As each of us have a different way to kickstart 2022 refreshed and reinvigorated, I went on to what has become our annual ritual of running through various sacred, and some earthly, sites of Tokyo. First to the North, then to the South and finally Eastward, the journey connected nine shrines and five temples, and passed by who knows how many countless smaller sanctuaries. I must confess these are no mere pilgrimages to pray for a fortuitous turn of events for the new year. Rather, this is a type of highly subjective, corporeal, and observational method to test as well as vicariously experience the hypotheses firsthand on theories written about Tokyo. It is a laborious undertaking borne out of love for cities, and driven by the idea that the past, the tacit and explicit histories, shapes the very nature of the city as manifested today. If we are to shape the future, we must understand exactly what it is from the past that is affecting the making of a present place.

Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, Tokyo Metro & Surrounding Areas (Technical Data D1-No. 860), 2016

The direct experiences of geological strata, its articulations, are distinct as well as real, and teases some imaginations about a city. For example, the physical measure of undulations on foot brings to mind Jinnai Hidenobu’s Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology (pp.025), in which he draws a parallel between seven hills of Rome and analogous conditions, albeit expressed as plateaus, in Tokyo. Here, the seven hills within the ancient bounds of Servian Wall have been analogized to seven plateaus (Ueno, Hongo, Koishikawa-Mejiro, Ushigome, Yotsuya-Kojimachi, Asaksaka-Azabu, and Shiba-Shirogane) within a feudal bondage of the spiraling moat . Of course, these are relational topographies, rising above the vast floodplains of the incredibly flat Kanto region.

Giambattista Nolli, The Pianta Grande Di Roma, 1748

The Roman version had sprawling imperial complexes that included palaces, temples, and basilicas; later appropriated into various uses, including grandiose Catholic basilicas. These had explicit public elements, and therefore were accessible to the people. This aspect would engender a groundwork for the genetics of interiorized urban corridors as exposed by the 18th century Nolli Plan. On the other hand, the Tokyo version consisted of organic patches, more complex than Byzantine mosaics, of S, M, L, XL plots allocated hierarchically for residences of the samurai class. They were thoroughly private, with very few extraordinary temporal exceptions when certain daimyos might on a whim or a sense of festive charity open their gates to the public on limited occasions. (Most notably, Owari-han shimoyashiki villa was reconstituted by Tokugawa Mitsutomo into what was known then as Toyama-sō, and remains today as the Toyama Park with a not-so-flattering, dark history during the Pacific War.) Plateau-wide exceptions were Ueno and Shiba occupied by the sprawling temple complexes established by the shogunate, vis-a-vis Kan-ei-ji and Zojo-ji, respectively. With a direct patronage of the power class, these were subjects of what Professor Screech aptly coined as the “iconography of absence”imposing osore, to be much feared, venerated and deferred all at once, and as such, not very accessible places for the masses. It is with great irony, perhaps intentional, that the first public park in Japan would be sited on the grounds of Ueno Kan-ei-ji by the Edict no.16 of Grand State Council in 1873, later codified into the Urban Park Act of 1956. The overt up-yours to the legacy of a bygone feudal epoch.

Approaching today, the number of engulfed plateaus increased as the likes of Yoyogi, Komaba, or Naito Shinjuku became integrated within the ever-amorphous boundary of the metropolitan area, which continues to grow while the country shrinks in population. Now with Covid-19, there has been an “exodus” of white-collar elites that can afford to have a dual-base lifestyle; a short stay base in Tokyo for occasional work-related events, and a more stable home base surrounded by verdant nature. By this metric, various places that can be reached in an hour by car, Shinkansen bullet-train or rapid express trains have become highly desirable destinations, epitomized by Karuizawa, causing a bit of frenzied local real-estate bubbles. Time will only tell if these bucolic bases will soon be emulsified into becoming a part of the metropolitan region, not so much in geolocational proximity, which they are not, but in more ambiguous terms of culture and appropriated urbane lifestyles. “Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is a content and an expression. Whereas form and substance are not really distinct, content and expression are…” - Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, pp.584)
Soon, Tokyo may well have seven mountains within!

At another level, there are invisible yet quite real topographies; the receded scapes. Pure contents and expressions of the digital era that impose on reality in uncanny ways. Next month, we will explore these receded scapes that have a great impact on the design of architecture and urbanism.