A Lateral View. Donald Richie
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of what is public (theirs). For such folk the neighborhood is of primary importance (and Tokyo is a collection of village-size neighborhoods), and its public aspect attains intimacy only when incorporated into the well-known.
For example, sections of old, twisted Tokyo are being torn down. Not because of any civic planning, but so that the most expensive land in the world may be more profitably used. And the new buildings are often built four-square, with straight streets. Not from any notions of urban efficiency, however; it is merely that buildings are most cheaply constructed if they are squarish and right-angled.
So, the old tangle is torn down. And it is rebuilt, incorporated within the basement of the high rise that took its place. There again are the bars, the little restaurants, the warren reborn.
The significance of public areas belonging to no one is not that they belong to everyone but that they can be used by just anyone. This means that the owners or lessees of private land in public places can be as idiosyncratic as they like.
Take modern Tokyo architecture. Visitors are astonished by its variety, given what they may have heard of the Japanese character. Instead of the expected conformity, they are presented with the wildest diversity.
The glass-and-concrete box (cosmetics) is next to the traditional tile-roofed restaurant (sukiyaki and shabu-shabu), which is next to a high-tech, open-girder construction (boutiques), which is next to a pastel-plastered French provincial farmhouse (designer clothes).
The architecturally odd is there to attract attention. Thus Tokyo main-street architecture has much the same function as the signs and banners that decorate it. To stand out is to sell something better. (As for conformity, there is plenty of that, but it is found in nothing so superficial as architecture.) Though profit may be a motive for eccentric architecture, it is not its only result. Among others, the stroller is presented with an extraordinary walking experience.
With space used in this distinctive fashion, one naturally wonders about the uses to which time is put. These are, as one might have expected, equally noteworthy. It is not so much that one can time-travel in Tokyo (and can do it even better in Kyoto), go from the seventeenth to the twentieth to the eighteenth century by walking around a block. One can, after all, do that in many European cities, which have more old buildings than Tokyo. Rather it is that Tokyo provides a fantastic rate of temporal change. In Europe a building was built for a century. In Tokyo a building, it often seems, is built but for a season.
They go up and come down at an almost alarming rate. In the Shinjuku and Ikebukuro sections, if you miss a month, you might well next time get lost, so fast and frequent are the metamorphoses. What you remembered has now become something else. And the hole in the street, the vacant lot, now holds the current architectural icon, a glittering chrome-and-glass structure like a giant lipstick or a mammoth lighter.
Old Edo had its construction-destruction compulsions as well, but they were different in that, first, there were so many fires that the reconstruction came to be seen as repair; and second, the new structures were not extreme because there were sumptuary laws and because the Edoite had only wood, tile and stone.
Now there are certainly no laws against display, and the Japanese architect has steel, glass, concrete and plastic, all of which can be forced into any shape desired.
The temporal dislocation in Tokyo is so extreme that the capital is, consequently, never finished. It is in a permanent state of construction. Like life it is always in flux. It is an illustration of itself—a metaphor for continual change.
The display of the Tokyo street, the Tokyo park, the Tokyo garden is thus a varied and a complicated thing. Walking becomes a variegated experience with many a surprise.
This is not perhaps unique to Tokyo, but is certainly not typical of the world’s major cities. There—Washington, D.C., Beijing, Moscow—one is presented with a view and the view is the experience. Once you have glanced at it you have comprehended and no amount of strolling about will add anything. There is nothing left to discover after the view of the Capitol, the Temple of Heaven or the Kremlin.
Obviously, human variety was not in the minds of these architects; rather, it was human similarity that was being both courted and celebrated. And Tokyo, too, has its monolithic views—but it only has two of them: the Imperial Palace and the Diet Building.
Otherwise, there are no views at all. Everywhere you look it is a chaos, but what a fascinating chaos it is. It is a mosaic city, a melange city. It has no center. It has no outside. It seems to lack even the structural supports we know from other cities.
One of these we know from the early medieval city and from its modern descendant, the Islamic city. This is the division into trade towns. Streets of the goldsmiths, area of the camel drivers, pits of the dyers—that sort of thing. Such remains are visible in all major cities: the West Side of New York, for example.
Tokyo has something of this, things bunched together from the old days before there was public transportation: Otemachi, where the banks’ headquarters are; Sudacho, where the wholesale cloth merchants are; Akihabara, down the street, where the cut-rate appliance people are.
But this grid cannot be used to comprehend the city because it is not operative. It is simply left over. Operative is a micro-grid that finds a bank, a cloth merchant, an appliance store in every neighborhood. And there are hundreds of neighborhoods in each district, and dozens of districts in each section, and tens of sections in this enormous city.
Duplication, therefore, becomes one of the features of a Tokyo walk. When you reach another public bath you are in a different neighborhood. And each neighborhood is a small town which has its laundromat, its egg store, its hairdressing parlor, its coffee shop.
Looking at the inner structure of Tokyo one is reminded of the inner structure of the traditional Japanese house. The sizes of the tatami,Jusuma and shoji are invariable. The construction is by modular unit. City construction is likewise modular—the laundromat in Asakusa and the laundromat in Shinjuku are identical.
We of the West, used to large swaths of activity, do not know what to think of the filigree of Tokyo, its fine embroidery of human endeavor.
But we of the West know what to feel. Walking on the streets of Tokyo we are aware of a sense of human proportion that we might not have known in the cities from whence we came. To walk in Tokyo is to wear a coat that fits exceptionally well.
The proportions (except where mania has taken over—the towers of west Shinjuku, for example) are all resolutely human. We raise our eyes to see buildings; we do not crane our necks. And the streets are narrow—all too narrow if it is one where cars are permitted. And there are little alleys just wide enough for a person. And there are things to look at.
Things to look at! Tokyo is a cornucopia held upside down. One does not know where to look first. If people say, and they do, that Tokyo makes them feel a child again, this is because it makes them all curiosity, all enthusiasm, all eyes.
This then is the display of Tokyo. It perhaps may be mercantile but its appeal goes far beyond the financial. Things become, in this plethora of sensation, detached from their utilitarian aspects. They exist for themselves: the cascades of kanji, the plastic food replicas in the restaurant windows, the façade, stories high, made entirely of TV sets.
One then remembers the woodcuts of Hokusai and Hiroshige—views of Edo—and sees the similarities. All of that detail, all of those particulars, all that decoration, the sheer movement of it—it is all real and it is all here now.
Especially on Sundays—the day (along with national holidays) when Tokyo turns itself again into Edo. The main streets in the major sections (Ginza, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Ueno) become malls. Motor traffic is forbidden (from 1 to 6 pm) and, as in olden times, people swarm into the streets. Unlike weekdays, when they rush about in the modern manner, on Sundays they stroll in the old-fashioned way. In Edo style they take their time, look at the stores, stop for a snack and saunter on.
Here, one thinks, looking at the leisured throng, Edo lives on. Despite the new backdrop of TV and computer games, the true human activity is the same, now as then. To leave the house and enjoy