine SAPIO.
In that article, Ohmae pointed out that, when the Asahi Shimbun built Nakanoshima Festival Tower as a major project on which the company had staked its future, it obtained approval from the relevant authorities to raise the floor-area ratio from the area’s prescribed 1,000 percent to 1,600 percent.
He also pointed out that the site stands beside a river and is not located on particularly solid ground, suggesting that the floor-area ratio may therefore have had no relationship to the strength of the ground.
He further suggested that the authorities may have feared what the Asahi Shimbun would write about them if they rejected the newspaper company’s request.
I agree that his inference is completely correct.
I will discuss this matter in greater detail later.
To put it bluntly here, creating an outrageous structure in which a company like this could shape Japanese public opinion was postwar Japan’s greatest mistake.
This article will continue.