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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, moats, and canals have gone, follow the elevated highways now set in their beds.

Architect Tange Kenzo believed that “everywhere you go in Tokyo, traditions and preferences of past generations—particularly those of the Edo period—exist side by side with Japanese preferences for the avant garde and for whatever is chic.” Thus, in Tokyo at its most modern, we will find attitudes, assumptions, preferences, and expressions the like of which we recognize from those of Edo. Even the kids shopping in Shibuya are displaying a commercial aesthetic we have seen before in old Asakusa.

To account for its shape and its history, Tokyo is commonly thought of as being divided into two major parts. These are what that eminent historian of the city, Edward Seidensticker, called Shitamachi, the Low City, and Yamanote, the High City. The former, built on the delta of the Sumida River, is what is left of yesterday—old Edo. The latter, built on surrounding higher ground, the hills leading to the Musashino Plain, is modern Tokyo, the world of today and perhaps tomorrow.

As the city expands, however, economic enterprise calls for a place of its own, and a third city has evolved. This might be called the Mid City, someplace between the relatively old and the brand new, a place where the two for a moment mingle, where Low City energy meets High City enterprise, where money can be made.

So, all together, megacity Tokyo looks like this: from the banks of the Sumida River spread what remains of the old city—defined by the Shitamachi Museum as composed of Kanda, Nihonbashi, Kyobashi, Ueno, Asakusa, Honjo, and Fukugawa. There we find a temple or two from the Edo period (1615–1868), a bit more from the Meiji era (1868–1912), a little more from Taisho (1912–1926) and from Showa (1926–1989)—mainly what is left from the Kanto earthquake of 1923 and the fire-bombing of Tokyo in 1945—and lots from the present Heisei period (from 1989 on). Despite the quickening torrent of erosion, Tokyo remains in this sense nearly 600 years deep—older than New York.

Originally, it was simply the site of a local lord named Ota Dokan who built himself a modest castle in 1456. It was from this location that the city spread. Edo (the name translates as “bay door”) was built largely on reclaimed land and what is now Ginza, Shimbashi, and Nihonbashi had been under water. The place-name of Hibiya, in Mid City Tokyo, means a place where seaweed was cultured. It was here that those who built Edo originally lived.

These people were brought in by Tokugawa Ieyasu, unifier of Japan, who decided that this would be the site of his new military capital. The place was mainly marsh and lacked drinkable water, but the warlord saw that this strip between the river and hills could be easily defended and that the port was protected from storms. So it was here that he fortified his castle, dug moats and canals, and set up his shogunate.

Tokyo is commonly thought as being divided into a Low City and a High City.

The Rainbow Bridge across Tokyo Bay demonstrates its colorful name when illuminated at twilight. It connects downtown Tokyo with Odaiba Island.

This castle-city kept growing. There was never enough space.

A miko shrine maiden passes gracefully through the corridors of the Gehaiden outer hall at Meiji Jingu Shrine.

The shogun’s daimyo (retainers) built their residences here, and with them came their samurai warriors, followed by the carpenters, masons, fullers, weavers, dyers, cooks and footmen who created this new city. Nihonbashi became the administrative center of Japan, and it was from its central bridge (Nihonbashi means “Bridge of Japan”) that all distances were to be officially measured.

The results were still to be viewed when the American scholar, W.E. Griffis, arrived in 1876. He observed that the general shape of old Edo was “that of an egg with the point to the south, the butt to the north, and the yolk of this egg is the castle.”

This yolk, this core, is commonly thought of as unoccupied. But this is not quite true. Empty also means not filled with streets, buildings, nor people. For here, in the middle of the largest city in the world, is this wild park, this island of green—280 acres of it—said to be home to rabbits and pheasants as well as the Imperial family. The royals dwell there modestly with their Imperial household staff, living in a manner considerably less unostentatious than did the former tenants, the bakufu, the house and staff of the shogunate, the Tokugawa family.

By 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu, leader of the clan and “unifier of Japan,” had achieved a military hegemony. By the following year he had been named shogun and the construction of his castle was underway. It grew into a great city itself, the first of the city’s many “cities within the city.”

All the daimyo had to contribute. Lumber was levied, the great cyclopean stones still lining what is left of the Imperial moat were gathered. Some were so enormous that, shipped up the coast to growing Edo, only two of them would fit on a single boat and each required 200 men to shift them. Pure white stucco, made from imported lime, was brought in to cover the outer walls, and specially-baked gray clay tiles constituted the roofs, with two enormous gold dolphins installed at the very summit.

And this castle-city kept growing. There was never enough space. This is why the lower hills were leveled, why the bay was pushed back and the land filled in. Eventually the whole area contained the largest castle in the world, holding, as it had to, the shogun and his entire cabinet and the daimyo and their retinues, which included not only their samurai, but also all of their attendants and their families. In addition there were the craftsmen and the servants, and then all the merchants and farmers who provided for them. Richard Cocks, one of the few Westerners to have seen the place back then, wrote in 1616 that the castle was enormous—as large, he said, as the whole city of Coventry in England.

In a way, the castle became the architectural personification of an ideal feudalism—with the shogun at the apex of this pyramid of power—a structure that lasted the 15 generations of the Tokugawa family. But it did make something of a crowd.

The castle was filled to bursting—a whole harem of wives and concubines, dozens of daimyo, hundreds of samurai, thousands of servants and most with no place to live except, eventually, outside the walls in what became the new city of Edo.

By this time, however, the castle was no longer a fort. It did not need to be one. Ieyasu had conquered everyone, had engineered what has been called “an era of peace.” Nonetheless, his palace remained imposing: 16 kilometers in circumference, 66 gates, 19 watchtowers. The roof of the main keep, 58 meters tall, was twice as tall as that surviving at Himeji Castle. It did not, however, survive. Destroyed by fire in 1657, it was never restored due to the cost. Yet it was apparently a marvel.

Apparently, because there are few sketches, no drawings, no woodcut prints of the castle as it was. Its delineation was forbidden, its image taboo. This was official policy. The Tokugawa was a military hegemony, the longest lived the world has ever known. Though it no longer functioned as one, the palace was still a military secret. By now, however, it was completely dependent on the outside for food and water, and the samurai sat idle, no more wars to fight.

As the castle dwindled, Edo grew. Retainers moved away from the designed grid of bakufu power. The straight streets and square corners became convoluted as convenience called, as they were crossed by more expedient paths, by short cuts, as the purely military pattern became civilian, and then descended into that tangled geography so typical of the needs of free trade. It has been said that it was as though the monumental man-made geography of Washington, D.C. had, once past the White House, reverted to the paths and lanes of rural Virginia.

So it is here with this castle, now the Imperial Palace, that one should begin exploring Tokyo, that livable megalopolis. Then one goes down northeast to Shitamachi, the Low City, where all those fullers and footmen lived; then up through the mercantile Mid City to the High City hills where the ruler and his samurai were; and on to the burgeoning south-west, following the geography and the trail of history into the future.

From the banks of the Sumida River spread what remains of the old city …

A magnificent shidarezakura weeping cherry tree in full bloom adds vivid pinks to the deep vermilion lacquer of the Hozomon Gate at Senso-ji, Tokyo’s oldest Buddhist temple.