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Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History
From its obscure origins as a fishing village along a marshy estuary, Tokyo grew into one of the world's largest and most culturally vibrant metropolises. For all its modernity and craving for the new, it is a city impregnated with the past. In the backstreets of districts that have inspired the setting for science fiction novels are wooden temples, fox shrines, mouldering steles and statues of Bodhisattvas that evoke a different age. The point where time past, present and future coexist, Tokyo
281 pages, CD-ROM
First published January 1, 2009
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September 1, 2023
If you love Tokyo, this is not the book for you.
“There are, of course, as many Tokyos as there are visitors. If a common perspective is missing, this is a tribute to the diversity and complexity of a city that can generate so many different interpretations” (p. xvii).
This promising introduction can only be described as false advertising. Rather than entertain the multiplicity of interpretations of Tokyo that exist, analysing events through multiple lenses and allowing the reader to make their own decisions, Mansfield forces his perspective down our throats with naked contempt for any other.
Generally speaking, there are two ways to look at Tokyo. You can look it like Edward Seidensticker, as “a stewing mass of people” where “there are no beautiful, dead surfaces to distract one from the vitality once it is known” (p. 216). This perspective is disgusted by modern vitality and longs for a dead past that is difficult to find in Tokyo. The other perspective is advanced by Ashihara Yoshinobu, where “the heart of Tokyo – and most of Japan’s cities – remains vital. This is the result of a healthy – if somewhat hyper-metabolism” (p. 248). This perspective focuses on the present and places high value on Tokyo’s vitality.
While both quotations can be found in Mansfield’s book, it is overwhelmingly on the side of Seidensticker. Ashihara’s quote is to be found in the eight or so pages towards the end of the book (p. 247-255) that offer any real analysis of modern developments besides blanket condemnation. The rest is essentially a hit piece. Mansfield romanticises the Edo period and denigrates all that came after, progressively more so.
His coverage of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel is emblematic of this imbalance:
“Built near the site of the old Rokumeikan, with a lotus pond facing the main entrance, the hotel, though open to anyone who could afford it, had a similar cachet. Not everyone was enamoured of the building, though. The English writer Peter Quennell refused to join the chorus of praise, describing the structure, ‘built by an eccentric American architect,’ as a ‘queer façade, its pretentious squat asymmetry recalls a modernist chest-of-drawers in stone and brick, the stone used being of a repellently porous type, pocked with large holes like a Gruyere cheese.’” (p. 176).
Do you see the problem? He mentions, extremely briefly, that the building had a good reputation, and even that most people believed it to be good (as do many architects today). Yet he only mentions this to brush it aside in favour of a lengthy quotation from a single, minority critic. Because Mansfield finds the idea of anything positive coming out of 20th Century Japan so abhorrent, he cherry-picks public reaction to bolster his simplistic narrative.
Indeed for Mansfield, a perspective is only “nuanced” if it aligns with his narrative. After citing Seidensticker’s “beautiful, dead surfaces” uncritically, he dismisses the more positive Arthur Koestler as one of the “foreign writers without Seidensticker’s more nuanced view of Japan” who merely “fixate on its more exotic aspects” (p. 216). Even esteemed author William Faulkner falls afoul of Mansfield for daring to be impressed by modern Japan: Mansfield paints his appreciation as nothing more than “the dutiful awe of the foreigner” (p. 252).
Mansfield, then, only affords respect to those intellectuals who disdain modern Japan, which perhaps explains his horrendously disproportionate coverage of author Nagai Kafu. With little love of Tokyo itself, it’s painfully obvious that Mansfield had really wanted to write a biography on Kafu. One need only look at the ‘Index of Literary & Historical Names’ (p. 263): where most entries have a maximum of two lines of cited page numbers, Kafu has an unparalleled four. I couldn’t help but groan at every mention of his name. Kafu is certainly worth writing about, but, as is apparent more generally, Mansfield has little skill in proportion and scale: skills as important to writing a history as accuracy.
What is perhaps most trying is Mansfield’s nostalgia-blinkered hypocrisy. The seedy urban culture of the Edo pleasure districts, as base and materialist an environment as could be, nonetheless receives praise from Mansfield as “the incubators of culture” (p. 124). Yet modern consumer culture is nothing more than proof of “the hollow ring of the economic miracle” (p. 246). Although able to find value in the spaces that existed outside of the ‘good taste’ of the Edo period – even overlooking the horrendous exploitation of women - he makes no effort to do so with the comparatively harmless spaces that conflict with the ‘good taste’ of today.
This habit of overlooking atrocities in the name of aesthetics is a concerning trend. He shows rare good sense in criticising Hal Porter’s attack on Tokyo as “demonizing the new Japanese” and coming from one who “preferred the ruined city he knew during the years of the occupation, and its more submissive, defeated people” (p. 223). But as a criticism, it is painfully ironic. His overwhelmingly negative opinion, first of Meiji industrialisation, and then of the post-war economic miracle, suggests that he too would much prefer Japan to have remained a poor and backward nation.
In his explicitly-stated preference for Tokyo as a city “tinged with an aching, poetic melancholy” (p. 255), he abominates the construction of apartment buildings for the post-war homeless as “drab” and “cookie-cutter” (p. 222), but laments the vanishing of “flophouses”, “bums”, and “street-walkers” (p. 255). He speaks with disturbing relish at how, following the devastation of the 1945 air raids, “Mount Fuji could once again be seen on the horizon of the ash-covered landscape as it had in the woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai” (p. 197). He closes the book quite sickeningly with a prediction, in indulgently gory detail, of Tokyo’s future destruction in an earthquake.
The Tokyo that Mansfield wants is a Tokyo that could only be desired by a detached, outside observer. Overwhelmingly, the Japanese are proud of what they have accomplished in the post-war economic miracle, and certainly have no fond memories of the war or of poverty. In one of the rare moments Mansfield allows the other side to speak, a Japanese baker says of the Tokyo of days past: “In those days Shinjuku looked so miserable that there is nowhere to compare with it now. As for any notion of rustic suburban charm, it could not have looked drearier” (p. 154).
If you came here looking to learn more about a city you love, you had best look somewhere else. This is a book for people who hate Tokyo as it is today, and will, if anything, discourage you from visiting. Those of us in Ashihara’s camp, the millions of people who adore modern Tokyo and find in it a beauty like no other, are afforded no more than a whisper; and the consequence is that readers can only leave this book with a half-understanding of Tokyo.
“There are, of course, as many Tokyos as there are visitors. If a common perspective is missing, this is a tribute to the diversity and complexity of a city that can generate so many different interpretations” (p. xvii).
This promising introduction can only be described as false advertising. Rather than entertain the multiplicity of interpretations of Tokyo that exist, analysing events through multiple lenses and allowing the reader to make their own decisions, Mansfield forces his perspective down our throats with naked contempt for any other.
Generally speaking, there are two ways to look at Tokyo. You can look it like Edward Seidensticker, as “a stewing mass of people” where “there are no beautiful, dead surfaces to distract one from the vitality once it is known” (p. 216). This perspective is disgusted by modern vitality and longs for a dead past that is difficult to find in Tokyo. The other perspective is advanced by Ashihara Yoshinobu, where “the heart of Tokyo – and most of Japan’s cities – remains vital. This is the result of a healthy – if somewhat hyper-metabolism” (p. 248). This perspective focuses on the present and places high value on Tokyo’s vitality.
While both quotations can be found in Mansfield’s book, it is overwhelmingly on the side of Seidensticker. Ashihara’s quote is to be found in the eight or so pages towards the end of the book (p. 247-255) that offer any real analysis of modern developments besides blanket condemnation. The rest is essentially a hit piece. Mansfield romanticises the Edo period and denigrates all that came after, progressively more so.
His coverage of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel is emblematic of this imbalance:
“Built near the site of the old Rokumeikan, with a lotus pond facing the main entrance, the hotel, though open to anyone who could afford it, had a similar cachet. Not everyone was enamoured of the building, though. The English writer Peter Quennell refused to join the chorus of praise, describing the structure, ‘built by an eccentric American architect,’ as a ‘queer façade, its pretentious squat asymmetry recalls a modernist chest-of-drawers in stone and brick, the stone used being of a repellently porous type, pocked with large holes like a Gruyere cheese.’” (p. 176).
Do you see the problem? He mentions, extremely briefly, that the building had a good reputation, and even that most people believed it to be good (as do many architects today). Yet he only mentions this to brush it aside in favour of a lengthy quotation from a single, minority critic. Because Mansfield finds the idea of anything positive coming out of 20th Century Japan so abhorrent, he cherry-picks public reaction to bolster his simplistic narrative.
Indeed for Mansfield, a perspective is only “nuanced” if it aligns with his narrative. After citing Seidensticker’s “beautiful, dead surfaces” uncritically, he dismisses the more positive Arthur Koestler as one of the “foreign writers without Seidensticker’s more nuanced view of Japan” who merely “fixate on its more exotic aspects” (p. 216). Even esteemed author William Faulkner falls afoul of Mansfield for daring to be impressed by modern Japan: Mansfield paints his appreciation as nothing more than “the dutiful awe of the foreigner” (p. 252).
Mansfield, then, only affords respect to those intellectuals who disdain modern Japan, which perhaps explains his horrendously disproportionate coverage of author Nagai Kafu. With little love of Tokyo itself, it’s painfully obvious that Mansfield had really wanted to write a biography on Kafu. One need only look at the ‘Index of Literary & Historical Names’ (p. 263): where most entries have a maximum of two lines of cited page numbers, Kafu has an unparalleled four. I couldn’t help but groan at every mention of his name. Kafu is certainly worth writing about, but, as is apparent more generally, Mansfield has little skill in proportion and scale: skills as important to writing a history as accuracy.
What is perhaps most trying is Mansfield’s nostalgia-blinkered hypocrisy. The seedy urban culture of the Edo pleasure districts, as base and materialist an environment as could be, nonetheless receives praise from Mansfield as “the incubators of culture” (p. 124). Yet modern consumer culture is nothing more than proof of “the hollow ring of the economic miracle” (p. 246). Although able to find value in the spaces that existed outside of the ‘good taste’ of the Edo period – even overlooking the horrendous exploitation of women - he makes no effort to do so with the comparatively harmless spaces that conflict with the ‘good taste’ of today.
This habit of overlooking atrocities in the name of aesthetics is a concerning trend. He shows rare good sense in criticising Hal Porter’s attack on Tokyo as “demonizing the new Japanese” and coming from one who “preferred the ruined city he knew during the years of the occupation, and its more submissive, defeated people” (p. 223). But as a criticism, it is painfully ironic. His overwhelmingly negative opinion, first of Meiji industrialisation, and then of the post-war economic miracle, suggests that he too would much prefer Japan to have remained a poor and backward nation.
In his explicitly-stated preference for Tokyo as a city “tinged with an aching, poetic melancholy” (p. 255), he abominates the construction of apartment buildings for the post-war homeless as “drab” and “cookie-cutter” (p. 222), but laments the vanishing of “flophouses”, “bums”, and “street-walkers” (p. 255). He speaks with disturbing relish at how, following the devastation of the 1945 air raids, “Mount Fuji could once again be seen on the horizon of the ash-covered landscape as it had in the woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai” (p. 197). He closes the book quite sickeningly with a prediction, in indulgently gory detail, of Tokyo’s future destruction in an earthquake.
The Tokyo that Mansfield wants is a Tokyo that could only be desired by a detached, outside observer. Overwhelmingly, the Japanese are proud of what they have accomplished in the post-war economic miracle, and certainly have no fond memories of the war or of poverty. In one of the rare moments Mansfield allows the other side to speak, a Japanese baker says of the Tokyo of days past: “In those days Shinjuku looked so miserable that there is nowhere to compare with it now. As for any notion of rustic suburban charm, it could not have looked drearier” (p. 154).
If you came here looking to learn more about a city you love, you had best look somewhere else. This is a book for people who hate Tokyo as it is today, and will, if anything, discourage you from visiting. Those of us in Ashihara’s camp, the millions of people who adore modern Tokyo and find in it a beauty like no other, are afforded no more than a whisper; and the consequence is that readers can only leave this book with a half-understanding of Tokyo.
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