I came to Tokyo for the first time in 2012. Little did I know back then that this initial trip was to spark an intellectual love story when I later made the capital the locus of my PhD research in Japan. I explored Tokyo primarily by foot and bike, and while scaling the quiet backstreets and busy station plazas, I pondered the vivid economic history the city had seen in the postwar era. My doctorate was situating the Japanese economic miracle within Tokyo’s unique urban space, honing in on its small competitive factories and its egalitarian living standards spread–out over a gargantuan mass of low-rise and high-density housing. There are several books that accompanied me on this journey. I put some of them into this Tokyo thread, with a few others to be found on the shelves.
Jordan Sand is a professor of Japanese history and has been my mentor throughout my research on postwar Tokyo. His own work covers a much broader period than mine, but also touches on postwar Japan. His Tokyo Vernacular sits at the interstice of history, urban theory and visual anthropology, reflecting Jordan’s broad oeuvre. The chapters include a critical take on the Edo Museum, Tokyo’s “Heimatmuseum” that depicts a populist everyday history; a discussion of “Yanesen”, an area in central Tokyo that has been delineated by a local heritage movement; and a piece on observation as a method. The book taught me to observe the city more closely, and understand how memory is produced.
Jorge Almazan and his Studiolab’s Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City is probably the best attempt so far at capturing Tokyo’s “secret sauce”. The book manages this feat not by dwelling on anecdotes and case studies, but by developing typologies and taxonomies of several phenomena that have validity across the cityscape. These phenomena include yokocho alleyways, narrow zakkyo buildings lining train station vicinities, and low-rise neighborhoods, among others. The analysis of the zakkyo buildings will appeal to architects, while the neighborhood chapter has a lot to say to urban planners interested in spontaneity and bottom-up urbanism.
Project Japan is Rem Koolhaas and Ulrich Obrist’s tome on Japan’s Metabolism, the avant-garde architectural movement that did not only provide much impetus to innovative building design but also provided a poignant social criticism of postwar Japan. The book is already a little dated, so it features interviews with several of the movements main figures who have since passed away. It is a feast for the eyes and brings to life this period of Tokyo’s history unlike many other works.
The late Ted Bestor has two books in this thread, reflecting his outsize influence on the field of “Tokyology”. His first book, Neighborhood Tokyo, was drawn from his doctoral field work in the late 1970s, early 1980s. He lived in what he thought of as a typical neighbourhood in Tokyo and wrote a masterful anthropological study that took aim at some of the popular misconceptions about the city–some of which still circulate to this day (e.g., that Tokyo is an amalgam of small villages). His other book in this thread is Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. An unforgettable sight to those who have had the chance to visit it before its relocation, the market’s inner workings are masterly explained through the myriad actors involved in the selling and buying of fish.
Tokyo’s most famous English language chronicler was Edward Seidensticker, whose Low City, High City covered everything up until the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, while his Tokyo Rising continued the story up until the end of the Showa period in the late 1980s. Seidensticker came to Tokyo with the Occupying Forces in 1945, but decided to pursue the study of Japanese literature instead of a Foreign Services career, later teaching at Sophia in Tokyo and various universities in the US. Besides his historical writing, he was one of the foremost translators of Japanese classics into English, e.g., several works of Kafu.
