A City Like No Other
Clear winter atmospheric conditions reveal Mt. Fuji’s distinctive peak rising dramatically beyond the skyscrapers of the Shinjuku District.
ACCORDING TO THE 2008 United Nations Report on World Urbanization, Tokyo remains the largest city in the world, at its daytime peak containing 36 million people, considerably more than in all of California, more even than in all of Canada.
More too than double the size of such runners-up as Sao Paulo, Bombay, Mexico City, and New York. The city even finds its place (thirty-fifth) in the list of the world’s largest countries. Yet, at the same time, Tokyo—true megalopolis though it be—is also ranked as one of the world’s most livable cities, topped only by Copenhagen and Munich.
In a world where over-population appears a major threat, how does the world’s largest city remain among the most livable, and for how long can it remain so? These are questions with many answers.
One of them would involve the very shape of the place, how it is made and how it grew. This shape was noticed, often with disapproval, by early Western visitors. Isabella Bird in 1880 said that Tokyo (formerly known as Edo) was a mere “aggregate of villages,” and that as a city it “lacked concentration.” In 1886, the American artist John La Farge was calling it “this big, dreary city of innumerable little houses.” Later, in 1930, English author Peter Quennel was finding things no better—“a huge extension of a single neighborhood”—and in 1976 the sociologist David Riesman found Tokyo to be “a metropolis superimposed on a series of small villages.”
These perceptions were noted and often echoed by the Japanese themselves. Novelist Abe Kobo wrote that the city is “a limitless number of villages. These villages and their people all appear identical. So no matter how far you walk, you seem to remain where you started, going nowhere at all.” The mad old man of Tanizaki Junichiro’s last novel, referred to “that overturned rubbish heap of a Tokyo,” and that finest of all Tokyo chroniclers, Nagai Kafu, wrote that “… it would seem that we Japanese are wholly lacking in the ability to build a city.”
To build one, perhaps, but not to “grow” one. Though Edo/Tokyo was originally (like Washington, like Beijing) a city born by decree, a place with military intentions, the logical structure of the planned city shortly gave way to something more natural.
For planned, logical Edo to so quickly turn into unplanned, illogical Tokyo indicates that progress is in itself a dismantling, a destruction rather than a construction, one occasioned by practical needs. Architectural critic and city planner Lewis Mumford offers a paradigm.
“Those who refer to the winding streets of a town as mere tracings of the cowpath do not realize that the cow’s habit of following contours usually produces a more economical and sensible layout than any inflexible system of straight streets.” There was thus a strong social need not for one center but for many centers—these are the villages that make up Tokyo.
This “village” model is now disputed. Tokyo is not, it is said, just a congerie of villages, in that such units are not mere remnants of older social structures. Rather, they are more like cells of the body, continuing as vital social units.
Perhaps this organic structure might account for some of the livability of the city as a whole, in that it is so “natural.” Each village-cell is composed of identical parts (nowadays the convenience store, the pachinko parlor, the karaoke place, no longer the rice store or the public bath) and, invariably, the koban, the station where your friendly neighborhood policeman works. Such “villages” take care of their own problems. Like cells in a body, each unit of this enormous conglomerate containing identical elements, the resulting pattern becomes organic—continuous, natural, all the parts fitting together in a harmonious way.
One can find echoed in this cell-like structure of Tokyo something equally cell-like in other cultural manifestations of the country. Traditional architecture, for example. Unit sizes are usually invariable. Your tatami mats would fit my floor, and my fusuma and shoji could become your doors and windows, and your pachinko parlor next door is just like mine.
As Kurt Singer, anthropologist extraordinaire, has said: “Let the Westerner sincerely try to live by Japanese customs “and he will instantly feel what a cell endowed with … human sensibility must be supposed to feel in a well-coordinated body.” It is perhaps this “organic” quality in the construction of Tokyo that has contributed to its livability. A secure and comfortable warren is created, one which well suits the human animal. As the social critic Donald Olsen has observed: “If the domestic house is the microcosm of the city, so the city is the home writ large.”
At the same time that we consider the spatial, however, we must also contemplate the temporal—the speed with which Tokyo mutates. It is common for a former resident to revisit an area and get lost because of all of the buildings torn down and all of the buildings put up in the interim. It has been said (by the Federation of Housing Production Organizations) that “private houses in Japan stand an average of 26 years before their owners knock them down and build anew.”
How does the world’s largest city remain among the most livable?
The new Sumida Hokusai Museum, designed by Kazuyo Sejima, one of Japan’s top female architects, celebrates the work and lifestyle of the renowned Edo-era master woodblock artist, Katsushika Hokusai.
The city combines the old and the new, is both traditional and trendy …
Fashionistas try for an evening snapshot of legendary designer Karl Lagerfeld outside the grand opening of the Ginza Chanel store.
Traditionally, buildings in this city have never lasted long. Edo would seem to have had more major fires than any similar metropolis. All the building materials (wood, wattle, plaster) were flammable. But they were also easily renewable. Wholesale reconstruction was as common as was wholesale destruction. Now, even though the building materials are glass, stone, and steel, the habit of routine reconstruction, pushed by the ever growing price of land (and the never ceasing demands of the construction industry) continues.
Perhaps Tokyo’s livability lies also in the way the city accommodates itself to its citizenry, and not the other way about. Certainly, one can learn much about Tokyo by looking at those who live in it. These have been observed as industrious, wasteful, impatient, gregarious, lavish, enthusiastic, given to following the latest fads and to lamenting the past. They would seem to prove Jacques Rousseau’s dictum that houses make a town but citizens make a city. Tokyo mirrors all their perceived qualities.
A further reason for Tokyo’s livability might also be found in its chronology. It is a city of layers, of strata, in which the discrete units of the patchwork of villages that make its surface so varied are matched by the slices of the past that remain scattered on the face of the place. The city combines the old and the new, is both traditional and trendy, and these extremes define it.
It has been remarked that Tokyo’s street pattern, despite social revolution, disaster, and time itself, has continued to resemble that of Edo, and architect Maki Fumihiko has demonstrated how contemporary Tokyo retains 19th-century Edo in the patterns of the winding streets. These remain basically unchanged, and the town-like groupings conforming to the topography remain true to Edo-period antecedents.
Anthropologist Jinnai Hidenobu finds that new forms are reset on inherited space, and that “developed as a modern city squarely atop this old structure, the essential features of Edo urban forms passed on unaltered.” And if you want to know where the old vanished rivers,