Also written: Tokiwaso
The Tokyo apartment house where Osamu Tezuka and a generation of young manga artists lived and worked in the 1950s. 32 in the letters, reducing to 5.
5Reduced, this term gives 5. It sits on The Turn with the rest of a turn.
Tokiwa-sō (トキワ荘) was a modest two-storey wooden apartment building in Toshima, Tokyo. From 1953 Osamu Tezuka lived there, close to the publishers he worked for, and when he moved out, young artists who admired him moved in.
Its residents included Fujiko Fujio, the duo who later created Doraemon, Shōtarō Ishinomori, creator of Cyborg 009 and Kamen Rider, and Fujio Akatsuka, the gag manga master behind Tensai Bakabon. Others visited constantly, and the group helped each other with work, deadlines and food.
Few buildings have had such an influence on a medium. The artists who passed through Tokiwa-sō shaped children's manga, science fiction, comedy and tokusatsu television for decades, and its story is retold often as the origin of the modern manga industry.
The original building was demolished in 1982. A reconstruction, the Tokiwa-sō Manga Museum, opened near the original site in 2020.
Counted letter by letter this term comes to 32 — 5 once reduced.
The reference files it as a turn. The number's contribution is freedom, disruption, and restless movement — and with it the 5's restlessness and hunger for change, which is the thread the reference follows here.
Split the term again and the vowels give a Heart's Desire of 22 (construction) against a Personality of 1 (initiative) in the consonants — construction underneath, initiative on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
Read on the 5's terms, this entry asks you to ask what was abandoned, and whether it deserved to be. The 5 moves for the sake of moving. Not every break documented here led anywhere, and the reference says so where it did not. The other entries that reduce to 5 are collected on The Turn.