Tokyo , livre ebook

Title Page

TOKYO

A Cultural and Literary History


by
Stephen Mansfield




Publisher Information

First published in 2009 by
Signal Books Limited
36 Minster Road
Oxford OX4 1LY
www.signalbooks.co.uk

Digital Edition converted and published in 2011 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

© Stephen Mansfield, 2009
Foreword © Paul Waley
The right of Stephen Mansfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.

Production: Devdan Sen
Cover design: Baseline Arts

Cover images: © Paul Cheyne/istockphoto; Stephen Mansfield
All illustrations: © Stephen Mansfield









Foreword

by Paul Waley


Of all the clichés that help to define life in the world’s largest city none is more persistent than that of the city of constant destruction and rebirth, the destruction inflicted both by natural forces and by the human desire to wring as much money as possible out of urban land. The Tokyo we see today has changed radically from the city of the 1970s, which in turn bears no resemblance at all to the city of the 1920s, and even less to Edo, the capital city of the Tokugawa shoguns. But what does it mean to live in a city where the landscape changes with such frequency and such totality? What is the e ff ect on its residents of living in a city that is so plastic and pliable, where so often it is impossible to find the buildings one remembers from one’s youth?
Tokyo has none of the monuments of the national capitals of Europe, nor of its Asian neighbours. None of its buildings conveys the sense of pride and pomposity of the Invalides in Paris or the monument to Vittorio Emanuele in Rome. You will not find in Tokyo a great open space like Tiananmen or a national monument like the one in Jakarta. There are no palaces - apart from the Imperial Palace, which is, famously, invisible - and the temples and shrines are a far cry from the Sacré-Coeur or Westminster Abbey. Japan’s modern history has involved an uncomfortable relationship with the past. Much of the period has been spent trying to forget the past and to ensure that as few reminders as possible are retained in the urban landscape. No wonder perhaps that the one significant exception is the most controversial site in the city, the Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of the Japanese war-dead are commemorated.
Lacking this visible aura of a capital city, Tokyo appears to many who visit it as missing a sense of unity and coherence. There is no sense of where the city starts or ends, no centre and no edge. There is no gravitas to the city, and no civitas. Lacking this authoritative script of its own history and without a commemorative urban landscape, Tokyo has no generally accepted aesthetic standards. A landscape law was passed a few years ago, but it has made little di ff erence. Controls on building heights exist, but these are complex and have been vastly relaxed. This is a city where you can build more or less what you like wherever you want to build it.
Tokyo is, in other words, a city that allows you strange freedoms. And the most fundamental of these is perhaps the freedom to read what you will into or onto the city. Everyone makes their own map of the city, creates their own centres and their own peripheries. Because no one imposes a vision of Tokyo on you, you make what you will of the city. And if there are few buildings around to kindle memories of the past, of one’s personal past as well as the city’s past, then the memory gravitates around people more than places. Tokyo is a city about people, ebbing and flooding, great waves of people washing around the buildings, rushing through the channels, and pouring back out again.
Tokyo is not just a city about great numbers of people moving around. It is a city composed of the maps and the memories and the struggles and strategies of its many million inhabitants, as they meet with colleagues, with friends, with soul-mates, with former classmates, and then break o ff and move on and meet with others. As they do so, they create their own routes around the city, marking here a favourite restaurant, there a bar for a water-cut whiskey. And in the end each individual ends up giving Tokyo the shape that suits and accords with their own lives.
Tokyo is a city, then, where you draw your own map and make your own spaces. And so the spaces of the city are unorthodox, interstitial, hidden away in neglected corners, down stairways, up elevators, and nearly always extremely di ffi cult to find the second time round. They lie round behind the sakaya , the liquor shop, and past the soba noodle restaurant, or down a flight of steps at the bottom of a short, sharp slope. These, not the privileged eyries on the top of its skyscrapers, are the real spaces of the city.
And the stories of Tokyo are just as personal, o ff -beat, and anecdotal as the spaces. Many of them revolve around the common people of the city and their encounters with ghosts and animals, or they are stories of patience and fortitude in the face of adversity. Some of them have even left their mark on the urban landscape. In what other city of the world does the most celebrated statue represent a dog, Hachikō, who came every day to Shibuya Station to wait for his master? These are the stories that Stephen Mansfield introduces us to here in the pages of this book.
It is a further cliché of the city that places of historical interest are disappearing, destroyed, crushed, swept away. The past is constantly receding. But this has been the pattern for well over a hundred years. Visitors to the city in the 1880s and 1890s were already complaining that the Japanese were westernizing their capital city and in the process destroying their own precious culture. And the plaint has been heard ever since.
We are particularly fortunate therefore to have such a perspicacious guide as Stephen Mansfield. Having lived in Tokyo and written about it for many years, he is able expertly to reflect in these pages the quirky, unpredictable, and multifaceted stories that go to make up the narrative of the city. He interleaves his tale with references to and quotations from both, Japanese writers and non-Japanese visitors to the city. In doing all this, he also conveys a sense of the changing tide of national history.




Preface & Acknowledgments

Henry James once summed up London in just a few words, calling it “the biggest aggregation of human life - the most complete compendium of the world.” The definition could just as easily apply to contemporary Tokyo, the world’s largest, most convulsively changing megalopolis. The city’s writers, artists and designers may be better qualified to interpret Tokyo than its legions of town planners or bureaucrats. Architect Maki Fumihiko, for example, has observed, “The aesthetic that this cityscape generates is one that favors fluctuations, fluidity, and lightness; it suggests the discovery of a new perceptual order.”
If Europeans are overawed by the architecture of the past, convinced that nothing as visionary or accomplished can ever be built again, this is where Tokyo, having none of these convictions or inhibitions, radically deviates, believing that it can improve on the past and produce something more outstanding, or at least more apropos the times. A city so utterly fixated on the present would seem incapable of producing a culture deeper than the neon script and signage that ripples across its surfaces; yet Tokyo, westernized but insistently Japanese, provides the setting for a culture that is simultaneously ancient and brand new. In an exciting city, full of stories about itself, you can feel a kind of fermentation beneath your feet as you walk its streets, something its writers and artists, eager to see the city’s nooks, crannies and mutations for themselves, have always done. There are few cities where emotional responses to transformations in the urban landscape have been so scrupulously recorded by writers, where literary themes and styles have evolved so directly from memory and observation.
From the very onset, Tokyo was destined to be a city of transformations. A city transfixed on the moment, its unflagging cycles of change have acquired the regularity of tradition. So great is the intensity of change that the city seems at times to be completely severed from its own history. Yet irrespective of the reality that assails the eye, the past is deeply engraved into the fabric of the city. It is these lines of historical continuity, connecting Edo and Tokyo, that this book explores.

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In order to make structural sense of Tokyo’s relationship to its past, I have chosen to track its cultural and historical development chronologically rather than thematically, though themes continually highlight the text. Japanese names appear throughout this book in their native order, surnames preceding given names. Thus, Kawabata first, rather than Yasunari. In the case of Japanese works of fiction, I have opted in most instances for the ones used in the standard English translations where they exist. Hence, Kafu’s Bokuto Kidan is rendered as A Strange Tale from East of the River . Photographs througho