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

2. Form and Pattern in the City

2 form and pattern in the city inference Studiesoftheorigins,developmentaltrajectories,andcontemporaryshapes of cities are legion. Politics, economics, and religion dominate the discussion , and they certainly play a role in any effort to understand the differences between Paris and Tokyo. But by themselves those three are unsatisfying , partly because each begs further questions of origin and evolution. Other, more diffuse forces have shaped these cities as well. However much any such factors have played a role in shaping either city, no single one will have dominated; some complex of influences has been at work. Even if all of these factors have played a role, they are not an exhaustive list of forces influencing the contemporary form of these cities. Still, each of these can be linked, however hypothetically, to urban space and form. Thus each must then be examined in light of the actual history of the city to estimate the plausibility of its influence (or lack of influence), either directly or as mediated through social, political, and other institutions . Such historical evidence may at first seem oversimplified, as if essentializing Japanese and Westerners according to an outmoded Orientalism. But acknowledging some real differences—relative, to be sure—between Japan and France may prove useful in defining certain unarguable dissimilarities between Paris and Tokyo. form and pattern in the city | 45 In one form or another, at least eight different forces may account for the differences we have already seen in the physical form of Tokyo and Paris: Esthetics: Pieces and Wholes, Tangibles and Intangibles Two aspects of esthetics are related to the forms of Tokyo and Paris today. The first is what might be described as a Japanese esthetic of parts (not necessarily integrated) versus a French, or perhaps Western, esthetic of integrated wholes. The second is a Japanese esthetic of intangibility and impermanence versus a French, or Western, esthetic of tangibility and permanence. Augustin Berque has described the builders of European cities as being relatively preoccupied with the whole city and with “grandiose symmetries ” among its parts.1 Hellenistic and Roman cities were carefully and comprehensively planned,2 and Paris grew from a Roman grid. This is not to say that disorder was absent, especially in the medieval city, or that the city did not have distinct sections. But they were never—as was the case with the commoner and aristocratic sectors of Edo—cut off from one another or internally composed of mutually isolated parts.3 Japanese city builders, by contrast, have traditionally been concerned more with parts, each growing incrementally with little relationship to the other parts or to the whole.4 This is in keeping with the relatively reductionist , microcosmic focus of Japanese esthetics in general.5 Such a focus is hardly absent in the West, but the esthetic has far more powerfully influenced a host of Japanese practices: beauty, perfection, and personal enlightenment may be achieved through the ever greater refinement of a smaller and smaller aspect of the physical or behavioral world.6 The problem with such an esthetic, if applied to cities, is that it would result in agglomerations of mutually unrelated, unintegrated parts with no unifying principle— exactly what comes to mind when one thinks of Tokyo.7 The notion that the city should constitute an esthetic whole came late to Japan and has not found an altogether hospitable home there. Nor has the notion that the city should possess a relatively unchanging face over time. The contrasting tangibility and apparent permanence of Paris’s urban form go beyond the simple difference between wood-based 46 | mirrors of memory and stone-based architecture. Compared to Tokyo, Paris has historically resisted change in both its whole and its parts. Great importance has been placed in the permanence of material forms over time, and the identity of the city and its people derives at least in part from its “stable physical scene.”8 Japanese esthetics—and, by hypothetical extension, Japanese urbanism —is far more characterized by implication, understatement, and ephemerality .9 Artworks themselves are generally distinguished by an emphasis on suggestion, simplicity, and perishability: the Japanese value and are attracted by impermanence.10 It could in fact be said that in Tokyo they have created the perishable city, and even fire and earthquake are inadequate explanations why. The Grand Shrine at Ise is demolished and rebuilt every twenty years with no notion that this disrespects the patrimony, and Japanese buildings and cities...