Infrastructure Run Rampant – Yokohama Station SF

This essay contains spoilers for the novel Yokohama Station SF by Yuba Isukari

In Minnesota there’s a saying – there are only two seasons: Winter and road construction. The weather in our region does a real number on the quality of our roads; the freeze-thaw cycle leaves us with potholes the size of moon craters that are the first flowers to bloom once the snow melts. Soon after, the streets are dotted with orange traffic cones as machines dig and scrape and patch until our thoroughfares are passable again.

Sometimes these projects are more long-term. Every weekday I hop in my car, driving from South Minneapolis into downtown via interstate 35W, which has for months been a winding maze of diverted lanes, temporary partitions, and signs warning motorists to slow down and heed the construction workers. This has been ongoing for almost four years and will soon be completed; the rebar and concrete that for weeks could be seen just over the concrete barriers, as well as the shiny new bus station that will accommodate a new high speed bus line along that corridor, speak to the project’s imminent completion.

Occasionally while I’m alone in my car during my early morning commute, my mind will begin to drift toward thoughts of what all this construction means – physical accessibility to the city via new mass transit, long term infrastructure repairs (including several bridges passing over the highway – perhaps partly a reaction to the disaster we experienced here back in 2007). I think it’s easy to label these big infrastructure endeavors “progress,” because of the obvious things that are fixed and improved. I know I’ll be happy not to have to drive over the patch-job that was the former junction of 35W and I94 just South of downtown Minneapolis, worrying about my tire alignment as I cross my fingers and dodge the worst of the cracks and bumps.

But there’s something vaguely unsettling about all this, too, if you start to look more closely. That big, glittering transit stop sits perched atop the freeway as it soars above Lake Street, an area that’s historically caused suburban white people to cringe and lament the city’s “violence and crime.” It’s a diverse area with many ethnic businesses along the busy urban corridor; as it stretches east it intersects the Hiawatha Avenue Light Rail line (the station for which also rises above the street proper) and enters an area that was heavily damaged during the civil unrest of 2020. There are good reasons why these two stations are located up above the street, the most important of which is that Lake Street is busy with traffic and would probably greatly suffer from the traffic control that comes from light rail trains crossing it perpendicularly at regular intervals. But I can’t help but feel like the structure of these intersections was partly designed for the comfort of the commuters just passing through; as cars crest these overpasses, it’s almost impossible for their drivers to see more than the very tops of the buildings below. We can sit in comfort, planning what to make for dinner while choosing to comfortably ignore the push and pull between poverty and gentrification going on just out of sight.

Yuba Isukari’s Yokohama Station SF imagines a world where infrastructure as a dividing line between the haves and have-nots has become endemic to much of Japan. The author mentions in their notes that the inspiration for the novel sprung forth from the idea that the real-life Yokohama transit station seems to be constantly and forever under construction – as I mentioned, this is a concept extremely relatable to us Minnesotans. In the book, Yokohama Station has, over centuries, become almost like a living entity, growing and spreading across Japan like a cancer; the mechanism by which it does this, the “structural genetic field,” escaped the control of its developers long ago. Hiroto, the story’s protagonist, is one of the have-nots living on the fringes of society; because he lacks the financial means to obtain a “Suika,” a brain interface required to interact with Yokohama Station’s structures and payment systems, he and those like him are forced to eke out a hardscrabble existence outside the station, living off of scraps that happen to make their way to the outside. Lest one think that infiltrating the station is feasible, its corridors are guarded by “automatic turnstiles,” sentry robots that sense both individuals without a Suika or people who’ve committed some crime against the station and who then banish them outside.

Hiroto obtains a special ticket from a professor who was spit out of the station near his slum; this “18 ticket” gives him 5-day access permissions to the inside in spite of his lack of Suika. Once he’s inside, he meets some strange individuals, including an artificial human and a woman who’s disguised her existence within the station by hacking into and manipulating its monitoring systems. It seems that there are factions who wish to infiltrate the living station and somehow stop its endless, cancerous growth, and it turns out that Hiroto may have unknowingly been brought into the fold to facilitate that.

Hiroto’s story is just one facet of the overall tale. Eventually we meet some members of the military whose sole purpose has become devoted to ensuring that Yokohama station isn’t able to send its tendrils across the water into untainted parts of Japan. We also get more glimpses into the state of things in the outside world, which is beset with robber gangs and violence as people fight over scarce resources. The reader eventually begins to construct a broader mental picture of the circumstances that may have brought the world to such a state; while the historical timeline is never commented upon in absolute terms, primarily because most people seem to have been suffering so long that the details have all but been forgotten over the decades, the implications of the imagined specifics are haunting – and in some cases also hit a little bit close to home.

Yokohama Station’s unstoppable force of expansion seems to be a malignant echo of the type of gentrification that I’ve seen swallow up entire neighborhoods over the years. In downtown Minneapolis, the formerly industrial Warehouse District was rebranded the North Loop, bringing with it shiny new condominiums and ambitious renovations of the older 19th century era brick buildings, along with restaurants and shopping. But the wave of Lululemon, Starbucks, and West Elm furniture also displaced the former arts district and other tenants who were suddenly unable to afford the rapidly-inflating rent.

Infrastructure has the ability to connect people to one-another by facilitating greater, more convenient access, but it sometimes comes at a steep price – the destruction of local, close-knit culture and the livelihoods of the folks who exist within that culture. In the mid-1950’s, the Rondo Neighborhood of St. Paul – a thriving business and cultural district for the local Black community, was torn in half to facilitate the construction of Interstate 94 between the Twin Cities. The highway, symbolic of post-war reconstruction and modernization of interstate travel in the United States, also served to disconnect members of a marginalized community from their collective cultural resources. Racial covenants and suburban redlining meant the folks displaced had fewer viable options to resettle.

This ugly bit of local history has only recently come back to the forefront of the broad public consciousness, thanks in great part to local community leaders and Mayor Carter of St. Paul. There are proposals in place to create a land bridge over a section of the highway to reconnect the neighborhood. But this is a much greater task than patching potholes or adding bus lanes; it involves stitching back together a community that was thoughtlessly torn in half for the sake of a concept called “progress.” But hiding in the shadows behind that glittering idea is an asterisk and some small print: *benefits limited to those who have wealth.

Hiroto is drafted unknowingly into righting the wrongs of Japan’s earlier society. He finds himself flipping the switch on the station’s structural genetic field, cutting off its lifeline. This would seem to be a victory, but for the fact that there’s no concrete idea of what might happen in the aftermath. Hiroto has lived a resource-starved life to this point, relying on occasional, random ejections of supplies from the station to supplement the humble fishing economy of his village. And yet, this is the system his life and culture have come to rely upon, so what are they to do when their supply lines completely disintegrate? Likewise, what will happen to all the wealthy denizens of the station when it eventually ceases to exist?

The implications of this are broad and somewhat unsettling. Human history proves that different groups being forced to share limited resources is a recipe for conflict. I can’t imagine that a culture which is used to having access to endless, convenient technology would adapt well to a new life so disconnected from it. And yet being provided with an open ending allows us to speculate a bit on some more positive “maybes.”

When I think about Rondo’s potential revival, or the proposed rent stabilization amendment that’s being introduced this local election cycle, I begin to have more faith that our country’s almost single-minded focus on unfettered physical “upgrades” that only serve certain populations may not be an inevitability. Granted, these things are only first steps that may start to address deep-seated structural inequities, but legal and physical infrastructure might prove themselves to be useful in righting wrongs just as readily as they were once used to inflict harm. The future is an unknowable world, and the best we can do is attempt to guide and form it into something whose structures work for the better good.

In the unsettling post-apocalyptic world of Yokohama Station SF, the structures of the old age are about to crumble, though if humanity has done anything throughout its history, it’s always, somehow, learned to adapt. But Hiroto’s ambivalent feelings point toward an unsettling reality – there are always groups in existence who arrogantly believe that they have a grand plan to ensure the best for all, and yet hardly a moment goes by where their proposed actions aren’t proven to create some new harm for a marginalized community whose needs weren’t realized, let alone seriously considered. Structural inequality, a system that creates “haves” and “have nots” is a problem, absolutely; but a nuclear solution that removes the biggest and most obvious barrier may not be the one-size-fits-all solution that those who’ve never lived a difficult life believe it to be.

What, then, is the answer? Yokohama Station SF, like many similar stories, doesn’t endeavor to provide one, leaving the reader to consider the options and imagine various outcomes on their own. Instead, I believe it invites us to see its story as a dramatic reflection of our own world’s issues, and perhaps inspire us to think critically about the ways in which structural inequities might be addressed so that the situation in the story, or at least the worst of it, might be avoided. And by my own interpretation, that begins by ensuring that all stakeholders have a place at the table to build communities in ways that serve to connect rather than divide them.

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Yokohama Station SF is available in physical release (hardcover) from Yen Press. It is also available in digital release.