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Kowloon, Hong Kong The Walled City has always been talked about by people. A British man named Lin Baoxian once described it like this:
"Those horror stories are far from the truth. Apart from the bad lanes, the Walled City is not much different from other lower-class areas in Hong Kong. The Walled City can be said to be a microcosm of Hong Kong, and it is populated by ordinary people trying to make a living. 》
Although the Walled City has long been reduced to ashes and turned into a silent figure in the image, its story has always been remembered by the world.
After all, although this place has nourished a number of black industries, it has also brought hope of survival to countless special people - , the "scar of Hong Kong" in the eyes of outsiders, is actually home in the eyes of people within the village.
Until April 1994, Kowloon Walled City was demolished, and the original site was rebuilt into Kowloon Walled City Park . Those once dark and narrow streets, turbid sewage, tangled wires, buildings that had not seen the light of day, and dense The signboard has eventually become a dark and unpredictable memory in the hearts of Hong Kong people.
However, although the Kowloon Walled City has become a memory of the times, there is a building known as "Japanese Kowloon Walled City" that still stands today.
It is called Sawada Mansion. After a full 25 years of construction and transformation, it is still the king of fish that has slipped through the Japanese legal system ...
In fact, unlike Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City, Sawada Mansion was originally It was built to protect vulnerable groups.
It is an apartment building, each room is about 36 square meters, and the minimum monthly rent is only 30,000 yen (about 1,500 yuan) .
There is everyone here, and the occupations are even more diverse. College students who don’t like living in dormitories, dispatched employees with low incomes, printing workers, groceries Shop clerks, civil workers, designers, nurses, lawyers, architects whose jobs sound stable and decent, as well as coffee shop owners, singers chasing dreams...
And those small rooms less than 40 square meters, because of different people Personality, identity and living habits are arranged in all kinds of strange ways.
Some people live a sloppy life, with a room full of clutter and nowhere to go; some people live a simple life, with a minimalist and clean room; some people live a cute life, with many cartoon decorations in the room; some people live a quiet life, accompanied by many books.
It happens that this group of completely different strangers can live a lively and intimate life.
The way they get along is more like the familiar neighbors who lived in a large courtyard in the past. Everyone can get along with each other. Often the family is in trouble, the whole building helps , full of the warmth of humanistic care, and "like to keep a distance" , don’t cause trouble to others” Japanese society is completely different.
What’s even more amazing is that many people who were once unemployed have found the motivation to live and what they want to do here again.
A grocery store owner continued to open a grocery store in his apartment after the previous store closed down.
An unemployed chef, after moving into an apartment, opened a restaurant with the encouragement of his neighbors.
This small restaurant serves as a restaurant and a coffee shop during the day, and turns into a small bar at night, which is very interesting.
A metallurgical woodworking master rented a store at a very cost-effective price. This is his metallurgical workshop, and the customers are other residents in the apartment building.
In addition to the above-mentioned shops, the apartment building has yoga classrooms, music classrooms, law offices, architect offices, and even art galleries.
The people living here have independently formed a state of "regional autonomy". Everyone practices and abides by the invisible rules of the building tacitly, autonomously and intimately, harmoniously and orderly.
However, such a utopian apartment building is actually the largest illegal building in Japan.
The story about it has to start with the man who built it, Kanon Sawada.
Kanon Sawada, before building “Sawada Mansion”, was a person who had no contact with architectural design at all.
He was born in 1927, just in time for an extremely serious economic crisis in Japan.
Sawada grew up in a machiya in the countryside. When he was in the fifth grade of elementary school, he accidentally caught a glimpse of a modern apartment in a magazine.
He was surprised to find that there were actually houses that were watertight. People living in them did not need to use buckets to catch the rainwater pouring into the house during windy and rainy weather.
From then on, a dream about "building a house" secretly sprouted in his heart.
After graduating from elementary school, Zetian did not choose to continue studying. Instead, he went to work in his family's building materials factory and accumulated a lot of practical experience.
html At the age of 427, he left the building materials factory and went to a big city to start a real estate sales business, where he also made his first pot of gold.
As the economic conditions improve, it is natural to start thinking about starting a family. However, Zetian's marriage is a bit delicate.
When his wife Yujiang married him, she was still a 13-year-old junior high school student. Her father was his teacher when he was a construction worker. Later, he spent all the family savings due to hospitalization, and his mother ran away. The lonely girl could not survive alone. Live on.
So Sawada took Yujiang to his home to take care of him as his daughter-in-law, because she was not of legal marriage age and could not obtain a certificate. The two of them belonged to "De facto marriage" (referring to men and women without spouses who live together as husband and wife without registering their marriage at the marriage registration authority, and the public also considers it to be a marriage between husband and wife) . For this reason, he was also used as "abduction" by the police. "Minor" was captured and interrogated.
The police believed that Yujiang was forced to "marry" Zetian and wanted to send her back to her hometown, but she refused.
It was not until 1959, when Yujiang reached the legal age for marriage, that the two officially held their wedding.
After marriage, Sawada never forgot his original dream. After years of accumulation and investigation, he and his wife Yujiang officially began to build their own apartment building in 1971.
And that year, he was already 44 years old.
At that time, Yujiang’s father had already recovered and been discharged from the hospital. The two carpenters threw away the design drawings and started building a house according to their own ideas.
They were very fast. In the first year, they built six units on the first floor, and in the second year they expanded it to 24 units on the fourth floor. Since then, other tenants have moved in one after another.
In the third year, the fifth floor of the apartment building was built, which is also the living space for Sawada's family.
Of course, building a five-story apartment building is not Sawada’s ultimate goal. He has been carrying out refined renovations based on the needs of different family members at different times.
For example, at first, they didn’t want to walk upstairs, so they demolished a few rooms and made a driveway that stretches upward so that you can drive directly to the third floor.
The apartment building is so big that it must have some supporting facilities. He also built an open-air hot spring bath and barbecue restaurant on the top floor.
What should I do if my grandson wants a swimming pool? Just roll up your sleeves and get started.
As it turned out, the swimming pool was not finished yet and he didn’t want it anymore, so Sawada changed the swimming pool into an exquisite courtyard.
Later, Zetian opened a field on the roof, where every tenant can grow vegetables.
Outside the stairs of the apartment, there is also a space for planting green plants. It has a feeling of modern " fourth generation housing " , where architecture and nature coexist harmoniously.
was modified and modified in this way. Time passed by 15 years ago, and the apartment building gradually became famous.
However, when Zetian built the building, he only bought the land and did not obtain the construction qualification. It has always been an "illegal construction house", and even a "forced demolition" sign was posted at the gate several times.
So his biggest wish is to expand the building to 10 floors and carry out comprehensive renovations to make it a "legal and compliant" building so that his family and other residents can live here in a down-to-earth manner.
Unfortunately, Sawada died of liver disease in 2003, leaving his wife Yue alone to guard the apartment building they built.
However, this place is getting more and more lively as time goes by.
Young people who have just graduated come here to settle down, people who like the renovation of old houses and small houses come here to study design, artists come to open galleries, single mothers with children come here to find the feeling of home...
What about Yujiang? She still lives here, taking care of the residents who come and go, and adhering to Sawada's legacy -
"With this building, we want to connect poor people from all over the world to enjoy freedom and happiness."
To this day, the apartment is still an "illegal building" that can be demolished at any time, but it has become a paradise to escape the city, able to carry everyone's life and dreams, and full of vitality.
Although the person who built it is no longer there, the rooftop vegetable garden built more than ten years ago is still producing good harvests every year.
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