Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects

by Jordan Sand

Preserved buildings and historic districts, museums and reconstructions have become an important part of the landscape of cities around the world. Beginning in the 1970s, Tokyo participated in this trend. However, repeated destruction and rapid redevelopment left the city with little building stock of recognized historical value. Late twentieth-century Tokyo thus presents an illuminating case of the emergence of a new sense of history in the city’s physical environment, since it required both a shift in perceptions of value and a search for history in the margins and interstices of a rapidly modernizing cityscape. Scholarship to date has tended to view historicism in the postindustrial context as either a genuine response to loss, or as a cynical commodification of the past. The historical process of Tokyo’s historicization suggests other interpretations. Moving from the politics of the public square to the invention of neighborhood community, to oddities found and appropriated in the streets, to the consecration of everyday scenes and artifacts as heritage in museums, Tokyo Vernacular traces the rediscovery of the past―sometimes in unlikely forms―in a city with few traditional landmarks. Tokyo's rediscovered past was mobilized as part of a new politics of the everyday after the failure of mass politics in the 1960s. Rather than conceiving the city as national center and claiming public space as national citizens, the post-1960s generation came to value the local places and things that embodied the vernacular language of the city, and to seek what could be claimed as common property outside the spaces of corporate capitalism and the state.

Genres: Japan, Nonfiction, History, Cultural, Japanese History, Material Culture

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extensively researched. My primary interest is always the shitamachi areas of Tokyo, and this book examines the postwar history of the Yanesen area, a northeast section of the city that survived the firebombings of 1945 — one of my favorite areas to walk around and take in the old school vibe.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was interesting though not entirely what I was hoping for, but that is as much my fault as anything. I thought there might be more actual discussion about the layered history of Tokyo, but this book's focus was on how different groups in Tokyo started becoming interested in discovering that history after the 1950s. The discussion of the politics of appropriation, use, and presentation of Tokyo's history is interesting, but the philosophical aspects of all of it were not really my cup of tea, and I felt I needed more background on the subject to be able to fully evaluate Sand's arguments.