A Lateral View. Donald Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ you are an active spectator. The display is not you and the others about you. The display is the street itself. The direction is not from you to it but from it to you.

      Shops line the street, open up, spill out. Clothes on racks and sides of beef alike are shoved onto sidewalks. The fish shop’s scaly glitter is right there, still gasping. Baby televisions piled high blink at you, eye to eye. Not here the closed transactions of the supermarket. Rather, on the Tokyo street, there is the raw profusion of consumption itself.

      And even in the more sedate avenues, such as the Ginza, where goods stay indoors, the display continues. Signs and flags proclaim; kanji (Chinese ideographs) grab and neon points. Signs, signs everywhere, all of them shouting, a semiotic babble, signifiers galore, all reaching out to the walker, the person going past.

      This is what is very Asian about the Japanese street. This we would recognize if the units were mangoes or rice cakes. But here they are calculators and microwave ovens, instant cameras and word processors. The content startles.

      Yet the form reassures. This is, even yet, the Japanese street we see in Hokusai and read about in Saikaku. In old Edo the main street was called the noren-gai. The better shops advertised themselves with their norer:, those entry curtains marked with the shop crest. The noren-gai was the better stretch where worth and probity were the standards.

      The concept remains. The noren may be façade-high neon or a mile-long laser beam, but the gai (district) is still marked as the place of display. From Ginza’s store-window showcases to the piles of silicon chips out on the sidewalk—like exotic nuts—in Akihabara, the display continues, a year-round drama in which all the actors are for sale.

      The Japanese street is, in a way, the ideal to which all other streets must aspire. It is the ultimate in unrestrained display Other streets in other countries are handicapped by zoning laws and citizen’s associations and the like. Not so Tokyo, or not to that extent. The Japanese street is very public.

      Conversely, the Japanese home is very private. In Edo all the houses had high fences. In Tokyo, though suburbia must content itself with merely a token hedge, privacy remains much respected. The house and the garden (if there is one) are private property in the most closed and restricted sense. In a city as crowded as Tokyo—Edo, too, for that matter—privacy is a luxury almost as expensive as space. What is acquired at great expense is zealously guarded.

      What is enclosed is, thus, private property. And what is open is not—it is public. So it is with most Western cities as well. But in Japan the difference is that the public space appears to belong to no one; it seems to be no one’s responsibility. As a consequence, there are few effective zoning laws, very little civic endeavor, almost no city planning, and while housing is subject to scrutiny, the surrounding streets are not.

      And so, the streets of Tokyo are allowed an organic life of their own. They grow, proliferate; on all sides street life takes on unrestricted natural forms.

      Tokyo is a warren, a twisted tangle of streets and alleys and lanes. Though there are some grid-patterned streets where civic endeavor has in the past attempted some order, this enormous city is a comfortable rat’s nest, the streets having grown as need and inclination directed. Opportunities to remake the city were resisted not only after the various Edo disasters, but after the 1923 earthquake and the 1945 fire-bombing as well.

      The reason was, of course, that the warren was preferred. It was seen (better, felt) to be the proper human environment. The Japanese, like the English, prefer the cozy, and consequently the streets of Tokyo are as crooked and twisting as those of London. There is a corresponding sense of belonging as well. The cozy warren is just for us, not for those outside.

      Which is what one might expect from a people who make so much of what is private (ours) and so little of what is public (theirs). For such folk the neighborhood is of primary importance (and Tokyo is a collection of village-size neighborhoods), and its public aspect attains intimacy only when incorporated into the well-known.

      For example, sections of old, twisted Tokyo are being torn down. Not because of any civic planning, but so that the most expensive land in the world may be more profitably used. And the new buildings are often built four-square, with straight streets. Not from any notions of urban efficiency, however; it is merely that buildings are most cheaply constructed if they are squarish and right-angled.

      So, the old tangle is torn down. And it is rebuilt, incorporated within the basement of the high rise that took its place. There again are the bars, the little restaurants, the warren reborn.

      The significance of public areas belonging to no one is not that they belong to everyone but that they can be used by just anyone. This means that the owners or lessees of private land in public places can be as idiosyncratic as they like.

      Take modern Tokyo architecture. Visitors are astonished by its variety, given what they may have heard of the Japanese character. Instead of the expected conformity, they are presented with the wildest diversity.

      The glass-and-concrete box (cosmetics) is next to the traditional tile-roofed restaurant (sukiyaki and shabu-shabu), which is next to a high-tech, open-girder construction (boutiques), which is next to a pastel-plastered French provincial farmhouse (designer clothes).

      The architecturally odd is there to attract attention. Thus Tokyo main-street architecture has much the same function as the signs and banners that decorate it. To stand out is to sell something better. (As for conformity, there is plenty of that, but it is found in nothing so superficial as architecture.) Though profit may be a motive for eccentric architecture, it is not its only result. Among others, the stroller is presented with an extraordinary walking experience.

      With space used in this distinctive fashion, one naturally wonders about the uses to which time is put. These are, as one might have expected, equally noteworthy. It is not so much that one can time-travel in Tokyo (and can do it even better in Kyoto), go from the seventeenth to the twentieth to the eighteenth century by walking around a block. One can, after all, do that in many European cities, which have more old buildings than Tokyo. Rather it is that Tokyo provides a fantastic rate of temporal change. In Europe a building was built for a century. In Tokyo a building, it often seems, is built but for a season.

      They go up and come down at an almost alarming rate. In the Shinjuku and Ikebukuro sections, if you miss a month, you might well next time get lost, so fast and frequent are the metamorphoses. What you remembered has now become something else. And the hole in the street, the vacant lot, now holds the current architectural icon, a glittering chrome-and-glass structure like a giant lipstick or a mammoth lighter.

      Old Edo had its construction-destruction compulsions as well, but they were different in that, first, there were so many fires that the reconstruction came to be seen as repair; and second, the new structures were not extreme because there were sumptuary laws and because the Edoite had only wood, tile and stone.

      Now there are certainly no laws against display, and the Japanese architect has steel, glass, concrete and plastic, all of which can be forced into any shape desired.

      The temporal dislocation in Tokyo is so extreme that the capital is, consequently, never finished. It is in a permanent state of construction. Like life it is always in flux. It is an illustration of itself—a metaphor for continual change.

      The display of the Tokyo street, the Tokyo park, the Tokyo garden is thus a varied and a complicated thing. Walking becomes a variegated experience with many a surprise.

      This is not perhaps unique to Tokyo, but is certainly not typical of the world’s major cities. There—Washington, D.C., Beijing, Moscow—one is presented with a view and the view СКАЧАТЬ