Our library has much on the history of Japan and Tokyo. For particularly useful call numbers we recommend looking on the shelves in these areas:
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The bells of old Tokyo : travels in Japanese time by
An elegant and absorbing tour of Tokyo and its residents
From 1632 until 1854, Japan’s rulers restricted contact with foreign countries, a near isolation that fostered a remarkable and unique culture that endures to this day. In hypnotic prose and sensual detail, Anna Sherman describes searching for the great bells by which the inhabitants of Edo, later called Tokyo, kept the hours in the shoguns’ city.
An exploration of Tokyo becomes a meditation not just on time, but on history, memory, and impermanence. Through Sherman’s journeys around the city and her friendship with the owner of a small, exquisite cafe, who elevates the making and drinking of coffee to an art-form, The Bells of Old Tokyo follows haunting voices through the labyrinth that is the Japanese an old woman remembers escaping from the American firebombs of World War II. A scientist builds the most accurate clock in the world, a clock that will not lose a second in five billion years. The head of the Tokugawa shogunal house reflects on the destruction of his grandfathers’ “A lost thing is lost. To chase it leads to darkness.”
The Bells of Old Tokyo marks the arrival of a dazzling new writer who presents an absorbing and alluring meditation on life in the guise of a tour through a city and its people.
Tokyo by
This beautifully designed book is a celebration of one of the world's most creative, dynamic and fascinating cities: Tokyo. It spans 400 years, with highlights including Kano school paintings; the iconic woodblock prints of Hiroshige; Tokyo Pop Art posters; the photography of Moriyama Daido and Ninagawa Mika; manga; film; and contemporary art by Murakami Takashi and Aida Makoto. Visually bold and richly detailed, this publication looks at a city which has undergone constant destruction and renewal and it tells the stories of the people who have made Tokyo so famous with their insatiable appetite for the new and innovative - from the samurai to avantgarde artists today. Co-edited by Japanese art specialists and curators Lena Fritsch and Clare Pollard from Oxford University, this accessible volume features 28 texts by international experts of Japanese culture, as well as original statements by influential artists.
Tokyo, 1934-1993 by
Over 600 pages of photographs of different neighborhoods in Tokyo from 1913-1993.
Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology by
Tokyo: destroyed by the earthquake of 1923 and again by the firebombing of World War II. Does anything remain of the old city? The internationally known Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu set out on foot to rediscover the city of Tokyo. Armed with old maps, he wandered through back alleys and lanes, trying to experience the city's space as it had been lived by earlier residents. He found that, despite an almost completely new cityscape, present-day inhabitants divide Tokyo's space in much the same way that their ancestors did two hundred years before. Jinnai's holistic perspective is enhanced by his detailing of how natural, topographical features were incorporated into the layout of the city. A variety of visual documents (maps from the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, building floorplans, woodblock prints, photographs) supplement his observations. While an important work for architects and historians, this unusual book will also attract armchair travelers and anyone interested in the symbolic uses of space. (A translation of Tokyo no kûkan jinruigaku.)
Emergent Tokyo by
Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive. Compared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo's inner workings. For cities around the globe mired in crisis and seeking new models for the future, Tokyo's success at balancing between massive growth and local communal life poses a challenge: can we design other cities to emulate its best qualities? Emergent Tokyo answers this question in the affirmative by delving into Tokyo's most distinctive urban spaces, from iconic neon nightlife to tranquil neighborhood backstreets. Tokyo at its best offers a new vision for a human-scale urban ecosystem, where ordinary residents can shape their own environment in ways large and small, and communities take on a life of their own beyond government master planning and corporate profit-seeking. As Tokyoites ourselves, we uncover how five key features of Tokyo's cityscape--yokochō alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, flowing ankyo streets, and dense low-rise neighborhoods--enable this 'emergent' urbanism, allowing the city to organize itself from the bottom up. This book demystifies Tokyo's emergent urbanism for an international audience, explaining its origins, its place in today's Tokyo, and its role in the Tokyo of tomorrow. Visitors to Japan, architects, and urban policy practitioners alike will come away with a fresh understanding of the world's premier megacity--and a practical guide for how to bring Tokyo-style intimacy, adaptability, and spontaneity to other cities around the world.
Edo, the City That Became Tokyo by
From 1603 to 1868, the city of Edo was the seat of power of the Tokugawa shogunate and the political center of Japan. In 1868 the city was renamed Tokyo and made the official capital of the nation. Both literally and figuratively, present-day Tokyo rests upon the foundations of Edo, and much of what is now thought of as traditional Japanese culture (woodblock prints, kabuki, sumo, haiku poets) found its final form in Edo. In this book, through over 200 black and white drawings and insightful text, old Edo is brought vividly to life--its planning, its construction, and the cultural energy that made it one of the most exciting, and populous, cities on the face of the earth. Edo was nothing more than a village on the edge of Edo Bay when Ieyasu Tokugawa chose it as the site for a castle from which he, as shogun, could administer the country. The castle was of utmost importance because Japan had just emerged from a hundred years of civil war, and Ieyasu was determined that the power he had gained should not be wrested from him by antagonistic warlords. The castle, of course, had to be supplied with the necessities of everyday life, and thus a town had to be build where merchants and artisans could live. It is the planning and construction of Edo Castle and the town that would support it that lie at the core of this book. In fact, the construction of the city would be an ongoing process throughout its 260-year history, in the wake of repeated devastation by fire and earthquake and under the pressure of an ever-expanding population. Another aspect of the book concerns Edo's cultural life, which moved over time from classical modes dominated by the samurai to the more popular and lively forms favored by the merchants and artisans. Featured here are temples and shrines, festivals, bath houses, pleasure quarters, kabuki theaters, street gangs, the poet Basho, sumo wrestling, side shows, ukiyo-e prints, barbers, and much more. Each page of the main text of the book is illustrated, and it is this combination that makes the book both a reading and a visual delight.
Tokyo: a Biography by
The history of Tokyo is as eventful as it is long. A concise yet detailed overview of this fascinating, centuries-old city, Tokyo: A Biography is a perfect companion volume for history buffs or Tokyo-bound travelers looking to learn more about their destination. In a whirlwind journey through Tokyo's past from its earliest beginnings up to the present day, this Japanese history book demonstrates how the city's response to everything from natural disasters to regime change has been to reinvent itself time and again. A calamitous fire results in a massive expansion of the city's territory. A debate over the Samurai code creates far-reaching social change. A malleable boy becomes the figurehead for powerful forces which change an ancient feudal society into a modern industrialized power within a generation. Utter destruction wipes the slate clean again so Tokyoites may start all over. And so it goes. Tokyo's story is riveting, and by the end of Tokyo: A Biography, readers see a city almost unrivaled in its uniqueness, a place that--despite its often tragic history--still shimmers as it prepares to face the future.
Mapping Tokyo in fiction and film by
Explores ways that late 20th- and early 21st- century fiction and film from Japan literally and figuratively map Tokyo. The four dozen novels, stories, and films discussed here describe, define, and reflect on Tokyo urban space. They are part of the flow of Japanese-language texts being translated (or, in the case of film, subtitled) into English. Circulation in professionally translated and subtitled English-language versions helps ensure accessibility to the primarily anglophone readers of this study--and helps validate inclusion in lists of world literature and film. Tokyo's well-established culture of mapping signifies much more than a profound attachment to place or an affinity for maps as artifacts. It is, importantly, a counter-response to feelings of insecurity and disconnection--insofar as the mapping process helps impart a sense of predictability, stability, and placeness in the real and imagined city.
An Anthropology of the Machine by
An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population.
Portraits of Edo and Early Modern Japan : The Shogun's Capital in Zuihitsu Writings, 1657-1855 by
This volume presents a series of five portraits of Edo, the central region of urban space today known as Tokyo, from the great fire of 1657 to the devastating earthquake of 1855. This book endeavors to allow Edo, or at least some of the voices that constituted Edo, to do most of the speaking. These voices become audible in the work of five Japanese eye-witness observers, who notated what they saw, heard, felt, tasted, experienced, and remembered. "An Eastern Stirrup," presents a vivid portrait of the great conflagration of 1657 that nearly wiped out the city. "Tales of Long Long Ago," details seventeenth-century warrior-class ways as depicted by a particularly conservative samurai. "The River of Time," describes the city and its flourishing cultural and economic development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. "The Spider's Reel" looks back at both the attainments and calamities of Edo in the 1780s. Finally, "Disaster Days," offers a meticulous account of Edo life among the ruins of the catastrophic 1855 tremor. Read in sequence, these five pieces offer a unique "insider's perspective" on the city of Edo and early modern Japan.
Tokyo : memory, imagination, and the city by
This interdisciplinary collection examines Tokyo in the cultural imagination. The contributors analyze how Tokyo has been perceived and experienced through such cultural lenses as novels, poetry, short stories, and films created in Japan since the 1980s.
Routledge handbook of Asian cities by
This handbook provides the most comprehensive examination of Asian cities - developed and developing, large and small - and their urban development.
A Tokyo Anthology by
The city of Tokyo, renamed after the Meiji Restoration, developed an urban culture that was a dynamic integration of Edo's highly developed traditions and Meiji renovations, some of which reflected the influence of Western culture. This wide-ranging anthology--including fictional and dramatic works, essays, newspaper articles, political manifestos, and cartoons--tells the story of how the city's literature and arts grew out of an often chaotic and sometimes paradoxical political environment to move toward a consummate Japanese "modernity." Tokyo's downtown audience constituted a market that demanded visuality and spectacle, while the educated uptown favored written, realistic literature. The literary products resulting from these conflicting consumer bases were therefore hybrid entities of old and new technologies. A Tokyo Anthology guides the reader through Japanese literature's journey from classical to spoken, pictocentric to logocentric, and fantastic to realistic--making the novel the dominant form of modern literature. The volume highlights not only familiar masterpieces but also lesser known examples chosen from the city's downtown life and counterculture. Imitating the custom of creative artists of the Edo period, scholars from the United States, Canada, England, and Japan have collaborated in order to produce this intriguing sampling of Meiji works in the best possible translations. The editors have sought out the most reliable first editions of texts, also reproducing most of their original illustrations. With few exceptions the translations presented here are the first in the English language. This rich anthology will be welcomed by students and scholars of Japan studies and by a wide general audience interested in Japan's popular culture, media culture, and literature in translation.
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