What does “play” mean?
With the generous support of our friend Yuriko Kubota, we had the opportunity to spend an afternoon with her mother and two of her friends, all now in their 80s. Each of them has lived in both Japan and the West (the U.S. and Canada) since the 1970s, bringing a transnational perspective to our questions. We asked: How do seniors like them play in public spaces? What does play mean to them today? What are their impressions of avant-garde design, such as Metabolism? And how do they view newer phenomena of “serious play,” like e-sports bars?
Our conversation foregrounded a striking divergence between lived definitions of play and avant-garde architectural imaginations of it. For them, play is defined by physical independence—swimming, walking, playing mahjong, arranging flowers—activities that are at once bodily, intellectual, and communal.
Parks such as Shinjuku were recalled as primary sites of play, rather than experimental architectures. While the 1960s and 70s are often retrospectively framed as a period of radical futurity in Japan, they remembered the West as more advanced at the time, with Japan’s rapid development not yet underway. This shaped their design preferences: when invited to visit Arakawa and Gins’s Reversible Destiny Lofts in Mitaka, they politely declined, finding the eccentricity amusing but not appealing. Instead, the buildings they spoke of with pride were the Imperial Palace and the Wako department store—icons of elegance, stability, and cultural continuity in their eyes.
As for contemporary play, they associated e-sports bars with a more masculine culture, far removed from their own practices of leisure and community. Their reflections suggest not a rejection but a playful contrast: avant-garde discourses of radical play versus the everyday architectures and activities that, for them, embodied continuity, beauty, and cultural pride.