A Lateral View. Donald Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ architects are traditionally encouraged to be both contemporary and extreme. Thus Tokyo is like an international exposition which has remained standing. If city structure in Japan remains “primitive,” then these extremely contemporary looking structures are like the tents of the nomads—with the difference that the Japanese move not in space but in time.

      One ought further examine this concept of the “primitive” and at the same time deprive it of its pejorative aspect. There is small doubt that the Japanese’ cities represent a stage of urban development earlier than that represented by those of the contemporary West. The concept is both simpler and, in its way, more natural. Certainly, once studied, the Japanese city is easier to comprehend than the Western. One can see the various village—units that make up the town—units; one can understand how these amalgamate into the city. In America, unless one understood the complicated social and economic forces involved, one could not comprehend why the main shopping districts should be moved from the center of town to its outlying suburbs, why this ring city should have no central section, and why there is little or no public transportation to such distant areas. The Western city is certainly the more highly evolved and the more difficult to understand. It is in this sense the more “civilized.” Its assumptions are, also, entirely different.

      A Western assumption is that the city is logically planned and built to last. Each structure in it is presumed to be in its proper place and constructed to endure. It is believed that what a man builds his descendants will enjoy. The urban complex may be added to, individual buildings may be replaced, the structure itself may be altered, but the assumption remains that, once built, it remains intrinsically as it was. This is accepted as literally true and the architect correspondingly builds for the future.

      An Eastern assumption, seen particularly in the cities of Japan and especially in its capital, Tokyo, is quite different. The city is not planned and all the buildings in it are subject to almost routine renewal. Opportunities to redesign the city—earthquakes, fires, wartime bombings—are ignored and solid buildings younger than those who live in them are pulled down to make way for new. The assumption is that the city itself is transient, and the architect consequently builds for the present.

      The Western city also assumes immortality. Buildings are made to last. (This is also true of many non-Western cities as well, Beijing for example.) Behind the assumption of this somewhat illogical immortality (since man and his works are nothing if not mortal) lies another concept. This is that one “ought” to appear immortal in all of one’s edifices. Anything which is made must be made for the ages. This in turn implies an amount of striving. The state strived for (and many Western architectural styles indicate this—think of soaring Gothic architecture) is something more than human. Dissatisfied with the common state, the Westerner attempts to deny it. (As do official cities in the East—Beijing is solid as the Pyramids; in the Chinese countryside, however, peasants continue to build in mortal clay.) This denial is responsible for some architectural wonders. It is also responsible for Los Angeles.

      Asians—and particularly the Japanese—have not (or have not until recently) shared such assumptions. Indeed, the assumptions have been just the opposite. Impermanence is our natural state and transience is the prime quality of life. There is merely constant sameness within constant change, and it is this quality which creates what small permanence the Japanese can observe.

      The great shrine at Ise is torn down once every twenty years. The wooden building demolished, its replica—identical in all respects—is constructed adjacent. Two decades later, when the new building is now old and weathered, it too is destroyed and a structure precisely similar is erected on the land the older building formerly occupied. This has been going on for centuries and indicates Japan’s accommodating answer to the demands of immortality.

      In its way the Japanese city follows this same pattern. The idea of continually pulling down and putting up is very strong. Tokyo for this reason always seems under construction and, indeed, will never be finally finished. The “logic” of the Japanese city lies just in this temporal consideration. Its assumption (so unlike that of the Western city which can be seen to live entirely in its past) is that the “now” is important but the importance of this “now” lies well within the framework of the accepted permanence within continual change. Tokyo buildings are consequently always new and yet, in this sense, always the same.

      Which kind of city best suits human beings is a question which must be individually answered. Certainly Tokyo, with its villages and towns inside the central city, its convenience, fits a society where the family and the other social units remain important. At the same time its systems of public transportation make traveling from one section of this enormous city to another both possible and convenient. It is one of the few major cities where one does not want to own a car. Tokyo would seem to lack, however, any of those architectural monuments which speak so eloquently of timelessness, of immortality—except, as we have seen, in the concept of timeless impermanence which the Japanese city has incorporated into itself.

      The Western visitor is thus presented with an anomaly when he visits a city such as Tokyo. He finds a completely humanized city, in that the more-than-human is never stressed and the merely-human is always emphasized. At the same time he cannot understand the natural and organic form of the city precisely because structural logic has no place in such a form. Nor is Tokyo, despite all of its bustle and seeming contemporaneity, a city which makes modern (logical) assumptions. That one can never locate an address in the city without outside (policeman, postman, tobacco-stand woman) help would indicate that it is not in any Western sense an efficient urban complex. But then efficiency as a virtue is not a Japanese concept.

      What the visitor discovers, if he stays long enough,. is a city which, despite its strangeness, is somehow familiar to him. He may then remember that its pattern is that of his own hometown—if he came from a hometown small enough.

      —1979

      The ‘Real’ Disneyland

      LOOKING AT TOKYO one sometimes wonders why the Japanese went to all the trouble of franchising a Disneyland in the suburbs when the capital itself is so superior a version.

      Disneyland, and the other lands it has spawned, is based upon the happy thought of geographical convenience: all the interesting localities on earth located at one spot. Thus, there are African rivers and Swiss mountains and Caribbean islands and American towns. One feels one is seeing the world in miniature and, indeed, “it’s a small world” is the slogan of one of the conceSSIOns.

      Compare this now to Tokyo. There are hundreds of American fast-food stands with matching mock-Colonial architecture, there is a plaster Fontana di Trevi and a state guest house modeled after Versailles; there are dozens of red lacquered Chinese restaurants and equal numbers of white stuccoed Italian; there are thousands of boutiques with famous foreign names (Gucci, Dior, Yves St. Laurent, Arnold Palmer) printed all over them; there is an imitation Baker Street straight from London; the Museum of Western Art in Ueno has Rodin castings all over the front yard; and there is even an onion-domed Russian Orthodox cathedral. All of this, and much more, in a glorious architectural confusion of Corinthian columns and chromium pylons, dormer windows and curved escalators, half-timber, plain red brick, sheet steel, textured lucite.

      In this architectural stew (something from every place on earth) even the authentically Japanese takes on the pleasant flavor of ersatz novelty. Thus the old Toshogu Shrine in Ueno or the Awashimado (1618) in Asakusa appear in Tokyo’s Disneyland context just as pleasingly synthetic as the new Japanese modernstyle restaurant gotten up almost right as a French bistro.

      In the face of this massive transplantation of everywhere else right into the heart of the capital, the Disney enterprises would seem to face the stiffest of competition. Tokyo is a mammoth Disneyland with an area of nearly 2,500 sq. km., and a working staff of almost 12 million. Yet net only Tokyo but all of Japan seems always to have the time СКАЧАТЬ