Tokyo: A Biography: Disasters, Destruction and Renewal: The Story of an Indomitable City Paperback – October 25, 2016

I lived outside of Tokyo from 1991-1996 and 2004-2011 and still maintain a condo on the outskirts of this magnificient city. Thus, it was with great interest that I delved into the history of Tokyo and even more pleasing to read that the author, uknown to me, and I had been in Tokyo for two of the major events that he mentions: the Sarin gas attack and the March 11, 2011 earthquake.Mansfield describes the city, its history, and its vibes perfectly. He captures the history and geography in clear, easily readable prose. My only criticism is that he should have included a timeline and static maps with overlays so that readers unfamiliar with the city could get a better sense of the locations and changing georgraphies of the places he describes. If he were to release a special Kindle edition, it would be great if he had animated historical maps that would reveal the changes Tokyo has undergone.A city as widespread and dynamic as Tokyo is impossible to entirely replicate in words; yet, Mansfield's account is perfect for the resident, visitor, future visitor, and researcher. Reading this history, stirred up my memories and desires to go back to this fabulous metroplis.

What do you want from a biography?You probably want to know how the subject become the one you now know, and to feel you were there on that journey. Stephen Mansfield gives you that, and pulls you through the journey, in his "Tokyo: A Biography—Disasters, Destruction and Renewal: The Story of an Indomitable City."But how does one do a biography for a city, and without just bombarding you with names, places, and dates? Mansfield takes on this challenge by showing how Tokyo has affected, and was perceived and portrayed by, inhabitants and visitors, writers, visual artists, designers, filmmakers, performers, architects, historians, scientists, and local and foreign warriors through its life. He weaves those elements with historical incidents and just enough facts to make his study more fascinating and easier to digest than a conventional history, and more insightful than a guidebook.Take visual artists and filmmakers, for example:• Hokusai and Hiroshige’s Edo Era woodblock prints recorded traditional and common urban landscapes, while Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s caricatures worked around censor restrictions.• Hiroshige III, Kiyochika, Yoshitora, and Utagawa Kuniteru II’s Meiji Era prints featured a new Tokyo racing to catch up with Europeans and North Americans, with trains and factories penetrating its landscape and shifting the city’s transportation and commerce from its vast waterway network to its modernized road and street systems.• Filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro and street-scene photographer Hayashi Tadahiko’s depictions of bypassed underclasses before and after World War II showed all Tokyoites have not always benefited from economic growth.Mansfield set his bar high, saying in his preface he wanted to write in the spirit of the great English historian Edward Gibbon, author of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and promising “…all that is significant and interesting insignificance.” You learn from those later bits that:• Shibuya’s Dogenzaka, a place now famous for separating money from owners, was named after a thirteenth-century man who performed that function as a bandit.• Tokyo banned kite flying in the late nineteenth-century due to risks from its crisscrossing telegraph wires and electric cables--and the ban is still in effect.• A game appearing after 1923’s earthquake took players around a board featuring gruesome scenes from the disaster.Mansfield corrects our tendency to romanticize Edo Era life, much based on its remaining architecture, by revealing its lower classes’ reality: squeezed into just sixteen percent of the city’s available space (versus the upper classes’ seventy percent), their land slivers stinking and insect and rodent infested, and always at the mercy of fires and epidemics, where “…everything could be lost in a moment,” as even haiku master Matsuo Basho learned when a firestorm consumed his Sumida River cottage.In later times:• An Englishman praised pleasant rides through Tokyo’s greenery, a feature European capitals then lacked, in the 1850s.• A Japanese playwright described her first experience hearing an orchestra with violins and piano while visiting the under-construction Nikolai Cathedral.• A Japanese poet related in tanka traditional-style verse how new trains disrupted his neighborhood’s tranquility.• A haiku master reacted to wartime attacks on Tokyo with verses on his home’s air raid destruction and family separation.• Film director Kurosawa Akira described street moods before and after Emperor Hirohito’s famous war capitulation radio speech.• An English poet described 1959 Tokyo as a “…huge, shapeless industrial suburb, extremely ugly and noisy,” but praised the Japanese for making it the “…liveliest and most fantastic place in the modern world.”Mansfield does not forget your nose or ears. His Tokyo has odors for almost every period he explores, including:• Putrid night soil carts around Shinjuku Station in the early twentieth century.• Setting cement vapors filling the air and waterways stinking after reduced to stagnation by new expressway and other construction projects as Tokyo builds for the 1964 Olympics.• Car exhaust fumes and fast-food restaurant ventilator smells greeting modern visitors.His soundscapes include:• Newspaper printing presses whirring after midnight and their morning distribution cart bells chiming in Meiji Era Ginza.• Footsteps in sand and creaking axles under oxen-pulled carts easily heard over mourning crowds “as silent as ghosts” lining the Emperor Meiji’s funeral cortege route.• Cheap eyeglass vendors yelling dust protection promises to passing customers after a huge 1913 fire.• Popular songs disappearing from airwaves as radio stations reprogram to martial and propaganda fare during the late 1930s.• 1964 Olympic preparation nighttime construction din forcing residents to use earplugs.Mansfield honed his style authoring guidebooks, and planned this project for twelve years. He supplements his research--he claims a 2,000 book and periodical collection on Tokyo--with his own insights from decades of living and working in the area.As the main character here is a city, you do not follow a sole person or group through this story. And although Mansfield compares Tokyo to other major world cities, past and present, he does not go into why modern Tokyo does not suffer the same problems that hurt or now afflict the others. Overall, though, you feel you have experienced this city’s life, so his biography approach works—through Chapter Seven and the Showa Era’s end.Where are Heisei Era resident and visitor voices in the last chapter? Mansfield here mainly tells us his thoughts, mostly negative, about Tokyo’s very recent past, present, and future. You appreciate him not sugar coating his subject, but this strays from the varied-viewpoints approach that balanced his prior text.Mansfield’s afterword criticizes Tokyo’s architecture, transport infrastructure, urban planning, density, slow foreigner assimilation, and climate effects, and predicts doom when the next big quake hits the overgrown metropolis. His recommendation to minimize the potential damage: shrink. Tokyo instead is enlarging and reinforcing. You might reconsider being here, now, after this book’s end.But Tokyo keeps drawing people. A newcomer, spotting me working on this review in a trendy Shinagawa food court, asked, “The new gold standard for books on Tokyo?” Yes, that is what Stephen Mansfield has given us, and why I have already purchased nine copies for friends and associates. You, too, would do well to consider the same gift for anyone interested in Japan--including yourself.# # #Copyright © 2017 David L. Gregory All rights reserved.

I'm not sure that there's much in Stephen Mansfield's Tokyo: A Biography (2016) that hasn't already been covered in Edward Seidensticker's comprehensive Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989, or actually, even in Mansfield's own Tokyo: A Cultural History. That being said, it is a nice, concise history of the city, which might be a good overview for a general reader. In addition, his last chapters are more up to date with recent events, but not in any significant detail.

“Tokyo: A Biography” is aptly titled. Stephen Mansfield has written a vivid history of Tokyo as an ever-evolving organism, a city being, as Edmund N. Bacon said, “a sequential continuum of sensory experiences.” Biography holds our interest to the extent the subject suffers vicissitudes. A charmed life would not hold our interest; we empathize with the person who fell and picked himself up or remained down for the count. Here Mansfield is blessed, for Tokyo has suffered floods and fires, famine and war. The result is a page-turner.Each disaster left the city a blank slate for the grand visions of administrators, architects, and other elites. But these were never fully realized and, as Mansfield notes, the lower orders gave the city its character—brash, ostentatious, urbane, and satiric. Tokyo was too big, vivacious, rebellious, and amorphous to buckle under the thumb of authority.There was also the insouciance of the child of Tokyo.The earthquake of 1923 left 104,619 dead or missing, notes Mansfield, a well-documented calamity recorded in various media including a board game with a panel illustrating survivors carrying a corpse.Two decades later B-29s were dropping napalm on the city—inflicting a fresh hell on the denizens of the warrens of wood-and-paper houses in the low-lying eastern districts. Mansfield quotes Takeyama Michio as describing the brilliantly lit skies into which the bombers flew as a “red lotus of fire” and admits being perplexed by the novelist’s use of a beautiful effusion for an apocalyptic horror. But as Takeyama explained: “During the air raids we thought each day would be the end. It was a shock to the see that the end of the world was so beautiful.”The tragedies of the following decades were of a different kind. Mansfield chronicles the dark side of the “economic miracle”—picturesque canals turned into “an unholy cocktail of raw sewage and biochemical sludge,” the proliferation of drab Soviet-style housing estates, and smog so bad vending machines sold oxygen. Next was a “gilded age” when the capital’s political and business elites indulged in unbridled hedonism and frivolity that included deserts sprinkled with gold flakes at Ginza restaurants. The tragedy of the “bubble years” is that this money squandered in play and speculation could have been invested in infrastructure and technology that would have grown the economy.Natural and man-made disasters have changed the city, but as Mansfield points out, Tokyoites themselves are passionate agents of change. They do not wax nostalgic and are likely to view the loss of a landmark as making way for something newer and better. Figures and places generally endure as toponyms only.The survival of Tokyo is ensured “not by preservation, but renewal,” writes Mansfield. “The wrecking ball serves as a metronome for this provisional city.” The last two decades have been comparatively uneventful in Tokyo. But Mansfield sees these years as the calm before the next tragedy. In a chilling afterword, he points to a future earthquake for which the city is woefully unprepared. Yet he leavens his apocalyptic prediction with the Buddhist sentiment of impermanence. Tokyo will flourish, he implies, because in this most eastern capital change is tradition.