Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects

Introduction: Rediscovering Tokyo’s Vernacular

1 Introduction Rediscovering Tokyo’s Vernacular It is usually the detached spectator of the city—the planner or urban geographer or sociologist—who sees it primarily in terms of flux and change: these similes of multiplying cells, of encircling tentacles, of increasing communication loads, of floods and erosion correspond to his notion of the essential urban landscape—a landscape of movement and perpetual aimless growth. But does the city dweller himself understand the city in these terms? Does he want to understand it in these terms? We have our doubts. —John Brinkerhoff Jackson, “Images of the City” (1961) the vernacular and monumentality The last decades of the twentieth century saw a worldwide efflorescence of public history and preservation. In what Andreas Huyssen has called a “voracious museal culture,” vast numbers of new sites and objects came to be identified as historically significant and were set apart for commemoration.1 The range of meanings sought in the vestiges of the past expanded, too. Politically, preservation took a populist turn, while commercially, heritage became part of a global industry. Tokyo came late to this trend, ostensibly with little material to preserve . Destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly since its founding, the city by the 1970s retained little in the way of building stock that was more than a generation old. Tokyo had been built of wood and other perishable materials, and U.S. firebombs razed the majority of it in 1945. Well after historic preservation had become a commonplace feature of the culture and economy of major cities in other wealthy countries, Tokyo lacked preservation districts, adaptive reuse projects, preservation architects, or suppliers of recycled or replicated period fittings and 2 | Introduction materials for old buildings. Physical evidence of the past in the streets of Tokyo was fragmentary and largely unmarked. It rarely possessed market value. Without prized buildings and streetscapes to display the city’s past, it seems reasonable to suppose, Tokyo could not be expected to celebrate its history in the way cities elsewhere were doing. Nevertheless, despite what appeared to be unpromising terrain for historic preservation, in the 1970s and 1980s neighborhood activists, scholars , architects, artists, and writers set about recording and preserving the traces of Tokyo’s past, and large audiences responded by searching for the same places and things or consuming them vicariously through books, magazines, museum exhibits, and television programs. In the 1990s, new theme parks, malls, and restaurants capitalized on Tokyo’s past. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government began to treat the city’s history as one of its greatest assets. A new subway line that opened in 1999 was named the “Great Edo Line,” taking the city’s former name. Riding a wave of nostalgia for the old city, the film Always, which depicted life in an ordinary working-class Tokyo neighborhood in 1958, swept the Japanese Academy Awards in 2006. Thus, by the early years of the new millennium , Tokyo’s past, including its quite recent past, had been transformed into a valuable—indeed highly marketable—cultural heritage. Why and how did this happen? The awakening of heritage consciousness in Tokyo involved no iconic preservation battle around a famous district or building and no significant change in the legal status of landmarks. Municipal and national government came late to the reevaluation of the city’s past and provided little protection to historic features of the cityscape. The preservationist turn in Tokyo thus fits poorly into a story of activists persuading authorities to institute legislation and save historic buildings from the wrecking ball. On the other hand, the critical view of heritage as late capitalism’s deft co-optation of consumers’ sense of deracination and longing for a simpler world fails to explain the motivations of ordinary Tokyo citizens engaged in recovering pieces of the past around them. Something caused Tokyoites to view their city through a new lens and mobilized some of them to research, preserve, and celebrate what they found. This process of the city’s historicization needs itself to be historicized, and its movements, actors, audiences, and contexts examined in their specific forms, which, despite the global nature of the phenomenon, are inevitably particular, since every city has its own cultural and political traits.2 Every city also has its own vernacular: a language of form, space, and sensation shaped by the local history of habitation. Newcomers Rediscovering Tokyo’s Vernacular | 3 encounter a city’s vernacular in a torrent of signals...