The Dimensions of Modern Japan
We left off last time on an admittedly defeated tenor. Faced with the inevitable decline of the character of Seto Inland Sea, in favor of the homogenous culture of ultra-modern Japan, we—the armchair travelers—resigned ourselves to acceptance.
But, after all, should we take seriously Donald Richie’s assumption that we are faced with “the last of old Japan?”
I want to perhaps temper our claim a bit and, more importantly, explore the dimensions of this problem in greater detail. We should be wary of anything too definitive: old Japan will be carried away by a tide of all things new, and Tokyo, the very font of novelty, a chrome-plated metropolis, will herald its end.
Let’s turn to Tokyo, then. How does history die or live on in the city? Is the past lost irretrievably, buried, plastered over, sealed under the cement foundations of all successive generations or simply hidden behind plastic and scaffolding?
But to proceed further with our inquiry, we need a guide. In fact, we need a guidebook.
Tokyo Stroll is just such a guidebook. Really, it’s tantamount to an encyclopedia for armchair travelers like us.
To begin, as Gilles Poitras does, we need to remind ourselves of the history of disasters that have befallen Tokyo. Natural and unnatural tragedy, fires and firebombings have conspired to periodically wipe the slate clean in Tokyo and Edo before it. In their wake, the city has been built anew. So it’s just as we imagined it, then: the past’s destruction is total and the new is its replacement.
But this picture is immediately complicated.
In a section evocatively titled “Things seen and not noticed,” we begin to understand that what’s at stake is, indeed, a question of dimensions. Poitras informs us that Tokyo is a vertical city. Yes, the buildings are many storied, but this is only half the picture. Rather, the contents of the city are arrayed in layers, and not in the way one might expect, with the past buried beneath the present. Instead, one finds both a shrine and a remarkable statue of Jizo on the rooftop of the fifteen-floor Mitsukoshi Ginza. Poitras tells us:
There is also an interesting statue known as the Shusse Jizō, which in the early Meiji period was found by construction workers in the filled-in Sanjukken canal. The name Shusse can be translated as “appearing in the world.” When the store was constructed in 1970, the Jizō was moved to the present location.
Contrary to all expectations, we have stumbled upon an absolute confusion of space and time. History is preserved here, without a doubt, but in a manner foreign to archaeological, sedimentary records. The past sits atop the present. Buddhist and Shinto worship are superimposed on one another. A gleaming, modern department store, and in Ginza no less, becomes a glorified pedestal to an icon trawled out of the bottom of a canal.
There are innumerable examples of how the past persists in Tokyo. Let one further suffice.
Of the Chokyuin Temple in Yanasen, Poitras writes:
This Shingon Buddhist temple was established in Kanda in 1611. It relocated here in 1658 after the Meireki Fire of 1657 as part of the redesign of the city. The temple is nicknamed Ajisai Dera, “Hydrangea Temple,” due to the many hydrangea plants here. There is also a statue of Enma in the garden that dates from 1726; it is unusual for a statue of Enma to be outdoors. Look closely at the gate and you will see bullet holes from the Battle of Ueno.
Again we find disparate times and places commingled in a single location, like a montage seen all in one instant. And to cap it all off, the bullet holes in the gate of the temple—not so much a thing as the lack of it—become themselves an artifact of the Boshin War. The past is never truly destroyed, even by weapons of war.
To imagine the past’s total annihilation to begin with, we’ve relied on a stark and frankly unfair reading of Richie. That the people and their particular lifeways will cease to exist in their present form—which perhaps is more the spirit of his claim—is incontrovertible. What we’ve done here is supplement this conclusion with the following: because something is gone does not mean it has vanished completely. Look closely—these things often are seen but not noticed—for the ways in which it lives on above or below where it once was, side by side with something wholly unlike it, deracinated from its previous existence, an artifact of how life was once lived.
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