Tokyo

is an aggregate of one hundred twenty-five villages.

Almost no foreign observer even now fails to discover in Tokyo a city of villages. Henry D. Smith II has collected a number; Isabella Bird called Tokyo an ‘aggregate of one hundred twenty-five villages’, though how she discovered this precise number is not known; in 1930, Peter Quennell found a ‘huge extension of a single neigh- borhood’; in 1976, David Riesman discovered a ‘metropolis super- imposed on a series of small villages’.

Isabelle BirdThinkers

Isabelle Bird