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.

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.

"Tokyo: A Biography" is the type of biography many objective people would love to have written about themselves. It is honest, refreshing and, in content, does not shy away from murkier undercurrents, even if the final balance is enough for the volume to be an a ode to a survivor, in this case one of the world’s greatest cities. It is not a guidebook of the type that informs readers of the latest in accommodation possibilities or of transportation networks and ticket prices, but rather it’s a guide — or companion to be more precise — to help the reader see into the mind and heart of Tokyo, to see something of that city’s memories of times past, of fortunes made and lost, of heartbreaks and simple joys and of its abiding strength and dynamic vitality. He writes as if the city were a friend of long standing.The book follows a basic historical chronology from the early Edo era to more recent concerns over the Great Fukushima earthquake in 2011, a deadly event fraught with danger and, with aftershocks felt in the city center, far to close for comfort. The book is much more than a mere history. It is also — perhaps even more so — a geography, an informed exploration of urban spaces, as well as a psychology, exemplified by the writer’s careful use of cause and effect.I lived for some years in Tokyo myself and, at first, thought the city’s architecture seemed a disconcerting and discordant mix of the old, whether decrepit or venerable, the breathtakingly modernistic, and the functionally banal. The author has a keen eye and is especially strong on matters architectural. This has caused me to abandon such architectural reductionism. For myself, I especially enjoyed the earlier chapters that detailed the city’s pre-Meiji era growth commotions. Tokyo is of course front and center in this book but is not viewed in cultural or historical isolation. Important international currents and the contributions of outsiders are given due credit.The writing style is both consistently elegant and discerning. Its scope and detail are more than sufficient for the general reader, whether that reader has been to Japan or not. Even for one whose knowledge of Japan in general, and of its capital in particular, verges on that of the expert, will find reading this book to be a rewarding form of leisure, iespecially for the writer’s use of irony.The writer (full disclosure - whom I know) has lived in Tokyo for over thirty years. He has published widely using both pen and camera on almost every facet of life in the Japanese archipelago and is well regarded for his skill with both, with good reason as anyone who reads this book will see. Highly recommended!