Low City, High City

This author is a fine stylist, as promised. He gives us a great deal of insight into Tokyo and it metamorphosis from local capital to world center...circa his 1980 perspective. It would be wonderful to have this level of knowledge distilled into a book more neutrally organized and with comparisons to a more up-to-date Tokyo, but we have what we have. There is no other. This is it. Buy it now.

When I was a teenager, I got a summer scholarhip to go live with a Japanese family in Tokyo. The experience changed me forever. Though America long remained the center of my daily life, Japan became for many years, "the alternate world". Japanese culture and the Japanese language fascinated me and I studied both for many years. I subsequently returned to Japan several times and have remained in contact with that family all my life. I'm now sixty-five. The Tokyo I first saw was only 36 years after the great earthquake of 1923 and only 14 years after the catastrophe of World War II. So it is that when I read Seidensticker's account of Tokyo, bits and pieces bob up from the flow of memory, my underground impressions and experiences not-quite-recalled, especially sounds and sights no longer to be found in the Tokyo of today. I found it most engrossing. LOW CITY, HIGH CITY is a local history---mostly of downtown Tokyo where in the Tokugawa period, the Edo culture flourished most. The author traces the tastes and tendencies of the townsmen, and how these changed under the giant wave of Western influence that began after the Meiji Reformation of 1868. He takes the process up to the Kanto Earthquake, which came just three years before the Taisho Emperor died and the Showa era (one of the most momentous in Japan's long history) started. This is the first part of a longer history of Tokyo, but it may be read on its own. Seidensticker, who died in 2007, was an esteemed translator of Japanese literature, both ancient and modern, who lived there. If you have no acquaintance of Tokyo at all, you will find LOW CITY, HIGH CITY heavy going, I fear. That's because he talks about the city districts, sections, streets, rivers, and parks and how they all changed over time, through numerous devastations by fire, flood, earthquake, and the wish to "be modern". You will find yourself aching for better maps than the two provided which show only broad outlines. The process by which Tokyo, and Japan, transformed itself from a remote Asian city (say in 1850) to one of the centers of the modern world (say by 1970) is a fascinating tale. This book helps reveal to Western readers what happened. Transportation, cultural life, literature, architecture, parks, recreations, land use, prostitution and coffee houses-----the list of topics is nearly endless. Like any local history, the mass of detail sometimes obscures the larger processes and themes. The Low City, by the harbor and along the Sumida River, had been the heart of Edo culture, but by the end of Meiji (1912), it had given way to the High City, that newer section of Tokyo on ridges and hills that surrounded the Low and stretched away south and west, the greater part of modern Tokyo. If you know Tokyo at all, you're going to find a huge amount of interesting and sometimes amusing detail in this well-written book. If you don't, perhaps this is not the place to begin because his weaving and bobbing,

Low City, High City is a lively and informal account of Tokyo's history from the end of the Tokugawa regime (in 1868) to the destruction of the city in the 1923 Kanto earthquake. During that half century, Tokyo was transformed from a feudal pre-industrial city of samurai and commoners to an imperial capital of bureacrats, businessmen, factory workers, and flappers. Seidensticker, a distinguished translator of Japanese literature, has written a highly readable cultural and social history of Tokyo that captures the colorful introduction of "Western" urbanism and chronicles the slowly fading old city. An absolute must for anyone with even a casual interest in Tokyo's past.