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"Tokyo (Japan) Civilization."
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Tokyo : a biography : disasters, destruction and renewal : the story of an indomitable city
The history of Tokyo is as eventful as it is long. A concise yet detailed overview of this fascinating, centuries-old city, Tokyo: A Biography is a perfect companion volume for history buffs or Tokyo-bound travelers looking to learn more about their destination. In a whirlwind journey through Tokyo's past from its earliest beginnings up to the present day, this Japanese history book demonstrates how the city's response to everything from natural disasters to regime change has been to reinvent itself time and again. A calamitous fire results in a massive expansion of the city's territory. A debate over the Samurai code creates far-reaching social change. A malleable boy becomes the figurehead for powerful forces who change an ancient feudal society into a modern industrialized power within a generation. Utter destruction wipes the slate clean again so Tokyoites may start all over. And so it goes. Tokyo's story is riveting, and by the end of Tokyo: A Biography, readers see a city almost unrivalled in its uniqueness, a place thatdespite its often tragic historystill shimmers as it prepares to face the future.
eBook
Tokyo : geography, history, and culture
\"This indispensable one-volume narrative examines the history, culture, environment, economy, politics, future, and more of the city of Tokyo, Japan's political and cultural capital.\" --Provided by publisher.
Book
Mirrors of Memory
As society becomes more global, many see the world's great cities as becoming increasingly similar. But while contemporary cultures do depend on and resemble each other in previously unimagined ways, homogenization is sometimes overestimated. In his compelling new book, James W. White considers how two of the world's great cities, Paris and Tokyo, may appear to be growing more alike--both are vast, modern, dominating, capitalist cities--but in fact remain profoundly different places.
Tokyo's growth appears particularly organic, with a pronounced austerity and boundaries far less clear than those of Paris, which has been planned and manipulated constantly. Paris has a thriving center and a noticeably more contentious relationship with its nation, and its own suburbs, than Tokyo does. White explores how the roles of cities and urbanism in each society, and the balance between nature and artifice, account for some of these differences. He also examines the role of authority in each location and considers the way catastrophes, such as war, alter a city--as well as the role fear plays in a city's construction.
While the author acknowledges that Tokyo is more physically fluid and superficially chaotic than Paris, he also demonstrates that it has an invisible order of its own (including a center that, contrary to most assumptions, is not empty at all). White depicts a Tokyo that relies less on the monumental, and is less influenced by government, than most cities in the West. Where the culture of Paris emphasizes clarity, exclusion, and marginality, the public spaces of Tokyo express ambiguity, inclusiveness, and impermanence.
In the end, White makes us reconsider which city better deserves the name \"City of Light.\" Nonetheless, he warns, several factors may combine to discourage Tokyo's international ascendance and even to threaten the future of provincial Japan. Thus it may be Paris, paradoxically, that is better poised to improve both its own position and its country's in the years ahead.
eBook
The bells of old Tokyo : meditations on time and a city
\"The Bells of Old Tokyo is a remarkable literary debut by Anna Sherman that is an elegant and insightful tour of Tokyo and its residents, as well as a meditation on Japanese culture and society. The book is structured around Anna's search for the eight lost bells that once surrounded the city. These bells marked the city's neighborhoods and kept time for its inhabitants before the introduction of Western-style clocks. The bells are tangible vestiges of a much older Japan--one that believed in time as represented by animals, rather than minutes and hours, a circle rather than a forward line. Similarly, the book moves in and out of time as we are introduced to Tokyo residents past and present: An aristocrat who makes his way through Tokyo's sea of ashes after WWII's firebombs. A shrine priest who remembers Yukio Mishima praying before his infamous death. A scientist who has built the most accurate clock in the world, a clock that will not lose a second in five billion years. The head of the Tokugawa house, the family that used to rule Tokyo, reflecting on the destruction of his grandfathers' city ('A lost thing is lost. To chase it leads to darkness'). And woven throughout is Anna's deep friendship with the owner of a small, exquisite coffee shop who believes that if you make coffee just right, and allow people the time to enjoy it, they will return to their 'true selves.' The Bells of Old Tokyo marks the arrival of a dazzling new writer as she presents an absorbing and alluring meditation on life in the guise of a tour through a city and its people\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Tokyo : a cultural history
In this addition to Oxford's Cityscapes series, Stephen Mansfield explores a city rich in diversity, tracing its evolution from the founding of its massive stone citadel, when it was known as Edo, through the rise of a merchant class who transformed the town into a center for art, to the emergence of modern Tokyo. Mansfield traces a city of print masters, Kabuki theater, novelists and great architecture, which has overcome many disasters, from the 1923 earthquake through the fire-bombings of World War II to the 1995 subway gas attacks.
eBook
Tokyo
Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City is a collection of eight essays that explore Tokyo urban space from the perspective of memory in works of the imagination—novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and films. Written by scholars of Japanese studies based in England, Germany, Japan, and the United States, the book focuses on texts produced in Japan since the 1980s. The closing years of the Shōwa period (1926-1989) were a watershed decade of spatial transformation in Tokyo. It was also a time (in Japan, as elsewhere) when conversations about the nature of memory—historical, cultural, collective, and individual—intensified. The contributors to the volume share the view that works of the imagination are constitutive elements of how cities are experienced and perceived. Each of the essays responds to the growing interest in studies on Tokyo with a literary-cultural orientation.
eBook
