Tokyo city challenges common ideas of cultural and architectural identity in that there are almost no buildings more than a century old, unlike the majority of other capital cities. Jinnai Hidenobu (1995) discusses in his book "Tokyo, a Spatial Anthropology", how Japan managed to preserve its traditional urban form, and yet modernise its architectural discourse by replacing only the contents of each land division and not the city layout itself. But after the events of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Pacific War, and ultimately World War Two, Tokyo had lost significant areas of built environment as well as, more crucially, its urban structure. Many designs were proposed to reform the urban crisis facing Tokyo in the years following World War Two, but it was Kenzo Tanges' "Plan for Tokyo 1960" which gained the most support from both the Japanese government as well as international design communities. Despite the schemes' popularity his designs were never realised and it can be argued that this is a result of a series of ignorant design decisions he undertook within the masterplan which contradicted even his own personal research and external influences. One influence which Tange drew from particularly throughout his career was Le Corbusier, whose utopian urban proposals also remained largely unbuilt. This essay will argue that the influences of Le Corbusier on Kenzo Tange as well as the intended social order and physical construction of "Plan for Tokyo 1960" resulted in the decisions which led to his designs being rejected.