JAPANESE CAPITALS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto and Tokyo, edited by Nicolas Fieve and Paul Waley. London: Routledge/Curzon, 2003, 418 pp., 75 plates, £65.00 (cloth).

Japanese cities are unusual. Compared to those in Europe or even the United States, there are few physical reminders of a Japanese city's appearance or atmosphere. Tokyo, notoriously, tears down or gentrifies buildings, but even Kyoto with some of its old architecture still standing provides few clues to a palpable past.

Meanings for urban landscapes must then be sought elsewhere -- not in edifices and monuments but in some narrative of continuity and change, something that requires a different form of historical imagination.

This is what this interesting collection of papers attempts. "Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective" had its origins in a 1997 European Association of Japanese Studies conference. Nine of the papers presented then, are collected here, along with five others. These are the works of a very diverse group, comprised of architects, historians, anthropologists, geographers and urban planners.