Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects by Jordan Sand (review)

Jordan Sand, a professor of Japanese history and culture at Georgetown University, has taken a healthy bite out of a vast topic relating to the world’s largest metropolitan agglomeration. In a series ofwell-researched chapters, he sets out to explore the motivations and influences that “caused Tokyoites to view their city through a new lens and mobilized some of them to research, preserve, and celebrate what they found” (2). To summarize all the detailed material and insights presented would exceed the space allotted for a review of this kind, so only a few greatly distilled highlights are presented here.

Sand begins by discussing events contributing to the genesis of a citizens’ movement to conserve the everyday places of Japan’s capital city. The first was an important shift in perspective. In the 1960s, in response to many writers who had lamented the lack of a tradition of civic monumentality and public space in Tokyo, a group of Japanese scholars offered an alternative theory of urban space, kaiwai (vicinity, district, activity space). These scholars, influenced in part by the spread into Japan ofthe writings of such authors as Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs, used kaiwai to explain urban space as something defined by the experiences that happen in a place rather than by specific boundaries. Sand explains that this awakened a beliefthat Japan had a unique form of urban space that was “more social than spatial” (32) and defined by the way people appropriated space spontaneously. As such, kaiwai made “native streetscapes an appealing starting point for subsequent urban and architectural theory” (32).

Sand’s discussion then proceeds to the impact of a transformational example of spontaneous urban-space appropriation— the 1969 occupation ofthe Shinjuku West Exit Underground Plaza of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. Completed in 1965, the plaza received awards for its two-story design that efficiently connected bus, rail, and foot traffic. By 1969 over a million pedestrians were using it each weekday, making it among the most heavily trafficked areas on the planet. By then the structure also became populated by “folk guerillas,” anti-Vietnam War protesters who erected signs and gathered to hear speeches in the bustling facility. Before long the protesters were expelled, and the name “plaza,” suggesting a gathering place, was changed to “concourse,” indicating a passageway that needed to be unobstructed. Sand sees the post-Shinjuku era as a turning point that re-sulted in activists shifting their focus toward an interest in places legitimized by kaiwai: “local community, marginal spaces, and the vestiges of the city’s past” (53).

This leads into a discussion ofthe machizu-kuri, or town building movement ofthe 1970s and 1980s, which is still very much alive today. Sand’s principal focus is on the Yanaka neighborhood where he lived as a University ofTokyo graduate student, which escaped destruction by the 1945 American fire bombing that leveled much of Tokyo’s densely settled shitamachi (lower town or downtown) to its east. Sand chronicles how three women, who were born in the area to professional families rather than the artisans and craftspeople who dominated the community, started a magazine called Yanesen, a contraction ofthe neighborhood’s component parts Yanaka, Nezu, and Sendagi. He contends that to raise the consciousness ofthe neighborhood they, perhaps unintentionally, created a new identity for Yanaka by expropriating and reinventing images of “old shitamachi.” More than the preservation of buildings, Sands contends that Yanesen created “a virtual community in print” (87) that was highly influential.

The author then addresses the expansion of what aspects of Tokyo’s built vernacular should be considered worthy of investigation, including the influence of street observation studies. The street observationists, including University of Tokyo architectural historian Terunobu Fujimori along with other colleagues, saw value in the details of the city, such as prewar shop...