Tokyo: A Biography. Stephen Mansfield
disorder, a city whose residents experience spasms rather than emotions. In foreign-made films with Tokyo settings, the actors wander the city like humans exploring the surface of Neptune. In one book, writer Paul Theroux dismisses Tokyo as “more like a machine than a city.” This book was partly written as a riposte to the perception of Tokyoites as involuntary cells or charged particles streaming through the body of the city. Tokyo exists, like all great cities, because of the presence of a highly individual populace.
For any writer contemplating the past, the foremost question must be how to authentically render the historical experience, how to acquaint today’s readers with yesterday’s events. —How, in the case of Tokyo, to reconstruct time past in this least mnemonic of cities. When you start to think of the past as happening, as opposed to having happened, a new way of conceiving history becomes possible.
Despite its colossal building projects, Tokyo can still seem inchoate, even incorporeal, a massive jellyfish of cement and light. So great is the intensity of change that the city at times seems completely severed from its own history. There is no such thing, however, as an abiding city. The pattern, with rare exceptions, is invariably one of transformation, mutability. This is of course, a question of degree. Any talk of the past presupposes the persistence of history. Yet in Tokyo, we are presented with the very opposite: the impersistence of the past. Nothing is preordained. History is time travel.
Edward Seidensticker famously wrote that the argument between tradition and change—a characteristic of European cities—is less relevant in Tokyo, where change is a tradition. Considering all that has befallen the city, from natural disasters to the obliteration of Tokyo during World War II and the elimination of history in the postwar construction period, it is surprising that among the many sacred figures absorbed from India into the iconography of Japanese devotion Kali, the Hindu goddess of chaos and destruction, was not given a place among the city’s pantheon of deities.
No doubt, some of the best city histories are impartial accountings, but if we make a cult out of impartiality, the result will be narrative leached of vitality. I’ve tried to strike a balance between objectivity for the sake of accuracy and, to borrow a term from Susan Sontag, the “passionate partiality” that comes from direct experience.
I can bear witness in small part to the city’s recent history. I count myself lucky to have been on the platform at Kasumigaseki Station just hours before the sarin gas attack was carried out by a Japanese death cult. I was in the city when the earthquake and tsunami struck nearby Fukushima in March 2011. I was fortunate to have gotten a sleeping unit on the upper floor of a twelve-story capsule hotel, the narrow building swaying drunkenly with the series of aftershocks. There was precious little sleep to be had that night. The capsule next to mine was occupied by a distressed insomniac babbling prophesies about a ruined city, like a biblical figure speaking in tongues.
The Asakusa Kannon temple, also called Senso-ji, may be the oldest religious site in the city, built to enshrine a gold statue of Kannon, Goddess of Mercy, that was “caught” by two fisherman on the Sumida River. Originally founded in 645, the temple was destroyed during the bombings of World War II. Once rebuilt it became, if possible, even more meaningful to the people of Tokyo as a symbol of compassion and peace. (Dreamstime © Zheng Dong)
Introduction
The flocks of Grus japonensis, the red-crowned crane, wading unmolested in the winter salt flats and tidal marshes, were not alone among avians nesting or sojourning along the swampy inlets of the bay. There were kestrels, egrets, Mongolian plovers, curlews, hawfinches, and the Japanese crested ibis, but it was the migratory crane—omnivorous consumer of crabs, snails, salamanders, and dragonflies—that would acquire special distinction as a Taoist symbol of immortality and fidelity, before it, too, like the city destined to rise here, would pass through cycles of growth, near-extinction, and transformation.
One thing that has not substantially changed is Tokyo’s geology. The city sits on the Kanto Loam Stratum, a bed of hard red clay amassed in the aftermath of volcanic eruptions. Tokyo’s top-soil of ash is roughly 20 meters deep. Abundant lashings of rain from the East Asian monsoons created sinkholes and depressions, forming sudden valleys in an otherwise flat terrain. The undulating unevenness—combined with the perforation caused by rivers and subterranean streams disgorging into pools, wet-lands, and the bay—formed the crooked backstreets that follow the course of old, long-filled-in rivulets or subterranean streams faintly sensed in the low rumbling heard beneath storm drains and manholes, representing visible traces of a natural topography around which the city has evolved.
This much we can verify, yet the fog of time obscures history. Even the skeletons and fossils of prehistoric creatures, like the one of a Naumann elephant excavated from beneath the business center of Nihonbashi Honcho, represent a period of history as firmly interred in the past as these bone relics. With the development of implements like stone axes, knives, and hot pebbles used for cooking—which took place during the last glaciation some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago—large creatures like the elk and elephant became extinct. Colder gusts of air caused the earth to dry and then harden, then to experience tidal advances in the early Jomon period (8,000 BC–300 AD), when the climate once again grew warm, the shoreline reaching as far as the range of modest hills known today as the yamanote. The bluffs and ridges at the shore provided natural jetties for fishing and gathering shellfish. Shell mounds and the outlines of pit dwellings in present-day Itabashi and Kita wards, along with the discovery of stone tools along the upper banks of rivers and at the head of the bay, indicate the existence of primitive settlements, the home of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.
A rich, inventive earthenware culture arose as the glacial epoch receded and a more temperate climate emerged. Earthen vessels from this period bear the impression of straw twines and cords pressed into the soft clay. These “cord-marked” pieces of pottery lent the age its name; the Jomon period. Tokyo is littered with mounds where these mollusk gatherers, a hunting, fishing, and gathering race, dumped their used shells. Bone tools and stone and ceramic ware have been found in middens.
As a study, archeology in Japan began, improbably, with the arrival of American zoologist Edward S. Morse, who visited to conduct advanced research on brachiopods, the Western Pacific shellfish. Traveling by train from Yokohama to Shimbashi on June 19, 1877, he chanced to glance out of the window as his carriage passed through the district of Omori. There he spotted a rise in the ground that he immediately identified as a shell mound. Further excavations revealed the site to be a 5,000-year-old cockleshell heap. Morse returned some days later with students from Tokyo Imperial University, and the group dug through the site with their bare hands, finding a “large collection of unique forms of pottery, three worked bones, and a curious baked-clay tablet.” Similar kitchen heaps were found in Ochanomizu, on Ueno Hill, and even in the grounds of the present-day Imperial Palace. A thirst for knowledge led to more excavations and the unearthing, in 1884, of another stratum of Japanese history along a slope near present-day Nezu Station now known as Yayoi-zaka. Grains of charred rice and chaff were found in jars and pots by the student excavators, the discovery driving back the presumed date of the region’s earliest agronomists.
The Yayoi period (300 BC–300 AD) was a time when rice cultivation and metalworking evolved in Japan. Advancements in better-managed communities during this period are visible in the everyday objects of the age. These include animal snares, fire pits, stronger earthen vessels fired at higher temperatures, clay figurines, lacquer ware, copper and iron tools, and burial urns— this latter an important and telling item. When people begin to honor their dead, they have made a significant leap in social development; the remembrance of ancestors is an important act in the establishing of historical time. The orange-brown-colored haniwa that were placed at the foot of ancient tumuli were also associated with remembrance of the dead. These unglazed clay figurines in cylindrical or configured forms represent people, animals, and familiar objects and shapes such as appliances and scale models of primitive residences.
In the western suburb of Todoroki, the scallop-shaped Noge Otsuka tomb has been preserved in remarkably fine condition. Dating from the fifth century, the mound is representative of the Middle Kofun