Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34)

by Stephen Mansfield

  Expedient to a fault, the city has moved through rapid facial changes as fresh ideas and materials became available. Wood and clay walls have given way to clapboard panels, copper sheeting, mortar, ferro-concrete and tile, as convenience and cost have dictated. In William Gibson’s 1996 scifi novel Idoru, a work set almost entirely in Tokyo, skyscrapers in the Shinjuku district, covered in organic building substances, appear to “ripple, to crawl slightly... a movement like osmosis or the sequential contraction of some sea creature’s palps.”

  The Scripted City

  In acquiring the added function of advertising props Tokyo buildings have been transformed into surfaces of running commercial text and scroll. In the street, a pre-eminently commercial environment, pedestrians rarely see beyond the side of a building that overlooks the street. Views are flattened into two-dimensional planes. Urban geographer Paul Waley has observed that: “Space in the Japanese city is conceived only in the context of the immediate visual field. This gives it an episodic quality.” If each panel is visualized as a story frame, it is one in a narrative set on constant replay, or re-write, the text as fresh and as shallow, as urgently produced as an advertising script.

  If the world’s largest city is unclassified in its particulars, the details left unnamed, commercial advertising inscribes Tokyo in a deliberate, expressive manner. The textual quality of Japanese cities, from their daylight advertising to night-time electro-graphics, permits urban spaces to be scanned and read. Like the city itself, this commercial script can only be digested piecemeal, in lines of haiku length or even just a few syllables.

  Where a former age delighted more in the texture and tone of walls and other urban exteriors, in contemporary, space-depleted Tokyo utility dominates the use of walls and surfaces. The result is a proliferation of panels hung with a forest of signage. (“In this country the empire of signifiers,” wrote Barthes.) Text is not confined to walls, daylight or neon. A common sight in the city is the address panel attached to a lamppost, accompanied by adhesive advertisements. Electric utility poles, similarly plastered with colourful commercials, often look like totem poles. Strings of image and text undulate from street level down steps and corridors into the tunnels of subways, reappearing inside the train itself as concave strips along the upper walls of carriages.

  In an age of information and consumerism, the transformation of walls into message boards was perhaps inevitable. This is not, however, an entirely new thing, but rather a development of practices dating from the Edo and Meiji periods. Lafcadio Hearn wrote in his 1894 work, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, that, “To the Japanese brain an ideograph is a vivid picture... the whole space of a Japanese street is full of such living characters - decorating everything, even surfaces of doorposts and paper screens.” William Faulkner, passing through Tokyo in the summer of 1955, took in the forest of Japanese syllabaries and Chinese ideograms with the dutiful awe of the foreigner who assumes that there must be profound messages and codes in the incomprehensible signage.

  Boards, vertical banners at right angles to buildings, even square rooftop signs, were a common feature of eighteenth-century Edo. Old postcards from the Taisho period show streets in the Asakusa district strewn with entertainment boards and banners, the wall already a lively vector for information and advertising. Signage in Japanese cities has developed since then to such an extent that in some instances the entire building may be obscured by hanging objects and structures. Many are liquid constructions, façade-scale TV screens so carefully aligned and affixed that they appear as a seamless part of the building itself. If billboards and hanging banners fix the message in an eye-catching static form, electronic screens represent the flow of time. At night conventional lighting is secondary to pools of neon in which, as writer Michael Ross has put it, “light varies from a supergraphic word to an entire building.” There is no equal in the western world to the complexity and density of detail embedded in Tokyo’s kinetic surfaces.

  The main character in another William Gibson novel, Pattern Recognition, steps into an electric twilight with “some different flavor of hydrocarbons to greet her as she exits Shinjuku Station.” She gazes from the crepuscular calm of a Tokyo taxi onto:

  ... a remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn’t see elsewhere, as if you’d need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home. Logos of corporations she doesn’t even recognize: a strange luxury, and in itself almost worth the trip. She remembers this now from previous visits, and also the way certain labels are mysteriously recontextualized here.

  Are such liquid dreams the shape of things to come? For some, these seductive transmissions, like panels of disposable manga, are, quite literally, the writing on the wall.

  Manga Metro

  The Edo woodblock artist Hokusai Ando is attributed with first coining the term manga in 1814 with his Hokusai Manga, a fifteen-volume collection of whimsical sketches and drawings. The highly contemporary subject matter of manga, its vitality and the relative speed of production bear some comparison with the ukiyo-e woodblock print, illustrations regarded at the time as products of a mass culture rather than high art. Japan is the first country to have really taken the comic book seriously, to have experimented on a mass scale with the medium as a new form of literacy.

  Today’s comic books and magazines have direct links with eighteenthand nineteenth-century picture books like the kibyoshi or “yellow-jacket books,” and the even earlier aohon, the “green books” that were already making use of synthetic and kinetic lines and panel organization. With the emergence of a money economy among the merchant class, the demand for inexpensive, mass-produced art, not for art’s sake but as pure entertainment, increased. Written largely by members of the samurai class with literary aspirations and a need to make some easy money, kibyoshi were mainly read by merchants and low-ranking samurai frequenting the city’s pleasure quarters.

  The mass-produced woodblock printed books of the Edo period involved a production process and division of labour similar to that existing among modern manga artists and their assistants. There are also parallels in the method of serialization used in kibyoshi and manga, as well as in content, which was expressed in a visual-verbal comic book format. Drawings produced in blocks were combined with text to form running narratives and illustrated panels not unlike modern comics. Like today’s manga too, many were published in serial form. As entertainment, their unique visual aesthetic is easily traced to the popular mass art of the Edo period, in which stylized violence, deformation and exaggerated sexuality were an accepted part of the common culture of the time.

  A flood of newspapers and magazines during the Taisho period helped to popularize the work of illustrators like Okamoto Ippei. Sometimes called the “father of manga”, Tezuka Osamu is credited with adapting cinematic techniques to the cartoon strips he produced in the late 1940s. Manga took off in the still poverty-stricken early to mid-1950s, satisfying a hunger for cheap visual entertainment. Tezuka’s cartoons of humanoids and androids, making their appearance as early as 1946, provided a fantasy world for war-weary readers. By the early 1960s, TV sets were no longer beyond the dreams of ordinary people. The two forms announced the primacy of the visual.

  The production of comics on a mass scale in the 1950s helped to expand readership among teenagers and adults. Lending libraries spread the word still further. Television and animated films, rather than sounding the death knell of the form, helped to influence the creation of manga as visual novels, resulting in many fruitful TV-manga tie-ins.

  Tokyo’s cycles of destruction and renewal are reflected in anime films, which routinely show cataclysms being visited on the city. Otomo Katsuhiro’s manga and anime work Akira has Tokyo convulsed by a powerful psychic explosion. From the dust a fresh city emerges and is christened “Neo-Tokyo”. The city is saved by the inner resilience and the hardened fatalism of its residents, their ability to sustain periods of almost Buddhistic non-att
achment and an unshakeable optimism, the belief that a better world follows naturally upon destruction. Catherine Russell has written, “It is a surprisingly short distance from the narrow streets of old Edo to the cybernetic space of contemporary anime.”

  Mishima Yukio is said to have been an admirer of the more violent, hyper-realistic forms of manga practised by illustrators like Hirata Hiroshi, of whom Mishima wrote a lengthy defence. Although there is no discernible manga influence in Mishima’s writing, his own blood-spattered ritual suicide would sit comfortably in the frame of a Hirata comic strip.

  Many writers who were weaned on manga and anime have used the structure and pacing of comic books and films for their novels. This particularly applies to women writers who emerged from the world of pop culture like Tokyo author Banana Yoshimoto, who has developed the introspective nature and exploration of psychology that characterize women’s manga for her own work, citing manga artist Oshima Yumiko as an influence. Yoshimoto has said that comics provided her with the inspiration for characters in works like The Kitchen, Lizard and Amrita. Severed from any links to social institutions like family or the work place, her characters console themselves by creating their own constructs that are simulations of family and social networks. The anomie of Tokyo, where almost all the country’s important writers reside, feeds the romantic longing of Yoshimoto’s readers as well as those of many authors. Anomie as a characteristic of the city, rather than a failing, is evident in Abe Kobo’s novel, The Ruined Map, where the coordinates of Tokyo are impossible to locate. Literary critic Maeda Ai has noted that place-names in Murukami Haruki’s works have been almost completely expunged, transforming the city into an abstraction.

  Another New Tokyo

  If Tokyo has lost anything from its attachment to development and change, it is the evocative corners of a city once tinged with an aching, poetic melancholy. Witness Kawabata’s “On rainy nights, carrying large oiled-paper umbrellas, the street-walkers come out of the flophouses in Honjo to solicit bums who stand under the eaves of the theatres and along the earthen walls of temples.” A little of this atmosphere can still be sensed in the back alleys of the city, where ghosts and elderly buildings exhale their musty breath, but it is muted, a far cry from the ambience-soaked city described in Okamoto Kanoko’s 1923 novel, The Spirit House:

  It was close to New Year’s Eve. The wind was blowing sand off the downhill road and the wooden sandals of the passers-by clacked on the frozen ground. The sound made the very roots of one’s hair shiver on this cold night. The wind carried the squeaking noise of the streetcars at the intersection into one’s ears, and the rustle of the foliage near the Hachiman Temple mingled with the squeak. It sounded like a blind man’s murmur from far away.

  Memory landscapes and literary descriptions acquire a special poignancy in a city where evidence of the past is so quickly removed. The lack of monuments and monumentality, the absence of preserved zones, the scarcity of individual buildings hailing from the past, the importance of literature as remembrance, all underline the victory of the present over history. You do not have to be in Tokyo for very long (less than a decade will do) to look back on parts of the city that no longer exist. As Shimada Masahiko says in his novel, Dream Messenger:

  Tokyo itself is an amnesiac city set in a desert. Things that happened yesterday are already covered with shifting sand. And last month’s events are completely hidden. The year before is twenty meters under, and things that happened five years ago are fossils.

  Foreign writers who have lived for any time in Tokyo have defined it less in concrete terms than as a city of the imagination. Angela Carter certainly saw it this way: “...this city presents the foreigner with a mode of life that seems to him to have the enigmatic transparency, the indecipherable clarity, of dream. And it is a dream he could, himself, never have dreamed.”

  David Mitchell’s 2001 novel, number9dream, has a Tokyo setting. Its main character, like Shimada’s narrator, finds that time and space are fluid properties: “Yesterday and this afternoon seem weeks apart. This grid of narrow streets and bright shadows, and the pink quarter of last night, seem to be different cities.” Mitchell’s novel concludes with the report of a massive earthquake in the Tokyo region, the announcement of a state of emergency.

  The mixture of stoicism and bravado that characterized the Edo era, mocking misfortune, laughing at the workings of fate, can still be found among Tokyo’s inhabitants as they ponder imminent catastrophe. Seismologists and soothsayers agree on one thing: built optimistically above three crustal plates likely to jam at any moment, Tokyo is living on borrowed time. The easternmost of the Asian capitals, a sea-facing metropolis constructed on the planet’s most geologically unstable landmass, it could all be gone in a matter of hours, or minutes. As cycles of seismic activity go, that hour is long overdue.

  There is talk of cataclysm beyond imagination. Roads may be wider now than during the 1923 quake, but most are congested with traffic that will block them off as escape routes, and probably turn them, in the words of writer Peter Popham, “into rivers of gasoline, potential rivers of flame”. A combination of toxic and flammable chemicals concentrated in the massive industrial strip of Tokyo-Yokohama, where there is also a nuclear reactor, with hundreds of small-scale manufacturing plants located in the crowded eastern residential areas will fuel the explosions. Rupturing gas mains will add to the liquid fire. Pedestrians not gassed by toxic emissions or cut down by squalls of razor-edged glass, collapsing air-conditioning boxes and utility poles will be buried alive or roasted in the fire storms that rage overhead or between the towers of scorched skyscrapers. Peter Hadfield explains the phenomenon is his book, Sixty Seconds That Will Change the World: the Coming Tokyo Earthquake:

  Fire has peculiar behavioral characteristics, one of which is that two separate fires will be drawn towards one another. A super-heated vacuum is formed in the air between and above them, creating a devastating wind that sucks the flames together and incinerates everything in its path.

  Dissonance and unreality along the Shinjuku railway tracks

  A cataclysm is certain, but not the death of a city. Returning home from an inspection of Asakusa, the scorched wilderness where until only recently his beloved Opera House had stood, Nagai Kafu made the following entry in his diary for the year 1944: “I have been witness to it all, Tokyo going to ruin.” Kafu, though he scarcely knew it at the time, was soon to bear witness once again to the rebuilding of a great city.

  Further Reading

  · Ashihara, Yoshinobu, The Hidden Order: Tokyo through the Twentieth Century. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1989.

  · Barr, Pat, The Coming of the Barbarians. London: Macmillan, 1967.

  · Becker de, J. E, The Nightless City, or the History of the Yoshiwara Yukwaku. Tokyo: ICG Muse, 1899.

  · Benfey, Christopher, The Great Wave. New York: Random House, 2003.

  · Bestro, Ted, Neighborhood Tokyo. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.

  · Bird, Isabella, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1880.

  · Birnbaum, Phyllis, Modern Girls, Shining Stars, The Skies of Tokyo. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

  · Bodart-Bailey, Beatrice M., The Dog Shogun: The Personality and Policies of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006.

  · Buruma, Ian, A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture. London: Penguin, 1985.

  · Buruma, Ian, Inventing Japan. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

  · Dunn, Charles J., Everyday Life in Traditional Japan. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972.

  · Ernst, Earle, The Kabuki Theater. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1974.

  · Fowler, Edward, San’ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

  · Gerster, Robin, Legless in Ginza: Orienting Japan. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999.

  · Greenfeld, Karl Taro, Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan’s Next
Generation. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

  · Guest, Harry, Traveller’s Literary Companion, Japan. Chicago IL: Passport Books, 1995.

  · Guillain, Robert, I Saw Tokyo Burning. London: Murray, 1981.

  · Harvey, Robert, American Shogun: MacArthur, Hirohitio and the American Duel with Japan. London: John Murray, 2006.

  · Hibbett, Howard, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.

  · Ishiguro, Kazuo, An Artist of the Floating World. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.

  · Ito, Ken K., Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.

  · Jinnai, Hidenobu, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthology. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1995.

  · Jones, H. J, Live Machines: Hired Foreigners and Meiji Japan. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980.

  · Kawaguchi, Matsutaro, Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2006.

  · Kern, Adam L., Manga from the Floating World: Comic-book Culture and the Kibyoshi of Edo Japan. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.

  · McClain, James L., Japan: A Modern History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.