What is the Kowloon Walled City? You can read about it here. While many people probably never heard of this place, it had a pretty big impact on popular culture. The Narrows in Batman Begins was influenced by the city’s claustrophobic, decrepit state. It is also a map in Call of Duty: Black Ops.
This blog is about a 1992 expedition conducted by a Japanese named Takayuki Suzuki into the KWC, just months before the KWC was to be demolished. Suzuki, along with some workers from the DAM-DAN corporation, were allowed into the notorious city to survey and map out the city. Suzuki’s team put their findings into this book. This was also the same Japanese research team that created this amazing cross-section of the city.
The original website, created in 1997, can be accessed here. However, the webpage was filled with grammatical, spelling and translation errors, making it really hard to read. In addition, the webpage had the design of a typical 90s website (i.e, it simply did not look good). In addition, because the website can only be accessed via the Wayback Machine, Suzuki’s expedition was not indexed on search engines such as Google.
Therefore, the purpose of this blog is to bring Takayuki Suzuki’s fascinating expedition to the world, this time with better readability and web design.
Disclaimers
I can’t speak or read Japanese, so I “translated” the entries from Suzuki’s own English entries instead of from his Japanese entries. I tried using Google Translate on those Japanese entries, but it barely helped. In turn, I add some of my own flair in order to convey what I believe Suzuki is trying to get at. If any Japanese speaking netizen stumbles on this blog, contact me at metacriticwontreviewthis(at)gmail(dot)com. Finally, the opinions stated in the expedition does not necessarily represent my opinions.
The Japanese entries are here, as well as here.
Header provided by Roger Price. Original photograph here.
The Kowloon Walled City Expedition 