Back in May we published our first video of Shibuya, but this place is huge and we didn’t have time to cover everything. Today we shot another part of Shibuya, a far less attractive, but interesting and full of life.

I arrived in Japan on the 15 of April 2001, and since then I can’t recall seeing this part of Shibuya not under construction… This is madnes,s but like Shibuya (the video below) there are some places in Tokyo that have been under construction for decades.

After speaking to various people about this I got several explanations. One is a political, most contractors for public renovation are linked to politicians and win their contracts by being friends with them, and when the political party who hired a certain contractor looses an election, the new group of politicians hire other contractors (linked to them)….

In a perfect world this wouldn’t affect things much since contactors are supposed to be professionals and should be able to finish the work… Yes, in a perfect world this would be true… In fact in many cases (not sure if this is the case of Shibuya), these contractors just restart projects almost from scratch, and blame the previous contractor of being incompitent… As you can imagine, in Japan elections are frequent and major public construction rarely end.

Let’s Visit Tokyo – Shibuya
(DivXHD 720p Direct Download “Right click, Save as…”)