Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects

Conclusion: History and Memory in a City without Monuments

142 Conclusion History and Memory in a City without Monuments I must not leave the truth unstated, that it is again no question of expediency or feeling whether we shall preserve the buildings of the past or not. We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us. —John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) John Ruskin states the ethos of historical preservation in the epigraph above in stark terms. Presented in this categorical fashion, the imperative to preserve would bring history to a stop, leaving us with an untenable accumulation of detritus. We would have to become nomads to escape it.1 Of course, Ruskin was arguing primarily for preservation of particular kinds of buildings: the Gothic churches of northern Europe, the stone and stucco palazzi of Venice and Florence, or the ruins of imperial Rome—piles of stone and mortar that had stood for centuries or even millennia. By the end of the twentieth century, the range of objects of preservation had expanded vastly worldwide, and with the accelerating speed of technological change, the time necessary for something to be recognized as belonging to a distinct and valuable past had shrunk from the centuries that separated antiquity from nineteenthcentury Europe to the decade it now took for a fashion to be recovered as “retro.”2 Tokyo in the late twentieth century occupied the opposite pole of the urban spectrum from Venice and Rome in terms of evidence of antiquity. The city’s physical state at the end of the millennium not only challenged the usefulness of Ruskin’s conservative dictum but History and Memory | 143 invited yet more basic questions: When do things of the present become historical? And, after all, why preserve anything? If, in participating in the global cultural turn toward the past, Tokyo was faced with a desire for memory but a lack of monuments that could constitute a heritage, then one might view the entire project of preservationism in Tokyo as based on a misrecognition, an attempt to transplant values from elsewhere into infertile soil. Perhaps, that is to say, the dominant trait of the landscape of Tokyo was not the fragile accumulation of fragments of the past but ephemerality itself, together with repeated destruction so complete that it left no ruins. If this were the case, then the sensibility that would be truer to the city’s cultural and material character—one that might serve as the counterpart to the appreciation of ruins in a city of stone—might rather be the apocalyptic perspective of Godzilla, the science fiction epic Akira, and other examples of film, literature, and manga in the large body of fictional works that have dwelt almost lovingly on Tokyo’s destruction and resurrection .3 Yet to portray Tokyo as a city without the traces of memory would be to overlook the ways that the past in this city has constantly evolved as citizens gave new meanings to its tangible and intangible traces. Despite Tokyo’s repeated destruction and rebuilding, Tokyoites, too, have searched for history among surviving places and material things. When preservationists began to make public cause of the remains of Tokyo’s past in the 1970s and 1980s, they did so for political reasons tied to the city’s present rather than because of the intrinsic architectural importance or inviolability of the objects of preservation themselves . This was not peculiar to Tokyo, since preservation in modern capitalist cities is always a field of political contention. Tokyo’s search for a usable past came in the context of moves to reclaim space and redefine participation in the imagined communities of urban and national citizenship. It derived from a set of attitudes about everyday life: everyday life as the location of deep social bonds sheltered from bureaucratic modernity; as a realm of discovery, where the familiar became exotic and the ordinary bled into the extraordinary; and ultimately , as a site of native authenticity. Yet as its most celebrated theorist , Henri LeFebvre, emphasized, the concept of everyday life is politically ambivalent, for it encompasses both the “organized passivity” of mass consumer society and the historical resources for emancipation from that passivity, located in a world before the dominance of consumerism and the bureaucratic state.4 144 | Conclusion The student radicals and antiwar protesters of...