A Lateral View. Donald Richie
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streets, for example, are not named, though all the crossings are; the plots are not numbered, though the houses are, with the result that addresses (assigned to houses in order of their construction date rather than their locations) are much scrambled; though districts are numbered, the numbering plan is arbitrary.
There is also little of the civic convenience observed in Western cities—few large central parks, no real congregation of cultural facilities. Likewise there is no zoning—no slums and no ghettos, no good and bad sides of the tracks, no strictly industrial areas, no strictly wealthy residential districts. Instead, rich and poor live side by side, and the bank, the pinball parlor, the beauty shop and the ward office are found in juxtapositions which are sometimes incongruous to Western ideas.
All of this is because the overall plan, the civic ordering of the city, is missing. There is no imposed and consequently logical pattern such as one sees in the West—and also in Kyoto, Japan’s only ordered city. There is much of the natural patterning one discovers in any living, growing organism, but this does not assist the confused Westerner who eventually must discover that the only way to travel profitably about the city is to memorize it.
Once this is accomplished, however, and once the visitor begins to accustom himself to Tokyo, he discovers that both patterns and structures are, in fact, evident—ones, however, he would not find in a modern Western city. There, units are welded together to create residential areas, business areas, etc. Here, these units are independent.
This difference is apparent in the cityscape of Tokyo itself. From any tall building one may look out over the vastness of the metropolis and find that there seems to be many more unitssingle buildings—than in Western cities. A view of Tokyo is like a pointilistic painting, each dot apparently unattached to the other, each building seemingly alone and independent. Individual architectural styles, building to building, greatly differ and no attempt is made toward any kind of visual cohesion.
As the visitor looks and learns, however, he sees that these variegated units are actually grouped, though not in the way he would expect in a city. The single units form small complexes. In each there is a bank, a supermarket, a flower shop, a pinball parlor. What one sees when one looks closely at Tokyo is a collection of hundreds of villages.
Each is a small town and their numbers make up this enormous capital. Like cells in a body, each contains identical elements, and the resulting pattern is an organic one. No town planner has touched this natural order.
Here the visitor may remember a similar city-structure with which he is familiar: the feudal European town. It too simply grew and assumed a final form natural to its inhabitants. Or he may remember Arab communities which still take this formgrowing out from the market place or the railway station. In the same sense the Japanese city, composed of many of these units, remains natural—or primitive.
Just as the Japanese themselves can—and perhaps should—be seen as a tribe, or a collection of tribes (Gregory Clark’s excellent idea), so their cities may be seen as integrated ensembles of small communities. This is as true of such smaller collections as Sapporo and Kagoshima as it is of the megapolis which now extends from Tokyo—Yokohama to Osaka—Kyoto. Each community has its usually identical parts—the general store or the department store branch, the specialized food shops (butcher, rice dealer, vegetable seller, fruit store) and its places of leisure (the coffee shop, the bar, the neighborhood theater, etc.). And these are much like those in the neighboring communities. Indeed, as in the module-built traditional Japanese house (tatami, shoji, fusuma, always in the same size), all the parts seem interchangeable. And each unit is, within the confines of its genre, complete.
Complete and impermanent. The observing visitor, turning from spatial to temporal considerations, soon sees that though nowadays such materials as stone, steel, brick and marble are widely used, the city as a whole does not appear as though it were built to last. In the days of wood and tile the very nature of the materials implied a certain mortality. Now, though the building materials have changed, their fallibility still seems assumed.
This air of the transient in otherwise permanent-seeming buildings is enforced in that traditional Japanese architectural styles are now largely neglected. Rather, new buildings in Japanese cities are constructed in styles so flamboyantly modem that one cannot but expect them to be shortly superseded. The air of unreality is consequently strong.
Also, no alternate unity of architectural style is attempted or achieved. Just as the Japanese himself is often meticulous about his family or his group, but neglects what we might define as his civic duties, so his buildings are units complete within themselves, no attempt being made to harmonize these with either the setting or the adjacent structures. Hence the random appearance of the Japanese city—no zoning, no attempt to create an overall district style, nothing but one individual expression after another. The unreality for the Westerner lies partly in that his assumptions about urban grammar are not those of the Japanese. Consequently Japanese cities feel to him like the back lots of movie studios where the various sets, all of them quite large and seemingly permanent, are constructed, used, and left standing. There seems no reason for their arrangement. They were built where they are for reasons of economy and convenience. There is no unifying style because the uses for each were different. And though they look sturdy one knows that they were not made to last and that, indeed, they will not.
The Western social structure which a city such as Tokyo most resembles is the single “city” which the West erects with full knowledge that it is not supposed to last. This is the exposition. Massive buildings are thrown up, streets are made, vast crowds are accommodated, but only for a season. The assumption is that all this will be pulled down. Consequently, building only for now, architects are traditionally encouraged to be both contemporary and extreme. Thus Tokyo is like an international exposition which has remained standing. If city structure in Japan remains “primitive,” then these extremely contemporary looking structures are like the tents of the nomads—with the difference that the Japanese move not in space but in time.
One ought further examine this concept of the “primitive” and at the same time deprive it of its pejorative aspect. There is small doubt that the Japanese’ cities represent a stage of urban development earlier than that represented by those of the contemporary West. The concept is both simpler and, in its way, more natural. Certainly, once studied, the Japanese city is easier to comprehend than the Western. One can see the various village—units that make up the town—units; one can understand how these amalgamate into the city. In America, unless one understood the complicated social and economic forces involved, one could not comprehend why the main shopping districts should be moved from the center of town to its outlying suburbs, why this ring city should have no central section, and why there is little or no public transportation to such distant areas. The Western city is certainly the more highly evolved and the more difficult to understand. It is in this sense the more “civilized.” Its assumptions are, also, entirely different.
A Western assumption is that the city is logically planned and built to last. Each structure in it is presumed to be in its proper place and constructed to endure. It is believed that what a man builds his descendants will enjoy. The urban complex may be added to, individual buildings may be replaced, the structure itself may be altered, but the assumption remains that, once built, it remains intrinsically as it was. This is accepted as literally true and the architect correspondingly builds for the future.
An Eastern assumption, seen particularly in the cities of Japan and especially in its capital, Tokyo, is quite different. The city is not planned and all the buildings in it are subject to almost routine renewal. Opportunities to redesign the city—earthquakes, fires, wartime bombings—are ignored and solid buildings younger than those who live in them are pulled down to make way for new. The assumption is that the city itself is transient, and the architect consequently builds for the present.
The Western city also assumes immortality. Buildings are made to last. (This is also true of many non-Western cities as well, Beijing for example.) Behind the assumption of this somewhat illogical immortality (since man and his works are nothing if not mortal) lies another concept. This is that one “ought” to appear immortal in all of one’s edifices. Anything which is made must be made for the ages. This in turn implies an amount of striving. The state