In this interesting study of Japanese urban space, the author writes that when he thinks of the Western city he envisions streets and their patterns of relationship, and dominant centers and peripheral places. But when he thinks of Japanese cities he sees scattered points with no clear inter-relationship and often no clear internal form.
Although many have observed this, few have found, as the author has, reason to learn from it. Veteran 19th-century traveler Isabella Bird, ordinarily so perspicacious, discovered an amorphous amalgam of great, featureless patches in an endless urban landscape. Educator and author W.E. Griffis discovered only temporariness and featurelessness. Zoologist Edward Morse said that "having got a bird's-eye view of one city, we have seen them all -- the minor variations consisting, for the most part, in the inequalities of the sites upon which they rest."
Even into our times, the Japanese city has been found unfocused, confused, chaotic. Novelist Hal Porter, writing as late as 1968, said that Tokyo was "a freak weed sprung from a crack in history and drenched by a fertilizer that makes it monstrous but not mighty, immense but immoral, overgrown and undercivilized." And this despite "two unparalleled opportunities (the 1923 earthquake and the 1945 bombings) to disentangle and straighten out its Gordian knot of streets."
The inference, of course, is that city planning, as the West understood it in 1968, was the natural model for the Japanese to follow in reforming their chaotic cityscapes. But there are other patterns than those the West follows, and it is these that Barrie Shelton discovers, and admires, in his book.
Despite some Japanese leanings toward the Western model (Arata Isozaki has said that his country "has yet to evolve a convincing urban archetype"), urban planning in any international sense has been triumphantly resisted and the result is a definite city structure, but one that differs. Explaining what this is and why it is better is the burden of this book.
Comparing Tokyo with Paris, the author finds that while the latter may exhibit greater physical beauty, it has a rigid, inflexible order compared to Tokyo, which may look ugly but shows remarkable dynamism and adaptability. Paris, observed the architect Yoshinobu Ashihara, is a "city divided with foresight in parts 'cut' from the whole," while Tokyo follows the sense of "the whole enveloping all of its various parts."
Another architect, Fumihiko Maki, noted the absence of "a clear relationship of center and periphery," that this characteristic resulted in an amorphous surface in Japan "that favors fluctuations, fluidity and lightness." Further, a design is visible amid the seeming sprawl. There is, as Ashihara found, a "hidden order." Thus Tokyo, for example, is not to be compared to the sprawl-cities of the West. One cannot compare, says Shelton, Tokyo with Las Vegas. Indeed, "Las Vegas is to Tokyo as an amoeba is to man."
The differences are carefully noted and indicate a radical contrast. "For a Japanese, emphasis is so often on parts at the expense of the wholes. Incompleteness is the 'natural' order." In working out his thesis, Shelton apposes some of the "essences" of Japanese culture against Western counterparts.
He finds: patchwork (against network); piecemeal (vs. integrated); decentralized (against centralized); temporary (vs. permanent); and vague (as opposed to clear) boundaries between objects and their surroundings. These qualities are no longer reason for disdain. Rather, they have become qualities to be emulated.
The reason is that the "Western" view no longer fits the West. Something more flexible, more eclectic, more people-friendly is called for. Postmodernism, that radical simplification that has freed a number of architectural constraints in the West, early found a Japanese home, as did Modernism before it. This has resulted in a perception that the author calls the "new view" and that should now inform the West.
That constitutes what we should learn from the Japanese city. Shelton finds in Japanese cities "a wider range of physical conditions and characteristics . . . reflecting more closely the new views. . . . Similarly, we find embodied in the work of Japanese designers a range of attitudes and approaches which are also more in tune with the new view." Learning from the Japanese city means revivifying the Western.
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