TOKYO
A BIOGRAPHY
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
— George Orwell
…cities are not a collection of objects. Rather, they are a sequential continuum of sensory experiences.
— Edmund N. Bacon
STEPHEN MANSFIELD
TOKYO
A BIOGRAPHY
DISASTERS, DESTRUCTION AND RENEWAL:
THE STORY OF AN INDOMITABLE CITY
TUTTLE Publishing
Tokyo | Rutland, Vermont | Singapore
ABOUT TUTTLE
“Books to Span the East and West”
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Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 by Stephen Mansfield
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is in progress
ISBN 978-4-8053-1329-9; ISBN 978-1-4629-1896-6 (ebook)
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First edition
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Contents
CHAPTER 1 The Master Plan
CHAPTER 2 The Restive City
CHAPTER 3 The Great Meiji Bazaar
CHAPTER 4 The Flammable City
CHAPTER 5 Hachiman, God of War
CHAPTER 6 Occupying Bodies
CHAPTER 7 The Independent City
CHAPTER 8 Fault Lines
AFTERWORD Plural Zones
This book is dedicated to
my son Rupert.
Preface
“It was in Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764,” the great English historian Edward Gibbon wrote, “as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started in my mind.” Few writers experience such timely or decisive moments. Cities creep up on us over time, insinuating themselves as an idea.
Gibbon’s approach to history was to understand it in predominantly human terms. It was a view of the past that was free from the idea of any inherent purpose. History consisted of causes, effects, events; there were no determining laws, theorems, no divine purpose. It was the opposite of the view held by the classic Chinese historians, who saw history as preordained but manageable by decree—if the Mandate of Heaven was lost by a weak or corrupt ruler, he could be legitimately, justifiably usurped, and the whole process of history restarted. Gibbon, a man of the Enlightenment, demonstrated that there were other routes back into historical time. To retrace those routes was to reencounter the human footprint on time. It was in something akin to that spirit, and a desire to write a history that would include everything of significance and interesting insignificance, that this book was written.
Many accounts of Tokyo, even those created today, when we should know better, are surprisingly dated inversions of reality. These books all too