Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun's City of Edo by Timon Screech (review)

A wide-ranging interpretive reading of the Edo urban landscape, Timon Screech's Tokyo Before Tokyo aims principally to clarify "the forces that shaped the shogun's city and governed its spatial logic" (p. 10). As the book's subtitle indicates, Screech seeks to reveal how the physical layout and built environment of Edo came to embody the authority of the newly founded shogunate, established both in terms of the new capital city's military security and in terms of its religious and cultural legitimacy. A lavishly illustrated volume with over one hundred images reproduced in glorious color and at generous size, the book is designed to be accessible to a nonspecialist audience while also providing a stimulating discussion of the city that will be of interest to specialists.

Various analyses in English explore the urban design of particular Edo districts and sites,¹ but I am not aware of any book-length study in English that addresses the design of the city as a whole. Perhaps the closest analogue, albeit about another city, is Matthew Stavros's Kyoto: An Urban History of Japan's Premodern Capital (University of Hawai'i Press, 2014), which shares Screech's focus on the urban planning of a major Japanese premodern capital. Yet in contrast to the broadly chronological framework adopted in Stavros's history, Screech is clear that he intends his book as "a selection of vignettes that are especially telling about how the city worked and how it was experienced" (p. 8). Many readers will have encountered some aspects of Screech's work on this topic over the years and some may be familiar with his 2007 Edo no daifushin: Tokugawa toshi keikaku no shigaku (The great construction project of Edo: the poetics of Tokugawa urban planning).² The contents of that earlier book (with the first two chapters substantially reorganized) appear in an updated form here, for the first time as a book in English, with a new chapter focused on Edo Castle along with an epilogue on the Edo-Meiji transition.

One of the important takeaways from Screech's treatment of Edo is his elucidation of how various organizational principles can be discerned in the overall layout of the city as well as in the structuring of specific sites within it. Seeking to correct the popular misapprehension that Edo developed by happenstance, that "buildings and streets … might appear random and unplanned" (p. 39), Screech explains instead how geomantic theory, literary associations, and attentiveness to visual possibilities shaped the city's growth.

In the book's opening chapter, Screech explores some of the geomantic principles of continental provenance most apparent in the grid-like layout of Kyoto (and in prior capitals such as Nara). He points out how analogies could be drawn between the city's structure and that of the human body, providing an interpretive framework that might privilege certain regions over others. Whereas the underlying principles are easily recognized in a city such as Kyoto, Screech contends that with some effort these same principles can also be discerned within the new layout of Edo. The notion that "spiritual forces" (ki) flowed generally from the northeast to the southwest explains, he argues, why certain religious sites were chosen for special patronage by the shogunate as well as how daimyō residences came to be apportioned in the area around the castle: with fudai daimyō to the northeast and tozama daimyō to the southwest (p. 43).

In a chapter focused on the interior of Edo Castle, Screech identifies these geomantic principles at work in the layout of rooms within the castle, in determining the direction from which visitors would approach, and even in shaping the significance of the paintings adorning the walls of the rooms in which they would be received. Basing his argument mainly on the structure of the extant Nijō Castle in Kyoto and corroborating his analysis with the few contemporary visual representations...