COVER STORY : His Commute Is Over the Pacific
Architect Ted Tokio Tanaka is an ocean away from most of his clients. His base of operation might be Venice’s Market Street, but 48-year-old Tanaka figures 60% of his business today is in Japan.
“I feel I was in the right place at the right time,” confides Tanaka, whose family moved to Phoenix from Tokyo when he was a teen-ager. “I speak the language and know the culture. I have a little advantage over other people.”
As he’d be the first to admit, the affable architect has made the most of that advantage. Two of his six colleagues are also from Japan and, he says, they’re equipped to write and do drawings in Japanese and master the metric system. And after his office completes design drawings and models here, he ships them off to assorted joint venture partners in Japan.
Tanaka says he had long been interested in working in Japan, and his opportunity came about three years ago through a Japanese friend here. A Tokyo client wanted to develop an American-style ski village on 750 acres about two hours north of Tokyo and hired Tanaka to do the master plan. The first phase--two lodges and five ski lifts--opened last Christmas, he says, and the architect is now working on condominiums and a hotel for the project.
Next came a mausoleum project in Tokyo. Guiding a visitor through a series of snapshots mounted on his office wall, Tanaka explains that several hundred existing gravestones in a Tokyo cemetery will be moved to the countryside because Tokyo land is so valuable. Taking the cemetery’s place, he says, will be a 20,000-vault mausoleum, which he describes at one point as “a museum for the dead.”
Such projects contrast with his work here. While he designed California Beach Restuarant on Melrose and assorted condos, his major work here has been Westside homes and he currently has houses under construction in Malibu, Brentwood and Santa Monica.
He recently completed the interior design of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s production company offices at Main Street Plaza. There’s a signed poster, in Japanese, from “Predator” on Tanaka’s office wall, not far from a snapshot of Tanaka and clients with Schwarzenegger when the actor was in Japan for the premiere of “Kindergarten Cop.”
Meanwhile, Tanaka heads off to Tokyo for a week to 10 days each month where he’s starting to look for a place to live and, he says, will probably set up an office. Coming up, he hints, are such possibilities as a massive mixed-use project in Tokyo--”it could take my lifetime to complete,” he quips--as well as projects in other Japanese cities.
The Japanese, he says, “love American ideas and American-made things . . . (but) aside from people like (architect Arata) Isozaki who are international, Japanese architects don’t have an understanding of what we have here. The people who have experienced it are the wealthy businessmen, and they are our clients. It’s very difficult to design a luxurious facility when you’ve never experienced it, (and) I don’t think you can feel the luxury of this country by visiting for just two weeks.”
America, and especially Southern California, represents the ultimate in luxury to newly wealthy, globe-trotting Japanese, theorizes Tanaka. “Here we live a very luxurious life, but Japan is not that way. They’re seeing all these luxurious facilities, including resorts and homes, and they basically want to have what they have seen. . . . They always say, ‘You have such a big sky here.’ ”
What’s next for Tanaka? With two partners from Japan, he has begun designing time-share units on property the three own in Carlsbad a block from the beach. They will be marketed in Japan, he says, and may be backed up by an educational program. One possibility: a class in “how to live a more leisurely life, like the Californians do.”
