The Japanese male’s attitude toward home has thus conditioned and created a number of urban attributes in contemporary society. The extended family (the in-laws) was sacrificed with an almost unseemly haste when the kukan mondai made the socalled nuclear family (papa, mama, two kids) the only economical unit. The necessary garden was similarly dismissed (along with the whole idea of Japan’s symbiotic attitude toward nature) when both space and economic considerations made it an impossibility.
On the other hand tradition, when it is useful, is maintained and even strengthened. The Japanese city has always had more bars than the non-Japanese city. These have proliferated to an amazing degree. The foreign visitor, surprised at the number of bars in the cities, wonders that any of them make any money, so fierce would seem the competition. They do, however, because half the population are customers and because these customers, having found a home, are loyal to it. And this was as true in Edo
as it is in Tokyo.
Though the ubiquitous coffee shop is largely a postwar phenomenon, it has been—as its sheer number indicates—incorporated into the home-away-from-home syndrome. It could even be called the daytime bar, serving as a home-substitute the same as its nocturnal equivalent, were it not that here—finally—the female, wife or not, finds her own piece of homelike territory. Though wives do often entertain other wives in their proper homes, the coffee shop offers an attractive alternative.
The coffee shop seems to know this. It is quite different from the European coffee shop. Always snugly enclosed (few open-air terraces in Japan), it contains curtains, easy chairs, personalized coffee cups, an array of newspapers and magazines, air conditioning, lots of green plants—in short, it contains everything the Japanese home is supposed to contain and, due to space limitations, often does not.
Here, as in eighteenth-century English coffee houses—more clubs than shops—men gather to discuss. And here, unlike the eighteenth-century English coffee houses, the women also gather. Each is finding solace and space. Each is experiencing that uniquely Japanese phenomenon (unique in scope at least): the alternate and substitute home.
It would thus seem true indeed that the Japanese regard the concept of home in a different manner. Home is regarded, if one cares to put it this way, in a creative manner. Since home itself is not actually lived in but merely visited by the male, alternate home-substitutes have been created along his daily path. The liability of rabbit-hutch homes has been turned, in a very Japanese manner into a kind of asset—a plurality of homes.
How destructive this is to wife, children and the concept of family—since home is, according to Western ideas, more than a place to sleep—is problematical. Byron has said that “without hearts there is no home.” He was thinking perhaps of the extended family; he was certainly not thinking of the Japanese nuclear family. At the same time, however, he was talking about closeness, family warmth and, I suppose, familial love. It is not that this does not exist in the contemporary Japanese family; just that conditions for its generation are no longer ideal.
—1980
Walking in Tokyo
ONE WALKS FOR various reasons. Often it is to get somewhere. Occasionally it is to enjoy the walk. The street leads someplace. Usually it is seen as a stretch connecting one place with another. Sometimes it is seen as itself. Different cities have different streets. The differences depend upon how the street is used and how it is seen. That is, walking in Marrakesh is different from walking in, say, Chicago.
And walking in Tokyo is different from either. Streets here have their mundane and ostensible uses but they also have something more. The Japanese street remains Asian, and it is still, in a number of senses, an area of display.
As, to be sure, are the streets of other cities. One thinks of the plaza, the town square, the cafe-lined avenue. But there are differences. In Europe, one is part of the display—to see and be seen, to look and be looked at. The street is a stage. How different Japan. There are no European-style cafes, few American-style malls. And usually no place to sit down. You, the walker, are not an actor.
Rather, you are an active spectator. The display is not you and the others about you. The display is the street itself. The direction is not from you to it but from it to you.
Shops line the street, open up, spill out. Clothes on racks and sides of beef alike are shoved onto sidewalks. The fish shop’s scaly glitter is right there, still gasping. Baby televisions piled high blink at you, eye to eye. Not here the closed transactions of the supermarket. Rather, on the Tokyo street, there is the raw profusion of consumption itself.
And even in the more sedate avenues, such as the Ginza, where goods stay indoors, the display continues. Signs and flags proclaim; kanji (Chinese ideographs) grab and neon points. Signs, signs everywhere, all of them shouting, a semiotic babble, signifiers galore, all reaching out to the walker, the person going past.
This is what is very Asian about the Japanese street. This we would recognize if the units were mangoes or rice cakes. But here they are calculators and microwave ovens, instant cameras and word processors. The content startles.
Yet the form reassures. This is, even yet, the Japanese street we see in Hokusai and read about in Saikaku. In old Edo the main street was called the noren-gai. The better shops advertised themselves with their norer:, those entry curtains marked with the shop crest. The noren-gai was the better stretch where worth and probity were the standards.
The concept remains. The noren may be façade-high neon or a mile-long laser beam, but the gai (district) is still marked as the place of display. From Ginza’s store-window showcases to the piles of silicon chips out on the sidewalk—like exotic nuts—in Akihabara, the display continues, a year-round drama in which all the actors are for sale.
The Japanese street is, in a way, the ideal to which all other streets must aspire. It is the ultimate in unrestrained display Other streets in other countries are handicapped by zoning laws and citizen’s associations and the like. Not so Tokyo, or not to that extent. The Japanese street is very public.
Conversely, the Japanese home is very private. In Edo all the houses had high fences. In Tokyo, though suburbia must content itself with merely a token hedge, privacy remains much respected. The house and the garden (if there is one) are private property in the most closed and restricted sense. In a city as crowded as Tokyo—Edo, too, for that matter—privacy is a luxury almost as expensive as space. What is acquired at great expense is zealously guarded.
What is enclosed is, thus, private property. And what is open is not—it is public. So it is with most Western cities as well. But in Japan the difference is that the public space appears to belong to no one; it seems to be no one’s responsibility. As a consequence, there are few effective zoning laws, very little civic endeavor, almost no city planning, and while housing is subject to scrutiny, the surrounding streets are not.
And so, the streets of Tokyo are allowed an organic life of their own. They grow, proliferate; on all sides street life takes on unrestricted natural forms.
Tokyo is a warren, a twisted tangle of streets and alleys and lanes. Though there are some grid-patterned streets where civic endeavor has in the past attempted some order, this enormous city is a comfortable rat’s nest, the streets having grown as need and inclination directed. Opportunities to remake the city were resisted not only after the various Edo disasters, but after the 1923 earthquake and the 1945 fire-bombing as well.
The reason was, of course, that the warren was preferred. It was seen (better, felt) to be the proper human environment. The Japanese, like the English, prefer the cozy, and consequently the streets of Tokyo are as crooked and twisting as those of London. There is a corresponding sense of belonging as well. The cozy warren is just for us, not for those outside.
Which is what one might expect from a people who make so much of what is