Story of WATERLINE

Once upon a time Tokyo was a city of canals and was so pretty with water flowing everywhere that it was known as the Water Capital, but as development advanced, evidence of the city that once was became harder and harder to find. Yet in the midst of that, T.Y.HARBOR, a space that allows you to eat with the water right before your eyes, began to hold a growing fascination for more and more guests.
And then on one clear day, I sat on the broad terrace, looking out at the backs of the buildings across the canal and surrounded by dikes of inorganic matter, and I had a thought that we should be able to create a space that better connects the water and the land, which is how I started thinking about WATERLINE.

When I thought that we could dock a boat and create a space that had never been done before, I began to do some research. In order to moor a boat you would need a dedicated waters use license from the Tokyo Metropolitan District, which managed the canals, but at the time they were not granting licenses for any purposes other than transportation and handling cargo, and in order to get a license we could propose to effectively use through subsidiary aid a barge of some sort, or else propose to develop emergency stores of food in case of a disaster, but neither of these applied. But in 2004, Tokyo Metropolitan District announced its Canal Renaissance plan, and with all of our efforts behind us, Tennozu was designated a model area, and we were given the go-ahead as the first project.

Next we had to decide how we were going to create the space. There were facilities to renovate ships like the Hikawa-maru, but we thought about how much we did not want it to be like a boat, and decided to create a structure atop a base of barge that was once used to shoot fireworks, so we could create a modern room that floats on the water. We then discussed with designers and decided that our model would be Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, even though it would be difficult to have broad expanses of glass walls atop a boat, for that was the space we wanted because it had never been done before.
There were also no places in the Tokyo Metropolitan District where an ordinary boat could be temporarily moored to a dock, so we also need to create a dock that would enable guests to come to the restaurant, and we wanted to have an environment that would also enable Tokyo’s boat owners to better enjoy a cruise as well.

That made us experience the pains of giving birth even more. Laws pertinent to boats would apply once a boat in a shipyard was floating in water, but at the same time, when a boat was moored for a long time the Basic Construction Act applied, and since the canals are considered a city street adjustment area, we needed to start by applying for a development permit, from which arose complicated processes that we had never even considered such as support for structure calculations and welfare regulations. There were so many laws that we hadn’t anticipated, and all of it was our first time experiencing such things. All of the shipyard work, from the basic level to the fitting-out work, was done at a shipyard in Chiba, and the completed boat was towed to the site where installation was completed, to become the only space like it in Tokyo on the night of Valentine’s Day in 2006. From the moment I first had the idea it had taken nearly four years.

For the completed boat, there was a sense of proximity to the water, which is why we named it WATERLINE in English. Not only do we want to propose a water’s edge lifestyle unique to Tokyo by means of a space that floats on the water where you can relax with the water right before your eyes, the very existence of this restaurant is testimony to the fact that what we thought we might have lost to Tokyo’s development is still present, if only a little, in a rich environment of the water’s edge that calls out to us. I most fervently hope so.