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

In his acknowledgments, Jordan Sand says that this book on Tokyo began as autobiography and took an anthropological turn before becoming history. He was a student of architecture when he thought of writing autobiography, and this study is above all a history of preservation. Sand aspires to historicize the process by which, in the decades since 1969, the people of Tokyo have rediscovered the history of their city as a distinct place and sought to preserve and record it. Three of his four substantive chapters address the topics included in the subtitle of the book: common spaces, local histories, and found objects. In the fourth, Sand turns from grassroots activities to the leadership of the metropolitan government in the construction of the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which opened in 1993.

Sand uses “vernacular” as a term of urban analysis to refer to “a language of form, space, and sensation shaped by the local history of habitation” (p. 2). The traits he identifies as Tokyo’s vernacular include small lots, construction in wood, and low-rise buildings. The vernacular city stands in contrast to elements of the city intended to be monuments to the nation. He argues that vernacular urbanism in Tokyo is primarily a reaction to the postwar nation that staged the 1964 Olympics and the World Exposition in Osaka in 1970 rather than to the imperial state that built the Diet Building. Sand contrasts citizen engagement in preservation not only to state monumentalism but also to the monumental form taken by the mass demonstrations that culminated in Anpo 1960.

Complicating the standard narrative of postwar economic growth, Sand draws attention to the dematerialization of wealth since 1971, linking floating currencies to real estate speculation, the decline of manufacturing, and the transformation of the Tokyo landscape from low-rise wooden construction to a landscape dominated by high-rise office buildings made of inorganic materials. Such changes were, of course, characteristic of economies worldwide. Sand is equally aware that the preservationist movements he documents in Tokyo were part of a worldwide enthusiasm for public history. While preservation was often populist, “heritage became part of a global industry” (p. 1).

In his chapter on commons, Sand treats the protests of the late 1960s in the plaza at the west exit of Shinjuku Station as different in nature from the Hibiya Riots of 1905, the May Day demonstrations of the occupation era, and Anpo, all of which addressed national issues and occurred on state-owned property where permits were required. What distinguished the Saturday evening antiwar gatherings staged by the activist group Beheiren and others was that they were built around interaction among strangers. Sand suggests that the participants were claiming “the common right of access to open space by virtue of being an inhabitant of the city” (p. 38). Whereas Hibiya Park, the plaza in front of the Imperial Palace, and the grounds of the National Diet Building, the sites of earlier mass protests, were all spaces indisputably owned by the state, the Shinjuku West Exit Underground Plaza was designed by the sponsoring transport companies to facilitate movement through the space. In contrast to the regimented marches of political protests, the actions of the “folk guerillas” who opposed the Vietnam War were carnivalesque. The playful free exchange of ideas stimulated by the folk guerillas ended on May 28, 1969, when the Metropolitan Police changed the signage at the West Exit of Shinjuku Station, substituting the word thoroughfare for plaza and thus justifying the removal of the demonstrators for impeding the flow of office workers necessary for Japanese capitalism.

Sand is attentive not only to what citizens did in common places but also to how historians, architects, urban theorists, and other intellectuals thought about such spaces. He asserts that both the spontaneous nature of the demonstrations at Shinjuku and the expulsion of the protesters in 1969 affected “perceptions of urban space and what citizens could do with it...