Tokyo

is a city constructed upon the principle of tract rather than line. The actual finding of an address is a matter of navigating in more or less the right direction, and asking aid and comfort upon approaching the bourne.

As Edward Seidensticker, the pre-eminent historian of Tokyo, puts it, ‘. . . the consciousness of place continues to be by tract or expanse and not by line.’ The actual finding of an address ‘is a matter of navigating in more or less the right direction, and asking aid and comfort upon approaching the bourne’.

is a city lacking of zoning – no slums and no ghettos, no good and bad sides of the tracks, no strictly industrial areas, no rigorously residential districts.

Not visible but equally important to Tokyo ‘style’ is the lack of zoning – no slums and no ghettos, no good and bad sides of the tracks, no strictly industrial areas, no rigorously residential districts. The city, Seidensticker informs us, ‘. . . has always accommodated side by side the extremely well placed and the extremely poorly placed’. The bank and the pinball parlour, the beauty shop and the flophouse are juxtaposed.

is a city whose map puts one in mind of a vast, ancient country village, with the streets following animal tracks and the boundaries of fields.

Lewis Mumford’s observation indicates the structure which Tokyo, once away from the castle, was evolving, not only in what had been swamp, the Low City, but in the High City as well. Edward Seidensticker has remarked that a map of this area ‘puts one in mind of a vast, ancient country village, with the streets following animal tracks and the boundaries of fields . . .’

Edward SeidenstickerThinkers

Edward Seidensticker