Japan Post — Otemachi: four years painted on three walls, and no caption anywhere

Concept

A building that explains itself in dates

Three separate rooms in this head office carry the same four numbers, set into the wall at the size of a doorway: 1871, 1875, 1916, 2007. One version is cut into a red panel, one into a green, one into a deep blue. A fourth wall, elsewhere, is covered edge to edge in five-digit postcodes — 104-6021, 104-6022, 104-6023 — running in neat columns like a page from a directory.

The company offers no explanation. The tour is thirty-seven photographs with a start button and no captions at all, which for an organisation of this size is either an oversight or a considerable act of confidence. What it leaves you with is a building that keeps writing its own dates on itself, in a district where every other tower is anonymous glass, and a lobby colonnade of pale round columns that could pass for a bank from any century you like.

01 · The lobby

Columns, and a great deal of stone

The ground floor is a long stone-floored hall behind a colonnade, with the lift bank at one end and seating set in loose groups. It is the first thing the tour shows after the building itself.

02 · The waiting floors

Low seating, high windows

Above the lobby the tour moves through a series of waiting and lounge floors: long benches under the glazing, and a red-carpeted room with white tub chairs.

03 · The number walls

Postcodes, and four years

One wall carries five-digit postcodes in columns. Three others carry the same four years — 1871, 1875, 1916, 2007 — each time on a different colour.

04 · The meeting rooms

Blue floors, and a patterned wall

The meeting rooms run from a blue-floored room with a screen to a plain boardroom of long tables, by way of a wall of white pattern and a curved counter with stools.

05 · The childcare room

Shelves, and a play mat

One floor holds a childcare room: low shelving, a patterned mat and a wall of small windows. The tour shows it without comment, between the meeting rooms and the canteen.

06 · Eating and sitting

The last four slides

The tour ends with the places people stop: a hall of long tables, a lounge with sofas, a run of booth seating, a restaurant-style dining room and a white room with a mural on one wall.