Canal City Hakata

Canal City Hakata, 博多

A couple of months ago I took advantage of a lull in the pandemic and went on a trip to north Kyushu. This involved my first visit to a city in over 2 years.

In my quest to visit ,what were for me, the exotic and unusual, I revisited Canal City in Hakata, a "Cathedral of Consumption".

Japanese shopping malls are for the most part architecturally bland, usually resembling industrial scale warehousing, but a few are not.

The interior of CanalCity is a meandering "canyon" with a water feature running along its base. It is also quite colorful.

Canal City was designed by American architect Jon Jerde, and the architecture is somewhat inspired by the canyon country of the American southwest. He also designed another colorful complex called Riverwalk in Kokura.

Like a methadone clinic or a pachinko parlor, people were lining up to enter before the doors opened.

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