Abstract
The four books reviewed here play their part in helping drag Tokyo out of the epistemological isolation into which it has sometimes been cast—cast because it does not fit so easily into many of the ready-made urban narratives. They show in their various ways that on the contrary Tokyo offers an unparalleled window onto urban change around the world. It does this, these books suggest, for a number of reasons: in the first place because an internally diverse and sophisticated society developed beyond the sphere of all but a marginal European influence; second because of the apparent abruptness of its transformation from “traditional” to “modern”; third because Tokyo produces such a different aspect of modernity and postmodernity to that with which the Western reader is familiar; and fourth because it does not “follow the script” in theoretical terms. Tokyo makes us think about what it means to live in cities now, forces us to question our preconceptions about modernity and about urban life, and encourages us to be cosmopolitan even if one would be hard pressed to see Tokyo itself as a cosmopolitan city, a point to be returned to later in considering Anni Greve’s work.
Several of these books transgress, or at least cut across disciplinary genres or other boundaries. Freedman’s Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road is an unusual hybrid between a work of literary criticism and one of social history, with informal commentaries thrown in. It brings together two disparate strands of literature. One is the body of literary criticism that discusses the rich and copious writing woven around the city (within which the work of Maeda Ai is preeminent). 1 The other consists of social histories of travel in Japan, where again there is a well-researched and growing literature in English (not to mention Japanese). At the same time, Freedman provides the reader with rich insights into Japan’s relationship with modernity and a perceptive commentary on changing gender roles in and around Tokyo in the first half of the twentieth century. She does all this with humor and a light touch, but also with erudition.
Central to Freedman’s work is her ability to convey the ways in which mass public travel transformed how people interacted. Public transport meant for the first time that people were thrown into visual contact with other, unknown people. Freedman quotes Georg Simmel: “Before the development of buses, roads, and trains in the nineteenth century [the twentieth in Japan], people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another” (41; Freedman’s brackets). The trams, trains, and buses became a ground for the enactment of male sexual fantasies, a previously nonexistent public sphere into which newly apparent young women were visible and therefore “available,” at least in the eyes of some male passengers. Although there were a number of prominent women authors active at this time, Freedman concentrates her attention on male authors. For each of the authors she considers, gender relations are crucial.
Freedman selects four works (or groups of works) that relate to different decades and differing modes of transport. The first story she considers is “The Girl Fetish” by Tayama Katai, written and set in the early period of train travel (1907), in which the protagonist dies in a rail accident after becoming besotted with a schoolgirl fellow passenger. 2 Freedman moves the reader cleverly across the different modes of transport and through the years at the same time. In Natsume Sōseki’s well-known story Sanshirō, published in 1908, streetcars epitomize the anomie and clatter of Tokyo for the eponymous hero, and at the same they curb his freedom of movement and stand for his inability to strike up a stable emotional relationship with a woman. From there we move onto a cluster of stories centered around Shinjuku Station in the 1920s, the new hub of middle-class Tokyo activity. It was in Shinjuku in 1926 that Tokyo’s “first ‘love hotel’” (46) was opened, and six years later Shinjuku was designated as one of Tokyo’s six licensed “red-light” districts. Stations had become (as they remain today) hubs of amorous activity. In the final chapter, Freedman selects a number of works, dating (approximately) from the 1930s that “eroticiz[e] and glamoriz[e] the poverty of bus girls, while acknowledging, even sympathizing with, the difficulty of their jobs” (175). Some of the earliest bus conductresses (that being the basis of the bus girls’ work) were graduates of élite girls high schools. The bus girls, whose demise came only in the 1960s with the advent of the one-man bus, provided a ritualized performance of professional but servile femininity that caught the imagination of writers and film-makers alike. In the story by Ibuse Masuji that Freedman considers here, a crash plays a pivotal role in a story about innocence and the corrupting power of money.
Throughout these stories, alongside the erotic allure of the young women who ride on trains and trams either as passengers or conductors, there are sudden scenes of discord and disruption caused by collisions and crashes themselves sometimes caused by suicides often leading to injury or death. It is as if these writers collectively are saying that even as modernity brings fresh freedoms to fantasize (for men), it also brings derailments and derangements (for both men and women). Alongside that, Tokyo in Transit represents a multifaceted disquisition into the impact of mechanized transport on people’s emotional makeup, their relations with other people, and their sense of what it means to live in cities which are themselves changing fast as a result of modern public transport.
If Freedman’s work is an enquiry into modernity, Zhongjie Lin deals specifically with the development of the modernist movement in the ideas and work of Japanese architects in the postwar decades. Lin’s various concerns are encapsulated in the book’s title: Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan. Is this really a “movement,” and if so, how self-conscious is it? Lin’s discussion of the Metabolists’ manifesto of 1960 and essays by Kawazoe Noboru underline both the extent that Kikutake Kiyonori, Kurokawa Kishō, and Kawazoe himself, along with one or two others, did see themselves not only as breaking new ground but as doing so as part of a group with shared ideas and a shared vision. Maki Fumihiko was originally part of the group, but his ideas of the pre-eminence of a changing urban order led him to drift away into a more critical position. Isozaki Arata remained formally outside the group, although many of his ideas ran along very close lines. Tange Kenzō was a sort of father figure, born at least ten years earlier than the Metabolists but extremely influential in all sorts of ways. Lin refers to a “reciprocal relationship, [which] to a great extent, shaped the Metabolist movement” (56).
Certainly Tange’s allegiance to Le Corbusier was one of the formative influences on Metabolist thinking and on their output, both realized and planned. Their ideas for social change too shared a core with those of Le Corbusier, appearing to be equally reliant on the benevolent leadership of the master architect. But what makes the Metabolist position stand out is their equally strong adherence to a Japanese building tradition deriving from the Ise Shrine, with its repetitive reconstructions, and the Katsura Villa and its modular style of composition. Their distinctiveness, as is clear from Lin’s text, is in their marriage of these two diverse approaches to create a vision that embraced both the formal structures of the Modernist movement and the organic and evolutionary potential of a certain almost atavistic Japanese approach. At the same time, they strongly rejected the ritualistic references to an ill-defined Orientalism that can still be seen, for example, in Watanabe Jin’s Tokyo National Museum of 1931.
Although the Metabolists created a number of individual structures that bear the hallmark of their style (a classic early example that Lin introduces is Kikutake’s Sky House of 1958), it is in their grand urban plans that they are best remembered, and especially their plans for Tokyo Bay. Here, as elsewhere, we are faced with the difficulty of trying to determine Tange’s position vis-à-vis the Metabolists. By far the most significant plan for Tokyo Bay was that designed by Tange, his Plan for Tokyo of 1960. In its combination of megastructure and mixture of straight line and curvilinear design it bears many of the features of the Metabolist vision. And it has been immensely influential, even if, as Lin points out, it was never realized as Tange had intended. “Ten years after the publication of Tange’s Plan for Tokyo,” Lin writes, “the reclamation of Tokyo Bay was well under way, although not in the systematic manner Tange envisioned. By the end of the twentieth century, there were more than forty projects under construction on several reclamation sites in the bay” (167). However, the grand vision that Tange had developed was totally lacking, and development was largely piecemeal and project-based.
The Metabolist movement fizzled out under the weight of criticism of what was widely seen as the excessive commercialism and nationalism of the 1970 Osaka Expo. While the work of its members remained important in the history of modern Japanese architecture, it is interesting to note that Japan’s most stellar practitioners in the last decades of the twentieth century have been architects who never fully or permanently ‘signed up’—that is to say Tange, Isozaki, whose work took on early a more post-modernist approach, and Fumi, who left the movement in pursuit of his own ideas of group building form.
Lin recognizes the Metabolist movement as bringing new and timely ideas to the table. “Metabolists’ works reflected a new thinking about the city: rather than understanding the city as an artifact or monument, Metabolists conceived of it as a site of change and impermanence” (247). “The megastructural forms they proposed in the 1960s appear inflexible and dated nowadays, but many themes they broached became astonishingly timely: the participatory strategy of design, adaptability of building, impermanence of urban structure, and the concept of the city as process” (246).
Both the books by Freedman and Lin help to build an understanding of how urban life and thought in Japan was shaped and reshaped by external influences. James White and Anni Greve take this one step further by hauling Japanese cities out of their Japanese context, or perhaps by bringing the world into Japanese urban space. Having said that, these are very different books indeed. Greve’s view of Tokyo is immersed in theory. White gives theory a wide berth.
James White, in his Mirrors of Memory: Culture, Politics and Time in Paris and Tokyo, dismisses any idea of global convergence. “Even the gutters are different” in Tokyo and Paris, he writes (24). Nor does White have any truck with Marxism: “Marxism is unsatisfactory because it is unfalsifiable” (24). “The third path I glance down but largely avoid is that of globalization,” but, White concedes, “I see Tokyo as having been impacted more heavily by globalization [than Paris]” (25). While it is clearly not White’s intent here to enter into contemporary debates on comparative urbanism, he does state in his Introduction that “until one compares one society, or city, with another, one cannot say with any assurance that what one sees or feels is specific or universal, unique or common” (19).
On the face of it, Paris and Tokyo, at least for this reviewer, have very little in common. White draws out their differences, both through metaphor and historical inquiry. “Parisians are the audience; Tokyoites are the cast,” he writes (29). Tokyo was developed along inductive lines; Paris’s development was deductive. Insurrection is a part of Paris’s history, not so for Tokyo (nor for Edo, as the city was called until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when its name was changed in short stages to Tokyo). The French state feared Paris, at least until the crushing of the Paris Commune, while Paris feared (maybe still fears) its restive banlieues. Edo/Tokyo has (almost) never engendered such fears. Tokyo has porous, organic borders; those of Paris have been tightly drawn. Tokyo remembers without monuments; White refers to a Japanese predisposition to “insurgent” commemoration (138). Paris, on the other hand, is undeniably a city of prominent monuments.
It is the contrasts between these two cities that stand out from White’s account. There is indeed little trace of global convergence here. White’s is a book written in the tradition of Edward Seidensticker and his histories of Tokyo. 3 It is in other words highly personal and fairly opinionated in an engaging sort of way. The author shows no sign of reticence in reifying his city-subjects. There are no evident plural possibilities here: Paris is; Tokyo does. Like Freedman in her references to travel experiences in contemporary Tokyo, White produces here a book that is not afraid of sidestepping academic convention.
Anni Greve’s Sanctuaries of the City: Lessons from Tokyo, while also rejecting conventional disciplinary territories, is steeped in theory, and attempts to use the example of Edo/Tokyo to enhance theoretical positions and understandings. The book starts, quoting a recent report, with the provocative assertion that “Tokyo, in company with Copenhagen and Munich, . . . belongs to the top three most ‘liveable’ cities in the world” (9). This is all the more provocative as Greve goes on to state on the same page that “Tokyo citizens live with an almost schizoid split personality, meeting the demands of the modern world with codes of civility, but behind the mask remaining traditional.”
Greve’s rather unusual book explores Durkheimian theory, and uses some of the ideas of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, to suggest ways in which certain spaces within Edo/Tokyo—for example, marketplaces, sakariba (places of human convergence in the city), and one or two locations in contemporary Tokyo such as Harajuku—might be seen as spaces of sanctuary. The surprising thing about these spaces is (or so I think Greve is telling us) that despite their very locally rooted nature, they have immense cosmopolitan potential because within them the stranger can feel at home. “Here too we have a paradox,” Greve writes, “we are dealing with a homogeneous, some would say ‘ethnic’ urban society with rules of its own that is nonetheless international in character” (163).
Returning to my original propositions concerning what Edo/Tokyo can tell us about urban change around the world, one might see these four books as making the following contributions. While enhancing discussions about Durkheimian theory, Greve is here advancing, if rather hesitantly, a new theoretical script for Edo/Tokyo; it is at least in part the distinctive nature of Edo society that facilitates this enrichment of the theoretical terrain. Freedman’s book evokes the disruptions and dislocations caused by insertion into the city of modernity’s mechanical means of transport. The disruptions, she is saying in discussing the work of her authors, was emotional; the dislocation was often in a very “real” sense physical. Lin’s review of Tange Kenzō and the Metabolists underscores the subtle ways in which the contours of modernism underwent changes when they were wedded to endogenous Japanese processes. We are reminded when reading Lin’s study that while Japan is indisputably a modern country, its modernity is the product of a different cocktail of forces and therefore looks a little different. Finally, the Japan that for obvious reasons fails to follow the (European/Western) script provides an excellent vantage point for looking back at the West. More specifically, as White shows in his book, Edo/Tokyo represents a promising platform from which to interrogate one of the paradigms (perhaps the paradigm) of European/Western urbanism, Paris.