Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology

By Hidenobu Jinnai

Tokyo: destroyed by the earthquake of 1923 and again by the firebombing of World War II. Does anything remain of the old city?

The internationally known Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu set out on foot to rediscover the city of Tokyo. Armed with old maps, he wandered through back alleys and lanes, trying to experience the city's space as it had been lived by earlier residents. He found that, despite an almost completely new cityscape, present-day inhabitants divide Tokyo's space in much the same way that their ancestors did two hundred years before.

Jinnai's holistic perspective is enhanced by his detailing of how natural, topographical features were incorporated into the layout of the city. A variety of visual documents (maps from the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, building floorplans, woodblock prints, photographs) supplement his observations. While an important work for architects and historians, this unusual book will also attract armchair travelers and anyone interested in the symbolic uses of space.

(A translation of Tokyo no kûkan jinruigaku.)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.
Tokyo: destroyed by the earthquake of 1923 and again by the firebombing of World War II. Does anything remain of the old city?

The internationally known Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu set out on foot to rediscover the city of

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520354906

Hidenobu Jinnai

Jinnai Hidenobu is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at Hosei University in Tokyo.

Book preview

Tokyo

Tokyo

A Spatial Anthropology

Jinnai Hidenobu

Translated by

Kimiko Nishimura

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology is a translation of Tokyo no kûkanjinrui- gaku, originally published in Tokyo in 1985 by Chikuma Shobõ.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the contribution of the Suntory Foundation in support of the publication of this book.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1995 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jinnai, Hidenobu, 1947-

[Tökyö no kkan jinruigaku. English]

Tokyo, a spatial anthropology / by Jinnai Hidenobu; translated by Kimiko Nishimura.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-07135-2

i. City planning—Japan—Tokyo—History. 2. Open spaces— Japan—Tokyo—Planning—History. 3. Tokyo (Japan) — Social conditions. 4. Urban anthropology. I. Title.

HT395.333T62513 1995

307.1'216'0952135—dc2o 95-6050

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper), @

Contents

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE The High City: Surface and Depths

CHAPTER TWO The Cosmology of a City of Water

CHAPTER THREE The Rhetoric of the Modern City

CHAPTER FOUR Modernism and its Urban Forms

Afterword

Notes

Index

Foreword

Richard Bender

Dean Emeritus and Professor of Architecture University of California, Berkeley

It is a pleasure to be able to introduce this book and, through it, the work of Jinnai Hidenobu to an English-speaking audience. Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology is part of a body of work that is as valuable for its insights and methods of analysis as it is for its description of the form of today’s Tokyo and its roots in the land, culture, and traditions of Edo.

With his conviction that we come to know a city by walking, Jinnai forms a bridge between the traditional methods of the planners of Edo and those of modern city planners like Professor Allan Jacobs, with his works on observing cities and great streets: walking; feeling the stones; reading a city with one’s feet. But Professor Jinnai adds another dimension. As he walks the crowded streets (and rows his small boat on the remaining waterways) of modern Tokyo, he guides himself with maps of Edo —seeing the rice fields, shopping streets, housing clusters, and temple complexes of Edo through the palimpsest of four centuries—and he opens our minds to some remarkable understandings.

Though almost no buildings more than one hundred years old remain in today’s Tokyo, patterns of development set centuries ago continue to shape the modern city. Streets, block sizes, building orientation, and the layout and character of neighborhoods were formed by the shape of the land, the flow of rivers, the cultures of wet rice and wood construction, and the social structure and religious practices that stratified the lives of the daimyo, the samurai, and the shop-keeper. A city takes its form over time. Its basic framework spans many eras and architectures. Jinnai helps us follow this evolution as the neighborhoods of the daimyo evolve into the sites of modern hotels, parks, and universities and the houses of the samurai become those of today’s salaryman.

Too often, in recent years, urban design has been seen and practiced as big architecture, with a focus on the design of complex buildings and building complexes. But cities are given form by many forces and over time. It is nature and the pattern of streets, public places, and land ownership and development that shape and animate the lives of cities. It is time we learned more about them: how they have come to us and how to design, redesign, and support their place in urban living. Professor Jinnai’s work helps us to focus on these elements of a city rather than on individual buildings and the more visible infrastructure. This book has much to offer all of us who are concerned with cities. It will whet your appetite and open your eyes on your own walks through neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, Soho, and St-Germain-des-Prés as well as Azabu, Mita, and Azakusa.

Preface

Deciphering the massive and complex metropolis of Tokyo as a text requires more than ordinary methods. But if we persevere in our reading, attacking the text chapter by chapter, no other city is as rewarding. With its intricate combination of lineages —first, the double spatial lineage of low city and high city, waterside and hillside; second, the temporal lineage of pre-Edo, Edo, Age of Civilization and Enlightenment, modernism, and the postwar era of rapid growth—Tokyo presents an appearance and tone unique to itself. If we can read Tokyo, no other city in Japan, or in the world, can possibly faze us.

It has been eight years since I first made the text that is Tokyo as the object of my research. Returning from studies in Italy and taking a position as a part-time lecturer at Hõsei University, I did not hesitate to choose Tokyo for my own and my students’ fieldwork. This is how the independent seminar called the Group for the Study of Tokyo and Its Neighborhoods (Tokyo no Machi Kenkyukai) came into existence. We did not begin with any wild ideas of tackling the entire city of Tokyo. Our surveys began far less pretentiously: we simply hoisted a flag and began walking around the city.

Before long, we learned of areas such as Shitaya and Negishi (Taito Ward), which had been spared destruction during both the earthquake and the war and thus preserved their neighborhood setting and low-city social relations. Moved and touched by what we discovered, we set about surveying the areas. We applied the method, more or less intact, that I had used in Venice — namely, of analyzing dwellings typologically in their own context and interpreting the structure of each area’s living spaces. (I discuss this method in Tokyo no machi o yomu [Reading the neighborhoods of Tokyo], published by Sagami Shobo).

But it was obvious that, if we allowed ourselves to become fixated on one area of the traditional and romantic low city, we would never be able to get hold of the reality of Tokyo as a city. Consequently, we completely reconceptualized our approach, turning our attention to the "high city⁵’ that sustains modern Tokyo. We decided to survey the entire area inside the Yamanote loop line.

Our scope was absurdly broad. Nevertheless, every Sunday, armed with an old or reconstructed map of Edo, my students and I began a series of events, consisting of walks around the city. Feeling each fold of the landscape beneath our feet as we walked, we tried to experience the city’s space physically as it had been lived by people in and through their history. The impassioned stories we heard from elderly residents throughout the city helped to give substance to our image of the densely meaningful places we surveyed. More than once I was astonished at the unexpected fascination of conducting fieldwork in Tokyo.

My greatest concern was not so much an exhaustive investigation of historical facts as an explanation from a historical standpoint of how the city of Tokyo got to be the way it is. I focused on the question of how people living in Tokyo since the Age of Civilization and Enlightenment of the 1870s experienced the alien culture of the West and how they understood it as they created their city. Gradually, my interest widened from the Meiji (1868-1912) to the Taisho (1912-26) and the early Showa (1912-92) periods. I found myself captivated by the urban forms associated with the modernism that blossomed —albeit briefly—in those years. I set about interpreting the urban space of that time, superimposing on it the image of today’s new age of the city.

But as I surveyed the high city and fell ever more deeply under the spell of modernism, I began to worry that I would lose sight of the basic structure of Japanese cities, one that I had intuitively grasped long ago. I realized that the time had come to rediscover the low-city spaces nurtured by Edo-Tokyo, but from a fresh perspective. I had been looking for some way to link my favorite themes: the watery capital of Venice and the city of Tokyo. The discovery that low-city Edo had also been a world-class city built on water was an unexpected breakthrough. At the invitation of a friend who had been raised in the low city, I set out from Tsukudajima in a boat. The dynamic spatial experience of this tour of Tokyo’s waterside opened my eyes to the reading of Tokyo at a whole new level.

This experience also enabled me to appreciate for the first time Higuchi Tadahiko’s unique discussion of the perspectives of the hillside and the waterside. Gradually it became clear to me that even more than in Venice, in Edo-Tokyo water plays a fundamental role in giving structure to the city. It also became clear that, in order to add depth to my argument, I must not limit my conception of urban living space to the everyday, or profane, world; instead, I had to move into the nonquotidian world, the realm of the sacred.

I had carried out a number of surveys up to that point and felt that I had a good grasp of the high city. Now I began to think that I ought to look at the whole city from this new perspective. Here I found Maki Fumihiko’s idea of the interior richly suggestive. A number of years before, a friend had asked, How much can you read of a city using your method? The question had never left my mind. Now, finally, I felt that I had gotten hold of the clue that would bring me close to the structure and meaning that lies at Tokyo’s depths.

My approach to Tokyo, which I arrived at through this process of trial and error, deviates at many points from the conventional methods of architectural history that I had used in the past. The method I had applied in my studies of Italian cities was also insufficient, at least by itself. The principles underlying the architecture and overall organization of European cities can be articulated rather explicitly. Not so in the case of Japan. Here, the essence remains invisible if the basic spatial structure, with its organic ties to nature and the universe, is not understood.

For this reason, I ventured to include the odd-sounding phrase A Spatial Anthropology in my title. I believe that my method—placing oneself within the urban space of contemporary Tokyo, replete with the meanings and memories that are the accumulation of human activities; conducting surveys of the field; and applying a comparative perspective to elucidate the special structure of the city—does in fact constitute an anthropological approach. Thus the title expresses my intention to grasp Tokyo from a new perspective.

In completing this work, I have become indebted to a great many people. They include, first, my fellow members of the Tokyo no Machi Kenkyukai at Hõsei University. The very demanding work of conducting research into Tokyo cannot possibly be done by a single person. Were it not for the our pleasurable joint undertaking, this work could never have been completed. In particular, I owe heartfelt thanks to Itakura Fumio, Inaba Yoshiko, and Muneta Yoshifumi.

I have also had the opportunity to participate in a number of interdisciplinary research groups and have received stimulating comments from specialists in a variety of fields. This was a valuable experience, which both broadened the framework of my research and gave it greater depth. In particular, I have been privileged to participate in a group that studies Tokyo’s cityscape as culture (Tokyo no Bunka Toshite no Toshi Keikan; in existence since 1979) along with scholars such as Ogi Shinzo, Haga Toru, Takashina Shuji, and Higuchi Tadahiko— all at the front rank of their field. At each meeting, we enjoy a talk by a talented guest lecturer, followed by a lively discussion. From these I have unreservedly taken a wealth of ideas about the ways to read Edo-Tokyo.

The Study Group in Residential History (Kyojushi Kenkyukai), led by my adviser, Inagaki Eizo of the Architectural History Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, has greatly stimulated my thinking about methodology in urban and social history, a recent topic of vigorous debate in Japan. I have been fortunate to participate in two other groups: first, over the past year, the joint study group led by Tsukamoto Manabu of the National Museum of History and Ethnography on aspects of Edo as an early modern city; and second, the Association of the Road (Michi no Kai), a study group led by Kuramochi Fumiya and Seki Kazutoshi, whose members (all roughly of the same age) are active in areas such as cultural anthropology and ethnography. Here I have been able to come into direct contact with research methods in specialized fields dealing with the city. My deep thanks to the members of all these groups who have assisted me in my work.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge the services of Izaki Masatoshi of Chikuma Shobo, who was a source of valuable advice and encouragement over the entire course of this project.

March 14,1985

Introduction

There is something I always have to explain to foreign visitors in Tokyo.

Tokyo, I find myself saying, is an anomaly among the capital cities of the world. You see, it’s become difficult here to find a house that’s even a century old.

Twice, most of Tokyo was reduced to smoldering ruins, once during the earthquake of 1923, and once again during the Pacific War. Then wholesale demolition and reconstruction followed during the postwar period of rapid growth. The Tokyo cityscape has completely changed. We are now in an unusual position — the only way we can see the Tokyo of the Meiji period (1868-1912), which was built by ravenously adopting Western culture, is in pictures and photographs. Tokyo is a great metropolis that seems to have lost the face of its own past.

By contrast, not long ago I made my first visit to the United States and was astonished by what I saw. New York, which I had always taken to be at the vanguard of contemporary civilization —and in a sense a model city for Tokyo — is in fact made up of old buildings dating from the latter half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Among them, it is the ponderous skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s that rise to form the skyline and give the city its character. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building especially are known for their art deco style. In addition to being truly elegant works of architecture, their nighttime lighting is spectacular, and even now they hold pride of place as symbols of the city. Not to be outdone, today’s ultramodern skyscrapers compete among themselves to be the most unusual in design and to stand out against the older masterpieces. Walking along the blocks of stylish apartment houses near Central Park and along the graceful residential areas of Greenwich Village, I found myself wondering whether I was really in New York. It made a powerful impression on me that the same New York that sends out the latest in contemporary culture to the world should also be a chic, old city.

Is Tokyo, where buildings from the 1920s and 1930s have been steadily torn down and very few old buildings remain, something of a bore compared to New York? Not necessarily. Aside from one section, which was the center of the early city, most of Manhattan is magnificently controlled by a grid pattern planned and laid out during the first half of the nineteenth century. A combination of great north-south avenues and east-west streets, the city is constructed logically. It is simple and convenient to find any building you might be looking for. In fact, it is so simple that after a few days of walking around town, one can even get a little bored.

Now look at Tokyo. From the standpoint of modern rationalism, with its reverence for clarity, it is truly difficult to form an overall picture of Tokyo’s urban space. Increasingly, there are few tasteful old buildings, and the streets and neighborhoods are losing their character. And yet, walking the streets of the city, one is treated to repeated changes in the cityscape. There is unexpected variety in the topography, with the high city’s hills and cliffs, winding roads, shrine groves, and large, verdant estates; and the low city’s canals and bridges, alleyways and storefront planter pots, and crowded entertainment centers. For the walker in Tokyo, the unexpected is always waiting. Tokyo may not have the old buildings of New York, but each place evokes a distinctive atmosphere nurtured over a long history: this makes Tokyo what it is. Recently, we have also begun to encounter marvelous works of architecture, overflowing with the kind of contemporary sensibility that uses the environmental context to heighten the appeal of the site as a whole. In the rush of our daily lives, however, and accustomed as we are to moving about by subway and automobile, we have few chances to take a leisurely walk around the city. As a result, we are growing insensitive to the appeal of such places.

Under these circumstances, do we simply give up, lamenting that with few buildings left from a century ago, Tokyo has lost the face of its past, its identity? No! To do so would be premature. Instead, we should see that in Tokyo a rich variety of physical locations, along with the urban structure that has filled them since the Edo —or Tokugawa— period (1600-1867), forms the essential framework of today’s city. This framework, together with the interweaving of old and new elements that make up the contents of the city, has produced an urban space that is without parallel in the world.

One way to take a fresh look at the familiar city of Tokyo is to guide foreign visitors on a walking tour. I myself have a large number of acquaintances from Italy, where the urban culture is based on stone construction. They have a lively curiosity about Japanese cities and are richly receptive to what they see. As we walk about the city, I listen to their impressions, noting what aspects of Japanese urban space appear new to them, and try to answer their perceptive questions. As I do, I find that I, the guide, am given an opportunity to appreciate features of Japanese cities that I usually overlook.

Once, after a number of years of such experiences, I found myself facing an audience of American university students of architecture and landscaping and delivering a series of slide-illustrated lectures (in English, no less) on the emergence of Tokyo. Although I specialize in architectural and urban history, I could not see much value in explaining history as such to a foreign audience. Instead, I decided to incorporate a historical approach into my reading of the distinctive features of contemporary Tokyo that had emerged as a result of its development. I entitled my lectures The Rhetoric of Tokyo’s Urban Space, thinking that it might appear novel to my foreign audience, and I made an effort to unlock the secrets of the city’s urban space for them. Paying attention to such features of the high and low cities as topography, roads, and land use, I showed that there were continuities from the city of Edo to be found in each, and that the structure of the city worked out during the Edo period serves as the basic stratum of contemporary Tokyo. I then addressed a wide range of issues, including the sense of scale, both in the city and in its architecture; the relations between nature and the city, especially the spatial configuration of the waterside; the use of axes and symmetry within the city; the existence of landmarks; the siting of buildings on lots; and finally, the ways that Japanese and Western elements are combined at various levels, from architectural design to urban space. I was hoping to clarify the logic found in the Japanese style of composing space. This meant that I was interpreting the most quotidian urban space that encompasses us — the sort of interpretation that occurs only when we try to make something comprehensible to a foreign audience. As I talked, it came home to me that once we separate early modern Edo from modern Tokyo, we become totally incapable of grasping the distinctive features of today’s Tokyo; Tokyo’s characteristic form has to be regarded as the end product of a mixture of elements from both periods.

We need a vantage point that acknowledges the interpenetration of the early modern and the modern in the formation of Edo-Tokyo and links the two periods in a single coherent vision. The notion of EdoTokyo Studies advocated recently by Ogi Shinzo¹ counters the tendency to treat the cities as separate entities by proposing that we cut across time and take a three-dimensional view. This is a praiseworthy notion indeed.

This attitude is especially important for our field, because it treats the formation of the city as continuous. Even with the advent of a new era, it is inconceivable that a soundly built city would use a single set of plans to alter its basic form suddenly and completely. It is true that after the Meiji Restoration, Tokyo transformed itself from the many-layered closed system of a castle-town to the open system of a modern city. But it preserved the urban form of the past and modernized in a flexible manner by replacing only the contents of individual lots.

Since the Age of Civilization and Enlightenment in the early Meiji period, Tokyo has taken Western cities as its model. But it would be a mistake to expect that an alien culture could be introduced and accepted as a total system. Western forms of architecture and urban design were incorporated gradually into the context of traditional Japanese cities, first by imitation combined with trial and error, and then by interpretation à la japonaise. This process produced an urban space and a cityscape encountered only in Japan. In all likelihood, this mode of adopting alien culture operates in much the same way even today.

In thinking about contemporary Tokyo as part of a single, EdoTokyo history, we can identify three important periods in the structuring of urban space.

First, and by far the most important, is the Edo period. The topography provided the most salient reasons for the formation of the city. Overlooking Tokyo Bay and situated at the edge of the Musashino Plain, Edo was favored with ideal conditions for the creation of an urban environment and a cityscape. In addition, this great castle-town used the topography masterfully in developing a system of roads and canals to divide the city into residential areas corresponding to the three major classes of warriors, commoners, and farmers. A residential environment and architectural forms suited to each class emerged: living spaces for the warrior class were created in the high city, with its varied land formations, whereas the commoners made their homes on land reclaimed from the river delta and threaded with canals in the low city.

Broadly speaking, a city can be conceptualized in two ways. It can be seen as an artificial creation, following an urban plan based on the ideas of the rulers or leaders. This process becomes possible only when it is sustained by a definite Zeitgeist and urban ideal. Or a city can be seen as the space that its people actually inhabit. The varied activities of the people who live and work there give meaning to urban space