Tokyo

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Japan

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is not a city to speak or in terms or beauty in any conventional terms, but it has a magic all its own. It takes you by the neck, shakes you, turns you inside out and then only slowly does it reveal its heart.

Understandably, Tokyo is not a city to speak or in terms or beauty - at least in any conventional terms. But it has a magic all its own. It takes you by the neck, shakes you, turns you inside out and then only s lowly does it reveal its heart. Ibid.

is, unlike the Western city, an anthropomorphized city where the merely human is emphasized. The Western city, by contrast, emphasizes the more-than-human monumental,

Western visitors are thus presented with an anomaly when they visit a city such as Tokyo. They cannot detect the natural and organic form of the city because structural logic has no place in such a form, yet they find an anthropomorphosed city in that the more-than-human is unstressed and the merely human is emphasized.

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 giving off the feeling of unreality to a Westerner because their assumptions concerning urban grammar are not there to be read. The buildings do not ‘fit’ the streets.

Hence the random appearance of the modern Japanese city – just one individual expression after another. The reason for the feeling of unreality experienced by Westerners is that their assumptions concerning urban grammar are not there to be read. After all, the buildings do not ‘fit’ the streets – rectangular edifices located on curved byways always result in singular effects.

is a city guided by the doughnut phenomenon: the daytime population of the inner wards of the city is six times higher than the population at night.

Waley has noted that since 1950, the population of the place has doubled, as has what planners call the doughnut phenomenon: the daytime population of the inner wards of the city (Chiyoda, Chuo, Minato) is six times higher than the population at night.

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.

tokyo, n.Trivia

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