The very title of this new collection by Gorazd Vilhar and Charlotte Anderson suggests multiple Tokyos. It posits a city so multifaceted that only various versions of it can suggest the complexity of the metropolis itself.
There have been a number of such paradigms. Among the first was the construction of a childlike people who did things backwards. Mark Twain said that "they begin dinner with tea and confections and close with the heavy work."
After that, dualistic anomalies were sought for and found. Sir Rutherford Alcock opined that "Japan is essentially a country of paradoxes . . . things are curiously reversed." Primitive though such paradigms were, they served their purpose. If we view others as upside down then, perforce, we see ourselves as right side up.
As knowledge grew, more sophisticated models were constructed. One that is still around retains the apparently necessary duality but emphasizes it differently. This is the pattern known as "Japan, land of contrasts." Here new and old coexist to a dramatic degree — shrines on high-rise roofs, white-robed acolytes on motor bikes.
Japan is seen as hybrid. This somewhat removes the onus of being paradoxically different, but a Western assumption remains that there is something dodgy about hybrids, be they mixed cultures or mixed blood. We have to have an alien against which to measure our own wholesome humanity. Edith Cresson when prime minister of France, famously compared the Japanese to ants.
Since then, succeeding paradigms of Japan have become more sophisticated. One of these, still much with us, is "Japan — continuity in change." The country is allowed to modernize as it will, but we are to have faith in an authentic core of pure Japaneseness. Thus, in its dualistic fashion, it indicates the necessary and reassuring difference between Them and Us.
Almost every Western view of Japan includes one of these paradigms, model ways to think about Japan, patterns for apprehension. In her introduction to this new photo/text collection, "Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo," Anderson refers to them by writing "the city abounds with contrasts of old and new, incongruities of East and West . . . creating a dazzling visual feast."
Dazzling it certainly is as presented through the lens of Vilhar. As in the gorgeous "Kyoto: A Cultural Sojourn," published a few years back, a frankly beaux-arts sensibility is used to picture the various ingredients of this great congeries of Tokyo.
A statue of the 15th-century founder, Ota Dokan is photographed against the grills and struts of the modernistic International Forum in Yurakucho — ancient verdigris against the sheen of new steel. A bronze replica of the 17th-century haiku master, Basho, gazes across the Sumida where he can now only see the big-box buildings of the new corporations recently moved there. A mendicant monk holds up his begging bowl in front of the elegantly kitsch show-windows of Wako department store. Traditional decor studs the florid wastes of Roppongi Hills.
Besides the colorful contrast of old and new, the persistence of the past is also pictured. There is a dynamic aerial shot of a four-ton portable shrine carried by its score of kimonoed bearers that could have been photographed in 1800 if they had had cameras then. A robed Buddhist priest walks by, eclipsing a bright red Coca-Cola vending machine. The traditional core holds.
These beautiful photos, so fully illustrating our paradigms, are plainly foreign views. For, as Anderson writes, "rather than viewing these elements as being in opposition, the Japanese prefer to see them as parts of a harmonious continuum." And, indeed, the search for incongruity, the assumption of a persevering past, would probably not occupy most native photographers.
The value of this collection, however, besides its sheer beauty, lies in just this concern for a Western interpretation of this dynamic Eastern capital. It provides a matrix for the juxtapositions, for the sheer montage offered by this city. In its way "Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo" is, besides being photo album de luxe, a pictorial guide through the city, an accounting of its many parts, a solution to its complexity.
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