Tenjin

This guide to Tenjin in Fukuoka traces how mayor Soichiro Takashima, a former TV news presenter elected in his mid-thirties, took on the height cap that had frozen the district's skyline near seventy-six meters for decades. In 2014 he talked Tokyo into naming Fukuoka Japan's first national strategic special zone, then used that status to lift the building limit without spending city money. Look up at the cranes overhead, and picture the roughly one hundred aging buildings that once stood boxed in under that old limit.