CityReads│How Tokyo Becomes the World’s Greatest City?

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How Tokyo Becomes the World's Greatest City?

Seidensticker tells the 100-year history of modern Tokyo.

Edward George Seidensticker, 2010. Tokyo from Edo to Showa, 1867-1989; the emergence of the world's greatest city, Tuttle Publishing.

Sources: http://www.tuttlepublishing.com/books-by-country/tokyo-from-edo-to-showa-1867-1989

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The years 1868, 1923 and 1964 hold significance for Japan. In Japan, the Meiji Restoration occurred in 1868 (whereby Japan embarked on the modernization of the country), on September 1, 1923 the Great Kanto Earthquake struck, devastating Tokyo, and Japan hosted the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964 (which marks in Japanese minds the reemergence of Japan on the international stage). while all of the Japanese events occurred in Tokyo. If one wants to understand Japan, the best place to start with is Tokyo.

Edward Seidensticker (1921-2007) was a translator and scholar who was responsible for introducing the works of a number of important modern Japanese novelists to the English-speaking world. Seidensticker knew Japan well after living there for years. He wrote a column for the Yomiuri Newspaper (the one with the highest circulation in Japan) that was collected and published in English as “This Country, Japan” and translated many classical Japanese works such as “The Tale of Genji.” There could hardly be a better guide to introduce one to Tokyo.

Seidensticker’s two works about Tokyo, “Low City, High City” and “Tokyo Rising” have been combined in one volume by Tuttle Publishing. This is fortunate, since they compliment each other and offer a complete history of Tokyo from its opening to the West through its achieving its status today as the equal of any major city in the world. This book tells the story and history of Tokyo's transformation from the Shogun's capital in an isolated Japan to one of the most renowned modern cities in the world. With the same scholarship and style that won him admiration as one of the premier translators of Japanese literature, Seidensticker offers the reader his own brilliant picture of a whole society suddenly emerging into the modern world. By turns elegiac and funny, reflective and crisp, Tokyo: From Edo to Showa is an important cultural history of Asia's greatest city. This book brings together here for the first time under one cover with numerous illustrations and an insert of beautifully colored Japanese woodblock prints of Tokyo from the era.

The fact that Tokyo became the capital of Japan in 1868. A distinction may be made between what occurred in the city because it was the capital, and what occurred because it was a city.

Seidensticker’s Tokyo starts in the Low City and moves out with it to embrace Asakusa. Much of these two volumes is dominated by the demise of the Low City and all that it stood for, until, that is, more recent years, when the deed is all but done and Asakusa consigned to the role of outpost for tourists. Many of Tokyo’s districts have a part to play in these pages, indeed they are the principal characters, invested with a personality that can change with time but that is rooted in a sense of the almost atavistic attraction of the Low City and the parvenu presumption exhibited by the districts of the High City.

Alongside the districts, there are a number of buildings whose presence animates these books: the Twelve-Storys tower in Asakusa, destroyed in the great earthquake of 1923; Tokyo Central Station, inconveniently located in the center of the city; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, which famously withstood the tremors; the city’s main theatres, prominent among them the Kabukiza and the Shibuya Embujo. And people, too, whose lives have helped to shape the city and define its culture—people like Hattori Kintaro, the founder of Seiko, the watch-making company; or Josiah Conder, the British architect whose influence was seminal in the teaching of architecture in Japan; or Enoken, the most famous and best-loved of Asakusa’s comedians; or the man called Suzuki who built a block in Shinjuku which he optimistically called Kabukicho. But the individuals whose presence most influences the tenor of these books are the many writers who have built at least part of their opus on Tokyo’s ground, not only the likes of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro and Kawabata Yasunari, with whom many of us will already be familiar, but lesser-known authors such as Osanai Kaoru and Takami Jun.

Seidensticker managed to capture in uncanny ways the telling details of historical change—the transition from feet to wheels in Meiji Tokyo or the change in eating habits after the great earthquake when women started eating out in numbers. This is very much history as it was lived at the time, which is a history reflected in newspaper articles, on stage, in cafés. It is in fact an approach that has more in common with certain traditions of Japanese representations of places and of the past, a cross between topographical writing and satirical social and cultural history. But above all in reading these pages one feels subliminally the presence of Nagai Kafu, the writer whose wistful stories were translated by Seidensticker and whose cultural prejudices are, one senses, shared. Seidensticker shares Kafu’s affection for the part of the city which had its best day then. The twilight of that day lasted through the succeeding Meiji reign and down to the great earthquake.

Low City, High City, which told of Tokyo between the Meiji Restoration of 1867 and 1868 and the great earthquake of 1923. The reversing of the two (low city, high city instead of high city, low city) was intentional. The book is elegiac, its emphasis on the part of the city which was the cultural center of Edo, predecessor of Tokyo, and was ceasing to be any sort of center at all. It is the Shitamachi, the plebeian flatlands, which Seidensticker call the Low City. Meiji was when the changes that made Japan modern and economically miraculous were beginning. Yet the Low City had not lost its claim to the cultural hegemony which it had clearly possessed under the Tokugawa.

The first of these works begins with the terrible earthquake of 1923. The name of the city had been changed from Edo to Tokyo at the time of the Meiji restoration, but still retained much of its old character. However, a great deal of that was lost in the tragedy.

“The great loss was the Low City, home of the merchant and the artisan, heart of Edo culture. From the beginnings of its existence as the shogun’s capital, Edo was divided into two broad regions, the hilly Yamanote or High City , describing a semicircle generally to the west of the shogun’s castle, now the emperor’s palace, and the flat Low City, the Shitamachi, completing the circle on the east. Plebian enclaves could be found in the High City, but mostly it was a place of temples and shrines and aristocratic dwellings. The Low City had its aristocratic dwellings, and there were a great many temples, but it was very much the plebian half of the city. And though the aristocracy was very cultivated indeed, its tastes―or the tastes thought proper to the establishment―were antiquarian and academic. The vigor of Edo was in its Low City”.

“Tokyo Rising” is the second half, and that begins with the reconstruction after the earthquake of 1923. The “Roaring Twenties” as experienced in Tokyo is described, followed by the Depression, then the war and its aftermath. The final two chapters of “Tokyo Rising” are entitled “Olympian Days” and “Balmy Days of Late Showa.”

Ironically, if it was war that devastated Japan, it was also war that enabled it to rebuild itself. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, America needed a base of operations in Asia along with local suppliers for the military. In 1950, that amounted to $180 million and before the war was over it amounted to $2.3 billion. It sparked a building boom and tremendous economic stimulus. By the beginning of the 1960s Japan had rebuilt itself and recovered, and in October 1964 it staged the Olympic Games to show the world what a success it had made of the job.

“Tokyo Rising” ends with Japan a full-fledged member of modern international society. It had achieved wealth and recognition as an industrial power. But that was a mixed blessing: there was also inflation and in 1973 it experienced the “oil shock” that the rest of the industrialized world did. Of course, Japan managed to muddle through as always, and by the time Emperor Showa died in 1989, it was again enjoying great economic success.

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