Mirrors of Memory: Culture, Politics, and Time in Paris and Tokyo

6. The Capital Envisioned

This tour of Paris and Tokyo has been thus far literally an ego trip: I have recounted, and tried to interpret, some of the visual characteristics of the two cities as a visitor might see them. But how these cities have grown has been determined by how others see them. There is more to form than topography, technology, war, disaster, and diplomacy; more to centerperiphery contrasts than walls, religion, and authority; more to manipulation than culture, resources, and power; and more to monuments than legitimacy, elitism or populism, or cultural conceptions of space. When one stops walking and sits down to read, the histories of Paris and Tokyo reveal many similarities in the way natives and outsiders, rulers and ruled, politicians and poets have perceived the capital. But they also reveal deep differences in “objective” perceptions, value judgments, and likes and dislikes , all of which—mediated through centuries of public- and privatesector decisions—have arguably influenced the visual, physical differences the foreign flâneur can see. Specifically, three things have struck me in a comparative historical reading of Tokyo and Paris. First, normative evaluations of Paris—and Western cities in general1—have tended to be much more ambivalent, and far more often negative, than those of Tokyo. Second, there is a relatively strong element of fear in views of Paris, but not of Tokyo. Third is the the capital envisioned 6 152 | mirrors of memory question of intensity: Paris inspires passion, both negative and positive, whereas both Edo’s and (even more) Tokyo’s admirers and detractors are decidedly more tepid. This is not a matter of Oriental Inscrutability versus Gallic Effusiveness; neither stereotype survives close examination. But the differences must be accounted for. evaluations of the capital: roots But how? A fairly diligent reading of Tokyo and Paris history reveals two types of possible bases for evaluations of the capital. In the first place, I suggest, are deep cultural predispositions toward cities in general, based in religion and morality, and in conceptions of nature and artifice. Then, second, there appear to be overlays: historically subsequent perceptions of the capital as a possible parasite, as a threat of some sort to the country, and as the locus of modernity, industry, and capitalism. The encomiums heaped on Paris over the centuries need no recapping; whathasstruckmeinacomparativevein,however,isthe—atbest—deeply ambivalent perceptions that Paris shares with cities in general in the JudeoChristian tradition. Greek and Roman civilization, of course, viewed cities positively, as centers of freedom, citizenship, and political life,2 and during the Dark Ages the church, too, assumed a more positive stance, as the relative safety of cities was contrasted with the barbarism outside. But ambivalence continued: medieval cities were places of safety and sin, and Paris did not escape this dichotomy, as an arena for free speech and thought but also for pleasure, temptation, and perdition.3 In Japan, such schizophrenia never developed. The Chinese tradition noted the virtues of rural life and on occasion decried the “vice and corruption ” of the city.4 But overall there was no notion that the city was distinct from or superior to the country or vice versa, such distinctions being more “a cliché of our Western cultural traditions.”5 Nor did Japan generate its own anti-urban tradition. Indeed, during Tokugawa rule Edo became the center of a vibrant, vigorous, and self-confident urban popular culture. Proagrarian and antimercantile ideas did arise, but I will suggest below that the foci of such ideologies were then and later luxury, mammonism, and poverty wherever found, and that the city never became an intrinsically the capital envisioned | 153 morally problematic place.6 Just as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shinto took no firm moral stand on the city, neither does Japanese culture distinguish invidiously between the world of nature and that of human artifice. Rather than seeing the hand of man in the city as opposed to—and either superior or inferior to—the workings of nature, it sees the city as mediating between man and the gods, man and nature.7 In the West, by contrast, ambivalence is once again apparent, as nature has been at some times seen as peaceful, innocent Arcady and at others as “brutish and ignorant.”8 The Greeks and Romans tended to conflate city and hinterland: citizenship appertained equally to urbanites and country folk. But with the fall of the Roman Empire, an age descended where nature was abhorred...