Something Old, Something New

In Japan, Vacheron Constantin unveils its second half of the Overseas project

- Darren Ho

Human Civilisation and almost every aspect of our life is dependent on the Earth and its natural resources that it freely offers to us. if you need proof, all you need do is to look at any major city or capital in the world. all of them have evolved along some sort of waterway and even today, the waterfront is still essential to the development of most cities, regardless of their status.

Take Kyoto and Tokyo. the former is the old capital of Japan, a city that’s old in roots but in steady pursuit of the new, while tokyo is in some way the reverse, a city that’s so bound up in the new and now but searching for an identity of its own among its somewhat schizophrenic self. Even their names, anagrams of each other, give the sense that they are part of a whole.

If you’ve never been to Kyoto, you must pay it a visit, and only then will you understand why Henry Stimson, the secretary of war for the united states during WWii was adamant in protecting the city from the ravages of the atomic bomb. it’s often suggested that the American archaeologist and art history Llangdon Warner was another who sought to defend Kyoto’s cultural and architectural history. Whether Stimson or Warner was responsible, or both, we’re simply grateful that the united states stayed its hand in fire bombing Kyoto’s grand monuments.