Читать книгу Tokyo: A Biography - Stephen Mansfield - Страница 8

Preface

“It was in Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764,” the great English historian Edward Gibbon wrote, “as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started in my mind.” Few writers experience such timely or decisive moments. Cities creep up on us over time, insinuating themselves as an idea.

Gibbon’s approach to history was to understand it in predominantly human terms. It was a view of the past that was free from the idea of any inherent purpose. History consisted of causes, effects, events; there were no determining laws, theorems, no divine purpose. It was the opposite of the view held by the classic Chinese historians, who saw history as preordained but manageable by decree—if the Mandate of Heaven was lost by a weak or corrupt ruler, he could be legitimately, justifiably usurped, and the whole process of history restarted. Gibbon, a man of the Enlightenment, demonstrated that there were other routes back into historical time. To retrace those routes was to reencounter the human footprint on time. It was in something akin to that spirit, and a desire to write a history that would include everything of significance and interesting insignificance, that this book was written.

Many accounts of Tokyo, even those created today, when we should know better, are surprisingly dated inversions of reality. These books all too often portray Tokyo as a city suffering from a multiple personality disorder, a city whose residents experience spasms rather than emotions. In foreign-made films with Tokyo settings, the actors wander the city like humans exploring the surface of Neptune. In one book, writer Paul Theroux dismisses Tokyo as “more like a machine than a city.” This book was partly written as a riposte to the perception of Tokyoites as involuntary cells or charged particles streaming through the body of the city. Tokyo exists, like all great cities, because of the presence of a highly individual populace.

For any writer contemplating the past, the foremost question must be how to authentically render the historical experience, how to acquaint today’s readers with yesterday’s events. —How, in the case of Tokyo, to reconstruct time past in this least mnemonic of cities. When you start to think of the past as happening, as opposed to having happened, a new way of conceiving history becomes possible.

Despite its colossal building projects, Tokyo can still seem inchoate, even incorporeal, a massive jellyfish of cement and light. So great is the intensity of change that the city at times seems completely severed from its own history. There is no such thing, however, as an abiding city. The pattern, with rare exceptions, is invariably one of transformation, mutability. This is of course, a question of degree. Any talk of the past presupposes the persistence of history. Yet in Tokyo, we are presented with the very opposite: the impersistence of the past. Nothing is preordained. History is time travel.

Edward Seidensticker famously wrote that the argument between tradition and change—a characteristic of European cities—is less relevant in Tokyo, where change is a tradition. Considering all that has befallen the city, from natural disasters to the obliteration of Tokyo during World War II and the elimination of history in the postwar construction period, it is surprising that among the many sacred figures absorbed from India into the iconography of Japanese devotion Kali, the Hindu goddess of chaos and destruction, was not given a place among the city’s pantheon of deities.

No doubt, some of the best city histories are impartial accountings, but if we make a cult out of impartiality, the result will be narrative leached of vitality. I’ve tried to strike a balance between objectivity for the sake of accuracy and, to borrow a term from Susan Sontag, the “passionate partiality” that comes from direct experience.

I can bear witness in small part to the city’s recent history. I count myself lucky to have been on the platform at Kasumigaseki Station just hours before the sarin gas attack was carried out by a Japanese death cult. I was in the city when the earthquake and tsunami struck nearby Fukushima in March 2011. I was fortunate to have gotten a sleeping unit on the upper floor of a twelve-story capsule hotel, the narrow building swaying drunkenly with the series of aftershocks. There was precious little sleep to be had that night. The capsule next to mine was occupied by a distressed insomniac babbling prophesies about a ruined city, like a biblical figure speaking in tongues.

The Asakusa Kannon temple, also called Senso-ji, may be the oldest religious site in the city, built to enshrine a gold statue of Kannon, Goddess of Mercy, that was “caught” by two fisherman on the Sumida River. Originally founded in 645, the temple was destroyed during the bombings of World War II. Once rebuilt it became, if possible, even more meaningful to the people of Tokyo as a symbol of compassion and peace. (Dreamstime © Zheng Dong)