Tokyo Tower

This guide to Tokyo Tower follows the eighteen months in 1957 when tobi, Japan's traditional high-rise carpenters, climbed its lattice frame with nothing but balance and nerve, barely a decade after the city had been firebombed to ash. It traces the steel itself, partly melted down from American tanks wrecked in the Korean War, and the engineer Tachu Naito, who designed the tower to bend with an earthquake rather than resist one. Listen for why the tower's color was never a design choice at all.